After the Party

by Lisa Jewell

  Then she set about removing her own clothes, keeping her gaze very much in short range, not wanting to discover that she was in fact surrounded by nubile Danish au pair girls and the crème de la crème of the local yummy mummy brigade. She rolled her elasticated dress quickly down her stomach and let it fall to the floor, where she stepped out of it and was about to squirt some sun cream on to her stomach when she heard a familiar squeal.

  ‘Scaaaar-lett!’ And there was Jessica, in a sensible navy swimsuit, the type that girls had always worn when Jem was a child, and a pair of goggles hanging around her neck. ‘Scaaaar-lett!’

  Scarlett eyed her up and down, circumspectly.

  ‘Hello, Jessica!’ said Jem, greeting her extra fulsomely, to compensate for Scarlett’s reticence. ‘Scarlett, say hello to Jessica!’

  Scarlett mumbled something under her breath and Jessica skipped happily from foot to foot, oblivious to Scarlett’s lack of effusiveness.

  ‘Scarlett, come swimming with me! It’s so cold! But it’s so fun! Come now! Come now!’

  Jem slid her sunglasses on to her head. ‘Where’s your dad?’ she asked, as breezily as she could.

  ‘He’s at home! He’s working!’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jem, feeling relieved. ‘You with your mum?’

  ‘No,’ said Jessica. ‘No. I’m not with my mum. I’m with my brother. Look!’ She pointed behind her to a spot on the other side of the pool. ‘He’s called Lucas! He’s my big brother! Come on Scarlett, let’s SWIM!’ She grabbed Scarlett’s hand and dragged her towards the shallow end of the pool.

  Jem put her hands to her hips and glanced across the water. Lucas smiled lazily at her and raised his hand to his head in a gentle salute. Jem put up a hand too and felt the colour drain from her face.

  He was dressed in oversized swimming shorts in a sludgy green colour that set off the caramel tones of his skin. His hair was shorn and he had sunglasses on his crown and even sitting with his arms wrapped around his bent knees, his hairless stomach was smooth and flat.

  Jem felt mortification on two distinct levels. First was born of the fact that the last time she had seen this man she had been the most drunk she had been in over four years, had probably stunk of booze and stale tobacco and had been linking arms with his dad. The second was that looking at him made her feel old. His gloss and vigour, his direct gaze, his sheer unapologetic youth – she knew that to his eye she was pointless. To Lucas she was just that nutty woman who got into a cab with him and his dad two weeks ago. She was not a girl. Jem’s father referred to any woman of his age or younger as a ‘girl’. A girl, basically, was any woman that a man would have an interest in sleeping with, either real or theoretical. A ‘girl’ was therefore entirely objective.

  She sat down and busied herself with Blake, who had started to whimper ominously in a manner that suggested that he had just discovered that he DID NOT LIKE THE LIDO (taking small children to new places was always a bit like Russian roulette).

  ‘He’s hot,’ said a male voice, by her right ear. ‘I’ll take him in the pool for you, if you like, cool him down?’ Lucas beamed at her and yes, his teeth were white as ivory and very straight. Jem and Blake both gazed at him for a second. ‘Would you like that, little guy?’ he said, tickling the soft pink soles of Blake’s feet. Blake gazed at him for a moment longer and then he smiled. ‘I’ll take that as a yes then.’ Lucas smiled at Blake and then smiled at Jem. ‘If that’s all right with your mummy, of course?’

  Jem stared at him, agog. She had no idea what to say. Lucas spoke with a soft Northern accent and when he smiled, which he did a lot, his green eyes literally twinkled. There was something about him, Jem suddenly realised, that reminded her of Ralph. When he was younger. When she’d first met him. The beauty of him, the leanness of him, the sweet simplicity of him.

  She found her tongue and she said, ‘Er, yeah, OK, sure. If it’s OK with you?’

  He directed his smile at Blake and said, ‘Come on then, buddy, fancy a dip?’

