Caught!

by JL Merrow

  The twins hadn’t known (or had forgotten) who would be picking them up from school today, so I reminded myself not to look disappointed if it turned out to be their mother, as it had been all week. Debs had been reserved but not unfriendly. She hadn’t mentioned Sean at all, in the few words we’d exchanged at the classroom door.

  I hadn’t seen Sean since Sunday evening. I’d thought about calling him, but, well, he’d said good-bye in such a casual way. I didn’t want to come over as some sort of clinging vine or crazed stalker.

  As it happened, my acting skills weren’t tested. I only hoped the few remaining parents were paying more attention to their offspring than to me as I smiled helplessly at Sean through the open classroom door. His answering smile didn’t waver as the twins launched themselves on him with abandon.

  “Uncle Sean! Look at my picture!” Harry demanded, holding up a colourfully crayoned rendition of a grossly elongated Guy Fawkes on a rack.

  “Mine’s better,” Wills insisted, thrusting his imaginative interpretation of a blown-up king in his uncle’s face.

  “Lads! Let me speak to Mr. Emeny for a minute, okay?”

  I gave the twins a stern look. “Why don’t you go and put those back in the classroom, boys? Seeing as we’re supposed to be saving them for sharing assembly?”

  They bombed back into the classroom, where they’d no doubt get up to further mischief. I didn’t care.

  “I hear you’ll be going to the rugby-club fireworks display tonight,” I said, drinking in the sight of Sean with his hair blown by the wind. “The twins told me all about it. Apparently there’s going to be a bonfire bigger than the whole school.”

  “Yeah, I think the lads might have exaggerated a bit there. But it should be good.” Sean shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at his trainers for a moment. “Look, I’m going to ask you this, and you’re going to say no, and that’s fine, okay? Not a problem.”

  “It isn’t?” I blinked. “Don’t I get a say in this?”

  He smiled at me, a lock of copper hair falling over his forehead as the wind dropped. “Sorry. I was just going to say, if you wanted to come too, that’d be great. But seeing as you’d probably rather hop on the bonfire than spend any more time today with these two tearaways—”

  “I’d love to,” I said quickly. Then I frowned. “But do you think Wills and Harry will really want me along?”

  “We’ll ask ’em. Lads,” he called, and they left what they were doing (nothing more alarming than an attempt to stack as many chairs as possible on top of one another, I was relieved to see) and came running over. “What would you think about Mr. Emeny coming to the fireworks with us?”

  I braced myself for vehement rejection and was unexpectedly moved when they bounced up and down as one. “Yeah! Come to the fireworks!”

  Sean grinned. “Right, then. I’ll pick you up at six. That okay? They do a barbecue, so we’ll be getting our tea there. Oh, and make sure you wrap up warm, and you might want to wear your wellies. It gets a bit muddy out on the field. We’ll see you later, all right?”

  “All right,” I said, as the twins dragged him off, one to each hand. I had two hours and thirty-three minutes. Plenty of time for a dash to a nearby department store for a pair of Wellington boots.

  When I opened my front door at 5:59, Sean raised his eyebrows. “That’s got to be the cleanest pair of wellies I’ve ever seen. And that includes in shops. Are you sure you want to wear them out?”

  I may have coloured slightly. “I needed a new pair. Anyway, where are your wellies?” A familiar pair of scruffy trainers peeked out from below his jeans.

  “In the car. They’re not great to drive in.” He smiled suddenly. “You look good in a sweater. Weird but good.”

  “Weird?” I looked down at myself. I’d donned a perfectly unremarkable fisherman’s rib sweater in dark green. With my Barbour on top, you couldn’t even see the elbow patches. And I’d thought the bright red scarf I’d wrapped around my neck lent it quite a jaunty touch. Festive, even.

  “You know. Casual. Hey, I wasn’t dissing it. Told you, I like it.” He stepped closer. “If the boys weren’t waiting in the car, I’d show you just how much I like it too. Speaking of which, we’d better get going. You got everything you need?”

