by Mason, Carol
Wendy gets her analytical look. ‘So in this case, I would have thought if you’re making a powerful statement like ‘Thin’s Not In’ you need to have some very real-looking people who are genuinely large and proud of it.’ She taps her knife handle on the table. ‘I hinted this to her, but she said there was no way Fatz clothing was going to be seen dead on a load of ‘heifers’.
‘She didn’t say that!’
‘She did. But the very point of the show was to attract heavier people to the brand! So see what I mean? Sometimes her thinking doesn’t make sense.’ She rotates her pizza plate between her hands, like it’s a steering wheel, like she’s trying to decide which triangle to cut into first, then she abandons it again. ‘If it were me organising it, I’d have the fashion show, but I’d get rid of this ‘Thin’s Not In’ business. I’d put a wide range of body-types up there to show that it’s all about the clothes not the weight, and Fatz is for everybody. Then you’re making it a positive thing rather than fixating on this tiring issue of thinness.’
‘Makes sense.’ So Leigh, what she’s basically saying honey, is that your brilliant marketing idea lays an egg. I smile. Wendy is like a kid in a toy shop. Totally newfangled with this idea of the working world. I’m happy for her. ‘It seems like an awful lot of drama to sell exercise pants, Wend, if you ask me. I think I’m glad I have a simple job, with sexy footballers to look at and a group of girls who work to live, not the other way around.’ She mops some of the oil off her pizza with her napkin. I’m hoping this is a sign we’re going to start eating. Wendy’s about the only person I know who knows little gems of dietary wisdom like the fact that most of the calories of Brie are in its skin. Sometimes she’ll use her knowledge as a reason to desecrate the stuff or refuse to go near it, other times, to say, And really who gives a damn?
‘Well poor Leigh’s done months of work for the show that he was previously all for, and now he’s calling it off. He got hysterical when she told him he was listening too much to his silly showbiz friends and not thinking for himself. He tends to zoom around the place in some battery-operated tizzy-fit, his face getting as pink as his velour tracksuit.’ Wendy does some zooming impersonation with her hands and I tuck into my food because I’m tired of waiting for her. ‘Poor Leigh seemed embarrassed that I’d seen him be so belittling with her. Because he did say some pretty horrid things.’
‘Like?’
She picks mozzarella off her pizza. ‘I can eat this or I can leave it…’ The two sides to her love-hate relationship with calorie-ridden food. She shoves it in her face. Finally! We have lift off. ‘Oh, I hate telling tales out of school…’
‘Don’t. Tales make the world go round,’ I smile. ‘Bet you were embarrassed sat there listening to all of it.’
‘I pretended I wasn’t. I picked up the phone and had a very long conversation with a dial tone. Acted like I was sure this sort of outrageous, juvenile behaviour is part of any office.’
‘It’s certainly not part of mine. Uproarious giggles are about as heated as we get. The girls and I went for lunch today and talked about footballers and the latest in who’s-zoomin-who in the Manager’s office. We had a grand old time.’ I drop an oily mushroom on my white jeans. ‘So it hasn’t put you off working there?’
She seems to measure the question. ‘No. So long as nobody is behaving like that with me, then, as Neil said, I’ve got nothing to worry about, have I? Besides, Leigh and I went for lunch. I told her she handled him brilliantly. She told me how she used his private toilet the other day and saw what she thought was toothpaste by the hand basin. It was Preparation H. We had a good laugh.’
I grin. ‘Have you ever thought about going back and finishing your degree?’
‘Now why would I want a degree when I have an Almost Degree!’ She always calls it that. Her face takes on that look of resigned impatience. ‘I do think about it sometimes. In many ways I don’t know what’s held me back. It’s been three years since Nina… All I’d have to do is two more courses.’
‘So go for it.’
‘Well it sounds easy when you put it like that.’ She shrugs. Which, I can tell, means, end of subject now.
She asks about me now. I keep it fairly benign—the usual suspects: my parents, my boss, the neighbours, the puppy and how he would rather garrotte himself on his choke chain than just stop pulling me. ‘So, how’s being a working woman fitting with your home life?’ I ask her, to get off the topic of me. What I mean is, How is Neil adjusting to not being the centre of your universe?
