by LUCY LAING
Tash paused, and put down the bucket of horse feed she was carrying.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘She told me when I saw her earlier. She’s so excited about it all.’
‘I hope she knows what she’s doing,’ I said.
‘I think she does,’ said Tash. ‘Just because we can’t think of anything worse than have a screaming baby to deal with twenty-four hours a day, doesn’t mean to say that Rach thinks like that. Plenty of women do it, after all. And anyway,’ she added, ‘it’s a good job we aren’t all the same, else the world would be a really boring place.’ That was true, I thought as I drove to work. Tash had it right. She was so forthright - she always called a spade a spade. You always knew where you were with Tash.
Her direct manner had landed her in all sorts of hot water over the years – and us too. Kaz, Tash and I had gone clubbing a few years ago and we had nearly got thumped, all because of her.
We had been walking out of one club at midnight on a Saturday and a group of five girls were in front of us. They were all huge with tiny unflattering skirts on and vest tops, with rolls of fat spilling over the sides. I can never understand why people dress like that. Do they honestly look in a mirror and think ‘hey, I look hot tonight’? Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a ‘fattist’. I’m not criticising people for being fat - it takes all shapes and sizes to make the human race. But don’t pour a size 18 white flabby body into clothes that are only designed for reed-slim clotheshorses. It’s not an attractive look. I hate my legs, I mean really hate them. I’ve got thick knees and wide ankles too. My legs don’t go in and out like legs should. They go straight down like tree trunks. But I can see that, and I wouldn’t be seen dead in a mini skirt because of it. I never have done. It’s not because I’m nearly thirty. My legs don’t look good in a short skirt and that’s that. So I usually wear trousers, jeans, or if I do wear a dress, it comes below the knee, like my sexy polka dot Karen Millen dress.
To someone like Tash, the girls’ outfits had been a nightmare. Tash was incredibly stylish. She had the most fantastic legs and her jet black hair was smooth and glossy, no matter how many stables she mucked out. I only had to look at a stable and my hair was suddenly filled with straw and old cobwebs. Tash looked like she had stepped straight out of a riding magazine photo shoot.
Nick had commented on how he’d love to photograph Tash, as according to him she had the most amazing bone structure. I had teased him mercilessly after that for perving after my friends. But I had to agree with him, Tash could stop traffic - and she frequently did. Whenever I walked down the road with Tash swinging her hips besides me to the frequent tooting of car horns, I felt as invisible and as unattractive as a female sumo wrestler. She had this raw sexuality exuding from every pore. I didn’t like to imagine what Tash was like in bed, obviously, but from what she said, she was a real tigress. And certainly she never had a shortage of admirers. After all, she had made Mr Beale the geography teacher do something he had probably never thought possible. He had risked his entire career and his marriage for Tash. If you could bottle what that girl had, you would make a fortune.
Tash had even confessed that she had had an affair with one of her best friends before she left Hong Kong. We had looked rather alarmingly at each other when she told us that.
‘Don’t be getting any ideas,’ Kaz had told her fiercely. Tash had raised her eyebrows at her.
‘I wouldn’t make a play for any of you,’ she had told us witheringly. ‘This girl was seriously hot.’ We all felt a bit offended, and for a split second we wanted Tash to think we were hot, (even though the thought of making out with one of your best friends was seriously gross).
Nick would almost choke on his own tongue if he knew that Tash had swung both ways. He already thought she was hot - this would be dynamite in his narrow-minded opinion.
A few days later I was at my desk, fishing in my bag for a tissue, when I suddenly felt my phone vibrating. I picked it up. Damn, there were five missed calls showing on the screen, all from Kaz. I hoped she was all right. I dialled her number.
‘You’ll never guess what?’ she said, as soon as she answered, before I could even say hello. ‘I’ve just seen Tash, in a coffee shop.’
So?’ I said.
‘With Mr Beale,’ she finished dramatically.
