by Fiona Neill
‘Well, I thought it was only that, a fantasy, and I was happy to go along with it,’ she says. ‘But he’s called me to tell me that he’s booked a girl that he’s found on an Internet site to come round tonight. He’s told his wife he’s in Paris. He says that she’s really gorgeous. What should I do?’ She is utterly panicked. I think for a moment.
‘Tell him that you had a Brazilian and it’s given you a rash. That will win you time, and then gently let him down at a later date, unless of course you decide to reconsider,’ I say. And then, in case I look too prurient, ‘At the very least you should check out the girl. You might even fancy her. I’ll call you later.’
I click the phone off and sit for a moment to recover my composure. Then I hear rustling at the sink. I know immediately that there is someone else in the room with me. I hesitantly stand up to full height to peek over the half-height door. Not only am I not alone, but Sexy Domesticated Dad is removing his cycle helmet and cycling shirt to reveal the full glory of slightly tanned and toned midriff a mere two metres in front of me. Luckily, the shirt is over his head at the point at which I look over. I gasp involuntarily and my hand covers my mouth in shock and then I duck back down behind the door again.
I decide to stand on the loo with my legs bent so that he can’t see my feet underneath. In less than a minute, my legs are aching so much that I have to put my clenched fist in my mouth and bite my knuckles in an effort to displace the pain emanating from my calves and upper thighs. I pray for redemption from this Lilliputian nightmare. I don’t deserve this, I think to myself. I try to work out exactly when he came in. If I am lucky, and luck wouldn’t seem to be on my side right now, it might have been at the end of my conversation with Emma.
I glance over the top again, meaning to duck down immediately, but he is in the middle of removing his cycling trousers to put on a pair of jeans. He is, in fact, standing there in the same pair of grey underpants that I glimpsed this morning. I look long enough to appreciate that all the cycling has given him strong, firm buttocks.
I duck down again but the motion makes me fall from my perch in shock. Sexy Domesticated Dad comes over and warily pushes the door open.
‘Lucy, for God’s sake, what are you doing? Are you all right?’ he asks, bending over me and grabbing my arm to pull me up. He is using his other hand to hold up his jeans and his shirt is completely undone and my face brushes his stomach as he hauls me out of the tight space beside the tiny loo. It is a very intimate moment, but I feel nothing but fear and embarrassment. It is more short circuit than current or connection.
‘I was practising my victory speech,’ I say, brushing down my jeans and trying not to stare at his underpants.
‘And it was so good, it knocked you sideways?’ he says.
I breeze out of the cloakroom and walk outside into the playground to take much-needed air.
When I go into the classroom the meeting is well under way and the only seat left is a children’s chair in between Yummy Mummy No. 1 and Sexy Domesticated Dad. Eyes follow me as I slide into the seat, but I can’t really see what is happening at the teacher’s desk at the front of the room.
Sexy Domesticated Dad looks down at me with a nervous smile. ‘You’ve missed the vote, Lucy, she got in by a whisker. You’ve been nominated Secretary and I’m the Treasurer,’ he says, looking worriedly at Alpha Mum. ‘She’s terrifying.’
Yummy Mummy No. 1 leans down and confirms that she voted for me. ‘Just for the fun value.’
‘Please can I have the attention of all of you,’ says Alpha Mum, looking at us. ‘Lucy, you might want to take notes for the record,’ she says, passing me a pen and paper.
Then Sexy Domesticated Dad leans over to me and whispers, ‘Never mind, Lucy, I’ve heard cosy threesomes are a common male fantasy. Do you still want to go out for that drink? I really need one after all this.’
8
‘Stretch your arm no further than your sleeve can reach’
THIS IS NOT the outcome I imagined. This is not the evening I imagined. Actually, this is not the life I imagined. When the meeting ends, Sexy Domesticated Dad makes a point of leaving the school alone. I am not unduly concerned, because I know he will be waiting for me somewhere in the street, so I lazily pick up my bag, chat with other parents and make my way outside.
