‘Good? Not great?’
I shook my head. Stupid though it was, now he’d said it, I did feel more confident. I felt like more than the frumpy, chaotic mess who lurched from one day to another, grateful that she got it right 90 per cent of the time. I felt like a proper human being. An adult. I felt like that person I had been chasing all those years in my marriage when I’d wanted a job, when I’d wanted to remember what it was like to go for a few hours without having a small person hanging off me, or worrying about if they were being looked after properly if they weren’t hanging off me. Suddenly I realised that it didn’t matter if all these men were looking at me thinking I was a prostitute, I should be savouring every second of being me, existing for the simple reason of existing. Not waiting for washing to finish, not waiting for meals to cook, not waiting for work to finish, not waiting for pick-up time, not waiting for the alarm to go off and start another day. Not even waiting for the end of a glass of wine to go back to my room and read over my course notes. Right then, in a hotel in Essex, I was a human. Being. Simply, being.
‘Not a great line,’ I said to him. ‘But I’m sure you can work on that.’ I drained my glass and then placed it in front of him. ‘And you can buy me that drink while you work on it.’ Confident is as confident does. Yvonne had been trying to drum that into me all these years. I finally understood what she meant.
‘My name’s Ciaran,’ he said as he gave the nod to the barman.
‘Hazel,’ I said.
‘Hazel,’ he repeated. ‘I’ve never met a Hazel before.’
‘I’ve never met a Ciaran before,’ I replied. ‘Tell me, Ciaran, are you married?’
‘No, ma’am,’ he said with a smile and a shake of his head. ‘I most certainly am not married. Nor otherwise engaged.’
I grinned at him. He clearly knew what I had in mind.
‘Will I see you again?’ Ciaran asked the next morning. Every part of my body had been brought to life with having sex with him. Every part of me throbbed with the pleasurable ache of having been explored, caressed, stroked, licked, sucked and fucked. I’d forgotten what it was like to have sex outside of the covers, to feel confident enough to have those silvery stretch-mark lines, reminders of the years of carrying children, on display. I’d forgotten what it was like to not wonder if the man I was naked with was revolted by the shapes and sags that made up my body as my ex-husband had constantly told me he was. Whereas Ciaran, he seemed to delight in every part of my physical form.
We were in his hotel suite – ‘opulent’, I think the appropriate word was to describe it. From its separate rooms to its huge bed to its antique-looking furniture, it was awash with luxury, wealth. It was a world away from my room on the lower floors, a galaxy away from rolling over in the night to find my bed had been invaded by younger children while confident head lice strolled across the pillow looking for the next head to infest. Even on those very rare occasions that I’d travelled with Walter, we hadn’t stayed in places like this. He would never have spent that cash. But Ciaran didn’t seem to be flash, or to want me to be impressed – he’d asked me after I leant across and kissed him in the bar a few hours earlier if I wanted to see his hotel room and we’d come up here.
‘You said you live up in Durham, I live in Brighton, it’s not like we’re only a few towns over,’ I replied, a little cruelly, I realised. But seeing him again, although a nice idea, was a fantasy.
‘I can afford to visit you, you know. But only if it’s what you want. I don’t want you to feel at all pressured, so if you’d rather it stayed like this, I’d be sad, but I’d accept it. Things like distance, though, they don’t need to come into this. Just decide if you want to see me again, and we’ll work it out if you do.’
‘The thing is, Ciaran, I’m not sure. My life is so complicated; I’m not sure.’
‘I understand,’ he replied sadly. ‘OK, I said I would accept it. So this is me accepting it – apart from giving you my number. I won’t ask for yours, but I will give you mine so if you ever change your mind, call me and I’ll come to see you.’
‘OK,’ I said to him. Knowing that I wouldn’t. I just couldn’t call him. My life was too complicated. Would Ciaran want me if he knew the real me? Ciaran, who was sophisticated, educated, gorgeous, was not looking for a woman in my position. ‘If I ever change my mind, I’ll call you.’ Of course I wouldn’t.
1 p.m. ‘Hello, you. I didn’t hear you get back,’ I say.
‘I got the early train because I missed you so much. I have missed you all so much.’
