The Birds and the Bees

by Milly Johnson

  ‘I’m no’ surprised,’ said Adam, who had long since stopped being shocked by the cruelty of people to each other.

  ‘I followed him to her house once, confronted her, asked her…begged her to stop seeing him.’ Stevie fell headfirst into the memory of that day, how she had waited outside in the car for over an hour tormenting herself with images of what they were doing together until she saw Mick leave and drive away. She had breathed deep, crossed the road and knocked hard upon the shabby peeling council-house door, determined to chase her rival away once and for all. Linda had looked through the side window to see who was at the door before brazenly appearing in a cheap and tacky negligée, the smell of sex and cigarettes and Mick hanging around her like a heavy fusty cloud.

  ‘I pleaded, I cried, I threatened all sorts. Totally lost every bit of dignity I had,’ Stevie went on. ‘She just laughed and shut the door in my face, made me feel this big. I think I went a bit mad really.’ Stevie cringed, but the wine had loosened her tongue and it felt easy to talk about it, even if she would probably recall this in the morning and want to die. ‘I did everything to get him to come back, except leaving him alone to get it out of his system. I thought if I dogged him he’d give in, you see, but it got me absolutely nowhere. The only thing I had left to try was letting him get on with it and see if he came back, but I ran out of time for that one. On the day I got my pregnancy confirmed, I came back home to find him packing. He said he was leaving me to go and live in Tenerife with Linda. The car crashed on the way to the airport.’

  ‘Oh my!’ Adam’s hand reached forwards and brushed her fringe back from her eyes in an instinctive and sympathetic gesture. She let him do it without slapping his hand away, which amazed him.

  ‘Mick had remortgaged the house to raise the money to go–got Linda to fake my signature, I presume. I was in big financial trouble when it all came to light and Linda’s family were going crazy. They made a huge scene at the funeral…it was an awful time.’ Stevie gulped. ‘His mum had a headstone done, but that was destroyed and his flowers kept getting kicked over.’ She recalled Mick’s mother ringing up in tears, expecting Stevie to go and clear up the mess with her, shouting at her to forgive him in death, not understanding why that could be so difficult for her, considering this was all Stevie’s fault.

  ‘If you had been more of a wife, he wouldn’t have left you and he’d still be alive.’

  ‘I was really sick, carrying Danny at the time, and found it hard to go out to work. But I had to, there were so many debts. Mick had cancelled all the insurances, you see, and I didn’t know.’ Stevie managed a little smile. ‘Then Midnight Moon came up trumps for me and gave me a chance to find my feet.’

  ‘Do you think it would have made a difference if Mick had known about Danny?’ Adam asked gently.

  ‘He did know,’ said Stevie, poking an escapee tear back inside. ‘I told him, showed him the test I’d done in case he thought I was trying to trick him. He told me to get shut and send him the bill. Six hours later, he was dead.’

  Adam winced. ‘Do Mick’s family ever see Danny then?’

  ‘I rang when I gave birth and left a message on their answering machine telling them how ill Danny was, and that if they wanted to see him, they ought to come straight away, just in case he didn’t make it. I sent them some Polaroids, but they just sent everything back with a note to say they’d pray for him.’

  ‘Some godly faith, turning your back on a wee baby!’ said Adam. Stevie shrugged. It was just one more rejection in her book.

  ‘They blamed me for not being a strong enough wife to keep Mick. If he hadn’t been running away from me, you see, he wouldn’t have had the accident, that was their reckoning.’

  ‘What nonsense,’ said Adam, shaking his head in outrage. ‘How on earth could you have been to blame?’

  ‘People need to have someone to focus their anger on, Adam. It’s easier blaming outsiders than the ones you love.’ Stevie’s voice faded, realizing exactly what she was saying. She saw Adam shift a little uncomfortably too. Yes, it was all too easy.

  ‘It must have been hard for you alone, with a wee baby,’ he said, moving swiftly on.

  ‘We got through,’ she smiled. Looking back, she didn’t know quite how, but they had.

  ‘Ye’re no’ close to your own family?’

