by Tony Parsons
But then look what her type had done to her.
Cat Jewell loved her life.
Every time she entered her Thames-side flat, Tower Bridge glittering just for her beyond her windows, it felt like she was taking a little holiday from the world.
Almost twenty years after leaving home, she had finally found a place of stillness and silence and fabulous riverside views, a place that felt like the home she had been looking for all these years.
In an underground car park, there was her silver Mercedes-Benz SLK, and although her brother-in-law Paulo, who knew about these things, made gentle fun of her – ‘That’s not a sports car, Cat, it’s a hairdryer’ – she loved zipping about town in a car that, rather like her life, was built for two. At the very most.
It was true that her flat was the smallest one in the riverside block, and the car was five years old and etched with a beading of rust. But these things filled her with a quiet pride. They belonged to her. She had worked for them. After escaping from the prison of her childhood, she had made a life for herself.
When she had come back to London after university, the woman who gave Cat her first proper job told her that you could get anything in this town, but sometimes you had to wait a while for a good apartment and true love. At thirty-six, she finally had the apartment. And she believed she also had the man.
Over the years Cat had had her fair share of sloppy drunks, premature ejaculators and the secretly married – on one memorable occasion, all on the same date – but now she had Rory, and she couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.
Cat had met him when he was teaching Megan wado ryu karate. He was standing in the corner at a party celebrating Megan’s end of term at medical school, and Cat had taken pity on him. You could tell he didn’t have it in him to start a conversation with anyone.
To Cat he had seemed an unlikely martial artist – soft-spoken, socially awkward, no swagger about him. Then as the party rapidly degenerated into what Megan said was a typical med school do, full of legless nurses and young doctors off their faces on half an E, Rory explained to Cat how he came to the martial arts.
‘I was bullied at school. The tough guys didn’t like me for some reason. They were always pushing me around. Then one day they went too far. I had concussion, broken ribs, a real mess.’
‘So you decided to learn – what is it? – kung fu?’
‘Karate. Wado ryu karate. And I enjoyed it. And I was good at it. And soon nobody pushed me around any more.’
‘And you mashed up the bullies?’
He grimaced, wrinkling his nose, and she realised she liked this man. ‘It doesn’t really work like that.’
Thirty years on, you could still glimpse the quiet, bullied kid he had once been. Despite his job, all those days spent teaching people to kick and punch and block, there was a real gentleness about him. A strong but gentle man. The kind of man you might want to have children with, if you were the kind of woman who wanted children.
Which Cat Jewell was most certainly not.
Rory’s body was fit and hard from the endless hours of wado ryu karate, but there was no disguising the inner wariness of a divorced man in his forties. He had done the whole happy families bit for so long, it hadn’t worked out, and he was in no rush to do it all again. He had been there, done that, and was still paying the child support. And that was fine by Cat.
Rory was more than ten years older than Cat, living across town in Notting Hill with a son who came to stay, usually when he had argued with his mother and stepfather.
Since his divorce, Rory had dated plenty of women who all seemed to have the alarms ringing on their biological clocks – women in their early thirties who had yet to meet Mr Right, women in their late thirties who had met Mr Right only for him to turn out to be Mr Right Bastard. It was too much. The last thing a man wanted to hear about on the third date was how much the woman wanted a husband and a baby. It would turn off any man. Especially a divorced man. After all of that, Cat was a sweet relief.
She didn’t want him for a husband, or a father. She loved her life, and didn’t need some ageing Prince Charming to change it. If their relationship was going nowhere, then that was fine. Because they were both happy with the place that it had arrived at.
And that was just as well, because Rory wasn’t in the position to give any woman a baby. Cat had heard all about it the night, a month after Megan’s party, that they had slept together for the first time.
‘I’ll wear a condom if you want me to, Cat. But there’s not really the need.’
She stared at him from the other side of the bed, not trusting him and wondering what line she was being spun.