‘Oh lately he’s been working so much again. So instead of watching the clock until he comes home, I fill the time in with chores that I can’t get done during the day anymore.’ Neil used to do long shifts, and was often gone from home for days. Where to, Wendy rarely knew. She’d live off her nerves, anticipating some ominous knock at the door. But now he’s high up in the chain of command, he doesn’t go away anymore. ‘When he’s home, I make sure I put everything else aside. If the laundry’s not done, so be it. I’ll make a nice dinner because that’s about the only time my lads will talk to me. Then when they’re off up in their rooms, we’ll open a bottle of wine, put on a bit of nice music and have some nice couple time.’ That’s about the closest Wendy gets to referencing a sex life. Wendy is a private girl. You never know if she gets constipated before her periods, nor do Leigh and I have any idea how many men she slept with. I think it’s one. Leigh thinks she might be a dark horse, that she might have a whole sordid past that she’s hiding.
‘But I must say he’s been very supportive. Neil is very supportive. Always.’
‘In what way?’ I’m visualizing piles of laundry he’s ironing. Him slugging a huge trolley around the supermarket.
‘Just everything really. He knew how much I wanted to get back into the workforce.’
Yet when an admin job came up at Northumbria Police he didn’t want her applying for it. She never told me this directly, but hinted and hedged, and didn’t bother to try to fill my jumping-to-conclusion silences.
‘He’s very supportive.’ She smiles, in a last-word sort of way, like a much prettier, more animated version of a Stepford Wife. “I’m full!’ She slumps back in the seat. ‘And after all that talk about fat and thin, you’d better not even ask me if I want dessert.’
‘Do you want dessert?’
‘Yes.’
We order two tiramisu.
It crossed my mind to mention that Rob and I aren’t getting on too well lately, without actually telling her all the details of course. (Perhaps if she’d share something very personal about Neil and her, I would open up. But she’d have to go first.). I decide against it. When she opens her purse to pay the bill, handsome, supportive Neil smiles at us from the plastic picture window.
~ * * * ~
Saturday morning. Our phone rings. I prop up in bed on an elbow, squint to see the clock. I was banking on Rob being around today to see if we can peck and make up. But he’s already gone to work, and it’s not even 9 a.m. I pat for the handset on the night table, dreading it being a mother emergency. Things have been ominously quiet since our day at the beach.
‘We’ve got to talk. Now. Fast. Won’t wait. H-e-l-p!’ It’s Leigh. Another crisis. She’s always having them: she’s just dreamt she had sex with Clifford, or she’s developed boozers nose, or she’s bleached her top lip and it’s gone blonde and curly and she looks like a walrus.
I sink back on the pillow, relieved it’s only her. ‘What on earth is the matter?’
‘Can’t talk,’ she whispers. ‘L about.’
I yawn loudly.
‘I—need—to- see- you.’
‘Well, we could always go out for a drink tonight if you feel like it.’ I’m suddenly annoyed that Rob has deserted me without any idea of when he’ll be back. I’m tiring of the silent treatment. It’s as though it’s my punishment for bringing up certain topics. In all our marriage, this is the first time we seem to be holding a grudge.
‘N
o. Can’t wait until tonight.’
Why’s she so secretive? ‘Well, you could come round here this afternoon.’ Oh, but then I’d have to clean the house. Weekends are when I should be doing housework but I desperately resent its intrusion on my free time. I struggle out of bed, draw back our white curtains. It’s another lovely day. The garden is bathed in sunshine. An overgrown lilac tree gently knocks against our window. Across the fence, next door’s bunny nibbles away safely in her hutch. ‘It’s so nice out, how about going through to Seaburn beach?’ I don’t know where the idea comes from, but it fills me with a twitter of excitement.
‘Seaburn beach? Why there?’
‘No reason. I mean, I just thought it’d be something different. It is a nice day. But we don’t have to.’ A voice says, Jill don’t go thinking a flirtation will solve your problems, because it won’t.
‘But what are we going to do there? It’ll be full of Sunderland supporters skinny-dipping while balancing beer glasses off their noses like circus sea lions.’
I blackmail her with silence.
‘Urgh, well, go on then, if you’re so damned keen.’
I hang up and feel terribly guilty but do two jumping jacks in the air.