  Blake didn’t protest at all as Lucas bore him towards the water. Jem watched anxiously from the side. She had only ever taken Blake swimming at the indoor pool before, where the water was tepid. She waited for Blake to yelp with horror as his naked feet hit the cold water, but his face registered nothing but pure delight as Lucas splashed him inch by inch into the shallow end.

  It occurred to Jem that she should be worried. She may well have spent forty minutes in the company of this man two weeks ago but she had no recollection of it and now she’d allowed him to carry her one and only son off into a swimming pool. A picture zipped through her mind: Lucas smiling malevolently at Blake as he slowly forced his head under the water and held him there wriggling until … Jem shook it from her head. Jem had spent her whole life trusting first and asking questions later, and her instincts (with a few dishonourable exceptions) had always proved to be spot on. And her instincts about this young man were good. He was good. And Blake was loving him.

  Lucas spent a full fifteen minutes in the pool with Blake before finally bringing him back to Jem. Jem was so busy staring at her darling son, at his bonny face and his swirls of wet dark hair and the mound of his fat, shiny belly over the drawstring of his colourful shorts that she didn’t really register the fact of Lucas’s own wet, shiny skin, gleaming like French-polished walnut in the lunchtime sun. And when she did she caught her breath.

  She put her arms out for her cold baby and wrapped him swiftly in the thickest of the three towels she had brought. She bundled him on to her lap and cuddled him to her, letting the sun and her body heat bring him back to room temperature.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to Lucas, who was squatting by her side.

  ‘No worries,’ he said, ‘we had a gas, didn’t we, little man?’ He rubbed the top of Blake’s head and smiled his strip-light smile again.

  This was the point at which Lucas would head back to his spot on the other side of the pool, if he intended to, but a moment passed and he didn’t. ‘So,’ he said, falling from his haunches and on to his butt. ‘You get home all right the other night?’

  Jem flinched and blanched. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ she began. ‘You know,’ she said, feeling total honesty would be the best approach, ‘I do not remember you at all.’

  ‘And you just let me take your son and heir for a swim?’ said Lucas, one of his eyebrows arching suspiciously, before he laughed to let her know he was teasing.

  ‘No, really,’ continued Jem, ‘the only reason why I know I’ve ever met you before is because my sister told me about it the next day. Seriously, otherwise I would have been at a loss.’

  ‘But would you have still let me take your baby in the pool?’ he teased again.

  ‘Yes, probably,’ smiled Jem, ‘I’m kind of a trusting person. And I knew you were Jessica’s brother and Joel’s son. So you came recommended.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he turned and squinted into the sun. ‘I love kids. Can’t wait to have a few of my own.’

  Jem frowned. ‘Oh, but not yet,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘why not? If the right woman came along. I’m coming up twenty-five. I’m not a kid any more, but I wouldn’t mind being a young dad.’

  ‘Like your dad, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Lucas drew his arms around his knees and surveyed the pool, his eyes looking for Jessica, then finding her and turning back to Jem. ‘Yeah. Not that he was a dad in that way. I mean, he wasn’t there. But he’s my dad now and it’s cool, it’s good that he’s young. So what about you, you must have started out young?’

  Jem looked at Lucas, looked at her baby, looked at Scarlett, looked at Lucas again. She could not judge his comment. Was he teasing her again? Was he visually impaired? Or was he, heaven forfend, flirting with her? She decided to play it straight, hopefully to extinguish anything playful between the pair of them. ‘Bless you,’ she said, ‘but no. I was a very old lady when I became a mother.’

  ‘Well, then, what? You can’t be more than thirty, tops?
That’s not old.’

  ‘I’m going to be thirty-nine in October,’ she said.

  Lucas let his jaw drop and stared at her agog. ‘No way,’ he said.

  ‘Yes way, sadly,’ said Jem.

  ‘Well,’ he held up the palm of his hand for a high-five, ‘in which case you must have one of those paintings in your attic. Because you do not look that old. No way.’