‘I mean, I’ll wear a condom if you want me to. Of course I will. But you don’t have to worry about getting pregnant.’
He wasn’t going to promise to pull out before he came, was he? Yeah, right. And the cheque’s in the post.
‘I’ve had the cut,’ Rory said.
‘What?’
‘The snip, the cut, the operation. You know. A vasectomy.’
For some reason she knew he was telling the truth. There was just something about the way he hung his head, smiling ruefully, saying the words that she knew he must have rehearsed.
‘I had it just before my marriage broke up. My wife and I – well, things were bad. We were both getting older. We knew we didn’t want any more children. So I had it done. And then she got pregnant by her tennis coach.’ The rueful smile. ‘So it was perfect timing, really.’
‘Did it hurt?’
‘A bit like getting your balls caught in a nutcracker.’
‘Okay. We don’t need to talk about it any more. Come here.’
It was strange at first – the feeling of a man coming inside her, and knowing she didn’t have to worry. Cat had spent so many years trying to avoid getting pregnant, enduring the various indignities of coil, cap, condom, pill and pulling out, that it was a load off her mind, and a load off her menstrual cycle, to be able to stop worrying about all of that. Rory was a considerate, experienced lover, and yet not one of those men who absolutely insist on the woman coming first, as though anything else would be awfully bad manners. They even had their own running gag about their contraception arrangements, or lack of them.
‘How do you like your eggs, madam?’ Rory would ask, and Cat would cry, ‘Unfertilised!’
She began to see his inability to have children as another one of the good things in her perfect life. Like the flat with the view of Tower Bridge, and the beat-up little sports car, and her job as manager of Mamma-san, one of the most fashionable restaurants in London, where tables were in such short supply that, when you called the reservation line, they just laughed at you and then hung up.
Unencumbered – that was a word Cat liked.
She was free to lie around all Sunday in her dressing gown, reading the papers, or jump on a plane and go to Prague for the weekend, or stay over at Rory’s place when the mood took her. Unencumbered – and that was just how she wanted it. Because after their mother had walked out, her childhood had been as encumbered as can be. She never wanted to be that tied down, that domesticated, again.
She didn’t want children, and could go for, oh, months, without even thinking about the subject – until someone implied that it was somehow abnormal to want to hold on to a life you loved – and she was too successful, and too fulfilled, to feel as though she was missing anything. Cat didn’t consider herself childless, she considered herself childfree. Big difference.
She wasn’t like those other women. She wasn’t like her sister Jessica. Cat didn’t need a baby to make her life worthwhile, and her world whole.
Where did it come from, that addiction to the idea of motherhood, that need to be needed? Cat knew where it came from – it came from men who didn’t love you enough. Men who left a hole in your life that a woman could only fill with some adorable, eight-pound crying and crapping machine.
So she lay in the dark with Rory sleeping by her side, and
she thought to herself, this is perfect, isn’t it? This is a good, unencumbered life. Unencumbered – the most beautiful word in the English language.
Why would anyone ever want anything more?
Three
Paulo and Michael grew up in one of the rougher parts of Essex, their father an engineer at Ford in Dagenham, and their childish dreams were full of cars.
More than half the men in their neighbourhood worked at the plant. Cars were everything here. Cars meant jobs, a wage packet, a glimpse of freedom. Cars were how the boy became a man. A teenager’s first Ford Escort was a rite of passage as momentous as any tribal scar. Yet although the brothers both loved cars, they loved them in very different ways.
Paulo was fetishistically obsessed with V8 engines, camshafts and the life of Enzo Ferrari. Michael’s interest veered more towards what he called ‘pussy magnets’.
Paulo loved cars for themselves. Michael loved them for what they could get you, the sweet illusions they projected, and the dreams they made come true.
Michael liked girls as much as he liked cars. His specialist subject, even when he was a spotty little virgin, sharing a bedroom with his slightly bigger brother, was ‘what drives them wild’.
