As It Is On Telly

by Marshall, Jill

  Finn (barely suppressing a snort). Don’t tell me – a pleasure pearl. Ha!

  He leans sideways out of camera shot, giggling even harder, and Pearl starts to shudder with restrained laughter.

  Bunty: (stern, Super-Mummyish): Actually, it was in my daughter’s bedroom, and it’s something I hope all parents will take notice of. You see, while my husband and I were having a dinner party, my daughter was upstairs emailing her friend in New Zealand. Her friend recommended a certain children’s book (she holds up the offending best-seller), and my daughter Charlotte keyed in the name.

  Pearl: Only she didn’t get a website featuring that character, did she?

  Bunty: No. She keyed in one of the letters incorrectly, and what came up was a horrendous site featuring … um … Russian ladies of ill repute and their collection of, well, sex toys, I suppose you’d have to call them.

  Finn: Like … like Pleasure Pearls! Oh. Stop, please!

  He sinks to his knees before the sofa, crippled with mirth, and Pearl begins to join in.

  Bunty: It’s not funny. It’s not funny. This is serious. It’s not funny.

  *

  ‘It’s not funny. It’s not …’

  ‘Funny. You said,’ muttered Graham, banging the pillow more firmly around his ears.

  Bunty opened her eyes. Graham’s smooth back appeared to stare at her reproachfully, and she studied it for a moment as she pulled her thoughts together. Had he waxed? She couldn’t honestly remember whether his back used to be this hairless or not. That wasn’t funny either – not at all amusing to be unable to recall whether your husband had gone from barely washing to now having back, sack and crack done. (She’d seen the procedure on a magazine show, or was it one of those Japanese torture things?)

  But definitely not funny was the realisation that your children searching for things on the internet could put in an innocent name and up would pop Madame Vanya with her array of helpful products.

  It hadn’t been Ben on the phone at all. It had been Cally.

  ‘Bunty,’ she said, ‘what has Charlotte been doing?’

  Bunty bridled, but only for a moment. She didn’t really like the fact that Cally would instantly assume that Charlotte had been up to no good, but she did have some basis for it, since Charlotte had been the cause of quite a lot of trouble in the past. ‘What do you mean? She’s just been upstairs while we’ve been having a dinner party.’

  Cally paused, and Bunty could tell that under any other circumstances she would have been dying to hear what that was all about, but then she said, ‘Well, it’s 10.30 in the morning here, and Paige has just come out of her bedroom to ask me what a dildo is. Yes, you heard right. A dildo.’

  ‘You shouldn’t leave your stuff lying around then, should you? You and Pete and your kinky love-life.’

  ‘Bunty, even if I had one of those, and I left it lying around, I wouldn’t stick a big label on it saying what it’s called, would I?’

  ‘It could be in its box,’ Bunty suggested.

  ‘Are you drunk or something? Oh, I suppose you might be. Okay. Bunty McKenna, go upstairs now and see what your daughter is up to on the computer, because she and Paige have been emailing for the last hour and that’s how it happened.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Bunty, finally realising that Cally was serious.

  Still clutching the phone, Bunty pelted up the stairs, barely wobbling in her high heels, and flung open Charlotte’s door. Charlotte nearly jumped out of her skin but then turned round with kohl-rimmed eyes so horrified that Bunty knew whatever she’d done had been a mistake. Or it might not have started out as a mistake, but it had gone too far.

  A hideous image of Madame Vanya, boobs and bottom strapped down with a few thongs of leather and very little else, with something like a telegraph cucumber in her hand, winked from the laptop screen. Graham’s laptop. Bunty’s first thought, as she reached out and shut it down as quickly as was humanly possible after the best part of a bottle of heavy red, was that this was another part of Graham’s slummy little secret. But then Charlotte, bottom lip wobbling, suddenly said, ‘Mum, I’m sorry, I didn’t do it on purpose, and I was only trying to look up this book that Paige likes, ‘Vanta Paradise’ or something and all these horrible pictures came up and … what are all those things?’

  ‘You didn’t go any further into the site?’ said Bunty, hardly daring to imagine what Charlotte, still so innocent despite all her bravado, might have seen.

  ‘Ugh, no. It’s gross!’ Charlotte shuddered dramatically and shoved the laptop back into its bag. ‘I am never going on the computer again.’

