After the Party

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘Where the hell did you get that from?’ he asked, his eyebrows raised in surprise.

  Jem shrugged. ‘Just some guy in an alley,’ she teased.

  ‘What!’ Ralph threw her a look of alarm.

  ‘Joking,’ she reassured. ‘Lulu. Of course.’

  She took a cigarette from Ralph’s back pocket and then, crouching in the shadows of the bridge, she went through the ritual, the tearing off of a strip of cigarette, the licking and the piecing together of the flimsy Rizlas, the separating of the tobacco and the sprinkling of the pungent green herb, then the rolling and the licking and the twisting of the tip and the curling up of card and the inserting of the roach and there it was, perfect and ready to smoke, like it hadn’t really been five years since she’d last made herself a spliff.

  ‘Like riding a bike,’ she smiled.

  ‘Are you serious about smoking that?’ said Ralph.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘of course. Why not?’

  He gestured towards the bridge. ‘But what if we get caught?’

  ‘We will not get caught,’ she laughed.

  ‘How do you know?’ he said.

  She laughed again. ‘Because we won’t.’

  He frowned at her. ‘Christ, Jem, just think about it. Just think if we got stopped. They could take us into a station. They could keep us there for hours. And how the fuck would we explain that to the baby-sitter?’

  ‘Well, given that the baby-sitter sold this stuff to me I don’t suppose she’d have much to say at all. Oh, come on, look at us – do you honestly think that the police force of south London have nothing better to do with their time than pull in thirtysomething parents off the streets of Battersea for having a little smoke?’

  She lit the spliff and she inhaled. Ralph looked at her forlornly. She looked at him wantonly. The smoke hit the soft lining of her lungs and burned. She coughed and laughed. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘I’ve lost the knack. My poor lungs!’ She passed the spliff to Ralph, who eyed it, eyed Jem and then took it from her reluctantly. ‘Why are you doing this?’ he said, inhaling.

  Jem didn’t say: ‘Because this is what we used to do when we were in love with each other and I want us to be in love with each other again.’ Instead she grabbed his hand and said: ‘Come on, let’s hop on a bus, let’s go into Soho. It’s not even ten!’

  Ralph glanced down at the spliff in his hand and then up at his partner and Jem knew immediately that he did not want to hop on a bus and go into Soho with her.

  Jem sighed. ‘Is that a stupid idea?’ she asked.

  Ralph shrugged. ‘Come on,’ he said, holding out his hand for her, ‘it’s late. Let’s go home.’

  Jem let her shoulders fall and acquiesced. Halfway back across the bridge, she flicked the burning spliff into the river below and watched it float away, a small white speck of nothing.

  Jem pushed the door to her son’s bedroom open a crack and peered through it. The room was dark, lit only by a small nightlight plugged into a socket above the skirting and the light from the hallway behind her. Blake was zipped into a pink sleeping bag (at £30 a pop Jem had felt no need to invest in new one after producing a boy child – he would never know). He had somehow managed to wedge himself into a corner of his cot against the (pink) cot bumpers and Jem swayed a little drunkenly into his room and pulled him back to the bottom of the cot. He stirred very slightly and rubbed at his cheek with a balled-up fist before settling back into a deep sleep. Jem stood straight and stared into his cot. Sober, she would have been out of here in a nanosecond, neurotic about the possibility of awaking him, but drunk and vaguely stoned she was quietly hoping that he would stir, that she would have cause to pick him up and hold him to her and soothe him home to sleep again. But he did not stir, he slumbered, and Jem stood above him and smiled and felt an ache inside her where a few days ago there had been another one, not slumbering and stirring but slowly, perfectly fading away.

  She looked at her son and then she looked at her flat belly and then she looked at her son again. It hadn’t been that bad, had it? Her time being pregnant with Blake? It hadn’t been so awful nursing him in the night; it had been quite beautiful, in fact – the silence, the softness of it. And really, now, in retrospect, it hadn’t taken so long to get to this point, to get to the point where she and Ralph could find time for each other again. So why had she been in such a desperate panic to stop her pregnancy? If anything she felt less close to Ralph since the baby had gone than she had beforehand. She felt tears rise upwards towards her eyes, but she pulled them back. She did not want to have to explain tears to Ralph. She could not tell him that she might have been wrong. Instead she sucked it all in, the emotion, the rawness, the sadness, sucked it all back inside herself and headed for her bed.