  “I—yes, I think so,” I said, wrenching my thoughts back from where Sean’s low murmur had sent them. I stepped outside and closed the door behind me. “Right. Lay on, Macduff.”

  “Lay on?” Sean’s smile turned wicked. “I’d love to, but like I said, the boys are waiting.”

  I glared at him and strode towards the bright red Golf that awaited us, a brace of unruly redheads strapped into identical child seats in the back. They greeted me with exuberance, then promptly returned to their noisy game of slapsies and ignored me totally.

  I strapped myself into the passenger seat as Sean slid behind the wheel. Despite the change from a two-wheeled conveyance to four, he was wearing his leather jacket. Underneath it I could see a soft-looking sweater in dark red, and a navy blue scarf was knotted casually around his neck. He looked warm and eminently huggable.

  Distracted from my admiration by the realisation that I’d sat on something, I reached for it and found myself holding up a lipstick. “Is this what you drive when you want to feel pretty?” I asked.

  Sean laughed, already starting the engine. “Nah, this is Debs’s car. I can just about fit the boys onto the van’s front seat, but you’d have had to ride in the back. Thought you’d find this a bit more comfortable.”

  “You’re probably right. I’m not sure I’m ready to know what a pest-control technician keeps in the back of his van.”

  “Yeah, well, given how we have to clean up after ourselves, I’d say that’s pretty close to the mark.” He pulled out carefully onto the High Street, and set off over the speed bumps at a racy twenty miles an hour. “At least I’ve got the van. It’s the poor sods who work in London I feel sorry for. Footmen, they call them, ’cause they travel around, well, on foot. Have to use public transport. I was talking to one of ’em recently, and he was telling me how he was halfway home on the tube the other night and couldn’t work out why everyone kept giving him funny looks and changing carriages. He’s carrying a backpack, and he’s got a beard, and he’s thinking, do they all reckon I’m a terrorist? Then it hits him. It’s the smell. He’s got half a dozen rat corpses in his backpack, all in varying states of decay, and a couple of dead mice in his pockets.”

  I shuddered. “Oh God. I suppose he’d just got used to it?”

  “Probably. Tell you what, though—that used to it I don’t want to be. Nah, I wouldn’t like to work in London even without all that.”

  “Because of the commute?”

  “Nope. Cockroaches. It’s like painting the Forth Bridge trying to clear an infestation in London. There’s some city areas they’re so endemic, the environmental health inspectors have to have a tolerance level. You just can’t get rid of them completely. Out here, it’s a lot more cut and dried—they find one roach in a restaurant, they close the place down till we’ve been in and sorted it.”

  “Ugh. I’ll never eat out in London again.”

  “Nah, don’t worry. Just make sure you give me a day or so to get the inside info on anywhere you’re planning to go, and you’ll be fine.” He seemed entirely serious.

  “Do you offer that service to everyone you know?”

  “Nah.” Sean grinned. “Just the ones I care about.”

  Warmth flooded through me at his words. Although possibly it was just the Golf’s heater finally kicking in.

  The rugby club was about halfway between Shamwell and the nearest town, Bishops Langley. Cars were queuing to get in from a hundred yards down the road.

  “Seems popular,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s the best display around. And the barbecue’s good. They get thei
r meat locally, none of that supermarket value-brand rubbish.”

  The twins’ ears pricked up at the mention of the word barbecue. “Are you gonna have a hot dog, Mr. Enemy?” Wills asked.

  “With onions and ketchup and yellow sauce and brown sauce?” Harry demanded.

  I turned to smile back at them. “I certainly hope so. Although I may stick to just ketchup.”

  “That’s boring.” Both of them started chanting, “Bo-ring, bo-ring—”

  “Lads,” Sean admonished. “Nobody’s getting hot dogs if they don’t behave themselves.” The silence was abrupt and absolute. I made a mock-frightened face at the twins, my eyes darting to Sean in alarm, and they giggled.

  “Oi, no conspiring with them,” Sean murmured when I turned back to the front. “You’re supposed to be the good influence.”

