A week later the long hair had gone.
In its place, not quite as short as Gilmour’s, was a carelessly tossed bob, cut tight into her neck and above her ears, with blonde streaks like honey.
With that and the glasses she now wore so much, she looked and felt like a different person. Not, at any rate, like the Meg Winter in the photographs. Nor, she hoped, like a hooker.
She met Elizabeth for lunch at the local deli. Elizabeth thought the hair looked terrific. She herself looked well, too. Her husband had been in Belfast for a couple of days and she seemed much the better for the visit.
She didn’t waste any time telling Meg exactly why.
‘Five minutes after we started talking we were in bed. It was fantastic.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Meg said. ‘So you’re back together again?’
‘Do you know,’ Elizabeth said, ‘before he met me he’d never gone down on anyone? I had to teach him what to do. He took to it like a duck to water, I’m happy to say.’
‘Jesus, Elizabeth, do you mind? I’m eating.’
‘Exactly.’ She laughed, then choked with a kind of snort that made people look round. Meg wondered if any of them had heard. The place was tiny.
‘Keep your voice down,’ Meg said. ‘So what now?’
Elizabeth chuckled at her discomfort. ‘He says he realises how much I hate Malaysia. He’s applied for a transfer back to the UK, a job in London.’
Meg put her knife and fork down. ‘Well, that sounds good.’
‘But we’ve agreed that Catriona and I will stay here in Northern Ireland until that’s definite, which won’t be before the end of the year, and in the meantime I can nip over now and then to look at houses. You can come with me if you like.’
‘Maybe,’ Meg said. She had had enough of London for the moment. Apart from that she had to keep an eye on her finances. The money which had been untouched for so long would not last forever.
She went to see her mother, a visit she had been putting off. She hadn’t told her she was going to be on TV. Then there was what she had said about religion. She hadn’t intended that. It had just come out. Nerves.
Her mother didn’t mention the subject. That was bad. She did not like her new look either.
‘Your beautiful hair. You’ve destroyed it.’
‘It’s just a bit of a change, Mum,’ Meg said, trying to be cheery. ‘I’ve had that other style for rather a long time.’
They were in the kitchen. Meg sat at the table. The little dog made a fuss of her and she stroked its head as it stood on its hind legs with its front paws resting on her knee.
Her mother was in the process of making a pot of tea but she seemed confused about something.
Meg got up and went over to her. ‘Can I help? What have you lost?’
‘The sugar,’ she muttered. ‘I can’t find the sugar.’ The door of the cupboard above her head was open. Meg could see the sugar bowl on the bottom shelf. ‘Here it is,’ she said, reaching for it.
Her mother tried to get the bowl at the same time. Neither of them grasped it successfully. It came crashing down, bouncing and spilling its contents onto the work surface before smashing in fragments on the floor.
‘Oh dear God, what a mess,’ Meg said, crouching and beginning to pick up the pieces. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’ll clear it up.’
Gloria stood ramrod straight. ‘How dare you take the Lord’s name in vain in my house.’ Her voice was quivering.
‘I’m sorry. It just slipped out. I didn’t mean—’
Her mother stared down at her. ‘Why? Why did you do it?’
‘It was an accident. I was trying—’
‘Shaming yourself before millions of people like that. Shaming me. Attacking those of us who do the Lord’s work.’
Meg straightened. The sugar crunched under her feet.
‘You didn’t tell me you were going to go on television,’ Gloria said. ‘And then – the things you said.’ Her eyes blazed and Meg saw pain as well as anger in them.
‘No,’ Meg sighed, ‘I didn’t tell you because I knew it would mean a row. I suppose I should have known it was inevitable either way. And what I said – it wasn’t aimed at you. I just responded to a question, that’s all.’
‘Did your father know about it?’
‘Yes. I told him some weeks ago what I was planning to do. I didn’t tell him when it was happening.’
‘No doubt he encouraged you.’
‘If you must know, he didn’t approve at all.’
Her mother opened a drawer. ‘I got these,’ she said. She dropped two envelopes on the table and then rubbed her fingers as if trying to wipe something away.
‘What’s this?’
‘Read,’ she said. ‘See for yourself.’