  Ralph was lying down. He was on his side, his back facing her side of the bed. He turned when he heard her come in and glanced at her.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Looking at Blake,’ she smiled.

  ‘Is he OK?’

  She nodded. ‘He’s gorgeous,’ she said. And then she took off her clothes and didn’t put on her pyjamas. Instead she climbed naked into bed alongside her partner and spooned her naked body up against his semi-naked body. They may not have had a laugh and got stoned and hopped on to a bus into Soho, but they could still salvage something valuable from their date. She rubbed the tip of her nose against the bare skin of his back and she smelled him and he smelled good. She touched her lips to his skin and she felt herself, for the first time in a long time, properly aroused, not just pleasing her man, not just maintaining the status quo, not even just enjoying herself, but wanting him, wanting it, insanely.

  She ran her lips up and down his back and into the crook of his neck, until finally, he turned towards her, on to his back and he put his hand into her hair and stared into her eyes and Jem leaned down to kiss him and suddenly his other hand was against her breastbone, pushing her away. And he whispered, into the soft darkness of their marital bed, ‘No, Jem, no. I can’t.’

  She raised herself to her knees and looked down at him. ‘What?’ she gasped.

  ‘I can’t. I … just. It doesn’t feel right.’

  She sank to a kneeling position and felt the sweet new rose of her passion shrivelling up.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I don’t get it. What doesn’t feel right?’

  ‘This,’ said Ralph, gesturing at their nakedness. ‘I feel, wrong. I feel …’

  Jem watched him, desperately hoping that he would somehow find the words from somewhere to explain his rejection of her advances. But words had never been Ralph’s strong point. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, finally. ‘I don’t know. I’m just tired. That’s all.’

  Jem stared at him for a moment longer, wishing there was something she could say or do that would reverse the last two minutes of her life. Her skin crawled with humiliation. Her heart raced with embarrassment. It was not only the first time that Ralph had rejected her sexual advances; it was the first time that any man, full stop, had rejected her sexual advances. She felt raw and exposed.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, climbing from the bed and towards her pyjamas on a chair in the window. ‘Fine.’ She pulled on her vest and her bottoms and she slipped back into the bed. ‘All those bloody months …’ she wanted to say, ‘all those bloody months you put me on a guilt trip because I wouldn’t have sex with you,’ but then she stopped herself. He was punishing her, she surmised. This was his way of saying, you made me suffer, now don’t expect me just to roll over and let you call the shots.

  She pulled the duvet up around her shoulders and she turned away from him. She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t talk to him. He had broken her in half, this new barely formed person she’d been trying to become. Tonight was the night that she was going to make sense of everything: of Joel, of the baby, of the trip to California, of getting married. It had all hinged on tonight. And now there was nothing left to see. The girl in the chiffon dress in the photograph fad
ed from sight. The evening, the rebirth, the imagined night of spontaneity, sex and fun – it had imploded. Suddenly she was hard and full of resentment again.

  She let hot wet tears take her painfully into sleep.

  Chapter 16

  It was a warm May afternoon. Ralph had finished another painting and decided to celebrate by taking a walk and smoking three cigarettes, back to back. These days Ralph tried to limit his smoking very strictly to ten a day. One after breakfast, with a coffee. One ten minutes later to get his bowels moving. Two between breakfast and lunch, then one right after lunch. Then he was allowed two between lunch and teatime, one after tea and two between teatime and bedtime. There was never an opportunity to smoke three in a row. Three in a row was like a glass of Dom Perignon, a heavy-bottomed tumbler full of finest ten-year-old malt whisky. Standing on his balcony puffing away would have felt a bit hollow, but walking through the streets of south London, the sun on his back, the world on the pavement, he felt like the king of the world.

