by Freya North
‘What about the slap?’ Zac asked.
‘Well, I suppose I could keep spares at yours,’ Pip proposed.
Zac couldn’t keep himself away from the mirror, or any reflective surface. He didn’t think back over his day at all. He felt lively and a daft voice materialized easily. Pip went through to the kitchen and though she told him to sit and relax, he preferred to follow her there and loiter and get in her way and pinch her bottom and tickle her side and cup both her breasts when she reached up in a cupboard for a new bottle of HP Sauce.
‘Zac!’ she declared with mock outrage.
‘Zig!’ he corrected.
‘Beans, cheese, HP,’ she offered, ‘or I could do tuna mayonnaise. Or a combination of any?’
‘The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?’ Zac posed.
‘Actually,’ said Pip, ‘I rather think it’s through his trousers.’
She’d certainly whetted his appetite and he’d tickled her fancy, too. But she insisted he ate up his supper first. He kept his face on during the meal, checking his reflection in the back of a spoon. They cleared away the plates and before she could protest or duck, he’d caught her in his arms and was kissing her passionately. She couldn’t do a thing about it. His kiss was so seductive that soon enough she was happy to submit. She’d never kissed a clown before. How good he tasted. Greasepaint and HP and an indefinable taste that was uniquely his. He was smudged and she was covered. They were both breathless and could have stripped off and got down and dirty right there in the kitchen if it wasn’t so small and if there had been more than a breakfast bar to lie upon.
‘Bed?’ Zac murmured, sucking her bottom lip, grazing his teeth against it, slipping his tongue along it and into her mouth.
But Pip insisted that he take off his slap because she’d changed her sheets that morning. She sent him into her bathroom where a jar of cold cream and a bumper pack of cottonwool balls awaited him.
When he emerged, however, free of make-up if a little blotchy here and there, Pip felt suddenly a little shy, somewhat apprehensive. There was no Dr Pippity or Merry Martha or Zig Zac to puppeteer. There was no Tom to be aware of. There was no ambiguity over whether he’d stay or go. They hadn’t had more than a bottle of beer each to be falsely bolstered by. There was nothing more to eat, neither wanted another cup of coffee. There was just Pip McCabe and Zac Holmes on the first Monday in November. It was what Zac termed a ‘school night’ and, past midnight, it really was bedtime.
How to get there?
Do I ask him?
Shall I just ask her?
‘Gosh, is that the time?’ Pip says and it sounds so contrived that they both laugh.
‘Shall we?’ Zac suggests. Pip nods, coyly, which isn’t contrived, it’s simply the way her face falls just then. But Zac doesn’t mind at all, he thinks it rather becoming. She locks up, switches lights off, checks the fridge door and takes a couple of deep breaths on the way to her bedroom. Zac is standing in his boxers. His ankles have corrugated marks from his socks. ‘I borrowed your toothbrush,’ he informs her, ‘hope that’s OK?’ Pip nods. He comes towards her. ‘Thanks for having me,’ he says, slipping her pullover off.
‘I’m rather hoping you’ll have me now,’ says Pip with a coquettish grin which this time she employs most knowingly.
‘Well,’ Zac falters theatrically, ‘OK then. If you insist.’
‘Oh, I do,’ Pip says, ‘absolutely.’
Pip’s bedside light remains on and they marvel and delight at the sight of each other. They thought they were full, but the taste of each other is so good they could gorge all night. The physical excitement is heightened by the anticipation – not just from the evening, but really from the months leading up to this very moment. Penetration, when it comes, is not an anticlimax but a vindication. And yet, the physical sensation of Zac inside Pip doesn’t feel remotely familiar to either of them, though it feels incredible. But there again, they’ve simply had sex twice before. Right now, they are making love for the first time and it’s as intense physically as it is soothing emotionally. Previously, having sex has been about taking gratification. Climax has been anticlimax. Tonight, exploring each other’s bodies is what is most absorbing. The more pleasure they give, they more they find they receive. The foreplay lasts longer than the copulating but when they come it is within nanoseconds of each other. It’s a wavelength thing. It’s a release, a culmination, a climax and yet also a beginning, a taste of what’s to come. And as they peel away from each other and pant, side by side, they congratulate themselves on their sexual compatibility.
Pip switches the light off.
Zac switches it back on. ‘You don’t have any coke, do you?’ he asks.
