Up All Night

by Carmen Reid

  ‘She’s not had anything?’ Bella’s tone was unmistakably surprised. ‘No vaccinations?’

  Jo shook her head: ‘Some of the interviews I’ve done in the past scared the shit out of me.’

  ‘But three is a dangerous age to get measles – or whooping cough,’ Bella reminded her.

  As if she didn’t know. As if Simon wasn’t going to be on the phone just as soon as he got wind of this word ‘epidemic’ on the news, telling her what a disgraceful, ill-informed, negligent woman she was. And how if she didn’t organize some sort of single injection programme ASAP, he was going to take their daughter to the surgery himself and have her Quintet-ed just as soon as was physically possible.

  The phone rang and her heart shrank a little at the thought that it might be Simon, sitting in bed with Gwen, companionably sticky and post-coital – yuck – watching the news, phoning her up to harass her about this.

  ‘Jo Randall,’ she said into the receiver again.

  ‘Hello, Jo Randall. Can I come and see you later, Jo Randall?’ That mix of teasing and sincere, confident and unsure, sexy and funny – it was him.

  ‘Oh . . . hello there.’ Something about the way she said it caused Bella’s eyebrow to shoot up comically.

  ‘I’m . . . er . . . there’s someone here. A friend.’

  Bella stood up, slid her feet into her mules, picked up her handbag and shook her head to indicate that she was out of there.

  ‘Well, she’s not staying much longer,’ Jo went on.

  ‘Why? Am I not allowed to meet your friends? Are you embarrassed about me?’ Big tease in the voice now.

  ‘No, no, don’t be silly . . .’ She felt all wrong-footed now. ‘You’d like her. It’s just. . .’ Well, face it Jo, she acknowledged, Marcus hasn’t been allowed to meet your friends, your parents, your children or anyone else because you don’t want to admit to him. You don’t want to admit to being freshly separated and already involved in a casual fling, sleeping with a twenty-something chef. Sleeping? Ha.

  My romps with five times a night cook.

  ‘He’s my tasty dish of the day,’ says Greenwich mum,

  Jo Randall, 35.

  Oh, stop it.

  ‘I won’t be finished here till after eleven. Is that going to be too late?’ he asked, deciding not to press her on the other stuff.

  It was too late. She had work tomorrow, but then again, she didn’t have to do the girls’ packed lunches and the school/nursery run because her mother would be here in the morning.

  Her mother . . . if Marcus could be gone before her mother arrived, then maybe it was possible.

  She heard his breath rise and fall down the line. Knew how much she would like to hear that breath rise and fall over her. Against her ear, against her neck.

  She hadn’t seen him for ten days and it felt like longer.

  ‘You’ll have to leave early,’ she warned him.

  ‘But can I stay up late?’ he asked. The tease.

  ‘I’ll see you later, then.’ Jo caught Bella’s eye and suddenly couldn’t keep the smirk from her face.

  Once she’d hung up, Bella flicked open her mobile and speed-dialled the cab company.

  ‘You don’t have to go just yet,’ Jo insisted. ‘He’s not coming for another hour or so.’

  ‘Aha, I do so have to go. Look at you -’ Bella gave a nod in Jo’s direction. ‘You look lovely to me, my darling, but let’s face it, you’ve got to shower, shave everything, change, change again, do your hair, then mess everything up a little, as if you haven’t tried, as if you’ve just been hanging about all evening looking gorgeous.’

  Jo laughed at her. ‘I do not,’ she said. ‘Well . . . maybe a bit. . . What shall I wear?’ she asked, immediately wishing she could strip the dress from Bella’s back because it would be perfect. ‘Everything’s in the wash from our holiday.’

  ‘A miniskirt and frilly pants,’ Bella suggested. ‘Don’t think he’ll notice much else after that.’

  ‘A miniskirt! I haven’t worn a miniskirt since. . .’ Since when? School? Year One at college?

  ‘You’ve got great legs,’ Bella advised her, swinging her soft, jangling suede bag over her shoulder. ‘Have fun.’

  Once Jo had closed the front door on her friend, she flew round the house, hastily clearing the kitchen, making the bed, throwing dirty laundry into the basket, then ransacking the remains of her wardrobe. She headed to the bathroom for the makeover.

