by Lisa Jewell
“She’s not like you.”
This was said abruptly. Almost sharply.
She blinked and stared at her fingers where they circled the stem of her wineglass. “She’s beautiful,” Maya said quietly.
“So what? How shallow do you think I am?”
“She’s also really lovely.”
He sighed, as though she were totally missing the point. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Yes. She’s lovely.” It was a concession, that was obvious. Not what he really thought.
Two of the teenagers had left the next room and were sitting side by side in a cubby opposite. A boy and a girl, involved in a theatrically intense conversation. She was listening to him with wide eyes, stabbing the ice cubes in a glass of Coke with the end of her straw, then running her fingers through her thatch of uncombed hair. He said something deep into her ear and she laughed and as she laughed his arm came around her and pulled her into him, bringing her face straight against his mouth. There followed a prolonged and intense bout of French kissing, their chests pressed together, his hand pushed hard into the small of her back.
Luke and Maya watched, momentarily mesmerized, then they looked at each other.
“Get a room,” Luke muttered under his breath, and they both laughed nervously.
The interruption was Maya’s cue to turn the conversation around onto neutral territory. But she couldn’t help herself. It was something to do with those teenagers. So raw and underdeveloped. And here she was, thirty-two years old. Married to an older man. A stepmother. Trying to get pregnant. Yet that, that ridiculous, messy, glorious, overblown time of her life when a week felt like a month and boys put their tongues in her mouth for barely any reason at all, when she was touched and squeezed and ogled and used, when she held men in places she didn’t want to hold them, wore clothes with holes in them and broke people’s hearts as easily as dropping glasses, felt suddenly as if it was only yesterday. Was it really all over? Forever? She experienced a sickening swell of nostalgia and turned to Luke, seeing him suddenly as a man of her own age rather than her decade-younger stepson. “Who’s your ideal woman, then?” she said, pulling the wine bottle out of the bucket and topping up their glasses to mask her nerves. “If it’s not beautiful, lovely Charlotte?”
She watched a dozen thoughts come and go through Luke’s mind. His strange pale eyes flickered slightly. He picked up his wineglass and then put it down again.
“You,” he said. “Basically.” He shrugged defensively.
She laughed, even though she’d almost expected him to say it. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’m old enough to be your—”
“Well, no, you’re not,” he cut in as though he’d already thought the whole thing through. “Not even nearly.”
“Well.” Maya put a hand to her throat, which had grown suddenly red and itchy. “Old enough to be your stepmother.”
“Yeah.” He ground the base of his wineglass against the tabletop. “That’s for sure.”
The teenagers had separated and were now caressing each other’s hands and talking to each other in a seamless stream, their eyes locked together. It occurred to Maya that probably neither of them would even remember this night, this moment, this corner of the Flask that had once been the site of such fevered passion. They might not even remember each other’s names. They certainly wouldn’t remember the feel, the smell, the precise sensation of themselves, right here, right now. She felt another wave of sickness, felt again the need to catch hold of herself, to pin herself down into her own moment.
“I think you’ll be an amazing husband to someone one day,” she said. It was bullshit, but she needed to say something.
“Yeah,” he said sadly. “Yeah.” Then he turned towards her, very fast, and said, “Do you think you’ll stay with him forever?”
“Adrian?”
“Yes. Adrian. Of course.”
There was only one answer. “Of course I will,” she said. “I love him.”
He nodded. And suddenly his body language became fraught with something tender and desperate. Almost as though he was about to cry.
The boy across the way had his fingers threaded up through the underside of his girlfriend’s hair, his thumb rubbing against the skin at the back of her neck. She leaned into his touch and smiled and then blinked at him, slowly, catlike. Maya held back a groan of longing and despair and almost unthinkingly, comfortingly, put a hand over Luke’s. His other hand immediately came down upon hers and then he caught her gaze with his, those eyes fixed onto hers, and Maya felt her heart pulse and burn with panic and watched his face come closer and closer to hers and she thought, I want this. Please let me have it. His lips came down upon hers and for one exquisite moment they were kissing each other and it was raw and teenage and damp and crazed and had nothing whatsoever to do with Adrian.