‘You’ve brushed your teeth!’ Pip laughs. ‘Have water.’
‘Who can we phone?’ Zac wonders. Pip is confused but she’s grinning because she knows from his tone and expression that he’s larking about.
‘I have Pepsi Max,’ she offers, ‘those small mixer cans?’
‘No, no,’ says Zac, ‘I was talking “caine”, not “cola”.’ Pip looks confused. ‘Cocaine,’ he says with a dead straight face.
‘What?’ Pip protests, sitting up and gathering the duvet against herself protectively. ‘I don’t do drugs,’ she doesn’t care how prim she sounds, ‘well, I have done – but only the soft stuff. And I don’t now!’
‘I don’t either,’ Zac confides, ‘apart from Nurofen.’ He pauses. Pip is looking decidedly uneasy. ‘You see,’ he says, ‘even though I’m shot away with tiredness, I think we should stay awake all night and not sleep at all.’
‘What?’ Pip is lost. ‘Why? Can’t we just do that post-coital cuddle and then fall asleep? I’m shagged – literally.’
‘Pip McCabe,’ he says, regarding her sternly, ‘don’t you see? When I’ve slept with you before, you’ve run away each morning. Something must happen while you sleep, some demon descend and muddle with your mind. If we stay awake, you can’t bugger off.’
Pip doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘I’m not buggering off,’ she assures him quietly, ‘I’m really looking forward to waking up tomorrow morning. And having you here. With me.’
It’s 5.00 a.m. She shouldn’t wake him on account of his nightmare day yesterday and no doubt another hellish day today. But she needs to.
‘Zac?’ she whispers. ‘Zac?’ She puts a hand on his shoulder. His skin is silky but cold, too. She pulls the duvet gently up to his ears. ‘Zac,’ she says, ‘Zac?’
He wakes with a start. ‘Fuck, what’s the time?’
‘Don’t ask,’ Pip says, ‘it’s only five.’
‘Are you OK?’ he asks. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing’s wrong – I wanted you to see that I’m still here.’
Zac absorbs this information and chides himself that, for his sins, he has lumbered himself with the peculiar girl he always suspected Pip was. How reassuring. He’d got her right. ‘Good,’ he says, turning his head back into the pillow, ‘that’s good. Be there in a couple of hours, too, and I’ll be very, very happy.’
‘There’s something else,’ Pip announces and her whisper hides the fact that she’s tearful.
‘Yes?’ Zac mumbles sleepily, raising his head from the pillow as much as he can muster.
‘I lied,’ she says.
‘Yes?’ he says.
‘Yes,’ she confirms.
‘I forgive you,’ says Zac. He’d forgive her anything for just two more hours’ kip.
‘But you don’t know what about,’ Pip implores, spooning herself against his back and touching her lips against his shoulder, ‘you don’t know what I’ve done.’
‘Whatever it is,’ he says, reaching his hand backwards and giving her a rub along her thigh, ‘you had a reason. Tell me about it in the morning. Don’t worry. Get some sleep, you mad woman.’
Zac wakes just before the alarm clock and finds Pip gazing at him intently. She smiles. He replies. She looks exhausted. ‘Hullo
,’ he says.
‘Morning,’ she says.
‘Are you OK?’ he asks.
‘I didn’t sleep,’ she says.
‘Shit, was I snoring?’ Zac grimaces.
‘No,’ Pip tells him, ‘no, you sleep in a very ladylike way.’
‘Oh God,’ Zac groans, ‘you’re not still harbouring doubts about my sexual orientation, are you?’
Pip laughs and shakes her head vehemently. ‘I need to talk to you,’ she says and looks serious and sad, ‘about my lie.’
The alarm bell trills out.
‘OK,’ says Zac, ‘but would you mind if I took confession in the bathroom? The shower curtain will do as a screen.’
Zac brushes his teeth and Pip perches herself on the edge of the bath. She takes a deep breath. Looks at Zac directly. And begins.
‘I haven’t seen my mother since I was six years old,’ she declares. She pauses, trying to assess his reaction to her bombshell. ‘I don’t remember her at all, really. She ran off with a cowboy from Denver.’
This, Zac was not expecting to hear. He’d thought at the worst there’d be some lurid confession featuring the Dashing Doctor and ambiguity about the overlap with himself; at best something about not letting him keep the clown hat. But it appeared that she was chaste and that he had the hat. ‘Your mother did what?’ The information was so bizarre, it was difficult for him to take in.