  Chapter Three

  Armpit sweat can boost older women’s sex lives, claim scientists. Women who wore perfume with a chemical found in female sweat were more likely to have sex.

  Daily Mirror

  Still Monday: 11.35 p.m.

  When Jo opened the front door, there he was on her doorstep stepping out of the luminous dark of an unusually warm May evening.

  ‘Hiya,’ Marcus said, slow and easy smile spreading.

  ‘Hiya,’ she said back, meeting his eyes. Relieved to see he was just as fanciable as she remembered. Because there was always that risk: she’d worried she might come back from her break, see him again and wonder what on earth she’d been thinking.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said, still on the doorstep, still smiling, trying not to let the smile run away into a nervous laugh.

  ‘Are you going to come in?’

  ‘That’s what I had in mind . . . yes,’ and the nervous laugh escaped, but he stepped into the little hall and they moved in to kiss hello.

  And this was the strange thing, that once they started to kiss, the nervy newness and the awkwardness fell away. It was as if they’d moved into the right gear or the native language. This was the easy part, the familiar territory. His wavy shoulder-length hair fell around her face, his fingers linked round her waist and he shut the door behind him with his foot.

  Jo’s hands were on the skin of his back, underneath his T-shirt, where he was warm and slightly damp to the touch after his bike ride over. She ran her hand round, brushed it against the fuzzy warmth of his stomach, then up to his chest. She could just pull off his T-shirt. He wouldn’t care. He wouldn’t care if she undid his jeans and pulled them off either, he was totally happy and unselfconscious naked. At one with himself, comfortable in his skin, grounded. It made her feel like a mass of complications, but was part of his irresistible attraction for her.

  She eased the T-shirt up to his shoulders, running her fingers across their smooth roundness, then tugged the top over his head and met his smile before they were kissing again.

  Want pulsing through her, she could feel her heart race, hear her breathing switch to shallow.

  The kissing. She loved the kissing. He had a small, precise tongue that he used to lick against hers. Stroking and stoking. He tasted dry, salty, but with a hint of sweet too. His curtain of hair smelled of caramelized onions, cigarette smoke, bacon and fresh bread. This was Marcus: always delicious, good enough to eat.

  She slid her hands into the back pockets of his jeans, squeezing at the solidity of him. He moved slowly, feet planted firmly to the ground, rooted. His hands pulling her into him, into the push coming from the crotch of his jeans.

  ‘Missed you,’ he said, breaking from the kiss to smile at her.

  ‘Me too,’ she said back.

  She pressed her face against the warmth of his neck and couldn’t resist sliding her nose down his skin to the fold of his armpit. The smell of his sweat had a strange effect on her. It didn’t matter that he was nine years younger than her, that they really had nothing in common, that if she was honest, she found lots of things about him intensely irritating, there was a magical something – hormones? Pheromones? Whatever chemical ingredient it was that governed the laws of attraction, he was her perfect match.

  She didn’t think she’d ever been so giddily moved by anyone, not ever. She ran her tongue against him, bit gently into his soft shoulder, licked at the skin in her mouth, heard him undo his belt buckle, and closed her eyes. His hands moved in under her dress and she felt herse
lf slipping into an unfocused, dissolving, rhythmically breathless place. When she opened her eyes to find her bearings again, she registered the framed photo on the wall opposite of her girls crouching in the snow, building a snowman. It had a sobering effect. Her children were upstairs, she couldn’t just get naked in the hallway with someone they’d never even met. What if one of them appeared on the stairs all of a sudden? The horror.

  ‘Shower?’ she asked and when Marcus nodded, she took him by the hand up the small spiral of stairs into the cramped white and pale blue bathroom.

  Jo had moved into this mini-house with various grandiose decorating schemes, but so far, all she’d had the time or energy to do was slap hideous Barbie trademarked glitter-pink paint over the girls’ bedroom walls. All the other rooms in the house were slightly shabby, but calmingly ordinary. When you’d spent years trying somehow, all at once, to have a glorious career, be a wonderful mother, a good wife, cook like a chef, housekeep like your mother, decorate like a Conran, it was nothing but a relief to let standards plummet. . . and call in a caterer. Ha ha.

