Men I've Loved Before

by Adele Parks

  ‘Sorry,’ said Neil once again, the moment he and Cindy were alone. ‘I just really needed to see you.’

  ‘It’s too early for dancing,’ she pointed out. She stifled a yawn which somehow underlined the point.

  ‘I know.’ He paused, embarrassed and unsure where to take the conversation next. ‘I thought I could buy you a coffee.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Cindy looked at her watch. She had three-quarters of an hour to kill before Heidi had to be at nursery. ‘You can buy me and Heidi breakfast. We had our first one at six thirty. I’m starving again.’

  ‘Heidi’s with you?’ Neil couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice. He was thrilled at the thought of seeing Heidi again but irritated with the thought of her hanging around in a strip joint.

  ‘Wait here, I’ll just get her and the buggy.’

  Neil and Cindy opted to visit a nearby greasy spoon rather than one of the chain coffee shops. Neil thought that Cindy in her canary-yellow clingy T-shirt and skin-tight cherry-pink tracksuit might draw more attention than they wanted in Starbucks or similar. In the greasy spoon, of course, the builders (arses spread over the rickety chairs and their stomachs popping out under their T-shirts) noticed Cindy’s plastic talons and her false eyelashes but, after one appreciative glance, they quickly returned their focus to their fry-ups and tabloids. Neil had a feeling that the curiosity of the mums living in the W4 postcode would have been harder to shake.

  Cindy ordered egg and soldiers for Heidi and coffee and fry-ups for her and Neil. Neil was unsure he wanted to eat but went along with Cindy’s suggestion as it was easier than thinking for himself. How could he waste head space on deciding whether or not he wanted breakfast when his wife was having an affair? Or at least she might be having an affair. She probably was. She possibly was. Oh, he didn’t know and he quickly grew impatient with himself just thinking about it.

  They chose the table in the window. Heidi sat patiently in an immaculate but old-fashioned high chair that the café owner dragged from a back room, surprising both Neil and Cindy. For a moment neither said anything but just looked out on to the high street. It was a bright winter morning. The sky was a solid blue and the cold sun sloshed on to the frosty road, throwing off a gleam that was annoying for drivers and delightful for children who saw joy in a road that sparkled. The light bounced in through the window and danced on the cutlery. It was actually a beautiful day but that only made things harder for Neil.

  ‘So where’s the fire?’ Cindy asked.

  ‘I think Nat’s having an affair,’ announced Neil solemnly.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Do you?’ he demanded, somewhat affronted that his huge announcement had induced such a clearly underwhelmed response.

  ‘I don’t know her.’

  ‘But do you think it’s likely? From what I’ve told you,’ he persisted.

  ‘Maybe.’ Cindy sliced into her fried egg. She anticipated the yolk running across her plate and into her toast. She loved soggy, eggy toast but she was disappointed, the egg had been in the pan a fraction too long and the yolk had solidified. Still, other than that it was a good breakfast and an unexpected treat. She’d been on a diet all week and she hated diets. That yogurt she’d eaten this morning simply wasn’t enough for a girl to manage on. Least, not a dancer. It was tricky, she knew she had to keep her figure but she didn’t want to go collapsing with hunger, did she?

  ‘Maybe yes or maybe no?’ pursued Neil.

  What was he on about? Oh yes, he wanted to know if she thought his missus was having it away with some other bugger. Well, probably. Who wasn’t? Cindy glanced at Neil and saw that this was not the answer he wanted.

  ‘The point is, why do you think she might be?’ Cindy asked, nicely deflecting the issue. She leant over to Heidi and tried to encourage her to eat a bit more toast or egg. Was it the white bit that was good for you or the yolk? Cindy couldn’t remember. She’d ask Cherry later on. Cherry knew everything there was to know about food nutrition and stuff; it came off the back of an eating disorder.

  Neil told Cindy that Nat’s account of her night out last night didn’t seem likely as he’d spotted Becky at the tube station and Nat hadn’t been with her. He told her that Nat had come home drunk and distressed, and that this morning she’d been elusive and argumentative.

