Wishful Thinking

by Jemma Harvey

  ‘I’ve got a date,’ Lin said abruptly, breaking into a conversation in which she had taken little part.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ I said.

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Georgie. ‘How did you meet him?’

  ‘I went on the Internet,’ Lin said, with the air of one admitting to a secret vice. ‘Like you suggested. I joined one of those dating sites. I gave a false name. I know it’s silly, but I didn’t want to – I thought someone might remember me. From magazines and stuff. I started e-mailing four or five guys, and it was fun, it was easy, chatting away, telling them what I wanted to tell, leaving out the bad bits. And they like me, they really like me. One of them proposed already, which was awfully sweet and romantic, but a bit quick.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Georgie. ‘I had a guy who wanted to fly me to his villa in the South of France – and he hadn’t even seen my picture.’

  ‘What?’ Cal snapped.

  ‘Oh . . . I was just fooling around in a chatroom.’ And, turning hastily to Lin: ‘What about this date of yours? Is he the one who proposed to you?’

  ‘No. We’ve just swapped e-mails. He’s divorced – his wife went off with his best friend, but he isn’t bitter. He says it was his fault for neglecting her. She wanted babies and all he did was work all the time. He’s a systems analyst or something. He says he didn’t realise what he’d lost until it was too late – it’s really sad – and now he’s prepared to work at a relationship, if he finds the right person. He wants kids, too.’

  ‘Ready-made?’ Cal queried sceptically.

  ‘I told him about Meredith and the twins,’ Lin said. ‘He thinks they sound great.’

  ‘The man’s a fool,’ I muttered, sotto voce.

  ‘What’s his name?’ Georgie asked. ‘Age? Vital statistics? Have you seen a photo?’

  ‘He’s thirty-six, and he sent me a picture. He’s got a thin face with nice smile lines and he looks kind. Not drop-dead gorgeous, but definitely okay. Anyhow, I have to start somewhere.’

  ‘That’s the attitude,’ said Georgie. ‘Don’t go falling in love across a room until you’ve seen the guy close up. What did you say his name was?’

  ‘Derek,’ said Lin, a shade defensively.

  Georgie opened her mouth, presumably to say something unflattering, but was unexpectedly forestalled by Cal. ‘I had a mate at school called Derek,’ he offered. ‘Great guy. Always backed me up in fights. I still see him from time to time.’

  ‘Maybe that’s a good omen,’ I said. ‘Where’s he taking you?’

  ‘Some place called Mean Cuisine,’ Lin said. ‘Brewer Street – or is it Beak Street? I’m meeting him there. I thought that was the right thing to do.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Georgie frowned. ‘Never heard of it. Places with clever titles don’t usually have brilliant food . . .’

  It occurred to me that it might be the ideal restaurant to take Todd Jarman, for the name if nothing else. We had arranged another session at his house for the following week, but the obligatory editorial lunch would fall due sooner or later. And it had begun to seem very important that I strike the right note. An unpleasant one, of course.

  ‘I don’t mind about the food,’ Lin was saying. ‘Any food I’m not cooking tastes good. Particularly if I’m not doing the washing-up either. It’s just . . . there’s a problem.’

  Why did I have a sudden feeling of impending doom?

  ‘Clothes?’ said Georgie, who could only visualise one kind of pre-date trauma. ‘We’ll sort you out. You could borrow my pink chiffon: it’s a bit summery but you can put a coat over it and it’s your kind of thing. Lots of floaty, drapey bits. It’s short on me so it’ll be fine on you.’

  ‘It’s not clothes,’ Lin said hurriedly. ‘The thing is, Vee Corrigan can’t have the twins, let alone Meredith, and Sean’s always too busy, and . . . and . . . you did say you might babysit, if I couldn’t get anyone else . . .’ She was looking at both of us, I noticed, though I had made no such offer. But friends stick together.

  Doom.

  Georgie blenched, then rallied. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘If you’re really stuck . . . ?’

  ‘I’m really stuck. Yes.’

  ‘We’d love to.’

  We? Oh, well . . .

