by Fiona Gibson
The boy was just a couple of feet away now, blocking the afternoon sun. “You’re too pretty for him,” he murmured. He looked embarrassed, as if the words had fallen out before he could stop them. Behind him his mates were making gurgling and choking sounds, like central heating pipes going wrong.
A flicker of concern crossed the boy’s face. “Hey,” he said, “you really don’t know?”
“Know what?”
The boy shrugged. “He’s a dealer, love. Knocks out hash for the whole estate.”
She nodded, taking in the words.
“Nothing else, though. No crack or anything. Been doing it for years from his flat up there—” he indicated the top of the building “—but not anymore ’cause the dumb fucker got busted last week. Looks like he’s up for community service.”
“Oh,” Hannah said softly.
The boy grinned. “Asking for it, flash bastard. Reckoned he was doing it to support himself and that loony mother what’s been in and out of mental asylums….”
She looked into the boy’s eyes, which were blank and pale. She turned to push the door open and ran up the stairs, not wanting to hear any more.
Through the door to Ollie’s flat she could hear faint music and the hum of a Hoover. A woman was singing. She had a clear, sweet voice. Hannah hovered, daring herself to press the bell.
The woman sounded happy, not like someone who was carted off to hospitals. The Hoover stopped and the music was turned up a notch. It felt wrong, bursting in on her when Ollie had been busted and all kinds of stuff had been going on.
Hannah jumped as the door opened. “Oh, gosh, don’t do that to me!” the woman exclaimed.
“Sorry,” Hannah stuttered, “I was…I’ve come to see Ollie, I—”
“Come in,” the woman interrupted, “I was popping out to the shops but it’s not important. I’m Celia, Ollie’s mum. Have a cup of tea with me, tell me how you’ve been feeling.”
Hannah frowned as she followed her into the flat. How she’d been feeling? Perhaps Ollie had told his mother about her. As Celia bustled around in the kitchen, Hannah sat gingerly on the sofa where Ollie had held and kissed her. “Here you go, sweetheart,” Celia said, handing her a mug of weak tea.
“Thanks.” Hannah glanced from the clip-framed photos to the real Celia, who’d arranged herself cross-legged on the floor. The two women weren’t terribly different. The skin around her eyes was more crinkled now, and her shoulder-length curly hair was flecked with gray, but she had a sweet, dainty face with vibrant green eyes, which had barely aged at all. “I’m not sure when he’ll be back,” Celia said. “You know how hard he is to pin down.”
Hannah dropped her gaze. What would it matter if she came straight out with it? Maybe the boy outside had been making stuff up just to keep her talking. Perhaps he, not Celia, was the mad one. “I was talking to a boy outside,” she began. “He said Ollie’s been…in some trouble.” She met Celia’s gaze.
“Yes, darling, but it’s all being sorted out. It’ll blow over.” Her smile wavered. “He’s a good boy,” she added. “Works ever so hard. Pays the rent on this place, has done since we moved in. But then, you’ll know all about that….”
Hannah nodded, as if she knew the first thing about Ollie and his financial arrangements. “I just hope he’s okay.” She really meant it. As she arranged the facts in her mind, she decided that it didn’t make him a bad person.
“People get up to far worse around here.”
“I know they do,” Hannah murmured. The tea was too hot to drink, but she sipped it anyway, scalding her lip. The room seemed less disturbing now. In fact, it felt almost cosy. Would she and her own mum ever be friends and equals, Hannah wondered, as Celia and Ollie clearly were? Imagine being cool about him being busted for dealing. Hannah remembered her mother’s grief-stricken face at the police station.
“That’s a pretty necklace,” Celia added.
“Thanks. Ollie gave it to me for Christmas.”
Celia chuckled and reached out to touch the silver chain. Hannah flinched as her cool fingertips brushed against her neck. “Naughty, isn’t he, buying you something so expensive? Especially with the two of you saving up for a deposit on a flat….”