Ciaran’s body is firm, solid, but also welcoming and comforting. So different from Walter’s body, which was doughy but unyielding – as though, in those moments when he couldn’t do anything but let me be close to him, his body was as keen as his mind was to keep me away, apart, separate. It’s only looking back now that I can see all those little instances where he told me by his actions, by his physical coldness towards me, that he felt nothing but contempt for me. I shudder a little as I remember how I used to twist myself into all sorts of knots to try to make him want me, appreciate me, to even act like he didn’t hate my very existence in this world.
‘You OK, babe?’ Ciaran asks in response to my shudder.
‘Yes, I’m fine, I’m fine,’ I reply. ‘Just a little flashback to the past.’
Ciaran kisses my neck and tugs me closer to him, reminding me of how physical he is, how physical we are. With Walter, I started to think I had no sex drive at all. Since he left, since Ciaran, I’ve discovered that my sex drive issues have virtually evaporated. I can feel Ciaran against me, growing hard.
Without meaning to, I sort of sigh and moan. I love this. This. That moment of suspension between the bubbling up of desire and the sliding into being physical. I love to be held here, the physical feelings matching the swirling in my veins, in my head. It’s like a suspension in time when I feel alive. It’s like I am fully aware of every part of my body, every cell, every synapse firing. I feel like I am connected to everything, tethered to nothing; I am an elemental part of the universe.
Ciaran’s hands slide up my green work pencil skirt and his thumbs hook into my knickers on either side of my hips. He tugs them down until they naturally fall away. He pulls my skirt down into place again and pauses. I know what he’s thinking. He’s told me often enough – he wishes that I would go to work knickerless so he can imagine me, sitting there, talking to customers about their accounts, giving them money, listening to their tales of woe and know that he could come in at any time …
I gasp as his fingers bring me back to where we were. I can feel him unbuttoning and unzipping his trousers, pulling them down.
‘Condom,’ I whisper as he gently pushes me forwards.
‘We don’t need one, remember?’ He punctuates those five words with kisses on the nape of my neck.
‘Ciaran—’
‘I’ve been living here three months now and we said we’d try, didn’t we?’ he cuts in. While he talks he gently, but definitely, opens my legs. ‘You want us to have a baby, don’t you?’ he adds. I gasp as he slips his fingers back into me. ‘Don’t you?’ he repeats.
‘Yes,’ I breathe.
His mouth moves up into a smile against my neck and he barely hesitates before he pushes in, groaning as he does so. I sigh, almost in relief that he still wants me, that the desire that has been winding itself up through my veins is being satisfied. Before I let go, slide into being with Ciaran, the absolute love of my life, my eyes flick guiltily to the wall cupboard to the right. On the top shelf, pushed quite far back, behind the tins of peaches and black-eyed beans, there is my bottle of one-a-day ‘vitamins’. When Ciaran started talking about having a child and convinced me to go off the Pill so we could use condoms and then maybe try for a baby, I was all for it. For about five seconds. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. For so many reasons, I couldn’t. I told him. I explained all the reasons why. Almost all. There was one that I didn’t want to think about, but t
he reasons he heard, the worries he listened patiently to, he understood. But at the end of the day, he loved me. He saw his future with me. And he wanted us to have a child together. A baby he could watch growing inside me, then growing more outside of me. A child that was half me, half him. A child we wouldn’t have to live without one night in the week, every other weekend, and almost half the holidays. Once I was pregnant, we could talk about marriage if that was what I wanted. He made it sound so possible, so easy, uncomplicated, perfect. I saw my future with him, of course I did. And when he watched as I chucked my supply of the Pill into the bins on the day the bin men came to collect them, I knew I was doing the right thing. That this was what we wanted and what my family needed – a stable, kind, generous, loving man who was connected to us by blood.
And I feel horrible about it. Yes, I really do. But I’m not going to think about what Yvonne suggested I do back when Walter wanted a fourth and I didn’t – empty out a bottle of vitamins and replace them with my new prescription of the Pill. It really isn’t like it was with Walter, though. Ciaran only wants a baby because he loves me, so I’m not going to think about that bottle of vitamins. Instead, I’m going to concentrate on this quick, before school run fun with the love of my life. And I will tell him one day soon.
3:25 p.m. ‘Any news on your friend Yvonne?’ Ciaran asks.
