The light in her upstairs flat was on and the curtains open, which boded well. Jemma was a girl-about-town, and he had realized as he turned the ignition off that, given it was a Saturday night, she might well have been out on it.
Neil checked his hair in the rearview mirror, spat on his hand and plastered it over his hair to no good effect. He tutted at his image, got out of the car and rubbed his fingers in the chill night air. He should have thought to bring a jacket, but then again he didn’t plan on standing out in the cold for too long. Striding across the pavement with his hands in his pockets, he shivered against the freshness of the night. He rang Jemma’s bell and lounged against the wall, waiting for her to come. The lights were bright in Calzone’s restaurant across the street, and the windows were misting with condensation. He should have tried to phone her before he set off, and then they might have been able to go out to dinner again. Neil glanced at his watch. Maybe it wasn’t too late. When there was still no sound of encouraging footsteps, Neil rang the doorbell again. It was freezing out here.
He was torn between ringing the bell again and giving it up as a bad job. Neil backed away from the door and looked up at the window. Jemma was peeping out, trying to see who was downstairs. He waved up at her helpfully, and he thought he saw her frown. A minute later the patter of her feet came down the stairs and she opened the door.
God, she looked fabulous. She was wearing a cream silk kimono, short, with precious little else. Her feet were bare and her tiny toes were painted with pearly peachy polish, which did very strange things to his insides. And her hair was all tangled, although she was trying to smooth it, and she looked even more like Alicia than she normally did.
“Hi,” he said.
Jemma pulled her kimono round her. Neil could tell she was cold too. “What are you doing here?”
“Did I get you out of bed?”
Jemma looked round. “Sort of.”
“Still got your cold then?”
“What?”
“Your cold.”
“Oh, yes,” Jemma said, and she sniffed.
“I wanted to talk some more about Ed and Alicia.”
“Now?”
“No time like the present,” Neil said hopefully.
Jemma looked like she felt differently. More any time but the present.
“Ed’s going away with another woman,” he said. “And Ali is off to the Maldives with her schoolboy.”
“She’s not?” Jemma let an unhappy stream of air out of her nostrils, which curled like smoke in the cold night. “She didn’t tell me.”
He was getting a little chilly in his shirtsleeves. “I think this calls for a crisis meeting,” he ventured.
“Not now,” she said. “I can’t. I don’t feel up to it.”
“Oh.” Neil tried his Princess Diana cute eyes. “I’m so worried about them.”
“Me too,” she said. “But there’s nothing I can do now. I’ll call you.”
He couldn’t believe this! He was being given the brush-off. He’d driven miles through driving rain and snow—well, not really—to get here and she wasn’t even going to let him in for a quick cuppa. “When?” he said pathetically.
“Soon,” she promised, but he didn’t like the way she looked over her shoulder when she said it.
“This is important to me, Jemma.”
“And to me,” she replied. “We’ll get together soon. Night, Neil.” And she shut the door rather too hastily for his liking. Her feet pattered away from him back up the stairs to the warmth of her flat. Neil stood looking bemused at the closed door, wind whipping round his neck.
He hunched his shoulders and shuffled back to his car. This was not how it was supposed to go. He was supposed to go inside for one thing, have a few sociable drinks and then they’d have a brief chat about what twits their respective siblings were, by which time he’d have drunk far too much to be able to drive, and where could you get a cab at this time of night, wasn’t it always a problem, and Jemma was supposed to have offered to share her bed for the night. So, what was wrong with fantasizing? Nothing except that fantasies rarely came true.
That’s why he was climbing back into his car with nothing to look forward to but the joy of a bag of soggy chips from the Chinese chippy at the end of his road. If it was still open. Knowing his luck, it would probably close as he drew in sight of it. He sighed as he went to start the engine. At that moment, Jemma came to the window and looked out. Perhaps she had changed her mind? Neil thought joyously. A bit of Night Nurse could work wonders. Then he noticed the shock of blond hair go past the window behind her and sucked in his breath without meaning to. There was someone else in the flat. No wonder she was looking so tousled—she’d got a bloke in there! Another bloke. A bloke who wasn’t him! Had all that flirting, all that fluttering of eyelids, just been a con? He’d thought there was at least a chance that Jemma had felt the same way he did. He’d worn a suede jacket for that woman! And flared trousers. He couldn’t believe that all the time she’d been playing with someone else’s ball. Perhaps it was just a mate she had in there. But then, if it was a mate, why couldn’t he have gone in too? Surely he wasn’t so embarrassing, despite his dress sense?
There was only one way to find out whether the potential love of his life was getting jiggy with someone other than him. Stake-out time. Neil clicked on the ignition, tuned the radio into Virgin FM and hunkered down in his seat, wishing, not for the first time, that he’d brought a nice, warm coat.
There was a knocking sound going on in his head. Neil sat bolt upright and banged his knees on the steering wheel, struggling to get his eyes to focus. A breakfast presenter on the radio was chattering wildly about nothing in particular, and Neil realized with a shock that it was rather more daylight than he had expected it to be. The sun streamed through the windscreen, making him wince. The knocking came again. It wasn’t in his head, it was on the window of his car. Jemma was standing in the road with a cup of tea in her hand.
