by Fiona Gibson
Ryan knows he could have all that again, but right now his daughter is demanding that he shows her how to skim a stone properly. He selects a flat, smooth pebble that’s cool in his hand, throws it hard and fast across the water and hopes for the best.
FIFTY-FOUR
Two hours after leaving Little Hissingham, Pete calls Barney with the gleeful announcement that Amy has texted him already.
‘That’s great,’ Barney says without conviction, simultaneously trying to clean Milo’s bottom with a wet wipe. While Barney grips the phone, Milo makes his escape, crawling away at speed and daubing the living room rug with poo.
‘You’d better come clean with Magda,’ Pete adds, ‘before you run into her again, you single dad with the adorable babies, managing all on your own …’
‘Oh, fuck off,’ Barney says, realising that he, too, is now crawling, in hot pursuit of his son. Dylan, who’s strapped in his bouncy chair with splatters of mustard-coloured baby food all over his front, wails to be let out.
‘Aren’t you going to tell her you’re married?’ Pete wants to know.
‘Yeah. No. God, it’s not really important, is it …’ Hell, how can so much poo come out of one little person? He grabs Milo and plonks him, still dirty-bottomed, on his lap.
‘Well, it’s probably quite important to Sadie,’ Pete reminds him.
‘Yeah. Listen, I don’t really have time to talk right now … I’ll call you later.’
Barney hangs up, still clutching Milo and gazes bleakly at the brownish stains on his freshly-washed jeans. Now, to make matters worse, Pete’s phone call has rekindled Barney’s guilt. He looks around the room in mild panic. There’s poo on the floor so he can’t liberate Dylan from his seat yet. His jeans are dirty, yet he can’t change them until Milo is firmly encased in a fresh nappy. And only then can he turn his attentions to the rug. So many tasks have piled up, just when he’d been congratulating himself for coping so well. The room smells like a sewer, and he’s lost one of the boys’ baby shoes too; it must have fallen off when they were in the woods. And the buggy’s a disgrace, its wheels caked with mud which he’ll have to scrub off before Sadie comes home and wonders where the hell he took them. She’s only been gone for a day but he has never known such crushing exhaustion in his entire life.
Breathing deeply, he cleans Milo as best he can, puts a nappy on him and, with Dylan’s cries dying down to a whimper, places his brother in the seat beside him. Then he sets to work on the rug. Pausing for breath, he glances up at the framed wedding photo on the mantelpiece. Sadie looks ravishing – all full red lips and tumbling wavy hair, like a young Sophia Loren. God, she was gorgeous. Still is, of course, when she’s not barking at him, being the parenting Führer. The phone rings, and he dumps the wet cloth on the rug and rushes to answer it in the kitchen. ‘Barney? It’s me.’
‘Oh, hi, darling. How’s it going?’ His fingers smell terrible, he realises now.
‘Good. Great …’ Sadie says.
‘Have a wild time last night?’ Barney wills her to say yes and tell him all about it, to distract her from quizzing him about how things are at home.
‘Not really, just a few drinks, bit of a dance at the end of the night.’
‘Oh, come on,’ he teases her. ‘It can’t have been that tame.’
‘Well, it was!’ she says tetchily. ‘We just had a nice night, that’s all.’
‘Right, okay. …’
‘How are the boys?’ she wants to know.
‘They’re fine, been really good.’
‘They don’t sound fine. They’re crying!’
Barney glances at his sons, willing them to be quiet. ‘Yeah, well, they’re just a bit hungry, I’ll feed them in a minute.’
‘You’d better go then,’ she says sharply.
‘Okay! I will, I just answered the phone …’ God, what was he supposed to do? Leave it ringing, making her panic even more?
‘I tried your mobile a couple of times this morning,’ she adds.
‘Sorry, out of charge.’
‘And the house phone. I tried that too.’
‘Like I said, we went out for a walk.’ Christ, had he said that?
‘You sound a bit stressed,’ Sadie observes.
‘Just busy. You know what it’s like.’