  ‘Doesn’t that seem to add up to a rotten conscience to you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, maybe.’ Cindy didn’t usually get into this sort of stuff with her clients. She wondered what to say. Her job was to take her clients well away from their reality. She was supposed to brighten their days and nights, she wasn’t supposed to collaborate with their paranoia and confirm their misgivings. Yet her experience was that everyone was capable of infidelity and that many, many people actually actively pursued it, but Neil was the last client she’d want to say that to. He was not like her other clients. He was a little more earnest and sincere. She’d called him soft to the other dancers but she hadn’t meant that in a mean way. He seemed to take an interest in her too, beyond her arse and tits. When they met in the park they’d behaved like friends. A lot like friends. She liked the idea of having a male friend. It was a novelty. She had lots of girlfriends, of course. Loads and loads of them as she was definitely a girl’s girl, it wasn’t easy to like men in her chosen profession. And then there was her Dave. But he wasn’t her friend, he was her husband. Friends were the people you talked to about your husband and so by that line of reasoning her Dave couldn’t be a friend, as lovely as he was. Cindy racked her brains as she thought what to say to Neil that he might like to hear. After all, that’s the line she took with most of her girlfriends, she always told them what they wanted to hear. ‘Yes, of course he loves you!’ ‘Yes, he’ll phone.’ ‘No, your bum definitely does not look big in that! Have you lost weight?’

  ‘It’s not total proof, though, is it?’ offered Cindy. It was the best she could come up with. ‘Come on, you pay the bill and you can walk with me and Heidi to her nursery school.’

  Neil was so excited about the prospect of dropping Heidi off at nursery he didn’t hesitate to pay the bill in full; after all, he’d said he’d take them to breakfast, he couldn’t expect her to pay half. In fact, Neil never expected Cindy to pay for anything when they were together, which was just as well because Cindy didn’t expect to pay for anything when they were together either. Her pleasure in their friendship didn’t stretch that far.

  He wanted to push the buggy but he didn’t dare ask so he settled for walking along next to Cindy and Heidi; sometimes on narrow pavements he had to drop behind them. He wondered if onlookers would assume they were a family. He found that he hoped so.

  Heidi liked her nursery school and rushed in, making her way directly towards the playhouse. Cindy almost had to drag Neil back out of the premises. He craned his neck in an effort to see the tiniest kids plod around the play dough table and the slightly older kids tear around the playground. Even in his wretched and confused state he felt a sense of joy snaking up inside his stomach. Look at them, he thought to himself, every one of them is a bloody fabulous miracle. OK, so that boy in the red top was nipping the girl in the green skirt and that wasn’t nice, Neil admitted, but all the same they were miracles. Why couldn’t Nat see how wonderful kids were? If looking at strangers’ kids made him feel this much better about life, he could only imagine how wonderful it would be to have one of his own. How would it feel to stare into the eyes of his son or daughter? To feel the weight of them as he carried them from the car to their bunk beds, as his dad had carried him when he was a small kid who’d fallen asleep in the back seat during a long journey home. Why didn’t Nat want it?

  ‘But if there isn’t another man then why is she being so bloody obstinate about having a baby?’ Neil asked Cindy as they walked through Ravenscourt Park on their way back towards Hush Hush. Neil knew he should probably be heading off to work but he had started to think of Ravenscourt Park as ‘their park’, his, Cindy’s and Heidi’s, and he d
idn’t want to miss the opportunity of strolling through it with Cindy again. He realised this was a bit presumptuous. Really, he had no right to imagine that the three of them had anything that was ‘theirs’; besides, this was only the second time they’d visited together. Well, third if you counted the trip to the nursery, to drop off Heidi, as a separate trip to this one, coming back from the nursery. It was no good; no matter how he massaged the figures, he realised that it wasn’t ‘theirs’. Nothing was ‘theirs’. They didn’t share a name, or a home or even a TV. What was he thinking, trying to pretend they had something more solid? The truth was they had an embryonic and slightly unexpected friendship at best, and a complicated commercial arrangement at worst. Neil didn’t want to think about that right now. He strode along the path, pushing the empty buggy as he’d seen real fathers do, just about an hour ago.