  ‘It’s not like they’re babies,’ Lin said. ‘They amuse themselves most of the time.’ (My blood did not run cold at this remark, but it should have done.) ‘I’ll organise food for them, burgers or chicken takeaway which you can reheat. Don’t let Meredith touch the mint-choc-chip ice cream, it – it doesn’t agree with her. And don’t let them watch anything unsuitable on TV. They watch it on their computers, mind you, but at least the definition isn’t so good.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Georgie. ‘I’m great with kids.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I said. ‘You’ve never had any.’

  Cal was looking decidedly amused.

  ‘Some of my friends have them,’ Georgie replied. ‘They all adore me. Lin’s lot will too.’ Nothing like positive thinking.

  ‘Bound to,’ Cal murmured.

  ‘Anyway,’ Georgie continued, ‘if the worst comes to the worst, I’m bigger than they are. When it comes to children, I believe might is right.’

  ‘Actually,’ Lin said tentatively, ‘the twins are eleven now. They’re getting very tall . . .’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Georgie attested. ‘I have natural authority.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said, ‘’cause I bloody haven’t.’

  ‘Cookie the realist,’ Cal commented. ‘Always the practical one.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yeah. Out of this trio, anyway. Lin’s a real girly romantic, no matter how many men she meets whose minds are below-the-belt. Georgie still thinks the world is her oyster, though she’s old enough to know better – she even fools it into oystering back, some of the time. You may be the youngest, but you’re – oh, I don’t know. Cynical. Pragmatic – is that the word I want?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I’m not cynical. Cynics don’t believe in anything. I do. I really do.’

  ‘She really does,’ Georgie corroborated. ‘Anyhow, I’m the cynical one.’

  ‘No – you just try to be. Sorry, Cookie. I didn’t want to upset you. I meant to pay you a compliment – on your maturity.’

  ‘A compliment,’ said Georgie, ‘is when you go on about her tits – but that doesn’t mean I want you to get back to that, okay?’

  He left me feeling vaguely unsettled, though it was hard to analyse why. Was I a down-to-earth cynic? On the surface, maybe. But underneath I was bubbling with secret romanticism and a yen to prove that the world could be my oyster too – with a pearl in it. The trouble is, when you’ve always been fat and not very attractive romantic ideals and world-oysterishness don’t have much chance to grow. Maybe my newfound sex appeal would colour my whole outlook, melting the hard outer crust of my personality and releasing a gush of dreamy-eyed optimism and total impracticality . . .

  ‘You’re looking a bit wistful,’ Lin said. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine. I was just thinking about . . . about Saturday night.’

  ‘I understand.’ Lin squeezed my hand. ‘The biological clock’s got a lot of tick left in it, Cookie. You’ll have kids one day. I know you will.’

  My mouth dropped open.

  ‘In the meantime,’ Lin concluded, ‘it would be wonderful if you could develop a relationship with mine. I’d love that.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Georgie.

  I didn’t look forward to Saturday evening with a sinking heart, principally because I didn’t look forward to it at all. It crept up on me like an end-of-term exam which you have convinced yourself can’t possibly be as bad as you feared. Granted you’ve done no preparation, let alone revision, you missed the lectures and you know bugger-all about the subject, but a little common sense will get you through. Children, I told myself, were just adults in the larval stage. The knack was to treat them as such. (I tried not to think
about my nephew and niece, Raphael and Hermione, who definitely belong to another species.) Besides, any children with Lin’s genes were bound to be basically decent. Of course, the twins also had Sean’s genes, and Meredith had Garry Grimes’ genes, but . . . I abandoned that train of thought as discouraging, called Georgie on her mobile to synchronise watches, and set off for the rendezvous point.

  Despite being close friends with Lin, we had seen little of the kids. They were all bigger than we remembered, especially the boys. Sandy was – well, sandy, with a collection of freckles that should have been endearing but weren’t and a taciturn manner which would have defeated a professional interrogator. I was not at all surprised he had been in trouble for bullying and felt he needed only a can and a couple of tattoos to turn him into a lager-lout. (He later showed us a tattoo on his arm, but it transpired he had done it himself with indelible ink.) Demmy was dark-haired and sallow, slighter in build than his brother, the taciturnity here mutated into swift sulks and occasional smiles where the ghost of Sean’s charm danced unawares. Probing questions revealed that Sandy despised Harry Potter (‘kids’ stuff’) but Demmy thought well of Pullman, Sandy grudgingly admitted to liking pizza, Demmy preferred pasta, both had PlayStations and skateboards, played football and/or rugger, supported Manchester United, Arsenal, and, failing that, any other British team, and seemed to have no ambitions beyond the soccer field. This information was elicited with some difficulty while Lin rushed around doing last-minute things to her face. When she finally appeared, mascara’d, lipsticked, and jacketed, Georgie asked: ‘Where’s Meredith?’

