by Fiona Gibson
Everyone except Beth and the cleaner had left the church. Hannah felt stupid, hanging around in the vague hope that Ollie might come back to find her. She wished she had someone to walk home with—someone like Amy, who she could have a laugh with and maybe share some chips, but she’d stopped coming months ago.
Beth appeared at the cloakroom’s entrance. She was wearing a gray felted sweater, skinny jeans and a string of brightly colored African beads. “Everything okay?” she asked, cocking her head.
“I’ve lost my bag,” Hannah explained. “It must be here somewhere.”
Beth scanned the hooks and benches, her gaze finally resting on Hannah’s hiding place. “Is it that blue one under the bench?”
“Oh, yeah, thanks.” She dived down to retrieve it.
Beth hovered, clearly wanting to chat. Her springy auburn hair looked as if wanted to escape from the plastic claw that gripped it on top of her head. “I hope you’re not too disappointed with not getting a main part,” she added.
Hannah came up to her feet, shaking her head vigorously. “Of course not.”
“It’s just…you’ve seemed a bit distracted lately. I was wondering if you’re still committed to the group, if you’re enjoying—”
“I love it,” Hannah protested.
Beth smiled warmly. “Well, that’s good. Just as long as you’re not upset…and you’ll be brilliant in the chorus.”
“I’m fine,” Hannah said, slinging her bag over her shoulder to signal: I want to go now.
“Have you seen Ollie?” Beth asked.
“No, I think he must’ve left.”
“He was looking for you. Said he’d see you in the usual place.” Beth crooked an eyebrow.
“Okay, thanks.” Hannah flashed a quick smile, hoping that Beth wouldn’t register the instant blush that was flaming her cheeks, and hurried out into the dusk.
She saw him smoking under the bridge on the towpath. “Hi,” she said, trying to dampen the breathlessness in her voice. “Why didn’t you wait?”
He took a quick puff of his cigarette. “Had a bit of trouble with my mum this morning. She’d threatened to come and pick me up from the church so I skipped off early.”
Hannah wouldn’t have imagined Ollie experiencing Trouble With Parents. He was virtually an adult, for God’s sake. “What happened?” she asked.
“Nothing much. She’s just a bit…intense.”
“Mine, too,” Hannah murmured. Ollie rested his back against the pitted stone of the bridge. Hannah leaned against the spot beside him, even though her part was slimy and she was forced to stand with her feet unnaturally apart to avoid slipping in the sweet-and-sour something.
Ollie flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the canal, where it landed with a hiss. “Hope you didn’t get into trouble last Monday night,” he ventured.
“No, it was fine.”
“You looked a bit tipsy when you left.”
“I was okay,” Hannah said firmly. Ollie looked at her as if he knew it hadn’t been okay at all. She flinched as his hand touched hers. It was as if the warmth between them, and not their actual skin, was making contact. Hannah’s entire body stiffened.
“Want to come over on Saturday?” Ollie asked. “I’m having some friends round, bit of a party. Mum works Saturday nights so I’ve got the place to myself.”
Her heart was bounding like a wild thing, caged in her chest. “What about your dad?” she asked.
“I thought I’d told you. My dad’s never been around—it’s just me and Mum.”
Hannah paused, then asked, “Did your dad die?”
“No, but he’s never been part of my life.” Ollie’s voice was flat as a puddle.
“Why not?” Hannah asked, unable to help herself. She was just like her mother: eager, prying, unable to let go.
“I don’t think him and my mum were really together. It just sort of…happened. I was an accident, Han.” He laughed. “It’s not a big deal. D’you see much of your dad?”
“It’s meant to be every other weekend but it’s never as organized as that. It works out okay. My parents are pretty friendly with each other.”
“Weird,” he said, squeezing her hand. “So, Saturday. Think you can come?”
“Sure.” She’d figure out some way of spending Saturday evening at a seventeen-year-old boy’s house with no adults present. Granny Nancy was always reminding her how smart she was. She’d come up with something.