We walk along the road towards the school. When he’s here and I’m here, we often do the afternoon school run. If I don’t do half-days on Wednesday, he often comes to work. He takes a complete interest in me and my work and lots of the people there know him by name, to chat to. I know I have to stop comparing the two, but Walter would never have done that. He only ever came to events at the school – even the concerts – because he might see Yvonne. He liked her. He saw the alpha in her and wanted a bit of it for himself. Ciaran isn’t like that.
February, 2017
‘Are you hiding this new man of yours from me, Hazel Lannon?’ Yvonne had cornered me at the gates on a Wednesday afternoon.
‘Hello, Yvonne, nice to see you. Seeing as I just saw you for coffee a few hours ago.’
‘Oh, please, don’t “hello, Yvonne” me. I practically invented shaming your friends into social niceties so you can distract them from what you’re hiding, OK? Why haven’t we met your new fella yet?’
I’d never heard Yvonne use words like ‘fella’ before. It sounded almost ordinary coming from her.
‘What’s with all the sneaking around? I thought we were friends? I thought we told each other everything? Well, not everything, because that would be weird and totally stupid, but you know what I mean. Why are you keeping him a secret?’
Because he is mine, I wanted to say. I loved him so very much and he was mine and I didn’t want to share all the fizzy, giddy excitement of being with him with anyone else. Not even Yvonne and the others. This was the first time in a long time that I had something – someone – who was all about me, all for me. With Ciaran, I didn’t feel like poor Hazel. I wasn’t single mum Hazel with the three kids whose ex-husband’s favourite pastime was abusing her. When Ciaran was travelling hundreds of miles – sometimes just for an afternoon – to see me, and we spent that time in bed, having sex and talking, I was the woman he’d met in the hotel. It hadn’t bothered him at all when I’d had to tell him that I had three children. He’d said no problem and we’d planned for him to visit when I had the house to myself and I wasn’t at work. I liked not being pathetic single Hazel any more. Actually, I loved not being single any more. That he was good-looking and great in bed didn’t hurt at all.
‘There’s no secrecy, Vonny, I just … you remember what it’s like when you’re first falling in love? How excited you are about everything and you just want to keep it close to your chest and not share any of it with anyone in case you jinx it?’
‘No!’ Yvonne said. ‘I’ve never been like that. I tell people everything all the time. Hello! It’s what friends do. You share.’
‘But not this, you must see that. I don’t know where it’s going, so I don’t want to talk too much about it. Especially when he might – might – be moving in this year sometime.’
‘Wow! That is huge!’ Yvonne said.
‘I know, which is why I’m not talking about it. I don’t want to jinx it.’
‘Do Anaya and Maxie know about this?’ she asked. Even now, years later, she was still convinced that we didn’t like her as much as we did each other, that we didn’t include her in everything. We did all we could to make sure she knew she was an integral part of our group, right down to helping out at Parents’ Council events for her sake. None of us would normally get that involved, but we did. And still, when she had seen us dress up as bunnies and elves and, in Maxie’s case, get dunked on one of the stalls at the summer fair, she still felt like an outsider.
‘No!’ I almost screeched, then remembered we were surrounded by other parents. ‘No one knows about that because of what I just explained.’
‘I want to meet him,’ she said.
‘Not going to happen.’
Yvonne screwed up her perfectly made-up lips and stared at me. ‘All right, fine. But only for now. You have to let me meet him sometime.’
‘And yes, you will. But not yet. Not yet, OK?’
‘OK,’ she replied. She wasn’t happy about it, though. She wasn’t happy at all.
3:30 p.m. I link my arm through Ciaran’s, and snuggle close to him as we walk. I don’t want to talk about Yvonne. Even obliquely. It’s all too painful, this. From all of it, I didn’t expect this pain. It’s painful because I know the other two must blame me. They must. They were both shocked at what came out of my mouth that night. And if I hadn’t started it then Anaya and Maxie wouldn’t—
‘Babe?’ he asks when I don’t speak.
‘Hmmm?’ I reply.
‘Is there any news about your friend Yvonne?’
‘No, I haven’t heard anything,’ I mumble.
We’re about to turn into Plummer Place, where the school is, and he stops. He tugs me to a standstill and spins me so I am right in front of him. ‘I hate that you fell out with her because of me,’ he says.