Neil wound the window down.
“I brought this for you,” she said.
Neil looked grateful. It felt like a canary had fallen asleep in his mouth during the night, and he was as stiff as a board. It had to be said that a Citroën wasn’t quite as comfortable as a Slumberland when it came to a good night’s sleep.
“Thanks,” he croaked, and reached out for the cup, which Jemma didn’t seem keen to relinquish.
“Why are you still here?” she asked.
“Er…” Neil said, not even sure why he was there himself. A steady stream of traffic buffeted the car as it drove by.
“Wouldn’t your car start?”
“Er…yes. Er…no.”
“Or were you spying on me, Neil?”
“Er…yes,” he admitted sheepishly.
“Do you think you had any right to?”
“Er…probably not.”
“Definitely not, I’d say.”
“I can explain,” Neil said.
Jemma was wearing jeans and a beaded jacket, and the color of the beads picked out the flames in her luxuriant red hair and the round red patches of anger on her cheeks. “Can you?”
“No. Not really.” He smiled wanly.
“Don’t ever sit outside my flat again, Neil,” she said. “Not for any reason.”
Jemma threw the cup of tea in his face and then handed him the cup and saucer through the window.
“Right,” he said as he dripped tea into his lap. Then Jemma flounced off and got into a huge silver Mercedes parked farther down the pavement. And as it drove away, Neil felt a little light go out in his heart.
CHAPTER 54
Christian is very quiet. And white.
“Hangover?”
He nods and then looks as if he regrets it.
“Did you go out?”
“No.” He forgoes a shake of the head. “Watched Match of the Day with Rob.”
“Who was playing?”
“Er…”
I smile indulgently. ?
??It must have been a great match.”
“Er…”
“Not that it matters,” I say. “I haven’t a clue who any of the teams are anyway. Want some tea?”
There is an infinitesimal movement that indicates a yes. “Advil? Dark glasses?” I think that’s a yes to all of them. His eyes are the cerise-pink color of pain, and every time he blinks I can tell that his eyelids are grating over his pupils like coarse-grade sandpaper. His nose is running and he is sniffing tiredly.
“Give me a minute,” Christian says hoarsely. “I’ll be fine.”
“You must have done a lot of cheering.”
Christian sinks lower toward the table. “Yeah.”
Elliott comes into the kitchen and leans up against Christian’s chair. “Are we going to do skateboarding?”
“In a minute.” Christian is looking less than convincing. I turn away to hide my smile.
“Anything to eat? Eggs and bacon?”
Christian gives an involuntary shudder. “No. No bacon.”
“Just eggs?”
“No. No eggs.”
“A minute’s gone,” says Elliott.
I think Christian is beginning to realize that having a hangover does not preclude you from parental duties. A child who wants to be entertained cares little for any fragility in your constitution. I bet he wishes that he’d stayed at home in his cozy bed rather than rushing round here first thing this morning.
If Christian spent most of last night drinking, I lay awake most of the night worrying. Don’t ask me what about. Everything is the short answer. The universe was bombarding me with worry vibes. I even got to wondering why I’d failed my maths “O” level, and that was about a hundred years ago and hasn’t made the slightest difference to anything at all, nothing whatsoever, since. I tied myself in several knots over a scarf I have that belonged to my grandmother that’s been kicking around since the 1950s which now has a nice hole fraying in one corner—not surprisingly. It was about three o’clock when I decided I ought to ask Jemma’s advice on stopping the steady erosion of the fragile material. It’s the sort of thing she would know about. She acts like she’s the world expert on everything anyway. And then I worried why I hadn’t thought of doing that earlier. See? I think I was avoiding worrying about the big issues really, like how are my children coping now that we are a dysfunctional family and how I’m going to pay my bills now that Kath Brown has bulleted me. I nearly, nearly rang Christian, but you know how it is. I didn’t want to wake him up and then have him lying awake worrying that I was worrying.
“I’ll come and watch you practice what I taught you yesterday, and then, when I’m feeling a bit better—” Christian looks remorsefully at me “—I’ll show you some more. Go and put your knee-pads on.” Personally, I’d be happier if my child was wearing full body armor. Elliott, placated momentarily, heads for the door.
“How much time did that buy me?” Christian asks.
“With Elliott, not much. He’s far too astute to allow a mere adult to blackmail him.” I am quietly pleased at how quickly my lover is learning to manipulate his way round the minefield of child care.
“I’d better go out then.” Christian pushes away from the table rather unsteadily.
As he passes me, head hung low, I touch his arm. “I missed you last night,” I say.
“I missed you too.” And he looks so hang-dog that it makes me smile again. “I love you, Ali,” he says, his misery turning to seriousness. “You do know that?”
“Yes.” I nod reassuringly, but my heart starts to pound. Though at times, I do wonder why, I want to add. This can’t be an easy situation for my young, beautiful boy. He takes my hands and puts them to his lips. His mouth is dry, his lips cracked and I bet his breath smells like a brewery.
“I’m sorry I got drunk.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “You’re entitled to some fun. You’re young. And foolish.”