While Paulo learned about Modena and Le Mans, Michael read top-shelf magazines and absorbed the lessons of ‘shallow fucking’ (‘You don’t put it all the way in – drives them wild, it says so here’) and locating the G-spot (‘Put a moistened finger inside and then move it as if you want someone to come towards you – drives them wild, Paulo, apparently’).
They both covered the walls with pictures of Ferraris, but Michael had Sam Fox sandwiched between the Maranellos and the Spiders. Until one day their devout mother saw her.
‘I’m not having the Whore of-a Babylon in my house,’ she said, pulling down the poster with one hand and deftly cuffing Michael around the ear with the other. She knew it wouldn’t be Paulo putting up Whore of Babylon pictures. ‘Put up our Holy Mother.’
‘No jugglies on the wall, lads,’ their father quietly told them later. ‘They upset your mother.’
And the brothers thought – jugglies? What would their old man know about jugglies?
Their parents had come across from Napoli as small children, landing within a year of each other, although you would never know it. Their father, another Paulo, sounded every inch a working-class Londoner, all glottal stops and talk of West Ham and Romford dogs, while their mother, Maria, had never lost the accent and the attitudes of the old country.
Maria – who was called ‘Ma’ by both her husband and her sons – didn’t drive, never saw a bill and never had a job. ‘My home is my job,’ she said. Yet she was the volatile, undisputed emperor of their little terraced home, giving her sons what she called ‘a clip round the earhole’ as often as she kissed their cheeks with a fierce, moist-eyed passion. The boys couldn’t recall their father ever raising his voice.
As a child, Paulo felt most Italian when he visited the homes of his friends. That’s when he knew his own family was special, not because they attended Mass or because they ate baked ziti or because his parents spoke to each other in a foreign language, but because they resembled the type of family that was dying out in this country.
Some of his friends lived with just their mother, one of them lived with just his father, many were in strange patchwork families, made up of new fathers, half-brothers and stepmothers. His own family was much more simple, and old-fashioned, and he was grateful for that fact. It was the kind of family that Paulo wanted for himself one day.
There were only ten months between the brothers, and many people mistook them for twins. They grew up unusually close, dreaming of going into business together one day – something with cars. Racing them, mending them, selling them. Anything. This was what they had learned from their father and all those long years at Ford. ‘You can’t get rich working for somebody else,’ said the old man, again and again, just before he fell asleep in front of the ten o’clock news.
After leaving school at sixteen, the brothers drove taxis for ten years, Paulo in a black London cab after passing the Knowledge, and Michael working the minicabs, until finally they had enough of a stake to get a loan from the bank.
Now they sold imported Italian cars from a showroom off the Holloway Road in north London. They brought in small quantities of pre-ordered merchandise from Turin, Milan and Rome, driving the cheaper left-hand-drive cars back to the UK themselves, doing the conversion to right-hand drive in their body shop, or else they bought second-hand in the boroughs of Islington, Camden and Barnet. Above their modest showroom a row of green, white and red Italian flags streamed in the weak sunlight of north London, above the name of the firm – Baresi Brothers.
They made a good living, enough to support both their families, although like many small businessmen they found there was either not enough work or more than they could handle.
Now when trade was slow, Michael produced the latest pictures of his daughter, Chloe, and spread them across the gleaming red bonnet of an old Ferrari Modena. If marriage to Naoko had calmed Michael down, Paulo thought, then the birth of Chloe seemed to have tamed him.
As they admired the latest portraits of Chloe, the brothers were joined by Ginger, the showroom’s receptionist. Ginger was married and somewhere in her late thirties, and Paulo couldn’t help noticing that Ginger’s breasts seemed to rise and fall in slow motion as she sighed with longing at the sight of baby Chloe in all her gummy-mouthed glory.
‘Oh, she’s gorgeous, Mike,’ Ginger said.
And Michael smiled proudly, completely smitten by his daughter. Ginger looked all dreamy-eyed, as she went to put on the kettle.