  Behind the security of the locked bathroom door, Marcus and Jo undressed each other quickly, kissing, touching, tripping in the tangle of clothes, hurrying into the liberation of the shower where they could lather up, slide against each other, take big soap-tasting mouthfuls of one another.

  Did anything else matter more than Marcus? Yes, but not right now in this moment when he was leaning back against the shower tiles, eyes half closed, water splashing down between them, his fingers moving against her, inside her, his other hand guiding hers urgently over his soapy, swollen hard-on. No, nothing else mattered. She flicked a nail against his nipple and watched him come.

  Afterwards, they lay on her bed together, Marcus naked, apart from his woven and leather bracelets, damp hair spilling out over the pillow beside her, unashamedly uncovered, one hand companionably on his crotch, the other holding a cigarette.

  Jo was much shyer – she had stretch marks, tummy bumps, cellulite, history – so she’d put on a silk slip, one Simon had given her years ago, but it was virtually unworn, then lay down, then got up again to open the window and let the smoke out, then got back onto the bed, where with her head on Marcus’s chest, they talked and joked comfortably together.

  When he was halfway through his cigarette, she began what she knew perfectly well was her ridiculous smoking dance. She took it from his fingers and had a drag, then she decided, yes, she would have a cigarette of her own. She lit it, took four puffs, felt her lungs contract and her head spin and didn’t want it any more. She got up, fanned the air and sprayed perfume.

  ‘I can’t just smoke, you know,’ she told him. ‘This is the one thing in life which does exactly what it says on the label-’ she held up the cigarette packet to him. ‘Kills you! Not to mention gives you wrinkles, bad breath, yellow teeth. Nothing about it is good. So why do I want to do it so much?’ She took the cigarette from his hand again and put it between her lips.

  ‘Will you calm down?!’ was his response to this.

  After another drag, Jo handed it back to him and started looking in her bedside table for her vitamin pills: vitamin C, the combined antioxidant tablets, to counteract the effect of the smoke.

  Smoking? She knew perfectly well she was only smoking again to piss Simon off, to pretend she wasn’t that old, to deny that she regularly thought about death. Smoking could only be done with true enjoyment when you were young, when death was a far-off country you wondered if you’d ever visit.

  But she now worried at least three times a day about what it was that would finish her off: a sudden heart attack, a slow cancer, the tragedy of a late night car accident. Horrible, horrible.

  She popped two vitamin pills as Marcus slid his hand over her breast.

  He’d been sleeping with Jo for several weeks, but he’d been watching her with interest for quite some time before that.

  She was a once a week, or at the very least once a fortnight, regular at the cosy but buzzily fashionable restaurant he worked in. Not that chefs and diners ever usually met. Chefs were relegated to the hot metal creative sweatshop at the back, diners pampered in the intimate leather booths of the caramel-coloured haven at the front.

  But, once she’d had several glasses of white wine (he knew now she never touched red in public because she thought she was too clumsy) and her soup or oysters, fish and salad then pudding – always chocolate of some sort – Jo liked to go to the back courtyard, not the front of house, and smoke a cigarette.

  This was where they had met, in the grubby courtyard, down by the bins, with the kitchen doors flung open to let out the heat, chefs and sous-chefs coming and going to blast their lungs with Marlboro reds whenever they got a chance.

  Jo liked to sit on the wall and gossip with whoever was around, make mock complaints about the food, moan about how boring her dining companion was and confess that she was out with them ‘just for work’.

  She always wanted to know if anyone famous had been in that week and what did they eat? Who were they with? Who was dating whom? It was a new restaurant, fashionable address, had only been open for half a year and all the cool, important, on the make types were there.

  Marcus had found himself watching out for her, sneaking glimpses of her through the serving hatch when she was in. Her and the ever-changing rota of people she brought to the restaurant. The occasional face he recognized from the papers.

  ‘She’s press, man,’ Sayed, one of the waiters, had told him, almost like a warning. ‘She always pays, she over-tips, she asks me if I’ve got any stories and she keeps the receipt.’

  ‘And then she comes round the back and has a fag with us,’ Marcus had observed.

