by Freya North
‘You look gorgeous,’ Ben says, ‘really sexy and cute and fuckable.’ He’s behind her, nuzzling the graceful sweep of her neck that her cropped hair has exposed. He fondles her breasts and then takes his hand down to her crotch and cups at it playfully.
‘Dr York!’ Cat says. ‘I have packing to do.’
‘And I want to fuck my wife,’ Ben whispers, with a titillating nip at her ear lobe.
Cat resists theatrically but he catches her wrists and suddenly he’s tonguing her hungrily. ‘Come on, babe. Procreation is top of our list after all, remember.’
‘Making babies is a very serious matter, Dr York,’ says Cat with mock consternation though she is wriggling out of her clothing.
Ben plugs her mouth with a kiss and takes her hand down to his jeans where his hard-on wells at an awkward angle. ‘Well then, we’d better commit ourselves to honing our technique.’
‘You’re the doctor,’ Cat says, dispensing with her knickers. Ben’s hands travel her body, he gorges on the sight of her. He loves her naked when he’s still fully clothed, the tantalizing interference of fabric between him and his wife’s silky skin. She squats down and unbuckles his belt, makes achingly slow progress with the flies of his trousers, easing down his boxer shorts as if it’s the first time she’s done so. She’s on her knees. His cock springs to attention. Her mouth is moist but teasingly just beyond reach.
‘Christ, Cat,’ Ben says hoarsely, clutching her head and bucking his groin to meet her.
‘Blow-jobs don’t make babies,’ Cat tells him artlessly, but she kisses the tip of his cock and follows this with swift, deep sucks that make him groan. She stands and looks up at him. His height has always turned her on and when he dips his face down to kiss hers it darkens his brown eyes. ‘Isn’t there some position that’s meant to facilitate fertility, doctor?’
‘Yes, Mrs York,’ Ben confirms, turning her away from him, running his hand gently up her back, pushing between her shoulder-blades so that she is bent forwards, ‘there is. Just. Like. This.’
He takes her from behind. The sensation is so exquisite that, for a while, they are silent, motionless.
‘Dr York? Are you sure doggy-style is medically proven to assist conception?’
‘No,’ Ben pants as he thrusts into her, his hands at her waist to haul himself in, ‘but I’m quite certain that the sight of your immaculate peach of an arse improves the quality of my load.’
DJANGO MCCABE
Often, making light of the dark makes good sense. When Django McCabe was trekking in Nepal in the early 1960s, en route to some saffron-robed guru or other, he came across a man who had fallen down a screed slope along the mountain pass.
‘Need a hand?’ Django had offered.
‘Actually, wouldn’t mind a leg,’ the man had responded. It was then that Django saw the man in fact had only the one leg, that his crutch had been flung some distance. Django learnt more from his co-traveller than from the guru: not to let hardship harden a person, to keep humour at the heart of the matter, to make light of the dark. A decade later, when Django found himself guardian to three girls under the age of four, the offspring of his late brother, he thought about his one-legged friend and decided that the circumstances uniting him with his nieces would never be recalled as anything other than rather eccentric, strangely fortunate and not that big a deal anyway. ‘I know your mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver, but …’ has since prefixed all manner of events throughout the McCabe girls’ lives.
I know your mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver, but crying because I accidentally taped over Dallas is a little melodramatic.
It was mid-morning and Django McCabe felt entitled to a little sit-down. But there wasn’t time for forty winks. It was Monday and if the girls were coming home for the weekend then he needed the week to prepare for their visit; he couldn’t be wasting time with a snooze. However, to sit in a chair and not nod off was as difficult, perhaps even as pointless, as going to the Rag and Thistle and not having a pint of bitter.
‘I’ll multi-task,’ Django muttered. ‘Apparently it’s a very twenty-first-century thing to do.’ And so he decided to combine his little sit-down with doing something constructive, in this instance scanning today’s runners. After all, studying the form would stop him dozing off.
And there it was. Staring him in the face. 2.20 Pontefract. Cool Cat. Rank outsider – but what did they know.
‘It’s a sign,’ he said, patting himself all over to locate his wallet which, after an extensive grope through the collection of jackets draped over most of the chairs in the kitchen, he finally found. ‘I’ll put a tenner on the horse. In honour of Cat. I need to pop into town anyway so either way, it won’t be a wasted trip.’