  Finally, we were at the head of the queue, and turned into the rugby grounds. We parked at the end of a long row of cars, and got out. The air was chilly and damp and infused with the mingled aromas of cooking meat and freshly churned-up mud.

  “Didn’t your sister want to come along?” I asked as Sean pulled on his wellies.

  “Nah, she said she did her bit pushing them out into the world, and someone else could do the standing around in the mud and freezing to death bit.”

  It wasn’t that cold tonight. “Is she, well, feeling all right?”

  “Yeah, she’s doing okay. She’s got a couple of mates round tonight to keep her company.” He paused, although perhaps it was just down to a fiddly bit of jeans-tucking. “It was her idea I should ask you along, actually.”

  I blinked. “Really?”

  “Don’t sound so shocked. She likes you.”

  She did? She could have fooled me, the last few days at school drop-off and pickup.

  “Right,” Sean continued. “We’d better get moving before these two get fed up waiting and do a runner.”

  Another rank of cars was already half-filled. We walked back down along the line, Wills and Harry urging us to “Come on,” and Sean and I attempting to hold them back while keeping a beady eye out for rogue motorists.

  I soon saw the wisdom in Sean’s recommendation of wellies. There were lights around the club house, and the gazebo providing a shelter of sorts to the barbecue, but otherwise the ground was completely in darkness, making it impossible to see what you were stepping in. I only hoped the pitches would still be playable after tonight. At the far end of the roped-off part of the field I could just make out the dim conical outline of what must be the stack of wood for the bonfire.

  We joined a good-natured queue to purchase hot dogs, which when they came proved to be unwieldy things, wrapped in a wholly inadequate scrap of kitchen roll. The organisers had clearly splurged on the sausages, which were fat, meaty and delicious, and scrimped on the bread rolls. They were soft, pallid and frankly unequal to the task set them, scattering their largesse of fried onions upon an ungrateful field.

  The twins tore into their dinner with gusto and total disregard for the consequences to their clothes, while I tried to eat mine with some semblance of politeness. The sparse lighting was very definitely my friend in this endeavour, and I commended myself for my foresight in donning a scarf the colour of ketchup. We walked slowly onto the field, the crowds getting thicker and the dim light fading as we neared the display area. I imagined there must be more people than us from St Saviour’s School, but with everyone bundled up in hoods and scarves against the chill it was impossible to recognise anyone from more than a few feet away, and difficult even then.

  “When are the fireworks going to start?” I asked.

  Sean swallowed a mouthful of sausage and licked a bit of ketchup from his lip. “Soon.” He grinned, his teeth shining white in the darkness. “You know, usually it’s the kids who get impatient.”

  “I’m not impatient. I’m just keen. Getting into the spirit of things. Actually, I’d have thought they’d have lit the bonfire by now.” I took another bite of my hot dog, tasting spiced pork and an alarming amount of ketchup. Yes, definitely a good idea to wear the red scarf.

  “Nah, they always do that at the end. Stops the smoke getting in the way of the fireworks, I s’pose. And, well, the darker the better, innit?”

  “Uncle Sean! Uncle Sean!” The twins, their hot dogs already a memory, clamoured at him. “Can we go and stand with George and Edward? They’re right by the rope and everything.” They pointed to a couple of shadowy child-size figures that could have been children, dwarves or even hobbits for all I could make out in the gloom.

  “All right, but no going anywhere else without asking, yeah?”

  “Yeah!” they shouted, already running.

  “Are you sure we’ll be able to find them again in the dark?” I swallowed the last of my hot dog and licked my fingers preparatory to wiping them on the scrap of kitchen roll.

  “I’ve never managed to lose them yet. And they’ve got their phones on, I made sure of that. Hey, you’ve got a bit of ketchup…” Sean leaned in and swiped his thumb over the corner of my mouth. Then he licked it. His thumb, that was, not the corner of my mouth, although from the way my skin tingled and my libido stirred, one could have been forgiven for thinking the opposite was true.

