After Ever After

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘Do you want a beer?’ I ask Gareth, ignoring the remaining part of me that is counselling caution against telling this stranger what’s going on in my heart or my head. It’s a concern that never touches my thin-skinned surface. I’m just sick of being on my own.

  Four crushed cans rock back and forth on their axes as Gareth slams his hand down on the worktop and I laugh again, tears pricking at my eyes this time. I’m not entirely sure how all my good intentions added up to me getting drunk with the garderner again, but right now I don’t care. One drink led to another and I’m having a very rare laugh.

  Flicking the hair back from my shoulder, I tip back my head until I can feel my neck stretch and the floor swoon beneath me. If I was the old, young Kitty Kelly, this would be my second date with Gareth, maybe even a sex date. I giggle at the entertainingly dangerous thought, but Gareth doesn’t even raise an eyebrow, he’s in full raconteur mode and any reaction from me is bound to be because of him.

  ‘So I said to him, I’m sorry, Woody mate, but rules are rules and you can’t be one of us until you’ve been initiated. Winter it was, mind, February, and the sea was freezing, but he so wanted to be in with us that in he went, not a stitch on, and stood there up to his waist for five minutes like we said …’

  I wipe my hand across my face, focusing on his story. ‘I don’t know why I’m laughing, it’s not funny. It’s horrible. Poor Woody! I can’t believe you made him do it!’

  Gareth giggles helplessly, his eyes bright at the memory.

  ‘I know, I know, it’s just some people are so gullible you can’t help yourself. So anyway, five minutes go by and out he comes, shivering all over he was. He was so cold you couldn’t hardly even see his dick, like a shrivelled up little acorn it was!’ He laughs uproariously. ‘Poor bloke. We did him give half a bottle of whisky after that and he was okay in the end. Off work for two weeks with pneumonia, but no harm done. He was a good bloke, Woody. Do anything for anyone, one of those types. The twat.’ He smiles at me. ‘You look a bit better. You’ve got a bit of your sparkle back.’

  I shake my head, conscious of my clean hair rippling around my shoulders.

  ‘What sparkle?’ I giggle, pursuing the compliment, forcing myself to draw back as Gareth fixes me with his predator eyes. He leans a little closer to me over the counter and cocks his head to one side as he regards me.

  ‘I mean you have a glow, a sparkle about you. I can see it in there burning brightly, just waiting for a bit of passion to ignite it, to burst back into glorious flames.’

  For two, maybe three, heartbeats I allow myself to float a little closer to his lips before pulling myself up in my seat.

  ‘Sounds like a health hazard,’ I say, and then, ‘You’re funny, with all your charm and chat-up lines. I bet you get any woman you want with all your la-de-da fancy lines. Never taking no for an answer. What happened to that girl you saw after me the other day? Still on, is she?’ As I speak I realise that the two cans of lager have gone to my head and that I sound maybe a little more challenging that I had intended.

  Gareth smiles to himself and seems to box away his cut-price charm before my very eyes. ‘I do all right,’ he says affably. ‘And what about you? Do you do all right?’

  I giggle. ‘Of course I do all right! I’ve got it on tap, I’m married!’ I insist loudly, losing my balance a little on the kitchen stool. I should have eaten, but eating on your own turns out to be boring. Gareth is still smiling to himself as he stands and begins to gather up his belongings and pack them away.

  ‘Yeah, well, that must be what’s given you back your sparkle then, except if it were, you would never had lost it, would you,’ he says quietly. ‘Still, thanks for the drinks, but I’d better get going, don’t want the gardener here half cut again when your husband gets in, do you?’

  I toy absently with a crushed can, my beer-lagged brain just catching up with his previous comment.

  ‘It’s just because I’m not tired any more. That’s why I look better. I used to look like this before Fergus, you know, and Ella. It’s got nothing to do with Fergus, or you!’ I say defensively.

  Gareth smirks and leans across the counter towards me.

  ‘I never said it did.’

