by Lindsey Kelk
Then another, then another.
‘I’m really sorry, John.’
He opened his mouth to say something but, before he could, I bent over to take off my shoes, turned back towards the Carriage House and ran.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
‘Where have you been hiding?’ Patrick asked as I dashed back into the baby shower.
‘I was outside,’ I said, slipping my feet back into my shoes and looking around for Sumi or Adrian or Lucy, anyone I could talk to.
‘Are you OK?’ He pressed the back of his hand against my forehead. ‘Do you feel all right? You’re quite warm.’
‘I need some water,’ I replied, my cheeks still hot and flushed. I certainly couldn’t talk to Patrick. ‘Are you going to tell me Lucy’s baby names or what?’
‘Sorry, I made a promise,’ he replied, holding his hand against his chest in mock shock. ‘But if you want to try to wrestle it out of me, I won’t stop you.’
‘Maybe we should go,’ I suggested. Lucy was back in her chair, surrounded by her acolytes, and Sumi was nowhere to be seen. Adrian, however, was by the bar, sipping a carrot juice smoothie and gazing into the eyes of a girl with long black coils all the way down her back. They were staring at each other so intently, it looked as though they were checking for cataracts. I was so happy for them both but something inside me swelled with sadness. I just wanted to leave.
‘Already?’ Patrick asked, almost disbelieving with relief. ‘You mean I don’t have to stay and schmooze?’
‘It’s OK,’ I told him, one eye on the back door. ‘You’re not here to win over my friends.’
Still no sign of John.
‘I’m not?’ He was understandably confused. ‘Then why am I here? I certainly didn’t come to play What’s in the Nappy.’
‘You came to be here, with me,’ I said, nodding and busying my hands by straightening his tie. ‘You’re here because I’m here. We’re here together.’
‘But we could be together at my place,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘Just the two of us, no one else. Wouldn’t that be more fun?’
Yes, I told myself, that’s what I wanted. What I’d always wanted. What I finally had. I turned my face up to meet him and pressed my lips to his and pushed away any and all thoughts of John McMahon.
‘Let me find my jacket and we’ll sneak out,’ I said, running my hand down the front of his body, hooking my fingers in his waistband. If only I’d gone over to his flat the night before instead of meeting Sumi and going to that stupid disco. ‘I’ll meet you out front in a minute.’
Patrick did not need telling twice. Without a second thought of his new best friend Lucy, he strode out of the party and straight down the rabbit warren, while I searched for my denim jacket. I’d had it when I arrived and I’d put it down when …
‘I helped them move the giant rabbit,’ I whispered to myself. There it was, a stonewash sleeve poking out from underneath the rabbit’s left bum cheek. Creeping over, I bobbed down, trying to balance in my heels and long dress, and grabbed hold of the jacket. I tugged gently, but nothing happened.
‘What are you doing?’
I looked up to see John looming over me.
‘Clearly, I am trying to get my jacket out from underneath this rabbit,’ I replied, yanking harder. ‘What does it look like I’m doing?’
‘Running away from a difficult conversation or molesting a giant stuffed animal.’
‘I’m not running away,’ I said, gripping the jacket with both hands. Why did a rabbit need to be so bloody heavy? ‘I’m leaving to spend the rest of the day with my boyfriend.’
‘In that case, why don’t you let me help you,’ John said, bending over to grab a handful of denim. He heaved my jacket out from under the wobbling rabbit and threw it into my arms. ‘Here.’
The bunny teetered behind me as I stared at him, clutching my jacket to me like a safety blanket. I wanted to say something, do something, only I didn’t know what. I wanted it to be all right and it wasn’t.
‘Ros! John!’
But we turned too late. The oversized cuddly toy fell face forward, right on top of the pair of us, knocking us both to the floor. I landed on top of John, pinned flat by an errant arm.
‘Shit,’ I said through clenched teeth, trying to roll out of a John, Ros and Rabbit sandwich without showing the entire room my knickers. ‘Shit shit shit.’
‘Ros?’ John whispered urgently.
