by Sharn Hutton
THIRTY-ONE
THE SUN SHONE DOWN ON HEATH TERRACE and glinted in the glass of Victorian sash windows, thrown open to welcome unseasonably warm autumn air. Adam strolled along the pavement, the tips of his fingers tracing the mortar in a low wall. Soft moss caught beneath his fingernails, its cool velvety texture in contrast to the rough stubble of brick. Heath Terrace wasn’t really on his way to the gym, but he’d taken to parking a few streets away and walking the last bit. A warm up, if you like. An opportunity to breathe in a bit of oxygen, before shutting himself away in the stale aired box that was Solomon’s. And you never knew who you might meet, of course, out in the real world. Or see. Just for a minute or two.
Number 25. He slowed his pace to a dawdle, the flaking blue front door of number 37 in plain sight ahead. He’d seen her coming out, about this sort of time before. This time last week he’d seen her walking with the pram, head bowed against the wind that day. It was just coincidence they’d walked the same way. Her, toward the church hall and him, the gym. He’d held back, not wanting to allow himself to get too close, but close enough to see her. Close enough to see her chestnut hair swept back in waves from delicate features. Close enough to see her gazelle-like frame slip through a crack in the church hall door and out of sight. Far enough to keep the dream from reality.
Pulled back into the here and now, Adam’s pulse quickened to see the blue front door draw open. The hooded canopy of a pram came through first followed by Rachel, squinting into the sun. Adam upped his pace to meet her at the gate. “Rachel! Fancy seeing you here!” he blurted. She looked up into his eyes and Adam snapped them away to his shoes. “Well I do live here,” she said.
“Going out?”
“Yes. Actually I’m a bit late. Peanut, well, you know.” Rachel rubbed at her face with the palm of her hand and Adam followed its path to her jaw. Lilac shadows stretched down onto her cheeks and made her green eyes shine.
“Keeping you up?”
“Yes, look, I’ve got to…”
“Right, yes.” Adam snapped out of his gaze. “Come on, I’ll walk with you.”
Rachel set off up the road at a surprising pace, Adam dipping in and out behind her avoiding lampposts.
“So where are you off to?” Adam enquired, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Baby group. Jammy Jingles.” Rachel sighed. She tucked her hair behind her ear.
“Ah, lovely. Quality mother and baby time.” Adam thought of all the other new mums, all filled with love for their little ones, just like Rachel. It would be a beautiful scene.
Rachel huffed. “Yeah, great. A room full of hormonal nutters waving their babies’ hands about singing nonsensical songs. I mean who actually winds bobbins?”
“Er…”
“And do you think that Peanut gives a stuff about what the wheels on the bus are doing? Do you think she even understands? No, of course not. But you have to do the smiling, and the simpering and the lovely sing-song tone of voice because that’s what babies like, isn’t it?”
Adam gazed at her, mouth flapping. “Doesn’t sound like you like it much.”
“It’s a lot of nonsense.”
“Then why are you going?”
“Because I have to. The Health Visitor has a desk at the back and I have to check Peanut in, weigh her, that sort of stuff.” Rachel sighed again and let her shoulders sag. Adam resisted the enormous temptation to put his arm around her and give her a squeeze. He gave her a nudge with his elbow instead. “Ah come on. It doesn’t sound as bad as all that. I’ll come in with you if you like.”
Rachel stopped walking then and looked up to him, her eyes searching his face for the truth of it. “God, you would as well, wouldn’t you? I can barely even get Jerry to make up a bottle and here you are offering to brave hell.”
Adam shrugged and looked away, abashed. “I’d do it for you,” he mumbled but Rachel had set off again, up the road, talking away.
“I couldn’t do it to you. I don’t want to scare you off. You might never come and tidy my house again.” She shot him a small smile over her shoulder and Adam thought that she could never scare him away. They walked on in silence and reached the door of the church hall in a couple of minutes.
Rachel looked down at her clothes and smoothed them with her hands, as if seeing them for the first time. “Look at the state of me.”
