by Freya North
I’d like to tell her that the baggage she thinks Zac shoulders is far more weighty to her than it is to him. But there’s no way she’ll hear that just yet.
‘I like him,’ she murmurs out loud, ‘I really do. But deep down I think I oughtn’t to go further.’
And Caleb? Just a day ago you were planning dinner parties and to reveal your coupledom to family and friends. You almost loved him, or at least you felt very strongly for him on account of him being so ‘normal’.
‘Is that why I slept with Zac?’ she asks out loud. ‘To get back at Caleb? To get over him? Was it simply just the drink influencing me? Or that I was feeling vulnerable? Perhaps vindictive – wanting to even the score?’
That’s what we’d like to know.
‘Perhaps a little of all those things,’ she decides, but now in a whisper. ‘Whatever the reason and however comforting and timely, Zac Holmes is not relationship material. And neither am I.’
Pip isn’t going to think about Caleb or consider his ‘normality’, or lack of it, just now. She’s humming, instead. Suddenly, she has remembered the tune Zac was whistling in her shower that morning.
‘Smokey Robinson,’ she says, relieved, ‘“Tears of a Clown”.’
She can only remember one line and she falls asleep, singing it over and again, feeling blank and refusing to think about Caleb or Zac.
But in my lonely room I cry
the tears of a clown
when there’s no one around
It was past midnight. Without considering the time, Zac phones his sister-in-law Ruth.
‘Yes?’ she answered the phone, hushed tones not concealing alarm.
‘Shit,’ Zac whispered back, ‘it’s only Zac. Is it too late?’
‘Zac,’ Ruth said, dropping the whisper for a quiet voice, ‘these late-night calls are becoming a habit!’
‘I shagged Clowngirl,’ he said, hating himself for dumbing it down, wishing he’d been brave enough, truthful enough, to say, ‘Pip and I had sex last night but I don’t think I was more than a one-night stand to her.’
Ruth, however, could hear very clearly between the lines. Fundamentally, if it had just been a shag, why was Zac phoning at this hour? After all, if it had been just a shag, why confide in her rather than brag to his brother? No, Ruth realized, it had been more than a shag; Zac and Pip had slept together.
‘Hold on,’ she said, ‘your brother is sleeping. I’ll take the call in the other room.’
If only Pip could have eavesdropped on what Zac said, how he phrased it and the tone of voice he used.
‘I found her crying her eyes out,’ Zac said. ‘Appears that her dashing doc was actually a bit of a wanker with a steady girlfriend. Anyway, I cheered her up – as did a bottle of Rioja. And I took her home and one thing led to another.’
‘You shagged.’
‘It was passionate,’ Zac qualified almost defensively, to Ruth’s silent approval, ‘but it felt like it had been a long time coming. Like there’s been some unspoken build-up. An inevitability.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Ruth, wondering why Zac sounded less than triumphant.
‘I don’t know where to go from here,’ he confessed. ‘I really like her – as more than a potential fling. But you know what – I can’t believe I’m going to say this – I’m a bit anxious.’
‘Why?’ Ruth asked, knowing she could easily fill in Zac’s gaps but knowing, too, that it was better for him to voice them out loud.
‘Two things, really,’ he said after a pause. ‘One: what am I about to get myself into? Is it worth it? Am I really ready for romance now, over and above simply sex which has been so simple over the last few years?’
‘Number two?’ Ruth pressed.
‘Two,’ Zac obliged, ‘nervousness. Are my feelings reciprocated? Or is she just on the rebound? I think I may be nothing but a one-nighter to her.’
‘There’s only one way to ascertain both,’ Ruth defined. ‘Broach number two first and then, if the answer is favourable, just relax into number one and see where it takes you.’ Ruth could sense Zac nodding. She could almost hear his brain charging over his concerns. ‘You could be pleasantly surprised,’ she said sweetly, ‘you might have found a very good thing indeed.’ Still he was quiet. ‘Zac?’
‘She’s on the rebound,’ he suddenly announced, with a complete change of tone, ‘and anyway, she was drunk, too.’
‘Zac Holmes,’ Ruth said, ‘I think you’re only going with that strand so that you don’t have to actually ask the girl how she feels. You’re plonking the onus on her so you don’t have to take risks.’ Zac didn’t reply.