“I am,” he says, and follows Elliott out into the sunshine. And I stand at the kitchen sink and wonder why I feel like crying. I start to prepare some food on autopilot, moving around my kitchen with a familiarity that belies the fact I haven’t been a permanent resident for quite some time.
I can hear Elliott giggling, the carefree laughter of childhood, and I feel awful that in our cruel adult way we are compromising him, blighting his memories, marring the days that should be all sunshine and roses. It gives me a quiet surge of warmth to know that something as simple as a skateboard can provide temporary relief from his worries. Will I ever find the right time or the right words to tell him that we, Ed and I, never meant any of this to happen? It wasn’t in our plan. Yet, all over the country fathers, and sometimes mothers too, are leaving their children. The divorce rate is so high now that I wonder it’s not possible to see them streaming away in droves from their suburban houses in their Ford Mondeos—a mass exodus of confused, bewildered, displaced adults. What are the statistics now? One in three? Every minute someone is born and every minute someone dies, and in the blink-of-an-eye gap in between, someone leaves their family to the clutches of the legal system. I wonder how many of these leavings are premeditated, planned over months, years, of unhappiness and deadness? Men frustrated with their lives, their work, their softening stomachs, their receding hairlines. Women who, tired of years of picking up socks, decide to find themselves before it is too late and they are lost completely in a world of detergent adverts. And maybe for some of them it isn’t like that. How many of them consider themselves happily married and then, through a series of silly and unfortunate events, find themselves outside that marriage, adrift on a raft of accusation and recriminations?
I call the boys in for lunch, and amid the vast issues of the breakdown of family life, still find the time to admonish myself for being a lousy cook.
We have finished lunch, such as it was. All that Ed has in the freezer is pizza, and I feel like offering to do a big shop at Tesco’s for him to stock up, but I’m not sure how he’d take it.
Christian is struggling to force down some pizza, but I can tell his heart and his stomach aren’t in it. But then, the pizza does vaguely resemble roadkill. He’s looking a lot perkier though, and some blood has returned to his face. Elliott’s has no blood, anywhere. And I’m truly grateful. His skateboarding lesson has again passed without incident which I feel is something of an achievement for an activity that is so potentially lethal. Elliott has decided that Christian is totally cool and they are happily bonding.
I prized Thomas away from Harry Potter to join us. I worry that Thomas is becoming quieter—along with everything else. Tanya has also graced us with her presence. She is wearing too much makeup and too little clothing. My daughter is treating Christian with an air of studied indifference that screams she also thinks he is totally cool.
“I want to pop round to Aunty Jemma’s,” I say. “Anyone want to come?” My children stare blankly at me. “Don’t all shout at once.”
“I want to stay here with Christian,” Elliott announces.
“Me too,” Thomas says, which is a bit surprising.
“Tanya?”
She shrugs.
“Is that a yes shrug or a no shrug?”
She shrugs again, but more emphatically.
“Shall I go on my own?”
“Yes,” Elliott says, peeling a mushroom from the abandoned remains of his pizza crust and licking it. “We’ll take care of Christian.”
“Oh good.” I look at Christian, who seems unconcerned about being abandoned in the depths of my family. “Is that okay with you?”
“Yes,” he says, and I wonder if he’s still a bit drunk.
“I won’t be long. I just want to borrow some bikinis and bits for the holiday.” I want to ask her about mending Grandma’s scarf too, but don’t dare confess this anxiety in public. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
They all stare at me as if I’m mad. “Well, I’ll go then,” I say hesitantly. “There’s ice cream if anyone wants i
t.”
“Fine.” Christian gives me a wan smile over his plate littered with pepperoni debris. “I’ll sort it out.” And my children look at him as if they have no doubt that he can.
I shoot over to Jemma’s, all in a flap and a panic. And when I get there, she’s not really in the mood to talk. She’s all grunty and distant, but obviously doesn’t want to tell me why. I keep looking at my watch, and that irritates her a bit more.
“I never see you these days, Alicia,” she moans.
“Come back with me now,” I say. “I don’t want to leave Christian alone with the children for too long.”
“Why? Do you think they’ll scare him off?”
The thought had crossed my mind. “He isn’t used to them.”
“Well, he’s going to have to bloody well get used to them, isn’t he?”
Clearly, my sister has not put a shilling in her sympathy meter today.
I give up trying to verbalize my anxiety and trail after her into her immaculate designer boudoir with her light oak wardrobes and her snow-white linen and her church candles that are never, ever burned. Jemma’s picked out some of her poshest bikinis for me, which is very thoughtful of her, but how I’m ever going to get my bum in them I’ll never know. I don’t feel like exposing the full glory of my bare bottom to her ridicule, and so I stuff them in my bag with mumbled thanks and think that I’ll try to rush into Marks & Spencer this week and spend some more money I haven’t got on a bikini that’s designed to hold a sagging posterior. They might even do one with a built-in secret tummy-control panel and my tummy could do with all the secret control it can get. I am torn between not wanting to look like mutton dressed as lamb and not being mistaken for Christian’s mum. A bikini feels like a fairly big danger zone.