  His fume-filled breath warms my face momentarily, and then I watch him as he zips up his jacket, and decide, despite his half-baked attempts to conquer anything in a skirt (or in my case a pair of jeans), that I wish that he did want me. I wish that he did make a play for me, because then, just for one fantastic moment, I would feel alive, I would feel free of everything stacked up on top of me. At least he’s here. At least he listens. At least even the thought of a man like him seriously thinking sexually about a woman like me does make me sparkle, just a little bit.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say suddenly. ‘For talking to me tonight when you could have been out with one of your flunkies. Thanks. You’ve been a friend?’ I phrase the statement as a question just so that I can reaffirm the exact nature of our relationship for us both.

  ‘No worries,’ Gareth says, and suddenly he stoops to kiss me on the cheek and I feel the slightest graze of his stubble. ‘See you tomorrow, pal,’ he says, and he heads for the door.

  After he’s gone the house seems suddenly cold and grey again, and I feel the weight of the two dark floors above me, empty except for my tiny baby. I resist the urge to rush up the stairs and bring her out of her cot to sit in front of the fire with me. Instead I go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. I look at the clock. It’s ten to ten.

  And Fergus still isn’t home.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I’m staring at a tray of miniature chicken supreme vol-au-vents that Georgina has just unveiled before me with the kind of flourish that is usually warranted by turning water into wine or something.

  ‘I knew you’d be struggling with the catering, dear, so I thought I’d contribute a little bit.’

  I try not to look at the twelve round turrets of flaky pastry and greyish mush, but somehow their lure is magnetic.

  ‘Well, thanks,’ I say lamely. In fact, my fridge and oven are both full right now of dozens of party-style buffet foods all bought courtesy of Marks & Spencer’s, all ready in under fifteen minutes, and all requiring no more of a struggle than removing the packaging before placing in a preheated oven, and these are just whatever the French word for a nibble is – after that I have a main course. I’m hugely proud of it. I had no idea you could get whole roasts prepackaged. Of course Georgina knows nothing about my chicken and my duck, so she’s still preening over her efforts.

  ‘I mean, I’d have done more, but I didn’t want you to accuse me of interfering again,’ she says pointedly through her fuchsia lipstick-framed teeth, and I wince. I was rather hoping she’d forgotten about that.

  After Gareth left on Monday evening, everything else went downhill. To say it’s been a difficult week would be an understatement. In fact it’s been exactly the kind of week you don’t need to have in the run-up to an event where all the most important people in your life will be under one roof judging you.

  When Fergus finally came home on Monday night it was almost eleven, and true to form Ella was up again and bright as a button, screeching for her daddy as soon as he got in through the door as if I’d been beating and starving her all day.

  Fergus kissed me on the cheek and flopped on to the sofa with Ella.

  ‘Do you want anything?’ I asked him awkwardly, still a little fuzzy from the lager. Fergus had begun to heroically row the boat with Ella, pulling her back and forth on his knee.

  ‘No, I had a pizza at work. A cup of tea would be nice, or a beer if you haven’t already drunk it all.’ He smiled as he said it, and I wondered how I could explain that there wasn’t any left without having to mention that Gareth was here too.

  ‘Have a glass of wine instead,’ I said. ‘Lager’ll give you nightmares.’

  When I returned a few minutes later, Ella reached out and grabbed the edge of my jumper, pulling me do
wn to sit beside her and Fergus, smiling at us each in turn.

  ‘She knows, you know,’ I said to Fergus after a while, feeling strung out and tired.

  ‘She knows what,’ he said without looking at me.

  ‘That we’re fighting. She knows and she doesn’t like it. She hates it.’ I watched his profile in the hope that the best thing between us right now might help us find a way back into what was good about our relationship.

  He put his palm on the top of her head, before blowing a raspberry on her cheek, making her giggle and shudder all at once.

  ‘I know she knows,’ he said. His face looked full and heavy with sadness. ‘My mum and dad were at it hammer and tongs for most of my childhood, and I knew about it, even when I was really little. I knew about it and I hated it.’

  ‘Were they?’ I asked him. I sounded rather more intrigued than was appropriate under the circumstances, but it was just that Daniel was such a self-possessed and quiet man that I couldn’t imagine him engaging in any kind of unseemly dialogue with his wife.