She chuckles mirthlessly. ‘Yes, sort of. I can relate …’
‘Yeah, I know. Stupid thing to say.’
‘Anyway, you said you were just about to feed the boys …’
Barney breathes deeply, wondering how this conversation has gone so wrong. ‘It’s okay. They’ve quietened down a bit now.’
‘That’s good …’ She clears her throat. ‘Um, Barney, thanks for this. For letting me … no, not letting, you never make me feel like I need permission to do anything …’
‘Of course you don’t,’ he says, relieved at the softening of her tone.
‘But thanks anyway. It’s been … good for me to get away.’
‘I’m glad,’ Barney says.
‘It’s … sort of like I’m me again,’ she adds hesitantly, ‘and it’s made me realise I haven’t exactly been a bundle of fun lately.’
‘Sadie, it’s fine,’ Barney says, his guilt kicking in again now. ‘You’ve just been under a lot of pressure …’
‘I don’t want to be like that any more,’ she says firmly. ‘I love you and I love the boys, and I miss you all, you know …’
‘We miss you too.’
‘I haven’t messed it all up, have I?’ she blurts out.
‘Of course not! You haven’t messed up anything. You’re a fantastic mum, and more than that, you’re the love of my life, you know that?’
‘Well, I hope so.’ She lets out a small laugh.
‘You are. You completely are.’
‘You’re mine too,’ she says.
After the call, with the boys in a happier mood and content to kick around on their play mat, Barney walks around the house in a semidaze. What was that about – Sadie worrying about messing things up and blurting out her feelings for him? She knows, Barney thinks, sweat beading on his brow. Somehow, she knows I’ve been in the woods with a couple of twenty-year-olds. After feeding the babies he takes them out again, marching around the village and avoiding the park, even though Magda isn’t working in the café today. You’re a bloody lucky man, he keeps reminding himself. Don’t mess it all up.
Later, he decides, when the boys are settled in their cots, he’ll wipe the food smears off the worktops and high chairs and investigate the whiff that’s started to come from the fridge. Then he’ll take the baby listener out to the back garden and delve into the shed where Sadie’s bike is lying all buckled and broken. There’s a mountain-biking centre nearby, with a repair shop, which he thinks is open on Sundays. Tomorrow, he’ll load the babies into their car seats and Sadie’s bike into the boot, and the three of them will drive to that bike place in the hope of putting everything back together again.
FIFTY-FIVE
‘I’d really better be going,’ Johnny says reluctantly. ‘I’m supposed to be picking up Cal from his mum’s at four.’ He and the girls are still in the café, having ordered yet another round of coffees which, he suspects, no one really wants, but has given them an excuse to spin out their time together.
‘Where does she live?’ Sadie asks.
‘Not far, just over in Merchant City.’ Johnny feels a twinge of guilt; usually he’s so keen to collect Cal from his mother’s that he shapes his entire day around it.
‘We could all come with you,’ Hannah teases him. ‘We could turn up en masse, terrify the poor boy …’
‘I want him to meet you all,’ Johnny says quickly, ‘but yeah – it might be a bit much for him today.’ A bit much for Rona, he means, and he can picture Action Man’s scathing gaze if he did show up with three women. Still rollicking around with your old student mates, Johnny? Anyway, better dash, I’m on call, got lives to save …
‘I’d like another quick loo
k around town anyway,’ Hannah says.
‘Me too,’ Sadie adds as a small silence descends, and Johnny focuses on the collection of cups and plates on the table.
‘Well, if it’s okay with you, and please say if it’s not, I’d like to come with you,’ Lou says suddenly.
Johnny turns to look at her. ‘Yeah! Yeah, that’d be fine …’
‘I don’t mean going to Rona’s place,’ Lou adds quickly. ‘I just mean I’d like a walk, mooch around for a bit. Might check out some of the other vintage shops, so I could head over that way with you if it’s okay …’
‘Of course it is. Shall we go then? I tend to get the evil eye from Tristan if I’m late.’