Hannah shrank away from Celia’s touch. “It’s okay,” Celia added, “he told me about your plans. I’ll be okay by myself. Doing much better these days, got a job and everything.” She directed her gaze to Hannah’s stomach. “I’m pleased for you,” she added warmly, “though I do feel a bit young to be granny.”
Hannah placed her mug on the floor, allowing her hair to fall forward. She couldn’t let this woman see her face. She didn’t know what to think or how to make sense of what Celia was saying. Was it a joke, she thought desperately, or had Ollie been making up all kinds of wild stories? She felt dizzy and stifled with the red walls around her. “You’ll be okay,” Celia continued. “I was young, too, when I had Ollie. Barely seventeen, just started college. Turned out he was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Hannah’s eyes filled with tears as she stood up. “I’ve got to go,” she managed. “There’s stuff I have to do.”
“Darling,” Celia cried, leaping up from the floor, “you’re all upset! Have I said something?”
“No, I—”
“You’ll be fine, you know that? You’ve found a wonderful young man. You’re adorable, you really are, just like Ollie said. And look at you—five months and not even showing! I was massive when I was carrying him, had to wear these gigantic dungarees from the army-and-navy shop…Thought of any names, sweetheart?”
Hannah blundered toward the door, not knowing or caring who Celia thought she was. “Hazel,” Celia called after her, “don’t feel you have to rush off, I can call Ollie on his mobile if you—”
She didn’t hear any more as she clattered down the steps, wanting to be as far away as possible from Celia and her red living room with all those staring clip-framed pictures. “Hey!” the straw-haired boy yelled as she hurried away from the block, “looking for your boyfriend? Come back, come and talk to us….”
Hannah kept running until she reached the canal. She tripped down the steps, stopping to catch her breath beneath the curve of the bridge. She thought about Celia’s words: People get up to far worse around here. She wondered who Hazel might be, and how she felt to be pregnant at, what, fifteen or sixteen years old? A girl in the year above Hannah had had a baby last year. “He’s gorgeous,” everyone had cooed, clustering round the old-fashioned pram with massive chrome wheels at the school gate. Ginny, the new mum, had tried to look pleased. Hannah had caught a look in her eyes, the look of someone who was trying to be brave when she desperately wanted to be young and free like everyone else. As they’d exchanged a glance, Hannah had realized she’d never met anyone who looked desperate to be in school.
A narrowboat chugging past along the canal. An elderly couple waved at her. Look at them, Hannah thought, waving back, they don’t have any worries. Life’s so much simpler when you’re old. When they’d gone, she touched her pink crystal necklace, feeling the chain’s silky coldness against her skin. Without undoing the clasp, she pulled it from her neck and flung it into the canal, where it barely made a splash, as if it had been nothing at all.
40
Max couldn’t pinpoint what irked him about tradesmen. The electrician who’d come to fit extra sockets had been overly chatty and displayed too great an interest in Max’s splint. “Buggered my hamstring,” he announced gleefully, “last time I played five-a-side. That was the end for me. Got to face it, haven’t you, mate?”
“Um, yes,” Max had responded, not quite knowing what it was that he had to face.
“There comes a point,” the electrician had rattled on, “when you’ve got to hang up your boots and admit you’re finished.” Max had blinked at him. He was thirty-eight years old. He’d barely got his head around the fact that he might be toppling toward the cavernous void they called a midlife crisis. Now, this s
tranger was blithely pointing out that he was finished.
The painter and the decorator, who’d come to finish the bedrooms now that Max was incapable of climbing a ladder, had given his emulsioning efforts a disapproving stare, as if an unruly child had sploshed paint randomly about the place. These people made you feel so incompetent, as if some doctorate in the Advanced Application of One-Coat Gloss should be gained before you attempted to paint a door frame.