Django would never place a bet by phone. He doesn’t trust the telephone. He says, darkly, that you never know who may be listening. But his Citroën 2CV he trusts with his life and, along the lanes of Farleymoor and the roads around Chesterfield, the little car filled to bursting with Django is a familiar sight. At seventy-four, Django is physically robust. Tall and sturdy, affably portly around the girth and crowned by a mane of grey hair always pony-tailed. He toots and waves as he drives. He thinks fellow drivers are slowing down to let him pass, to wave back. Actually they’re swerving to keep out of his way, holding up their hands in protest.
There are people in every continent who regard Django as their friend, though his travelling days ended with the arrival of his three small nieces some thirty years ago. He has rarely left Derbyshire since and it is the area around Farleymoor, on the Matlock side of Chesterfield, where his warmest clutch of friends are massed.
‘Morning, Mary, and don’t you look divine for a Monday,’ Django says, entering the bookmakers.
‘And don’t you look colourful for January,’ Mary says, wondering if he’s warm enough in his paisley shirt and tapestry waistcoat.
‘From Peru,’ Django tells her, opening his waistcoat wide, like a flasher. ‘I had to trade with bandits on a mountain pass.’
‘And what did they get of you, duck?’
‘My passport,’ Django says and he roars with laughter. ‘A tenner on Cool Cat, if you please.’
‘Rank outsider,’ Mary warns him.
‘I know,’ Django shrugs, ‘but the odds were worse for Fenland Star yesterday and truly terrible for Pipistrelle last week and they both won.’ He hands over a ten-pound note. ‘She’s flying home as we speak, you know. Cat. I have all three girls descending on me for the weekend.’
Mary knows Django’s girls. They were at school with her daughters. ‘No doubt you’ll be cooking up a treat for them, then?’
‘She’s been in America for four years,’ he says, leaning on the counter and beckoning Mary closer. ‘That’s an awful lot of McDonalds. Apparently her hair is now red.’
Mary can’t see the connection between McDonalds and hair colour. If she remembers correctly, Cat is the sporty one who married the doctor of a professional cycling team.
‘So I am indeed preparing a Spread to welcome her home and put back some nutrients,’ Django is saying. ‘Oh, and let’s have a tenner on Three’s Company at Fakenham. Good little horse, that.’
Django McCabe hasn’t had a beard for over twenty years, yet still, in moments of contemplation, he strokes his chin with fingertips light and methodical as if his goatee still sits proud on his face. The habit is one that he uses for all manner of pontification, from selecting horses according to their names or the form given them by the Racing Post, to his choice of the next domino at the Rag and Thistle. Currently, he is toying with his chin while wondering what to cook. Laid out before him are all the foodstuffs from the fridge, most of those from the larder, and a few from the capacious chest freezer too. He doesn’t believe in shopping according to a recipe, he cooks to accommodate available ingredients; he invented food combining in its most oblique sense. He fingers his invisible beard and begins to make his considered selection, as an artist might choose pigme
nt for the day’s palette. Indeed, Django feels at his most creative when cooking – he sees blending, mixing, combining, concocting, as art, not science. Thus he never measures or weighs and he believes cookery books are to cooking what painting-by-numbers kits are to painting.
Whenever his nieces visit from London, it warrants a Spread. And as the forthcoming weekend is to be not just an ordinary visit, but a homecoming celebration, it has to be a Monumental Spread. Django hasn’t seen Cat since the summer. None of them has. Christmas was peculiar for her absence. She’d turned thirty-two years old in the autumn and he hadn’t been able to make her a birthday cake. On top of that, Pip implied recently that Fen has been a little down. He knows of no way better to warm the heart and feed the soul than to fill the stomach with all manner of home cooking first.
Django is at his happiest when cooking for his girls, even though they are all in their thirties, with homes of their own, and their health has never been of concern.
‘It’s habit,’ he’ll say when they say he needn’t have, when they say a pub lunch or ready-meal supper would be fine by them, when they say they are too full for seconds let alone thirds. ‘I’m old and stuck in my ways,’ he’ll declare. ‘Humour me.’ he’ll say the same thing when presenting them with carrier bags bulging with Tupperware containers when they leave again for London.