  ‘Not really. Catherine and Eddie are my family. I’d have been lost if it hadn’t been for them. That’s why I feel such a failure for Danny. I wanted him to have the family life I never had. I thought we’d found it with Matthew.’

  ‘So why Matthew? Why did you fall for Matthew?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘My ex-husband Mick was wild, live-for-the-moment, intoxicating, a one-man charm offensive. Matthew was considerate, affectionate, faithful…’ She gave a little laugh at that last quality. ‘I think I fell for what Matthew wasn’t, rather than what he was, if that makes any sense. Mick exhausted me, burnt me out, stamped all over my heart, then along came steady, nice Matthew. Chalk and cheese, or so I thought.’

  ‘They weren’t really all that different though, were they?’ said Adam with his objective eye. ‘From where I’m standing, they were both takers in life.’

  ‘Probably,’ said Stevie, nodding. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t special enough for either of them in the end. I thought more of them than they did of me, if that doesn’t sound like romantic claptrap.’

  ‘Naw, it doesn’t at all,’ said Adam, thinking of Diane, of Jo, of his mother. He knew what it was like only too well to be on the begging end of love and the insanity it produced.

  ‘So come on, why Jo? Stevie asked him. ‘Why would you want someone as gorgeous and flawless as her?’

  He laughed and flicked her hair, and she turned to him with her sweet, funny, smiling face and deep blue eyes. It was as if he was looking at it for the first time. It wasn’t the perfect, magazine-cover face of someone like Jo; there were fine lines around her eyes to show how much she had cried and laughed and loved and lived, but Stevie Honeywell’s was making his heart do flick-flacks in a way that no one else had ever made it do.

  ‘Jo, eh? Because, if this doesn’t sound like romantic claptrap, Jo promised me the sort of love I’ve been looking for all my life. Some people just have to ability to mould themselves to what you want. Jo was one of them.

  ‘I was just recovering from a nasty divorce. My wife, Diane, had run off with her boss. You know the type: thirty years older than her, Satsuma tan, married of course, owned the company. If that wasn’t enough, she then tried to get half of everything I had, too. I went a bit mad masel’. Actually, I shouldnae really be telling you this after what you thought of me.’

  ‘Oh, go on,’ she said, poking his arm with her finger.

  ‘I got a solicitor’s letter saying she was entitled to half of everything. So rather than sell the stuff, I started to halve it with a chainsaw.’

  ‘Half of everything? I’ll give you half!’ he had roared, when she finally confessed that all those late nights hadn’t been down to ‘finishing a project’ after all. He’d started to divide their furniture all right. He’d got as far as slicing two dining-room chairs down the middle then realized he was scaring himself more than he was Diane.

  ‘No!’ said Stevie, horrified but sympathetic.

  ‘Yes. I regret my outburst now. Only because she ran off with my wee cat, though–och he was great, I loved him a load. She took him and then she gave him away, can you believe? She just didnae want me to have him. Diane was so cold, and then along came Jo with her “vulnerability” and her soft words, just when I needed them most.’ As he was telling this to Stevie, Adam realized just how much of a gift Jo had when it came to manipulating men. She had played to his insecurities; that initial warmth she had used to reel him in had chilled by a few degrees every day to keep him interested, to keep him on the begging end of her attention. ‘The rest, as they say, is history.’

  ‘Crap at picking partners, aren’t we?’ said Stevie. ‘I once went out w
ith a policeman who was knocking off grannies behind my back.’

  ‘I can beat that. My first proper girlfriend said she wouldn’t sleep with me unless I covered my hair up with a shower cap.’

  ‘I can understand that, though.’

  ‘Och, you cheeky wee…’

  He leapt on her playfully and she shrieked with laughter, and suddenly the words and sounds dropped away because there was no more need for them, and his hands were cradling her face, and his lips started an achingly slow descent to hers as if he was scared she would push him away, but she didn’t. Her heart was pumping some weird chemical around her system that was making her drunk with smiley feelings. The air around them was still as if it too was holding its breath. Adam’s lips brushed Stevie’s teasingly and she thought she was going to explode if they didn’t come into land, like now.

  Then someone knocked on the bloody door, and kept knocking.

