After the Party

by Lisa Jewell

  The gap between the two sets of people was growing smaller and Jem needed to decide how to approach the oncoming moment. Should she acknowledge their close encounter of last week by being extra fulsome with her greeting, or just revert to her old-style nod and fifty per cent smile? She stole a look at him and then made a show of rearranging Blake’s hat. Joel really was a most unspectacular-looking man, almost bland, but clearly, if the rapid pulse of her heart beneath Blake’s warm body was anything to go by, he had a certain something.

  Joel and Jessica closed upon them. There was, in Jem’s opinion, too much space between father and child, especially as the pavement had a slight downward camber to it. She would not feel comfortable if that was her small child looping side to side across the paving stones, inches from the kerb on occasion.

  She could see concern start to etch itself on to Joel’s face and for a moment felt a flicker of relief: there would be no encounter, he would pass them by, distracted by his daughter’s reckless scootering and Jem would be able to breathe properly again. But instead Jessica, looking up and seeing her small friend Scarlett, broke out an enormous smile, cried out, ‘Scarlett! Scar-lett!’ lost all concentration and came off the pavement between two parked cars.

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Joel abandoned his usual soft-shoe shuffle and broke into a long-legged gallop. ‘Oh my God!’ Jem ran forwards, forgetting that she had fifteen pounds of baby on her chest. An oncoming car swerved gently to avoid the pink scooter, which had rolled into its path. Jessica wailed.

  Joel scooped her up from the gutter with one strong arm, hoiked back the errant scooter with the other. He held her on his lap and pulled her fine blonde hair from her cheeks. ‘Jessie, Jessie, Jessie, what were you thinking? What were you doing?’

  He glanced up at Jem, his expression a mix of relief and embarrassment.

  ‘Is she all right?’ asked Jem.

  He pulled back her fringe and looked into her eyes. ‘Are you OK, pops?’

  She wrinkled her nose and sniffed. ‘My knee hurts,’ she cried.

  Jem breathed a sigh of relief. A hurt knee, considering the alternatives, was a glorious thing indeed.

  Joel was flustered, making too much of the hurt knee, avoiding Jem’s gaze. She could tell he was mortified, not just by what had happened, but by the fact that Jem had witnessed it; all dads knew that their parenting skills were being judged constantly, not only by their own wives but by every mother they passed on the street, in this case quite literally. Men spent much less time imagining their children dying than women, which was, Jem felt, both a good thing and a bad thing, but on this occasion, clearly, he could have done better.

  He looked up at her and smiled. ‘Oops,’ he said.

  Jem smiled back. ‘I have to say, I was half expecting that to happen.’ She smiled again, not wanting to come across as hectoring.

  ‘Yup, well …’ he tailed off, gently bringing Jessica to her feet.

  ‘Let’s have a look at that knee, shall we?’ said Jem.

  Jessica rolled up the leg of her jeans and Jem and Joel peered at it. It was scraped and raw and showed the beginnings of a bruise, but was not bleeding.

  ‘That’s not a very big ow,’ Scarlett interjected haughtily from her pushchair.

  Jessica looked at her crossly, her cheeks streaked with tears. ‘But it hurts!’ she wailed, throwing herself against her father’s legs and howling into them. Jem and Joel threw each other a look of bemusement.

  ‘OK, pops,’ he soothed, stroking her hair, ‘let’s get you home. Let’s go home and make you a nice big cup of hot chocolate, eh? Would you like that?’

  Jessica nodded her head up and down against his legs and Joel smiled at Jem again.

  There was a moment’s silence. Joel touched his dry lips with the tip of his tongue. ‘I saw you,’ he said, ‘the other day.’

  Jem flinched slightly, feeling exposed. ‘Oh, yes …?’

  ‘Yes, on the tube.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she feigned a slow dawning memory.

  ‘You were …’ he made a gesture with his shoulders and arms that Jem thought might have been suggestive of a jacket.

  ‘Smart?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, yes, smart, not that you’re not always …’

  ‘No, actually, I’m not always, very rarely, in fact.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘Yes,’ she continued, knowing that it was very much time to say goodbye and be on her way, but wanting him to know something about her anyway. ‘It was my first day back at work.’

