‘What do you mean fine? Did you sort something out about the baby? Money or something?’
‘You know what, you two really get on my tits sometimes. I am capable of making some choices for myself, you know. I don’t need you watching my every move. I mean, you,’ she says, pointing at me. ‘You don’t even feel you can go out without having a minder waiting up for me. Do you think I’m going to top myself or something?’ She flings the magazine she has been reading at the telly, toppling the latest casualty of our attempts to cultivate house plants to the floor.
I am used to her mood swings but it has been a long time since I’ve seen her temper flare up like this. Not since the last time she was with Chris, in fact.
‘We just worry, Rose, that’s all,’ Selin says quietly. ‘We were there, remember, when he hurt you? We can’t help worrying, we love you. But you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’ She gives me another look that tells me to keep my mouth shut or else.
‘Sorry, mate,’ I mumble insincerely. After all, it was my bed she climbed into three nights out of four in the aftermath of the affair. I didn’t go through all that sleep deprivation for her to swan off and play happy families with the evil perpetrator of her misery at the drop of a hat. Rosie sighs and flings her head back to look at the ceiling.
‘He thinks we should make a go of it,’ she says flatly.
Rage and disbelief begin to hurtle towards my mouth as Selin’s hand grips my wrist and her dark eyes hush me. I shut my mouth under protest.
‘He says that the baby is more important than our little differences and that it deserves a proper family. He says that he’s had time to think while we’ve been apart and that he’s realised he has missed me. He said he’d been plucking up courage to get in touch since the night we … well, you know.’
‘Little differences! So, that bird in the café was helping him pluck up courage, was she?’ I blurt out before Selin’s tightening and painful grip quiets me.
‘Look, I’m not a total moron, you know, I know what a wanker he is. Has been. But he’s got a point about the baby. I mean, Jen, how many times have you told me how much your dad abandoning you hurt you, how much you’ve missed having a father figure? Well, it was the same for me. Maybe I haven’t got the right to deny my baby the chance to have two parents. And anyway, he does seem … different, like he’s changed. You didn’t talk to him today. He made a lot of sense.’ Rosie hugs a cushion under her chin and stares blankly at the TV.
I sit in silent fury; after nearly twenty years without a father it has never occurred to me that no father might be a better option than a bad father. I can’t change my mind just like that, can I? Time and time again I’ve thought about how different my life would have been in a million small but important ways if my dad had only been around during my teenage years. If only I had had him to give me a lift to Hull on my first day of university instead of struggling scared and alone on the train with two rucksacks; if I had had him to change the plug on the lamp in my bedroom instead of having to ask my new flatmate’s dad to do it. But I still think having had him for a while and then feeling his loss so acutely is worse, it must be worse than if I had never known him at all. If I’d never known him I wouldn’t miss him, would I? And if Rosie gives her baby a dad who’s likely to duck out at any given time, things will be just as bad for that child too, won’t they?
‘But you don’t have to be with him to have him in your baby’s life, do you?’ Selin says. Good point, that is exactly what I was going to say.
‘Don’t I? You know as well as I do that my dad and Jen’s never made the effort once they were gone.’ I couldn’t argue with her there. I think I had six or seven embarrassed weekend trips to Brent Cross every other Saturday, but then I decided I couldn’t stand it any more and my dad didn’t feel the need to coax me. Soon after that the calls stopped and then the birthday cards. Once when I was about eighteen I got back in touch and tried to re-establish some kind of relationship. It ended in a stand-up fight in a Chinese restaurant. He blamed me for not bothering to get in touch with him, for letting us drift apart. ‘But you’re the dad,’ I had said. ‘You were the adult. You left me.’
The problem is that as far as I can see Chris and my dad have a lot in common. They are exactly the same kind of man. At some inevitable point Chris will be saying the same goodbye to Rosie again and this time to her baby too. Maybe it would be better for neither of them to ever have to face that pain.
‘So what are you going to do?’ I ask belligerently.