‘She left us – three girls and our dad – for some bloke from Denver. A cowboy. A ranch owner. Very rich. We haven’t heard from her since.’ Pip speaks flatly, focusing on her hands lying deceptively still in her lap. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
‘For what?’ Zac exclaims gently, thinking to himself that it’s Pip’s mother who should be doing the apologizing.
‘For lying,’ Pip admits.
‘Django?’ Zac asks.
‘Oh God, he’s real – you could never make up someone like him. He’s been our mother and our father, our guardian angel. We never had to want for a thing – warmth, love, sustenance. Django provided for us and he still does.’
Zac sits beside her though the edge of the bath is unremittingly cold against his bare bottom. She glances at him and sees he has a blob of toothpaste dribble on his chin. It can stay there. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says again.
‘It’s awful,’ Zac says, shaking his downcast head, ‘terrible.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Pip says, wondering what else she can say or do to prove it. She knows her background must sound unconventional but she’s confident that she and her sisters are grounded, good people. And so she also knows she shouldn’t have lied. ‘I’m sorry. It is awful. You’re completely right.’
‘Huh? No, I mean for you,’ Zac says, stroking her leg. ‘I can only imagine and actually, I’d rather not. Poor Pip. And your sisters.’
‘But I lied,’ Pip says, almost urgently, ‘to you.’
‘And I can understand why,’ Zac says. ‘No wonder you’ve trodden so carefully. I don’t blame you. It must lurk at the back of your mind that people who should stay, go.’
Pip considers this. Then she sobs, her lips aquiver.
‘So, to combat that, you tend to pip them to the post.’ He raises her chin gently with his hand. Her eyes meet his. He’s gazing at her, benevolently.
Then her nose wrinkles and she sucks at her lip. ‘Pip them to the post?’ she says, helpless not to snigger.
‘I know, I know,’ Zac cringes, burying his head in her shoulder, ‘you deliver your great confession and that’s what I come out with. Jesus!’
Pip’s smile is short-lived. She looks concerned again. Zac sidles up close and nudges her. ‘I’m not afraid of commitment,’ she says as if defending herself, as if he’d be justified to think that she was, as if her revelation and the fact that she’s lied to him might well make him change his mind.
‘Good,’ says Zac, ‘because neither am I.’ They regard each other. ‘Think how I am with Tom,’ he tells her. ‘If you’ll have me, I’ll stay.’ Pip’s eyes smart. ‘I know you have your sisters. Your friends. Your crackpot uncle who I am dying to meet,’ Zac continues, ‘but if you’ll allow me, I’d really like to take on some of the looking-after, too. If your nearest and dearest will tolerate me.’
Pip looks into Zac’s eyes. Django’s voice fills her memory and her heart – he’d told her that if Zac was even half the chap he thought he was, he would understand and embrace the provenance of her fib.
Django’s right. And why wouldn’t he be. And Zac’s right for me. And why wouldn’t he be.
Pip thinks of Cat and Fen. Recently, they haven’t seemed like her little sisters. It’s not that they’ve suddenly grown up, Pip realizes, but that she herself has let them into her world, though she had to dismantle some of her barriers to do so. And in they bustled, armed with affection, concern and actually pretty mature, sound advice. Pip looks again at Zac. How they’ll all love him! They’ll be so happy for her. And he’ll fit right in. Pip has not needed a man, but at last she is content to want this one. She can practically smell, almost taste, the banquet that Django will no doubt prepare in honour of Zac’s first visit.
I want to make it soon. I want to bring Zac into my family’s fold.
A tear slicks an oily passage out of Pip’s eye and takes a faltering path down her nose to her lips. She licks it away. Zac has let her have her thinking time without intrusion but now he senses he can gently nudge her. ‘You can never,’ he says, soft but firm, ‘never have too many people looking after you. You ask Tom!’ Pip wants to nod and laugh and cry but finds she’s only capable of a jerk of her head and a strangled gulp. Tenderly, Zac puts his arm around her. ‘I’m here,’ he whispers, ‘because I want to be. Why would I want to leave?’ Pip lays her head against his chest and hears his heart as she listens to his words. ‘But,’ Zac says, ‘I’m late for work and I have a sod of a day ahead.’
