by Adele Parks
‘Hate the paperwork that comes with the job, babe. It’s a bore. Mostly I stuff it in the bottom drawer of my desk and ignore it. You know?’ He’d hovered over the word desk, checking that she was suitably impressed. What? Did he think if he confirmed that he owned a laptop she’d shag him? ‘But the staff love me. Especially the ladies, if you know what I mean.’ Gary winked at her. She thought there was a real danger that he might kiss his own bicep, the way weightlifters did just before they picked up something exceptionally heavy. If he did, she’d laugh. She wouldn’t be able to stop herself. ‘Drink?’ he asked.
One drink. One drink and then she was going. This was idiotic. How could she have believed this was a good idea? What was she thinking? She’d go home, wait for Neil to get back from Karl’s and then tell him all about this episode. He’d split his sides laughing. But she couldn’t leave now, that would be more embarrassing than staying. Reluctantly she said, ‘Yes, OK. I’ll have a vodka tonic, please.’
‘Ohhhh.’ Gary looked in pain. He pursed his lips (but Nat noticed his forehead stayed smooth, he couldn’t have had Botox, could he?) ‘You cannot be serious, babe. That’s one hundred and eighty calories.’ Gary’s eyes dropped from Nat’s face to her waist.
Oh God, she’d forgotten how he always did that. She’d ended up getting so skinny when she dated Gary. Skinny and miserable. It was hard to enjoy food if it was always accompanied by a breakdown of calorie and fat content.
‘No, really, that’s what I’d like,’ she said resolutely, proud of herself for holding firm. When she used to go out with him, she always ended up sipping Diet Coke and sucking the lemon slice for fun.
‘OK, babe, it’s your temple. I’ll get you a slim-line tonic, though, hey? That will save you eighty-nine calories.’ He winked at her, convinced he was doing her a favour.
Natalie had never spent such a boring hour in her life. It amazed her that she’d used up six months of her life seeing this man at least three times a week. Tonight, it was all she could do to stay in her seat long enough to wait for him to finish his smoothie. What kind of bloke ordered a smoothie in a pub anyway? Yes, he had big hands and she remembered that they were in proportion to his other big member but she now also remembered that the muscles were inversely proportional to his grey matter. Why hadn’t she cared back then?
‘Are you seeing anyone serious at the moment?’ Hunk asked, after a while.
‘I’m married,’ said Nat, waving her left hand in the air. How come he hadn’t checked out the ring? Was he that slow? She was certain that if she’d been wearing her wedding ring on either one of her nipples he’d have noticed.
‘Oh, I see.’ Gary smiled a broad all-too-knowing smile and winked at her. ‘So what exactly made you look me up? Trust all is OK with hubby.’
‘Yes . . . great, thanks,’ mumbled Nat. She turned scarlet. What a question to ask. Didn’t this man have any social graces? He really was Neanderthal. The way he said hubby made her skin crawl. The problem was that somehow, despite him being as dense as Campbell’s soup, he’d nailed her. What an idiot she was to have called this man. Of course he’d jump to the obvious conclusion. What could she expect from him, or anyone, for that matter? He’d assumed that she was a bored housewife looking for a little extra-curricular. She had made herself look like such a ridiculous cliché. Desperately, Natalie searched her mind for a plausible reason or even a tenuous excuse for calling Gary. She couldn’t mention the Little Black Book. She couldn’t say that in some vague ill-thought-through plan she was just confirming that she had married her One. It would be too horrible to admit that currently her confidence was dented because she now found that she and Neil disagreed on the fundamental issue of whether they should or should not have a baby. She could not admit that she’d wanted to have a quick look round at all the also-rans just to reinforce her original choice. She was an idiot! She sounded insane even to herself.
‘I was thinking of getting a personal trainer and I thought you might be able to recommend one,’ Nat mumbled. Hoping her excuse sounded plausible.
‘I do a lot of personal training myself, actually. Some women like two or three sessions a week. It pays really well, it’s very lucrative,’ he said with a practised smile.