It lasted for all of six seconds, until Maya fought her way out of the moment and back into her real life.
“Christ,” she said, holding him back with a hand against his chest, where she could feel his heart banging hard. “No. Oh God. No, Luke!”
She turned it into his fault. She had to. She wanted to apologize but she couldn’t.
He pulled back from her, his fingertips over his lips. “I’m sorry,” he said. He clutched the back of his neck and moved away from her. “I am so sorry. I don’t—”
“It’s OK. Luke. It’s OK. Just don’t—”
“No. Shit. It’s not OK. That was . . . I’m such a twat. Christ. I can’t believe—”
“Luke. Stop it. It’s fine.”
“Please.” He gripped her hand. “Please don’t tell anyone. What I did. Please.”
She shook her head. “Of course . . .”
“Don’t tell my dad.”
“My God. No.”
He let his head fall down onto her hand, rubbed his forehead back and forwards against her skin. She looked down into the youthful thickness of his hair and softly rested her other hand against it. She wanted to rake her fingers through it, feel it part beneath her touch. She wanted him to lift up his head and kiss her again. But for now, they sat like this, him prostrated against her while she stroked his hair and stared sadly through the window at the misty, sodium-stained Highgate night.
27
July 2012
Adrian let the curtain drop at the sound of Caroline’s footsteps up the front stairs. He’d just watched Paul Wilson kissing his ex-wife in the front seat of his white minivan (it turned out that Paul Wilson was a purveyor of organic mushrooms and truffles, making him possibly the most Islington person in the borough of Islington. His van said “Shrooooom!” in diminishing typeface on the back doors) for approximately ten minutes. As if the entire preceding weekend hadn’t given them both ample time for such things.
He heard the children upstairs stampeding to the door to greet their mother, and the dogs skidding about on the tiled floor in their desperation to see her face. As though she’d been gone for weeks, not since yesterday morning. Caroline appeared at the door of the sitting room a moment later holding a writhing dog and a wodge of mail, looking entirely like a woman who’d been having sex for thirty-six hours. Her lips were engorged and tender, her hair voluminous, her blue eyes burning bright as a hot summer sky. Are you ovulating by any chance? he wanted to ask.
As Much Sperm as Possible.
That had always been her mantra when they were trying to conceive. None of this timing it to the precise moment of the egg floating away from its moorings. Just quick and often.
“Hello,” she said, dropping the dog and examining the letters in her hand. “Good weekend?”
“Yes,” he said brightly. “Really, really good weekend.”
She sat on the sofa and removed her sandals. Beau came in holding a certificate he’d been given that morning at a science show at the Business Design Center. “I made a firework,” he s
aid, climbing onto Caroline’s lap and letting her look at his certificate. She peered at it over Beau’s shoulder, pointing and making the appropriate parental noises. Adrian watched from the armchair. He imagined her sitting there, bursting at the seams with Paul Wilson’s thirtysomething sperm.
Christ, he thought, is this what it was like when he and Maya had been trying to get pregnant? Is this what it felt like for the rest of them? He’d always assumed everyone would be delighted. A new brother! Or sister! A brilliant new addition to the large and wonderful family he’d brought into being. And everyone had seemed delighted. Cat in particular. At the time. But thinking of the venom in those e-mails from the mysterious poison penman or -woman, had the whole venture actually been shrouded in ill will and unhappiness? Had it upset Caroline? Susie? The little ones? He tried to remember what the others had said about it. But he couldn’t. Is it possible, he wondered now, that he hadn’t asked them? Hadn’t discussed it?
“Miserable bloody weather,” said Caroline, eyeing one of the letters cursorily and then sliding it back into its envelope. “Honestly, I can’t remember a more depressing July. Makes me want to emigrate.”
