by Carol Mason
‘I really think we should go home now, Toby.’ I am suddenly – horribly – cold.
He rattles on but I’m no longer hearing him. Every distrusting thing Sophie and Charlie have said about Joe is rushing back. Is there something I have failed to see? ‘Your daddy just texted,’ I lie. ‘He wants us to go home now. He’s missing you.’
‘Okay,’ he says, disappointed.
When it’s safe for him to jump off, I steady the swing, and he does a pretend leap through the air.
‘One quick go on the slide!’ he says, running towards it.
‘No,’ I call out. But it’s too late. Before I can muster up another word, Toby has run around to the base of the slide. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and says, ‘Look, I can walk up it with no hands!’
As he begins to walk up the slide, I know what’s going to happen about a split second before it does.
His shoes slip and Toby pitches forward.
There is a moment of silence after his face makes contact with the metal. And then he screams.
When we walk in the door I can hear Joe on the phone. The moment he sees us, he lowers his voice, turns his back and walks out of range.
Grace is sitting cross-legged on the sofa and looks up from her phone. ‘Ugh,’ she says to Toby. ‘That looks nasty.’
Toby’s nose is red and there’s a crust of dried blood around his nostrils. I did my best to stave off the swelling by applying a bag of frozen peas. He seems to be taking the whole thing in his stride though.
‘Hey, little bud,’ Joe falls to his knees to inspect his son’s face, at the same time handing me his phone. ‘It’s Meredith. She wants to speak to you.’
As I take it from him, dread scurries up my spine.
‘Why would you let him walk up a slide with his hands in his pockets?’ she says. Her voice is eerily quiet and calm.
Her apparent bewilderment throws me. ‘Er, I . . . I’m sorry, I—’
‘What was he wearing anyway? Did he have his trainers on?’
My face blazes with a hot, potent embarrassment. ‘Erm . . . No. No, he didn’t . . . Actually, unfortunately . . . I forgot them.’
I glance at Joe but he redirects his gaze to the floor. In the background I can hear Toby excitedly telling Grace how we went to the shop and bought a bag of frozen peas, ‘Because Lauren said it’ll stop it being swelled, but they made my hands cold!’
Meredith says, ‘You can’t take a kid to a park in his school shoes, Lauren. And you can’t take your eyes off him while he’s there.’
‘But I didn’t take my eyes off him!’ I blurt out.
Her tone is measured again. ‘Well – clearly – you did.’
A hollow, suspenseful silence follows. Like that of a crowd at a beheading, before the guillotine comes down.
‘Meredith.’ I clear my throat. ‘I really am sorry . . .’ She’s got a right to be annoyed. I can’t believe I forgot the damned trainers. ‘I promise next time I’ll try to be more alert . . .’
I think I hear her snigger. ‘Look . . . I’m not really interested in next times. You should have taken him to A&E. He needs to be assessed by a doctor.’
This takes me aback. Er! What? The insult stings. I say, quite firmly, ‘Meredith . . . he didn’t need a hospital. I assessed him myself and—’
‘What about an X-ray? What if his nose is broken? He could have lost a front tooth. You do know that if they lose one at this age they won’t get their adult teeth for two or three years? You know that? Right?’
The blood whips up in my veins. ‘But he didn’t lose a tooth.’ I try to mimic her earlier composure and not show I’m rattled. ‘There’s a bit of swelling, but even if he went to hospital they wouldn’t know anything until some of the—’
‘I’d rather a doctor make that call, if you don’t mind. At a hospital.’
I glance at Joe, who is still staring impassively at the floor, then at Toby, who is watching me with a face full of curiosity.
‘Would you like to speak to Toby?’ I say. ‘He’s right here.’
‘Put Joe back on,’ she says sharply.
I hand the phone back to Joe. Grace and I meet eyes but she swiftly glances away. But not before I catch a hint of mischief in her expression. Of course! I bet she rang her mother the second I rang Joe and told him.
Joe strides off to the other end of the room again.
I stand there feeling a bit like the elephant in it.