  Jem smiled and said thank you and made a fuss of taking Blake out of his wet trunks. This was uncanny. This was silly. This was not what she had expected when she’d left the house this morning. She unpopped a carton of raisins and tipped them on to the towel in front of Blake, who started plucking them one by one like a human skill crane and popping them robotically into his mouth.

  ‘So,’ continued Lucas, his voice sounding a change of tone. ‘You and my dad. What’s the story there?’

  ‘Oh. God,’ Jem began, glad in a way that he’d brought up the subject to take them away from small talk. ‘Honestly, I have no idea. I was – clearly – somewhat the worse for wear that night, but me and your dad, honestly, nothing, a strange thing, a strange relationship.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, in what way?’ He ran his fingers across his naked scalp, dislodging a few lingering dewdrops of pool water.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. We knew each other by sight, I was fascinated by him, fascinated I think by this man who looked after his child alone, without a woman, probably because at the time my own partner was leaving me to do everything and I suppose I found him, you know …’

  ‘Impressive?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess. And my partner went away for a week and I sort of tried to get to know your dad a bit better and, well, I possibly pushed it a bit far.’

  ‘Yeah, you had him over for dinner, right?’

  ‘Oh. He told you?’

  ‘Yeah. Not in detail, particularly, just that he was getting mixed messages off you.’

  Jem nodded and picked at a loose thread on her towel. ‘It was a bit like that, yes, and then I saw him a few weeks later and, well, he basically verbally abused me.’ She turned to look at Lucas, to watch his reaction, but there wasn’t one, just an imperceptible nod of his head.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said.

  ‘Hmm what?’ asked Jem.

  ‘Well, yeah, my dad’s got his issues. You know.’

  ‘You mean his ex?’

  ‘Well, yeah, his ex is one of them. But, well, he’s got his demons too.’

  Jem looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘Drugs. You know?’

  ‘Your dad takes drugs?’

  ‘No, he used to. Not any more, of course. He hasn’t touched them since Jessica was born.’

  ‘What sort of drugs?’

  ‘Well, the hard stuff. Smack.’

  Jem blinked and held her breath for a second. She was blind-sided by the revelation. ‘Your dad was a junkie?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Lucas nodded. ‘It was bad. I didn’t see him for years. My mum wouldn’t let me and besides, he wasn’t really that interested, you know; he was only interested in the stuff. But then Paulette got pregnant and he totally turned himself around. Methadone at first and then he was one hundred per cent clean by the time Jessie was born. But every day’s a struggle, he still goes to meetings.’

  ‘Ah, right, at that community centre on Maygrove Road?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. How did you know?’

  ‘’Cause my sister lives at the top of that road, you know, in that old pub.’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t know the road. I’ve never been there. Just know that that’s where he goes for his meetings. Three times a week, every week. But he was a user for five years, and, well, he’s still not really the same as he was before. He’s got this dark side now. He’s very cynical and untrusting. And I think that you were the first person in a long time he let into his life. I think …’ he rolled a piece of gravel around beneath his fingertips, ‘and don’t quote me on this, but I think he thought you were like him, you know, I think he thought you were lonely. And then it turned out that you weren’t. You were just … bored.’

  Jem nodded, not sure how to respond. She felt horrible. Even more guilty than before, now she knew a bit more about Joel’s past. She wondered if Lucas judged her for her behaviour. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I didn’t handle the whole situation very well. I was in a strange place at the time. I was a bit lost. A bit confused. And I was definitely partly to blame. Well, more than partly …’

  ‘But still, that’s not an excuse for him to lay into you the way you say he did. But yeah, my dad, he’s a really good bloke, a really amazing dad, but just a bit screwed up about the rest of humanity.’

  ‘It feels like,’ Jem began cautiously, ‘it feels like he’s got a bit of a chip on his shoulder?’

