Stevie didn’t earn a fortune but he’d rather taken advantage of her selfless generosity, and whilst she was paying all the bills, thinking she was helping him to clear off some of his debts, he was actually wining and dining Jo. He hadn’t quite told either of them just how bad things were financially–a man has his pride, etc–but Stevie had been quite sweet about the little she knew anyway. She used to stuff his pocket with money if they went out with friends and he would produce it like a wizard and play the benevolent sybarite. He suspected Jo might not be quite so accommodating.
On the drive back to the hotel, he was thinking that he would need to approach the financial problem with Jo sooner rather than later because this holiday had just about wiped him out. His resolve doubled when she swanned regally out of the hotel to wait in the car, leaving him to settle the account there too. There was an embarrassing moment when his Barclaycard was declined and he had to hunt around for his emergency Goldfish, which he was glad she hadn’t been witness to. If the bloody basic bill wasn’t bad enough, he discovered all the ironing services she had charged to the room, and she had just wasted another fifteen quid on coffee and farty little chocolate truffles whilst he had been engaged in taking the suitcases back to the house. Still, when she got her share from her divorce from MacLean, they would be laughing financially. Speculate to accumulate and all that.
He was like a kid who couldn’t wait to unwrap his Christmas present when they got back to Blossom Lane. He lifted her over the threshold and shoved the door to with his foot so as not to interrupt his smooth passage up the stairs, but giggling she broke away.
‘Don’t leave the suitcases in the car,’ she said.
‘Later,’ he said sexily, moving back in for more kisses.
‘No way, my jewellery is in them,’ she said, pressing him back out.
‘Oh okay,’ he said good-humouredly and went out to the Golf that she’d parked in his carport whilst his Punto stood behind it on the drive. There were lights on in the cottage across the road, he noticed. Lord, some people have more money than sense! Still, he wouldn’t swap with them for what he had waiting for him behind his door.
Jo was running her finger around the surfaces when he got back inside.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m surprised. Had it been my man moving another woman in, I’d have made sure it was an absolute tip.’
‘Stevie’s not like that.’
‘I don’t mean to sound cruel, Matt, really I don’t when I say this. Nice happy Stevie might not be like that but, as you know, unhappy scorned Stevie can be very nasty.’
‘Hmmm,’ said Matthew, although he knew that was slightly out of order. ‘Nasty’ was not a word he could truly associate with his ex. Even when she told him how mad she had gone during the Mick business, she had not done anything that could truly be classed as ‘nasty’. Not making up a bed for him and his new lover hardly constituted cutting all the crotches out of his suits, although he realized he hadn’t checked them. Sprinting quickly up the stairs, he threw open the wardrobe doors and flicked through them. Nope, all intact. Phew! Like he’d doubted her really! He knew Stevie like the back of his hand, although he had thought she would be more upset about them splitting up than she was. Admittedly, her total acceptance of the situation had surprised him. And even though he knew it was unreasonable, it had slightly annoyed him too.
Jo followed him up at a more leisurely pace and sussed out the wardrobe space situation.
‘So that’s one suitcase worth, where do I put the others?’ she said with a teasing smile.
‘We’ll figure it out,’ he said. ‘Personally I think you should throw all your clothes away and be naked for ever.’
She laughed, and he thought, Bloody hell, she’s in my bedroom at last. He felt as thrilled as he did when he was in the same situation with Tina Tinker when they were seventeen and his mam and dad were away for the night.
‘I see the bed’s not made.’ She poked the naked quilt.
‘Do you care?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think I want to see you undressed on it now.’
She slowly unbuttoned her shirt, and the sensations that started to missile his brain knocked all thoughts of Visas and Mastercards and bank loans and overdrafts into Kingdom Come.