  ‘Oh,’ he replied, his eyebrows raised, ‘maternity leave over then?’ He gestured at the wriggling Blake.

  ‘Kind of. I’m only doing the odd day, just here and there, when I can squeeze it in. And what about you?’

  ‘Oh, kind of the same really. The odd day, here and there, when I can squeeze it in. And a kind of rolling, ongoing maternity leave the rest of the time. Heh.’ He smiled and rubbed the back of Jessica’s head again.

  Jem wanted to ask him more, find out what he did for a living, here and there, why he looked after his daughter, if he had a wife, where he had been, where he was going, but her daughter, with more sense than she had, saved her from herself.

  ‘I want to go now, Mummy, can we go now, Mummy, now, Mummy?’

  They smiled at each other apologetically. ‘Well, yes, you’re absolutely right, of course,’ Joel said to Scarlett, who looked mildly embarrassed to be spoken to by a strange father. ‘Time for us to go too. Time for hot chocolate. And Barbie plasters.’

  Jessica gripped his hand and smiled up at Jem. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s called Jem,’ Scarlett called from her pushchair, like a cantankerous old lady in a Bath chair. ‘Jem is her name.’

  ‘That’s a pretty name,’ said Jessica.

  ‘Why, thank you, Jessica, and so is yours.’

  Jessica smiled shyly and then they both turned to leave, father and daughter, hand-in-hand, homeward bound, for hot chocolate and soothed knees.

  ‘Can we go now, please?’ moaned Scarlett.

  ‘Yes, sweetheart, we’re going now,’ she replied.

  ‘Did that Jessica nearly die?’ she asked thoughtfully.

  ‘Well,’ said Jem, ‘she was going a bit too fast on her scooter and her daddy wasn’t really paying enough attention but it could have been a lot worse.’

  ‘Is he a bad daddy, then?’

  Jem smiled. ‘Yes,’ she laughed, ‘he’s a rubbish daddy.’

  ‘Not like mine, then?’

  ‘No,’ Jem sighed, ‘no. Not like yours.’

  ‘Cause my daddy’s the bestest, bestest, bestest daddy, ever, ever, ever.’

  Jem smiled again. And then, as she walked, as the distance between them grew out again and the length of time she would have to wait until she saw him again increased, the smile fell slowly from her lips.

  When she was younger, Jem had had a recurring dream. In this dream she walked down a quiet street, alone, under a full moon. In this dream she stopped outside a house and glanced down into a window just below street level and through that window she saw a man with a neat skull, facing away from her, smoking a cigarette. It was, though she didn’t know it at the time, a glimpse of her future, it was a glimpse of the man she would meet and fall in love with and live happily ever together with. It was a glimpse of Ralph. She had dreamed him before she’d met him. What more assurance could a girl want that the man she was with was the right man than to have a string of vivid precognitive premonitions?

  These sorts of things had happened to her when she was young, when her head was light with indefinites and nebulas, when her world was floaty and haphazard and totally lacking in any form of ballast. She’d been able to open her mind and imagination to the foibles of the future, she’d had time to analyse her dreams, and her life had been unstructured enough to allow for fortuitous meetings and romantic serendipities. Not now. From the moment Scarlett had been handed to her in the hospital three years ago her
life had been firmly pinned down, like tiny weights inserted into the hem of a flyaway dress. It was still a pretty dress, but it no longer flipped out wantonly at the edges, it didn’t ruffle in the wind, it hung straight and serious, a grown-up dress, a modest dress. Jem didn’t mind this sudden straitening of her existence. She’d been expecting it. She was ready for it. If anything, she’d expected motherhood to curtail her essential spirit more than it actually had.

  But now it was time to search inside the fluff of her head again, see what her unknowing mind had to say about dream men who turned into unsupportive partners who mocked your job, left you with all the cruddy chores, pestered you for sex and then thought it OK to disappear to America for week-long birthday parties, what it had to say about innocuous crushes on strangers who made you blush and how you squared the whole cycle of falling in and out of love with the reality of a three-year-old in a pushchair telling you how much they loved their daddy, because she was, she suddenly realised, faced with finding an answer to a terrifying question: If Ralph and I can’t find a way to reconnect with each other, then what the hell happens next?