‘God, for a beefy bloke you’re a bloody wimp,’ said Ruth, knowing it sounded harsh but confident it was the right thing to say. ‘Good-night, Zac. Good luck.’
Zac hung up and hummed softly the tune that had been on his brain all day. It was almost getting on his nerves.
Now there’s some sad things known to man
but ain’t too much sadder than
the tears of a clown
There was something about Pip, behind her slap and motley, her carefree zest and energy. Zac didn’t want to give too much credit to clichés of hiding behind a mask. But the truth was that he’d seen her in despair; vulnerable and hurt. The truth was, he felt for her. He really felt for her. But the truth was also that though the notion was certainly intriguing, the encumbrance of it was not. It was all starting to get on his nerves as much as Smokey’s tune. It would be better to get both out of his mind.
Think of a different song.
How about Marvin Gaye, ‘Sexual Healing’? How about focusing on the fact that Juliana would be back from South Africa in a week or so?
TWENTY-ONE
Conveniently, if deludedly, Pip reckoned she could levy against Fen the way she decided to feel about and deal with Zac. She wouldn’t have been able to have seen Zac that Thursday night anyway, even if she’d wanted to. A phone call from a distressed Django revealed that the middle McCabe girl, whom everyone thought so sensible and soft and centred, had actually been seeing two men at the same time. Lovely Matthew Holden, the urbane and generous young magazine editor with his own flat in Islington, who already had Pip and Cat’s seals of approval. And now, it seemed, some other chap as well, a bloke called Someone or Other Caulfield, twenty years Fen’s senior. An impoverished landscape gardener in Derbyshire, apparently. That’s how Django knew. When Fen was allegedly assessing sculpture in a private collection in Derbyshire. They’d been seen. In broad daylight. In a local pub, good God.
Pip and Cat were horrified, not just at the perceived wantonness of it all, but more at Fen’s secrecy. They’d had no idea and that, to them, was far more shocking, much more insulting and hurtful, than the notion that their middle sister was a morally inept slapper. Fen, upset but not defensive, went to great lengths to attempt to explain to Cat and Pip that she wasn’t playing one man off against the other. She tried to reveal how each man satisfied the two strongest strands in her life – town and country – and the myriad associations of each. She implored her sisters to believe how deeply she felt for both men, that she herself felt both fine and capable about keeping them apart. That, quite simply, at this juncture, she couldn’t choose between them, nor even see that she had to or ought to. No one was going to be hurt, she proclaimed, she would ensure that personally. She had never been in love but now she was, and twice over. She felt privileged. She wanted her sisters’ support, even if she had to bide her time for their approval.
However, Fen’s situation is a whole different story. Suffice it to say, that night, alone in her flat and believing herself to be at her most level-headed, Pip took Fen’s situation and manipulated it to her own ends. Thus Pip now stacked upon the baggage she presumed Zac to be burdened by, a clump of her own negative theories about love itself. Her hastily contrived conclusion was that love was not worth the effort. In her eyes, neither her sisters, nor her friends, were better off for the presence of a man
(or men) in their lives. She reasoned that she’d been happy enough when single – indeed, considerably happier than at present – and that all her current worries and insecurities and her tears had come only when men had been involved or, rather, when she’d been involved with men.
It was thus with a liberating sense of relief that Pip concluded Zac to be a great bloke she’d had sex with the once, and Caleb simply a bloke she’d had great sex with for a couple of months. Swiftly and decisively, she relegated both men to her past and put both down to experience, because for her present and her future, she decided that neither was a good idea. Neither provided the answer because, actually, she had no questions. She’d tried them both out. One naughty. One nice. Neither necessary. After all, she had already decided that she needed to keep herself stable and available for her two sisters: Cat was heading off to the Tour de France in little over a week and Fen was no doubt going to spin out of control pretty soon, too. Thank goodness June was fast heading for July and soon she’d be able to think in terms of ‘That was a month ago’. Thank goodness for the approaching weekend in Derbyshire. The sisters were to travel up together tomorrow evening, once Fen had finished work, Cat had filed copy, and Merry Martha had done a seven-year-old’s birthday party in Maida Vale.
Of course I’m going to give Pip something other than her sisters to think about up in Derbyshire! The conclusions she’s sketchily drawn in her bid to tidy her life are far too hasty, poorly composed and irritatingly nebulous. So, guess who’s going to seven-year-old Benji’s birthday party in Maida Vale? Billy is. With his cousin, Tom Holmes. And though Tom’s Auntie Ruthie is taking them and is due to collect them, too, once she’s seen who the entertainer is, she’ll phone Tom’s father and ask him to pick the children up instead.