Adam looked and saw nothing to worry about. Skinny blue jeans were rolled up to reveal slim ankles and a chunky knit cream jumper hung to mid-thigh. She wore the floral pumps he’d seen in the shop.
“I think you look adorable,” Adam said and when he saw her eyebrow twitch, regretted it immediately. “OK, well I’ve got to get to the gym. Enjoy Hell.” He clasped his hands together and marched away, leaving her in a stunned silence.
Solomon’s was only another five minutes’ walk, but he got there in two, heart pounding and sweaty. He tried not to think about her as he raced up the stairs and into the locker room. He focussed only on his breathing, striding out on the treadmill and put her totally out of his mind concentrating on the free weights and technique, but the man in the mirror looked sad and alone.
THIRTY-TWO
GRANDMA RAY’S CLOCK BEAT A SLOW MARCH. Every hypnotic stroke dragging at the eyelids Rachel fought to keep open. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Her head bobbed with the metallic throb: a dishevelled conscript plodding on.
Peanut lay asleep in the crook of her arm. A still full bottle of milk balanced on the worn chintz of the nursery chair arm. All was quiet apart from the clock. They were alone in the house. Alone again.
She looked down into Peanut’s peaceful face. It was so tempting not to wake her, to let her sleep on and hope that she didn’t wake up at two or three or four. She longed for a reprieve, for just one night of unbroken sleep.
Deep down she knew that without this ten o’clock feed there was no chance of Peanut sleeping through. She had to wake her. Surrender to the ritual. Push in the nutrients and vent the tears. Why so many tears? Why couldn’t she get it right? Why was she such a useless mother? Peanut was better off asleep. Maybe better off dead.
Rachel sighed and stared blindly down at the floor. The night light oozed its scarlet glow across the carpet, pooling at her feet. The image of the sharp chef’s knife, downstairs in the drawer, dropped uninvited into her mind.
Now that could stop the tears; stop the maddening screaming that punctuated every night and day. Rachel’s head buzzed and exhaustion closed her eyes before the tears could rise.
How desperate to even think it.
Peanut stretched a slow arm out above her head and flexed her spine, breaking Rachel’s train of thought and the sleepy lull. How gratefully she took the bottle, welcomed it, as if she had no memory of what would inevitably follow. But now it was out of her hands so Rachel accepted the decision made and retreated into the old armchair’s hollow.
The nursery glowed hazy red around them, waning into the dark corners where Rachel’s demons prowled. Bilbo Bunny stood guard at the edge of the cot. Vigilant and reproachful, he stared Rachel down.
Rachel again. Always Rachel. Where was Jerry? A muscle ticked under her eye and she shifted in her seat.
He’d been the one that liked children so much: the one to home in on a kid with a football for an impromptu game; the one with the comedy voices to send nieces and nephews off into howls of laughter. He’d seemed like such a good prospect as a father, but now that he actually had a child, he was nowhere to be seen. Even when he was there he was bloody useless.
She’d been tricked into this. She’d never have given up her life before if she’d known just how awful it would be. This was all Jerry’s fault.
He’d tempted her down a sunny path and buggered off when the weather changed. She didn’t recognise this place, this gloomy swamp. A shadow of her former self: undefined and irrelevant, who was she now?
An incompetent mother.
She fought against the guilty weight, but the sticky mud of depression s
ucked at her weak limbs. Hopeless. Lost. Drowning. Her laughing husband had turned to smoke. There was no substance to cling to, to haul herself out of the mire.
She looked down again at the infant in her lap. Peanut had fallen back to sleep, the teat of the bottle, released from her mouth, hanging ignored in mid-air. She looked so peaceful and the milk in the bottle was only a quarter gone. Rachel pressed her lips together. To let her sleep on almost certainly meant she’d be up again in the night, but it did mean peace now and that release from duty was too good to turn down.
Rachel levered herself out of the chair, laid Peanut as gently as she could in the cot and crept away to her own bedroom. She was so desperately tired. Sleep now and things might feel better later, at two or whenever she got woken.