  PART TWO

  One Year Later

  Jem turns the key uncertainly in the lock of Ralph’s front door. She has never used this key in this lock before, although the key has been hanging from a peg in her kitchenette for months. The kids are with Lulu, thoroughly exhausted after a birthday party in a soft play centre in West Norwood. Lulu is giving them lentils, beans and brown rice for their supper, the only dish that all four of them will eat, mainly so that they can have a farting competition afterwards.

  Jem pushes open the main door to the house and feels a chill against her skin. The communal hallway is large and under-furnished, piles of unclaimed junk mail sit on a crude MDF shelf nailed into the wall, a bike, divided into two parts and folded in on itself, rests against the wall, tethered to a water pipe. The front door of the ground-floor flat is painted turquoise and has a ‘Beware of the Dog’ sign taped to it. Jem can hear an animal growling ominously from behind it.

  She takes the dun-coloured steps up to the first floor and inserts the next of the two keys into the white door there. The door has four dimpled glass panels in it and a vertical chrome letterbox. She inhales greedily before she pushes open the door, taking in extra air to see her through the next moment or two of her life. She has only been to this flat on three other occasions and each time it was full and alive with her children and their father. Now it is empty, and Jem is not entirely certain of what she will find on the other side of the door.

  It is seven days since she last spoke to Ralph. It is seven days since he was in his car, headed somewhere dark and mysterious, and it is two hours since he was due once more at Lulu’s house to collect Scarlett and Blake. Jem has been oscillating crazily between anger and fear. She is angry in the moments when she looks at her children and tries to imagine what there could possibly be out there in the big wide world that is more alluring, more compelling than being with them. And then she is fearful in the moments when she knows there is nothing and that the only thing that could be keeping Ralph from his children is foul play, madness or tragedy.

  Ralph has not been answering either of his phones, he has not been in touch with his father and he has not been in touch with his friends. This morning Jem was even moved to e-mail Smith, in California, to see if he knew anything about the whereabouts of the errant Ralph. She has yet to hear back from him.

  Ralph gave her his keys a few months ago, not so that she could let herself in in the event of him disappearing off the face of the earth, but in her capacity as his nearest neighbour, in the event of him locking himself out. It was Lulu’s idea to use it. ‘Go,’ she said, as the hour of Ralph’s promised reappearance and collection of his children came and went, ‘go now. Leave the kids here. It’s lentils and farting tonight – they’ll be fine.’

  Jem peers into the hallway and moves a large pile of mail to one side with her foot. The flat smells bare and unlived in, slightly damp. Ralph’s shoes and trainers sit in a row on a wooden plinth outside the living room. She glances at them and feels a wave of tender sadness. Ralph’s shoes. She’s always had a thing about Ralph’s disembodied footwear. When they’d shared the flat in Almanac Road, she would anthromorphise his shoes when he was out. Shoes were such intimate things when they were disconnected from their wearers. When she was younger, Jem had used the ‘empty shoe’ test to judge whether or not she would want to sleep with a man. She would look at his shoes then imagine them empty by the side of her bed the next morning. More often than not, this would be sufficient to extinguish any misplaced sexual interest. It had been the opposite with Ralph’s shoes. Every time she saw them she felt a glow of warmth and desire, and when she’d awoken the morning after their first night together and seen them there, his shoes, separate from him, the insides worn smooth with the imprint of his socked feet, she’d felt complete.

  But now, not only are those shoes empty, but their owner is lost and Jem’s heart is aching for him. She fails to understand how their perfect love story could have come to such an abrupt and almost incomprehensible pass.

  Jem walks into Ralph’s living room and sees a room left in a hurry. There is a pile of crinkled cotton sheets draped halfway between the tumble drier and a basket. The sink is full of plates and mugs. Assorted newspapers, magazines and etchings have been piled haphazardly into the middle of the coffee table and a pair of Ralph’s socks sit in unfurled coils on the carpet.

