Page 7 of Such a Good Couple
‘Can you guys take this one?’ Clara shouted over to them, giving the toddling Reggie a push towards the metal detector. ‘He needs a change,’ she called, quickly stuffing a nappy and wipes into his tiny hands.
CHAPTER 3
The buzzing of her family WhatsApp group chat caused Maggie Strong to stir a full fifteen minutes before her alarm.
She pulled her phone out from under the pillow to see an unsettling missive from her mother.
Mam: Dirty fecker. I always knew he was a slimy little prick.
She could see that it was indeed stupid o’clock. Aka 6.15 a.m. The injustice! The alarm was set for half anyway, they would be leaving for LAX soon, but a mother of two in her forties needed every scrap of sleep she could get.
She rolled over and landed directly into one of the strips of white-hot sunlight that was slicing through her blinds and across her huge bed – it was no doubt already in the thirties outside.
Los Angeles mornings were somehow the mostmorningestmornings of anywhere. The sun was barely up but she could tell from the distant sounds of traffic and general vibe of activity audible in the house beyond her bedroom door that the outside world’s day had already started in earnest. People in LA took meetings at 6 a.m. Lots of people, like Fionn, her husband, went to the gym at 4 a.m., when it was still dark. It was a deranged, though unavoidable, part of his job.
It was after lunchtime in Ireland so her group chats were already bopping. The family chat, unnervingly named It’s AFinger – a reference so old, neither her parents nor her two younger siblings, Emer and Donal, could remember the origin story – was brimming with indignation about a just-leaked story of an Irish politician doing the usual Irish Politician Stuff.
This is what had elicited her mother’s message, a message which the others were now violently protesting.
Emer: Gah, Mam, too early for the image of a slimy prick. Now that’s burned indelibly on my retina.
Donal: Look at Emer pretending she isn’t balls deep in slimy pricks round the clock.
Dad: Can we go one bloody day without the aubergine and splashy drops emoji in this group? It’s bloody obscene. On a less lewd and more cultured note, I was reading about Fionn’s new indie movie! He’s becoming so well regarded, delighted for him, and working with Adam Abramson is incredible. Can’t wait to ask him all about it when ye’re back at the end of the month.
Maggie thumbsed-up his message and flicked over to her other most active thread, Slags For Life, where Clara and Annie were comparing notes on what they’d packed and generally squealing about how excited they were to be all together in just eight more hours.
Maggie typed: Cannot WAIT to see you two gorgeous hags, then she x’d out and brought up the internet to check the weather for Provincetown but was instead met with the headline she’d read last thing before falling into an agitated sleep the night before.
SEE: These Pics Of A-List Actor Finn Strong’s Wife Are GivingUs All Hope.
Queasy shame made her stomach curdle. She hadn’t clicked in when the article had shown up in her newsfeed last night. But it had taken everything in her to resist. Now her finger hovered over the underlined link.Don’t, Maggie! This is stupid. It’s not productive. Nothing good ever comes of this, her rational side was desperately trying to remind her.
Her Fuck-It Side clicked the link. Sometimes knowing something was out there but not quite knowing what it was was worse, she reasoned.
She scrolled past the sycophantic opening paragraph …
He’s Hollywood’s hottest leading man …
… down past the list of accolades and achievements:
There’s Oscar buzz around his role in Adam Abramson’s Fires in Vermont premiering at NYC Celluloid Fest this autumn …
… and then on to the sick-making fawning over the fact that ‘despite it all, he’s still with the girl he met in college’. Underneath this paragraph was a carousel of images of a woman shopping. Maggie clicked through them, observing herself looking hassled as she crossed a Santa Monica car park with her twins, Dodi and Essie, trailing behind her. She was juggling the holy trinity – phone, coffee, handbag – and wearing high-waisted blue jeans, sunglasses and a white shirt. In one picture, her phone was wedged between her ear and shoulder as she unlocked her colossal white Grand Cherokee Jeep with blacked-out windows. It wasn’t a great angle: the position had caused her jawline to disappear into a series of cascading folds. In another picture, she was placing her coffee on the roof of the car, herraised arm causing her shirt to lift. Her exposed belly was in the process of devouring the waistband of her jeans.
‘We love that Mrs Finn Strong (aka Maggie!) is just your totally average girlie, embracing her imperfections,’ the final words of the piece trilled.
Maggie clicked out of the article just as her phone’s alarm began to beep. She hit ‘dismiss’ and stuffed the phone back under her pillow. Just a few seconds on the internet had thrown her nervous system into high gear and she now needed to climb down off the ledge of anxiety that any encounter with the press or social media inevitably inspired these days.
Maggie had married ‘Finn’ back when he was Fionn and they were just two of the many struggling theatre people in rainy, downtrodden Dublin in the 2000s. Now Fionn Strong was Finn Strong and he went to the gym at4 bloody a.m.with the rest of the lunatics.
His side of the bed was empty currently, not because he was out honing his body (voted top ten torsos inGQmagazine three years running) but because he’d spent the past month in Quebec shooting the third instalment in theEndurancemovie franchise. He had agreed a short hiatus though and would be flying in on Friday to meet her and their friends in Provincetown for the 4th of July weekend and a long-overdue vacation.
Vacation! Maggie caught herself.Holiday, for feck sake, Maggie. Don’t become one of them.
Maggie pulled herself from the tangle of the bed and hit the keypad on the wall above her side table to raise the blinds that covered the entirely glass wall that cleverly folded open onto the private patio of their renovated-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life 1920s bungalow on Lime Orchard Road, Beverly Hills. Neighbours included Penélope Cruz and Jennifer Lawrence.
Fionn and Maggie had been living in the bizarre land of fame for five years now and it had never become normal. Themovie-star wives fell into two categories: Civilians and Stars In Their Own Right. Maggie had noticed after her first twenty or so Hollywood parties that the two groups didn’t mix. She stuck to her allotted group but the other Civilian Wives seemed to assimilate more easily than she had. They told her to just get on the train and enjoy the ride.
