‘I do, too, now that she’s my housemate,’ Cara pointed out.
‘She’ll understand.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
Adam turned towards her and stretched his arm across the back of the bench, resting his cheek against his hand. His face was awfully near to hers, Cara thought with a nervous gulp. She didn’t think she’d ever been in such close proximity to him, although she’d worked with him for ages now. His skin looked temptingly soft to touch and, despite the best efforts of the smoky pub, she could smell a tang of citrus soap.
‘How come you two are friends?’ Adam asked.
Cara pursed her lips. The hidden question was, How come a wild, winsome, bottom-baring broad like Emily is hooked up with a strait-laced pillar of morality like you? And it rankled slightly, because it was one thing trying to live your life in as healthy and abstemious way as possible, but entirely another if people viewed you as a boring old fart because of it.
‘We met at university,’ Cara said. ‘We both studied English, Emily because she’s always had a burning desire to teach, and me because I wasn’t good enough to get on the art course I really wanted to do. We’ve stuck together ever since.’
Through good times and bad, Cara thought. Even though they were entirely different characters. And it was strange that Adam had formed his opinion of Emily from a one-dimensional glimpse of her on the Internet, because that really wasn’t Emily at all. In fact, the most shocking thing about this for Cara was that Emily, behind closed doors, had seen fit to be a brazen hussy in the bedroom. Emily was sensible. Emily was down-to-earth. Emily was organised. Emily was neat. Emily wore Marks & Spencers’ work suits. That is not the trademark of a woman who has a penchant for kinky sex. And even though Cara was entirely grateful that it was Emily’s bum on the Internet and not hers, there was also a small green pain that nipped at her, reminding her that despite her devotion to sensual massage oils, scented candles and velvet bedthrows, her sex life had not been all that she might hope for. The thought that Emily had been romping round with gay abandon for years was a tiny bit hard to swallow.
There was part of Cara that liked being independent and self-sufficient, but on the other hand, it was infinitely better to share the trials and tribulations of your life with someone. And it had been a long time since she’d had someone to look out for her. Too long. It gave her a warm glow to think that Adam had tried to be so protective of her today. She looked up to see that he was finishing his drink. He was a nice guy. A bit scruffy for a knight in shining armour, but at least you wouldn’t have to fight him for the bathroom mirror in the morning.
Adam clinked his glass down onto the stained table swimming in the dregs of someone else’s beer and smacked his lips in satisfaction. He had good lips. Pink and full. Strong.
‘Right,’ he said, rubbing his hands together in a particularly decisive way. Cara hurried down her tomato juice. When Adam said, ‘Come for a quick drink,’ he evidently meant it.
‘Doing anything tonight?’ he said as he stood up. ‘I mean, as well as telling Emily she’s about to become a local celebrity.’
‘No,’ Cara said. ‘Nothing.’ She’d planned to spend some time meditating to help her clear her head of today’s stress, but suddenly it sounded rather pathetic to mention it. ‘No,’ she said again, clearing her throat. ‘You . . . er . . . you don’t fancy grabbing a bite to eat, do you? There’s a new veggie restaurant on the High Street. It’s supposed to be OK.’
‘I can’t,’ Adam said. He looked flustered. A pink tinge came to his cheeks which may have been due to the Guinness or to embarrassment. ‘I’ve got other arrangements. Plans. Stuff to do.’
‘Oh, right. Right,’ Cara said, struggling to gather her coat together in a rush. ‘A date. You’ve probably already got a date.’
Adam shuffled a bit. ‘Well, sort of.’
Cara rolled her eyes and punched his arm playfully. ‘You guys! What are you like?’
Adam rubbed his arm. ‘Yeah.’ He forced a laugh.
Now Cara was embarrassed. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it. I just thought . . . well, I thought . . .’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I know,’ Adam said. ‘Oh, is that the time? I’d better be off.’ He looked down at his wrist and he wasn’t wearing a watch. They exchanged a glance and Cara had no idea what it meant. Adam scratched his stubble uncomfortably. ‘Maybe another time?’
‘Well, yeah. Maybe,’ Cara said. ‘Maybe another time.’