  ‘That’s because she’s got the hots for you, man.’

  He’d laughed that off as the joke it was intended to be. But flushed all the same because he had the hots for her. Big time . . . was smoking much more than he should be to make sure he didn’t miss her.

  She was smart. In her slinky trouser suits and shirts, with her choppy brown bob and sporty energy, she reminded him of Bond girls. Not the ones in the bikinis that got bumped off after they’d been shagged, but the clever ones in the high-necked blouses and boots that carried the guns and knew how to scramble up walls and detonate nuclear devices.

  She carried a big reddish brown bag. Part briefcase, part satchel, it had a shoulder strap and although it looked bulging and heavy, she slung it about her with ease and carried it wherever she went.

  He wondered what was in the bag – tape recorder, notebooks, addresses, important phone numbers? Of course her mobile phone, which she would keep switched off inside the restaurant, but part of her cigarette break routine was checking the interminable messages.

  She didn’t wear a wedding ring, he’d noticed. But he was certain there was a mark where one had been. Her fourth finger was just barely perceptibly narrower below the knuckle and the slightest shade paler.

  Then, one night she’d come out in a knockout outfit: tight grey pinstriped skirt, even tighter matching sleeveless waistcoat. He’d found it hard to drag his eyes from the outline of her tiny, but to him breathtakingly sexy, tits because she’d been too cold to sit in her usual spot on the wall, so she had come and stood beside him in the warmth of the kitchen door. ‘Did you make the monkfish and mango?’ she’d asked.

  ‘Did you eat it?’ he’d asked back.

  ‘No! Way too retro,’ she’d told him. ‘It was so back to the Eighties, you should have stuck on a deep-fried courgette flower, a couple of kiwi slices and called it the yuppy guppy! Mind you, I’m sure you’ve no recollection of the Eighties. You were probably in your pram.’

  ‘Not quite,’ he’d smiled. ‘Who are you with tonight?’

  ‘Ah. Someone important who doesn’t want to give me the story, hence the need for full-on temptress wear—’ She’d gestured to her waistcoat and skirt.

  ‘Is it working?’ he’d asked.

  ‘I’ll mee
t you back here after dessert and let you know.’ Jo had winked, causing him to dare the question: ‘So, are you married then?’ with a shrug supposed to show how casual he felt about it.

  Her answer, which she gave with her face turned to him and an unflinching look, had been the flirtatious challenge: ‘Why, do you want to ask me for a date?’

  ‘You’d be lucky,’ he’d managed in reply, still at least sounding cool, although he was now feeling far from it.

  ‘I’m separated,’ was her reply.

  ‘Sorry,’ he’d said. But their eyes were locked together and it was hard to ignore the mutual attraction.

  ‘Don’t be,’ she’d said. ‘I’m better off without him.’ She’d broken eye contact at that, drawn in one last lungful from her cigarette, then flicked the butt high over the wall and out into the street on the other side. ‘So,’ she’d turned to face him, head a little to the side, hair brushing her bare shoulder, ‘where shall we go afterwards?’

  ‘Huh?’ he’d asked, not understanding.

  ‘On our date,’ she’d said, utterly relieved at how easy, how natural this was turning out to be. She’d thought post-marriage dating was going to involve all sorts of to-ing, fro-ing and turmoil.

  Jo had waited in the restaurant till closing time when he’d taken her to the cramped bar the kitchen staff went to after hours for beer and vodka shots.

  ‘Don’t you have to go home?’ he’d wanted to know. ‘To your kids?’

  ‘They’re with their dad,’ she’d explained, buying yet another round of drinks, paying cash from a battered brown wallet which seemed to be overstuffed with receipts and countless scraps of paper.

  ‘And anyway,’ she’d told him later, ‘I don’t like going home when I’m the only one there. I’d rather stay out.’

  They went to someone else’s flat and drank more.

  ‘Don’t you ever get drunk?’ he’d asked her, leaning too heavily on her bare shoulders, not sure if she really had just kissed him, full on, mouth to mouth, sliding her hands straight into his combats. Or if he was just more drunk than he’d ever been before because an unusual feeling of nervousness had caused him to up his shots-to-beer ratio to bad effect.