“What’s emigrate?” said Beau.
“It means going to live in another country,” said Adrian.
“I don’t want to emigrate.”
Caroline smiled and squeezed him. “We’re not going to,” she said. “Don’t you worry. Did you watch the rowing?” she asked, addressing Adrian.
“No,” he said, “no. Was it good?” He didn’t care about the rowing. He imagined the rowing as having been a brief between-shag breather, watched in bed from under rumpled, sex-soaked sheets.
“Amazing,” she said, “all those giant men. Backs like wardrobes.” Her eyes glinted with lust.
“Can I . . . ,” Adrian began. “Could we maybe meet up for a drink next week? Just the two of us?”
Caroline blinked at him. “Er, yeah, sure. I’ll have to check with Cat, when she’s in . . .”
“Or Luke could sit with them?”
“Yes, or Luke. Whichever. That’s fine. But not Tuesday,” she said. “I’m out Tuesday.”
“Fine,” said Adrian. “Good.”
He got to his feet then and cupped Beau’s soft, warm cheek inside his hand as he passed him, almost groaning at the tenderness of his skin. He went up to his quarters in the study, packed his bits back into his rucksack, kissed the kids, slung the rucksack over his shoulder and left the house. It was dreary and damp. He turned the collar up on his jacket and he headed for the bus stop.
There’d been a woman in his flat. Adrian could tell the moment he opened the front door. First was the smell, something sweet and floral, not like the spicy stuff that Luke slapped all over his chops every morning. Then there was Luke himself: lighter, softer, his hair not quite right.
He’d shaved off his experimental beard, too, leaving his face looking raw and exposed. He thought of Beau’s cheek under his hand half an hour ago and wondered when he’d last stroked Luke’s face. He was aware that there would always be the last time for these intimate nuances of his relationships with his children and that often that time would pass unnoticed. When, for example, had Cat sat on his lap for the last time? When had he last kissed Otis on the lips, picked Pearl up in his arms, called Luke one of his childhood nicknames, held Beau up on his shoulders? He had no idea. He thought of crying at the leavers’ ceremonies of his oldest children, knowing that he would never again see them in their primary uniforms, that they would never again be little. But there were no ceremonies for these other “lasts,” no realization or acknowledgment that something precious was about to end.
“You OK?” he said, dropping his door keys into a bowl and removing his jacket. Luke nodded at him casually, his long legs hanging either side of the bar stool by the kitchen counter.
“Had a good weekend?”
“Yeah.” Luke yawned. “Yeah. It was good.”
“Do anything interesting?” He pulled yesterday’s underpants out of his rucksack and put them straight into the washing machine, followed by socks and a T-shirt, dimly aware of the heat of the drum, of its having been recently used.
“Not really.” Luke’s gaze dropped back to the laptop.
Adrian headed into his bedroom, knowing already what he would find. New bedsheets. He wouldn’t normally have noticed apart from the fact that his cleaner changed them every Friday and he’d left her out a brand-new sheet, still in its packaging, to replace an old one with a rip in it that he and Beau had used the week before to paint on. The new bedsheet had been pale blue. The one on his bed was blue chambray. He pulled open a drawer and found the pale blue sheet washed, pressed and folded into a freakishly neat square.
His cleaner did not iron bedsheets. Adrian certainly did not iron bedsheets.
He lifted the pillow to his face and sniffed it. There it was, that same sweet smell. And there, snagged on the corner of the bedside table was a blond hair. He smiled grimly. Fair enough, he thought, he couldn’t expect his six-foot-two, twenty-three-year-old son to invite ladies into his bunk bed. But still. Sex. Here. In his monk’s quarters. Sex all over his ex-wife. Sex everywhere. As much sperm as possible. He pulled his hands down his face. And then he sat down heavily on his bed. And through the grim conceptual fog of everyone but him having sex came suddenly and overpoweringly the thought of Maya. His perfect little Maya. Her neat, tidy body. Everything where it should be. The dimples in the small of her back, one above each pear-shaped buttock. The golden freckles on her shoulders and arms. Her eyes squeezed shut in the dark of night. The pale white nape of her neck like a beautiful surprise when he pulled up her amber hair.
