The Other Woman's Shoes

by Adele Parks

  His lips never left hers until he’d teased, then bruised her with tiny, pleasurably painful bites. Without removing any of her clothes and without moving from that position, he pulled her into orgasm; her breath was shallow, her heartbeat fast, her chest was flushed, her pants were wet. She came once, then again, then again. And it helped. Her mind was full of the smell of sex and the feel of blood pulsing around her genitals, which helped cloud out the lost Tupperware, the lost husband and the lost family. He inched her out of her jeans and sweatshirt. She moved quickly and shamelessly, stripped him bare, then threw away her own lacy briefs. They stood naked in the kitchen and in each other’s arms and kissed. Then kissed and kissed some more.

  People had said to her that divorce was like death; that you had to grieve, that it was natural to feel lost and angry and sad. Martha didn’t know about that, all she wanted was to feel alive. With each joyous thrust she felt lit up, stirred, awake. He picked her up and she wrapped her legs around his waist. She directed him to the kitchen table so she could rest her buttocks rather than have him take all her weight – not that he cared, she seemed weightless to him. He pulled her closer and closer into him, entering her a little deeper, faster and harder each time. They behaved like animals that couldn’t, wouldn’t ever get enough of each other. They fucked hard, often, and with great hope and affection. She’d been a girl, then a woman, now she was a girl again.

  February

  33

  Martha would always remember February as sunny. Which was peculiar, as February was normally so dull and soulless. This year, every morning she was greeted by bright blue skies split by sharp winter sun. She wore a great deal of yellow, and she smiled an awful lot, despite Eliza asking questions like, ‘You do know there’s no such thing as a perfect man, don’t you?’ Martha didn’t think she was actually required to reply, so she didn’t. Her silence provoked Eliza to demand, ‘You think he’s perfect, don’t you?’ in a tone that made it clear the correct answer, as far as she was concerned, would not be ‘yes’.

  ‘Near as damn it,’ breezed Martha as she buttered a slice of toast for Maisie. Maisie took the toast, held it for about two seconds, then threw it on the floor. Naturally, sod’s law was in force and the toast landed buttered side down.

  ‘Oh dear,’ laughed Martha. She buttered a second slice and handed it over. Stupid little things like smudging butter into the carpet didn’t upset Martha any more. For the first few weeks after Michael had left, Martha found that she cried if she spilt milk, despite the old saying that there was no point in doing so. The children’s tantrums had almost overwhelmed her; if one of them fell and grazed a knee, it had been a close call who cried the most – Martha or the child. The care of Mathew and Maisie had appeared as a huge challenge that she was not up to. Now, nurturing, comforting, loving and protecting them was once again effortless.

  Or at least possible.

  Getting jiggy with Jack was good for Martha. She felt validated.

  Eliza’s constant harping didn’t even get to Martha, although it sometimes seemed that Eliza’s raison d’être was to urinate on Martha’s parade.

  ‘Jack has so much energy. I wonder if you could cope with it 24/7?’ asked Eliza. She crammed the final spoon of her cereal down her throat and then immediately started flying about the kitchen, packing up the things she needed to take to work.

  Was it possible that one day Martha would come to think his constant chatter as irritating as Michael’s silence was alienating? No, she couldn’t imagine it. Eliza was mistaken.

  ‘It was you who said perfect men didn’t exist. If so, Jack has to have some flaw, and if his biggest fault is being energetic then things can’t be too bad,’ reasoned Martha. ‘Besides which, I’m not proposing 24/7.’ Oddly, Martha didn’t feel as ridiculous as she perhaps should have in using a phrase that belonged in a teen movie.

  ‘Have you introduced him to anyone yet?’

  ‘What do you mean, “introduced him”? You’ve met him.’ Martha started to clear the breakfast plates from the table and stack them in the dishwasher.