Adam eased round her, without touching her, heading for the door. ‘Hope it goes well with Emily.’
‘Yeah. Me too.’ Cara gave him a wave. ‘Hope it goes well with . . . whoever.’
But Adam was gone, disappearing through the squash of backs and elbows and beer glasses.
Cara folded her arms and let out an unhappy snort. ‘Oh flip,’ she said.
Chapter Thirteen
There were wire hanging baskets containing the long-dead remnants of geraniums dangling either side of the porch and it had started to rain. Adam shrugged himself a bit more deeply into his coat. Reluctantly, he rang the doorbell.
If he cared to examine it, which he most certainly didn’t, it had been a bit of a shock for him when Cara had asked him out to dinner. He supposed he shouldn’t read too much in it. You only had to flick through the Daily Mail to discover that women did that sort of thing all the time these days – only usually not to him. And then out of the blue, Cara popped the question. Cara, from whom he would least expect it. The weird thing was, he’d sort of wanted to go to dinner with her. She was very small and cute and always looked as if no one loved her – and that was a feeling he could readily identify with.
At that moment Laura, his ex-wife, opened the door and promptly walked away from it. She looked over her shoulder and said, ‘You’re late.’
‘Five minutes,’ Adam countered.
With a cry of ‘Dad!’ Josh rushed down the stairs, nearly knocking his mother over, and jumped into Adam’s waiting arms. Adam spun him round.
‘Don’t you think you’re getting a bit old for this?’ Adam puffed as he got his breath back.
‘No.’ Josh jumped back to the ground. ‘But you are.’
Laura’s jaw was set. ‘It’s a school night. I don’t want him out late.’
They had gone through this little ritual every week since Josh had started school and now he was twelve. Every week it got a little harder to bite his tongue. Adam ignored Laura and spoke instead to Josh. ‘Have you done your homework, champ?’
‘You ask that every week, Dad,’ his son chided. Perhaps Adam too liked his own little rituals.
‘And you always say you have, but you haven’t.’
Josh grinned and Adam cuffed him round the head. Laura looked on, unsmiling. But then, Adam thought, there probably wasn’t a lot to laugh about if you were married to a short, fat, balding building society manager called Barry.
It was strange how time changed things. In the last few years, Laura had somehow managed to metamorphose from a beautiful butterfly into a hairy, scary old caterpillar. When they’d first met, she’d been an untameable, attractive woman with a mass of tumbling black curls, a penchant for leather trousers and tops that left the world in no doubt about her cleavage. Now she was a tight-lipped harpy who lived in cardigans and scraped her hair back in a knot and whose only joy in life seemed to be to make Adam miserable. It was ridiculous. They’d split up nine years ago. Nine long years. Laura was the one who remarried within the blink of an eye and he was the one who was still sitting alone at nights in a flat with only McCain’s Home Fries, a six-pack and Survivor for solace. What had she got to complain about?
Perhaps it was significant that after several years of marriage to Mr Barry of the Alliance & Leicester, there were no brothers or sisters for Josh to play with. Or perhaps it was the fact that Adam was still very much around, determined to remain in Josh’s life when Laura would really rather he’d been exterminated from the face of the planet. The term ‘ex??
? was a bit of a misnomer really, because Laura would never truly be a complete ‘ex’ as long as Josh was around to bind them together. Not that he was complaining. Josh was his only reason for getting out of bed some mornings. Most mornings. Every morning.
‘Luigi’s?’ Adam said.
‘Yeah!’ His son whirled round on the spot.
The thing Adam most liked about Josh was his enthusiasm. Luigi’s was a small family-run Italian restaurant nestled beneath one of the towering oaks that lined the leafy part of Rosslyn Hill, just before Hampstead slid quietly into Belsize Park. It was cheerful, cosy and they were always welcomed like old friends. They went to Luigi’s every week without fail and yet Josh never seemed to tire of it. That was probably down to the fact that Mrs Luigi thought Josh was the cutest thing that walked the earth and told him so, regularly. She also gave him huge helpings of ice cream to reinforce it. And they were comfortable there. Adam never felt like he was doing the Single-Father-Trying-To-Entertain-Bored-Kid syndrome at Luigi’s.