Thankfully, there was no else in the house right now. Max sat on a straight-backed chair in the kitchen, dutifully performing his leg raises—twenty per leg, rest and repeat—figuring that the real problem was that he wasn’t accustomed to having to ask for help. All these years he’d lived in a state of reasonable contentment—if depressed, he was only mildly depressed—cooking perfectly serviceable meals, trying to be a decent enough father while running the shop and fitting in a weekly cycle down to Kent. Even sex—he was pretty self-sufficient in that department, too. It was, he decided, hugely overrated. Most people said that after the first time, but his had been with Jane, and that had been anything but. When it was all over—approximately one-point-four seconds after it had begun—he’d wrapped his arms tightly around her. They’d fallen asleep that way, and woken up in the same position to a changed life. That had been the best part, waking up and finding her still there. He’d never come close to feeling that way again.
Max tried to summon up the energy for another leg-raise. This was so un-him, exercising for exercise’s sake. He’d never done push-ups, owned a set of bar bells or belonged to a gym. Cycling wasn’t about exercise, but about having the courage and mental capacity to push himself to the limit. It was about letting go.
He glared around his kitchen, which he’d had refitted in a whirl of pheromone-induced enthusiasm. Actually, it didn’t even feel like his kitchen. It was Veronica’s. She’d even picked the goddamn granite countertop. “So much more hygienic than wood, sweetheart, and don’t you think laminate looks cheap?” she’d said. Now, whenever their paths crossed, she greeted him with a pert ‘hello,’ as she might with any of Zoë’s friends’ fathers. Not that Zoë seemed to have any friends, apart from Hannah. Since they’d come back from Scotland they’d hung out together as usual, although he’d detected a shift in their friendship. Hannah had stopped wearing all that atrocious makeup for a start.
The rap on his front door made Max jump. He hauled himself up from the chair and hobbled toward it. He realized it was Jane before he’d let her in, despite the fact that the lower half of her face was obscured by the bubble-wrapped panel. She lowered it, grinned at him, and the twinge in Max’s leg melted away.
“Poor you,” she said in the kitchen, resting the panel against the wall.
“It’s not so bad,” Max said airily. “Splint’s coming off next week. There’ll be physio for a few weeks after that…well, I should be shipshape again.”
“So you’ll still be able to cycle?”
“Hope so.” They stood awkwardly for a moment. He saw her glance down at the panel. “So,” he added, “can I see it?”
Jane nodded. He watched as she peeled off its bubble-wrap and carried it through to the back room. How right she seems here, he thought, as if she belongs. He knew, before she held the panel at the window, that he’d like it. Even if he didn’t—even if she’d veered wildly away from the colors and shapes they’d discussed—he didn’t care at all. He’d still live with it and love it.
“So,” she said, “what do you think?”
His gaze traveled from her face to the swirling reds and golds. He walked toward it, feeling the colored light warming his face. “It’s…it’s perfect,” he said.
Jane smiled, and he saw relief spread over her face. She placed it against the wall. “I’m so glad. You see, it’s not the one I made for you. I made another one but it didn’t seem right….” She looked flustered now; her cheeks were pink, and her eyes were avoiding his. Max was overcome by an urge to hold her.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Max,” she continued, “something happened in Scotland, I met some—”
He did it then, not caring what she’d think; he took her in his arms and buried his face in her hair. “I told you,” he whispered, “it doesn’t matter.”
She pulled away, still pink in the face. “I’ll install it for you later this week.”
“Whenever you have time,” he said.
“Are you sure Veronica will be okay about it?”
He frowned at her. “What’s it got to do with Veronica?”
“It’s just…I know she’s helped you do the place up. The kitchen and everything. And the window—Well, she might feel weird that your ex-wife—”
He laughed mirthlessly. “I never think of you like that. As my ex-wife—”
“Don’t you?” she asked softly, meeting his gaze. “How do you think of me, Max?”
He cleared his throat. “As you. As Jane, that’s all. Anyway, me and Veronica aren’t really…a thing any more.”
“A thing?” Jane asked, laughing.