‘What?’ I replied, meeting his eyes as a rescue effort mounted beyond the rabbit. He was smiling. Without a word, he put his lips to mine and kissed me.
Short, sharp, electric.
I pulled back, stunned, just as the bunny was successfully raised by Adrian, Eva, Creepy Dave and Weird Dean.
‘Are you hurt?’ Eva asked, offering a hand to help me up and Ade pulled John to his feet. ‘Do we need to call an ambulance?’
‘I’m fine, thank you,’ I insisted, still clutching my jacket in both hands. ‘Also, you are very strong.’
‘I teach CrossFit,’ Eva nodded. ‘Nice to meet you.’
‘And you,’ I murmured, catching John’s eye and pressing my fingers to my lips. ‘I’m just going to pop out and get some fresh air, excuse me.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ he offered.
‘No you won’t,’ I shouted, running out the rabbit warren and back into the real world, where Patrick was waiting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
‘Anyone home?’ I asked as I let myself into my parents’ extremely hot kitchen the next evening and immediately downed a giant glass of water. It seemed as though the entire country had been stuck in a sauna and I wasn’t coping. Maybe that was why my brain was messing with me. It was just too bloody hot for rational thought. I’d seen them talk about heat-induced psychosis on BBC Breakfast and if it was on the BBC, didn’t it have to be true?
To atone for whatever it was that had happened under that rabbit, I had spent the rest of the weekend doing all of Patrick’s favourite things: watching foreign films, preparing complicated food that ended up tasting like shite and melting as we walked around parts of a heatwave-stricken London that I, and every single other person I knew, was too afraid to travel through, even on the bus. It was prejudice against poverty that kept us away, Patrick explained, not the fact there was nothing to do and the one pub he wanted to go to had been closed because a secret cockfighting ring had been uncovered there a week before. We had to fight that prejudice by facing it, Patrick explained, he’d learned that in Yangon. He seemed slightly less chipper when we finally got back to the tube station and he realized someone had stolen his wallet out of his back pocket but still, it seemed like overall he’d had a nice time.
And I had barely thought about the kiss at all.
‘I’m in here,’ Mum called from the living room. ‘Your dad’s at the club and we’re on sugared almond duty.’
Every Sunday for the last five years, Dad went to that bloody tennis club in his tennis gear, carrying a tennis racquet, and he came back three hours later, half cut, and passed out on the living room sofa until Songs of Praise. None of us had ever seen him play a single set of tennis. It really was a wonder their marriage had lasted so long.
I set my bag down on the back of my armchair and joined my mum on the floor, where she was surrounded by dozens of little voile bags and a plastic bag of sugared almonds so big it could have ended world hunger. My mother had her glasses on, her hair tied back and was wearing a string bikini. In fairness, she was looking amazing.
‘Please tell me Dad put a hot tub in while I was at the baby shower?’ I said, crossing my legs to sit down opposite her.
‘Every year for the last five years I’ve told your dad we need to get air conditioning and every year he says the weather won’t last,’ she grumbled as she pulled a cardigan off the settee and slid her arms into the sleeves. ‘This is the last year. I’m calling someone next week and getting it done. It’s too bloody hot.’
‘Don’t put the cardi on
for my benefit.’ I peeled off my shoes and socks to reveal my slightly-worse-for-wear pedicure. ‘I was going to ask if you’d got another bikini.’
‘Two bikinis?’ she clucked. ‘Why would I need two bikinis? And we did talk about getting a hot tub at the bottom of the garden, your dad could have got a good deal on one, but you’ve got your shed instead.’
There was definitely a hint of accusation in her voice.
‘How was the baby shower?’
I helped myself to a handful of sugared almonds and began filling bags.
‘Good.’ I replied, popping one of the sugared almonds in my mouth. ‘Mum, how did you know you wanted to marry Dad?’
She grabbed another dozen bags, pulled them all open at the top and gave me a look. ‘Is this because your dad told you I was pregnant when we got engaged?’
‘No,’ I replied in between sucks on the sweet. I’d forgotten how awful these things were. ‘But also yes.’