  ‘In her room,’ Lin said, trying not to look anxious, and failing. ‘She’ll be down in a minute. I bought you this.’ She thrust a bottle of wine into my hands. ‘I’m sure they’ll be fine. Do I look okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ we said in chorus.

  ‘Take care of them, boys. Try to remember your manners. Is that the taxi?’

  It was. We pushed her through the door with a last ‘good luck’ and turned back to the bottle of wine, which was clearly all that stood between us and tedium. Or so we hoped.

  Meredith still didn’t appear, and the boys immersed themselves in a DVD in which a supernatural villain specialised in lopping off the heads of random victims, evidently in order to replace his own, which had gone missing some time previously. (Why he needed so many was not clear: he’d only lost the one.) At one stage, Sandy remarked sapiently of one of the female roles: ‘She done it.’

  ‘She can’t have,’ I said, lured into dispute against my better judgement. ‘It’s a ghost story. The ghost done it.’

  ‘She done it,’ Sandy repeated obstinately.

  ‘How d’you work that out?’ asked Georgie.

  ‘She’s that actress who always plays the villainess. I’ve seen her in lots of things. Of course she done it.’

  ‘But she’s just been killed herself!’ I objected.

  ‘It’s a fix. She done it.’

  (Amazingly, he was perfectly right.)

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Demmy. ‘Can we have supper now?’

  We reheated chicken nuggets as per instructions. Sandy demanded pizza. ‘There isn’t any,’ said Georgie.

  ‘Yes there is,’ he said. ‘In the fridge. I don’t like chicken. I told you: Mum always has pizza for me.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d like something different too,’ Georgie said sarcastically, turning to Demmy.

  ‘Yes please. There’s pasta in the cupboard.’

  I grinned, left her to it, and went upstairs to locate Meredith. Like a fool, I thought that was the soft job. When my tap on her door produced no answer, I opened it slowly and went in.

  It was clear that at some time in the remote past the room had been decorated to suit the supposed tastes of a little girl: butter-yellow walls, curtains patterned with sunflowers, pale blue carpet. But the walls were smothered in posters, not S-Club 7 or Gareth Gates but an assortment of far from cuddly monsters, an old-fashioned Dracula, Lord of the Rings, and prints of Max Ernst, Escher, and Warhol’s Coke bottles. Clothes, books, and CDs littered the floor; in the middle there was a mock-bearskin rug with pink furry mouth agape and an array of white furry teeth. It was wearing sunglasses. Meredith herself sat at a desk watching something on her PC. There were earphones clamped to her head connected to a Walkman on her lap, and a carton of ice cream, nearly empty, beside the keyboard. When she turned round my worst fears were realised (not for the last time, except the truth was to prove worse than my worst fears). A smudge darkened her cheek and a pale green moustache rimmed her upper lip. It was mint-choc-chip. She studied me with a jet-black gaze that was completely impenetrable.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m Cookie.’

  No response. Presently, by gesture, I got her to remove the earphones, though I was perfectly sure she could hear me even with them on.

  ‘Why Cookie?’ she asked. ‘Because you eat so many biscuits?’

  So much for my diet. ‘No,’ I responded, suppressing infanticidal urges. ‘My surname’s Cook. That’s why they call me Cookie. Should I call you Merry?’

  ‘Not if you want to live,’ she said, deadpan. Meredith, it was plain, was good at deadpan. She had her father’s monkey face without the humour, squashed under an unnaturally domed forehead, the small features set into tight little lines. Her hair was braided against her scalp and twisted into curious-shaped nodules on either side, like the head-pieces on a cartoon robot. Her eyes were so black it was impossible to distinguish iris from pupil: they looked like little round holes into nothingness. Most nine-year-old girls have some spurious charm – the bloom of childhood and all that – but Meredith Grimes appeared uniquely and determinedly charmless. Her monkey-face was at once unreadable and alarmingly intelligent.