  Lucas smiled sadly. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed, ‘that about sums it up. But don’t let that put you off him. As long as you’re straight up with him, he’ll be a good person to know. But if you send him mixed messages, like you did? Well, you’ve seen what can happen.’

  They both turned then to watch the two girls in the shallow end of the pool. ‘So, you’re baby-sitting today, are you?’

  ‘Yeah, all week actually. My dad’s got a freelance contract, deadline’s next Wednesday. I’ve got a bit of time off from college so I said I’d take Jessica for a few hours a day. Not that it’s a hardship. She’s a really easy little girl. And with the weather like this …’ he spread his hands, ‘well, it’s like a little mini-holiday.’

  Jem kept waiting for Lucas to go back to the other side of the pool, to find some reason not to sit with her any more. But he didn’t, and as lunchtime turned into teatime they sat and chatted and they shared their picnics with each other and the girls. Jem batted away every attempt Lucas made to flirt with her. He was that kind of man, she could tell, a man who loved women, a man who could not resist the temptation to flirt. She didn’t take it personally. Some men were just programmed that way. But she enjoyed his company none the less. He was light-hearted and easy to talk to. He was refreshing.

  They met up again the following week. It wasn’t scheduled or premeditated, it just so happened that London was hot and they both had children to entertain, and where better to entertain children in hot London than in an outdoor pool? Jem arrived every day at twelve thirty with her children and a picnic and a bikini under her sundress. Lucas was already there, in his sludge-green shorts, his silky toast-coloured skin growing browner by the day and he would, invariably, the moment he saw Jem arrive, pick up his towel and his bag and join her in the shade. They talked about life and love and children and families and London and books and dogs and the North. They discussed his degree (he was studying for a Masters in Applied Science) and her career (he’d never heard of Karl Kasparov) and they talked about the upcoming wedding (that’s so cool, he’d said, that’s exactly the way I’d like to get married, quick and cheap, and then blow the rest on a honeymoon). It was remarkable to Jem that she had found so much to talk about with a man who was so much younger than she, and she found herself looking forward to the daily trek to the park in the midday heat, Blake’s buggy loaded down with towels and toys and snacks, Lucas’s warm welcoming smile as she appeared from around the corner, more than she cared to admit.

  And then suddenly it was Thursday and the skies filled with black and the rain came and the lido was just a distant memory, and anyway, Jessica was back with her dad and Lucas was back at college and this tiny, magical little window in Jem’s long London summer was slammed shut in front of her very eyes, with nothing to remind her of it but the pale outline of her bikini marked out in triangular white across her breasts.

  Destiny. Jem believed in destiny. But she questioned it more and more these days. She’d read too much into the coincidences that had led to her bumping again and again into Joel back in the cooler days of spring. She’d believed that it meant something. But now, in retrospect, it was clear that it had meant nothing. Just two people in the same locale with children of the same
age. Destined, maybe, just to be slightly unconventional friends. That was all. And now there was Lucas. What a strange and twisted journey he had taken towards this point in her life. Born twenty-four years ago in another part of the country, chanced upon meandering home through south London at three in the morning with his father, and then placed right opposite her in the lido during four of the only hot days that June would have to offer this year. How much attention should Jem pay to encounters of this kind? What did it all mean? She was getting married next month. On paper and in essence, everything at home was fine. Ralph worked, he ran, he helped with the kids’ tea, he cleared away after breakfast, he emptied the dishwasher, he picked up abandoned shoes and water beakers, he took responsibility for his children and the upkeep of his home and he was, in many ways, utterly beyond reproach. He was everything that Jem had wanted him to be for the past four years. But something had changed. Something wasn’t right. Jem wasn’t entirely sure what it was. It was something about Ralph, about his smile, his demeanour. He seemed, well, fake was the only way she could think of to describe it, as though he were pretending to like her. He was clearly very happy with his home life and his children, and seemed to be enjoying his work, but whenever he looked at Jem, it was as if he wasn’t seeing her any more.