  Chapter 51

  ‘Matthew, whatever’s the matter?’ asked Stevie, forced to answer the door before he bashed it down. He looked terrible: bleached and distressed, and his hair was stuck up like Ken Dodd’s.

  ‘Can I have a quiet word, Stevie?’ He looked past Stevie to Adam, who melted into the background, leaving them to it.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Can you come across the road, please?’

  Stevie looked horrified at him. ‘Over there? No, I can’t. Why?’

  ‘Jo and I are finished.’

  ‘What?’ Stevie’s head started swimming with shock.

  She looked behind her. Adam wasn’t there, but she knew he must have heard what Matthew had just said. She wanted to go and find him, and see what that piece of information had done to him. Then again she didn’t. Jo was free. It was obvious what it would mean to him.

  ‘Please, Stevie!’

  Despite the frustration in her heart and her body, she couldn’t say no. She couldn’t have deserted anyone in that state. Except Jo, maybe. She could make an exception in her case.

  She slipped on her shoes, took another look behind her and followed Matthew across the road.

  ‘I don’t want to go in there,’ she said, as he opened up the door.

  ‘Please. There’s no way she’ll be coming here again,’ he said, and disappeared inside. Cautiously, she went in behind him, feeling a prickle at the back of her neck as if Adam was watching her.

  It felt odd to be in the house. It was as if she had never lived there, but remembered it from old photos. It was horribly untidy and there was a film of dust everywhere that gave the room a dull, dead appearance. She half-expected to see Miss Haversham covered in cobwebs sitting in the wing chair with a big spidery wedding cake.

  ‘Stevie, I’m sorry, I just don’t have anywhere else to turn.’ He was walking up and down in front of her, overdosed with nervous energy.

  ‘Matthew, sit down, please. Start from the beginning.’

  ‘I don’t know where the beginning of this mess is. I’ve been sacked. Jo’s left me. I came home today and all her stuff had gone. I don’t know what to do.’

  Stevie gulped. Jo had left him. Would she try to come back to Adam then? Would she walk straight back into that soft, forgiving part of his heart that was forever reserved for her? Stevie felt panicky and wanted to go back to the cottage. She stood up to go, but then Matthew started to make strange groaning noises and she knew she couldn’t leave him.

  ‘Why have you been sacked, Matthew?’

  ‘For harassing Jo. Yes, don’t look at me like that. I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I think Jo has been spreading stories at work that I’ve been hitting her.’

  ‘You hitting her?’ Anyone who knew Matthew wouldn’t believe that, surely. Then again, people judged on hearsay–wasn’t she herself testament to that?

  ‘It gets worse. I’m also, apparently, a sexual predator.’

  ‘Why would she say things like that?’

  ‘I think she got the idea that I had more money than I actually have.’ He looked shifty at that point. ‘When she found out I was broke, things changed. She started…Oh God! That’s why!’

  Matthew slapped his forehead as the realization of what all that rough sex was about hit him like a bullet to the brain. The bruises! That was why she wanted him to bite her. How thick was he not to have seen it?

  ‘What, Matthew?’

  ‘She started asking me for…’ What a knob I am!

  ‘For what?’

  Matthew blanched. This really wasn’t the sort of thing Stevie should hear. But he was desperate, and to get the right sort of help, he needed to tell her everything. Just as if she was a sort of heart bank manager in the mould of Robert.

  ‘Rough sex. She wanted me to hurt her.’

  Stevie shifted a little uncomfortably. It felt weird, listening to details of his intimacies with someone else. She couldn’t tell if it hurt; her feelings were too mixed-up to pick out any pure emotions.

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘No, of course not! Although…’

  ‘What?’ she encouraged eventually, after no details were forthcoming.

  ‘I gave her a love bite, here’–he indicated the place on his own chest–‘it looked pretty nasty. But it wasn’t a real bite. And we both got a few bruises from banging into walls and falling off the bed and things. I’m not into that pain stuff, as you know.’

