The Great Escape

by Fiona Gibson

  Barney makes a peculiar noise at the back of his throat. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since …’ Pete shrugs. ‘Just lately, that’s all.’

  ‘Right. Since you got your new iPhone.’

  With a roll of his eyes, Pete turns his attention back to the girls. ‘Well, I’d like to come. It’ll be interesting …’

  ‘Might pick up some new techniques,’ Barney murmurs with a snigger.

  Magda smiles brightly. ‘What about you, Barney? Are you free tomorrow?’

  ‘Well, not really,’ he blusters. ‘I’ve got the kids …’ He indicates them sitting contentedly in their buggy, as if Magda might have forgotten who his kids are.

  ‘Oh, the babies will be fine,’ Magda insists. ‘It’s all outdoors, they’ll enjoy it and it won’t take too long …’

  ‘Love to,’ Pete cuts in eagerly. ‘C’mon, Barney, we’re not doing anything else tomorrow, are we?’ Barney shakes his head mutely, imagining Sadie’s stern gaze shooting all the way down from Glasgow.

  ‘Great,’ Amy says warmly. ‘Around eleven, by the lake in the park?’

  ‘Sure.’ Pete grins. ‘See you then.’ Barney forces a smile, and as they turn to leave he glances anxiously around the beer garden to see if any of these watchful village types have been paying attention to their exchange. Not that I’m doing anything wrong, he reminds himself firmly, steering the buggy out through the gate and towards the sanctuary of home, where he plans to salvage whatever tattered fragments he can from the kids’ bedtime routine.

  THIRTY

  Sadie, Hannah and Lou have been installed in the low-lit bar opposite their hotel for less than half an hour, and already Sadie has confessed that she and Barney have had sex only once since she was six months pregnant. She glances down at her shoes. They’re not flat, battered Hissingham Park pumps with half the sparkles fallen off, or even marginally smarter coffee-morning shoes. They’re Sexy Sadie shoes – patent beauties with precarious four-inch heels. ‘I’m sure it’s normal,’ Hannah says. ‘You’re knackered, you don’t have the time. It’s like your priorities have changed. Things’ll get easier when the babies are a bit older …’

  ‘… Like at university,’ she says with a wry grin. ‘Oh, you’re probably right. It’s just that other mums seem to manage it.’ She does this a lot these days; says ‘mums’ instead of ‘women’.

  Sadie smiles, catching the eye of a tall, dark-haired man with glasses who’s standing in a small group by the bar. ‘Well,’ Hannah adds, ‘it sounds completely normal to me, not feeling like throwing yourself around the bedroom …’

  ‘You’re saying normal a lot,’ Sadie says with a grin. ‘D’you think we are normal, the three of us? For our age, I mean? When we were in Garnet Street, I always thought we’d have everything sorted out by now. Thirty-five seemed so old!’

  ‘I thought I’d have a roof terrace,’ Lou murmurs, ‘and my jewellery would be stocked at Liberty, and Spike and me would have made lots of beautiful babies. What about you, Han? Did you think you’d be married by now?’

  ‘Maybe not the married part,’ Hannah says thoughtfully, ‘but when I used to think about the kind of man I’d like to end up with, not the Marcs of this world but the one who was really meant for me …’ She pauses, looking up from her glass. ‘He was like Ryan. He really was. When I met him, there was none of the usual game playing or that time-wasting stuff and … well, it was as if he’d been there for me all along.’

  Lou frowns and pushes back hair from her eyes. ‘What about Daisy and Josh, though? How are you going to deal with that?’

  Hannah shrugs. ‘I suppose it’s pretty common for kids to hate their prospective stepmother. Maybe that’s just going to be part of getting married.’

  Sadie pauses. Outside, the street is thronging with smart couples and large, sprawly groups of students. The bar is packed, and the man in glasses keeps glancing over. Sadie’s wine has topped up the effects of Felix’s champagne, and she wonders, wildly, what’s making the three of them so keen to convince each other that everything’s all right. Why has Lou sacrificed her jewellery-making to work at Let’s Bounce and keep a man who barely has the energy to scratch his own arse? And why should Hannah put up with Josh and Daisy’s hostility? Perhaps this weekend, as well as being their great escape, is their chance to figure out what they need to do when they get home. ‘I think we should make a rule,’ Sadie blurts out.