  ‘Oh yeah, they hated each other for years, for as long as I can remember until I was about ten, and then Dad left home for about two weeks. I don’t know where he went or who with to this day. But Mum went to pieces, guzzling the whisky and popping tranqs, the works.’ He half smiled. ‘It was like living on the set of Sunset Boulevard. I was left wandering about that big house making beans on toast for tea and telling the lads at school everything was fine and that my rugby kit was still dirty because our washing machine was broken. Eventually I had to tell a teacher, who phoned my mum, and then some aunt turned up from somewhere, and then the whole Irish family mafia kind of thing was set in motion and someone’s cousin found Dad and talked to him and about a week later Dad came home. They never talked about what happened, not in front of me, at least, and they were just different with each other from then on, as if they’d both realised how easily everything they had could have fallen apart. They really loved each other, still do, but back then they let everything else get on top of them and they forgot it.’

  As he spoke he loosened his tie before pulling it off and dropping it into Ella’s delighted hands. ‘I don’t want that to happen to us, Kitty. I mean, I know I’m not very good at explaining how I feel, but I don’t mean to go on about sex all the time. I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t care if we never have sex again, just as long as you remember that you love me.’

  I leant into the curve of his arm and breathed in his scent in a few deep breaths. Ella pulled my hair companionably.

  ‘I’ll never forget that I love you,’ I said, smiling up at him, my head tipped at an acute angle dictated by Ella’s none-too-gentle attentions, and I made a silent promise to make that statement true. ‘Ouch! Or you, pickle.’ She lay her head on my shoulder and we all held each other very tightly for a moment before watching TV and drinking red wine long into the night until Ella eventually slept again.

  When Fergus returned from putting her into her cot, he took me in his arms and held me quietly. I held my breath until I could muster up the courage and energy to speak again.

  ‘Would you really not care?’ I said suddenly into the companionable silence.

  ‘Not care about what?’ Fergus said into my hair.

  ‘If we never did it again?’ I wriggled in his arms so that I could look at him.

  ‘Would you care?’ he replied cautiously.

  I nodded heartily. ‘Yes, yes of course I’d care. I love making love with you. I just seem to have fallen off the horse and I’m having a bit of trouble getting back in the saddle, sort of thing. But I know I will eventually … get back on the horse, and what’s more love getting on the horse and riding the horse – hard.’

  Fergus laughed and held me tightly for a second.

  ‘Great analogy from Kitty Kelly, there. Was that in one of your magazines?’ I shrugged, glad to have made him laugh. ‘Listen, when I was banging on about intimacy earlier, this is what I meant. You and me together, talking and not talking, but together, close. I’d rather have this and no sex than emotionless sex neither one of us enjoys.’

  I took his glass out of his hand.

  ‘Oh well, if you like all this sitting about staring into the gas fire nonsense, then you won’t be interested in taking me for a riding lesson right now,’ I said with my best sexy face. The sweetest smile that I’d fallen for in the beginning spread slowly over Fergus’s face and I drew him into my arms. In perfect silence and the darkness of our bedroom, we made love, half drunk and half asleep, companions and friends more than passionate lovers, but at least we were close and at least we had talked. It felt like a beginning.

  When I woke up the next day he’d already gone, leaving a note by his side of the bed.

  ‘My mobile’s gone flat, call Tiffs if you need me,’ and he’d scribbled her number down quickly. Which meant he knew it, and probably off by heart. Despite hours of rationalisation, for the rest of that day until he came home I felt jealous and angry, and as soon as he got in we had another fight. Not about us, not about sex, this time, but about the washing machine. It’s a long story.

  In the meantime I waited around for Gareth to turn up that morning but he never came. It was only after a call to Fergus and then a hunt through the Yellow Pages that I realised I didn’t have any kind of contact number for him. I couldn’t even remember seeing one on the side of his van. I remembered Daniel had recommended him to Fergus and I phoned him to ask for a number, but he said he’d heard of him through a friend and had never actually had the number.

