Home Truths

by Freya North

  ‘Man,’ sighs Jake, ‘I've been searching my whole life for a simple shag.’

  Matt shrugs. ‘You know what I mean.’

  Jake doesn't, but he nods anyway as he's not particularly interested in developing this strand of the conversation.

  ‘You know something,’ says Matt, ‘I wonder if we hadn't had Cosima whether we'd have split up by now.’ He picks at the label on the beer bottle. ‘But I also wonder if our relationship would have been better without having a baby. Terrible thing to think, really.’

  ‘Like you can't have the one without the other – or you can't have both? Or something?’ Jake asks, his eyes drawn to three girls ordering at the bar.

  ‘Something like that,’ says Matt.

  ‘Fantastic,’ says Jake. Matt frowns until he realizes he's referring to the girls who are sending lascivious glances in their direction.

  Usually, the point at which Jake starts to prowl is when Matt decides to bale out and go home. He tends to glance at his watch and calculate the maximum sleep he needs against the hours of sleep he's actually going to have. This is when Matt usually slaps Jake on the shoulder and tells the girl, or girls, to look after his mate. And this is the point when Jake says ‘Goodnight, Daddy’ and feels a slight sense of relief that he's free to continue the evening in his own inimitable way. This is when Matt goes home. As you'd expect. He's a father after all. It's not seemly to drink into the small hours; it's irresponsible. So go home, Matt.

  But Matt sees little point in going home. Fen will just say he stinks of booze and fags and forbid him from going anywhere near the baby and then reproach him for the fact that it all amounts to her being the one who's always up at the crack of dawn despite her matchless tiredness. So Matt doesn't go home because just now he doesn't like who's at home; what he likes more is the upbeat revelry of his immediate milieu. And he likes the girls who have come, pouting and posturing over to him and Jake. He likes the way one of them licks her lips while he's speaking. She's hanging on his words and his arm because she's a little unsteady on her feet; not surprising, considering the combination of cocktail and the precarious height of her fuckme shoes. Matt doesn't quite know what he's talking about but she seems to find him scintillating and hysterically funny. When she throws her head back like that, her throat looks so lickable. He likes her pierced navel, there's a sparkly dangly thing hanging from it. And look at the tantalizing wobble of her high, nubile – oh Christ – braless breasts.

  What did you say her name was, Matt?

  ‘Are you married?’ she's asking him.

  ‘Nope,’ Matt says.

  ‘Is your mate?’ she asks, trying to focus on Jake who has an arm around each of her friends.

  ‘God no,’ Matt laughs.

  ‘I'm so pissed,’ she complains, lolling into Matt's chest.

  ‘Me too,’ Matt agrees, using it as an excuse to drape his arm around her and flop his hand down to the small of her back. If she brings her face up, he knows they'll snog. In fact, he wants her to, so he strokes the small of her back and extends his fingertips beyond the unmistakable boundary to her buttocks. Up comes her face and in slips Matt's tongue. He can taste Bailey's and Marlboro Lights. For the first time in five years, he is sharing his mouth with a woman other than Fen.

  ‘Hey! Daddy!’ says Jake. ‘Let's go to Eddie's.’

  Matt takes his mouth away from the girl's though his hand keeps her clasped against him. ‘Who's Eddie?’ he asks, wondering why Jake isn't raising eyebrows at him, or looking remotely shocked, or even amused.

  ‘It's this late-night drinking den in Dean Street,’ Jake says with a glance around, as if embarrassed to be in the company of someone who's never heard of Eddie's.

  ‘Why did he call you Daddy?’ the girl is asking Matt, who ignores her.

  ‘Nah!’ Matt says to Jake. ‘I'm going to head home.’

  The girls with Jake look at their friend. ‘You coming to Eddie's?’ they ask her.

  ‘Nah,’ she says, just like Matt.

  Jake and the girls shrug, say a brief goodbye and head off.

  So, Matt, are you going to head home then?

  Yeah, I'll just have one for the road first.

  One what?