  ‘I’ve met him, you didn’t introduce him to me.’ The difference, which was obviously apparent to Eliza, eluded Martha; she looked puzzled. Eliza tried to be clear. ‘I was here, he came here, you told me his name. It’s not the same as going out of your way to introduce him to someone. Have you introduced him to Mum and Dad yet?’ Eliza stopped her frantic search for her mobile, her credit card and her Tube pass and turned to face her sister, hands on her hips.

  Martha recognized a challenge when she saw one. ‘Err, no, the opportunity hasn’t arisen,’ she admitted.

  ‘Or Claire, or Dawn, or Dom and Tara, or any of your friends, or Michael?’

  ‘Michael? For God’s sake, Eliza, why would I want to introduce Jack to Michael?’

  ‘No one’s met him, have they?’

  ‘I’ve told everyone who’s important about him.’

  ‘But none of them have met him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Odd that,’ said Eliza; she was finding it difficult to resist adding ‘Ha.’

  ‘Not so odd.’

  ‘He’s a shag then, not a boyfriend.’

  ‘He’s a tender shag.’

  ‘But not a boyfriend,’ Eliza said flatly.

  ‘He does care,’ argued Martha.

  ‘You know that all the women he’s tenderly shagging will think that,’ said Eliza emphatically, then she asked if Martha had seen her Tube pass.

  Martha would not think about it. It couldn’t be helped; therefore thinking about it wouldn’t help. So Jack saw other women. So what? Slept with other women – so what? A vision of Jack kissing another woman flashed into Martha’s head. The woman’s face was blurred, indistinct. Martha pushed the cruel picture out of her mind, but not before it stabbed. She felt the pain in her chest. This was silly. She’d been through this in her head a million times. So, he still wanted variety. So, he wasn’t ready to settle down. Nor was she. He cared about her. She was having fun. That was all that mattered. There was no need at all to think beyond that. It was as good as it got.

  In her position.

  Eliza bounced upstairs. Martha could hear her turn the tap on to full as she cleaned her teeth. Eliza bounced back downstairs again: she was always late, always in a hurry. Martha handed her her Tube pass.

  ‘Oh, thanks.’

  ‘The thing is, Eliza, the odd mix of affection and coolness suits me; I’m not sure I’m ready for anything more.’

  ‘You’re just saying that because he’s not offering you anything more,’ argued Eliza as she zipped up her knee-high boots.

  ‘I’m having fun, hanging with a style guru who doesn’t do coke, how much harm can be done?’

  ‘Lots.’

  ‘He’s sexy and beautiful and–’

  ‘And you’re asking me what harm can be done? Look, he’s not your type. He has a tattoo, wears a necklace and rides a motorbike.’ Put like that, it almost seemed as though Eliza had a point. Martha wasn’t usually attracted to men with tattoos, or bikers or jewellery-wearers but, oddly, Jack had made all three things the epitome of horniness.

  ‘He has form. He’s slept with a stripper, and ticks off women he’s done by country of birth. Variety is his thing,’ insisted Eliza.

  ‘So he has a past – don’t we all?’ Martha made a mental note not to share quite as much info with Eliza. It was evidence that was later used against her.

  Eliza slid into her huge winter coat. She wasn’t exactly cheerful as it was, but putting on the ugly coat always catapulted her into a dire mood. The coat didn’t suit her. It had been a duff purchase. ‘It’s not even his past that worries me, it’s the fact that he wants a future.’

  Martha sighed inwardly. She knew Eliza was right. The other day she’d asked Jack if he’d ever done three-in-a-bed. She’d sort of been joking, but he’d taken her question seriously and said, ‘No, not yet.’ Martha didn’t dare confess this to Eliza; she knew she’d be outr
aged. She’d also asked him if she was the first married woman he’d ever slept with. A fairly ignominious question, but she was struggling for a first, and she so wanted to be unique to him in some way. Unfortunately, it turned out that a few years back he’d casually dated some woman who was also waiting for her divorce to come through.

  At least he was honest.

  Cold comfort.

  Martha only brightened when she realized that she hadn’t asked him if she was the first mother he’d slept with; she made a mental note to do so.