  ‘It’s rather strange really,’ he said to me. ‘I can’t remember where I heard about him or how I got in touch with him in the first place, now I come to think about it.’

  Gareth turned up on Wednesday as if nothing had happened, the heroic glaze I’d given him whilst whiling away many hours in his company considerably tarnished.

  ‘All right?’ He breezed in through the door with a quick glance up at a sky patched with clouds as he entered. ‘Looks like it might be a nice day.’

  ‘Where were you yesterday?’ I demanded, by way of a hello. ‘For a whole day I waited in for you and you never turned up. I do have a life outside this house, you know. If I’d known you weren’t going to bother turning up, I could have gone somewhere, done … something.’

  He smiled at me a smile that said, ‘Yeah – like what?’

  ‘Listen, I’m your gardener, love, not your … not your bloody boyfriend.’ He didn’t respond with the abject apology or even the friendliness I’d been expecting after Monday evening, after everything. ‘And besides, I did tell you. I told you I was going away for the day to price up another job for after this one. I told you I wouldn’t get back from Luton until Monday afternoon. I told you last week.’

  ‘No you didn’t,’ I protested weakly, before remembering. ‘And when I saw you on Monday you said see you tomorrow, I remember!’

  Gareth sighed and gritted his teeth. I was almost certain that he’d never said anything about having Tuesday off, but he was so self-assured and I was so all over the place that I couldn’t be sure if he did or not.

  ‘I don’t remember saying that. If I did, it was just a reflex, just because I always say it, it’s not a bloody promise!’ he told me angrily, and I found myself backing away from him, shocked by his sudden, sharp, aggressive edge. He caught my reaction and his face instantly softened.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that I had a hell of a trip, shit loads of traffic, and I didn’t get back till late and then the neighbours’ bloody baby kept me up all night, and I keep thinking about … Well, sometimes you can’t get everything you want and it pisses me off. I shouldn’t take it out on you, though.’ He dropped a long-fingered hand on to my shoulder. ‘I did tell you, honest, but you’re so busy and all, what with running this place all on your own, you must have forgotten.’ He smiled then with the kind of delight little boys reserve for train sets and spiders. ‘I’ve got a van full of plants out ther
e. If the weather’s going to be as good as I think, we can spend all day planting out? I’ll teach you Latin names.’

  ‘Really?’ I cried, almost forgetting my anger with him. Before I could even finish the cheer, a clap of thunder had shaken the sky until it opened, letting out a torrent of rain.

  ‘Just our luck, right?’ Gareth said with a complicit grin, and I let us be friends again. A friend, after all, doesn’t break any promises.

  Five minutes later I’d made him a coffee and we both sat in the kitchen watching the rain.

  ‘It looks like someone picked up the Channel and just dumped it all in one go,’ he said bleakly.

  ‘I thought you country blokes were supposed to know about weather.’ I eyed him speculatively. ‘All that rain in Wales. I’d have thought you’d be able to sense it or something. Nice day my arse.’

  Gareth lifted his chin and shrugged.

  ‘I grew up on the nastiest council estate in Cardiff,’ he said. ‘Not exactly what you’d call rural, but anyway, I’ll give it another go.’ He examined the thick low covering of angry cloud closely. ‘I reckon it’s going to rain for a bit yet,’ he said, returning his gaze to me with a wry smile.

  ‘So, if you grew up in a city, why are you a gardener?’ I asked him. It was a stupid question, but it was chucking it down with rain, and since his disappearing act yesterday I’d realised that while I’d let him into my home, my life and to a certain extent my head, I knew practically nothing about him.

  Before answering me, Gareth looked at his reflection in the day-dark window for a moment longer, and I could see him weighing up his options. It was a look I’d seen before, but only ever in the mirror. It was the way I’d looked when I’d debated whether or not to tell everyone the whole truth about my mum.

  ‘Well, I always thought I’d join the army right from being a little lad, but when it came to it I failed the entrance exam.’

  I kept my mouth shut and tried my best to look just half interested, but I honestly thought all you had to be able to do to get in the army was add two and two together and prove you weren’t psychotic. Or maybe you had to prove you were. One or the other.