Oh. My. God. Was he talking about personal training or had she just made matters far worse because she’d inadvertently stumbled on to some sort of code for an altogether different type of workout? Either way, there was only one response. ‘Oh no, I wasn’t thinking of you.’
‘You weren’t?’ Gary looked confused.
‘No. Wouldn’t seem very professional, would it? Not with us having a history. There’s probably some code that prohibits it, the way there is with doctors and psychotherapists and other professionals.’ It was like talking to a child. She was flattering him to get off the hook. How could a personal trainer ever be equated with a doctor?
‘None that I’m aware of.’ He looked puzzled and concerned.
‘Yeah, I’m sure there is. The Hippocratic oath or something. But if you think of anyone else who could do the job, do let me know. In the meantime, I’ll just have to cut back on the vodkas.’ In fact Natalie was already imagining her next vodka, a large one, in the comfort of her own home. She stood up and started to gather her belongings.
‘Er, OK.’ Gary looked surprised that the evening had ground to a sudden halt. Had he been having a good time? Natalie wondered how that was possible, but then she thought of the last few times they’d had sex together. He’d always seemed to be having great fun, irrespective of her participation, and this conversation had been just the same. ‘I’ll call you then, if I think of anyone.’
‘You do that,’ said Nat, not bothering to tell him that her number had changed.
15
Becky howled with laughter when, the following day, Natalie upchucked the details of the encounter with the Hunk.
‘So, I take it you don’t want his phone number?’ deadpanned Nat.
‘Erm, no.’ And then pretending to hesitate, Becky added, ‘How well hung did you say?’ Then shaking her head, ‘No, no, not worth it. Thanks anyway.’ She laughed.
‘Without a doubt, it was the most boring evening of my life. He spoke about muscle-building techniques for forty minutes without pausing for breath!’ squealed Natalie.
‘He’s built like a Greek god, though, yeah?’
‘Yes. In fairness, whatever he’s doing, works. If I saw him in a magazine I’d pause and ogle but that man has no place in the real world.’
‘You didn’t fancy him?’
‘Not an insy winsy bit.’
‘That’s because you and Neil are so happy,’ said Becky confidently.
‘Mmmm,’ said Natalie.
‘What did Neil make of it all? Bet when you told him he was all jealous at first, then grateful and then you had hot sex, right? Men love to hear how pathetic you think your exes are. It’s a big turn-on.’
‘You live in a dream world,’ said Nat with a strained grin. It was unlikely they’d make love on a Monday night, and besides . . . Becky instantly saw exactly what Natalie hoped to disguise.
‘You didn’t tell him?’
‘There was nothing to tell,’ replied Nat defensively.
‘You met up with an ex of yours.’ Caution had sneaked into Becky’s voice.
Nat didn’t want to give the encounter any gravitas. ‘No biggy,’ she said, hoping to sound airily dismissive.
‘That’s not what you told me.’
Both women burst into infantile giggles over Becky’s pun and Nat hoped the conversation would be dropped. She had intended to tell Neil all about Hunk. Well, maybe not all about him. She’d never planned to confess that she’d called Gary, Neil wouldn’t understand why she’d done that, she barely understood why she’d done that. She’d planned to say she’d bumped into him on the street and had agreed to have a drink with him. She’d wanted to laugh about the encounter with Neil, and yes, she’d hoped that they’d then make love. Not as a
response to him feeling jealous or threatened but as a celebration of their relationship. But Neil had come back from Karl’s later than he’d done before and drunker than ever before. He’d said he was just going round to play some Xbox games and have a takeaway pizza, nothing more adventurous than a quiet boys’ night in. He didn’t get home until after two in the morning and stank of booze. Nat had opted to feign sleep, much easier than bickering or bringing up the subject of her having a drink with her ex. Then this morning, the only thing Neil said to her was, ‘I bumped into Jack Hope last night, remember him?’
‘Vaguely.’
‘You met him at a couple of work parties. He designed the website for Mad Metal II.’
‘Oh yes, it’s ringing a bell.’