  As if Eliza were reading her mind, she sighed theatrically and warned, ‘Oh Martha. You’re heading for such trouble. Even white mice in laboratories learn faster than this.’

  Martha raged inwardly. She wanted to ask what Eliza wanted her to learn. How to close down? How to be cold and untrusting? How to shield herself against falling in love again? That wasn’t a life as far as Martha was concerned. She didn’t say any of this; all she said was, ‘At least I won’t be in tidying the kids’ toy boxes on Valentine’s night.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘Well…’ Martha couldn’t think of anything else to say. She’d assumed that Jack would spend Valentine’s with her but, thinking about it, there weren’t any guarantees.

  ‘How do you know he won’t want to spend Valentine’s night with one of his many other naked friends?’ inquired Eliza.

  How indeed?

  ‘Look, Martha, I don’t want to seem unnecessarily cruel but’ – But she was going to be unnecessarily cruel, Martha just knew it. – ‘you’re looking really great at the moment, and you’ve always had the sweetest nature, but, Babe, there are a lot of great-looking girls out there – hundreds of them – and, well, men rarely fall for sweet natures.’

  Oh.

  Martha didn’t want to ask but she knew she had to. ‘What do men fall for?’

  ‘Great tits. A challenge. Kylie Minogue.’

  Martha looked down at her average tits; small-but-perfectly-formed was the best description she could ever hope for.

  Martha thought Eliza had been entirely clear, but Eliza obviously saw a need to be more explicit. ‘I mean, I know they say that more than a handful is a waste, but neither of us has even a sufficiency. And you’re not Kylie – you can’t even sing – and as for being a challenge…’ She stopped mid-sentence, as though there was nothing more to be said.

  ‘What?’ demanded Martha. ‘Why aren’t I a challenge?’

  ‘Martha, you’re available, caring and predictable. Does that sound like a challenge to you?’

  ‘I’m not going to play games. It’s just not me. Besides, I’d lose.’

  Eliza looked at her sister and once again thought how utterly horrific this situation was. Martha should not be getting divorced, she wasn’t brutal enough to forge her way through the dating jungle. It was obvious that Jack was going to make mincemeat of her, it was only a matter of time. Although Martha had repeatedly insisted that Jack was just for fun, it was clear that she was falling for him. Falling hard.

  It was also clear that Eliza was wasting her time trying to preach caution.

  She wasn’t trying to be a killjoy; she was honestly worried for Martha. ‘Right then, if you are insisting on continuing with this relationship’ – she said the word in the same way most women say pornography– ‘then at least make an effort to understand him, give yourself a fair chance.’ Martha was all ears. ‘Men like Jack–’

  ‘What do you mean, “men like Jack”?’ interrupted Martha.

  ‘Men who are too good-looking for their own good.’

  Although Eliza didn’t intend it to, her comment increased Martha’s ardour; Martha fizzed with pride.

  ‘Men like Jack aren’t planners,’ pursued Eliza, ‘so what you need to do is something, everything, to put yourself in the forefront of his mind. Easy access, so to speak. It’s an ever-increasingly competitive environment out there, Martha. You have to cut through the clutter.’

  Martha got the impression that Eliza was practising a pitch for raising the budget on a music video. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You have to be the first and last woman he thinks of every day.’

  ‘How do I do that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, think creatively.’ She glanced at the kitchen clock. ‘I’m late for work, we’ll talk about it tonight.’ Eliza kissed her niece and nephew and blew a kiss to her sister. ‘Give it some thought, think out of the box.’

  The door banged shut behind Eliza.

  34

  ‘You did what?’ asked Eliza. She was absolutely aghast and couldn’t for the life of her hide it.

  ‘Well, it was you who said I had to cut through the clutter, put myself at the front of his mind,’ defended Martha.

  ‘But, Martha, you sent out all the wrong signals.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Oh God, you are a case.’ Eliza stared at the spreadsheet on the screen in front of her. The numbers were beginning to blur into one another. She almost wished that she hadn’t picked up the phone; she didn’t need this. ‘Yes. They’re not children, Martha. Chocolate, for fuck’s sake? Why didn’t you just take a copy of the Beano and some Johnson’s baby wipes and be done with it? You don’t want to be seen as a mother. You want to be seen as fun.’