The thing was, it would have been quite easy to invite Cara to come with them – as a friend – but he never talked much about Josh at work. He wasn’t even sure if Cara knew he had a son. But then that would have intruded on his time with Josh and that was a very precious commodity. It just seemed easier to let her think that he’d got a date. As if.
‘Come on, Dad.’ Josh tugged at his sleeve, eager to get to his four-cheese pizza.
‘Right.’ Adam smiled wearily at Laura. He really wished that they could make peace with each other.
‘Don’t be late,’ she said and slammed the door.
His son looked up at him and shrugged. ‘Women,’ Josh said.
Chapter Fourteen
The minute I walk through Cara’s front door, I can hear a dreadful din. It sounds like a cat having its teeth pulled out. One by one.
The noise is coming from the lounge and, believe me, for a minute there, I feel like going straight up to my room. Instead, I decide to face it. Tonight, I do not want to be alone. Tonight, I want to find something alcoholic lurking in the fridge, in among the organic tofu and the beansprouts, and drink it. All of it. Whatever it is.
I open the door and Cara is sitting on the floor, in the Lotus Position – what else? She has her eyes closed and is clinking little bells together that are attached to her outstretched fingertips. The tortured cat noises are coming from somewhere in the back of her throat and I wonder what she’d be like at ‘I’m Every Woman’ in the local karaoke bar if this is the unholy row she makes when she’s clearly trying to do something spiritual.
I throw my bag on the sofa, which makes her jump, and I think she’s not quite as deep into her trance as she’d like me to believe. To confirm it, she opens one eye.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask, following my bag to the sofa.
Cara opens the other eye. ‘I’m trying to attune to the universe.’
‘Ah.’ I cuddle one of her tie-dyed cushions. ‘Bad day?’
‘Dreadful,’ Cara admits, de-trancing. She picks the little bells off her fingers. ‘I have some bad news.’
‘Ha!’ I say in my most sympathetic voice. ‘You do?’
Cara unwinds her legs and comes and curls up next to me on the sofa. She pulls her floaty skirt down over her knees and leans towards me. Cara looks like a very troubled person. ‘How did it go with Declan O’Cheeky Bits?’
‘Bad,’ I say with a vehement nod. ‘Very bad.’
Cara inclines her head as a signal for me to continue.
‘The dot.com businesses are all going down the pan,’ I start, not needing an excuse to launch into my monologue. ‘Except the one featuring my arse, but I’ll come to that later. Our house is being repossessed and Declan has emptied my bank account of my money by forging my signature in my cheque book.’ I look at my friend and, not for the first time today, my heart feels literally as if it is going to break – just snap quietly in two and that would be the end of it. ‘He has, without my knowledge, made me a director of his company and I am now jointly responsible for his debts which are, at a conservative estimate, one hundred thousand pounds and rising.’ I sigh heavily, which does not even come close to expressing how I feel. ‘My life could not be any worse, Cara.’
‘Mmm,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘I think it could.’
‘No way.’ I shake my head. ‘I am already contemplating taking a long walk off a short cliff.’
Cara shrinks back into the cushions, holding one in front of her like a barrier. ‘The paper is running a story tomorrow,’ she says as she bites her lip.
I am arrested in my flow. ‘Which paper?’
‘My paper.’
I don’t think I like the sound of this and it’s clear that Cara isn’t expecting me to. I purse my lips tightly. ‘On what?’
‘You,’ she supplies flatly.
‘Me?’
Cara nods, wincing slightly.
‘Your paper?’ My eyes are out on stalks again. ‘Your paper is running a story on me? Why? Why are they doing that? Why are you letting them?’
‘I couldn’t stop them, Emily.’ Cara looks distraught. ‘It’s a good news story.’
‘It’s not.’ My hands are sweaty with panic. ‘It’s a terrible story. My life is crashing around my ears and now I’m going to do it inside the Hampstead Observer.’
‘Front page,’ Cara says quietly.
