‘Es delicioso,’ Ava said, grinning with her tiny shoulders raised to her ears in joy. Both the children were bilingual. They weren’t too strict about it, but Marina tried to speak only Spanish to them and Nick stuck to English. Ava still sometimes mixed it up.
Six-year-old Luca was making a Mohican with his wet hair.
‘Dad?’ Luca said, face suddenly serious, studying his hand, his hair still on end, ‘what makes the tops of your fingers go all wrinkly?’
‘Just ’cause the water makes them soft,’ Nick replied, not looking at his son but massaging shampoo into Ava’s hair. It was another question of Luca’s that he was not sure how to answer. If he answered too fully, then Luca would ask another, even more difficult question. Nick lathered up Ava’s dark curly hair.
‘That hurts,’ she cried out, tears sudden but brief. ‘Hurting me.’
‘Sorry.’
Marina was naturally gentle. She said Nick didn’t realise his own strength.
‘I hate you,’ said Ava, sullen but no longer crying.
‘You’ve not to say hate,’ Luca corrected, by rote.
‘Well, I love you,’ said Nick, reflexively, using one of Ava’s Tupperwares that she used as pretend cake tins to rinse her hair.
‘Dad?’ said Luca, frowning earnestly.
‘Uh huh.’
‘You know how all of us in our family have got brown eyes …’
‘Yup.’
‘But you’ve got blond hair and me, mum and Ava have got dark brown …’
‘Yeah?’ Nick raised his eyebrows as he waited for the question. Luca still had his Mohican. The solemnity of his face beneath the ridiculous hairstyle made Nick smile.
‘Well, why didn’t one of us get your blond hair, like I have your big toes?’
‘Um … I dunno. I think the gene for dark hair is stronger, so it cancels mine out.’
‘The gene?’
Nick panicked, knowing he’d got himself into trouble. It would go on for weeks, if not months, and would culminate in hours on the internet learning the facts so that he could break it down for his son. ‘I’ll look into it and explain tomorrow.’ He was sure that other fathers got away with that as an answer, but his son always remembered. Luca never, ever forgot when an explanation was owed to him.
He lifted Luca out and towelled him dry, leaving Ava in the bath as the water drained. She liked to lie down and feel the pull of the water sucking her to the bath, or else she would kneel and watch the whirlpool up close.
Dry, Luca left the bathroom and streaked down the hall and then back. ‘Look at me. I’m running about naked,’ he giggled, wiggling his bottom and making a funny face.
On his knees, Nick couldn’t help laughing at him. ‘Go get your pyjamas on.’ He looked down and saw that his T-shirt was soaked through. ‘C’mon, missy.’ Nicholas lifted Ava out of the bath and wrapped a towel around her, swaddling her like a baby. ‘Have you forgiven me?’
She nodded abstractly. Lashes wet over huge brown eyes.
‘Do I get a kiss, then?’
She tilted her head coyly, then lunged forward and kissed him on the lips. He sat back on his heels, stunned.
‘That’s my girl.’
He scooped her up. Luca was at the top of the stairs, battling his pyjama top – head in an armhole. Rusty, their ten-year-old Border terrier, lay with nose on paws watching them, only his eyebrows moving.
Marina and Nick had got Rusty when they lived in the flat in Balham, and the dog had become used to life with them before the children, when he had been the centre of attention. He was silently disapproving but stoic – allowing ears and tail to be gently pulled and fur to be stroked against the grain. The dog always seemed grateful for the children’s bedtime. Now Rusty watched as Nick passed with Ava in his arms.
In the bedroom, Nicholas unwrapped Ava from her towel and bunched up her pyjama top so that she could put her head through. She ran away from him, climbing on the bed and jumping up and down. He caught her and tickled her, blowing a raspberry on her round belly, and then held her between his thighs as he put the top over her head and tugged her arms through. He bent to kiss her hot cheek as he pulled on her bottoms.
Then it was story time on the big beanbag in Luca’s room. Marina was reading them Aesop’s Fables in Spanish – the Hare and the Tortoise – but when it was Nick’s turn the children always tortured him by asking not for a story but a performance.
