Page 10 of Statistically Speaking
This, I tell myself, is going to be a good year.
Chapter 5
Two Sad Women, Sixteen Truffles, and One Rather Magnificent Mr. Darcy
“And this new girl, Katie, she actually turned up in an old-world dress and a fancy hat?” asks Margie, curled up in amusement, a faux-fur blanket over her lap.
“Yep. A big hat with ostrich feathers, full suffrage colors, and bright red lipstick.”
I’m telling her, and Bill, the story of the year’s first history club meeting, which took place in X12 after school today.
We are in Margie’s pretty terraced garden, on a dry but cold evening, watching the sun set over the sea and sipping mugs of tea, steam clouding up into the air. Bill doesn’t have any tea because he’s really rubbish at holding mugs.
“I wouldn’t have thought bright red lippie was much of a feminist symbol,” says Margie, “but I’m glad if it is. I used to love a bit of red lippie, me.”
“Weirdly, it was,” I explain, trying not to sound like a teacher but probably failing. “The suffragettes took a lot of care with their appearance—they wanted to appear feminine and powerful, rather than like they were trying to be men. There’s a great story—possibly fictional—that the woman who founded Elizabeth Arden in New York left her officein 1912 to hand out tubes of red lipstick to women who were marching for votes.”
“And how many tubes of lipstick did she hand out?” Margie asks mischievously.
“Even I don’t know that—but now you’ve asked, I’ll try to find out!”
She lets out one of her cackles, and Bill thumps his tail in response. Party animal.
Margie has crept into my life and now takes up quite a lot of space in it. When I first moved into the flat upstairs, she gave me a cactus in a pot. Told me it would be impossible to kill (she was wrong). I thanked her politely and fully intended to remain on nodding terms only—it had worked with neighbors thus far in life and I didn’t see why this would be any different.
That changed the first time I saw her struggling to bring her milk in. She had it delivered, but as I went down for my run one morning, I spotted her in obvious pain attempting to pick it up with her poor twisted hands. I had no idea what was wrong with her then, but knew I couldn’t walk by without helping.
Taking in the milk resulted in my being shown her garden, and being convinced to have a cuppa, and hearing pretty much all of Margie’s life story. She is sixty-six, Liverpool born and bred, divorced with one grown-up son who lives in Surrey, and has two young grandchildren she only gets to see at Christmas. The love of her life, she told me, is Bill, her rescue dog.
The next morning, as I tried to tiptoe around to the beach path unnoticed, Bill spotted me. He actually jumped up, massive paws resting on top of the fence, and I swear he spoke to me with his eyes. Liquid brown yearning buried beneath tufts of shaggy fur.
Margie had appeared, told me to take no notice of him, she’d let him out for a trot later, but somehow the words just came out of my mouth: Would he like to come for a run with me?
He would, it turned out—and he’s been my regular running partner ever since. Margie has been my regular hot-beverage maker, and I have been her regular morning assistant. I do a few bits of shopping for her when she needs it, and she makes me casseroles and bowls of Scouse stew, the local culinary specialty, when she’s feeling up to it. She’s stopped giving me plants now, because she knows she’s just condemning them to an early grave.
It is a strange friendship, but one, reluctantly, I value. I say “reluctantly” because I’m not generally brilliant at keeping friendships going. I’m fine up to a point, but I like to keep it shallow. I’m not a hermit; I enjoy going out, but I like my friends to be of the casual-chat-in-the-pub variety. I don’t think I need a psychologist to explain why that is, given my history, but it’s not something I really want to fix—I’m happy as I am. Or, at the very least, not unhappy.
Margie often has other ideas and is basically a very nosy person. Maybe it’s because her own life has been made smaller in recent years; maybe she has always been like this.
I know she loves these chats, where I tell her about my day and she tells me about the goings-on at the beach, and I do too. When we’re talking about stuff like this and not about me, anyway.
“She sounds like a blast, Katie does,” she adds. “I wish I could meet her. I’d love to be the sort of person who turns up in fancy dress even when nobody else does.”
“I know,” I reply, “me too! She just breezed right in, with her hat and her handmade placard demanding votes for women, and didn’t give a damn when everyone stared at her.It was brilliant. Within seconds, everyone was laughing, and she was the center of attention, and everyone knew her name and had told her theirs, and they were all planning what they were going to wear for the next session.”
“Some people have that knack, don’t they, love? That confidence that makes people want to be around them. I used to have it myself, back in my younger days.”
“You still do, Margie. I can’t keep away.”
“Well, that’s just the pulling power of a good dog, that is, Gem. Bill is irresistible to all. So what are you up to tonight? Netflix and chill? Grading? Hot date with that PE teacher fella?”
I’d mentioned Karim to her over the summer, when a text from him had landed while I was picking some of her homegrown strawberries and raspberries. She’d been like Bill with a bone ever since, determined that it was about time I “saw some action.”
“Gorgeous young thing like you,”she’d said, grinning,“you need to be out there. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it, you know?”
“You just want to live vicariously through me,”I’d replied, not wanting to ponder exactly what it was she thought I might lose—I didn’t want to ask, because she doesn’t shy away from naming body parts.“And if that’s the case, you’re in for a dull time.”
She’s asked about him a lot since then, and even made me show her his profile picture on Facebook. I don’t really use Facebook, but I am on it, and I do enjoy looking at other people’s lives—maybe I’m just as bad as Margie.