They stood there, with the bridge arcing over their heads like a giant arm, and the traffic rumbling above them. It felt safe: dark, damp and secret. Ollie raised a hand and stroked Hannah’s cheek. Then his lips were on hers, and it wasn’t remotely like horrible Michael Linton, who’d tried to crumple her face with his mouth. You read all that crap in the girls’ magazines—the ones Amy and Rachel bought religiously—and it was all about eyes closing, lips meeting and learning how to relax. Kissing wasn’t something you learned, Hannah realized now, or wrote to some patronizing agony aunt about in the hope of gleaning tips. It just happened.
Kissing Ollie felt natural, as if the billions of cells in her body had suddenly figured out how to behave. She kissed him and kissed him, not caring that she was probably standing in a puddle of sweet-and-sour sauce.
She wanted to kiss him forever.
11
“Hello?” chirped the female voice on the phone.
“Sorry, I think I’ve called a wrong—”
“Is that you, Jane?” the woman asked. “It’s Veronica. Max just stepped into a bath. Shall I ask him to call you later?”
Jane was conscious of a numbness spreading up her body. It was how she’d imagined an epidural might feel: rattling toward her head, unstoppable. “There’s no hurry,” she blustered. “I’ll talk to him when he’s, um, out of the bath.”
“Okay, take care now,” Veronica said.
Jane replaced the receiver and glared at it. So Max was wallowing in a warm bubble bath, sipping a glass of wine, perhaps, that Veronica had kindly brought in for him. She’d be perched on the side of the bath, chatting away as he soaped himself. Maybe helping him soap himself. Jane shuddered, and tried to shoo the thought away.
Did he have a pet name for her yet? How would you shorten Veronica—to Ronnie? Or Nonnie? She was, Jane was certain, wearing some saucy negligee/robe-thing with nothing underneath. That voice—slow, drawly, with a husky edge—definitely had a tinge of the postcoital about it. Max seemed to have made the transition from lonesome singleton requiring meals-on-wheels to part of a couple, half of Max-and-Veronica, in the space of a month. Jane was shocked by the speed at which he’d slipped in to we-speak. Sure, there’d been evidence of the odd girlfriend at the old house: an unfamiliar lemon dressing gown hanging from a hook in the bathroom, a tub of moisturizer looking abandoned on the windowsill. No one, as far as she knew, had swanned around his bathroom, checking the water temperature for him: ready for a little more hot, sweetheart?
Jane wasn’t wearing anything remotely robe-like. She was dressed in her oldest jeans, which were ripped at the knees, and a sweater she reserved for working in the studio during the colder months. Leaving Hannah playing music in her room, she marched across the back garden to the studio.
She pulled up a stool at the workbench where she’d spread out her watercolor sketches. Although she’d taken photos of Max’s back room, she’d lost any sense of its dimensions and space. Her sketches looked crude and amateurish. Some of the Nippers kids could have produced better.
Hannah’s golden star panel caught her eye. She’d made it when she was nine or ten and had been so proud that she’d insisted on taking it to school cocooned in thick layers of newspaper. Now it was propped against a wooden wall with no light coming through it. Hannah must have taken it down from the bathroom and dumped it here.
She wouldn’t ask her daughter why she’d moved it, just as she’d forbid herself from mentioning Max’s nudie wine waitress next time she saw him. He’d assume she was jealous, t
hat she had a problem or something, which was so ridiculous as to be laughable. Did she need someone to answer her phone while she took a bath? Or to take her to dinner without being asked? No, she most certainly did not.
“Veronica’s not what you think,” Max said, levering the back tire from Jane’s bike. The workshop at Spokes was jammed with wheels and dismembered frames heaped up like discarded scaffolding. Jane could barely squeeze in without fear of elbowing a tin of spanners from a shelf.
“I’m not thinking anything,” she protested. “I don’t have any preconceived ideas about her. She seemed really, really—” She scrabbled for words.
Max glanced up from his crouched position. In his new, coupled-up state, he even looked different. Kind of sleepy, more wrinkled around the eye region. His eyes looked different, too. They were glinting, Jane noticed. She’d never realized that eyes were actually capable of acquiring glints. He gave her a quizzical look, then turned back to her bike and fitted the new inner tube. He replaced the tire and flipped the bike the right way up. Jane pulled her purse from her bag.