Somewhere along Fitzjohn’s Avenue, I find him lurking underneath the branches of a ceanothus bush that had drifted from its plot in a safe suburban garden to sprawl in rebellious arches across the pavement. It’s only up close that the light of the street lamp highlights a pair of trousered legs and familiar Converse trainers underneath the branches, and I inwardly congratulate him on finding an evergreen shrub so willing to participate in our intrigue.
He steps out from underneath a branch and says, ‘Lucy Sweeney, I presume,’ and I laugh a little too eagerly, brought up short when I realise that his surname has completely escaped me. I know that it’s a type of fish, but I can’t recall which one. ‘Robert Cod, Robert Haddock, Robert Hake, Robert Dory,’ I whisper to myself, trying out different possibilities. I know it is one caught in the North Sea.
‘Robert Bass,’ he says to me. I am shocked to realise that I must have said some of this out loud. I pause for a moment.
‘I’m illustrating a children’s book,’ I hear myself say.
‘That’s very exciting.’
‘Those are the main characters. It’s an allegory about the decline of fish stocks in the North Sea.’
‘Is there a baddy?’
‘Crawford Crayfish,’ I say. ‘An American import.’ Then I fall silent. I am at once horrified and impressed by my ability to lie on demand. I know truth is subjective at the best of times, but nevertheless I am entering whole new realms of deception.
We stroll the short distance to a noisy pub that we remember walking past on the school run, exchanging a few platitudes along the way. I notice that both of us shrink into our coats and look shiftily down at our feet when a car passes. The pub is on a quiet residential street. There are benches and tables outside on the pavement. A couple of patient dogs of the long, hairy variety are tied to table legs with leather leads wound in complicated knots. They stand up to greet us hopefully. Robert Bass tentatively opens the door, and I know that he is doing a quick sweep of the room to check there are no other parents from school. He seems well versed in the dark arts of subterfuge.
The strands of a hundred conversations and nasal tones of an early Oasis song almost knock us backwards. The last time I went into this pub, about six years ago, it was an unappealing blend of grubby carpet and beige walls with a generous coating of yellow nicotine on top. If you scraped your finger down the flock wallpaper it left a white trail behind. A cloud of smoke hung permanently at ceiling level, and the benches that followed the outline of the wall were covered with long lumpy cushions. It was all roll-ups, redtops and scampi fries.
Now, wooden floors have replaced the ugly brown carpets with brash geometric patterns. There are hard benches and straight-backed wooden chairs. The bar serves olives, cashews and crisps made from vegetables. It is pared back and simple, but much less cosy. The demise of soft furnishings means noise has nowhere to go. It bounces from one hard surface to another like an echo chamber. People, even those under thirty, cup their ears to hear conversations.
I spot a couple leaving from a small round table in the corner and lead the way to a bench that might have spent the previous couple of centuries in a small country church in East Anglia. It is as out of place as we are. The back has carved figures of saints wearing robes, with carefully sculpted folds that dig painfully into the back of our heads. It is shallow, narrow, and deeply uncomfortable, and it compels us into immediate physical intimacy. We rest against each other like a couple of old trees, who over the years have been forced into a relationship of unwanted physicality to prop each other up. The only problem is that once we are in this position, we can’t move. When he crosses his legs, I lose balance and lean towards the
table, and when I bend forward and move my shoulder away from his, he lurches into the vacuum.
Robert Bass says that he hardly ever goes to pubs because he can’t stand the smoke. I concur, using my foot to push the packet of John Player firmly to the bottom of my bag. In fact, it has evidently been so long since either of us has been in a pub that we sit for a while, just staring.
‘I suppose we could tell Alpha Mum that we’re not going to be involved,’ I say, while scrutinising a beer mat. ‘It’s all too absurd. She’s one of those women who should never have given up work, she’s got far too much restless energy.’
‘Actually, the headmistress cornered me afterwards and said, completely off the record, of course, that she would be very grateful if we would do this so that we can “curb the excesses”, her words not mine,’ explains Robert Bass, building a complicated structure with the beer mats on his side of the table. ‘She said it would be an exercise in damage limitation. She voted against her. She wanted you.’