Johnny tries to affects a breezy demeanour as he and Lou part company with Sadie and Hannah outside the café. Yet it’s proving to be a challenge. He feels like a teenager again, a teenager who cannot believe his good fortune to have found a glittering excuse to be with his favourite girl. Lou is chatting animatedly as they walk, the skirt of her patterned dress swishing around her slim calves, her neat little feet encased in flat red ballet pumps. Lou’s auburn hair is just as she wore it in Garnet Street, as if the defiant curls have resisted any attempts to tame them. Her face is pink-cheeked and pretty, her eyes sparkling and alive as she stops to admire the jewellery in a posh boutique.
‘This is gorgeous,’ she enthuses. ‘I’m sure I remember the name from college …’ She peers at the label attached to a necklace made from fine interlocking silver hoops.
‘Your stuff’s lovely too,’ Johnny ventures.
‘Oh, I haven’t made anything in ages. I keep intending to, but in the evenings I don’t seem to have the energy and the weekends …’ She shrugs. ‘They sort of pass me by in a thrilling whirl of domesticity. Anyway,’ she adds, ‘I don’t have any materials at the moment. We’re kind of going through a bit of a cash crisis.’
‘Isn’t Spike working?’
Lou shakes her head and laughs dryly. ‘I’m not blaming him, though. I could get it together if I really wanted to and had the motivation.’
‘You should. You really should make some space for it, Lou, because the pieces I saw on your website—’
‘You’ve looked at my website?’ she exclaims.
‘Yes, I did.’ He feels his cheeks colouring. ‘I looked at it last night actually.’
Johnny focuses hard on the necklace in the window, conscious of Lou studying his face.
‘Well … I’m flattered. So what did you think?’
‘Really impressive. It’s a nicely designed site.’
‘Thanks. A web designer I know offered to do it in exchange for some jewellery. But I need to start doing the stuff everyone tells you to do – the marketing, the getting out there and selling myself.’ Lou pauses and smiles. ‘And I guess I’ve never been very good at that.’
‘I wish I could help,’ Johnny says.
Lou laughs, sending a tiny jolt of electricity through him as she tugs gently on his arm. ‘You already have. I can’t tell you how lovely it’s been seeing you again. And isn’t it weird, you looking at my website last night when I was probably only a mile away, sitting in Felix’s bar with Sadie and Han …’
‘It’s bizarre,’ he agrees. His ears feel as if they’re sizzling now.
‘And d’you know what?’ she adds as they turn the corner and make their way past a stag party, one member of which has ‘Clive – Doomed Groom’ emblazoned across his black T-shirt – ‘I’ve got this feeling that things are going to be different when I get back to York, I really do, probably because I feel different.’
‘Do you?’ he asks. ‘Why d’you think that is?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Lou says blithely, and for a moment Johnny allows himself to think it’s because of him. But of course, it’s being away with her old college friends that’s lifted her spirits. ‘Maybe it’s seeing you,’ she adds.
‘Oh, I tend to have that effect on women,’ he jokes feebly.
‘You know what I mean,’ she murmurs.
Johnny glances at her as they walk, trying to read the expression on her face. Whether she really meant that or not, he’s seized by an urge to take her hand in his; the hand he’s wanted to hold since he first met her sixteen years ago.
Just do it, he tells himself. What will she do – pull her hand away and run off screaming? If I see a pigeon, he tells himself, I’ll hold Lou Costello’s hand. They take a right turn, heading towards Rona and Tristan’s smart red sandstone block. Just ahead of them, a boy of around Cal’s age in low-slung jeans tosses his half-eaten packet of chips in the vague direction of a bin. It collides with its side, bouncing backwards and scattering pale yellow chips on to the ground, and Johnny has never been happier to see pigeons descend in his entire life.
FIFTY-SIX
Spike is playing, and it feels good. His fingers are agile, his lack of self-consciousness perhaps aided by the last traces of his hangover. He is standing in front of a particularly crappy shop filled with 99p T-shirts, lurid cheap handbags dripping with gilt chains and other assorted tat. Yet Spike doesn’t care; he’s just grateful to have found a pitch. He learnt enough about busking etiquette in his youth to know that you’re not supposed to set up too close to another musician. He is singing a love song. It was inspired by Astrid, and he wrote it literally in a fever; it had come to him when he’d been virtually dying of flu a couple of weeks back. However, now she’s clearly ousted him in favour of some big blond freak, he likes to think his lyrics run deeper and are really about enduring love.