She shed her clothes to the floor where she stood and flopped down on the edge of the bed to pull a favourite old T-shirt over her head. Teeth, she really ought to clean her teeth. Rachel stared blindly forward for a moment, trying to summon up the energy to go to the bathroom, but then something caught her eye. A tiny paper corner poked out of an improbable place at the top of the chest of drawers in front of her. She reached forward and brushed her fingertips over it to see if it was a trick of the light, but no, the paper bent and flipped back into place. Mystified, Rachel rose to squint at it.
There was a millimetres gap running beneath the top edge of the drawers and the facia below, through which the paper point had escaped. She pinched at it and pulled. Out came an unfamiliar page, clearly part of a credit card statement. Transactions from the month before listed down its length. ‘Regal Beauty’, ‘Karen Millen’, ‘Phase Eight’: luxury shops that Rachel did not buy from. ‘Glamour Nails’, ‘Duchess Spa’, the list when on. What the hell was this? Rachel peered in through the tiny gap where this mystery had come from, but it was too dark to see anything else. Perhaps if she poked about with a knife she might be able to dislodge something else.
Fuelled by intrigue, she retrieved a slender chef’s knife from the kitchen and returned to jab ineffectively through the gap. She couldn’t get hold of anything, but all her probing made the facia move. A drawer. It was a drawer. She pressed in random places hoping to release a lock, but nothing happened. She pulled at the sides and found that it simply slid forward. A secret drawer at the top of the chest. She’d never known it was there. Jerry’s secret drawer.
Wide-eyed, she scanned over its contents. Passports, a few scattered cufflinks, a watch and a pile of papers. She scooped them up. It was indeed a credit card statement. Pages and pages, chock full with line after line of luxury purchases. ‘Selfridges’, ‘John Lewis’, ‘Ocado’—again and again. She flipped through to find a cover page. Jeremy Adler, 15 Grove Gardens, his old address, but the date was recent: last month. The balance was over twelve thousand pounds. Rachel collapsed to the bed. What the hell? She’d never seen anything about this card before. The other papers proved to be more credit card statements, much older, dating back a couple of years, with balances less terrifying, but still into four digits. The beneficiaries listed all had a similar feel: luxurious and feminine.
It came to Rachel in a wash of clarity: Jerry hadn’t been weaning Isabell off him, he’d been pandering to her, supporting her, giving her exactly what she wanted. For years! The proof was there to see. While she’d scrimped and saved, Isabell had got exactly what she’d wanted, always had. Fury boiled in Rachel’s veins. While she’d been leading the life of a martyr, Isabell was spending their money. Jerry had made a fool of her, made a mockery of her choice to be a stay-at-home mum, an exhausted, depressed stay-at-home mum.
She clenched her jaw and glared at the knife, discarded on her pillow. Where the hell was Jerry anyway?
THIRTY-THREE
JERRY SQUEAKED HIMSELF INTO THE FINAL GAP on the low leather sofa. Seeing him flap late into Locksley’s office, Gemma had squeezed up closer to the other junior to give him somewhere to sit. Spink watched them with disdain. He was sitting in relaxed pole position, on one of the two leather chairs on the visitor’s side of Locksley’s desk—clearly the early bird. The man himself sat on the other, not wanting a desk to divide him from his team.
Jerry had remembered the sales meeting thirty seconds ago when he’d sauntered out into the main office to find nine empty seats where the sales team should have been. He’d sprinted swearing up the stairs, lobbing the remains of his sandwich out of the window, before blundering into Locksley’s packed office.
He gave Gemma a grimace of thanks and, knees approaching his ears, tried to arrange his limbs into a comfortable position. He brushed crumbs from his tie, turned his attention to Locksley and assumed the angelic expression of an attentive student. Spink heaved a sigh of reproach.