Nick’s hungry caterpillar slurped and lurched, antennae tweaking underarms and ears. His witches cackled camply and screeched. His giants made the floor shake, fee fi fo fum, causing Ava and Luca to squeal with laughter.
Sometimes he would try to read something quietly and normally, but they would always plead for the characters and the voices, promising not to get too excited and to go straight to sleep. Tonight, he tried to be a timid Rumpelstiltskin, but Luca was unimpressed.
‘Dad, read it properly.’
‘I am.’
‘Do the funny voice and the jumping up and down.’ Luca stamped his foot in imitation.
‘Tomorrow.’
When Nick finally made it downstairs, barefoot, jeans still damp but wearing a fresh T-shirt, Marina had lit candles and poured him a glass of wine. He picked up a prone, juice-stained bunny on the stairs and fired it into a toy box in the corner of the room as he let out a long sigh.
The kitchen windows were steamed up, and the smell made his stomach rumble. He was hungry. He had spent most of the day at a school in Croydon, his fourth week delivering a series of drama workshops to the lower school, and he hadn’t eaten properly since breakfast. A Snickers and a flat white in the car before he picked up Ava and Luca from the childminder.
He sighed as he looked at the long, bare wood table, daring to relax for the first time that day. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Two plates were on the table with cutlery set on top. Crusty bread had been torn open.
‘Tired?’ Marina was standing by the stove, her dark hair swept up into a messy bun. She was wearing her favourite navy tracksuit bottoms tucked into his old fleece-lined hiking socks. A bright blue sweatshirt, off the shoulder and cut off so that her brown stomach showed when she stretched to turn off the extractor fan. The bone of her wrist was exquisite as she reached out for her wineglass.
Nick circled his arms around her before she caught the glass. He put his two hands over the gentle swell of her stomach and then ran them under the easy give of her waistband to cup her bare behind in both hands. She leaned her head back towards him and rested it on his shoulder. He kissed her neck and she turned, draping her hands over his shoulders. She backed against the counter and he leaned into her, pelvis to pelvis.
‘They asleep?’ she looked up into his eyes.
He loved her face. Oval, olive skin, eyes like their daughter’s – fathomless chocolate brown. The careful arch of her brow and the cut of her cheekbone, almost jarring with her eyes, making her seem sculpted, detached, intellectual. Full lips and a space between her front teeth. Crinkles at the corners of her eyes and a mole just below her left lower lid, like a black tear.
‘Of course they’re asleep. I’m the master.’
‘You refused to do the voices, so they fell asleep out of boredom?’
‘No, I gave one of my best performances, actually. Put a lot into it.’
‘You’re a little liar.’
They rocked back and forth for a moment, breathing each other in. They didn’t always make it, but Fridays, when they were good, were just like this – remembering that they were lovers and two distinct people. Often the week would rush past in a flurry of work and parenting and friends and family commitments, so that they felt they were only really together in the early hours of the morning, entangled in each other’s warm smell. And sometimes not even then, if there were nightmares or monsters, little ones creeping the hall in fear. Luca would lift the covers and slip in beside Marina, but Ava always went to Nick, curled in a ball in the crook of his arm.
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br /> ‘Let’s eat.’
The prawns were curled pink on top of the scarlet rice. Nick sank into a wooden chair and ran his fingers through his hair as Marina spooned portions onto plates.
‘Could eat a horse,’ he said, tucking in right away, biting into a succulent piece of rabbit.
They would each talk about their days, but Marina liked to go first. He was prepared to listen.
‘So, you remember that DfiD bid I was working on?’ Marina peeled a prawn and licked her fingers, olive oil making her lips glisten.
Nick nodded. He had taken too big a mouthful and the rice was hot. He took little sips of air to cool it down as she continued.
‘You won’t believe it. Theresa found out about it and now she’s trying to mastermind everything.’ She opened her eyes wide then dunked her bread in oil and washed it down with wine. ‘She is so patronising, so micromanaging it makes me insane. “This is a wonderful piece of work,” she tells me with that stupid smile she has, “it has to go to the board.”’
