by Judy Astley
‘Pity we never . . .’ They’d spoken together again. Neither sentence was finished as Neil leaned closer and gently kissed the edge of Mel’s mouth.
So this is what it’s like, this no-commitment instant sex, Mel thought an indecently hasty few minutes later, as, on the small tatty bed, with her former headmistress only feet away on the far side of the door, she lay beneath Mr Nicholson (geography), with her knickers on the floor gathering old school dust.
Six
‘I had sex with my old geography teacher last night.’ Mel, her voice light and jolly, tried out this forthright revelation on Jeremy Paxman as she sliced open a sachet of Whiskas for him. The cat was only interested in food, and continued going through the twice-daily routine of granting his owner some small display of affection, plaiting himself round her legs and purring. ‘I hadn’t seen him for twenty-five years. Probably won’t ever see him again, either,’ Mel continued as she put the bowl down on the floor. She wondered what all this would sound like to another human, how she would react if, say, it was Cherry telling her this.
‘Are you appalled, Jeremy? Do you think I’m a desperate old slapper?’
The cat shoved his greedy face into the malodorous mess, the purring continuing in fits and starts as he guzzled. She could hardly expect him to be the slightest bit interested. Cats, she thought as she switched on the kettle, didn’t have to agonize about whether a spot of instant, no-commitment sex was or wasn’t a good idea. They didn’t talk about it, analyse it, wonder if they’d done the right/wrong thing and what would happen next, if anything. Unlike humans they were allowed to put nature first and knew exactly what they were there for: when the opportunity to procreate arose they simply took it and then scarpered without a backward glance. Morals, squeamish considerations about pregnancy, disease and guilt and a follow-up date out of politeness just didn’t get in the way. Lucky buggers – though, in Jeremy’s case, not so lucky: the cat had been neutered at six months. She tickled the top of his wide black head. No wonder there was no response: he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.
Ben was at the bus stop again as Mel made her traffic-snarled way to the gym. She tooted the horn and watched him taking his time to recognize her. He looked even more hunched and skulking than ever, as if he was trying very very hard to pretend he was somewhere else, anywhere but at a chilly bus stop on his way to school.
‘You look a bit down,’ she commented as he dropped his long body onto the passenger seat. He shrugged and folded his arms defensively, as if scared she expected full-scale confiding as payment for the ride.
‘Bloody school. Bloody exams, bloody parents.’ It all tumbled out like a long verbal sigh. Mel wished she hadn’t said anything. His proper response should have been a smile, a shrug and a ‘Y’know how it is’ to which she could have grinned back and said something equally meaningless like, ‘Yeah, isn’t it though?’
‘Exams this year?’ she asked, pulling up to yet another traffic-light queue.
‘Every year. All the time. AS, A2, whatever, till next year when they change the system. Again. Too late for our lot. And when I’m home . . .’ He was really warming up now, hadn’t even said hallo, how are you. Oh the glorious self-centredness of the young, only themselves to think about. Not that different from me, in fact, Mel admitted guiltily to herself.
‘What’s wrong with home?’ she asked slyly. Please God, let it be possible that Perfect Patty was not entirely faultless as a mum? Could a woman who’d single-handedly cooked twenty-five Victoria sponges for the local retirement home jubilee party have failings? Mel hoped so: for Patty was also a woman who could barely bite back a request for guests to remove their shoes at the door for fear of a grain of mud sullying the textured cream Berber, and really did need her devil side exposed.
‘They’re always on at me. Well Mum is, Dad just grins at me like it’s sympathy, but he’s just being lazy and scared of her. She goes, “Haven’t you got any homework, Ben?” and, “It’s so important to read round a subject, Ben.”’ Mel laughed at Ben’s too-accurate mimicry of Patty’s deceptively soft-spoken tone of benign but determined dictatorship.
‘Come on now, she’s only got your best interests at heart.’
‘That’s something else she always says. And she says it in that way like she’s just a bit disappointed.’ Ben looked despondent, suspecting he was travelling with a closer ally of his mother than he’d assumed. It didn’t stop him continuing, though, he was in full grumble mode.