~ * * * ~
We park half a mile up at the Roker pier, because of course now I’m actually in the vicinity of the beach, I AM NOT GOING NEAR THAT RUSSIAN. It was tempting, for about three minutes. But I’m married. It’s wrong. And Rob would be so disappointed in me if he knew. Instead, as it’s lunchtime, we pop into a pub, place our food orders and take our lagers over to an alcove.
‘I’m going to have an affair,’ Leigh’s eyes are riveted devilishly on my face. My glass that was on its way to my mouth crash-lands on the table sending Stella slopping onto the table. ‘I’ve met somebody Jill,’ she tells me. She makes this hhh-aar! I’m-withering noise, slumps so far down on the bench she practically slides off. ‘He’s so good-looking Jill. He’s a red-hot-blooded sexy bloke, and he’s actually interested in me, it’s a miracle.’ She wiggles her painted-on arches for eyebrows, fans her face, makes gargoyle expressions, and goes Whoar! and Cor! like a building-site worker. I’ve never seen anybody like this, except, maybe, Benny Hill. I tell her this and she grins.
I quiz her and she says he’s married, got kids. ‘And you met him where?’
‘Oh he’s been around for a while. He’s… he works in retail management. High up.’
‘He’s a client?’ She has always said she has one or two attractive ones.
‘I bumped into him on Friday. I was in town, walked into the bank and there he was. We were both surprised.’ She goes off in a trance for a moment or two, smiles. ‘It was the way he looked at me Jill. And when we got on talking there was just such chemistry.’ She claps her hands over her face. ‘Oh hell, what am I going to do?’
‘Nothing!’ I still don’t believe my ears. Leigh? Of ‘affairs are so tacky’ fame?
‘Nothing?’ her face falls. ‘Nothing isn’t an option Jill. All my orgasms have his face on them.’
‘But you’d never have an affair. You think the very idea of a married woman -’
‘I know. But that was before there was anybody to have an affair with.’ She does the Benny Hill face thing again. The usual Leigh who looks like she’s spent ten years in a coffin, now seems like she’s suddenly come back to life. But it’s scary. Part of me thinks she was best off dead. ‘I tell you Jill, he’s got me… I can’t think straight.’
‘You’re just in heat. It’ll pass. You’ll forget about him.’
‘I don’t want to forget about him, I want to fuck him.’
Wow. I am squirmy all of a sudden.
‘I’m serious. I’ve imagined it every position. Oh Jill…the body on him! And I’m gagging for a bit of rough.’ She sticks her tongue out, pants. ‘Lawrence’s puniness used to be attractive after I’d been with all those macho arseholes. I felt enamoured of him having legs like an eight-year-old Ethiopian. But you know last week he went for a blood test and kept the plaster on for four days! And he kept showing it to me like he’d had open-heart surgery. It’s such a turn-off.’
This makes me smile. Normally she’d say something like this, or tell me he was on the Internet all weekend looking for holiday packages to Lapland, and we’d chuckle. But Lawrence’s foibles don’t feel like a laughing matter right now. ‘But this man’s a client, Leigh. You could get fired over it.’
‘Oh no, nothing like that’d happen.’ She swings curtains of black hair off her shoulders. ‘I know what I’m doing. I’m going to give it an expiry date. Say six weeks to bang my brains out. After which time it’ll get dumped.’
‘What? Like a carton of yoghurt?’ Or eggs. Maybe it’s her ovaries. A mid-life. She told me Lawrence thinks she’s having one. My eyes flick over her waif-like body in its trendy little Fatz black velvet tracksuit. ‘But do affairs work like that? I mean, what if you fell in love?’
She rolls her eyes, nurses her beer glass between her small breasts. ‘You always romanticise everything Jill. You’re the Milk Tray type of gal, which is lovely, but I’m not like that. It’d be strictly the business. No pillow talk. We meet, we bang, see you tomorrow. Go at it hell for leather for six weeks, then that’d be it. We’d both walk away. No harm done. Just something fantastic to look back on.’ She takes a long drink, her eyes buzzing around the bar, which has suddenly filled up. ‘I mean, don’t you think it’d be great?’
I don’t know why Leigh’s prospect of hanky-panky should get me feeling all wriggly like this. ‘Maybe. If it worked like that.’