Locksley flipped the page of the chart that stood on his desk. “So that concludes individual figures on existing accounts. Now, on to new business.” A ripple of relief washed around the room. A couple of the account handlers, who’d brought their lunch into the meeting, ferreted it out from beneath the spare office chairs they’d also been clever enough to roll in with them. Organised, Jerry mused, prickling with inadequacy.
“Right now we’re picking up ninety per cent of our new business in response to advertising.” Locksley looked down at the note card in his hand. “Fourteen new business enquiries have come in over the last month. Only four have progressed to proposal stages and we are in a competitive bid situation on three. That’s just not enough. We need a far more proactive approach if we’re going to pick up enough to stave off redundancies.”
Mouths stopped chewing. He glanced around the team over the top of his glasses. “We need to look harder and aim higher. We have to set our sights on the big players of the IT world.
“Next week, TEKCOM will be running for five days in the Las Vegas Convention Centre. The biggest manufacturers, developers and systems providers in the world will be exhibiting there.
“It will be attended by blue chip internationals, IT professionals and top brass looking for the latest technology for their companies. This year we will be there too.” Locksley spun his chair to face Spink. “Donald, I want you out there flying the flag for Locksley PR. You too, Jerry. It’s time to crank our efforts up a gear and play with the big boys.”
Jerry’s eyes stretched wide. Vegas. Las Vegas. Wow. A bubble of excitement formed in his chest. Just wait till he told Rachel. Oh, no, hang on, that might not go down so well. He’d not been doing much fathering of late. A solo trip to Vegas was unlikely to be met with much enthusiasm.
Still, it wasn’t as if he was actually any good at the whole fathering thing was it? Might be best to take the spotlight off that particular shortcoming for a while.
Isabell wasn’t going to be best pleased either, but that was tough. Business trips were unavoidable if he was going to ‘making the good home’. He grinned to himself. A trip was just what he needed.
“This is a massive networking opportunity.” Locksley went on, “Meet as many people as you can. Find out what they’re planning, what they’re looking for or launching. There will be companies there that we’ve never even heard of working in unfamiliar markets. Talk to everyone, but most important of all, make friends with Mango.”
Locksley turned his attention back to the room at large. “Mango is the single largest information technology company in the world. They have subsidiaries in every country and marketing budgets into the millions. They are respected throughout the industry as precision manufacturers with codes of ethics and fair trade unparalleled by any other organisation, even in broader industries. Get our feet through the door and under the table, gentlemen. What an alliance it would be!” Locksley slapped his hands down onto his thighs with a laugh and Jerry couldn’t help but smile along with him.
Spink roared out, “Las Vegas! Yes!” He leaned forward, lifting his flabby behind up from the leather and punched the air. “Why the hell didn’t we think of this before?” Tiny flecks of spit showered down, like nickels tumbling from a one-armed b
andit.
Jerry was excited, but Spink was positively orgasmic. Jerry flicked his eyes to Gemma who shrank into the sofa to get out of range.
“A brilliant plan! So much opportunity!” Spink’s eyes glazed over as he tossed himself back into the chair with a whoop. Jerry gawped at him. Did Spink know something that he didn’t? His stomach churned cheese and pickle and he squirmed on the sweaty leather. Shying away from the uncomfortable vista that was Spink, Jerry’s eyes fell to the many photographs and framed awards that sat behind Locksley’s desk.
He wondered where Locksley was in that sunset photo with his wife. It looked like somewhere he wanted to be, like a location worthy of Remi’s adventures. Tropical warmth radiated out from the picture of happiness. Jerry imagined Remi’s yacht moored in the bay, just out of shot.
The frame tucked behind held a yellowing certificate: an entrepreneurial award made some fifteen years previously. Locksley had worked his way up, building his business over time and was now captain of an impressive ship.
Jerry considered his personal list of achievements. Captain of the school football team was about as lofty as it got. Even that was only as a sub when Adam had broken his leg. More recent achievements were harder to place. Becoming a parent was more Rachel’s accomplishment than his. He’d bumbled along for years, allowing life’s events to steer his course.