  ‘You know, Nat not wanting kids is not normal. It’s not natural.’ There, Neil had said it aloud. The thoughts he’d so often played with of late had finally been voiced. His wife was not behaving rationally in refusing to have a child. She was being unreasonable to the point of unnatural.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Cindy. ‘My Dave didn’t want babies. Nor did my best mate Di’s partner. Nor did my dad, come to that. It’s usually men who are not as keen. Not the women.’ Cindy shrugged, clearly stumped by Nat’s attitude and then added, ‘I just took matters into my own hands.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I stopped taking the pill, you idiot. What did you think I meant?’ Cindy laughed as she delivered this piece of information. She didn’t see it as the terrible abuse of trust that it no doubt was, she saw it as an age-old trick used by the desperate and determined. ‘I just said it was a slip-up. I was taking pills for a kidney infection at the time so I blamed the tablets that the doctor had given me. I said they must have worked against the pill or something and so my Dave wasn’t suspicious. And then it was a done deal and he quickly got used to the idea. I’ve told you before that there isn’t a better dad than him, now. Once he got used to the idea.’

  ‘It’s not quite the same for me, though, is it?’ pointed out Neil.

  Cindy stared at him for a moment and then grasped his meaning. ‘Oh no, I suppose not.’ She laughed. ‘Oh well, it doesn’t always work out so well as it did for me, anyway. My friend Di’s boyfriend buggered off and in the end she couldn’t face it on her own so she had a late abortion.’ Neil winced. He felt powerless and distraught. Cindy noticed and tried to cheer him up, she didn’t like to think about Di’s abortion either; it had been painful, shocking and heartbreaking. None of the girls ever talked about it to Di. Cindy squeezed his arm. Her touch was strange. In many ways they were intimate, for example Neil could recognise her deodorant, as many times she’d stood in front of him naked, raising her arms above her head, but they rarely touched. ‘Don’t worry, Neil, I’m sure if we put our heads together, we’ll come up with something.’

  Neil seriously doubted this was the case. He’d spent hours and hours considering his problem over the last few months and hadn’t managed to find a solution, so it seemed unlikely that Cindy could crack it before her shift started.

  ‘Oh, look! Heidi didn’t take Mrs Flippy into nursery.’ Cindy crouched down beside the buggy and pulled out a raggedy stuffed toy rabbit from the shopping basket.

  ‘Mrs Flippy?’ asked Neil.

  ‘Mix between Floppy and Lippy. When Heidi was a tiny baby I used to hold the rabbit in front of my face and say to Dave, “She’s crying, it’s your turn to change her nappy,” or whatever, you know in a funny voice. And so he renamed the rabbit Lippy instead of Floppy but that seemed a bit wrong for a baby’s toy so we settled on something in the middle.’ Cindy grinned as she relayed the memory.

  This small insight into Cindy’s domestic life bit into Neil’s consciousness and embedded itself there. He was beginning to see it was a bit fucked up that he knew what this woman’s minge looked like and what her kid’s toys were called and yet he had never touched her with any sort of affection. His relationship with her was a bit like a relationship someone might have with their favourite soap star while following a particularly compelling plot. Neil knew he should sit down and think about all this. He and Nat were both chasing about, getting drunk and avoiding stuff, they had to sort themselves out. But right now he had Mrs Flippy to think about.

  ‘Will she miss her rabbit?’

  Cindy looked concerned again. ‘Yes, she probably won’t settle at nap time.’ Cindy checked her watch. She didn’t have time to take the rabbit back to nursery. She glanced at Neil, wondering how far his good nature could be stretched. He understood her unvoiced request.

  ‘I’ll take it to her. I’ll drop it off on the way to work,’ he offered.

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘I’d be delighted.’ That statement was almost too true. Neil wondered what was wrong with his life that his biggest kick could come from pretending to be someone’s father, or at least acting as a useful family friend. Cindy held out the rabbit towards him and as she did so he noticed her wrist. It was, quite usually, patterned with her thin blue veins. Funny, he’d seen every fragment of her body: her smooth and strong inner thighs, her neat, nipped-in waist, her out-y belly button and of course her scarcely there pubic hair and her surgically enhanced tits, but he was sure her wrist was the most erotic part of her body. He felt slithers of appreciation and excitement scamper around his body. He stared and stared at her wrist as she impatiently waved the toy rabbit at him. She was wondering why he hadn’t reached out and taken it. She was going to be late if he didn’t get a move on.