Meg opened one of the letters. There was no address at the top. She looked to the bottom of the page. There was no signature either. Just the words, True Christian.
Your daughter sups with the devil, the letter said in tiny green capitals. She is a heathen and flaunts herself like a harlot before the world. The Son of Man will send out his angels and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend and them which do iniquity. And shall cast them into a furnace of fire.
Nice. Truly Christian indeed. ‘Is this some sort of quotation?’
‘Matthew, thirteen.’
She was not surprised to see that the second letter was also anonymous. It was less imaginative and did not draw on fearsome Biblical firepower. Its message was curt, in a spidery hand.
‘You are not welcome among us. Keep away. You will be struck down.’
By whom it was not clear. Meg was disgusted and angry.
‘This is awful,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do about it – apart from throwing them in the bin?’
‘I showed them to Pastor Drew. He said he would pray for me and for you and that he would pray for the poor misguided people responsible.’
‘Well, that’s very helpful of him,’ Meg said with a sarcasm she could not be bothered to hide.
‘But why did you do it?’ Gloria asked.
She was tired apologising. ‘OK, maybe what I said will have offended some people but that’s just an excuse.’ She lifted the letters. ‘In fact, this kind of proves the point. These are from members of the congregation of that church down there. They’ve made that pretty obvious. But what sort of people write things like this? What sort of Christian sentiments are these?’
‘It doesn’t have to be anyone from our church,’ Gloria said, not even convincing herself.
Meg did not bother to argue. ‘Mum, this isn’t really about me – it’s about you. There are clearly some bitter people, jealous for some reason, perhaps, and they’ve taken a dislike to you. I’m their way of getting at you. Maybe they think you and the pastor are too friendly. I don’t know.’
Gloria’s eyes widened. ‘What are you suggesting?’
Meg raised her hands in protest. ‘I’m not suggesting anything. You don’t know what goes through people’s minds, that’s all.’
She thought of her mother’s own dexterity at spreading poison. There was something of an irony here but she got no satisfaction out of observing it. Hate mail was cowardly and sick. It was easy to suggest dismissing it as the work of a couple of cranks but a lot harder to do so.
Faith, what she believed was her Christianity, was important to her mother but through it, and more important still, was prestige, position, the admiration of her peers. That was being eroded. Meg felt like telling her what she thought of the Pentecostal Baptist Church, that Drew was a charlatan, using people and taking their money, but she did not want to undermine her more than her nameless correspondents had.
‘I’m going away for a couple of days,’ her mother said, more subdued. ‘I have a friend who has a cottage on the North Antrim coast. She’s always asking me to come and visit her. I thought perhaps I would.’
‘Good idea,’ Meg said. ‘It sounds great. Nice walks, fresh air. Just the thing you need.’
She looked at the letters on the table. It was ridiculous. The damned things were driving her mother out of her own home.
Her gaze returned to the floor. ‘Is there a dustpan and brush?’ she asked. ‘Better clean this mess up.’
The following morning, she got some letters of her own. There were two of them in a brown envelope with a compliments slip from Sally at Granada.
‘Haven’t looked at them. All yours,’ she had scribbled.
After what had happened to her mother, Meg opened the first with some trepidation. But it was innocuous: a letter from a woman in Doncaster who ran a group for the families of people who had suffered brain injury. She wondered if Meg was on the Internet and would like to contribute to their activities.
The second was from a woman whose husband had had a stroke and had been in a coma for several weeks. She wanted to know if Meg thought he would recover, the way she had.
She could feel the desperation in the thin notepaper and wished there was something she could do to help. What the letters reminded her more than anything was that she should consider herself lucky. Preoccupied with Paul Everett and his killer, caught up with her parents and their problems, not to mention Elizabeth, it obscured the fact that she had survived. With or without a memory, she had a life of sorts to lead.
A couple of minutes later, she was dialling a telephone number.
A woman answered; a real person, not an automated system. That was rare, as she was discovering.
‘New Central Hospital, Betty speaking, how may I help you?’
‘Oh, hi, yes,’ Meg said, ‘I wonder if you could give me the name of the doctor who’s in charge of emergency medicine.’