Cathy Kelly - Just Between Us

‘OK,’ stammered Tara, taking the card.

‘Hi, Mikey,’ said a voice and a tall, striking dark-skinned woman came up and laid a proprietary hand on his Armani-clad shoulder.

‘Hi, Crystal,’ he replied, turning to her.

Tara slipped away, scarcely believing life could be quite this perfect. Mike Hammond wanted to meet her. The show she worked on had just won a prestigious award. And she was married to the most wonderful man in the world. What more could she want?

Twenty-four hours after National Hospital won the Best Soap award, Tara still sounded as if she was on a high. She’d loved the congratulatory bouquet of flowers Holly had sent that morning, had spent the whole day pretending to work but being too excited to, and now she and Finn were going out for a celebratory dinner in their favourite restaurant.

‘You mean you aren’t going to stay in and watch yourself on the ceremony on TV?’ teased Holly.

From the phone came the sound of her sister groaning. ‘No way! I’m going to tape it instead and maybe one day, I’ll be able to bear to look at it.’

‘I’m going out too but I’m taping the show,’ Holly said, ‘so I can make everyone watch it in future and point out my fabulous sister, who was really responsible for National Hospital winning.’

Tara was still laughing when she hung up.

Holly, who was running late, rushed back into her bedroom to paint her nails, then sat on the edge of her bed waggling her fingers so the sparkly lilac nail polish would dry more quickly. She still had to wriggle into the instep-destroying boots she’d bought to go with her new black trousers, though she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to bend over to zip them up. The Dolce & Gabbana corset, lent at huge risk by Gabriella from the International Design department, was what could euphemistically be called a ‘snug’ fit. Breathing was difficult, bending over would be impossible.

‘It came back because it was too big for one of our best customers and it’s going in the sale in January, but whatever you do, Holly, don’t sweat on it !’ Gabriella had warned the day before. ‘And don’t smoke!’

‘She won’t,’ promised Bunny, Holly’s friend and colleague from the children’s department, who’d been the one to wangle the loan of the corset from the fabulously gorgeous Gabriella. Gamine and funky, with cropped blonde hair and a way with clothes that meant her uniform of white shirt and black trousers looked catwalk cool, Bunny was Holly’s idol. There was no way Gabriella would have loaned it to her, Holly thought, if Bunny hadn’t asked first.

Both Bunny and Holly crossed their fingers regarding the safety of the outfit: strange things regularly happened to Holly, weird and unexplainable things that ruined her clothes. Coffee miraculously leapt out of cups and flung itself at her; drunks on the street crossed perilous traffic to lurch happily against her; perfectly ordinary bits of the footpath reared up to trip her. Therefore, it was entirely possible that some unusual accident would mean the borrowed outfit would get shrunk/covered in bleach/otherwise hideously disfigured in the Bermuda Triangle effect which surrounded Holly. But Gabriella didn’t need to know that.

‘I know it’s a twelve and you need a fourteen, but they look better when they’re tight. And it’s perfect on you,’ sighed Bunny, earlier that day, when Holly had struggled into the corset in a changing room in Lee’s Department Store, where they all worked.

The two girls looked in the mirror. In a miracle of wonderful tailoring, the corset had jacked Holly’s waist into tiny proportions, giving her a siren-like hourglass figure which she didn’t have in real, non-D&G life. Bunny quickly pulled Holly’s scrunchie off so that her poker-straight chestnut hair shimmered over her shoulders.

‘Now,’ said Bunny, delighted with her efforts. ‘You look amazing. Those boots make your legs look so long. When you’ve got my necklace on you’ll look perfect.’

‘You don’t think I look fat, do you?’ Holly said anxiously. She wouldn’t have said it if Gabriella was around. Gabriella resembled a very beautiful twig on even more twiglety legs, and fat cells would have blanched at the thought of daring to even touch her.

‘ Fat? Don’t be silly.’ Bunny shook her head vigorously. ‘You look wonderful, Holly. You’re going to wow them all tonight.’

School reunions should be banned, Holly muttered, testing a nail to see if it was dry. Ever since Donna had phoned with the exciting news about the ten-year reunion of their class from Kinvarra’s Cardinal School, Holly had fretted. For a woman with self-esteem so low it could limbo dance under a two-inch fence, the prospect of meeting the girls she’d been in school with was one filled with terror.

Old schoolmates would want to know what exciting things Holly was doing with her life and what sort of fabulous men she was going out with. ‘Er nothing’ and ‘nobody’ would not be adequate answers. On the plus side, at least she’d lost weight since school, but she was never going to be what anyone would call thin. And what was the point of being thinner when she had nothing to show for it?

Donna, her best friend from school, was thrilled at the very notion of a reunion, and had talked excitedly about how lovely it would be to catch up with everyone.

‘Just think, our class together again after all these years. I can’t imagine some of them as twenty-eight-year-olds: they’re stuck in my mind at seventeen. Obviously, I don’t mean Lilli and Caroline,’ she said. ‘I meet them every day at the school gates when I’m dropping Emily off and they’re just the same, really. But there are so many girls and I don’t really know what they’ve been up to. So many of them are living in the city or abroad…It’ll be wonderful to see everyone again, won’t it?’

‘Yes,’ bleated Holly.

‘I heard that Michelle Martin’s coming too, which is a coup for the organising group. Who’d have ever thought that one of our girls would be a big TV star.’

‘Donna, she’s a news reporter, not Britney Spears,’ Holly pointed out, overcoming her anxiety in order to set the record straight. Michelle had been a total nightmare at school: loud, overopinionated and determined to get the shy girls (like Holly and Donna) involved. Anyone who didn’t go along with her (Holly and Donna, again) received contemptuous glances which implied that amoebas were more fun. ‘We used to hide from her, if you remember.’

‘No we didn’t.’ Donna sounded cheerful. ‘Oh it’s going to be such fun. You are coming, aren’t you, Holly? I know you’re madly busy and probably have zillions of glamorous Christmas parties to go to, but this will be fantastic. I know December’s two months away but I’ve already told Mark he’ll have to baby-sit because I’m going to stay overnight in Dublin. That’s the whole point of having it in a hotel, so there’s no awfulness about getting taxis and lifts home.’

Donna still lived in Kinvarra, but many of the school’s old girls had moved to the city, which was why a hotel in Dublin had been chosen for the party. Donna was doubly pleased at this. For a start, there’d be no chance of wild misbehaving at a reunion in her home town where gossip spread like wildfire. Secondly, she loved visiting Dublin and this trip would mean a bit of blissful shopping the next day without having to manoeuvre a buggy round too.

‘The only problem is what to wear?’ mused Donna, before going on to list possible outfits and why they weren’t suitable because they were old/unfashionable/too tight on the hips. ‘Of course, you won’t have that problem, Holly. When you’re going out every night like you, you know exactly what to wear. Mark and I never get further than Maria’s Diner these days and you can turn up in a sweatshirt covered with baby sick and nobody bats an eyelid.’