Chapter 23
Nothing could have prepared Stevie for the sight that met her eyes as she went to close the kitchen blinds. She could not possibly have ever found a big enough piece of padding to protect her heart against it, not even on the World Wide Web. She jumped back from the window as if it had just given her a belt of electricity and hid in the shadows, wanting to move away but unable to. With a gruesome compulsion, she watched the smart red Golf drive cosily into Matthew’s carport then his black Punto pull up behind it. Both drivers got out smiling, and then her ex-fiancé scooped up her treacherous ex-friend in his arms and carried her Prince-Charming style into her ex-home. They were giggling, probably singing a song from Oklahoma as well, because that’s what it looked like–Hollywood happiness–the sort you dream of but only one person in a million ever gets, and it is never you. The door seemed to close slowly and magically behind them, and at that very moment it felt as if someone had whipped away the top layer of Stevie’s skin and everything that possibly could, hurt and throbbed. What the hell had possessed her to follow Adam MacLean’s hare-brained scheme and move into this cottage, when she had known she would feel like this as soon as she saw them together? It was going to kill her, day after day after day. She could appreciate how Prometheus felt now, having his insides eternally picked at by a big bird for stealing fire from the gods. Except it was her that was being both stolen from and punished, and no prizes for guessing who the big bird was.
Mesmerized, she stayed there watching for sights of more animation, and was rewarded, if you could call it that, for her patience with the sight of Matthew speeding out again to get their suitcases, rushed and clumsy like some Ealing Comedy newlywed. Then she watched as the bedroom light went on upstairs, and then watched as it went off.
Her high-performance imagination made a best friend and a powerful enemy. When dealing with the Parises and Brandons at work, it had a good place, but here it tortured her with a horrible and vivid slideshow projection. They would have fallen onto the bed now, not even noticing that it hadn’t been made. An orchestra was welling up behind them, the couple that were meant to be, the heaven-made match who would ride every tidal wave life threw at them, like champion golden Australian surfers. They would buy each other anniversary cards, years from now, with poems on page 3 that précised to ‘we showed ’em, didn’t we?’ and their ‘our song’ would be something by Shania Twain. They would spend their lives bonking like beautiful body-perfect minks: Jo savouring Matt’s toned, lightly muscular body and his big shoulders whilst Matthew marvelled in her velvet skin and her cellulite-free arse. These were Stevie’s thoughts as she stood in her Joseph and his Technicolor Dreamcoat dressing-gown and Totes Toasties, and continued to sip from a mint Options, which had long since gone cold.
She honestly did not know if she could go on. Her life was a shambles, her fiancé was a love rat, her friend was a love rattess, she couldn’t face writing any more and she was in a house she couldn’t afford. Not only that, but she had not yet formally sorted out terms and conditions with a bloke she owed money to who had no qualms about bashing women he supposedly liked. So what would he do to women he couldn’t stand the sight of? And what if McPsychopath demanded his oats instead of money–and she didn’t mean the Scott’s Porage variety? Then again, she had to go on, because she had a wee–a little boy sleeping upstairs, wrapped round a cuddly Superhero, who needed his mam to be strong and to feed him and provide for him and give him a home other than a cardboard box on a street somewhere. Even if she was an old boot of a mam that had surprised no one by being dumped. Thank God she was only drinking cold hot chocolate and wasn’t up to her forehead in gin because by now she would have had her Roy Orbiso
n CD on and be upping the Kleenex shares by fifty quid each, and be in a very dangerous state of mind.
She did eventually doze off in bed that night, but only in between many wakings up that meant she bobbed in the shallow waters of sleep rather than surrendered to the deeper warm currents that rested the mind. Her dreams had a Hammer House of Horror certificate.
Stevie had read, and indeed written, about people who compartmentalized their pain, who put a jolly face on and confronted the world, even though their heart was cracking inside them, only to sob into their pillows when they were safely alone, but she didn’t really believe anyone could manage it successfully. She found, however, the next morning, that she was living proof of the phenomenon. She scurried around the kitchen like Doris Day, for Danny’s sake, tra-la-la-ing as she poured out Coco Pops and orange juice and made ‘fresh cwoffee’. She kept the kitchen blinds open to a minimum, just enough to let some sunlight squeeze through them, but at an angle that didn’t allow her to see anything of the house opposite, or the goings-on of the people within it.