  It is clear that Ralph knew he was going away, but that he possibly imagined he’d be back fairly soon. There is a bad smell coming from the fridge and Jem reveals a piece of unwrapped Cheddar and an old packet of smoked salmon to be the culprits. She tips the lumpy dregs of a plastic bottle of milk down the sink and wrinkles her nose at the rank sourness, and then she finds a carrier bag and empties the contents of Ralph’s fridge into it. She pulls open the door beneath the sink, where Ralph keeps his bin and is about to drop the bag into the bin when something catches her eye. It is a note, crumpled up, with Ralph’s handwriting on it. It has been torn into numerous pieces and some of the pieces are discoloured where an old teabag has soaked into the paper. Jem tries to reassemble it and ends up with a message that reads:

  You are so beautiful. I will take your beauty with me … You are a pure and sweet and perfect human being … coming to me last night. I will never ever forget it … I have to go now … There is something I have to do … and start the whole thing all over again … I’ll be gone for a while … You are an angel … Ralph x

  Jem gasps and feels the room start to spin slightly. She feels she might faint and slams her hands against the table’s edge to steady herself. There is a love note in Ralph’s bin, a love note that has been ripped into pieces and screwed up in anger. Who was it written to? It must be Sarah. Jem feels suddenly filled with rage and hatred. Whoever this Sarah is, she has Ralph’s heart and for that, she despises her.

  She goes into Ralph’s bedroom. She has never been into Ralph’s bedroom before. It is smaller than she’d imagined. It is not airy and white and full of billowy curtains and soft sheepskin rugs, as she has imagined, but small and cramped, with an unmade bed in one corner, a cheap teak-effect wardrobe in the other and a rather small window overlooking the side return, which is where the household keep their wheelie bins. One of Ralph’s paintings hangs over his bed. It is not one of his ‘Jem’ paintings, the famous collection he painted while he was aching with unconsummated love for her. Those were all sold a long time ago, for vast amounts of money, save for one that Jem keeps above her own bed. Rather it is one that he painted just after he got back from California, after his ill-fated trip to see Smith last year. It is a dove, painted in thick scrapings of off-white paint, its wings outspread, its oversized beak wide open as if in a silent scream. Below the disturbed dove lies the footprint of a city, painted in black, brown and scarlet squares. It is not clear whether the city is alive, on fire or razed, post-apocalypti
cally, to the ground. The expression on the dove’s face would suggest the latter.

  The painting is ugly. She hates the stuff that Ralph has been painting lately. It makes her feel sad. Jem turns her head from it and looks around for clues. The first thing she sees is a bracelet, on the bedside table. It is silver with small blue and rose-pink beads hanging from it. She picks it up. It is very light, cheap, probably cost a few quid from River Island. She holds it to her nose and breathes in – it smells of skin. Her skin. Sarah’s skin.

  Jem knows nothing about Sarah. Blake and Scarlett have never met her. Jem has seen only her car, a neat Ford Fiesta in a strange shade of lime green, with a pair of sage-green Wellington boots and a large umbrella on the back shelf. A year ago, Jem could have pictured the sort of girl that Ralph would want to be with if he wasn’t with her. A year ago she could have described a thin, wispy blonde with a difficult personality and a fondness for black eyeliner. But now … all she knows is that Sarah has Hunter Wellingtons in the back of her car, that she wears cheap, flimsy, not especially stylish jewellery. And now, clearly, that she has shared a bed with Ralph.

  Jem puts the bracelet back on the table. She feels shivery with distaste and sadness. Ralph. Her Ralph. With another woman. She aches for him. She misses him.

  Jem returns to the living room and heads for the answerphone. She sees it flashing and presses play.

  ‘You have five new messages.’

  Two of the five messages are from Philippe, Ralph’s agent, wondering how he is and if he has anything new he would like to show him. His voice is slightly high-pitched and laced with barely concealed frustration. The first message is Jem’s, the one that she left last week when he didn’t come for the children. The fourth is from Ralph’s dad, saying that he’d just spoken to Jem and that everyone was a bit worried about him, and the last is from her, from Sarah.