“Oh Christ,” he groaned. “Maya.”
And then he remembered those last times. Those last months. When he’d look at her sometimes and wonder where she’d gone. She would be there, right in front of him, astride him, she’d be making the noises, pulling the faces, but he’d known she wasn’t there. He’d thought it was because the baby wasn’t coming. He’d thought it was because of him. He’d feel guilty, even while it was happening, guilty that he’d given everyone a baby but her. Guilty that he was too old. Guilty that his hair was thinning, that she’d got the tail end of him, not the golden beginnings. And the guiltier he felt, the more she’d looked at him with a kind of benign pity.
He hadn’t thought about this. Not since April 19. He hadn’t thought about how it had been then. He’d fixated on the years before. How perfect it had been. He’d fixated on the shock of her death. Here one minute, gone the next. Completely out of the blue.
But had it been? he wondered now. The e-mails had been coming for months. The baby had been failing to materialize for months. The distance in her eyes had been there for months. Everything had been wrong for months.
Adrian rubbed at his eyes, holding back tears. Who had he thrown away his perfect family for? Who was Maya? He couldn’t remember her anymore. What had it been? Him and her? Them? Had it been sex? Had he been having a midlife crisis? Was it nothing more than the joy of a sweet smile and perfect breasts?
His history was unraveling. For years it had been neatly filed, Rolodexed, Filofaxed. The linear progression of things. The stages and phases. Now it was as if someone had shaken everything out onto the floor in a pile. And there it was: his history. A bloody mess. And he didn’t know where the hell to start.
PART THREE
28
January 2011
Dear Bitch
Happy New Year!
I hear you all had a lovely time at the big family Christmas. How magical it must have been for all your husband’s children to have you there, the spare part, the moron who thought she could just waltz into someone else’s family and play the queen bee. Apparently you contributed a homemade Christmas pudding to the party. Everyone pretended they liked it, but according to my sources it was inedible. Just you showing
off, I suppose. Again. You really do think you can just bake a cake or remember someone’s favorite TV show or give someone a piggyback or plait their hair and that everyone will fall in love with you. But they won’t. They’re not stupid. Not like your idiot husband. I can see right through you and so can they. It’s just a matter of time, Bitch. Everyone will see you for what you are. In the meantime, do feel free to disappear.
Maya copied, pasted, deleted. She barely read them anymore. The e-mails had been coming for months now. Sometimes twice a week, sometimes not for a few weeks at a time. For a reasonably sensitive person, Maya had become pretty desensitized to the shock now. Yeah yeah, she’d think, inedible Christmas puddings, bring it on. What. Ever.
But the words, while they didn’t sting at the point of attack, left a bruise on her emotions that ached dully over the hours and days that followed. She felt permanently tired. It was probably work, it was probably that bad cold she’d had the week before Christmas, it was probably just winter and the long nights and the dark afternoons. But often it felt more sinister than that, the heaviness in her limbs, the weight behind her eyes. It often felt as though she was being poisoned.
She’d promised herself she’d tell someone if the e-mails were still coming by the New Year. And here it was, January 1. And she already knew that she would never tell anyone.
She shut her laptop and surveyed her wardrobe. They were due in Hove at 1:30 p.m. for Susie’s annual New Year’s Day party. She pulled on a black knitted dress with a white satin collar and appraised herself. She patted her tummy. The little mound of it. In her heart she knew it was Christmas excess. In her heart she knew that there was no way, even if she was pregnant, that she’d be far gone enough to show like that. She pulled the dress off again. She didn’t want to set people wondering today. She didn’t want people looking at her in that infuriating, questioning way, their eyes lit with hope and delight.