‘Whaat,’ I nearly dropped the phone. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive,’ she said. ‘I was on my lunch hour and I had to go to Boots in town, so I walked past that tiny coffee shop on the corner, just before the pub. You know where I mean, we never go there because it doesn’t do cappuccino.
‘And there they were. I saw Tash first of all, as she was facing the window. She didn’t see me, so then I stopped by a lamppost and pretended to tie my lace so I could carry on looking.
‘I couldn’t tell who she was with at first, as he had his back to the window, and his hair is a lot greyer now than when he was at school. But then he turned sideways and I could see that it was him. I couldn’t believe it.’
We both fell silent.
‘What do we do?’ I said eventually. ‘He is probably still married to Mrs Beale, so Tash shouldn’t be even going there. We’ve got to say something.’
Kaz agreed, but we couldn’t decide what to say. It may have all been entirely innocent, but given their past history, it didn’t seem likely.
‘If I get any inspiration, I’ll call you back,’ I told Kaz, and hung up.
‘Your life is better than a soap opera,’ Nick remarked, looking up from his computer where he had been working on some images. I’d forgotten he was there. I always seemed to have juicy phone calls when he was lurking in the background.
‘What’s been happening now in the world of the HHC?’ he asked. ‘Whatever it was sounded exciting.’
I paused for a minute. If I told Nick what Tash was up to - and about her sordid affair with Mr Beale when she was still at school - I think he would ejaculate on the spot. After all, schoolgirls were the object of most grown men’s fantasies. And here was a real life one being acted out under his nose.
Mind you, he was still seeing his young student, which was nearly as good as a schoolgirl fantasy. I may as well tell him - he always seems to know what’s going on in my life anyway. And we were stuck about what to do - I could pick his brains for ideas.
‘Now whatever you do, don’t ejaculate in my direction,’ I said sharply, turning my chair around to face Nick.
He laughed. ‘I know you’re gorgeous, Bee,’ he said. ‘But I think I can just about manage to contain myself.’ I ignored that remark, and proceeded to tell him about Tash.
‘You see, it might all look innocent now, having a coffee together and just chatting,’ I finished telling Nick. ‘But Tash loves nothing better than getting her claws into a married man, even though it is against club rules. And it was hardly innocent the last time - thirty days holed up in a bed and breakfast together.’ Nick’s eyes lusted over at the thought of thirty days in a bed and breakfast with Tash, and then quickly pulled himself together.
‘What can we do about it?’ I said to Nick, hoping he would have some answers.
‘It’s her life, she has to live it,’ he said unhelpfully.
‘No way,’ I said. ‘Her love life is now under club rules. We decide who she sees, as we know what’s best for her. And seeing Mr Beale again certainly isn’t.’
I rang Kaz back this evening.
‘I’ve got a plan,’ I said, when she answered the phone. ‘I think we have to follow Tash, to see what she’s up to.’
‘Good idea,’ said Kaz. ‘Then when we’ve got some hard evidence, we can confront her.’
‘The only thing is, I don’t think we should tell Rach what we are doing,’ I said. ‘She will get all excited and try and make us wear the latex masks, and she really is crap at any form of stalking.’ Kaz agreed with me.
We decided we would wait until Tash told us that she was going out, and then put the plan into action. We didn’t have l
ong to wait. Two days later, I’d invited the girls round to my house, and I got a text message from Tash, saying that she couldn’t make it. I rang Kaz.
‘This is it,’ I said. ‘This is when we will catch her out. She can’t be sneaking around our backs with a married man. Not when she’s a fully fledged member of the HHC. She swore to us that she wouldn’t get involved with a married man again, and now she’s gone and broken that promise.’
Ten minutes later, I had picked Kaz up in my Mini and we had driven fast over to Tash’s house. I was worried that she might have already gone, but luckily her white Ford Fiesta was still in the drive.
We parked fifty yards down from the house, far enough away so that Tash wouldn’t see us when she came out. We could see her light on in her bedroom.
‘She’s probably tarting herself up for Mr Beale,’ I said angrily.
Tash took ages to appear. Kaz and I sat in the car, chewing some gum I had found in my CD box.