‘Look . . .’ I hear him say plaintively. ‘He doesn’t need to go to hospital. I checked him out. He’s perfectly fine . . .’
I stare at his back, annoyance pulsing in my veins.
‘Yes, yes, I know . . . You’re right. It could have been a lot worse. But it wasn’t. Like I said . . . it bled a little and it’s tender, but he’s going to be okay.’
Toby chimes in, ‘Tell Mummy about me and the peas!’
I reach a hand and touch the top of his head, my eyes still locked on Joe’s back.
‘Meredith. Look . . . Believe me, I know what a broken nose looks like . . . !’ He sighs. ‘Like I just said . . . he doesn’t need an X-ray. I’ll decide tomorrow. If I think he needs one, I’ll take him in then.’
He seems to have no idea how he’s just undermined me.
Suddenly, he turns and looks at me, a long-suffering expression in his eyes – as though his medical knowledge gets called upon on an all-too-regular basis and it can be tiring.
Right. Clearly I’m not needed. I turn and walk out of the room.
Hours later, we have come to bed.
‘I’m sorry I forgot his trainers,’ I say. It occurred to me a little earlier that while I’ve been silently fuming the entire evening, I seem to have forgotten that Toby was the one who got hurt. My thoughts should only be of him, and of how guilty I feel, not how pissed off I am at Joe, or my wounded pride. Nonetheless, I can’t resist exhuming this.
I watch him close his laptop, reach over and place it on the night table.
‘It’s fine,’ he says, without exactly looking at me. ‘You can’t be expected to remember everything.’
I wait for more. But nothing comes.
‘You know . . . if I’d thought he needed to go to hospital I’d have taken him,’ I say, quietly but not without edge.
He glances at me, almost a little defensively. ‘I know.’ And then he says a firm, ‘I know that. Are you upset?’
When it comes down to it, I’m not sure I feel like clashing with him over it. ‘No,’ I say, after a small time out. ‘I’m not upset.’
‘That’s good, then . . .’ He leans over and pops a conciliatory kiss on my cheek.
Daddy had a girlfriend and that’s why Mummy left him. I hear Toby’s voice, right as I feel the warm press of Joe’s lips on my skin.
My blood runs cold.
ELEVEN
My shift at work starts off uneventfully. I’m able to catch up on some paperwork, even have a bit of fun with some of the nurses. But in the afternoon we’re swamped. Among other cases, I see a ninety-year-old with a fractured radius, a woman who suffered a violent reaction to an over-the-counter hair colour, and an extremely agitated twenty-one-year-old who is convinced that a weekend bender has given her cirrhosis of the liver. She holds up her orange palms and bursts into a trembling fit of tears, barely able to get her words out. Once we establish that she received a Vitamix for her birthday and the orange palms are actually due to the increased levels of beta-carotene in her bloodstream from all the carrot juice she’s consumed, she leaps off the bed and hugs me. I lie and tell her no, she’s not an idiot, loads of people jump to that same conclusion, and I make her promise me that if she suddenly goes on a beetroot-eating craze she won’t worry herself incoherent thinking she’s got bladder cancer. She laughs, then hurries to ring her boyfriend to break the good news that she’s not dying.
After my shift, Joe meets me at Victoria, as he was in the area for work this afternoon. I walk across the concourse to find him standing near the Ca
ffè Nero, head down, absorbed by his phone. Blue suit, as usual. Crisp white dress shirt. He once told me that in his field people rarely wear suits anymore. But he respects the act of doing business, the interaction, the time. If he’s coming to meet you, he wants you to know he didn’t just come from a knockaround in the park.
He looks so utterly handsome and I get a strangely sinking feeling that there might be something in his past behaviour that he should have told me about.
As I’m watching him, trying to picture him being a cheater, he looks up, his very serious expression suddenly transformed by a smile. ‘Well hello,’ he says, in that winning way of his, and when I approach he kisses me with a certain zealous appreciation on the mouth.