  When it's very late and you're drunk and horny in a bar in Soho, where do you go? As Matt snogs the girl, he asks himself this question. They're still in the bar, but they've found an enclave with a curved leather banquette. He's bought them a drink which they haven't yet touched. They've been groping at each other while sucking face; there's a teenage randiness to it all which Matt is, literally, lapping up. He is sitting, legs spread, with a hard-on bulging shamelessly through his trousers. Every now and then, the girl sweeps her hand over it in a kind of maintenance check. Matt's been feeling her breasts through her top and because it's so skimpy and because she's not wearing anything underneath, she's as good as naked to his touch.

  ‘Let's go back to yours,’ she suggests.

  Matt looks at her as if she's mad. But how's she to know his child and the mother of his child are there? He's told her Jake calls him Daddy because he's the eldest. He's told her he calls Jake Twat because he is one.

  ‘Can't,’ he replies to her, ‘there are people there.’

  She shrugs this off.

  ‘Where do you live then?’ he asks.

  ‘Purley,’ she says.

  Even in his drunken state and despite his aching balls, Matt assesses that Purley is pointless. The taxis would cost a fortune. ‘Purley,’ he says. ‘Oh.’

  ‘There's the loos here,’ she says. ‘They're big and posh and this place turns a blind eye to people going in pairs.’ She taps the side of her nose as if she knows a secret and it takes a while for Matt to realize she's alluding to cocaine.

  ‘Have you got any?’ he asks, actually feeling his desire for drugs is more iniquitous than the adulterous lust bulging in his trousers.

  ‘Ruby's got the wrap,’ she says forlornly, ‘but I reckon your mate had most of it anyway.’

  Matt thinks he's probably relieved. At the same time, he's slightly disconcerted that he didn't realize Jake had been doing drugs that evening. That Jake hadn't offered any to him. Though, in all probability, Matt would have refused. If this girl had in fact had some, would he? He's too drunk to debate it. She's winking at him, nodding her head in the direction of the toilets.

  And off they go, hand in hand, no one is in the lead.

  The cubicle is spacious; faux panelled with strangely subdued lighting. There's loo paper on the floor and a Vent-Axia whirring away, affording a contradictory soundproofing of sorts. As soon as they're in, with a giggle and a fast lock of the door, they're snogging and fumbling and grappling and groping again. Matt has pulled her top to one side so he can see her tits in the flesh. They're fabulous: sizeable but pert with keen dark nipples craving his attention. While he sucks, she ruffles his hair through her fingers, backs up against the wall and spreads her legs, guiding his hand up in between. He rubs his fingers ravenously against the gusset of her thong. She gyrates against him and his thumb probes under the material to the lips of her sex. She's shaven. He's aching, there's a sackload of spunk which has been cramped in the holding bay of his balls for what seems like hours.

  ‘Have you got a condom, then?’ she asks. Matt frowns. ‘You've got to pull out then, all right?’

  In spite of the alcohol, Matt's inner voice is suddenly sharply lucid. The harder the facts of the imminence of infidelity, the softer his cock becomes. Man's best friend. Warning balls. He's far more grateful for his flaccidness than he is embarrassed by it.

  ‘Don't worry,’ she says sweetly, glancing at Matt's limp penis and she sits on the toilet and takes a pee. ‘Another time, maybe? Shall we go to Eddie's?’ she says conversationally, while wiping herself with loo paper and righting her thong. ‘See if Twat and the girls are there?’

  ‘I'm going to head home,’ Matt says.

  ‘Will you see me into a cab, then?’ she asks.

&nb
sp; And he does. And he says that of course he'll call her though he's aware that she's not aware that she hasn't given him her number nor asked for his. He flags down a taxi for her and watches it go. He finds that he's now utterly sober. So sober that his mind is reeling with frantic theories on what constitutes infidelity. He doesn't want a cab, he wants to walk and think and fast. As he marches up Wardour Street, weaving his way through all the people, he wonders if he just cheated on Fen. He justifies that he was drunk. He reasons that it wasn't sex anyway, in the penetrative sense. When push was about to come to shove, he had not wanted it, regardless of the state of his cock. But had what he had done amounted to being unfaithful? Was it possible to rank degrees of infidelity and if so, how far down the scale had he just stooped? He'd snogged another woman, had a grope and a feel. So his heart hadn't been in it, his mind hadn't been on it, his dick hadn't been sucked and his conscience had remained firmly trothed to Fen. But the urge had been there and whose fault was that? Could he blame Fen? Or had he only himself to blame? Or should he marvel that his love for her had caused his inner voice to yell out, Stop? He crossed over Oxford Street and walked briskly along Tottenham Court Road, feeling slightly hostile towards the pockets of pissed-up people for whom a night out in town was still young and promising. Despite the crowds of people, no one but him had any thoughts of home so he flagged a taxi with ease.