‘And she’s always on my case about the computer. She’s made me put it downstairs in the kitchen so she can make sure I’m not getting into porny chat rooms and then she chats all through my work. Yak yak sodding yak. Can’t wait to leave.’
‘What, school or home?’
‘Bloody both. Soon as.’ Ben sighed so deeply Mel feared for the total collapse of his lungs.
‘Rosa’s computer is still in her room – she’s using the university ones. You could come and use it if you want.’ What the hell had made her say that? What was she thinking of, volunteering to have another rangy, permanently starving teenager hanging about and making the house reek of unsavoury trainers? What happened to delighting in all that blissful personal space and time?
Ben’s face whipped round to study hers, to see if she meant it. She smiled at him, and marvelled at the way a teenage mood could lift so instantly. ‘Could I? Really? What, like any time?’
Mel hesitated, wondering what she’d let herself in for. Perhaps he would want to spend hours searching out Internet totty, tapping out his life in chat rooms and e-mails like Rosa did. Perhaps he’d want to know what she had in her computer, maybe think it was OK to wander in and out of her study asking her how far she’d got with Tina Keen’s new case or, worse, read stuff over her shoulder. On the other hand he seemed so miserable, and she had offered. She’d just have to make a few ground rules.
‘Yes, but phone first – and it’s only for work, no hours on the Internet.’
‘Cool. I’ll be round tomorrow – I’ve got this French lit. essay to finish. All I get at home is Mum twittering on about when she was doing André Gide at school.’
Melanie dropped Ben off at the school gates, where a couple of his mates were leaning against the wall waiting for him. As she pulled out to drive back into the main road she could hear their over-loud male laughter. She glanced in her mirror at them; the two who weren’t Ben were gazing back at her, grinning and doing that kind of poorly co-ordinated shuffle that joshing boys did when they were being dirty-minded and jocular. Ben was striding away from them. She couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see whether he was distancing himself from their comments. He probably was, she thought, though whether out of horror at the very idea of his middle-aged neighbour as schoolboy fantasy fodder, she’d never know.
Sarah’s Freelander was in the gym car park – close to the door, so she must have arrived early again. Melanie hadn’t spoken to her after the Neil-in-the-staffroom incident. When she had ventured back to the main hall – rather shaky on her feet, and mentally, and quite possibly physically, rather dishevelled, Sarah had been ensconced in the centre of a group that Mel identified from the safe distance of the doorway as most of the star hockey team from their fourth-form days. As just about anyone could have predicted, they’d grown into a sturdy bunch of broad-shouldered women with no-fuss haircuts. One or two, who were standing with their feet planted solidly far apart, looked as if they still pounded up and down a pitch most weekends. She would hazard a guess that they in their turn had become games teachers and married the kind of men who enjoyed having their lives run for them like a fixture list. Mel had baulked at the idea of joining the group, especially as she’d hardly got her breath back from the brief but intense exertions. Instead, she’d caught Sarah’s eye across the group, mimed what she hoped was a convincing oncoming migraine and waved a quick goodbye. A fast escape was better than facing Sarah saying archly – and far too loudly – ‘And where did you get to
all this time?’
In fact, as she drove slowly into the car park, she wasn’t sure she could even face it now. Sarah would be flexing away on the cross-trainer, watching her skinny but muscular frame in the mirror. She’d see Mel and shriek, ‘Bone to pick with you, sweetie!’ and every head in the room would turn and stare as Sarah leapt off the machine and hustled her out to the locker room. And she’d have to tell her – Sarah would pull that ‘I’m your best friend’ number and out it would all come. She wouldn’t be able to lie, either – people who’ve known you since before your first period tend to notice when you’re telling whoppers. It wouldn’t be like telling the cat – Sarah wouldn’t just ignore her and go in search of a coffee and a bun. She’d want to know all sorts of gruesomely intimate details. She’d ask questions. Her eyes would be shimmering with eagerness to be Told All. For a woman who would far rather, as she’d once put it, have a facial than a fuck, Sarah’s interest in other people’s sex lives seemed almost fetishistic.