‘But I’d make it work like that. I have to Jill. I love Lawrence in my own way, and you know there’s absolutely nothing more important to me than my family. Especially when you think of my childhood. The ice-cream vendor moves in on Monday, tells me to call him dad, that he’s waited all his life to meet a woman like my mother, then by the weekend all that’s left of him is an empty Magnum wrapper.’ She chortles.
It amazes me how Leigh has the capacity to laugh at her bizarre upbringing.
‘You know I would never fuck-up Molly’s life like my mother did mine. But I have to reclaim a part of me in this equation. Do something, not for Lawrence or Molly or Clifford, but purely to make me feel happy.’ She looks hacked-off again. ‘The thought of shagging only Lawrence until the day I die is enough to kill me now. Jill I’m tired and I’m uninspired. I badly need a thrill. And it’s just one affair. I’m not talking about going on some sexual rampage with every man alive.’
‘Can’t you just… I don’t know… get a new job?’
‘A new job’s not what I need. Besides, that job pays our mortgage and keeps Molly in private school and singing lessons. That job keeps Lawrence at home so he doesn’t get too stressed and obsessively compulse himself into an early grave. And as I always believe, better the devil you know. Cliff, much as I complain about him, is predictable. He knows how far to push me, but because he needs me, he also knows when to back off.’
No mention of her nasty fight with him; she mustn’t think Wendy would have told me.
Her eyes lock onto mine. ‘Come on… it’d be wild, Jill. Wouldn’t it?’
I feel like planting my face in the tabletop. ‘Well, I know what you mean about needing something to happen that makes you feel better,’ I tell her, with bleak enthusiasm. ‘For us at the moment, sex is like the Monday morning chore of taking the rubbish out.’ Mind you, I wish I got it once a week, but I don’t tell her that. She looks at me, staggered, seems to wait for me to dish the dirt that must lie behind a rare outburst like that. ‘But I’m not sure an affair’s the answer to marital problems. I mean, think of what you’ll lose in your marriage if you have a fling Leigh. You’ll reach your Golden anniversary knowing you were the Olympic gold-medallist who took steroids. You didn’t win a fair game even if you have impressed the rest of the world. You were a cheat.’
She just looks at me blankly and blinks. ‘Maybe I don’t put such a high value on
loyalty as you do Jill. Or maybe I think there are many other ways of being loyal. Ways that more than compensate for the one way that you aren’t.’
I can’t believe this is the same person talking. The person who always said that because she screwed around so much when she was single, she got it all out of her system. Unlike me, she always says. I have my adventures to come.
I get her to spill the beans about this Nick when our food comes. Here goes... So she bumped into him in the bank. He said, ‘Hiya there, lovely day,’ then he sniffed out whether she was blissfully married and made it clear that he wasn’t. More such harmless chatter between virtual strangers ensued. Then, as it was her turn to move to a teller, he asked her if she wanted to go get a coffee. And she was so taken off guard that she said no. So he said, ‘well, maybe another time,’ and she’s spent the last week analysing what she should do about it, whether it’s up to her to make a move, or whether she should wait and see if he makes one.
For somebody who manages millions of pounds of sales for a hip company, it seems hard to believe she’d sit there obsessing over something that doesn’t sound to me like it’s worth the bother. I hate telling her the obvious, but… ‘Well he might have literally just meant go for coffee, and maybe another time might have just been his way of politely saying see you later.’
‘Ah, but you weren’t there were you?’ she wags a finger at me. ‘You didn’t get looks he gave me, or the seductive emphasis he put on the odd little things he said. Or the way his pupils dilated when he was talking about how boring his marriage was.’
‘He talked about how boring his marriage was?’ All this in the bank? It must have been one almighty long queue.
‘He did.’ She strums her pearly fingernails on the table. ‘We’ve got to think of something clever to test the waters a bit more. Something that’s on the surface harmless in case he really doesn’t want to have an affair, but not, if he does, eh Poirot?’ She crosses her still winter-white arms over her chest. (Leigh can’t tan as she had a melanoma ten years ago, from her mam slapping oil and vinegar on her and putting her in the sun.) ‘You don’t have any instant thoughts do you?’