‘Would you mind, Zac?’ Ruth says softly with a very passable impression of someone with a chronic headache. ‘My head is killing me.’
‘Let me call June,’ Zac says, ‘I have a stack of bollocks to wade through before I can leave.’
‘June’s away with Rob,’ Ruth reminds him in a flimsy voice, ‘that’s why Tom’s staying with us tonight.’
‘Bugger,’ says Zac, ‘I forgot.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Ruth says with a wince worthy of a medal for martyrdom, ‘I’ll take a couple of painkillers and try to nap in the car for a few hours. I’ll be fine. Honestly. Don’t worry. Please.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ Zac says gently with an edge of guilt, ‘it’s no problem – I’ll just bring the work home and do it over the weekend. You go home directly. It’s no big deal. Not at all.’
‘No, honestly,’ Ruth says meekly, knowing it’s important for Zac to actively want to collect the boys, not just do it as a favour to her, ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘Stop it,’ he chides. ‘I won’t hear another word, there’s no issue. Nothing comes before my son. Go home, Ruth, rest.’
‘Oh Zac,’ she all but whispers, ‘thanks so much.’
‘Are you OK to drive?’ he asks. ‘Why not leave your keys and take a cab?’
‘I think so,’ she replies with a credible quiver to her voice. ‘I should be OK. If I head off now. If I take it slowly.’
Ruth revs her engine with some triumph. She embarks on the mother of all detours: from Maida Vale to Holloway via Westbourne Grove. The circuitous route is totally unnecessary but a sublime pleasure. Two hours’ quality shopping time is a luxury Ruth seldom has nowadays. She can’t remember when she last browsed around Agnès B and Paul Smith and APC without Billy tugging her sleeve, whining to go. It must be even longer since she treated herself to tea and cake at Tom’s Deli rather than burger and coke in McDonald’s. Momentarily, she feels just slightly wicked about her white lie. Will she be tempting fate by faking it? Might a monster migraine tomorrow be her comeuppance? No. Rubbish. She is doing a very good deed indeed, matchmaking the clown and the accountant. She is well deserving of the wodge of cake, plus the Hepburnesque A-line dress. Oh, and the Diptique candles and the armful of cornflowers and delphiniums. After all, she had resisted the divine bag at Paul Smith.
Initially, Zac was irritated to turn up in Maida Vale so early when he’d left work harassed and in such a rush. Soon enough, though, he couldn’t believe his eyes, his luck or how fantastic it was that Ruth should have a migraine on a day when the traffic was so light. For a split second, he felt guilty at the degree of his pleasure in Ruth’s malady. But his sister-in-law’s headache was an absolute blessing. In fact, he was downright delighted that she felt too poorly to collect the kids, that he’d turned up so damn early. Because – well, what do you know! – three guesses who’s entertaining the children at Benji’s seventh birthday party! Just then, despite being one of life’s most down-to-earth non-believers, Zac worshipped the gods of fate and fortune for having smitten Ruth with the headache. He even took a moment to send vibes of thanksgiving heavenwards.
Because there was his clown. Over there. Doing a precarious handstand as proficiently as Les Dawson used to play the piano in an expertly bad way. Her shapely legs akimbo, one clad in red and green stripes, the other in blue and yellow spots. Her body swaying this way and that, threatening to topple at any moment. She was yodelling ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ at breakneck speed. Oh, the skill of it!
There was Pip, mid-handstand, mid-song when, from her upside-down vantage point, she spied at the back of the room a pair of legs in chinos, feet in suede slip-ons, that could only belong to one person.
She forgot the words.
She forgot how to maintain a handstand.
She forgot what she was meant to feel about Zac.
She was acutely aware that she was upside down with her legs splayed, her body tilted at a gravity-defying angle.
Silence.
‘Eyes-and-ears-and-mouth-and-nose,’ she suddenly sang shrilly, flic-flaccing herself upright and taking a deep bow. ‘Heads, shoulders, beans-on-toast, beans-on-toast.’
‘Knees-and-toes!’ the children shrieked back the correction. ‘Knees-and-toes!’