We go to an eatery at the back of the station, one that’s known for its great cocktails. As Joe orders us some appetizers and drinks, the young waitress flirts with him, virtually ignoring me. I watch the easy way he handles the attention, with a certain ‘conscious immunity’. For some reason I remember a remark Sophie made ages ago, when I confided that Joe hadn’t really divulged much about why he and Meredith divorced. He’s attractive, successful and charismatic. I’d not rule out the possibility of him being a player.
Our concoction of gin, St Germain and green chartreuse arrives. As I sip I think, Okay, Joe is not cavalier with people’s feelings, and has never been disloyal to Meredith in his words. If he really did cheat he must have had a very good reason.
We pick at the appetizers and talk about our respective days. Joe is always fascinated by my job and I’m as intrigued by his work because it’s so different from my own. Sadly, though, our pizza comes out a little too crispy and burnt at the edges, the tomato sauce scant and dry. I tell him we should send it back, but he just says, ‘It’s fine. We can always just order something else.’ When the waitress comes over to ask if everything’s okay, the thought of paying sixteen quid for something inedible really bothers me, so I tell her it’s dried out and we can’t eat it. Joe brushes off my complaint with an embarrassed apology that leaves me looking like I’ve made a fuss about nothing.
‘Why did you do that?’ I ask him, when she’s taken the burnt offering away.
He shoots me a glance, seems slightly put out by my question. ‘It’s not her fault, is it? I just hate sending things back . . . making a fuss about food.’ He frowns. ‘No one wants to be that guy!’
Hmm . . . I do recall him once having no problem telling a male Starbucks barista that his coffee was cold.
I try to push this unpleasant cocktail of thoughts to the back of my mind. But when we’ve moved on to sharing a perfectly cooked order of truffle mac and cheese, I find myself saying, ‘Why did you and Meredith divorce?’
His forkful of food freezes on its way to his mouth. ‘Why would you ask that?’ he says, after a study of me. ‘I mean, you know why. I told you.’
I stare at the chunk of pancetta in the cheese sauce. ‘She was never there. You were just occupying the same space. You were like strangers.’ I repeat the words exactly as he’d said them when we were first dating. I remember at the time thinking, Joe seems to want to know everything about me – to deep-sea dive for my darkest secrets – and yet he gives away very little in return. In fact, he might well be the most secretive – or should I say guarded – man I’ve ever met.
‘Yes,’ he says, taking a drink of water. ‘For the most part. That’s right.’
In the back of my mind I think about secrets and our entitlement to know them. If Joe has cheated, do I, as his new wife, really have a right to know the ins and outs of that situation? What purpose does it serve? Is he not allowed to keep his past exactly where some would say it belongs?
‘You had an affair,’ I say. Somehow I can’t resist it.
He looks me over like he’s seeing an alien. ‘An affair? What? No. Why would you say that?’
There’s an instant where I find myself trying to determine whether the slight outrage of his reaction means I should assume it’s genuine.
I can hardly say Toby said you did. So I say, ‘I don’t know. Just that . . . isn’t infidelity one of the main reasons why marriages break up?’
He shrugs. ‘Maybe. Probably. But they break up for lots of other reasons too.’
‘Do they?’ I recognise a hint of devil’s advocate in my tone. ‘Like what, for example?’
His jaw drops a little. ‘Well . . . I don’t know off the top of my head! Why don’t you google it if you’re so curious?’
‘It was just a question.’ I try to shrug it off, like he’s doing. ‘You’ve just never really talked much about it, that’s all.’
He shakes his head, and I can tell he’s a little exasperated. ‘It’s because I never really thought there was anything to talk about.’ Then he adds, ‘But I’m sorry you came to the conclusion that I must have cheated.’ He puts his fork down. ‘Pretty disappointed, actually.’
Something between us is changed. A wall has gone up around him and now he seems to be dwelling silently – petulantly – on the other side. I find myself overly scrutinising his words, combing back over his reaction, only to conclude that he really does seem offended, like I’ve hurt him.
