by Claire Allan
The plans had been set in motion very quickly. Dylan had left Hope sitting open-mouthed at the kitchen table that day, picking up his two mugs of teaand sauntering upstairs.
Hope had listened to the murmured muffle of their conversation. The murmur had quickly turned into high-pitched squealing and shortly after Cyndi hadappeared in the kitchen, eyes glistening, extra-white teeth grinning, and she had sat down beside Hope and said she hoped they became really good friends as well as housemates.
That had been just under a week ago, and Hope was now watching as Dylan worked himself into an absolute frenzy preparing the house for moving-in day.
He was lost in a frenzy of sheet-washing and dodgy-magazine-clearing-out and he had even made sure all his laundry was done and his boxers and socks were folded and paired and neatly stashed in his drawer.
Hope had emerged from her office after her phonecall with Ava to find him choking on the fumes from the oven-cleaner and looking slightly pale.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect, you know,” she said and he smiled.
“Well, it does and it doesn’t. As you well know, my mother would have a shit fit if she knew I was moving a woman in here with a dirty oven!”
“Christ, please don’t tell her our oven is dirty! She’ll think I’m an awful slattern and never invite me back for a lovely roast dinner again.”
Dylan laughed. “I’ve had a hard enough time telling her I’m moving a woman in without mentioning the state of our oven. She’s a bit concerned.”
“I can imagine so. She loves you, you know.”
“And she’s fecked off that I’ve not fallen madly in love with you.”
As he laughed, Hope felt the need to laugh along but she wanted to scream Or indeed cry. Instead she lifted the can of oven-cleaner, sprayed it liberally in the oven and waited for the choking fumes to overcome her.
“Jesus, Hope would you calm down with that? It’s frigging toxic.”
She rushed to the back door to breathe in some fresh air, then turned and looked at him, tears pricking in her eyes –which she could at least attribute to the fumes. “Sorry,” she muttered, and to be honest she was sorry about a lot of things. Not least that he hadn’t fallen in love with her and made his mother’s dreams come true.
“Things are about to change,” she said softly.
“But we’ll always be friends,” he said, peeling off his rubber gloves and walking over to hug her. Even with the whiff of oven-cleaner off him, she found herself leaning her head towards him and breathing him in as deeply as she could.
“Drink,” she muttered – then repeated loudly, “Drink!”
“Drink?”
“We should have a drink? Last night – just us two.”
“That sounds like a perfectly wonderful idea, Ms Scott,” he declared. “The oven can wait.”
Ten minutes later Dylan had headed to the off-licence and Hope was sitting on their sofa, staring at their very clean and tidy living room. She had found the dregs of an already open bottle of wine and had poured it into her glass, downing it a little too fast while switching on her laptop and logging into Spotify. A little music would calm her down, she thought, immediately being transported back to her student days when she would drag a reluctant Dylan onto the dancefloor to accompany whatever song was their current favourite.
When he walked back in, two bottles of wineclinking together in a white plastic bag, she looked up and smiled at him as N-Trance’s ‘Set You Free’ played in the background.
“Do you remember this one?” she asked, raising her glass and waving it towards him.“The Students’ Union and the M Club?”
“I’ve tried to block that out,” he laughed, walking into the kitchen.
He reappeared with two liberal glasses of dark-red liquid and put one down in front of her.
“We didn’t drink this in those days,” he said, sitting down opposite her.
“A pint of Harp and a vodka and Coke!” Hope chimed.
“Diet Coke. You were always fussy about that. And then you would have a kebab on the way home.”
“Medicinal. Had to prevent the hangover so I would be fit for lectures the next day.”
“Of course,” he laughed.
She sat entranced by the crinkle around his eyes which hadn’t been there, of course, when they first met. He had been so young then. She bit back a swell of emotion and clicked on another song from their student days.
Dylan glugged back his wine and looked at her – a wicked smile on his face.
“C’mon, Ms Scott – time to dance.”
Standing up, feeling brave thanks to the wine she had downed, she started to dance, throwing her arms in the air as the strong bass beat of the dance tune hit full force.
She felt free. She felt set free.
The bottles of wine were emptied and the vodka bottle which had sat on the worktop had been demolished. They were dancing still, and laughing, to Lisa Loeb singing ‘Stay’ in her sweet melodic tones when she looked at him and those wrinkles, well, they were irresistible now. Despite her better judgement, she found herself drunkenly reaching to touch them, to feel his skin on hers. As her fingertips touched his skin, as Lisa Loeb sang about longing, he looked at her, directly into her eyes, as if he had never seen her before. And before she knew it his lips were on hers. She breathed him in, feeling his lips kiss her harder and with a longing she hadn’t experienced in a long time.
She knew it was wrong. She knew, even amid the fug of wine and vodka, that she shouldn’t be doing it – but God, she had wanted this so much and when he kissed her she couldn’t help but kiss him back and feel him move close to her, his body eager to be as close to hers as possible. When she heard him groan, she felt herself gasp and she was lost in him, in his body, in pulling off his T-shirt, in unbuttoning his jean, in allowing him to undress her there and then in the middle of their living room and almost before she knew it, before she had time to really enjoy it, he was there inside her and it was over. And she wanted more. She needed more. But she knew, she just knew, she wasn’t going to get any more.