  It was just as he’d put his second cigarette to the tip of his third cigarette and drawn in the warm leafy smoke that he saw them.

  Jem and Joel.

  They were standing outside the playground. Joel had a pink scooter in one hand and with the other he was stroking Jem’s arm. Jem had one hand on the handle of Blake’s buggy and the two girls were involved in some kind of skipping activity behind them.

  Ralph caught his breath and coughed slightly as the smoke went down the wrong way. He stamped the finished butt to the ground with his booted foot and moved behind a parked van, his hand over his mouth to mask his coughing. Peering from behind the van he could see that Jem and Joel were involved in some kind of rather intense conversation. Jem, it was clear, was engrossed in what Joel was saying and at one point she covered his hand on her arm with hers. They both stopped talking then for a moment and looked at the ground, then they looked up at each other and Joel said something and suddenly he was falling against Jem and Jem put her arms out to hold him and the two of them stood like that for a good ten seconds, Ralph estimated, before finally pulling apart. Then the man called Joel put one hand out and stroked Jem’s hair with it and Jem’s body language, which should at this point have recoiled in horror, seemed to curl towards him, her eyes lowered coquettishly. Then they smiled at each other and rather than saying goodbye and going their separate ways, they strolled together in the direction of Ask pizza restaurant where Joel held open the door for Jem and the buggy and followed in behind her.

  Ralph scuttled from behind the van and took a position opposite Ask, this time partially obscured by a phone box. They’d taken a seat in the window. Jem was hoisting Blake into a high chair, a girl with a dark ponytail was handing out a fan of oversized menus. Everyone was smiling at everyone. If you didn’t know better, Ralph thought, if you were just a stranger walking past you’d be thinking: how nice, a family out for a teatime treat. (You might also think: what is that hot woman doing with that dweeb, but that was not really the point.) Ralph stood behind the phone booth for exactly twenty-eight minutes. He smoked ten cigarettes, back to back and he didn’t enjoy one of them. He was going to wait until they left before moving along, returning home, but all the smoking and all the adrenalin had loosened him up inside. His bowels were wriggling with discomfort and fear, and he walked home at high speed.

  * * *

  ‘Nice afternoon?’ he asked when Jem got home half an hour later.

  ‘Yeah, lovely.’

  ‘Good, what did you do?’

  ‘Oh, the usual. Playground. Pizza.’

  Ralph waited a beat, waited to see if Jem would offer the information, give him something innocent to grab hold of before he reached the worst possible conclusion.

  ‘Just you lot?’ he said.

  He saw Jem pause for just a second before glancing down at Scarlett. She would not be able to lie in front of Scarlett, but he could tell she wanted to. ‘No, actually we bumped into Jessica in the playground, didn’t we, Scarlett?’

  ‘Yes. And we all went and had a pizza together and Jessica’s dad let me eat his ice cream from his cake because he says he doesn’t like vanilla.’

  Ralph nodded and smiled at her. ‘Is Jessica’s daddy nice, Scarlett?’

  She shrugged. Scarlett was always the litmus test for the substance of people. She only liked about five people in the world, three of whom were her direct family. If Scarlett liked someone it meant something. ‘Yes,’ she said eventually, pulling at a black spiral of hair. ‘I think he is. He’s got a nice voice.’

  ‘A nice voice.’

  ‘Yes, he sounds like Daddy Pig. Except … not so fat.’

  Ralph forced a smile. ‘So, you’ve made a new friend, have you?’ he asked Jem in as pleasant a voice as he could muster.

  Jem threw him a strange look. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t really like that. He kind of, er, forced himself on us. I stupidly mentioned that we had to go because Scarlett had been promised her favourite pizza, and I thought that would be the end of it, but he just kind of invited himself along. I felt a bit sorry for him because he’d just told me all about having a really terrible time with his ex-wife …’

  ‘He’s not married?’

  ‘Well, no, not any more. But the wife’s trying to get custody of Jessica and he was so upset about it, it was a bit embarrassing really. I mean, I hardly know him, but it seemed a bit rude then to say no when he wanted to join us for tea. Just after he’d been so upset. You know.’