‘I didn’t marry your dad because I was pregnant, I married your dad because I loved him,’ Mum answered. ‘Fancied him too, which I suppose is how I got in trouble.’
‘“Got in trouble”,’ I repeated, chomping down on the almond. ‘Thank god we don’t say that any more.’
‘You wait until you’re pregnant and you’ll find out how much bloody trouble it is,’ she said, slapping my hand away from the bag of sweets. ‘Thirty-two years later and I’m still in trouble.’
‘I just wanted to see if both flavours are equally disgusting,’ I whined, feigning hurt and rubbing my hand. ‘Why do we even have these?’
‘It’s good luck,’ Mum answered. ‘And I wanted them at the first one but your nan said we couldn’t have them because they’d break her teeth.’
‘And they won’t break them this time?’
‘They might,’ she replied with a wicked smile.
‘So you just knew?’ I said, abandoning my task and lying back on the living room carpet. ‘That you were going to marry him?’
Mum looked up at the living room ceiling and smiled a smile that was far too happy for someone who was contemplating some really quite dodgy Artexing.
‘The first time your dad kissed me, I felt like I was floating,’ she said. ‘It felt like we were the only two people on earth who knew this incredible secret and I never wanted it to stop.’
‘Gross,’ I muttered.
‘You asked.’ Mum put down her stack of little voile bags and gave me a good, hard, maternal stare. ‘What’s going on? You’ve only been back two minutes, surely there isn’t a proposal in the offing?’
I took a deep breath and looked at her, my mouth clamped shut.
‘Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,’ she trilled, one of her all-time favourite quotes. ‘Out with it.’
‘Do you remember Patrick? The one I was seeing before I left?’
She reached for her cup of tea as though it were something stronger. I wondered, for just a moment, if it was.
‘You do remember him then.’
‘I do,’ she replied in a tone that suggested that, while she remembered, she did not necessarily approve.
‘We’ve been seeing each other again.’
‘Right.’
‘My friends aren’t especially impressed.’
‘Should they be?’ she asked, allowing me to sneak a second sugared almond. The blue ones were just as rank as the pink. ‘As I recall, it didn’t end terribly well.’
‘It’s complicated,’ I told her. ‘But we were both at fault.’
She sipped her tea in her cardigan and bikini while I carried on putting sugared almonds in bags, waiting for her next move.
‘We met him once, didn’t we?’ she asked eventually. ‘He was the writer, the clever one?’
‘Yes,’ I confirmed, pleased with the description. He’d like that, my former literature professor mother remembered him as clever. ‘But you make it sound like a bad thing.’
‘Not at all,’ Mum replied. ‘I’m clever, you’re clever. But I wouldn’t want it to be the first thing people thought of when my name came up.’
I’d never heard her complain when people went out of their way to tell her how clever Jo was, although, to be fair, the word used most often in that scenario was genius. Not that it bothered me at all.
‘What’s so bad about people thinking you’re clever?’
‘There are a million things a person can be and clever is a decent piece of the puzzle,’ she said kindly. ‘But I would hope you would think of a lot of other words to describe me first. Kind, funny … snazzy dresser?’
With an eye roll and a snicker, I felt the sugared almond get sucked into the back of my throat and immediately spat it out into my hand. The sweets were out to get me. Funny and kind. Those were two of the words John had used to describe me. At least me when Patrick wasn’t around. Clever Patrick.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, arranging my sugared almonds into patterns on the floor. ‘I always liked how clever he was.’
Mum added a blue almond to my pink trail. ‘But?’ she prompted, sensing the word before I could say it.
‘Patrick is everything I ever wanted,’ I began, not quite sure where I was going to end up. ‘And now he wants me. Or at least I think he does. But something isn’t quite right.’
Picking up a reel of white ribbon and a pair of scissors, Mum slowly rolled out the ribbon and began snipping it into six-inch lengths.
‘Ros,’ she said, rolling and snipping, rolling and snipping. ‘Do you know why there are so many books about people falling in love and people getting their hearts broken?’