As soon as Danny was safely in school, her whole body seemed to sag, not helped by the fact that a day of trying to sort out Paris and Brandon’s fates awaited her. She knew another wasted morning of rubbish-quality writing would be the outcome, and that the only possible solution of working off some of the half-grief, half-murder feelings that were munching away inside her, lay up the road in Well Life.
It was the first time she had been since doing her Norman Wisdom routine on the treadmill, but contrary to her belief, no one nudged each other as she got on it or pointed her out. There were no, ‘That’s her’s whispered a bit too loudly or sniggering behind hands; she was once again consigned to the anonymous. Grabbing a towel, she put her bag in the locker and climbed aboard the treadmill carefully. She had forgotten her headphones so couldn’t divert her thoughts by listening to Jeremy Kyle trying to sort out complicated dysfunctional lives on the overhead TVs. Maybe she should give him a ring.
She tried to blank her mind and keep her pacing rhythm true to the background music blasting out through the speakers, until she realized the track was ‘Loneliness’ and a connection sparked between her and the song. From then on, every time she heard it in the future, an accompanying image of herself lonely and rejected would loom up in her head, sadly trying to achieve the impossible by running on the spot. Her eyes started to leak again to her absolute horror, and she tried to build a quick surreptitious eye-wipe into her routine, which nearly upset her balance. She had decided to rest the machine for a couple of minutes when she saw Adam MacLean heading directly towards her.
Oh farts!
She acted out a scene of ‘something in my eye…oooh good, it’s gone now’ whilst waiting for the inevitable.
‘Sohowryegeinun?’ he said, in the mistaken belief that big volume would make her understand what the hell he was saying. Seeing her look of utter confusion, he began again slowly, as if he was talking to a daft old aunt. ‘So how arrre you getting on?’
‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘I’ve just got something in my eye.’
‘Aye, the place is full of flying things.’
She suspected that might have been sarcasm, but he wasn’t giving any clues.
‘Any news aboot yoor man?’
‘He’s…er…’ Her voice started to wobble and she coughed. ‘He moved in last night with…er…’ She couldn’t have said her name if there was a million pounds riding on it.
‘So it’s time to start a plan of action,’ Adam said, after a big gulp.
‘Right,’ she replied warily. She rubbed her neck, which was straining because of the angle it had to achieve to talk to him up there.
He picked up on that and asked, ‘Have ya time for a wee cup o’ tea?’
‘Um yes,’ said Stevie, following five paces behind him to the coffee bar, where he grunted something about sitting down at a table (she thought) and then said something equally incomprehensible to the girl behind the counter who seemed to understand perfectly. It was obviously a prerequisite of his staff to be bi-lingual, she concluded. English and Caveman.
Stevie sat with her hands in the prayer position in between her knees. She was trembling. It wasn’t unlike the sensation of waiting outside the headmaster’s office for a roasting, which she had only had to do the once, and that was a case of mistaken identity. To be there for a legitimate reason was bad enough, but to be there when you were innocent of the crime alleged (apple scrumping) had been terrifying. Fortunately her case for the defence was believed (‘It couldn’t have been me, I’ve got a fear of heights and I’d vomit if I climbed a tree’), especially after it was validated by Miss Crackett, the PE teacher, who had once been witness to her being sick from the top of the ropes. She was rightly exonerated, but that experience had left its scar. She had never been able to abide injustice.
Adam put down two cups of tea and a jug of milk and some sugars on the table and then sat down opposite to her, blocking out most of the light from the window behind him like a solar eclipse. He tipped the milk over hers first but she refused. Likewise the sugar.
Jeez, she doesn’t take sugar! he thought.
Jesus, he’s got manners! she thought.
Then she remembered he probably had a first-class degree from the University of Charm and quickly withdrew any thoughts of goodwill.
