by Tony Parsons
Over the next ten years London would become full of Asian restaurants that were neither owned nor run by Asians – bright, funky places with menus that served Thai curry and Vietnamese noodles and Chinese dim sum and Japanese sashimi, as if that continent was really just one country, with a cuisine that was perfect for beautiful young people who cared about their diet and their looks. Mamma-san was among the first.
Cat joined the noodle queue on Brewer Street, and wrote a rave review for her little listings magazine. When she came in again, not working this time, Brigitte offered Cat a job as manager.
As the listings magazine took a very casual approach to paying its contributors, Cat took the job. The magazine went out of business soon after. Mamma-san moved up-market and out of Soho, although Cat believed that the clientele were still the same ragged-trousered kids who had queued up on Brewer Street all those years ago before going dancing at the Wag, just ten years older and, a decade into their careers, a lot more affluent. Brigitte seemed to enjoy her restaurant as much as they did.
‘A great man once said, Arrange your life so that you can’t tell the difference between work and pleasure.’
‘Shakespeare?’ said Cat.
‘Warren Beatty,’ said Brigitte.
It was love at first sight. Cat had never met anyone who could quote Warren Beatty, although her mother claimed that he had once touched her arse backstage at the London Palladium. Brigitte had more fun than anyone Cat had ever known. After the domestic drudgery of her childhood, here was life as it ought to be lived.
When most of the city was still sleeping, the two women toured the markets – Smithfield for the restaurant’s meat, Billingsgate for their fish, New Spitalfields for vegetables. Red-faced men in stained white coats shouted at each other in the pre-dawn gloom. Cat learned how to hire good kitchen staff, and how to fire the bad ones when they turned up drunk or stoned, or couldn’t keep their hands off the waitresses.
Cat learned how to talk to the wine merchant, the VAT man, the health inspector, and to be scared of none of them. Although she was only four years older, Brigitte felt like the closest thing to a mother that Cat had ever had.
Brigitte was one of those European women who seem to discover a lifestyle they like in their middle twenties, and then stick with it for ever. She had never married. She worked harder than anyone Cat knew, and played hard too – twice a year she flew off to walk in the foothills of the Himalayas or dive in the Maldives or drive across Australia.
Sometimes she took Digby with her, and sometimes she left him at home – more like a favourite piece of luggage than a man. Brigitte enjoyed her life, and for years she had been Cat’s North Star, guiding her way, showing her how it was done. This unencumbered life.
But now Brigitte selected a photograph of Digby and herself on a blinding white beach. The Maldives? Seychelles? One last look, and she fed the photo to the shredding machine.
‘What’s he done?’ Cat said.
‘He wants to be with someone who can bring something new to a relationship.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, for example, a pair of twenty-four-year-old tits.’
Cat was speechless. And outraged. Men didn’t treat Brigitte like this. She was the one who did the dumping.
‘Some well-stacked slut from his office.’ Brigitte calmly fed the shredding machine a Polaroid of Digby and herself atop a couple of drooling camels, the pyramids shining in the background. Dry-eyed, Cat noticed with admiration. Even now, Brigitte seemed in control. From the floor below they could hear the clatter and din of Saturday night at Mamma-san.
‘I just wanted to tell you there are a couple of footballers at the desk. They haven’t booked.’
‘Alone?’
‘Two women with them. They look like lap dancers. Although of course they could be their wives. What should I tell them?’
‘Tell them to call ahead next time.’
‘Could be good publicity. There are a couple of photographers outside.’
‘It’s even better publicity if we turn them away.’
‘Okay.’
Cat turned to leave. Brigitte’s voice caught her at the door.
‘Do you know what I am this year?’
Cat shook her head.
‘Forty. I am forty years old. How can I compete with a big bouncing pair of twenty-year-old tits?’
‘Twenty-four. And you don’t have to compete. You’re a strong, free woman who has seen life, and lived life, and all that kind of stuff. You don’t need to latch on to some man to prove you exist. She has to compete with you.’