‘He married a woman with two kids of her own and now they’re expecting another at Christmas.’
‘Lovely,’ said Nat. She threw her toast in the bin, as she’d suddenly and completely lost her appetite. ‘Where’d you bump into him?’
‘We went to a club in town. Poseidon or Poison or something. I can’t remember. We were lashed before we made the decision to go there. Karl’s a regular.’
‘I thought you were having a quiet night in.’
‘I changed my mind.’
‘You appear to be doing a lot of that recently.’
With that Nat had banged closed the front door and rushed for her bus. There seemed to be an enormous space between them all the time at the moment and it was easier to bear if they weren’t in the same room.
‘Are you going to call any of the others?’ Becky asked, bringing Nat back to the here and now.
‘Others?’
‘Old flames.’
‘Definitely not!’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, it was hardly a successful evening with the Hunk, was it?’
‘On the contrary, it was a total success,’ said Becky assertively. ‘You said your motivation for going was to clarify that everyone else you ever dated was a loser.’
‘I don’t think I said exactly that.’
‘No, but something on those lines. Look, Nat, it’s been clear to me these last few weeks that you haven’t been quite as happy as you normally are.’ Becky looked at her hands. Nat’s glance followed involuntarily. Becky always had great nails, they were long and white-tipped, it was one of the first things Natalie had noticed about her. That, and the fact she liked to wear hats. ‘It’s none of my business but I sort of hazarded a guess that perhaps all was not well between you and Neil.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘He doesn’t ring the office any more, you don’t rush home at six o’clock, you don’t text him so much during the day like you used to.’ Becky risked looking up at Natalie. She was making a leap. They were friendly colleagues but not yet friends. They shared a filing cabinet, ideas for initiatives, tea breaks and a table in the cafeteria most lunchtimes. Plus, when the team went for drinks together after work, they always found that they gravitated towards one another. Becky was sure that if she’d been married or Nat had been single they would have socialised a lot. As it was, they had very separate ideas of what constituted a good time on a Saturday night. Still, they liked and respected one another and Becky didn’t like to see Natalie so unusually down in the mouth, but a discussion of this kind was altering the balance. They hadn’t talked before about anything quite so personal and once they did there would be no going back; they would be friends, not just friendly colleagues. Becky was unsure how Natalie would react. Nat was fun and gregarious but deeply private at the same time. Becky tentatively edged on.
‘Your Neil seems like a nice bloke. I chatted to him for ages at the Christmas party last year. Until I got off with Don in PR. You’ve always been really happy, until recently. I just thought it might be good for you to see how crap being “out there” is.’
‘I’m not planning on being “out there”, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ said Nat tetchily. She was agitated by Becky’s insight and her suggestion that she might need to know what was ‘out there’.
‘I know that, but sometimes it’s easy to forget how good something is, or someone is, and I just thought if you reminded yourself why you chose him and how few decent blokes there are . . .’
Nat looked irritated. Becky clamped her mouth closed, she’d gone too far. But in fact Nat wasn’t irritated by what Becky was saying, she was horrified. Horrified that her problems with Neil had caught other people’s attention. Terrified that she might just find herself ‘out there’ again. Petrified that this baby issue wasn’t going to go away and that she and Neil wouldn’t be able to sort things out. It wasn’t that Nat totally accepted Becky’s rather bleak view on the male population in the twenty-first century, it was more the fact that she didn’t want anyone else. Neil was her One. Wasn’t he?
Nat turned back to her screen, signalling to Becky that she considered the conversation over.
‘I’ll go and get us both a cup of tea, should I?’ offered Becky, keen to make amends. She didn’t want to scupper their amicable working relationship and now she wished she’d kept her mouth shut.
‘Yeah, thanks, that would be nice,’ said Nat with a nod.
Nat didn’t understand why she did what she did next but the moment Becky moved away from her desk, she reached into her bag and pulled out the ancient leather address book. It was as though she was hypnotised or functioning on autopilot, performing actions she neither authorised nor anticipated. She firmly pressed the numbers on the phone with her pencil end; in some dark crevasse of her mind she was dimly aware that she was pressing her self-destruct button but she battened down any feelings of misapprehension.