  ‘What kind of rule?’ Hannah asks.

  ‘An honesty rule. A sort of truth or dare …’

  ‘I’m not running down Buchanan Street naked,’ Lou declares.

  ‘No, not that kind of dare,’ Sadie laughs. ‘I mean, we’re only here for two days, right? And the three of us haven’t been together like this since … when?’

  ‘Your wedding,’ Lou murmurs.

  ‘Yeah. And that was four years ago. So I think, as we’re here, we should start telling each other exactly how we feel and stop all this pretending.’

  ‘You start then,’ Hannah says with a grin. ‘You tell us what you’re thinking about now, apart from that man in glasses who keeps looking at you …’

  ‘What man in—’

  ‘She hasn’t noticed!’ Hannah sniggers to Lou.

  ‘Okay,’ Sadie laughs, ‘I sort of registered him, but here’s the really sad thing. I’m not thinking about whoever might happen to be looking because I’m wondering whether Barney’s used up my breast milk, which he’s meant to keep for emergencies, and if he’s tried to put them down to bed too early to get some peace and quiet and they won’t settle …’ She tails off. ‘And I think my breast pad’s leaking.’

  ‘Can’t see anything,’ Lou reassures her.

  ‘So you reckon it’s a national state of emergency in Little Hissingham tonight?’ Hannah asks.

  ‘Yes. No, not really. Now I’m thinking he’s taken the boys out this afternoon, and got chatting to some gorgeous young single mother who thought, ‘‘Oooh, look at him, managing all by himself with those babies …’’’

  ‘You’re insane,’ Lou laughs, shaking her head.

  ‘I know. I’m just a power freak, Lou. I rule Barney with a rod of iron, poor sod, and I’m paranoid …’

  ‘Me too,’ Lou cuts in. ‘You know what? One time, a couple of weeks ago now, Spike was ill with some kind of terrible gastric flu – well, a cold really – and I thought I could smell something off him.’

  ‘What kind of smell?’ Hannah asks.

  Lou shrugs. ‘Kind of … sweet. Vanilla-ish. Like … body lotion or something.’

  ‘You don’t think he’s up to anything, do you?’ Hannah cuts in.

  ‘No. No! God, he wouldn’t have the energy. And he’s, like … forty-eight …’ Hannah gives her a look. ‘I know,’ Lou adds quickly, ‘that forty-eight-year-old men have affairs, of course they do. It’s not like there’s an age restriction …’

  ‘You don’t think Spike is, though,’ Sadie adds.

  Lou shakes her head. ‘No, I don’t. It’s just me being silly … anyway, guess what he’s doing this weekend …’

  ‘Playing a gig?’ Sadie suggests.

  ‘No. Staying home to write his CV!’

  Hannah and Sadie burst into peals of laughter. ‘Well. God,’ Hannah exclaims, ‘maybe this weekend’s going to do him good. You know – shake him up a bit …’

  ‘And maybe Barney’ll realise that looking after the babies basically involves walking around the park about eight million times,’ Sadie adds, ‘and when I get home, he’ll have put that gloomy little cottage on the market and found us a lovely flat.’

  ‘Closer to London, you mean?’ Hannah asks.

  ‘Yes, like actually in it.’ Sadie kicks off the shoe that’s pinching her. ‘You know what, though? I feel better already. Just being here, I mean. Escaping for a bit.’

  Lou nods firmly. ‘Me too. And maybe I’ll resign from that crappy job when I get back.’

  ‘And start making jewellery again?’ Sadie asks. ‘Could you make
enough money doing that?’

  ‘Well,’ she says, grinning, ‘I doubt it, I mean we’d probably starve, but at least I’d die happy …’

  ‘What about you, Han?’ Sadie asks, turning to face her. ‘What about you and Ryan’s kids?’

  ‘Erm …’ Hannah places her glass on the table. ‘That’s kind of tricky.’

  ‘Can’t Ryan do something about it?’ Lou asks.

  ‘He could, I suppose, but they went through hell when Petra left and I don’t think he’s prepared to do or say anything to rock the boat.’

  Sadie reaches across the table to squeeze Hannah’s hand. ‘So … where does that leave you? I mean, you’re marrying him, Han …’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that I don’t want to be with Ryan,’ Hannah declares. ‘I just don’t want to be with him the way we are, in that house. I could move out, get a little flat … we could even still get married, but live separately like Helena Bonham Carter and her man, the film guy …’

  ‘Tim Burton,’ offers Sadie.