Melanie turned the Golf round and headed back to the road. She didn’t want to go straight home again, either. That would seem so pointless, and besides, it would only depress her if she got there and Max hadn’t turned up yet with the new York stone slabs for the garden (without which, according to him, no further progress was possible). She’d forgotten to bring her mobile phone, but Cherry wouldn’t mind an unheralded visit. She always said that her kind of meticulous painting was the one art form where you really could do two things at once – listen to the radio, make mental shopping lists – be lied to by your ‘oldest’ friend.
* * *
Roger stopped the car at the end of the road and parked in the residents-only section at the end of the small row of shops. He noticed the laundrette had closed down, and felt a small tingle of surprise that it could have happened without him being around to know. Not that it should have been a surprise – this was hardly bedsit-land; most houses in the area had what Mel called a futility room, fully equipped. The shop doorway was boarded up, paint-flaked and shabby, and its windows were covered with posters warning the world not to stick up other posters. Between the smart deli with its £30-a-litre olive oil and authentic French rustic bread, and the chic greengrocer who sold organic herbs by the fresh-picked bunch, it looked like a grumpy vagrant who had strayed into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.
Roger bought a parking ticket from the machine outside the delicatessen. It still seemed a strange thing to do – for so many years he’d had a residents’ permit. It had actually been the last bit of his connection with the area to go and he’d almost been inclined to renew it secretly the last time it expired. He didn’t need one at the shiny new Esher house – with the integral garage and gravelled driveway there was room for an entire dinner party’s worth of cars down at their end of Balmoral Close.
Leonora’s parents had bought the house outright for their treasured daughter. It was in her name only – Leonora’s father had punched Roger on the arm in a slightly harder than jovial manner and said, ‘Well, better to be safe, eh?’ as if Roger was a serial divorcer, likely to run off with half the takings the minute the ink on the marriage certificate was dry. The house didn’t yet feel at all like anything Roger could call home – Leonora and her mother Maureen had chosen it together from a brochure of newly built executive homes and had marched about in their stabby high heels on the new pale floorboards, clutching swatches, making unchallengeable decisions about fabric and paint and carpets.
Leonora had let him choose the crockery that went on the wedding-present list and had given way (after some pouting and sulking) when he’d put his foot down about the lime-green leather sofa. Citrus yellow wasn’t what he’d call a compromise, though. In fact all the house’s furniture seemed bizarrely hotel-like and came from stores that were unfamiliar to him. Melanie had veered between forays to IKEA or Habitat interspersed with junk-shop treasures. Leonora had peculiarly grown-up tastes, exactly like her mother’s, and liked things in ‘sets’. She’d chosen a chilly slate-topped dining table with eight matching wrought-iron chairs, the fat, frilled cushions of which didn’t make up for the feeling that the whole ensemble was intended for a far sunnier climate than Surrey’s. He and Melanie had never had matching chairs: the big old scratched elmwood table in the kitchen was attended by their collection of Lloyd Loom antiquities. The cat slept on all the cushions in turn and shed fur. Roger wondered what would happen to Leonora’s frilled fancies when the new baby started smearing goo on every surface. She would be a demon with the Dettox. Back at the old house there was probably still the odd crust of Farex filling in the chair weave, like mortar in a badly pointed wall.
Roger knocked on Mel’s door. He could have phoned, he knew that, but the urge to show off his honeymoon tan was just too great. And it wasn’t as if they weren’t still friends. Everyone was amazed at how amicably they’d parted. There was no reply. He could see Mrs Jenkins’s lace curtain flicking urgently back and forth, and he waved to show he’d caught her snooping. He knocked again, harder. Sometimes Mel didn’t answer the door if she was working, saying that if it was important enough they’d knock more than once or come back later. Eventually he was rewarded by the sound of feet and the door was flung open.
‘She’s not in,’ said a tall wild-haired man in a mud-splattered sweatshirt. ‘She’s gone down the gym, I expect.’
‘Don’t you know?’ Roger asked, taking in the fact that the man was wearing thick tweedy socks but no shoes. Presumably a lover then, he thought, feeling ludicrously betrayed.
‘No. I don’t. I’m the gardener,’ the man said with a shrug. ‘Who shall I say called?’