Django McCabe is their family tree. The desertion of their mother, the death of their father gave him no choice – but ultimately gave him his greatest blessing. His arms, like great branches, have been the protective clasp, the loving embrace of mother, father, confidant and mentor to Cat, Fen and Pip. He provided the boughs in which their cradles were rocked. His are the roots which have always anchored them and kept them safe.
TUESDAY
Fen McCabe used to enjoy looking in the mirror. Far from it being a vanity kick, She’d found it an affirming thing to do. In the scamper of a working day, to grasp a private moment to nod at her reflection was sustaining. Hullo you, She’d sometimes say, what a busy day. And in the heady period when Matt Holden had wined, dined, wooed and pursued her, She’d frequently nip to the loo in some restaurant or bar, for a little time out with herself. He likes me, She’d beam at her reflection, you go girl! She’d wink at herself, give herself the go-ahead to party and flirt and charm the man who, soon enough, wanted to be with her for life.
Since having a baby six months ago, Fen has hated looking in the mirror. Not because she finds the sight depressing but because she finds the sight so strange. She doesn’t so much wince away from the sight of a few extra pounds, the limp hair, the sallow skin, the dark and puffy eyes, as glance bewildered and wonder who is that? How can this be my reflection when I don’t actually recognize the person staring back? And mirror mirror on the wall, wasn’t I once a damn sight fairer than this? So it’s something of a relief not to have the time during the day and to be too tired in the evening to face the facts staring back from the looking glass.
The phone is ringing, the baby is crying. Fen is nearer to the phone and Matt is nearer to the baby. Matt knows that Fen can find little wrong with the way he answers the phone so he’s happy to swap places here in the kitchen.
‘Hullo?’ he answers. ‘Well hullo!’ He looks over to Fen. She’s wearing truly awful pyjamas. Even if they’d been a matching set they’d have little to commend them. The bottoms have polka dots on a sickly lilac background. The top is littered with cutesy cartoon animals, a strange hybrid love child of a dog and a rabbit and even some teddy bear chromosomes somewhere along the line. ‘Hold on, I’ll just pass you over.’ He holds out the receiver.
‘Who is it?’ Fen mouths but Matt will only cock his eyebrow and grin. As Fen shuffles over to the phone, the placated baby at home on her hip, Matt notes her slippers. The grey, felted monstrosities he once termed ‘eastern-bloc lesbian clogs’. He’d had her in stitches at the time, She’d done a bastardized folk dance in them and had him in hysterics, before She’d banished them under the bed. For good, so He’d thought, until just then.
‘Hullo?’ says Fen.
‘Boo!’ says the voice.
‘Cat?’
‘I’m back! we’re in a cab, on the M4. Heading for Clapham.’
Matt watches the smile warm her face. He thinks how clichéd it sounds to say that the sun comes out when Fen smiles. But in his eyes, it does. And suddenly he forgives her the pyjamas and the clogs and he feels bad for having felt irritated with her and now he wants to go to her and put his arms around her and kiss the asymmetric dimples on her cheeks, brush her overlong fringe away from her forehead and kiss her there too, scoop her hair into a pony-tail and bury his nose in her neck. She’s hanging up the phone and he thinks that, though he’s now ready to leave for work perhaps there is time for a little spontaneity, for affection, for physical and emotional contact. The baby can stay on Fen’s hip. They’re a family after all. Group hug and all that. So he crosses the kitchen and he’s about to reach for her when her nose wrinkles.
‘Gracious,’ she’s saying to the baby, ‘how can someone so little and cute make such a revolting smell.’
‘I’ll change her,’ Matt offers.
Fen falters. ‘It’s OK,’ she says, ‘I’ll do it. I want to check that her nappy rash has cleared.’
She may only be six months old but Cosima Holden-McCabe has decided, quite categorically, that she will not be eating anything unless it is orange in colour. Fen is fretting over whether puréed carrot and mashed sweet potato for the fourth day running – and currently for breakfast – might give her baby carotene poisoning. Or have caused the nappy rash. Or created the current extreme pungency of the nappies.