“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck.”
And he got up and left her lying there feeling the very exact opposite of set free.
Chapter 10
In times of stress Ava’s mild OCD tendencies came squarely to the fore. By Friday, when she still hadn’t heard from Karen despite sending a grovelling apology on Monday, she was in Control Freak Heaven or should that be Hell?
Her suitcase was packed – her tiny travel-sized bottles of toiletries filled and stashed away. Her manila folders were full of Poly Pockets with every aspect of her trip to France planned. She had been chatting to Jean-Luc via email and had pulled together a list of charity shops and auctioneers to donate Betty’s unwanted things to. Jean-Luc had offered to take both Ava and Hope to lunch while they were in Saint Jeannet and had promised to leave a welcome-pack in Betty’s house with some provisions to get them through their first day. He did seem a lovely man. Ava wondered again if Betty and he had, at any time, been in a relationship. She liked to think that Betty had her end away at least once after Claude died. She patted her case and mentally worked her way through a list of travel must-haves to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything vital.
“You can buy stuff in France,” Connor had laughed. “They have shops. They sell toothpaste and shampoo and all sorts of items related to personal hygiene.”
She had stuck her tongue out at him and laughed. She was a sucker for her own brands and always resistant to change. She preferred to know she had her favourite brand of toothpaste rather than panicking about what would be on offer in a French supermarket. Not all minty freshes were the same, she thought as she added ‘Listerine Mouthwash’ to her list of things still to buy.
“I just like things the way I like things,” she said, sitting down on the bed beside him, “and good for you that I’m not the kind of girl mad into trying a new thing every couple of weeks and being all adventurous.”
/> He gave her a nudge and a wink and replied: “Oh, I don’t know. Being a little more adventurous wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.”
Ava felt herself bristle even though she knew he was just making a not-very-funny, semi-rude joke. But right then and there those words “stick up your arse” came right back into her head. Boring, she chided herself. She was boring. Connor reached over to kiss her and she found herself pushing him away – trying to make it look like a bit of carry-on but really being dangerously close to lashing out.
“You’d be lucky,” she mocked, trying to keep her voice light but getting up and walking into the ensuite where she closed and locked the door, and stared at her face in the mirror. Her roots needed doing, she noticed. There were a few greys at her temples which were poking through, despite her recent highlighting job. Her hair was cut in a sensible bob. Sensible. Yuck. She suddenly hated that word. Her eyes looked tired. There were wrinkles – definite wrinkles. Shaking her head, she wondered when she had become the kind of woman who worried about wrinkles. She smiled and saw a grimacing woman look back at her.
“Are you okay?” Connor called.
“I’m just going to take a shower,” she replied, switching on the hot water full pelt and watching the swirls of stream rise and fill the room. Yes, she would have a shower. Stripping off, she tried not to look at her body, mapped with stretch-marks, in the mirror. She’d need to buy some more Bio Oil, she thought, mentally adding it to her list.
She should have been out that night – with the teaching staff from school. Come the end of the school year, a group of them would always go out on the lash – the older ones staying only for dinner, the younger ones hitting Sandinos or one of the trendier in-places where they would drink into the wee small hours before going on to someone’s house and continuing the night out a bit longer. Ava hadn’t gone out on any of those nights – not even to the old farts’ dinner – since Maisie was born. They had asked the first year and then they didn’t any more and Ava had felt relieved in a way. She didn’t enjoy going out the way she used to. She felt out of the place with the older crowd and completely out of touch with the younger teachers. At times she felt as if they were speaking a different language – as if the entire world had moved on without her when she was on maternity leave. She had left any ounce of coolness she had in the maternity unit. They got excited about who was playing at Oxegen that summer. She got excited about what was on offer in Dunelm Mill that week. Just recently she had gone in a fit of rapture at buying an enamel home-keeper’s box where she could store all her cleaning products. She was even more excited when she discovered there was a matching clothes-peg bucket.
She looked at herself again – feeling stuck somewhere between being old and young and feeling like she was just nothing. Maybe Connor was right. Maybe Karen was right. Maybe she should just get under that damn shower and then get dressed and go out and meet her colleagues anyway. She could fake cool. She could fit in.
Feeling a sense of bravado, she stepped under the shower and scrubbed herself with Flying Fox Shower Gel and conditioned her boring, sensible haircut to within an inch of its life before climbing out and roughly drying herself off. If the world wanted her to show a more adventurous side, she would. She would slip on the skinny jeans she had bought in the January sales and had never had the nerve to wear. She was sure she had a pair of death-defying stilettos in the bottom of her wardrobe and she had a billowing lace top which she had worn at Christmas and never again. She would do her make-up – full make-up, not just a slick of foundation and a dab of blusher. She’d do her eyes, and straighten her hair and spray perfume right between her boobs and everything.