Pip walks to the bathroom door. ‘Zac?’ He pokes his head around the shower curtain. ‘I’m sorry I lied,’ she stresses a final time.
‘You’d have to do far worse to put me off,’ Zac assures her. She nods. She looks over to him, he’s shivering slightly. She ought to let him have his shower and embark on his nightmare day.
‘Tell you what,’ Zac says, ‘I’ll forgive you everything for a cup of tea.’
Pip laughs. ‘Herbal?’ she asks. ‘Or normal?’
‘Normal!’ Zac pleads. ‘And a towel,’ he calls after her. ‘This one is like the Turin bloody shroud – it has half of Zig Zac’s face on it.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Theodora Children’s Trust, which was the inspiration behind my fictitious Renee Foundation, trains and funds talented artists to work with sick children in hospital every week of the year. The Swiss Theodora Foundation was formed in 1993 and has established Theodora clown doctor programmes in nine countries around the world. In the UK, the Trust (set up in 1996) currently supports nine trained Theodora clown doctors. Eight hospitals, one special centre and almost 30,000 children a year benefit from their visits. I am indebted to the Trust and its executive director Joanie Speers for enabling me to study the work of its clown doctors. It was a privilege to watch them at Great Ormond Street and at Guy’s hospitals. I would like to thank Dr Mattie (Matthew Faint) and Dr Doalot (Eliza Neam) for allowing me to follow them on their ward rounds. I know that Pip is a better clown doctor for it.
My research for Pip was fun and fascinating. I am grateful to Clown Mattie (again) for all his help and enthusiasm, for opening the doors to the Clowns’ Gallery to me after hours and for lending me research material. Also, to Clown Fizzie Lizzie (Elizabeth Morgan) whose knowledge on clown history is encyclopaedic. Other people willing to assist me were: Clown Bluey (Blue Brattle), Gino the Clown (Georgina Hargreaves), Emile the Mime Clown (David Girt) and Clowns International photographer Robert Morgan.
Many thanks are due to Alan McGee for kindly letting me set up my laptop in a relatively quiet corner of his office when my son Felix decided my study at home ou
ght to be his bedroom.
I’d like to thank the team at Random House and the indefatigable Sophie Ransom from Midas PR. As ever, immense gratitude goes to my agent, mentor and friend, Jonathan Lloyd. Finally, special thanks to Mary Chamberlain for her fastidious editing – and patience.
Theodora Children’s Trust, 42 Pentonville Road, London N1 9HF. 0207 713 0044. www.theodora.org
‘Clowns work as well as aspirin, but twice as fast’
Groucho Marx
AFTERWORD
The number of people who said to me ‘you can’t have an accountant for a hero’ or ‘you can’t have a heroine who’s a clown’ …! However, before I’d even started to write this, my 6th novel, I knew Pip herself pretty well through writing about her sisters Cat and Fen in my fourth and fifth books. And as for a hero who’s an accountant? Well, why not? I’ve always been keen that my characters should be down-to-earth, normal people – people my readers will recognize themselves in or know others just like them. It’s one of the reasons I started writing – I was bored of reading books where the characters were uber-glam and had careers and lifestyles that meant nothing to me.
Whilst researching this novel, I discovered amongst friends and family just how many people don’t much like clowns. But also during my research, it became clear how clowning goes way beyond greasepaint. The Clowns Gallery in east London was a fascinating starting point – colourful, yet odd and eerie too. A huge cabinet contained over a hundred years of painstakingly painted eggs – each documenting and also copyrighting the unique masks of individual clowns.
In March 2003, when my daughter Georgia was just 6 weeks old, my son Felix, then twenty three months, broke his leg quite badly. It necessitated a lengthy stay in hospital, in traction, followed by a period of time at home in a ‘spica cast’ which went from his waist down both legs. He adapted marvellously – but it was traumatic for me. In hospital, despite being flat on his back, he still had fun with the art therapist – but there were no clown doctors there. When, that summer, I started to research Pip in earnest, it became fundamental for me to highlight the incredible work these artists do – and thereby give substance to my book as well. Research is a true perk of my career – but for the first time, through Pip, I found it incredibly humbling and enriching too. Watching the clown doctors at work and seeing the effects on patients and their families was profoundly moving. They’re a gifted and generous bunch. And, after a day’s shadowing them, I’d return home to hug my children tight and be so thankful for my blessings.