  My mouth was suddenly dry, and I had to clear my throat before I could speak. “I often wonder how previous generations ever survived to adulthood. No mobile phones, only the most rudimentary child seats, and playing in the street.”

  Sean was looking deep into my eyes and standing so close to me I could feel the warmth of his breath on my face and smell the spices from his hot dog. “Hey, don’t knock the safety stuff till you’ve got kids of your own.”

  I wanted to step forward and take him in my arms. I had to remind myself we were in public, and furthermore, surrounded by small children and their parents. Some of whom were bound to know me as Mr. Enemy. Even if they could most likely no more recognise me than I could them… “I don’t mean to disparage. Actually, I’m in favour. It means we don’t have to worry.” It was becoming absurdly difficult to order my thoughts and hold a sensible conversation.

  “Yeah, we can relax and enjoy the show. Hey, I think they’re about to start.” Sean stepped back and turned, and the spell his proximity had cast on me was broken.

  The noise and chatter of the hundreds of people assembled had begun to quieten, and I could make out shadowy figures scurrying around some distance away on the other side of the rope. A taper flared—and the first firework was lit.

  Given the budget constraints the organisers must have been under, the show was really quite spectacular. I found myself oohing and ahhing along with the rest of them. I was glad the twins had made a break for the front—what with all the toddlers sitting on fathers’ shoulders, they’d have found it hard to get a good view in the thick of things. Especially of the grand finale involving Catherine wheels and fizzing thingummies, spelling out the host club’s initials.

  As I squinted at the display and finally made it out (BLRFC, which sounded like the sort of noise one might make after indulging in a few too many hot dogs), I felt Sean’s arms slip around my waist. My momentary tension melted away when I realised that among all the people here, not one of them was looking remotely in our direction. Relaxing into Sean’s grip, I let my head fall back and folded my hands over his. The skies lit up with a final flourish of rockets exploding in ear-splittingly rapid succession that seemed to go on forever, and Sean’s embrace warmed me even as a kiss to my neck sent shivers down my spine.

  Then the barrage of explosions ceased, and all that was left were the after-images on our retinas and a heavy drift of smoke in the air.

  There was a loud silence—and then people began to talk and to move again. Far down the field there was a flare of light as the bonfire was lit. Sean stepped away from me, and the chill of the night made its unwelcome presence known. “Better
find the boys,” he said, sounding apologetic.

  I’d no sooner started to scan the crowd for their matching woollen hats than they were upon us, bursting out of nowhere in a clamour of “Can we go see the bonfire?” and “Please, Uncle Sean, please?”

  Sean grinned at me. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Of course not.” We swam against the tide of the crowd, many of whom seemed to be leaving now the main show was over, and neared the fire, which I could now see was ringed by another rope for safety’s sake. Just as well, I thought, as we could feel the heat from the flames even here, and sparks were flying in the breeze. Sean and the twins and I stood with the other less hurried members of the crowd, and watched as the flames slowly consumed the now unrecognisable figure of the Guy.

  Was this what it would be like to be a father, I wondered?

  No. This was what it must be like to be an uncle. A normal uncle, not the sort of father-substitute Sean was. Being a father—a proper father, the sort Peter must have been to his own children, and had done his best to be to me from the age of fifteen—involved a lot more than taking the children out for a treat. It would include all the small, everyday stuff my own father had never had time for, like telling them off when they were naughty, reading them stories at bedtime and nagging them to tidy their rooms.

  And I needed to remember that the twins were never going to be some convenient, ready-made family for me and Sean in some idealised future together. If I were ever to end up with some sort of parental role in their lives, it would be following the traumatic loss of someone they and Sean all loved dearly. This—tonight—was just a fantasy, no more real than the figure of Guy Fawkes now combusting merrily on the bonfire.

  By the time we left, the twins’ steps now dragging even though they put up a game plea for hot chocolate (Sean told them firmly they could have some at home) the crowds had largely dispersed. It was a much quicker business getting off the field than getting onto it had been, and we were soon driving back into Shamwell.