Walking out of the bathroom, towel pulled around her, she saw Connor still lying on the bed watching TV. Feeling devilish and determined to prove she was far from boring and far from a stick in the mud, she turned to face him, dropped her towel and even though she was cringing from the inside out she shimmied in front of him.
“Adventurous enough for you?” she winked and she could clearly see by the expression on his face and the rise in his trousers that it was.
“C’mere,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Later,” she said, bending to lift the towel. “I’m going out. For the first time in three years I’m going to go to the staff party. The funky one. In a proper bar.”
“Can you not go later?” he said gruffly.
“I have to get ready. I want to look amazing.”
“You do look amazing!” he said.
“Connor, douze points!” Ava grinned, speaking in a faux French accent.
“So stay . . .” he said, getting up and walking towards her.
She didn’t know why but she felt nervous and she held the towel up to her body, covering herself.“I need to go.”
He put his finger to her lips and looked deep into her eyes. “I need you to stay . . .”
She looked back at him, torn in that second between wanting him and wanting to be herself – the old unencumbered self who sang and danced till four in the morning and who could never, ever be described as having a stick up her arse or being a martyr to her own cause. Connor kissed her – a kiss that made her feel dizzy and not boring at all – but she still wanted more. But when he kissed her again, deeper this time, she thought about how nice it felt. And safe. And this was a place where there was no chance of her being left alone, nursing a glass of wine and wondering what on earth everyone else was talking about. This was a place where she knew she was welcome – and wanted – and where she didn’t have to pretend. Her plans to dress up faded as each kiss grew deeper and more urgent. She wasn’t being a bore. She was being a desired wife. She was being wild, here in her own bedroom, doing things which young, wild things did. Sure it was within the safe boundaries but that was okay. That was all just perfectly okay.
Slipping between the sheets and allowing Connor to show her just how much he wanted her, she pushed out every negative thought in her head and allowed herself to believe that this was what she wanted more than anything. And that she hadn’t just spent half an hour feeling like an outsider in the life she once knew and loved.
Sitting at her kitchen island and sipping from her coffee, she watched Maisie at her feet. Her daughter was sitting on the floor, face frozen in deep concentration, little tongue poking out the side of her mouth, drawing a picture which would have sat well in any modern art collection.
She had decided not to go to Soft Play – partly because she still wanted to get a few things together for her trip but also because she was kind of scared of bumping into Karen.
“I don’t understand you,” Connor had said when she tried to explain how Karen intimidated her. “She isn’t any better than you.”
“But she’s loud – and not afraid to speak her mind.”
“Except when it comes to telling that husband of hers how utterly miserable she is.”
Ava had smiled. For a bloke, Connor could be quite in touch with his feelings and the feelings of others at times.
“You don’t understand,” Ava said. “Now that we’ve fallen out she will have badmouthed me to every other mammy on the block. I’ll be the wicked witch.”
“You need to learn to stand up for yourself,” he had said, sitting down beside Maisie and helping her with her drawing.
Ava tried to defend herself, but she couldn’t. He was absolutely right. “I will, one of these days.”
“You used to be more feisty,” he said.
And once again she felt her world shift just that wee bit beneath her feet. It seemed, at the moment, no matter what she did, she never quite hit the mark.
“I’m still feisty,” she replied meekly and watched as he laughed. She knew he wasn’t being cruel. He was being absolutely spot-on. There she was, in her slippers with her hair tied back in a ponytail, looking like the least feisty person in the entire universe. She picked up the tea towel from beside her and threw it at him.
“If you say so,” he laughed. �
�Now away with you, wife, and get everything ready for your big trip and then you can help me pack for our trip down to Dublin. So far I’ve only a pair of pyjamas and some stripy tights packed.”
She winked and said: “So you’re okay for tights . . . what about Maisie?”
“Ha ha.”
“Well, I said I could still be feisty,” she laughed, but inside she felt a little shaky and a little unsure of herself. She felt ready for an escape. She needed an escape.
Chapter 11
The rhythmic slapping of naked flesh from the room beside hers distracted Hope from her checklist. She lifted the earplugs she had bought for just such a purpose and popped them in her ears before the fever-pitched moaning started. Dylan and Cyndi were very much in the honeymoon period. Just that morning she had walked into the kitchen to find them going at it like rabbits on the kitchen table. When they had – red-faced and white-arsed – retired to their room, Hope had sprayed almost an entire bottle of antibacterial kitchen cleaner on the table and scrubbed it vigorously. She had also vowed to always, always use a plate from now on. No eating anything straight off the table, not even a piece of fruit.
Yes, Cyndi had moved in. Nothing had changed. Nothing had even been mentioned, if the truth was told. Hope shouldn’t have expected any different. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have form for this kind of thing. She shook her head. She had been stupid, bloody stupid, to think it could have been any different.
Dylan had come downstairs the following morning, while she had been hanging over a cup of coffee trying not to vomit, and had said nothing. He had smiled, opened the fridge, commented that there was no bacon and sat down opposite her, lifted her coffee cup and sipped from it.
“Mad night last night. Totally mad. Too much to drink.”
“Indeed,” she said, looking up at him, her face red with embarrassment. She expected him to say something, anything, about what had happened.