  ‘But why tell all those lies? Why didn’t she just leave you?’ asked Stevie, steering the conversation away from the history of their own sex-life.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Unless she had a new lover. Wasn’t that what she had done to Adam? Invent cuts and bruises to get the new sucker onside? thought Stevie, in full-on Miss Marple mode.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ said Matthew. He was half-talking, half-hiccuping like Danny did when he was upset.

  ‘Have you tried ringing her?’

  ‘She’s not answering.’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t,’ Stevie said, sourly.

  ‘I’ve just secured my house against my job. I’ll lose everything.’

  ‘Why have you done that?’

  Matthew sighed and prepared to sacrifice a big chunk of pride.

  ‘I’ve got no money, Stevie. No, actually, I’ve got minus no money. I’m up to my neck in debt.’

  And so you took Jo on holiday. With my son’s holiday money, Stevie thought, but she didn’t say it aloud. However much he might have deserved it, she couldn’t kick Matt when he was down. And he was about as down as you could get, by the look of things.

  ‘Please stay with me for a bit longer,’ he said, as she looked eagerly across the road and saw a light switch off. ‘Just ten minutes. Stevie, I’ve been so stupid. I’m not even sure she was telling the truth about Adam now. Maybe he didn’t hit her or do all those things she said he did.’

  ‘I’m quite positive she lied,’ said Stevie. ‘He’s a good man.’

  ‘Can I make you a coffee?’ he said, noticing the wistfulness in her voice and therefore changing the subject. He did not want to know how good Adam MacLean was, because Matthew didn’t feel like a very good man himself.

  ‘Just a quick one then,’ said Stevie, who didn’t want one, but couldn’t bear to see someone so lost. Matthew had a long sleepless lonely night in front of him; ten more minutes in his company wouldn’t kill her.

  ‘You can help me, Stevie. I hate to ask but you are the only one who could.’

  ‘In what way?’ she asked cautiously, in case he wanted her to be some intermediary between him and Bitchface.

  ‘Can you tell them at work that I’m not violent?’ he snuffled. ‘I’ll never work again if they think I’m a sexual predator. I can’t stand it that people are thinking that about me.’

  And because Stevie had once been accused of apple scrumping at school and couldn’t bear to see injustice, she said that she would.

  When she went back to the cottage, only one light was on and
Adam had gone to bed. She knocked gently on his door, but he was obviously asleep and didn’t answer.

  His plan had worked, after all. Jo was free. There was nothing stopping him going to her.

  Stevie didn’t think she could bear it.

  Adam was awake, tracing the sounds of her footsteps up the stairs, her soft knock on his bedroom door, and he wanted so much to say, ‘I’m here, come into my room. Come into my bed,’ but he didn’t answer. So it looked as if his plan had worked, after all. Matthew was free and with one click of his fingers, he had managed to get her over the road again. She had leapt out of Adam’s arms to go to him. The sand in his hourglass had run out. Matthew was free. There was nothing stopping her going back to him.

  Adam didn’t think he could bear it.

  Chapter 52

  Adam had left for the day by the time she had got up the next morning. He must have crept out, Stevie reasoned, because she hadn’t heard a thing. In a panic she tore into his bedroom and threw open his wardrobe, but his clothes were still there and she almost wanted to sob with relief. Then she rang Catherine and asked if Danny had been okay. Catherine told her that he had trotted off to school with the others as happy as Larry, and she was going to pick him up as well because Eddie had promised he could go over to the allotment with Boot and Chico, the two dogs, and dig his mum out some veg. Stevie was to come for him after tea at six, and if she even tried to take him away earlier she would be in big trouble with everyone. Then Stevie told her she was the best friend in the world, and Catherine said she knew and demanded chocolates every day of her life, and every single detail of Adam MacLean’s willy, if she ever got them. Stevie laughed aloud for the benefit of her friend, but inside she felt hollow, because she knew she never would.

  She wrote a text to Adam, asking him if he was okay and could she ring him. Then she deleted it before sending. It was only fair to give him time to come to terms with Jo being available. Of course, Jo would hurt him again, but he loved her and she was his for the taking; Stevie knew that from all the jealous looks Jo had cast her at the barbecue. Adam needed space; all men did. According to Men are from Mars, anyway.