‘That’s bad, right? The bid going to the board, I mean.’ Nick raised an eyebrow.
‘Yes, of course; the board will hack around with it and it will become nothing like I wrote, but that isn’t the worst thing. She wants me to increase the bid by fifty grand. Fifty fucking grand.’
Even swearwords were elegant on her lips, defused by her lilting, anglicised Spanish accent. Marina was director of Child International’s London office, the breadwinner of the family, making more than twice what Nick brought in with his company, ACTUp, which he’d set up when Marina was pregnant with Ava. By then his own acting career had diminished into merely audition attendance. His company delivered acting workshops for kids and media training for adults. It wasn’t what he had planned to do but he mostly enjoyed it.
‘She drives me crazy.’ A viscous tear of olive oil rolled from the corner of Marina’s mouth to her chin and she caught it with the heel of her hand. ‘She is a terrible woman …’ She shook her head and sighed, picking up her fork.
Her accent showed most on her ‘r’s. The terrible woman was Theresa Long, Chair of the Board of Trustees at Child International. Nick already felt as if he knew her intimately.
‘Why is increasing the bid so bad?’ he said, scraping his plate with his fork as he walked to the pot for more. ‘Surely the more money the better – if you’re lucky in getting it anyway?’
‘If we increase it, it will cross the funding threshold and I will need to incorporate formal accounting, but it is not just that – the funders will expect more and I do not have the staff.’
She kept talking, one leg tucked under her, pausing every mouthful or so to gesticulate with her fork, her forehead wrinkling as she recalled the day’s exasperation. Her work was stressful – more so than his.
When Luca was a toddler, Nick had been cast as a regular on the BBC drama Scuttlers about a street gang in the 1890s and had thought, This is it. He had paid a fortune for a voice coach, to get his Manchester accent just right. They had bought the house on Firgrove Hill and the following year took the whole family – Nick and Marina’s parents, Nick’s siblings and their children, on holiday to a villa in Portugal. When the show came out, someone had recognised Nick in Sainsbury’s and asked for his autograph.
His character had finally been tortured and murdered. The series had then been decommissioned and other roles hadn’t come his way.
Those that can’t do, teach, his father had said woundingly when Nick started ACTUp to compensate for the lack of roles. Teaching was still performing, he had learned, and he liked working with the kids. He was good at it; and he was a husband and a father now. He had to support his family. His last real acting job had been reading Dante’s Inferno on Radio Four – over a year ago.
‘And then you know what she said to me?’ Marina shook her head in frustration, teasing her prawn skins from the rice, then sitting up, posturing, imitating her boss, whom Nick had never met but could now visualise. ‘She says, “You don’t know how difficult my job is, Marina – I’ve got to persuade the rest of the board. It’s much harder than managing the day-to-day operations.”’
She turned her mouth to one side and waved her fork in a gesture of defiance that reminded him of the Marina he had met for the first time in the Marlborough Arms off Hampstead Road. He had been an out-of-work actor while she was doing a masters in Economics at UCL. They had tended bar together, working for five pounds an hour, and flirting heavily: flicking bar towels across the backs of each other’s legs, brushing up against each other when a keg needed changing. Nick had waited until the last minute to make his move, when she was set to return to Spain. He had been ready to forget everything, teach English in Spain if he had to, but then she got a fundraising job in London.
That was Marina. She seemed so relaxed, warm and unpresumptuous, but she aced everything she touched.
‘I mean,’ Marina continued, ‘she tries to make out that I am just some office manager, when really she wants to do my job for me.’
The anger pinked her cheeks and he wanted to kiss her again, but knew he would be rebuffed as she was on a roll. ‘She’s awful,’ he said, agreeing instead, raising both eyebrows and pushing his plate away. ‘Is that final, though – will you have to increase the bid and send it to the board?’
Rusty had moved nearer the table since Nick got second helpings. Now he stood to the side, averting his eyes yet watching Nick wipe his plate with bread. Normal dogs begged shamelessly, while Rusty thought he had mastered seeming disinterest. No Olivier Award for him. Nick broke eye contact with Marina to give him the crust.