‘I feel like a couple of those fat American detectives who are always staking people’s houses out,’ said Kaz. ‘All we need is a couple of polystyrene cups of coffee and a bag of doughnuts.’
Half an hour later, the front door suddenly opened, and Tash sashayed down her front drive and opened her car door. She turned the ignition - and I turned mine at the same time.
She reversed down the drive and set off down the road, with me following a short distance behind.
‘I wish I’d borrowed my mum’s car, I’m worried that she’s going to recognise my Mini,’ I fretted, following Tash as she turned right towards the local park.
A few minutes later, Tash pulled up in the car park and jumped out.
‘Now what do we do?’ Kaz asked.
‘We follow her of course,’ I said.
We ran over to the start of the path, and we could see Tash in the distance, amongst the trees. There was an rusting Victorian pavilion in the middle of the park, and she was heading for that.
Kaz and I tried to keep as quiet as possible as we threaded our way in-between the trees too. I could see the grey ornate railings of the pavilion in front of us, and we saw Tash sit down on the bench at the front of the pavilion. A few seconds later, we both gave a gasp as we saw a man walk out from behind the pavilion and sit down beside her. It was Mr Beale.
‘Crikey, the years haven’t been kind to him,’ I whispered to Kaz. Mr Beale was quite grey around the temples, and he had a bit of a paunch. They looked deep in conversation - and had no idea that Kaz and I were crouched behind a nearby bush watching their every move.
Mr Beale suddenly slumped forward and put his head in his hands. Tash put her arm around him and put her head down close to his. I could feel Kaz stiffen beside me. I had the urge to run over to the bench and pull Tash up and shake her by the shoulders. What on earth was she playing at? I turned to Kaz, and shook my head. Neither of us could quite believe what Tash was doing. We had tried not to think too badly of her when she was a schoolgirl, believing that she didn’t know better. But now, ten years down the line, she was behaving just as badly. If not worse, as she knew what heartache she had caused for his wife last time.
Tash stayed for an hour talking to Mr Beale, and then they both stood up. She gave him a long hug and he buried his head in her shoulder. Tash turned and started walking back to her car. She walked right by the bush where Kaz and I were. We could even see the stripes on her trainers as she walked past, and we hardly dared breathe.
We waited until she had disappeared from view, before we crept out of the bush and made our way back to our car.
‘At least she didn’t have rampant sex with him on the bench,’ said Kaz. ‘I don’t think I could have stomached seeing that.’
‘We need to call an emergency meeting tomorrow night,’ I said. ‘And then we will have to tackle her about it.’
I sent out the email the following day. I half expected Tash to reply saying that she couldn’t make it because she was sneaking off to meet Mr Beale. But her reply read, ‘I thought we were having a meeting next week - why the emergency?’
‘Something’s come up that we need to discuss,’ I typed back.
‘Are you going to be giving her fifty lashes?’ said Nick excitedly as I switched off my computer to go home. I’d told him that we had followed Tash and watched her shameful behaviour with our own eyes.
‘Something like that,’ I said grimly, picking up my handbag.
‘Can I watch?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely not,’ I replied, and swept out the door. I’ve always wanted to do that, sweep out the door. And it felt really good - like I was in some Hollywood film or something.
The girls were sitting around the table at the restaurant when I ran in. The stupid burglar alarm had decided to keep going off as I was due to leave the house, and I had been frantically trying to reset it. But it kept going off. Cursing, I eventually cut the power to the alarm and ran out of the house.
‘Sorry,’ I panted as I came into the restaurant. We all ordered our food, then looked at Kaz, who was chairing the meeting.
‘This is no ordinary meeting,’ she said solemnly, looking around at each one of us. ‘This is an emergency.’ She paused for dramatic effect, and we all waited for her to carry on. ‘It has come to our attention that one of us has not been acting under club rules,’ she said. The girls all looked at each other. There was an air of expectancy hanging over the table.