‘They love it if you’ve got kids,’ Michael told his brother when they were alone.
Paulo smiled. ‘I guess it’s a sign that your wedding tackle’s in full working order, and you’re a good provider, and all of that. You know – a good mate.’
‘Yes, all that old bollocks,’ Michael said, as he considered his daughter’s pouting beauty. ‘It drives them wild, doesn’t it?’
Megan didn’t remember too much about the party. A crumbling Victorian house big enough to provide a home to half a dozen trainee doctors. The sweet and sickly smell of dope. All these people she knew acting ten years younger than they really were. And all this really bad music – or at least music she didn’t know.
Then suddenly there was this guy – Kirk, definitely Kirk – and he was different from the other people there.
For a start he wasn’t as unhealthy-looking as all the young doctors. He didn’t drink as much, or smoke as much. He didn’t have the cynical line in chat that Megan’s contemporaries had developed as a way of dealing with the parade of disease and deprivation that was suddenly passing through their lives, expecting to be saved.
He just stood there, a fit, good-looking Australian boy – more reserved than you would expect a guy like that to be – smiling politely as the finest minds of their generation got stoned and drunk while talking shop.
‘Everybody’s so smart,’ he said, and it made her laugh.
‘Is that what you think? I thought this lot were just good at passing exams.’
‘No, they’re really smart. Got to be smart to be a doctor, haven’t you? I don’t understand what they’re talking about half the time. All these medical terms. Someone was talking about a patient who was PFO.’
Megan smiled. ‘That just means, Pissed – Fell Over,’ she said.
He frowned. ‘It does?’
She nodded, and let him into the secret language of medical students. Raising her voice above the bad music, while he tilted his handsome head towards her, Megan told him about ash cash (money paid to a doctor for signing cremation forms), house red (blood), FLKs (funny-looking kids), GLMs (good-looking mums) and the great fallback diagnosis, GOK (God only knows) – all the mocking slang that protected them from the sheer naked horror of their jobs.
‘But you still got to be smart, th
ough,’ he insisted.
What an open and honest thing to say, she thought. And so unlike all the people she knew, who couldn’t open their mouths without trying to make some cynical little joke. She looked at him – really looked at him – for the first time. ‘What do you do?’
‘I teach,’ he said. It was the last thing she would have expected. ‘I teach people how to dive. You know – scuba dive.’
She gestured with her glass, taking in the party, the flat, the city.
‘Not around here.’
His wide white smile. Megan loved his smile. ‘In sunnier places. You ever dive?’
‘No, but I’ve got a certificate for swimming a length in my pyjamas. Not really the same thing, is it?’
He laughed. ‘It’s a start.’
He liked her. She could tell. It happened quite a lot. She knew she wasn’t as pretty as Jessica, who had a kind of baby-faced beauty about her, or as tall as Cat, who was as long-limbed and rangy as a dancer, but men liked Megan. They liked all those curves and a face that, because of some genetic accident, somehow looked slightly younger than her age. They liked that contrast. A girl’s face and a woman’s body, Will always said excitedly, heading straight for Megan’s breasts.
She smiled at Kirk, and he did her the honour of blushing. It felt good to have this kind of contact after being with Will for so long, and having to make sure she didn’t send out the wrong signals. Tonight she could send out any signal she liked.
Then suddenly there was finally a song she knew and loved – the one where Edwyn Collins sings, ‘Well, I never met a girl like you before.’
‘That can be our song,’ Kirk said, grinning sheepishly, and usually such ham-fisted flirting would have turned her right off. But she let him get away with it because she liked him too. Right at that moment, she liked him a lot. He wasn’t part of her world and that was fine. She was ready for a break from her world.
And then there was that moment she had almost forgotten about after all the years as someone’s girlfriend – the look of recognition in the eyes of someone you don’t know yet – and suddenly his face was an irresistible object, and their heads were slightly tilting to one side, and finally they were kissing.