Brigitte began to laugh. ‘Oh, my darling Cat.’
‘She’s not the catch,’ Cat said, warming to her theme, ‘you are!’
Brigitte stared wistfully at a photograph of Digby and herself at a crowded party – New Year’s Eve? – and then gave it to the shredder.
‘The trouble is, Cat, as women get older, the pool of potential partners gets smaller. But for men, it gets bigger.’ She fed the shredding machine a picture taken on a bridge in Paris. ‘So where does that leave women like us?’
And as the roar of Saturday night boomed beneath her feet, Cat thought, women like us?
Four
It was his favourite moment of the week.
When the city streets were starting to empty, and the lights were going out all over London, Cat would ease her long body into his car, closing her eyes as soon as her head touched the passenger seat.
‘Boy,’ she said. ‘I’m bushed.’
‘We’ll be home soon,’ he said.
He always picked her up at the restaurant on Saturday night. By the time Mamma-san closed for business, and the last drunken customer had been decanted into a taxi, and the kitchen staff and waitresses had all been fed and watered and packed off in a fleet of minicabs, by the time Cat locked up Mamma-san, it was always the early hours of Sunday morning.
These Saturday nights and Sunday mornings were among their favourite times. They would have a drink back at his place, shower together, and make familiar lazy love before expiring in each other’s arms.
Sunday meant brunch just off the Fulham Road, surrounded by the papers and fresh bagels in a little café they felt was their own private secret, where they could watch the world go by and pretend it was Chelsea in the swinging sixties. In these luxurious hours of doing nothing very much, their dreams coincided. Cat found the freedom she had craved since childhood, and Rory found the quiet life he had searched for since the end of his marriage.
But not tonight. Rory let them into the flat, and there were lights and music that shouldn’t have been there. Bright lights, loud music.
‘Jake must have let himself in,’ Rory said.
Jake was Rory’s fifteen-year-old son. He usually stayed with Rory’s ex-wife, Ali, at the weekend, and lived with Rory during the holidays. The exceptions to this rule were the nights when hysterical screaming rows ended with Jake storming off to his father. Rory frowned. What was it this time? He turned to Cat with an apologetic smile.
‘Hope you don’t mind,’ Rory said.
‘It’s fine,’ Cat said.
She had been looking forward to being alone with Rory and shutting out the world. But what could she say? Her man had a child, and if they were going to be together, she had to live with the fact. Besides, she liked Jake. When she had first met him, three years ago now, he had been a shy, sweet-natured twelve-year-old boy who had reacted to his parents’ divorce as though the sky had fallen in. Cat loved him instantly, and saw echoes of her own childhood wounds in the boy. Jake was clingy with Rory, and easily moved to tears, and you would have needed a heart of stone not to warm to him. But Cat had to admit it was hard to equate that sunny-faced twelve-year-old with the hulking teenager that Jake had become.
‘What’s this music?’ Rory smiled brightly, as he came into the room with Cat. ‘Nirvana?’
Jake – spotty, lanky and hooded, hormones in turmoil – was draped all over the sof
a with a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips.
‘Nirvana?’ he sneered. ‘Nirvana?’
There was another youth by his side, wearing a woolly hat. Cat thought, why do they wear outdoor clothes inside? What’s cool about that?
‘Nirvana,’ the youth chortled. ‘Nirvana!’
‘It’s White Stripes,’ Cat said. ‘Something from Elephant, isn’t it? “Ball and Biscuit”, is it? Shame on you, Rory. Hello, Jake.’
‘Sounds a bit like Nirvana,’ Rory said sheepishly.
Jake rolled his eyes to the ceiling. ‘It does not sound anything like fucking Nirvana!’
‘Tone down the language a notch,’ Rory said. ‘And please open the window if you have to smoke that stuff.’
‘Mum doesn’t mind.’
‘Mum doesn’t live here. Don’t you say hello to Cat?’
Jake grunted.
‘Hi, Jake, how’s it going?’ Cat said, in that affable voice she seemed to reserve just for him.