Max lowered himself onto one of the two wicker chairs, the sole furniture in the room. Jane sat in the other, curling up her legs. “Things didn’t go too well in France,” he added.
She glanced down at the splint. “I can see that.”
“I mean with me and her. She didn’t take it very well—my accident and everything.”
“How does one take an accident? It was hardly your fault,” Jane protested.
“She seemed to think I’d been reckless—not listened to her. It’s okay,” he added quickly, “we’re still friends…well, not friends exactly, but it’s all right. It’s not awkward.” He realized his voice had acquired a slightly strangulated, undeniably awkward quality.
“I’m sorry,” Jane said, as if she really meant it. Max looked at her, yearning to tell her the real reason it was all over—how Veronica had seen his face when he’d played Jane’s message. How she’d read thoughts in an instant. How she wasn’t so dippy after all.
“You should get out,” Jane said gently. “Go for a meal or see a film or something. You look like you’ve been stuck in here for days.”
“Well,” Max said sheepishly, “I have.” Was she suggesting that they went out, just the two of them? In the evening, like a real couple? He pictured them in a restaurant—some friendly, unpretentious place—with Jane not shunting butterless asparagus around her plate, but wolfing her food, hungry for the hottest curry on the menu.
“Why don’t you give Han a call?” Jane asked.
He frowned, failing to grasp what she meant.
“The two of you haven’t spent time together for ages. I can’t remember the last—”
“The aquarium,” Max interrupted, trying to mask the crushing disappointment in his voice. “That’s the last time I took her out. I don’t think she wants to hang out with me anymore.”
“You could ask her,” Jane insisted. “Why not ring her—she’ll be back from theater workshop by now—and see what she’s doing later? Come on, Max—she could do with a treat.”
Max studied her face. “Why, what’s wrong?”
She paused, biting her lip absent-mindedly. “Something’s happened since we came back from Scotland. I think there was some boy, and it’s all finished now—maybe he met someone else while we were away. She’s trying to be brave about it.”
“Has she said something?” Max asked.
Jane smiled. “I’m her mum, Max. I just have a feeling.”
Max felt a wave of shame. He was incapable of “having a feeling” where his daughter was concerned. Jane was right; for months, he’d spent their dad-and-daughter time either with Veronica, or Hannah had been holed up in Zoë’s bedroom when she was supposed to have come to see him. He’d lost her and he hadn’t even noticed.
“If you think she’d like to come out,” he said, “I’ll give her a call.”
“Of course she’d like to,” Jane said, squeezing his hand.
What struck him was how sweet and natural Hannah looked. Her purplish hair color was long gone, and now she seemed to have ditched the garish blue eyeshadow and overly glossed lips of her Zoë era. Her eyelashes looked normal, having lost their clogged-matchstick appearance. She had appeared at the door as his cab had pulled up outside Jane’s place and skipped toward it, looking almost—no, truly—pleased to see him.
And she seemed to approve of his choice of restaurant, Max decided, glancing around the Opal’s bustling interior, although it came to something when his own daughter seemed more at ease in such places than he did. He’d chosen it because it was new, not grossly expensive and he couldn’t think of anywhere else. Their table had been squished into a too-small corner. Max felt ungainly, as if he should keep his elbows tucked in and somehow shrink into himself. He glanced around at numerous unlined faces. Max had started to feel horribly geriatric.
His crutches didn’t help. Although he could manage to hobble around the house without them, he still needed them whenever he left the house. Hannah took a sip of her freshly squeezed juice. “Dad,” she said hesitantly, “Zoë told me something about Veronica.”
“What?” Max asked.
“She thinks she’s seeing someone else. Her business partner or something. Some guy with fuzzy hair and glasses who’s invested in the aphrodisiac stuff. Pug-ugly, Zoë said.”
Max pictured someone who vaguely fit that description from his party. Or rather, Veronica’s party. “It’s okay,” he said, trying to keep a lightness to his voice. “We weren’t very…well-matched.”