  Ralph folded his arms across his chest. ‘But it was all right, was it?’ he asked, thinking of the picture of familial harmony he had witnessed for twenty-eight long and unpleasant minutes outside the pizza restaurant.

  Jem shrugged and pulled Blake out of his buggy. ‘It was fine. He’s just not someone I really want to be friends with, that’s all.’

  There were a dozen things that Ralph could have said in reply to this last statement, any number of things that might have taken the conversation to a place where misunderstandings might have been ironed out and presumptions not given a chance to propagate and take root. But he didn’t. Instead he just smiled at Jem knowingly and left the room.

  Chapter 17

  The following day was forecast to be the Hottest Day of the Year So Far with temperatures reaching twenty-five degrees so Jem decided to collect Scarlett from nursery early and meet Lulu and her two youngest boys on the South Bank for lunch and skateboarding. It was the last day of the half-term and London was awash with families. By the time Jem, Scarlett and Blake had dismounted the number 68 bus outside Waterloo station it was one o’clock, the sun was at its peak and Jem was sweating lightly. Blake had spent the last fifteen minutes of the bus journey screaming plaintively from his buggy and Scarlett had taken it upon herself to be responsible for soothing him, jumping up from her seat at regular intervals to squash his angry cheeks between the palms of her hands and pet him slightly too hard on the top of his head and attempt to distract him with a very noisy squeaky toy that hung from the straps of his pram. This meant that Jem had spent the last fifteen minutes saying: Sit down, Scarlett. Leave him alone, Scarlett. You’re making him worse, Scarlett. SIT DOWN, SCARLETT until the very sound of her own voice combined with the incessant whine of her baby and clucky squealing of her daughter made her want to shoot herself in the head with a gun, so she had no idea what the other passengers on the mostly full bus must have been making of it. She was sure that the whole bus must have breathed out in relief as one as she and her noisy clan finally got off the bus and the hydraulic doors shhhed closed behind them.

  She found her sister sitting on the pavement reading a book while her sons threw themselves nerve-rackingly around the skateboarding pit under the Festival Hall. Behind her a small steel band was belting out something cool and summery, which lent the entire area the feel of a Caribbean beach resort. Further along a sinewy man in cut-off leggings and nothing else was performing somersaults whilst simultaneously juggling three teapots. It was
remarkable to Jem that every day while she walked the same triangular lines of her life: home – nursery – shops – home – nursery, etc., there was a man here on the South Bank, not three miles away, juggling teapots. She felt a small familiar pull of regret that she was not living her life to the full. She’d closed off entire sections of the world to herself because she couldn’t face the logistics of taking children out of her comfort zone, because it just seemed easier to stay at home or close to it.

  ‘God,’ said Lulu, hugging her warmly, ‘isn’t it lovely?’

  ‘Beautiful,’ agreed Jem, ‘though buses plus heatwaves plus children is a bit of a nightmare combination.’

  ‘We walked!’ said Lulu, her voice tinged with pride.

  ‘What, all the way?’

  ‘Yes, all the way. Though I wouldn’t have got those two to do it if they hadn’t had their boards with them.’ She pulled Scarlett towards her and attempted to embrace her. Scarlett pulled away and looked vaguely affronted. A very Victorian child, Scarlett, when it came to public displays of affection. Lulu smiled.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘how are you?’

  Jem smiled. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘I think.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, clicking on the brakes on Blake’s buggy and lowering herself to join her sister on the pavement. Scarlett clambered on to her lap and she encircled her with her arms. ‘Weird week.’

  Her sister’s eyes widened. ‘How come?’

  ‘That guy again,’ she said, wondering how much Scarlett would be able to absorb and digest of what she was about to say.

  ‘Single dad?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jem, ‘that one. A funny thing happened yesterday.’

  ‘Right …’ Her sister pulled her sunglasses on to her head.

  ‘Yes, he was at the playground and it’s the first time I’ve seen him since the other, er, incident.’