‘Because we’re all simple idiots?’ I suggested.
‘Not quite,’ she replied as I swept my almonds into one tidy pile. ‘It’s because it fits quite nicely into the pages of a paperback. A real love story – a true, enduring love story with all its ups and down and compromises and ugly and petty and mundane moments – would be longer than a phone book and not nearly as interesting. Grand passion might make for a good read but it doesn’t make for a happy life.’
‘OK,’ I said, filling an empty bag with almonds to avoid looking at the boob that was trying to escape from the left cup of her swimsuit.
‘There’s nothing glamorous about going to bed with a headache and waking up to find your husband has done the dishes but I’m telling you, dearest daughter, I’d take that over a thousand lovestruck Mr Darcys, any day of the week.’
I gasped. Speaking ill of Austen was tantamount to heresy in my mother’s presence.
‘Once the bloom is off the rose of romance, clever doesn’t get you as far as you might like,’ Mum said with her breast now flying free. ‘Same goes for brooding and intense and mysterious. Basically anything you would have looked for in a man when you were studying for an English degree. Throw it all out the window.’
‘Books do a real number on us, don’t they?’ I said with half a laugh.
‘If it weren’t books, it’d be films,’ she nodded. ‘At least you’re literate, I don’t take that for granted. What I will say is, all any mother wants is for her child to be happy and you don’t look especially happy to me.’
I looked at her and frowned. ‘Mum, your boob fell out.’
‘Bloody hell,’ she muttered, promptly putting it away. ‘That’s all I need to hear. That you’re going out with this clever chap because he makes you happy.’
‘He’s not just clever,’ I replied, very interested in my toenails again all at once. ‘He’s lots of things.’
Mum raised her eyebrows in silent rebuttal.
‘He’s fascinating, I could listen to him talk for hours and never get bored,’ I went on, absently stuffing nuts into the little gift bag. ‘He’s travelled all over the world, he loves to learn about new things, he’s really driven. And he’s funny, not ha-ha funny but still really funny. And not to go into detail but I still get butterflies every time I see him. That’s important, isn’t it? At least at the beginning.’
‘Very importa
nt,’ Mum agreed. ‘And those are all wonderful qualities but they’re not going to run out and buy you a box of tampons in the middle of the night when you’ve got the flu. What else do you like about him?’
‘I can always buy them in bulk,’ I replied. I’d expected listing Patrick’s positive attributes to be an easier task but it wasn’t coming as quickly as I’d expected. I couldn’t in all honesty call him kind, even though he wasn’t mean. He wasn’t exactly generous in nature, even though he had his moments. And he could be as hot as the seventh circle of hell but he definitely wasn’t warm.
‘Does he make you happy?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied immediately.
‘Happy when you’re with him, not happy that he’s with you,’ she corrected carefully.
‘He does make me happy,’ I said, looking for the truth. There was no point lying now. ‘Only it feels so different to before. I get frustrated and anxious. I’m not always sure he’s listening to me. To be honest, things aren’t going exactly the way I thought they would.’
‘Things rarely do,’ she said, delivering sage wisdom with a light touch, in that way only mums seemed to know how. ‘But you’ll know what to do when you know what to do.’
‘That does not feel helpful,’ I smiled, my bag of almonds slipping out of my fingers and falling into my lap. I watched the candy-coloured nuts spill onto the hardwood floor before rolling away into adventure under the settee.
Mum shrugged and combed my hair back off my face, holding my eyes with a smile of her own. ‘You’ll work it out, Ros, no one else can do it for you. I know you’ll sort it out, you always do.’
‘Thanks, Mum,’ I said, chewing on my bottom lip to stop my eyes from welling up. I hadn’t realized just how much I’d missed her and not just while I was in America. Ever since Jo came along when I was fourteen, I couldn’t remember us spending any real one-on-one time together. ‘I should go and get some work done. Big week coming up.’
She gave a nod and set back to work on the sugared almonds. ‘Make sure you’re getting enough rest. You’re working every hour god sends at the moment. I see that light on all night.’