‘Oh, er. I’m Roger.’
‘So you’re Roger!’ The gardener’s face was lit by a massive smile, one that Roger didn’t much like, for it contained too much of something that looked like flagrant amusement.
‘What are you doing to the garden?’ Roger asked. Mel hadn’t said anything. And the bit between the gate and the front door looked just as it always did – unkempt and overgrown, almost to the point where it could qualify as a stylish meadow effect.
‘Come through and have a look.’ Max opened the door wider and led Roger through the kitchen.
‘Here we are. A long way to go yet, but we’re getting there.’ Max shoved his tweedy feet into a pair of muddy green wellingtons and opened the back door.
‘Jesus. What the buggery’s going on?’ Roger felt sickened, outraged. It was like suddenly meeting a much-loved old friend who’d become wasted and raddled with disease. Where was the clematis he and Mel had chosen together? The roses with wittily appropriate names they’d given each other on anniversaries, the long lavender hedge that had been back-breaking to clip into shape each autumn and the lawn with the struggling beige patch where it had never recovered from being under Rosa’s sandpit? He felt sad, full of impotent anger towards Mel. She was destroying such a huge part of their life together.
‘She said she doesn’t want to do mowing, or weeding or pruning any more,’ Max explained. ‘She said it’s chuck-out and makeover time, and to be honest I think she was right.’
‘Right? What would you know about it?’ Roger turned on him, wanting to smack his fist into the placid, good-looking face and do it the same kind of serious damage that Max had done to his garden.
‘Palms, bananas, some bamboo, pebbles, that kind of thing.’ The man seemed oblivious to Roger’s fury. ‘That’s what we’re going for.’
We? Roger had had enough.
‘I’m leaving. Just tell her I was here.’
He stalked off back into the house, shaking with rage.
‘Oh, and by the way, congratulations!’ Max shouted after him.
‘On?’
‘The baby of course and the new wife. Mel told me! Nice one!’
Melanie did not intend to tell Cherry about Neil. Cherry would be ‘disappointed’ in her. She’d feel sorry for her, thinking, wrongly, that she’d grasped at a chance for quick sex in the hope that it wo
uld lead to something, a relationship, snatched-at company for a few hopeful dates, even. She didn’t want her thinking that because it wasn’t even close to being true. She’d had sex with Neil because, as with climbers and Everest, he was there and she wanted to know what it was like, this casual no-responsibility sex business.
Mel wasn’t surprised to hear Cherry shouting ‘Who is it?’ from inside the door. It wasn’t that Cherry was terrified of being ambushed by a mugger the moment she let the chain off, it was simply more than likely that she’d got wet hair wound up in a towel or no mascara on.
‘It’s me. Melanie. Please let me in and give me coffee!’
‘Oh. Mel. Well, OK.’ That sounded a bit grudging, Mel thought, wondering if she should just make an immediate excuse, change her mind and go home.
‘You should have rung!’ Cherry opened the door and smiled. ‘Come into the sitting room, I’ll bring you coffee and cake.’ Cherry pushed the sitting-room door open and almost hurled Mel onto the long blue velvet sofa.
‘What’s wrong with the kitchen? I’ve hardly ever been in here.’
‘Oh, nothing! Bit of a state, that’s all, I was just working on something and it’s all over the place.’ Cherry’s hands were indeed freshly paint-splashed. If they hadn’t been, Mel would have suspected she’d got hidden in the kitchen the kind of lover that might be a touch embarrassing to introduce to friends: a hired stud perhaps, or a beefy female biker. Whatever paint she was using smelled peculiar too, there was a sharp acetic whiff in the air that reminded Mel of dead things in the school biology lab. Cherry shut the door firmly on her guest, leaving Mel’s curiosity to rise like boiling milk. She’d give her a few minutes to feel secure and then pounce.
‘So what kind of cake have you got?’ Having given Cherry a mere thirty seconds, Mel wandered into the kitchen on the pretext of seeking food.
‘Wow, look what’s come in!’ Mel stopped still in the doorway and pointed. On the table, right in the middle of Cherry’s scattered paint tubes and brushes, sat a small grey squirrel clutching a walnut.