‘I’ve made the front page?’
She barely nods.
‘Great,’ I say. ‘Oh, that’s just great!’ Try as I might to pretend this isn’t happening, I know that it’s only too real. ‘I’m going to get that bloody Declan O’Donnell, rip his heart out and castrate him! Not necessarily in that order.’
Cara puts her arms round me. ‘Some good could come of this, Emily.’
I sink against her, feeling wretched. ‘Like what?’
Cara looks at me earnestly. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’
‘I need to be drunk, Cara,’ I mumble. ‘I need to be very drunk.’
‘I have bought some Smirnoff Ice for that specific purpose.’
Cara is a truly wonderful friend.
‘Then, when we are too drunk to function,’ I warn her, ‘we need to think of a cunning plan. A very cunning plan indeed.’
Chapter Fifteen
Luigi’s restaurant was busy as always, but nicely busy, not can’t-hear-yourself-think busy. Adam liked it because it was one of the few places in the area that didn’t require you to take out a second mortgage in order to eat there on a regular basis. Josh liked it because it made him feel grown up, whereas McDonald’s was now relegated to the realms of comfort food in times of crisis, and as Josh approached the joys of adolescence, his father suspected there might be plenty of emergency trips to the Golden Arches.
At Luigi’s, they always sat at the same window seat, watching the well-heeled of Hampstead strut their stuff. The streets were quieter during the week, not thronging with tourists and window shoppers like they were on Sundays. While Adam daydreamed, Josh liked to arrange the objects on the table, making geometric designs with them that he tried to keep within the bounds of the red and white check pattern on the tablecloth. First it was the salt and pepper, then the sugar bowl piled with rock-hard crystals of sweetness in livid colours, the obligatory knackered Chianti bottle with rainbow-coloured melted candle and, finally, the simple white vase usually containing a selection of flowers which rotated between a wilted rose, a wilted carnation and a wilted daisy-thing that neither of them knew the name of. If he got really bored, he started on the cutlery and the red paper napkin. Adam wondered whether it was an indication of what profession Josh might eventually lean towards. If it was, Adam hadn’t a clue what that might be.
Adam savoured his glass of wine while Josh slurped his Coke. Eventually, Adam turned his attention from people-watching back to his son, feeling a smile curl his lip as he looked at the boy, rapt in the task of unnecessary organisation of condiments. ‘What have you been up to this week?’
Josh shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
Their conversation always started the same way. Adam would ask what Josh had done, to which his son would duly reply, ‘Nothing.’ That would then be followed by a half-hour, non-stop download of all the things he had actually done that week.
Mrs Luigi delivered their pizzas and they tucked in, momentarily diverting Josh from his story about somebody-or-another’s dad buying them a wrecked Mini that they were going to do up together, from which Adam was evidently supposed to conclude that they should be doing similarly expensive father-son bonding activities.
Adam looked aimlessly around the restaurant and as he did so, his perma-frown started to deepen. Everyone else in here was part of a couple. All of them. Why had he never noticed that before? The two thirty-somethings on the next table could hardly keep their hands off each other, which wasn’t exactly on in the middle of a family-orientated restaurant on a table next to a twelve-year-old boy. At their age they should know better, or at least be able to wait until they got home. Adam treated them to a glare, at which they glared back and groped each other a bit more. Josh swizzled round so that he could get a better view.
The couple beyond them looked as if they were on a first date. They were talking to each other too animatedly to be comfortable, tripping over each other’s sentences, laughing just that little bit too hard. It had been ages since he’d taken anyone out on a real date. He’d almost forgotten what it felt like. Well, actually he had forgotten. Completely.
‘You need a woman,’ Josh said.
Adam pointed his fork. ‘Eat your pizza.’
‘You do,’ Josh stressed.
There were times when he was sure that his son and heir was a mindreader. ‘I don’t,’ Adam said. ‘Eat your pizza.’
Belligerently, Josh stuffed a forkful of pizza in his mouth. ‘It’s been ages since you had a girlfriend,’ he mumbled through it.
Adam scowled at his son. ‘I don’t tell you everything.’