  ‘Good night out?’ the cabbie asks him chirpily, having passed comment on the weather, the traffic conditions and Ken Livingstone.

  ‘Crap,’ Matt says, glowering at his reflection in the window.

  ‘Coming home empty-handed are we?’ the cabbie chuckles. ‘Your powers of persuasion let you down tonight?’

  Matt looks up, straight into the eyes of the cabbie staring back at him from the rear-view mirror. ‘Quite the opposite,’ Matt says. ‘She was up for it. I wasn't.’

  ‘Heart strings not plucked, then?’

  Christ will he not just shut up!

  ‘My heart's at home,’ Matt says while wondering why he hadn't shut up, himself.

  ‘Ah,’ the cabbie sighs, ‘so you knocked temptation back to touch. Good for you, mate.’

  ‘I had a touch,’ Matt mumbles, ‘it didn't feel good at all.’

  ‘Precisely,’ says the cabbie, ‘so it was good for you.’

  Cat Out of the Bag

  The last thing Matt felt like doing, two days later, was to go out again. However, the choke of guilt, the nauseated regret, became more severe in Fen's presence. When he was at work, he longed to be at home, as if he imagined Fen and, to a lesser extent Cosima, suddenly unprotected without him there. When he was apart from her, he desperately needed her in sight – even if this meant apologizing to her photograph which he carried in his wallet. He stroked the image with the tip of his little finger, proclaiming to her that he'd never drink again, that he'd see no more of Jake, that he'd re-focus his eyes for Fen alone. What had happened was nothing, just stupidity; it had felt vile, a lesson had been learnt. Or so he kept telling himself. Yet in Fen's company, he couldn't even meet her eye, so convinced was he that he wore his sin as a sandwich board, guilt writ large all over his face. All he could do was feign tiredness as the cause for his uncommunicativeness, close himself off by watching The West Wing on DVD, while Fen made much of doing all the tidying up, all the cooking and all the laundry. When Matt did glance at her, hoping to bestow a loving, affirming smile, he found himself flinching away, as if her top was emblazoned with You fucking bastard how could you. So, though a part of Matt felt he should go home directly, to silently beg her forgiveness and declare his utter steadfastness and enduring loyalty, when Ben phoned and suggested they meet at the Mariners, Matt embraced the opportunity to be distracted from both his atonement and culpability.

  Ben had beers waiting for them.

  ‘How's life?’ Zac asked. ‘Pip told me about Cat's non-trip up North. Is she OK?’

  Ben took a visibly deep breath. ‘She'll be fine,’ he said, ‘but I have to tell you both something and it's about Django.’ Ben looked from Matt to Zac and saw the same look of surprise and enquiry. ‘He's told me to tell you. It's not nice. The long and short of it is he came to the hospital for some tests and he has prostate cancer.’

  ‘For fuck's sake,’ said Matt, closing his hand over his eyes.

  ‘Cancer?’ said Zac. ‘Jesus.’ Ben let the news sit with them a moment. ‘Hang on,’ said Zac, ‘he was down here? In London? When?’

  ‘The day that Cat went up to Derbyshire,’ Ben said, shaking his head. ‘Last Wednesday. I made an appointment and sent him a train ticket. It was the only way I could be sure he'd have it looked into – he wouldn't go to his GP. And I'd noticed some signs a while ago – before all the Derek–Mother shit.’

  ‘Does Cat know now?’

  ‘No. He didn't want anyone to know. And now he wants me to tell you. And us to tell them.’

  ‘Christ,’ Zac and Matt said in unison.

  ‘Poor sod,’ Matt said sadly. ‘What's the prognosis?’

  ‘It's difficult to say at this stage,’ said Ben. ‘It's not uncommon and it's usually very slow growing – sometimes the effect of the treatment is much worse than the symptoms of the cancer itself. Often sufferers can live out a normal lifespan. However, he has pain in his hip, leg and back which suggests it may have spread to the bone. He's only had a physical exam and blood tests. Now he needs an ultrasound, then we're into the territory of biopsies and scans. The results will take a while but they'll show the grade and stage of the cancer.’