‘Well, he wants me to think about it. He’s asked me to go down to his cottage in Oxfordshire for the weekend. I’ll be alone,’ she says, silencing the protests before they begin. ‘He’ll still be in London. He just thought I might like the space and the fresh air, and I would. I’m going Saturday morning.’ She twists in the chair to look at us, resting her face on the arm.
‘No lectures, girls, OK? Not until I’ve sorted this out?’
‘No lectures,’ Selin says and I press my lips together in silent mutiny, managing to refrain from exchanging tortured glances with Selin. Maybe nothing I can say to Rosie is going to make a difference to what she decides. But I haven’t given up yet.
‘Cheers, oh and by the way I got you these.’ She chucks two Miniature Heroes Mars sweets at us and turns back to the TV. ‘I ate the rest.’
After Rosie goes to bed, overtaken by that weary kind of calm that washes up after a day of heightened emotion, Selin and I sit together on the sofa for a little while longer listening to her move around the bathroom, pour a glass of water in the kitchen and then retreat into her room. We idly watch the TV for a few minutes more until we hear her light switch click off.
‘What do you think?’ I say immediately, in an unnecessary stage whisper that causes Selin to raise her famous eyebrow at me with disdain.
‘I think she shouldn’t get too stressed out and if Chris is stressing her out we shouldn’t add to it with lectures she won’t listen to and opinions she won’t take any notice of. She’ll come to the right decision eventually. I expect. Don’t forget what the midwife said about support, she needs our support.’ She leans a little closer to me and I notice she is wearing a heart-shaped locket around her neck with an engraving of her initials. Another present from her doting dad, I expect.
‘Nice,’ I say, nodding my head at her neck, and her hand closes instantly around the locket.
‘Um thanks, present,’ she says quickly. ‘How did he seem to you? Chris? Did he seem like he had changed at all?’ I note her obvious embarrassment and think how sweet it is that she should be worried about upsetting me. She knows how much I wish I had a dad like hers. My thoughts turn back to Chris.
‘Well, he’s got a bit jowly. But apart from that he did seem really affected by the news. I don’t know, the bloke’s a serial romanticist.’ I have no idea if that is a real expression but I did humanities at college and Selin did maths, so I can pretty much say what words I like and she’ll go for it. She could do the same to me with the square root of anything and probably does.
‘What I mean is,’ I continue, ‘he falls in love with one woman after another at the drop of a pair of knickers and every time she’s the one! He’s in love with being in love. Maybe he could fall for the idea of fatherhood in the same way.’
Selin leans back and examines her shell-pink nails. ‘It must be different with your own kid, though, surely?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ I say. ‘So, you and me this weekend, kid? Friday we’ve got disco with Jackson and then Rosie’s off to the country. What do you fancy doing?’
‘Um, actually darling, I meant to say. I won’t be able to make it out Friday. I’ve got this thing on.’ Selin has this habit of pulling one side of her mouth right down when she is feeling sheepish, it makes her look like a rather charming frog.
‘Thing? On? What sort of thing?’ I ask. Selin never has things on unless they are things with us.
‘Family party �
� you know the drill.’ She rolls her eyes and does her frog face.
‘Oh, that kind of thing. Fair enough. Someone getting engaged, are they?’ When you live round our way there is a Turkish wedding every Saturday, it seems, and more often than not Selin is related to or acquainted with either the bride or groom. But even before the ribbon-decked cars process up and down Green Lanes and the misty-eyed bridal portraits appear in the local photo studios, there is an equally big and impressive engagement party. I have been to a couple with Selin before; they are always top entertainment.
‘Yeah, something like that. You could come, but well, I suppose you don’t want to let Jackson down, do you?’ she asks mildly. I’m sure she thinks I fancy him.
‘Well, never mind. What about the rest of the weekend?’ I ask, half hoping she won’t be around to find out what I’m up to.
‘No can do, sweet cakes. Families, huh?’
‘Oh, OK. I’ll just be a Ken-no-mates on my own then,’ I say, feeling two seconds of sorrow.
‘Sorry, love,’ she says, patting my arm, but of course before she finished uttering the words, in my mind’s eye I’d got Michael in my bed all weekend long and for a whole night too.
Things couldn’t have worked out better.