‘Wouldn’t you rather have a nice squidgy banana? Are you OK, pumpkin?’ Keeping her eyes on her baby, waggling a spoon loaded with orange mush, Fen speaks to Matt. ‘Does she look orange to you?’
‘Pumpkins are orange – You’re probably giving her this complex.’
Fen looks at him for a loaded moment.
‘Joke?’ Matt says with a sorry smile. ‘She looks bonny – she has a lovely glow to her fat little cheeks.’
‘She’s not fat!’ Fen protests.
‘It was a compliment,’ Matt assures her. ‘I meant it affectionately.’
‘But do you think the glow to her cheeks is a bit orange?’
‘No, Fen, I don’t.’ Matt peers in close to his baby and kisses her cheek. ‘She looks fine.’ He glances at his girlfriend. ‘I think Cosima is happy and healthy and that carrot-and-sweet-potato mush is her favourite food of the moment. I reckon it’s because you look peaky in comparison, Fen.’
‘If I do look peaky,’ Fen says defensively, ‘it’s because I’m so bloody tired.’
‘I know you are,’ Matt says and it irritates him that Fen heard an insult instead of the concern intended. He wants to say, I’m tired too, you know; but he hasn’t time for a petty dispute over who is the more exhausted. ‘Why don’t you ask your sister if she’s around today? You can have a little time to yourself?’
‘She’s only just got off the plane!’
‘I meant Pip.’
Somewhere, Fen knows Matt’s intention is sweet. But lately, unbridled sensitivity has lain far closer to her surface than sense. ‘You don’t think I’m coping, do you?’ she says.
‘You’re doing brilliantly,’ Matt says, because the books and the magazines have instilled the sentence in him and advised him to ignore the ironing mountain, piles of toys and general debris. ‘I’m late. What are you doing today? Is it Musical Minis?’
‘No, that’s Thursday.’
‘TinyTumbles?’
‘No, that’s tomorrow. I may meet up with the baby-mums this afternoon.’
‘That’ll be nice.’
Fen shrugs. ‘I always come away feeling a bit insecure,’ she confides. ‘Their babies apparently sleep through the night and most have at least one tooth. And I’m not really sure about the women – I can’t find a connection apart from the babies being the s
ame age. They’re forever trying to outpurée each other with increasingly exotic organic recipes. But all my baby wants is orange stuff.’
‘You’re being unnecessarily hard on yourself,’ Matt says, ‘and on Cosima. And possibly on that bunch too. Stop being silly. You’re wondermum and we love you.’
Fen can’t hear the last sentence. Her ears are ringing with the fact that Matt says she’s silly. She wants to say, Well fuck you. But they’ve made a pact not to swear in front of their child.
‘I’m late.’ He gulps his coffee. ‘Work is mental at the moment – I’ll try and leave early, cook us something nice.’ He kisses the top of Fen’s head and brushes his lips over the peach fuzz adorning Cosima’s. ‘Bye, girls. Have fun.’
Tom Holmes likes Tuesdays very much. He doesn’t like the fact that at school Tuesdays mean dictation followed by football. Tom finds it difficult to coordinate hearing a word, then assessing its meaning in context and having to write it down, all in the space of about two seconds. It thus seems entirely logical that instructions for rigging a yacht could well be ‘Pacific’ instead of ‘specific’. It frustrates him that he never does well in dictation and that there’s no opportunity in dictation to saliently reason that ‘Pacific’, taken contextually, is just as appropriate as ‘specific’. He’s slightly taken aback that Miss Balcombe won’t at least acknowledge that ‘Pacific instructions for rigging’ sounds fairly logical. He doesn’t like it that there’s no room for manoeuvre with meaning where dictation is concerned.
Football makes Tom miserable, more so because He’s acutely aware that a nine-year-old should never admit to being miserable in the context of football. He supports Arsenal, which has won him friends at his North London prep school, but he hates playing the game. He hates playing because his limbs are often sore from eczema. Mud can actually sting but tracksuit trousers can catch and snag on chapped skin. Though his teammates are pals enough not to comment, Tom still catches them glancing at his body, unintentionally repelled. However, what makes dictation and football bearable is that, on Tuesdays, he stays with his dad and stepmum at their cool place in Hampstead.