“Don’t be silly,” Max said. “When have I ever charged you?”
“Well, thanks for fixing it.”
“You know what?” he added. “I really think you’d like Veronica. She’s managed all on her own for years with two kids. It hasn’t been easy. Her son Dylan’s a bit weird—quiet, withdrawn—but Zoë seems fine. She’s a year older than Han. Maybe they’d get on.”
What was this: some teenagers’ matchmaking service? Jane pictured a younger version of Veronica minus the overglossed lips, weeping at the hairdressers. “You really think so?” she asked.
Max wheeled Jane’s bike from the workshop through to the shop. “Might be good for her to broaden her circle. Stop her going out and drinking with those losers from theater workshop.”
“She only did that once—”
“Just an idea,” Max said. “I’m having a party, a kind of housewarming thing. You’ll come, won’t you? Hannah and Zoë could get to know each other.”
“Your place can’t be finished already.”
“Nowhere near,” he said, laughing. “It was Veronica’s idea. She’s been helping me paint downstairs and offered to dress the house for the party.”
“Dress the house?” Jane blurted. “What will it be wearing?”
Exasperation clouded Max’s eyes. “Why are you being like this?”
“I’m not being like anything!”
“Yes, you are. You’re being…Jane.”
“Sorry,” she muttered, taking her bike from Max and gripping its handlebars fiercely. “Maybe I’m just feeling weird about being thirty-seven.”
Max’s hand shot to his mouth. “Shit, Jane—your birthday. I totally forgot.”
“That’s okay,” she said, thinking: you never forget.
“Well, happy birthday.”
“Thank you.”
He held the door open as she wheeled out her bike, adding, “You will come on Saturday, won’t you? It’s just a casual get-together thing.”
“Sure,” she said, even though the prospect of Hannah befriending this Zoë girl seemed as viable as jamming together pieces from different jigsaws and expecting them to fit.
12
Hannah perched on the blue canvas sofa in the foyer of Nippers Nursery—“Quality Day Care From Three Months To Five Years”—trying to blot out the incessant whooping that was coming from the main play area. Someone was squawking about her picture not drying fast enough. A nursery song tape struggled tinnily in the background.
Hannah had never been a nursery song kind of kid. Like the fairy stories her dad had chosen for her, with their tales of princesses with shattered glass hearts, they’d made her yearn to run out of her nursery class and pull on her elastic eye patch and do some cutlass-waving. Now it sounded like every kid in the nursery was running on the spot. Imagine, she thought, spending seven hours a day here, as her mum did. Imagine coming home from work with face paint smeared on your trousers, glitter in your hair and your voice hoarse from all that storytelling and singing. Hannah couldn’t help pitying her.
Would she ever reach a point when she’d want a child of her own? Hannah doubted it. Anyway, to get pregnant you had to have sex, a concept that she found faintly intriguing, yet represented a potential minefield of blundering embarrassment. Unlike Amy’s mother, Jane had never subjected her to “the big talk.” She’d merely dispensed little nuggets of info over the years; enough for Hannah to decide that, even if some boy ever wanted to do it with her, she’d be sure to use at least five methods of contraception at once.
A couple of mothers had wandered into the foyer and squished their blubbery bums on to the sofa on either side of Hannah. One had a mole on her chin with a wiry hair poking out of it. Hannah’s thoughts of sex had brought her neatly round to Ollie Tibbs. At seventeen, surely he’d done it. He certainly looked like he had. He had this air about him—an ease with himself. Hannah imagined him kissing her and touching her. The two of them, all lips and limbs on his bed this Saturday night, with his friends all gone home and his mum not back for hours.
One of the mothers bent to prize a drawing pin from the sole of her clumpy shoe. The other was using a matchstick to gouge dirt from under her fingernails. They were sitting so close to Hannah they could probably tell she was daydreaming about a boy. They’d be having those young people today kind of thoughts. Hannah tried to focus on more mundane matters, like the process of osmosis that they were doing in biology. One substance absorbing another. Even that made her think of sex. Hannah blinked at the door to the play area, willing her mother to come through it.