Lou. It’s about Lou, Spike realises, his voice ringing clear and pure across the street, the voice he’d almost forgotten he had. He starts changing the lyrics to whatever comes into his head on this beautiful spring day. He wants Lou, and he’s singing his heart out for her.
Why has it taken him so long to realise this? As Spike launches into the third verse he pictures the provisions she’d lovingly bought for him: the noodles and mangetout and chicken. He loves that girl, he reflects, his voice cracking a little as a pound coin lands in the open guitar case. Another follows it, and he smiles his thanks each time, grateful that it’s going down well, this love song he’s now virtually making up as he goes along.
A small crowd has formed in front of him. A boy has stopped, clutching a guitar case of his own. I can’t be past it, Spike decides, if a teenager wants to listen to me. Then, past the boy, Spike sees someone else: a girl walking towards him with curly red hair in a black dress with flowers all over it and little pumps on her feet. Pretty girl, he thinks, watching her gradually come into focus. She smiles at her boyfriend who’s holding her hand, the way Spike and Lou held hands what feels like eight hundred years ago. Then Spike ceases to notice the small audience that’s gathered around him, or even a little girl who runs forward and showers coins into the guitar case.
‘What’s up?’ a man yells as Spike suddenly stops playing.
‘Play!’ the little girl demands. But Spike can’t play because he’s staring into the middle distance where the girl he loves, the girl he’s travelled all the way from York in a clapped-out ambulance to see, is strolling along in the sunshine holding the hand of Johnny Lynch.
FIFTY-SEVEN
It doesn’t fit, Spike being here on this sunny afternoon in Glasgow. It can’t be, Lou thinks; it’s just a man with longish dark hair in a battered leather jacket – hardly an unusual look for a busker. She keeps telling herself this – it can’t be Spike, he’s at home in York, doing his CV – even as he charges towards them with his guitar still strapped on.
‘What the hell are you—’ she shrieks, springing apart from Johnny as Spike swipes wildly at his jaw. ‘Spike, for God’s sake!’ Lou screams as he misses his mark.
‘Just get away, Lou,’ he shouts back, this time landing a punch on Johnny’s cheek before two men grab him, pulling him back, yelling, ‘Jesus, calm down! Leave him alone …’
‘What are you doing with Lou?’ Spike roars, trying to launch h
imself towards Johnny again, but held back firmly by the two bigger, stronger men.
‘You’ll get arrested, mate!’ one of them barks.
‘Sort yourself out,’ the other one tells him. ‘If you’ve got a problem, deal with it. You can’t just attack someone in the middle of the street—’
Lou stares at Spike. He’s actually followed her here. She glances at Johnny who looks dazed as he holds a hand to his cheek. Blood is leaking from a cut. ‘Are you all right?’ she asks, reaching out to touch his face.
‘Yeah, I’m okay,’ he mutters, flinching.
‘What are you doing here?’ she snaps, whirling back to face Spike. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’
He opens his mouth as the two men loosen their grip on his jacket. ‘You’re with him,’ he splutters, indicating Johnny who’s pressing a hankie against the side of his face. ‘You came up here to be with him, didn’t you?’ Shaking his head as one of the men lets him go, shortly followed by the other, he fixes Lou with an anguished gaze.
‘Of course I didn’t! Are you crazy? Hannah ran into him in a shop – she was buying coffees and there he was and we’ve just been hanging out. I don’t know what you think we’ve been doing …’ She glances back to where Johnny was standing, but he’s gone.
‘You were holding his hand,’ Spike growls.
‘Yes, because we’re friends, for Christ’s sake. God. Can’t I spend time with old friends?’
‘Oh yeah. All the touchy-feely-huggy stuff. I’d forgotten about that.’