  Her wrist was definitely the prettiest and most startling thing he could imagine. It was a tiny, feminine wrist, a mother’s wrist. It carried her lifeblood and she had given life, too, actual life. To Heidi. She’d reproduced. Cindy had reproduced. Of course he’d known that for weeks but now the importance of that information hit him. This woman was a miracle. These veins were miracles. They were important. Important to him. Suddenly, Neil grabbed Cindy’s hand and he brought her wrist to his mouth. He kissed it long and hard, not caring that they were standing exposed in the middle of Ravenscourt Park. Anyone could have walked past them. A colleague of his, a client of hers, but Neil didn’t care. Cindy stared at him, unsure what to do. His kiss was charged and erotic and kind. She recognised all three incarnations and was flattered by the third. So he’d kissed her wrist, where was the harm in that?

  Suddenly he let go of her wrist and with his right hand he grabbed the back of her head and pulled her face close towards his. He landed his lips square on to hers and before either of them gave the scenario much thought, his tongue entered her mouth. The unfamiliar territory set off numerous sparks. He felt bolts of excitement in his mouth, his chest and, inevitably, his cock. His left hand moved a fraction towards her breasts. He didn’t actively decide to grope her in the middle of the park; it was more spontaneous than that, his hand just moved towards them without permission from his brain. Her tits were closer than he anticipated. He banged into her hard nipple before he expected to. So there they were, in the park, kissing and fondling. Perhaps it was a natural extension to all that had gone before. He knew the colour and texture of the nipples that he could now feel through her T-shirt. They’d been inches from his face on many occasions. He’d often had the opportunity to just stick out his tongue and he’d have known them before now anyway, unless of course some huge bouncer had punched his lights out for touching one of the performers. He’d have known their roughness, their texture, their hardness, their sweetness. He knew their colour. They were a dark burgundy colour. He knew their shape. They were large ovals, bigger than Nat’s.

  ‘Get your fucking hands off my wife!’ Neil heard the words just a second before he felt the air being thrown out of him as he was shoved away from Cindy and the incredible crack across his jaw.

  Neil had never been hit before. Least not since the playground and that stuff was nothing in compari
son to this intense agony. He didn’t fall to the ground, like he’d seen on TV and in movies, he stumbled backwards in an ungainly way and found himself clinging on to Heidi’s buggy. Cindy was screeching something and trying to stand between him and her husband. Neil couldn’t take it all in. Jesus, that hurt! His jaw throbbed and his neck ached. Did he have some sort of whiplash? Was he bleeding, were his teeth loose? He could taste blood. The man was small and spitting. He had yellow teeth and acne. He had disproportionately large hands, or at least it seemed that way as he unleashed a flurry of blows on to Neil’s crouched and quivering body.

  29

  Alison and Tim took dinner parties very seriously. They were quite old school in their approach as they prided themselves on showering their guests with every attention and courtesy; casual entertaining was anathema to them both. They worked as a team, with clearly defined roles. Alison invited the guests, bought the ingredients and flowers, set the table, put nibbles into bowls and placed the bowls in accessible places around the sitting room. Tim did the cooking and was good at it. His lamb and minted potatoes were legendary; their guests were always only too pleased to pepper the conversation with a shameless number of compliments, in the hope of a repeat invitation.

  Alison always paid attention to detail. From time to time, she cut out helpful articles from magazines, ones that explained how to entertain in style. She always ensured that her napkins matched the flower arrangement and candles. Nat was often struck by the fact that not only did Ali have napkins but she had sets in at least three different colours. Nat usually put a roll of Bounty on the table and her idea of going posh was to buy paper serviettes from Ikea. Every time she ate at Tim and Ali’s she flirted with the idea of visiting John Lewis and buying some proper table linen; the problem was, whenever she got to John Lewis she invariably stumbled across a lovely lipstick that she preferred to spend her money on.