‘It wasn’t about you.’
‘Maybe, but if I hadn’t told you about—’ He stops talking and looks around, checking that no other person, no other parent, will hear what he is about to say. I slap my hand over his mouth. It’s bad enough he had to tell me once; I don’t need to hear it again.
‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ I lie. ‘It was a long time coming.’
‘Maybe, and I don’t know the ins and outs of it, and maybe it really is nothing to do with what I told you, but I still think you should go and see her.’
I shake my head. I don’t think I can. I’d have to face Trevor, and the girls. After his texts and his calls, the way he keeps asking what was going on, I can’t do that. I really can’t.
‘Just think about it, Haze. She was your friend for so long, you and her went through a lot together. Think about how bad you’ll feel if she dies. Just think about it.’
What does he think I’ve been doing since 19th August? All I keep thinking is: What if she dies?
‘OK,’ I say to stop him talking about this. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Good,’ he says and smiles at me. ‘Good.’
You wouldn’t think that if you knew what she did, I decide as we carry on towards the school. You wouldn’t think that at all.
FRIDAY
Cece
7:45 p.m. My dress – a tight, satin, jewel-blue creation that is ruched around the middle and stops just below my thighs – elicits a low wolf whistle from my husband when I enter our bedroom. He is in his dinner suit and stretched out on the bed, one arm behind his head, the other holding his mobile as he avidly reads something. He’s reading the sports pages, of course. Or the news. Or something, anything other than whatever has set off the suspicious thrumming at the back of my mind. Since the ‘T. B.H.’ ‘tell’, since his grumpi
ness, since he seems to have forgotten how physically affectionate we usually are with each other everything Sol does sets off my suspicions. There is a new pattern of behaviour developing around Sol, and I do not like that idea.
In my old job, I was paid to be suspicious, but I always left it at my desk. It never infiltrated my life. Until now. Until Sol and I have not been getting on. When he is here, he’s moody, snappy and disengaged. When he does speak to me, it’s to make barbed comments about stuff not being picked up, there still being boxes that need unpacking, how I’ve managed to fill an entire day without actually having a pristine house. In response, I’ve bitten my tongue.
Sol presses the ‘lock screen’ button on his phone and, rather than toss it onto the bed like he normally would, he slips it into his inside jacket pocket.
‘You look amazing,’ he says after another wolf whistle. ‘Give us a twirl then.’
I pause, wait for him to get his phone out to take a picture – and nothing. He puts his other arm behind his head and waits for me to perform for him. ‘Go on, twirl. Nice and slow, though, so I can get a proper look at you.’
Downstairs, from the living room, I can hear the children, all three of them, talking loudly and excitedly to my mum. She’s come down to babysit while we go to Sol’s work’s autumn ball. Apparently, with the amount of overseas employees they have, they find it virtually impossible to have a proper Christmas party in December, so they hold an event in early October to have a chance at the biggest number of people attending. The children are so happy to see Mum. They used to see her and Dad all the time in London, as my parents did a huge chunk of the childcare. Their voices carry all the way up here, each of them – Harmony included – wanting her attention and approval. I know they’re especially excited because the other significant adult in their lives spends a lot of time either at work or growling at them.
‘Go on,’ Sol prompts again. ‘Give us a twirl.’ And there’s something … He does this all the time when we get dressed up to go out. He lies on the bed waiting for me to finish getting ready and then asks me to twirl, to show him what I’m wearing so he can take a photo. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but this time it feels as though I am being asked to perform, somehow. Maybe it’s the hitch of the eyebrow, the unfamiliar leer that is shading his lip, but this almost feels like I am on the receiving end of a voyeur’s attentions. It’s a ridiculous thought, of course. He’s my husband, I’m not working in a strip club and having to display my body for an entitled man who has handed over cash to see me, but there’s something … It’s hard to put my finger on it; it’s an imbalance, a shift that has occurred between us. I am being silly, I know that. Sol is still the same man I fell in love with, have been raising three children with, who I have trusted with almost all of my secrets. But I’m not going to twirl for him, not this time. Maybe not any other time. Not until I know what this shift is; and that hitch of the eyebrow, the hint of a leer on his lips, disappears.
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