The friend was called Jude. Jude had been planning to stay the night with Jake until there was some dispute with Jake’s mother. The details were unclear. As far as Cat could make out, it was something to do with three-day-old pizza, unwashed socks and treating the place like a hotel. So Jake and his friend had escaped to Dad.
Cat felt sorry for Jake. She knew what it was like to have your mother and your father living different lives in different homes. She knew how trapped a teenager could feel. She struggled to remind herself that Jake was still the same vulnerable child she had known not so long ago.
But her Saturday night was shot, and it was hard to fight the feeling that your parents ruin the first half of your life, and then somebody else’s children ruin the second half.
How her mother would have laughed.
There was no lazy lovemaking for Rory and Cat that night, and the glass of wine they shared in the kitchen felt perfunctory, like a ritual that was getting old.
They bolted down the wine, as in the living room White Stripes gave way to hip-hop blaring from the TV, and she tried her best to hide her disappointment from Rory, because he was by far the kindest, most gentle man she had ever met, and she supposed she loved him.
She was bone tired. When they crawled under Rory’s duvet, they made spoons, and she soon fell into a fitful sleep, despite the boom-boom guns-and-bitches racket coming from the TV set.
When she woke in the early hours she was desperate for water, and wearing just her pants and a white karate jacket snatched from the dirty laundry, she padded her way through the now silent flat to the kitchen.
When she turned on the light she gasped. Jake and Jude were in their boxer shorts, munching toast.
‘Oh, excuse me,’ Cat said, grabbing a bottle of Evian from the fridge, and deciding not to get a glass because going to the cabinet where they were stored would have meant getting closer to all those gawky white limbs of the two teenage boys.
As she closed the bedroom door behind her, she heard the voice of Jake’s friend Jude, and their graveyard laughter.
‘Not bad for an old girl,’ he said.
Michael pushed his smile into his daughter’s filthy face.
‘She’s a mucky pup,’ he observed. ‘And she’s a chubby bubba. She is, she is! Ooza lovely chubby bubba? Ooza lovely chubby bubba? Chloe is, Chloe’s a lovely chubby bubba!’
Chloe stared blankly at her father.
Then she burped, and the burp evolved into minor projectile vomiting, a milky stream of mashed organic vegetables erupting from her mouth and then dribbling down that dimpled chin.
And Jessica thought, forced to listen to this mindless gibberish, who wouldn’t throw up?
‘Oooh, has Daddy’s chubby bubba got an upset yummy-yummy tum-tum? Has she? Has she?’
It can’t be good for her, thought Jessica. Talking to a baby as though you have just had a full frontal lobotomy, it just can’t be good for her development.
But then again, thought Jessica, what do I know about it?
Nothing, that’s what.
While Naoko cleaned the bile from her baby daughter’s face and clothes, Michael rushed off to get the £1,000 digital camera that he had bought to record Chloe’s vomiting for future generations.
Naoko lifted Chloe from her high chair and gently placed her on her feet. Chloe was walking. Well, not exactly walking. More like staggering really, Jessica thought, as she watched her niece shuffle around with the grim purpose of a drunk trying to establish sobriety, her parents on either side of her like kindly, concerned policemen.
‘She’ll be adorable when she gets some hair and teeth,’ Jessica said.
Michael, Naoko and Paulo shot her a look, as if she had uttered some unforgivable blasphemy.
‘Even more adorable,’ she added quickly.
‘She has hair and teeth.’ Naoko smiled, stroking the light brown bum fluff on the top of her daughter’s head. ‘Don’t you, Chloe-chan?’
Chloe smiled, revealing four tiny white teeth, two up two down, in the centre of her wet pink mouth. And then she collapsed onto her nappy-covered bottom, her brown eyes wide with shock. Four adults rushed to attend to her.
‘Come to your Uncle Paulo.’
But Chloe didn’t want to come to her Uncle Paulo. She clung to her mother and howled with outrage, staring at Paulo as though he had just climbed in through the window with a chainsaw.