‘Hi, hi, Matthew. Matt Jackson? It’s Natalie. Natalie Morgan. Yeah, it has been a long time.’
16
Neil called Karl and asked him if he wanted to meet for a quick pint, even though it was a Friday and normally Neil went straight home from work to curl up on the sofa with Nat. It was their habit to watch a DVD and eat a takeaway. But tonight Nat was going out with Becky. They were going to some gig at the Royal Festival Hall. Not to see a band or anything remotely hip like that, Nat and Becky were going to listen to readings of ‘experimental’ poetry. Nat had invited Neil along but she had to be taking the piss, she knew that there wasn’t a hope that he’d choose to spend his Friday evening listening to a group of pretentious, self-indulgent hippies drone their nonsensical, amateur philosophies, and manage to pretend he thought it was art. No thank you. It didn’t seem much like Nat’s cup of tea either, actually. It must have been Becky’s suggestion. She seemed the type to enjoy poetry recitals, thought Neil, as he remembered that she always wore hats, even indoors.
Clearly, Nat was bonding with Becky. After years of being cautious about befriending work colleagues, it appeared that suddenly Nat and Becky were best buddies. On Monday Nat had gone for a drink with Becky, straight from work on the spur of the moment, not that he could complain about that, after all he’d been with Karl, and Nat probably didn’t want to be at home alone. Monday had been an unexpectedly heavy night. It had taken Neil until Wednesday afternoon to shake off the hangover. The plan had been a quiet pizza but then they’d ended up going to a club. Karl had said he needed to find a distraction because Jen was being sulky and his new bit on the side was being clingy. Neil had found he needed a distraction too, although he didn’t say so. But now, tonight, a Friday night, Nat and Becky were off out again. Two nights in one week. Neil didn’t mind, as such. Not exactly.
It would be ludicrously outdated and unreasonable of him to insist that there were only certain nights that he should meet up with his mates and she could meet up with hers (boys’ nights out and girls’ nights out, so to speak). Hoping everything could coincide neatly was daft. But . . . it was just that . . . well, that’s what they’d always done. Thursday nights were independent nights. Friday nights were for curries and watching the box. Saturdays were for dinner parties and restaurants with friends, Sund
ays, a trip to the movies. Mondays and Tuesdays were quiet nights in (often Nat would stay late at work or bring stuff home, Neil would play video games). Was she getting back at him for his excesses on Monday? It was true that he’d been the one who broke the unwritten rule first; he admitted that. Neil wished he hadn’t gone out on Monday. Knowing where you stand was one of the perks of being a couple. On Wednesdays the pair of them always went to the local Italian and then it was back to Thursdays. That’s what they’d always done. That was their routine. But now Nat wanted to go and listen to poetry readings on a Friday. The next thing would be she’d be suggesting they visit Bellisimo’s on a Monday!
It was uncomfortable. Something wasn’t as it should be. He somehow instinctively knew that Nat’s visit to the Royal Festival Hall tonight was linked to his request for them to start a family. He couldn’t formally tie up the two events but it was something he felt in his gut. It was as though Nat was saying, ‘Ha, look, it’s not just you who can throw a curve ball! You want a baby, well, I want poetry!’
Neil shook his head in an effort to clear it. Saying such a thing, even to himself, made him sound ridiculous. How could the two things be related? Nat wasn’t petty or reactive. If she had a problem with his request for a family, she’d discuss it with him.
Neil shook his head again. Honestly, that was even more ridiculous. There was no if involved. Obviously Nat had a problem with his wish for a baby; he knew that, he just didn’t understand why. And she hadn’t discussed it. In fact she’d stonewalled his attempts to do so, over and over again. She tenaciously hung on to her point that she’d always said she didn’t want a baby, that it shouldn’t be a surprise to him. OK. He got that, but why? He had once said he didn’t want one either but now he’d changed his mind. Surely his repositioning at least re-opened the debate.