The tea was molten and burnt her mouth. Adam watched her gasp, gulp, fan her mouth in barely covered amazement, and asked, ‘Are ye sure ye’re no’ a self-harmer?’
‘It was extra hot!’ she snapped. ‘Where did it get brewed–hell?’
It wasn’t outside the realms of possibility.
‘So have you any ideas whit you’d like to dae next, before I tell ye what I think?’ he said.
Stevie shrugged. In truth, she didn’t want to do anything but pack up and escape to some place on the other side of the world. A nice thought that rocketed up freely, only to be brought down by the weight of practicalities.
‘We have to sort out money,’ she said tentatively. ‘It all happened so fast we didn’t get an agreement.’
‘It’s okay–if you don’t pay, I’ll throw you oot,’ he said with a smile that didn’t quite reach up to his eyes.
Her lungs inflated sharply.
‘S’okay, only joking,’ he said, seeing the look of horror flash in her eyes. ‘I’m no worried aboot aw that, we’ll sort that later, really. It’ll give me an excuse to come around to the cottage some time soon and be seen. Talking of which, have they seen you yet?’
‘No,’ said Stevie, shaking her head. ‘I sneaked my car into the garage and I’ve only used the back door when I’ve gone out anywhere.’
‘Guid–sorry–good. Now, let me think.’ He stroked the red stubble coming through even though he had only shaved a few hours earlier, and stared up into space as if hoping to see the answer materialize there in front of him.
‘We have to leave them a tantalizing trail of crumbs. They have to realize that you’re living there before he knows there’s anything going on between us two. Not that there is,’ he added sharply.
Like she’d have jumped in and blushed and giggled and tried to correct him!
‘So here’s what I think,’ Adam went on. ‘Did you get a forwarding order for your post?’
‘No, not yet. I—’
‘Paarrrfect,’ said Adam. ‘Now, here’s what I want you to do…’
Chapter 24
‘Darling, where’s the iron?’ Jo called upstairs to Matthew, now alone in the bath that they had been sharing until five minutes ago.
‘Under the stairs with the ironing board. Sorry, darling, didn’t you hear me?’
‘Yes, I know you said that, darling, but it isn’t there.’
Matthew heaved himself out of the bath and into his robe to go and check for her. He padded downstairs, leaving bubbly footprints, and poked his head inside the cupboard, where Jo was waiting and gesticulating like an airhostess demonstrating a safety procedure.<
br />
‘But it’s always there,’ he said, scratching his damp head.
‘Stevie will have taken it, won’t she?’ said Jo, shaking her own damp head whilst smiling with some annoyance. ‘Like she took your microwave and any towel that was half-decent.’
‘Oh yes…er…she might have. It was a big fancy thing. She only bought it a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Gr-eat,’ said Jo. ‘So what do I use now? Please tell me you’ve got a spare.’
‘Look,’ said Matthew, who thought she looked uber-sexy in sulk-mode, ‘we’ll pick up one tomorrow. You’ve got stacks of other clothes you can wear,’ which, incidentally, had taken up her side of the wardrobe and half of his and they would still have to buy another at some point. If he managed to find some space on a Visa, that was.
‘I haven’t anything that’s pressed though. Aw, I really wanted to wear that dress, too,’ Jo pouted.
‘I wanted you to wear that dress, too, darling,’ said Matthew, moving in for a long, slow kiss. She had worn it the first time they had made love in Stevie’s car. It had very happy memories for him and he was hoping for an action replay in the back of his Punto on the way home from the restaurant.
‘Okay, I’ll find something else,’ she sighed. ‘I can’t blame Stevie for taking a little revenge. I’m only glad it wasn’t more.’
‘Put anything on. We’re only going out for something to eat at Giovanni’s, not the Ritz,’ he laughed and tweaked her gorgeously cute nose.
‘Matthew Finch, I shall always look my best even if we are eating fish and chips out of newspaper on a park bench.’
The Birds and the Bees Page 14