Either that, or he’s a very good actor.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t really mean to imply—’ On some level it is a bit unlikely. If Joe had cheated, why would he and Meredith have managed to stay friends? She hardly comes across as the forgiving type.
‘It’s fine,’ he says. But he won’t look at me again.
We eat in silence now. His eyes cast around the room. The moment our plates are empty and the waitress is in earshot, he flags her down and asks for the bill.
We Uber home, not in silence, but without any of our usual post-night-out rapport. He reads on his phone and I stare at the space between our legs. We’re not making physical contact; not a single part of us is touching. And I can’t help but be reminded of Uber rides in the past, when we were first dating, where I would find myself enjoying the sight of our hands locked together, the feeling of Joe’s fingers entwined through mine. That giddy sense of us being an indivisible unit.
Given the evening has somehow flatlined, I decide to go straight to bed. But as I’m walking towards the bedroom he says, ‘Feel like a brandy?’
‘Sure,’ I say, grateful for this small concession. ‘Might as well.’
After I wash off my make-up and slip into my nightgown, I walk back out of the bathroom and see the brandy is sitting on my night table. His, on the other side.
I get into bed and pull my Kindle from the drawer while he takes one of his lengthy showers. I listen to the water running, contemplating the concept of what it means to truly know another person – and whether you ever can. Or whether we all go through life just giving – even to the people who are closest to us – only that which we allow them to know.
‘Reading?’ He jumps in beside me a while later, buoyant again.
‘Maybe for a bit.’
He doesn’t say anything, just watches me, expectantly, and I think he’s going to initiate something – to cement the fact that we are okay in the wake of that rather strange conversation. But then he pulls out his phone.
‘Oh, look at this,’ he says, after a moment.
He turns the screen around and presses ‘play’.
It’s some sort of karaoke of Queen’s ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’. It takes me a moment to realise, actually, it’s not a karaoke; it’s Grace and her friend putting on a performance. They’re rocking out, front of frame, with guitars – belting out their patchy grasp of the lyrics then folding in fits of laughter. The friend is dressed in a skinny white tank top, has her hair greased back and a thick black moustache under her nose. And Grace is sporting a giant shock of long, dark, poodle-like curls. Brian May!
‘Oh to be a teenager again.’ He chuckles.
‘Indeed,’ I say.
But all I can focus on is Grace – in the electric green waistcoat from Topshop.
TWELVE
Finally, on Saturday night, while Joe is out walking Mozart on the Heath with Toby, I pop my head around her bedroom door. ‘Hiya, Grace. Is it okay if we have a little chat?’
She is sitting on her bed, long bare legs drawn up like a tent. She’s wearing another of her oversized T-shirts that scarcely covers her bottom, and no knickers. She looks up from her phone. ‘What about?’ she asks.
I venture inside, despite not being given an actual invitation, and perch on the end of her bed.
‘The fact that I think you may have taken a green waistcoat from Topshop without paying for it,’ I say, as unthreateningly as I can.
There is a moment where her jaw drops, the pretty little pink bud of a bottom lip falling away from the top. And then she says, ‘What?’ But her face turns beetroot red.
‘I saw you go into the changing room with it, and you left without it. And then I saw you wearing it when you were doing your Brian May act the other night – which was very good, by the way.’
I am fully expecting her to deny it, but after a spell of staring at me like I just landed from Mars, she says a flippant, ‘So?’
I’m thrown a little off course by her admission and sense she knows this. I don’t want to turn this adversarial by asking her why she stole the thing when she’s more than capable of affording it. So instead I say, ‘How did you do it? I mean, everything has electronic tags these days. I don’t get how you could pull that off.’
She seems to measure me for a long moment. I’m pretty sure she’s going to back-pedal or shut the conversation down but instead, a glint of mischief – almost triumph – appears in her honey-brown eyes. ‘Actually, you’d be surprised. Not everything is theft-proof these days. If you scrutinise the rails hard enough, you’ll find loads of stuff that’s not been retagged after returns. But if you do encounter one of those nasty little fuckers . . . there’s always this.’