Chapter Thirty-three
As ever, Friday morning is easier to wake up to with the sure and certain knowledge that I and the rest of my colleagues will spend the working day getting ready for it to be 5.30 and for the weekend to begin.
Carla will make her lunchtime trip to Miss Selfridge and after coming back to her desk twenty minutes late she will tantalise the boys with glimpses of her latest clubbing-bikini-masquerading-as-a-dress acquisition. If the rest of this week has been anything to go by she’ll then throw herself at Jackson for a good fifteen minutes before his good manners cave in and he scuttles off to the coffee machine, preferring even work-machine coffee to her dreadful skinny-legged preening.
Either Kevin or Brian will ask Carla out and she will turn either Brian or Kevin down, depending on whose turn it is. Carla will spend the rest of the afternoon discussing her hairdo on the phone with a mate called Kelly or Trisha and the boys will end up in the pub next door from 5.45 until closing time, nudging each other every time a likely-looking girl goes past and never once plucking up the courage to talk to her. Eventually some poor cab driver will lose that night’s lottery and take them back to wherever it is they live in zone four and consider himself damn lucky if there is no vomit to clean up. They will stumble up the stairs in their respective parental homes, desperately hoping not to wake mum and dad up but looking forward to mum’s greasy fry-up in the morning. If their mums are lucky neither one of them will have poohed in the bath by mistake this time like Kevin did last New Year.
Georgie will leave half an hour early if she’s not working from home, which she rather tends to do on a Friday. This Friday specifically, Jackson and I will get changed in the loos (separately, of course), have a couple in the pub next door (gaze with smug pity at Kevin and Brian for a while) and then meet Rosie for a couple of Sea Breezes and Cosmopolitans before hitting a club. And then, of course, I have the rest of the weekend to spend with my nubile and athletic lover during which we can work on improving his performance time, and I don’t mean speeding him up.
Ha, Carla, you practically pre-teen minx, I beat you this week.
‘I’ve asked Carla, Kev and Bri to join us tonight. I hope you don’t mind?’ is the first thing that Jackson says as he sets a tall latte from the deli down the road on my desk. As predicted, Georgie has left me a message to tell me she is working from home and Jackson has discarded his tie, exposing an intriguing length of tanned bare neck. I’m sick as a pig.
‘Mind? No! How nice, a work outing.’ Bollocks bastard bollocks. I think about my glittery halter-neck languishing in my kitbag, which will surely look prim and dowdy compared to whatever scrap of shimmery something Carla will shoehorn over her non-existent behind. Jackson settles himself in my visitor chair and pops the lid off his own coffee.
‘I mean, they aren’t exactly my cup of tea, as you English say, but Carla asked herself and I thought at least if I asked the guys we could lose them later if it got too dire.’ Or he asked them so he could lose me if I got too dire.
‘Sure, no problemo.’ I smile at him and sip my latte and make small talk until he departs. Bollocks bastard bollocks.
I phone Rosie to moan but she’s out on a client lunch, and yes, it isn’t quite 10.00 a.m. yet. I phone Selin to moan but rather surprisingly she has the day off to go shopping. Selin never has time off. I must remember to ask her about it.
With all moaning avenues firmly blocked I reluctantly open a spreadsheet for cover and spend the morning surfing the internet for cheap flights that I will never take whilst picking up calls about every two minutes. The fax hasn’t called me for a while and when I got the switchboard to look into it they said it was probably a fault in my set and gave me a new one. It must have just been echoes on the line that I thought I heard on the other end, or myself breathing into my own headset.
The day passes slowly and when the tinny bell sounds on my PC to let me know I have an e-mail I pray it’s not from Lizette chasing all the invoices I haven’t signed off in three months, but from one of the girls or maybe even Jackson. Just something that is going to give me five minutes of relief from sodding area-sales figures.
When I check, I see it’s one of those anonymous greetings you can send from some sites. I open it up and there’s a link through to a website where a card waits for me to pick it up. I smile to myself, thinking of Michael, and I double click on the link. While I wait for it to open, the egg-timer turns somersaults on my screen and I tap a finger against my keyboard.