Merry Martha, looking flushed and very jolly, put her hands on her hips and frowned: ‘That’s what I said, diddle-eye?’ She sang again: ‘Heads, shoulders, beans-on-toast, beans-on-toast!’ Again, the children protested ‘knees-and-toes’ and again Merry Martha got the song wrong.
Zac was laughing. Not because she was Perrier Award-winningly funny, but because her antics and energy infused the room with infectious daft jollity. The skill of her magic was to weave such apparently simple and unconditional fun in and around the children. And by the looks on their faces, she was achieving this in abundance.
‘Where is Bendy?’ Merry Martha asked, though she now spied Tom for the first time and gave him a grin. ‘Where is Bendy?’
‘Who?’ the children chorused.
‘Bendy!’ the clown declared, as if they were stupid. ‘The Burp-day Boy – Bendy!’
‘Benji!’ Benji proclaimed, his hand held aloft. ‘It’s Benji and I’m him. It’s my birthday.’
‘Come here, Bendy Burp-day Boy,’ the clown ordered, to much mirth. ‘I am going to create for you – cos it be your Burp-day – a balloon in the shape of a, um, a, um – balloon!’
Benji looked vaguely disappointed when the clown blew a long thin balloon and presented it to him. ‘Thank you,’ he said anyway.
‘Can I have it back, if you please?’ Merry Martha asked, grabbing the balloon before the child had a chance to hand it over, let alone protest. ‘Thanking you kindly, Burp-day Boy.’ With a twist and a stretch and a knot and a mutter and a whistle and a daubing of marker pen, the clown returned the balloon as a sausage dog. There were appreciative gasps all around. She made more animal forms and distributed them amongst the throng. She established eye contact with Zac. ‘Dearie me, dearie me,’ she squawked, ‘there is a great big kid at the back with no balloon.’ Twenty pairs of eyes fixed on Zac. Followed by nineteen sniggers (Tom was the exception).
‘He’s not a kid,’ Tom protested w
ith his hand up, ‘he’s my dad.’
‘Oh well, then,’ Merry Martha declared all sulkily, ‘if he’s only an old mad dad, no balloon for him!’
‘But I think he could have one,’ Tom said, suddenly concerned that he’d deprived his dad of Merry Martha’s highly collectible latex sculpture (Tom had kept Dr Pippity’s balloons until they’d wrinkled and deflated and stuck dustily to themselves). ‘Even if he is just an old mad dad. I think he might like one, anyway.’
‘Righty-ho,’ the clown trilled, wrestling with three long balloons and then wielding her marker with gay abandon. ‘Come on up, old mad dad.’ Zac approached, holding her eye contact and twitching his mouth, raising his eyebrows in an ‘I’m warning you, bitch!’ kind of way. ‘You’re right,’ the clown marvelled to Tom, ‘he’s too big to be one of you. He is an old mad dad.’ She turned to Zac, eyes a-sparkle. ‘Would you like this balloon? It is a balloon in the shape of a bunny rabbit. It is a delectable collectible.’
Zac grinned at her and said ‘Yes, please’ in an animated way.
‘Firstly, you must stand on one leg,’ the clown decreed. He did so. ‘Now you must place your hand in front of your mouth,’ she ordered. And he did so. ‘Now you must place your other hand behind your back, please, like this.’ She demonstrated. He did so. ‘Now,’ she said, winking at the children, ‘you must hop around the room like a Red Indian who has trodden on a wasp, making loud Red Indian-style noises to ward off evil spirits and praise the balloon gods.’
Zac looked at her as if she were mad and well on the way to a jolly good hiding. But, with an ‘I’ll get my own back later’ kind of smirk, he did as he was told. The children fell about laughing. Even Merry Martha momentarily laughed like Pip McCabe. ‘Well done, old mad dad,’ she said, ‘here is your prize.’ Zac collected his trophy and returned to the back of the room, with most of the children wishing their dads were even half as mad. While Merry Martha involved the children in a mass, tuneless rendition of ‘Happy Burp-day Dear Bendy’, Zac admired his balloon rabbit. On its belly she’d written ‘Bunny Girl xx’. It gave him as much of a sudden thrill as if she’d taken his cock and deep-throated him there and then. His conscience tried to remind him to focus on Marvin Gaye and Juliana. But he told himself to shut the fuck up. She didn’t think of him as a one-night stand. How could he have worried that she was merely on the rebound? She liked him. She wanted him. That was all that mattered.