Katie pulled her pea jacket tighter around her toned arms and looked up at the bare, mangled branches of the gargantuan fig trees overhead. It was a cold Boxing Day, the wind was bitter but for the most part what little snow dusted the area had melted. The ground was frozen and hard as she, Maggie, and Maggie's two daughters walked through Hyde Park, cheeks chapped and noses flushed red.
Maggie's eldest daughter Lizzy, now nearly three years old, was an adorable, chubby-faced tot with small, bright eyes and a shock of bright red hair right on the top of her head. The younger, eleven month-old Abby, was a miniature version of her older sister, despite the fact they had different fathers. They were sweet girls, and Maggie loved them both. Katie did too. She was Aunty Kate, and had taken on the role cheerfully.
Wild, boy-crazy Maggie had finally settled down with a bloke from Edinburgh named Richie, a short, rat-faced fella nearly twice her age with a distinctly-pointed nose, greasy brown hair that was scraped back loosely against his scalp, and a deep Scottish brogue that made his speech almost unrecognisable. He took on the role of fatherhood to both girls and Maggie loved him dearly for it.
Katie liked him too. She liked him if anything because he made Maggie happy. Since they'd gotten together, Maggie had been a completely different woman. Kate had never seen her smile so much! And dear old Mags deserved to be happy. She'd flitted from man to man, and while she said she liked the wildness of sex and strangers, Katie knew deep down Maggie craved the things all women, all people craved-to have someone to love and cherish, and to love and cherish you back.
Katie had been feeling that urge as of late, ever since Junior's engagement to Niamh. Junior . . . She had been thinking of him constantly since the night before, and she wasn't sure why. Well, she had liked him once, like that, but that had been so long ago now . . . Being surrounded by Maggie and her happiness didn't help, either.
She was glad for her friend's new-found love, and really Maggie was the only friend she had outside of Junior, as sad as that little fact was, but at the same time she was jealous of her. Katie, jealous of Maggie, whose life by comparison had always been a mess. Maggie with her children and her poxy clothes and her messy bedsit. But Katie would trade her left arm for Maggie's life. No matter how she gobbed off about it, nothing could change the fact that Maggie had two children she loved, a boyfriend who loved her, and a fullness inside her that Kate couldn't ever remember feeling.
There was a hole in the very core of her being, and she wasn't sure what would fill it. She wasn't sure if it would ever be filled.
'Well ain't this just barry.' This was from Richie as a particularly bitter gust of wind whipped past them. 'Cold like this could make a man go radge. - Bundle up, little lasses, or you'll freeze yer little hooters!' Abby and Lizzy giggled despite the stinging in their cheeks and clutched their noses, which were running snot down their upper lips. Maggie noted a particularly long, gooey tendril on little Abby's chin and wiped it with her mitten, at which Kate grimaced. She never could get behind the uncleanliness of motherhood.
'I can't wait 'til we get some Bovril in us. I'm Hank Marvin,' responded Maggie, and Katie noticed her voice had taken on a bit of an Edinburgh lilt. There was so much Scottish surrounding her, her own brash cockney suddenly sounded foreign to her own ears as she chimed in:
'Me too. Maybe there's a chippy somewhere. Or we could nip by Sainsbury's.'
An easy silence fell between them, and for a while only the creaking branches and distant screams of the few odd children could be heard through the park. In the distance, car tyres rolled by on the icy tarmac, and heavy boots crunched through small patches of snow. Carollers sang a chorus of 'We Wish You A Merry Christmas', still ringing their little bells and collecting money for the Salvation Army. London was quiet, and the smell of winter flitted through the air.
A laughing couple nearby distracted Kate from her thoughts, and she glanced over at them. The boyfriend, young and in a smart jacket, with dark, wavy hair and a set of oval-shaped glasses on his nose, had slipped on the ice-slicked pavement and fallen onto his arse. His girlfriend, a gorgeous young woman with long, white-blonde hair, laughed so hard there were tears in her eyes before she tried to help him up. Her efforts were fruitless, however, and the man dragged her down on top of him, where they laughed together and kissed.
Katie didn't even realise she'd stopped to watch them. Maggie and Richie turned to face her a few paces ahead, each holding a little red-headed babe in their arms.
'She dinnae look very happy,' the Scot said solemnly, wiping his hand over his thick moustache, which had collected water droplets from his breath freezing and subsequently melting in the wiry hairs.
Maggie hoisted Abby further up onto her hip. 'She's just lonely, Rich. - Kate, you all right?'
Katie blinked and turned away from the couple to face her friends. 'Yeah . . . Just hungry.'
She pulled her arms tighter around her and mustered what little energy she could spare to bustle over to the others. After eating with the happy little family, she would have to return to her tiny, lonely flat, in the suffocating emptiness, with no one to join her but whatever Christmas special was playing on television. The holiday season really was the most depressing time of the year, she reckoned.