Eventually it opens on to a big red love heart pulsating and releasing other tiny little hearts floating into my screen until they seem to bounce off the edges of the monitor. A musak version of ‘Heaven Must be Missing an Angel’ rattles out of my rubbish speaker and as I watch a message floats out of the heart in big fat bubble lettters. ‘I’m watching you,’ it reads before each letter swells and then bursts. The animation begins again.
I’m puzzled. It’s not exactly high romance, in fact it’s a bit spooky. I glance up across the office to where Jackson is sitting and he catches my eye, winks and smiles at me. Ha-ah! So not Michael at all, Jackson in fact. Well, that certainly is an intriguing development and does rather make the prospect of this evening slightly more bearable. Of course he could just have meant it as a friendly prank without any connotations but in my experience a boy never does anything remotely out of the ordinary without any connotations.
In the taxi Carla talks about her hair, her bare-look stockinged legs seeming to take up most of the cab. I cross my denim-encased legs demurely at the ankle and admire my impulse-buy boots. Fully aware that after any period of sustained foot action lasting over ten minutes I will be a virtual cripple, I love them nevertheless. They are sophisticated, cool, sexy and hip. Carla’s silver platforms, that are even now making predatory contact with Jackson’s loafers, are showy and cheap. Shoes, like dogs, say a lot about their owners, and that’s all I’m saying. Jackson’s eyebrow-raising, aimed at me from across the cab, reminds me of the unspoken secret of the e-mail card and instigates a tiny uncurling of my smile.
As a proper adult I really shouldn’t be so peeved by Carla’s invasion into my night out. I really shouldn’t be so jealous of her just because she is younger than me and skinny and clearly isn’t wearing a bra under her dress. I should be confident in my maturity, confident that the allure of the breadth of my experience makes my blue eyes much more interesting to gaze into, and not just because of the first faint tracings of fascinating laughter lines that I have begun to notice recently. In fact, I am perfectly happy to be my age in the presence of such a naïve and shallow young slip of a girl, with nothing to talk about apart from herself and her leg-waxing regime. I am not remotely intimidated by her.
Th
e stuck-up anorexic bimbo cow.
We’re meeting Rosie in Langley’s off Covent Garden, in time for the cocktails happy hour. It’s one of my favourite places to go, not only because about six or seven months ago it was the place to be (I think it was anyway, I first came here during the summer) but because I love the metallic, retro feel of the place.
I have got an unformed idea that Jackson, three or four cut-price Cosmos and I might go down pretty darn well on the dance floor later on in a Saturday Night Fever kind of way. I wouldn’t want to brag about my disco-dancing prowess but I reckon people must think I’m pretty good, they certainly always stare at me when I’m shaking my stuff to ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’.
Rosie is late, and so I offer to order Jackson and me our first drinks at the bar and leave Kevin and Brian to fight over who gets to buy Carla a drink. As Jackson and I break away from them I feel Carla’s hungry little eyes follow us through the crowd. Nul point, Carla love.
The bar is crowded, about four or so people deep thronged in a dense mix of suited salesmen, Red-or-Dead-and Diesel-clad media girls and those who would have been models if only fate had made them taller, thinner and better looking, but who gamely sport the ‘fuck you’ pout anyhow.
The secret weapon that I have over pretty much all of these people is that even though some of them have been queuing for nearly ten minutes, I will almost certainly get served before they do. How? It’s simple. I squirm my way towards the edge of the bar, disarming normally competitive men by activating weapon ‘cleavage stun’ and negotiating feisty girls with a well-placed rib-bound elbow. When the target site is taken I stand on the foot rail that runs along the bottom of the bar with both feet and lean as far over it as I possibly can, exposing at least three inches of cleavage. Unless I’m very unlucky and the bar is entirely worked by mean-minded women or gay men I will be served straight away. Tonight is no exception. One guy, temporarily wrenched out of my thrall, mutters, ‘Bloody typical,’ under his breath but I’ve started a tab, left my card behind the bar and made my way back to our much-coveted table before he’ll even make it back to the bar’s edge.
Growing Up Twice Page 18