‘So we have to go through with it?’ I say, trying not to sound hopeful.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘She’s called a meeting at her house next week to decide about the Christmas party. Perhaps we could go together.’ He is smiling slightly, a half-smile, with his lower lip pushed out as though he is trying to stop himself from laughing. I don’t dare to look at him because there are too many undercurrents and if I stare into his eyes I might get pulled under. Instead, I start to tear the corners off a beer mat.
I know that he is watching me and can feel the heat of his face burning the side of my left cheek. To turn towards him requires little more than a twenty-degree rotation of the head. Quiet movements are sometimes much more significant than grand gestures, especially when they involve married folk. I look round and meet his gaze, and we stare at each other without saying anything for a little too long. Then we both start to speak at once.
‘I think that if we both lean forward at the same time, we could take off our coats without one of us falling over,’ he says. And so we rid ourselves of layers of thick coats and scarves, and I know that when we sit back, our bare arms will touch and then anything could happen.
‘I think I should go and get us a drink,’ I say. He says that he has to phone his au pair to warn her that he will be late back. His wife is still at work. ‘She is hardly ever home before ten o’clock, and she is out the door again by seven-thirty the next morning. Sometimes I don’t see her for days and we communicate by email and notes left round the kitchen,’ he says. There is no trace of bitterness. It is a statement of fact. A proper post-modern virtual relationship.
The beer mat lies in tatters on the small table. It has been split in half, torn into tiny pieces that flutter on to the floor when people walk by. I remember other times, long ago, when shredding beer mats into tiny jigsaws became a useful displacement activity during difficult conversations.
I get up to walk over to the bar and decide that I won’t phone my mother-in-law. She is probably already in bed, because despite all her protestations that she never sleeps until we get home, we have never yet found her awake on the rare occasions that we have missed our curfew, and besides, a phone call to reiterate what I have already said, even if it involved the tiniest change to the agreed plan, is liable to provoke a disproportionate reaction.
I struggle through the crowd at the bar to create a space for myself at the front and then wait there like the hopeful dogs outside. I bob up and down, stand on tiptoe, wave and then perch on the brass rail that runs around the bottom of the counter gaining about half a foot in height. But I am still invisible.
A girl comes up beside me. She looks about twenty and is wearing a silver mini-dress and knee-high boots, without any tights even though it is winter. Her long, dark hair is draped around her face in a way that looks relaxed but probably took a long time to achieve. The barman immediately comes over and takes her order. Beside me a man is having a conversation on a mobile phone and ordering drinks at the same time. I glance back towards Robert Bass, and he looks at me with a quizzical expression. I shrug my shoulders and continue with my quest standing at the bar, thinking about the last time I ripped up beer mats with such passion in a pub.
How is it that I cannot manage to assemble even the bare bones of what happened yesterday, and yet something that occurred more than a decade ago returns to mind with such a wealth of detail? It was exactly eleven years ago. Tom and I had recently moved into a flat in west London together. I was coming home from work one night in the early days of this new arrangement, at about eleven o’clock and slightly drunk. Actually, I was earlier than usual. I had to get up the next morning to go to Manchester so my colleagues had pushed me into a cab and told me to get an early night. Tom had said that he was going out with friends. Nothing specific. Our lives were so busy that we sketched the outlines and filled in the detail later.
When I reached our road, it was blocked by a police car. There had been a hold-up near the Uxbridge Road, and we were directed down a parallel street. So I shouldn’t have been there at all. But as we manoeuvred slowly down this road, I saw a couple kissing. The man was half-sitting on a low wall outside a small terrace house, and he had pulled the woman between his legs so that their upper bodies were pressed against each other, pushing back into a hedge that was growing behind the wall. I knew, even before I saw the man’s face, that it was Tom. There was a familiar economy of movement in the way one of his hands was drifting up and down the woman, a finger lingering to trace small circles on the nape of her neck and then drifting around to the front of her V-neck T-shirt. She leant back in pleasure and he kissed her.