‘Yes, and it will be a nightmare. The funders will expect me to change the world, and how can I do that with so few staff? They just expect miracles.’ The tendons along her neck were tensing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I thought I was going to explode.’ She dipped her pinkie in the olive oil and licked it. ‘I had to get it out of me.’
‘I love you,’ he whispered, head dipping.
She smiled, her eyes opening to him. They had been married for seven years, parents for six. Marina reached out and cupped his cheek. He turned to kiss the palm of her hand.
He poured them both another glass of wine. Marina was rubbing the back of her neck and he stood up and took over, kneading the brown skin. He noticed that she had a knot above her right shoulder. She moaned lightly, in pain or relief, and then looked up at him.
‘So how was your workshop?’
‘It was all right, I suppose.’ He kept kneading her shoulders and she let her head drop. ‘More of the same – driving me nuts. Cannot wait for it to finish.’
‘You only have one more week?’
‘Well, week and a half – they do their performances week after next.’ He sighed loudly, sat down and drank another sip of wine.
‘It’s a rough school.’ She raised an eyebrow at him as she dabbed crumbs from her plate with her forefinger.
‘It’s not a bad school – good arts programme – but I dunno, it’s just that group.’
‘The loud girl giving you trouble again?’
‘Loud girl?’
‘The fat one.’
‘Angela. God help me. She wasn’t there today. I dunno, I worry about her, but I have to admit that it was easier without her there.’
‘Why don’t you just send her out?’
‘I could, but that’s not the point, is it? It’s about inclusion and building confidence. I think I just need to get better at controlling her behaviour. She’s really quick though, y’know. One of those kids who has an answer for everything.’
‘But you said she is aggressive?’
‘Aggressive to the other kids, not to me.’
‘Just be strict with her.’
‘The other kids don’t like it when you get serious. Drama’s supposed to be fun. It kind of kills the mood. Let’s change the subject.’ He held up his arms as if surrendering.
‘What about talking to the head teacher about her?’
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‘Nah, it’s fine. I’ve made a special effort with her recently. I’ve tried to focus just on her when I can … I think that’s all she needs.’
There was a thump from upstairs and Rusty, who had become more anxious since the children arrived, jumped suddenly to his feet and watched the door. It was only a few seconds before the cries started.
Nick exhaled audibly.
‘I’ll go,’ said Marina, pressing her palms on the table to raise herself to her feet.
‘We should just get that bunk bed back,’ Nick said. The noise was likely Luca, who kept falling out of bed since they had moved him from his high bunk into a normal bed. His old bed had had a barrier and he was used to rolling against it.
‘Either that or put bars on this one,’ Marina laughed as she slowly made her way to the stairs, ‘like a hospital bed.’
Luca was calling ‘Dad!’ Because Nick was at home more, both children instinctively called to him when there was a problem. There was no worry that he would wake Ava, who slept like a stone, and Marina did not rush as she climbed the stairs.
Nick drank his wine, looking out of the window at the sun setting on the full-grown paper bark maple in the garden. The night was still and he could just make out clouds clustered like a fist on the horizon. He picked up his phone and flicked through his emails. There were a couple of messages from his accountant, signatures needed on company reports that showed his income had shrunk since last year.
An email from his agent, Harriet, mentioned an audition. Nick reached for his laptop at the far end of the table. He had to close down World of Zoo which Luca had been playing earlier, then opened Harriet’s email. A young male actor was being sought for a TV advert for cold and flu medication. Nick grimaced. This was what it had come to – auditioning for adverts – yet there would be a lot of competition and he never seemed to be first choice. ‘Your face is too pretty,’ Harriet had once told him, sucking on her cigarette. ‘You’re not getting the parts because you look as if butter wouldn’t melt.’ He replied, asking if she thought he had a chance this time.
He closed the computer and opened a text message from his brother Mark, who was on holiday in Thailand with his long-term girlfriend, Juliette. There was a picture attached of their two pairs of sandy feet photographed before a blue sea and sky.
Little Liar Page 2