  ‘But I am a mother, and moreover, I thought it was fun. You know that Friday Crunchie feeling. It is a Friday.’

  ‘Well, you’ve blown it. You’re buggered. You’re never going to see him or hear from him again.’

  Martha’s enormous and overwhelming crime was that she had dropped in at Jack’s office and left three Crunchie bars in reception. One for him, and one each for his colleagues Drew and Dave. Martha had wrapped the chocolate bars in brown paper, tied the parcel with black ribbon and marked it ‘urgent’. She hadn’t included a note. She was quite pleased. It had taken quite some restraint not to include a note; she thought it gave the impression that she was cool and mysterious.

  The delivery of chocolate was not a totally unmeditated gesture. For one, it was Friday afternoon, and in a matter of hours Jack would be coming round to see Martha. She was so excited, she’d had that Friday Crunchie feeling all day. (To be accurate, she’d had it all month.) The odd thing was she wasn’t alone in thinking this. Jack had texted her and said he had that Friday feeling. And Jack had a surprisingly, scandalously, sweet tooth.

  Another motivation was that Eliza had said Martha was predictable; Martha had been stung.

  It all added up to a Crunchie bar.

  She’d delivered the package at three-fifteen after a particularly intense day of swapping flirty text messages. However, it was now six-thirty and she hadn’t heard anything from him yet. She’d expected him to call straight away. She was stuck in that miserable no man’s land of an embryonic relationship. She was tortured.

  There were of course a number of factors that could explain his silence. Perhaps he hadn’t received the package: maybe it was still lingering, unnoticed, in an in-tray somewhere. He might not get his post until Monday morning now, which would ruin the joke entirely. Or maybe he had received it but thought it was from someone else (she should definitely have included a note; it was stupid, arrogant not to). Or possibly he’d received it and thought it was a ridiculous, infantile thing for Martha to have done. Had she embarrassed him? Martha generally felt very confident in Jack’s company, but perhaps she didn’t know him as well as she thought – It wasn’t as though they were proper girlfriend and boyfriend. He had other naked friends. Were Crunchie bars presumptuous?

  Martha called Eliza at work for guidance and succour. Eliza did take away Martha’s horrible feelings of uncertainty but she was not at all cheering. Eliza firmly believed that the third explanation was a certainty.

  ‘When were you supposed to be seeing him next?’ demanded Eliza.

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘Tonight? So why did you get in touch at all? There was no reason to speak or contact him today if you’re seeing him tonight.
’

  ‘I got in touch because I was thinking about him and I wanted him to be thinking about me. You said the first and–’

  ‘Last woman he thought of. Yes, I know, I know, but bloody hell, Martha, you are so ignorant. Don’t you have any understanding of the dating rules?’

  ‘No, not really,’ admitted Martha. She was inches away from reminding Eliza that she was newly dumped and had been out of the ‘game’ for over ten years. She had bugger-all idea about what to say, or do, to influence. She had no clue how to lure. She used to have. She was sure she had had some idea in her youth – but now? It was all text-messaging and mobiles, and they gave the game away by saying how often you’d called, what time and where from; it wasn’t easy to be subtle. Also, because of the sophisticated missed-call feature on every phone, you couldn’t kid yourself that he must have called when he clearly hadn’t. If he hadn’t called it was a cold truth. She was out of her depth. But she thought that giving a Crunchie bar was quite innocuous. A fun gesture. She hadn’t realized that it was breaking the rules and would lead to the certainty of being dumped.

  ‘We’d been texting. He’d even said he had that Crunchie feeling, and I’d texted back that I knew exactly what he meant and that I’d had that exact feeling for a while now.’

  ‘What?’ Eliza was obviously disappointed with Martha’s attempt to explain and justify her actions. ‘Well, to start with, you should definitely not have texted him today at all. There was no need if you were expecting to see him. You have to play it cool.’