  ‘Yeah, like them …’

  ‘Or Woody Allen and Mia Farrow,’ Lou suggests.

  ‘But they split up,’ Sadie reminds her.

  ‘That’s because he started sleeping with her adopted daughter,’ Hannah points out.

  ‘Well, you could get your own place,’ Sadie offers. ‘I know it’s not exactly conventional, and your parents might think it’s a bit weird, but if it means having some distance from those horrible kids …’

  ‘You know what?’ Hannah says. ‘They’re not actually horrible. They’re just horribly … normal.’

  ‘Like us,’ Sadie says with a grin.

  ‘We’re so normal,’ Lou agrees.

  ‘Let’s get some cocktails,’ Sadie insists, ‘and toast our complete and utter normalness.’

  ‘If we’re going to have cocktails,’ Hannah says, ‘d’you fancy trying Felix’s bar?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe we’ll get them on the house?’ Lou suggests.

  ‘Great idea,’ Sadie says, forgetting her breast pad and even her babies for a moment as she throws her arms around her friends and hugs them as tightly as she possibly can.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Spike and Père Magloire are getting along great. He’s never imagined being friends with some craggy old bloke in a robe and a nightcap, but now he feels like they’ve established a strong rapport. There had been a couple of inches out of the bottle when he discovered it, lurking behind Lou’s cereals, and now there’s only a quarter of the bottle left. That’s the thing with quality booze, he reflects. You can enjoy yourself with no unpleasant consequences – which is the kind of set-up he thought he had with Astrid. But never mind her. Père Magloire is doing a sterling job of making him feel much better about all that. A distant memory causes Spike to smile – of him, similarly desperate for drink in Lou’s Garnet Street flat, and unearthing a bottle even dustier than this one and straining it through her tights. He definitely has a talent for squirrelling out long-forgotten booze. Maybe he should put that on his CV.

  By now – 8.37 pm – Spike is hungry and remembers, slightly too late in the proceedings, that it’s not a good idea to drink on an empty stomach. After another fortifying sip of brandy, he places his mug on the living room carpet and makes for the bathroom to spruce himself up. The white T-shirt and jeans are fine; all he needs is a quick splash of water on his face, plus a cursory check of his nasal hairs and he’s good to go.

  At the chip shop at the end of the street, Spike buys a deep-fried sausage and a carton of pale, limp chips, plus a bottle of Croatian red wine from the off-licence next door. He carries his supper home and eats at the kitchen table, eyeing Lou’s collection of beachy finds, which she’s arranged on the shelf above the worktop. Delicate shells, twisted nuggets of driftwood and barnacle-encrusted pebbles are often starting points for her jewellery designs. He feels a tug of regret that she hardly ever makes anything these days, a feeling compounded by the realisation that the sausage, an unsettling combination of grease and an unyielding plasticky skin, has been a very poor choice.

  Spike wipes the grease from his lips onto the back of his hand, fixing his gaze upon a cluster of spiky coral. Lou had been such a grafter at college, such a talented girl, winning prizes almost every year. She’d kept up the momentum for their first couple of years in York as an artist-in-residence … so what had happened? Maybe she’ll stick to her word and get back into jewellery when she comes home, Spike reflects. Then she’ll be happier. And he’ll do his CV, he decides, feeling foolish now for going on about spiked truffles and realising, with a sudden inebriated pang, that he misses Lou, and that maybe it’s for the best that Astrid has been so offish.

  Sunday night, and Lou’s return, now feels like a terribly long way away. He’ll go to that gig, then – the one Charlie’s doing the sound for. Have a night out, but not a massive night out, then get up early tomorrow and try to remember all his qualifications and jobs and any other qualities he can think of to put on his CV.

  Yes, that’s it, Spike decides, abandoning his half-eaten supper and the barely drinkable wine. He’ll be sensible this weekend, using Lou’s absence as an opportunity to clear his head. Right now, though, there’s a little brandy left in the Père Magloire bottle, and a whole night of fun to be had.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Ryan has been thinking about new and inventive ways to market quirky bar snacks but keeps coming back to the fact that, really, all anyone wants is crisps or nuts. Ultimately, it comes down to crispy or crunchy – nice and simple and covered in salt. No one really wants little baked biscuit things. The laptop is hurting his eyes and brain, so he abandons it on the sofa, throws some random ingredients into the wok and pours himself a glass of wine.