They were singing now, a great swell of kids’ voices:
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday dear Jay-ayne…
Christ, her mum’s birthday. How could Hannah have forgotten? “Come to work after school,” Jane had said that morning, “and we’ll go somewhere nice for dinner.”
Hannah had thought it was weird, this dinner-out-of-the-blue. Then she’d figured: end of the month. Jane would have just been paid. What hadn’t registered was that September 30th was her birthday. She was thirty-six or thirty-seven or thirty-eight. Bloody hell.
Hannah checked her watch. Jane would be out any minute. She scanned the foyer hoping that, by some miracle, she might spy something to pass off as a lovingly chosen present. Her eyes flitted across multi-colored backpacks that hung from pegs like scrunched kites. A jumble of slippers and elastic-fronted plimsolls were heaped under a bench. The two mothers’ kids were ferried out by a whey-faced day care nurse who looked about fourteen and was busily swamping them with coats and hats. They all clattered out, letting in an icy gust and leaving Hannah alone on the sofa.
She delved into her jacket pockets, the crumby remains of some long-forgotten Kit Kat embedding itself under her nails. She rifled through the schoolbag that lay at her feet. Nothing remotely giftlike in there: just a dog-eared biology homework jotter, a leaking green gel pen and a half-eaten packet of Starbursts. To her embarrassment, she realized she must have absent-mindedly combined her name and Ollie’s in Biro on the inside of her schoolbag: Hannah Tibbs. It was time she grew up, got a grip on herself. She made a mental note to erase it—with bleach, maybe, or Wite-Out.
Hannah’s entire body was rigid with panic. She had about ninety seconds to concoct some kind of excuse. Any old lie would do. She’d bought a present ages ago and lost it—or had left it at Amy’s because it was too big to hide at their house. When had Hannah ever bought her mother anything big? Last birthday it had been a turquoise leather purse from Camden Market. She couldn’t remember the present before that, but recalled the childish junk she’d bestowed upon her over the years. A coffee jar covered with ripped sticky paper—“for your pens, Mum!”—and a beaded bracelet made from self-hardening clay. Hardly the most alluring of gifts, but Jane had always seemed ridiculously pleased. She’d worn the clay bracelet fo
r months until the elastic had snapped on the Roman Road and the beads had bounced down a drain.
“Hi, Han,” Sally said, bundling a little girl toward the toilets.
“Hi,” Hannah said dully. A string of snot was dangling from the child’s nostril. The sight of it caused bile to rise in Hannah’s throat. How could Jane deal with these kids and all their bodily fluids without puking? Sally had paused by the loo door and was studying her intently. “Looking forward to your night out?” she asked.
“Yes, thanks.” Hannah forced herself to produce the expected smile. There was something faintly comforting about Sally’s round, cheery face with its flushed cheeks and cherry-colored lips. She looked like the kind of friendly auntie who’d always have something delicious baking in the oven. “Do me a favor,” Sally added. “Remind your mum to use her present before it runs out.”
“What is it?”
“A voucher for an aromatherapy massage at Serene. She could do with a treat, don’t you think? It’s got a three-month use-by date, so make sure—”
“Need toilet,” the child protested, jerking Sally’s arm.
Shit, thought Hannah. A massage. Her best friend had arranged for her to be slathered with exotic oils and Hannah hadn’t even got it together to buy her a fifty pence nail buffer. Her gaze rested upon a pile of cards on the front desk. It was probably intended for some art project or other. The cards were pale blue and an off-putting lobster color and looked as if they’d spent years slowly fading on a windowsill. Just one: that was all Hannah would need to make a card. She hadn’t made one since primary school. Jane would be so surprised and delighted, it might detract from the absence of gift. Hannah watched her own arm slide forward, as if mechanically controlled, her fingers pluck at the top sheet—a lobster one, as bad luck would have it—and jab it into her bag.