  ‘You shouldn’t be eating mint-choc-chip,’ I said, picking up the ice-cream carton. There was clearly no point in trying to make friends. ‘Your mummy says it disagrees with you.’

  ‘Does she?’ Meredith said. ‘I like it.’

  ‘Would you like to come downstairs and have some chicken?’

  Rather to my surprise, she got up, discarding the Walkman and switching off the computer. As it went into shutdown mode, I caught a quick glimpse of the vanishing picture. ‘That was a porn site!’ I gasped in horror.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be watching that stuff. You’re nine. You shouldn’t be able to log on to those sites.’

  ‘Oh, it isn’t for me. I was checking it out for the twins. I’m better with computers than they are: I know how to bypass the anti-child system. I don’t like porn much, it’s boring. I don’t think they do either really, they just watch it so they can talk about it to impress their friends. They pay me to get past the censorship device. They get more pocket money than me, ’cos they’re older. Grandma Vee gives them money too.’

  ‘Does your mother know?’ I found myself asking, mesmerised.

  ‘Of course not.’ She gave me what, in another child, would have been a winning smile. ‘Don’t tell her, will you?’

  ‘Why not?’ I rallied.

  The smile faded to a black glare, latent with menace, but she said nothing. She didn’t need to. Her expression said it all.

  Downstairs, she ate her way through most of the chicken while the supernatural villain bagged a few more heads. ‘I don’t think we should let her watch this,’ Georgie hissed, sotto voce.

  ‘It’s better than what she was watching in her room,’ I replied, out of the corner of my mouth. This is what children do to you. I had never spoken out of the corner of my mouth in my life – for one thing, it’s extremely difficult – but five minutes with Meredith had turned me into a mutterer of furtive asides.

  ‘It might give her nightmares.’

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  When both the chicken and the head collection were finished, the boys switched to a sports channel showing something which, from the massive padding and
frequent bouts of inactivity, appeared to be American football. ‘I don’t get this game at all,’ I remarked. Astonishingly, Meredith proceeded to give me a comprehensive explanation that left me none the wiser, but impressed. ‘Do you enjoy it?’ I asked her.

  ‘Not really: it’s very slow. I don’t like any sport much.’

  ‘But you understand it?’

  This time, all I got was a sort of shrug. Understanding things, evidently, came naturally and meant nothing.

  ‘What kind of games do you like?’ I persisted.

  ‘Chess. Bridge. World Domination.’

  ‘I play chess,’ I volunteered bravely.

  ‘Are you any good?’

  My turn to shrug.

  ‘I play on the Internet with a man in New Zealand. He’s a maths professor. I’ve won our last two games.’ So much for that.

  Georgie, who had been distracted by the array of muscular male buttocks on screen, remarked: ‘I think we need the wine now,’ and went into the kitchen.

  ‘Do you want to see my party piece?’ Meredith said unexpectedly.

  I couldn’t imagine her having a party piece, and for a few seconds my stare must have been as blank as hers. ‘All right,’ I said.

  I should have been warned by the way the twins lost interest in the TV and turned to look at me. Meredith stood up, facing the armchair where I was sitting. Her eyes squeezed shut and an expression of intense concentration convulsed her features. She pressed her hands to her stomach, which made a horrible glooping noise. ‘Are you okay?’ I demanded in idiotic concern.

  The jet of vomit – pale green with chicken lumps – caught me full in the chest, dousing my sweater, bra, breasts. I must have screamed, because Georgie came rushing in, a half-corked wine bottle in one hand. ‘My God!’ she gasped. ‘Cookie!’ And, to Meredith: ‘You poor child—’

  Meredith was panting slightly, possibly with triumph. ‘My party piece,’ she announced.

  ‘Your what?’ said Georgie.

  ‘Her party piece.’ The vomit was starting to ooze down my cleavage. I got to my feet, white with fury. I know I was white because I could feel it – the blood draining from my cheeks as my face went hard and cold. In that instant, I wondered how anyone could object to corporal punishment for children. Or capital punishment. I spoke to Meredith in a voice I had never heard myself use to anyone, let alone a child. ‘Take me upstairs to the bathroom. Now.’