  Since Petra left with the children, Ryan has also pottered about in Daisy and Josh’s bedrooms – he has reached the age where he potters, he realises – gathering up books, clothes and sweet wrappers from the floor and dragging their duvets up onto their beds. He found a wizened peach, its skin all baggy and wrinkly, a plate of toast crusts and a toffee, which seemed to have melted into the carpet – virtually all the food groups in his son’s room. In Daisy’s bedroom, the rug crunched with tortilla chips, clearly her salted snack of choice. God, his kids are phenomenally messy. Ryan used to be too, but he’s had to force himself to invent routines and systems, all the stuff Petra used to take care of with alarming efficiency, to keep his family clothed and fed and in a reasonably hygienic state. And they’re doing okay, they really are – which gives Ryan a faint glow of pride. He doesn’t want to upset his family’s fragile happiness by grumbling about messy bedrooms.

  Now, having finished his uninspired supper, Ryan has drifted up to Hannah’s studio. He’s not sure why, and it feels vaguely like trespassing; he wants her to feel that it’s her space, away from his children, who he knows can be surly (he’s tried to tackle them on that score, only to be met with innocent shrugs and protests of, ‘But I didn’t do anything!’). It’s a beautiful room during the day, a loft conversion paid for with one of Petra’s performances in Berlin, with light flooding in and an uninterrupted view over the park. In the evening it becomes a cosy den, away from the domestic clutter of the rest of the house.

  The landline rings, and Ryan snatches it from Hannah’s desk as if caught doing something naughty. ‘Ryan? It’s me.’

  ‘Oh, hi, Petra. Is everything okay?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, everything’s fine…’ Only Petra can use the word to mean, actually, everything’s totally un-fine. ‘… We’re just going through Daisy’s reading books,’ she adds.

  ‘She’s done quite a bit of extra work during the week,’ Ryan says quickly. ‘Honestly, Petra, I think she’s doing okay.’

  ‘Well, she says so, but after that parents’ evening …’ That parents’ evening. The one at which Daisy’s teacher happened to comment – quite casually, Ryan thought – that when his daughter didn’t know a word, she was inclined to just make it up. Well, Ryan made things up
all the time. At work, he made up the fact that he gave a monkey’s about two more fragrances being added to the Corsican-Maquis-in-your-toilet range. ‘She was telling me about a proper short story she’s written all by herself,’ Petra continues. ‘Something they were doing at school on the theme of … what was it again, Daisy?’

  ‘An unforgettable experience,’ Daisy pipes up in the background, sounding so much younger than she does face-to-face.

  ‘Oh! Right. She didn’t mention it to me. That’s good, though, isn’t it? That she’s writing stories? I’ll have a read of it when she comes back.’

  ‘Would you mind emailing it over?’ Petra asks. ‘She seems really proud of it and I’d love to see it.’

  Ryan’s attention is momentarily caught by a young couple walking hand in hand across the park. He wishes Hannah were here now, and they could go out, see a film or have dinner, do things that normal couples do. ‘I doubt if it’s here,’ he tells Petra, ‘if Daisy was working on it at school.’

  ‘Daisy says it is. Says there’s a copy on Hannah’s computer because they were told to finish it at home.’

  ‘Really? Okay, give me a minute …’ He fires up Hannah’s PC. ‘Could you ask Daisy what it’s called?’

  ‘Hang on a minute …’ Ryan hears Daisy explaining something convoluted to her mother. ‘She can’t remember,’ Petra says.

  ‘Well, could you put Daisy on? Maybe we’ll be able to figure it out.’

  ‘Sure. Here you go. Daisy, Daddy wants to talk to you.’ There’s a shuffling noise as Petra hands Daisy the phone.

  ‘Hi, sweetheart,’ Ryan says. ‘So, you want me to find this story of yours?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Mum wants to read it.’

  ‘Right, er … so you’ve no idea what you called it?’

  ‘Mmmm … no.’

  Ryan exhales, clicking open Hannah’s document file. ‘Can’t see anything here, darling. It looks like work stuff, mostly, and pictures …’