I told the taxi-driver to stop, because I needed to make a phone call. This was in the early days of mobile technology and the phone was so big that it hid most of my face. I shrank down in the back of the taxi and called Cathy.
‘It’s me,’ I whispered, even though there was no possibility that Tom could hear me.
‘Are you all right, Lucy?’ she said, because I had paused.
‘Fine, I think. I’m sitting in a taxi, watching Tom getting quite intimate with another woman, very intimate actually if you consider that he is in full public view less than a hundred yards from our flat as the crow flies . . .’
‘Lucy, cut to the chase, tell me exactly what you can see,’ she demanded.
‘Well, I can see him kissing a woman. At least it’s a woman I suppose, because the alternative would be too awful, because I think that women can be properly bisexual but men who swing both ways are definitely gay, although there are exceptions . . .’
‘Lucy, I know it’s hard, but please stick to the story,’ she said.
‘Well,’ I started again. ‘I can see him kissing a woman with short dark hair. She’s wearing a denim mini-skirt with buttons down the front, a little top and flip-flops. There’s not much left to the imagination. The downside is that it’s the kind of kiss that’s definitely a prelude to something more intimate. On the upside, you only kiss people like that when they taste new and exciting, so it can’t have been going on for too long. They’re going into the garden of the house and I think they are behind the hedge. I can only imagine the rest.’
‘Are you sure that it’s him? You know how short-sighted you are,’ she asked.
‘Of course I am, I’m so close that if I opened the window and leant out I could almost touch him.’
‘That’s awful. What a shit, Lucy,’ says Cathy.
‘The other thing is, apart from the fact that she is everything that I’m not, I think I recognise her,’ I said. ‘I’m fairly sure that she was at Emma’s party the other weekend. I think she works with her.’
‘Did they talk at the party?’ she asked.
‘Well, I did notice him talking to the same woman for a while but I didn’t think anything of it.’
‘So what are you going to do? Do you want me to come over?’
‘No, don’t worry, I’ll work something out, I wanted to tell you because it helps to ab
sorb it. I’ll call you tomorrow.’ I continued staring at the hedge for a few minutes, knowing that Tom and the woman were behind it. There was an overwhelming temptation to get out of the taxi and stand by the garden gate until they noticed me. But I knew, if I actually heard what was going on, I would replay the whole scene with sound incorporated, and there would be no going back from that. Overhearing someone have sex is much worse than watching it with the volume turned down.
So this is what I did, although I never told anyone, because through the months that followed I played the role of aggrieved girlfriend with some aplomb, and I felt that I could hold everything together as long as I had a secret to sustain me.
Instead of going home, I told the taxi-driver to take me back to work and wait outside for twenty minutes. Everyone was still drinking cheap wine in the Green Room, a tatty, tired and airless function room in the basement below the studios. We ended up here every night after Newsnight finished, with guests who had come on to the programme, eating flabby vol-auvents and curled sandwiches that had been sitting around for hours. My colleagues weren’t surprised to see me again, and one in particular I knew would be quietly pleased.
Since this man is now a relatively well-known film-maker, it seems unfair to mention him by name. But incredible as it sounds now, at that time we were both senior producers at the BBC with one of those professional relationships that teetered between open competition and brazen flirtation. That evening had been particularly stressful. I had successfully delivered my tape about illegal immigrants found dead in the back of a lorry in Kent at 10.28, two minutes before the programme was due to air, beating this man to the top news slot and earning myself rare and therefore very sweet praise from Jeremy Paxman.
I stepped back into the Green Room in a reckless mood, feeling strangely euphoric, although with hindsight I realise I was probably in a state of shock. The man came over to me and we resumed the conversation we had left hanging in the air less than an hour earlier. He was leaving the next day for a week in Kosovo. ‘I know it’s probably a bit left field, Lucy, but you don’t want to come home with me, do you?’ he asked minutes after I reappeared. It was that simple. There was no preamble. We kissed and fumbled as best we could during the taxi ride home, aware that the driver was watching in his mirror, and sneaked into his house so that his flatmates wouldn’t see me. He had a girlfriend, whom he has subsequently married, but they weren’t living together at the time.