‘Tash, can you explain what you were doing with Mr Beale on two separate occasions?’ said Kaz, sharply, looking over at Tash.
To give her credit, Tash remained as cool as a cucumber, staring back at Kaz without dropping her eyes. I must admit, she had a nerve. I would have crumpled under such interrogation. Soph and Rach had both let out a gasp. It was the first time they had heard of anything going on.
‘What do you mean, I’ve been spotted twice?’ said Tash, coolly. ‘By who?’ Kaz told her that she had seen her in the cafe with Mr Beale, and then she took a deep breath.
‘And then Bee and I followed you to the park the other day and saw you with him.’
Tash burst out laughing. ‘I didn’t see you at all, that was pretty good, girls,’ she said. ‘Where were you?’
‘We were in the bush by the pavilion,’ I said. ‘But more to the point, Tash, what on earth are you doing? You know that Mr Beale is married, and all the heartache you caused last time. You promised this club that you would no longer go after married men. You swore that you understood the words ‘other people’s husbands.’
‘So that’s what you think of me, is it?’ said Tash, scraping back her chair and standing up, her eyes flashing with anger. ‘How long have you known me? You must know that I’d never go back on my word.’ And with that she grabbed her handbag and stalked out the restaurant. We sat looking at each other, not knowing what to do. Then Soph stood up.
‘I don’t believe she’s doing anything wrong. I think you’ve misjudged her,’ she cried, running out after Tash.
‘How can she think Tash isn’t doing anything wrong?’ demanded Kaz. ‘Bee and I saw her with our own eyes. Tash has run off with him once, I wouldn’t put it past her to do it again.’
The door opened, and Soph came back into the restaurant, pulling a reluctant Tash behind her.
‘I think you have all got some apologising to do,’ Soph said hotly, pulling out a chair for Tash to sit on. ‘It’s not what it seems.’
I raised my eyebrows at Kaz. This had better be good.
‘Go on,’ encouraged Soph, giving Tash a little poke in the ribs. ‘Tell them.’
Tash looked up.
‘It’s not what it looked like,’ she said finally. ‘Mr Beale has been having problems with his wife Hazel and he wanted some advice. He has discovered she’s been having an affair.’ We gaped at her. I thought I was going to hear some ‘round the houses’ explanation from Tash - but not this.
‘They got back together after his affair with me,’ she carried on. ‘And they were desperately try
ing for a baby for years, which you probably all know about. They ended up trying IVF treatment as nothing was working, and eventually, five years ago, their daughter Lauren was born.
‘He said that although it had been a really tough five years - which had nearly broken them apart - when Lauren was born, they were both over the moon. All they had ever wanted was to be parents and now they had their daughter.
‘Then a year later, she fell pregnant again - but this time without any help at all. The IVF had kick-started her body into working again, and she gave birth to their second daughter Rosie three years ago.’
So far it sounded like a wonderful story - I couldn’t think how it had all gone wrong.
‘But then last year she went on a diet. She’d put on four stone since the girls were born and felt enormous,’ carried on Tash. ‘So she decided to join a slimming group and managed to lose five stone, and according to him looked fantastic.
‘The only problem was, she had also joined a gym to try and shape up and she’s gone and had an affair with the gym manager, which is still going on. He only discovered it two weeks ago and he’s heartbroken. He doesn’t know what to do.’
The story was awful, there was no doubt. But there was one thing that I didn’t understand.
‘How on earth are you involved with it?’ I asked Tash. ‘Your affair finished ten years ago and as far as we knew, you never saw him again.’
Tash looked a bit sheepish. ‘He asked me to join Facebook as his friend a couple of years ago. I didn’t think there was any harm in it,’ she added defensively, seeing our shocked faces. ‘It was only a few emails on Facebook, it’s not as though I was shagging him or anything.’
She did have a point. But she hadn’t told any of us that she was back in touch with him.
‘Honestly it was all innocent,’ she said. ‘I talked with him on Facebook about once every six months, that’s all. Then recently he asked to see me again to see if I thought there was anything he could do to save his marriage.’