Chloe was changing. A few months ago, when she was still indisputably a baby, Chloe didn’t care who picked her up and gave her a cuddle. But now, one month short of her first birthday, with babyhood already being left behind, she was clinging to her parents and regarding anyone else with suspicion. Not so long ago, she was content to lie back and be admired. But already, she was becoming her own little person, stingy with her affection and wary of the world.
Paulo was crushed. He had fondly imagined that Chloe would grow up loving him, just as he loved her. But she was dumping him already.
Jessica was glad that Chloe’s cuddles were off limits. When she had held her as a newborn baby, something strange happened inside her. It was far more than wanting a baby of her own. It was the terrible knowledge that she had been born to give birth in her turn, and that she might never fulfil that destiny.
For Jessica, there were a thousand humiliations in any visit to Michael, Naoko and Chloe. She couldn’t stand the pity of her brother- and sister-in-law. They were decent-hearted people, but it was bad enough feeling like a defective woman, without having to put up with all the concerned, sympathetic looks at her lack of fertility. The fact that the sympathy was genuine, and meant well, only made it worse.
She could understand their delight in their daughter – if Chloe were her baby, Jessica was certain she would never leave her side. But where did understandable, unbridled joy end, and unbearable, insufferable smugness begin?
Yet she had to be the good guest – expressing wonder at how much Chloe had grown since she had last seen her (seven days ago). Listening with rapt interest as Michael discussed developments in Chloe’s bowel movements, or Naoko went on (and on and on) about her daughter’s eating habits, and her apparently whimsical changes of taste.
Give me a break, thought Jessica. It’s bad enough that I can’t have one of my own. Do I really have to give a standing ovation to everybody else’s baby?
Jessica knew that Naoko was a good woman, and that Paulo was as close to Michael as she was to her two sisters. And, objectively, she could see that Chloe was a lovely baby – good-humoured, robust and adorable. In a bald, toothless, incontinent-old-geezer sort of way.
Jessica really didn’t want to come here for Sunday lunch any more. It was just too hard.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, with the fixed grin that she wore as protection around other people’s babies.
She fled the room with Naoko holding the red-faced, crying Chloe, and Michael stroking his daughter’s (when you thought about it) alarmingly large head, and Paulo keeping a respectful distance, like a minor courtie
r. Nobody even noticed her leave the room.
Jessica desperately needed to get to the bathroom, but there were these bloody baby gates all over the house. Now that Chloe was on the move, disaster had to be averted on every landing and stairway. Because of an eleven-month-old child who could just about make it from the sofa to the coffee table (the numerous remote controls were a source of endless fascination to Chloe’s sticky fingers), the Victorian terrace had been turned into a maximum-security prison.
Chloe certainly wasn’t getting through these gates. They were hard enough for an adult. You had to find the little button on top, press it down and lift up the gate all at the same time. Then you had to step over the bottom of the gate without falling flat on your face. Jessica made it through three gates and locked herself in the bathroom, where she confirmed what she already knew. Her period had started.
One more month of failure. One more month of feeling like she should be recalled by whoever had manufactured her. One more month of seeing that disappointed look in her husband’s eyes, neither of them daring to say what was in their hearts – that this marriage might be childless for ever.
And, just to rub it in, her period brought one more bout of teeth-grinding pain that would have had a grown man begging for it to stop.
I’m not crying, Jessica thought. They’re not going to see me cry.
But she had to get out of here. She had to find a place where she could remove the fixed grin and take a shower and let her husband hold her. So she almost ran out of the bathroom, stumbled over the metal bar of an open baby gate and, with a shocked intake of breath, fell flat on her face.
By the time Jessica presented herself in the living room, Michael was on his knees playing peek-a-boo with Chloe, who was now dry-eyed and shrieking with delight – talk about violent mood swings – and Naoko was alerting Michael to the latest bulletins from the kitchen.
‘I tried her on broccoli blended with sweet potato but the funny thing is that she refuses to eat anything green and – my God, Jessica, are you all right?’