  Matt and Zac sat silent and shocked. ‘I can't believe this,’ Matt said with audible alarm.

  ‘What treatment will he have?’ Zac said.

  ‘It depends on what the tests reveal,’ Ben said. ‘It's not my area. But I know around one in twelve men are diagnosed with this illness. He may have had it for years – it tends to be without symptoms in the early stages.’

  ‘I can't believe it,’ Matt rued again. ‘What are we going to do about the girls?’

  ‘I have no sodding idea,’ Ben sighed, ‘which is why I thought we should meet. Cat is up and down at the moment.’

  ‘Fen too,’ said Matt.

  ‘And Pip,’ said Zac.

  ‘Is he OK?’ Zac asked. ‘You know, psychologically?’

  Ben smiled sadly. ‘Beneath the neckerchief and dodgy trousers, there's an ill man of seventy-five. And unfortunately, the tests are pretty unpleasant.’

  ‘Is he coming back down for the tests?’ Zac asked. ‘Perhaps we could arrange for him to see the girls then?’

  ‘He's been referred to his local oncology department,’ Ben said.

  ‘He needs support,’ Matt said, ‘he needs his girls.’

  ‘So what are we going to do about them?’ Zac asked. ‘I could tell Pip,’ he offered, ‘then she could tell the others? She's suggested to them that the three of them should go up to Derbyshire soon, anyway.’

  Matt nodded but Ben shook his head. ‘I don't know. I know their traditional dynamic is to look to Pip for advice – but that dynamic was turned on its head by the mother showing up and the Derek business and the whole parentage thing. I speak for Cat, of course,’ said Ben, ‘because I think somewhere, deep down, she just can't help fearing that she's slightly less of a sister to your two than they are to each other.’

  ‘Which is horse shit,’ Matt assured him, backed up by Zac raising his glass.

  ‘I know that,’ said Ben. ‘It's stupid, I know, but it's where her mind is at just now.’

  ‘They should know at the same time,’ Zac said. ‘I could do a dinner gathering and we could tell them all together.’

  ‘I don't know,’ Matt said. ‘It's going to be such a massive thing – we don't know how they'll react individually. And then there's Cosima – if we're round at yours, Fen will have half her mind on how the baby is.’

  ‘Good point,’ said Ben, ‘and I think Cat might feel a bit compromised – like we've engineered a situation. She's very particular
about her comfort zone at the moment – even if it is behind the closed doors of our rental place in Clapham.’

  ‘The thing is, we are going to need to engineer it,’ said Zac.

  ‘Meticulously,’ Matt agreed.

  The three men sipped their beer contemplatively, half their thoughts directed to Django, half to their girls. ‘I reckon we tell them separately but at the same time,’ said Ben. ‘We agree on a time, and specific information – perhaps down to the very wording.’

  Matt and Zac nodded in agreement. ‘I think we also let them know that we met to discuss this,’ said Matt, ‘that it's what Django wants. And that they're each hearing the news at the same time in the same way.’

  ‘OK,’ said Zac, ‘this is good. We also need to decide which order they'll phone each other. I know it sounds contrived but our McCabe girls have a tendency to leap on their emotional high horses and bolt. We can't have them all in a scatter – they're going to need each other.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Matt and Ben.

  ‘You find in traumatic situations, those involved need assistance in deciding what to do and how to do it,’ said Ben. ‘Cat is still insecure, somewhere, about the dynamic between her and her sisters. Perhaps she should make the first call. I'll have her phone Pip – and then Pip can phone Fen?’

  Matt and Zac nod. They've gone off their beer.

  ‘This is crap news,’ Matt said forlornly. ‘Really horrible.’

  ‘It'll be the making or the breaking of them,’ Zac agreed.

  ‘As a family,’ defined Ben, ‘as well as individually.’

  They dreaded being grilled by the girls when they arrived home because it had been settled that nothing would be said until 9 p.m. the following evening when the situation would be revealed according to the information advised by Ben, the precise wording honed by the three of them.

  When Zac arrived home, Pip was watching a cable health channel about having babies, but she zapped over to E4 hurriedly.