  ‘Bunty! Bunty!’ called a tinny voice. Bunty looked around, convinced for one surreal moment that Madame Vanya was calling to her from the laptop, then remembered her mobile phone.

  ‘Bun, I heard all that. I’m sure it was just a mistake,’ said Cally.

  ‘I think so.’ Bunty sat down hard on the bed, her heart suddenly thumping against her rib cage. ‘Oh God, how awful. She’s banned from computers from now on.’

  ‘Paige too,’ said Cally.

  ‘But how will they keep in touch?’

  ‘They can talk on the phone, or write letters to each other. Then we can vet them like they’re prisoners. Which, of course, they are.’ Cally sounded woolly for a moment, then tuned back in on the other end of the phone. ‘Look, sorry, I’d better go. David’s waking up and Pete’s not back from refereeing yet to give him his bottle.’

  ‘You mean you’ve got to feed your own child?’

  ‘Outrageous, isn’t it? Bye, Bun-hun.’

  Bunty’s whole body drooped as the phone went dead. God, she missed Cally. Charlotte missed Paige too. What were they doing a world away from each other? Well, invoking global witchery in the form of Madame Vanya, it appeared.

  ‘Mum,’ said a small voice next to her. Charlotte’s hand crept into hers. ‘Would you read to me? I want to get those sicko pictures out of my head.’ She made outrageous vomiting noises just to demonstrate how sick they’d been.

  Bunty almost cried. Her little girl was back. Only for a moment, perhaps, and down to very dubious causes, but she was going to cherish it. Together they squashed onto Charlotte’s single bed and read Little Women, which was about as wholesome a book as Bunty could lay hands on, and only later, long after Marmee had administered soup to the needy of the district and Charlotte had fallen asleep on her shoulder, depositing a goodly amount of lumpy mascara onto her linen shirt, did Bunty ease herself out of the bed and the room, and slide in next to Graham, still fully dressed apart from her shoes. After the sight of Madame Vanya there was a strong possibility she would never take her clothes off again.

  *

  Now she had woken up after her slightly twisted dream about Pearl and Finn – not that it was their fault in any way, but she was starting to see them in rather a different light now – she felt oddly calm. Resolved. Today was a new day. She would attempt to talk to Graham about his ‘situation’. She would forget about the Croesus Club and all that it entailed. And she would monitor every waking second of Charlotte’s day, with much the same assiduous attention that she had devoted to stalking Ben. Oh. Who? Yeah, nobody.

  Charlotte needed them. That much was evident. And if Graham was too wrapped up in Kylie Smiley Pert Bum to care then she, Bunty McKenna, Super Mummy, would step into the breach.

  Of course, she reminded herself as she stared at the ceiling thinking about Charlotte’s white and horrified face, it was a mistake to assume that their daughter hadn’t noticed the atmosphere about the place. It would have been very evident to her that her father was out more often (which she may have been glad about, having professed to hate him so much a couple of years ago that she’d even tried to find a new dad for herself). Bunty had also recognised the wide-eyed curiosity now accompanying the goodbyes whenever she, too, was heading out the door, taking up a new ‘sport’, meeting Kat yet again for a little drink, or hosting bizarre dinner parties with people she barely knew and who
’d not long before been up to their armpits in sewage.

  Yes, Charlotte was pretty savvy, despite her apparent detachment from their world. Or the world in general. And they hadn’t given this a whole lot of consideration. Bunty had merely assumed that Charlotte would live with her, and that Graham would go on to spawn little Kylie look-alikes with wife number two and would sideline Charlotte over the years. She’d be relegated. On the bench. Suddenly Bunty was filled with a fury so intense at what Graham was about to do their only child that she had to tussle with a very strong temptation to clamp the ear-covering pillow around his face, and squeeze. They had to talk. She was just wondering how to open the conversation (‘So, Graham, when you leave me …’) when Graham lifted himself up on one elbow, stared wildly at the clock over her shoulder, then screamed ‘Bollocks!’ straight down into her ear.

  How had he known what she was going to say? ‘There’s no bloody need for that. You just perforated my eardrum. And it’s not bollocks, it’s very important …’

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ muttered Graham, flinging back the duvet and flying out of bed. He took a backwards glance at her. ‘Fully clothed? So that’s what it’s come to now, has it? I wasn’t that desperate for sex, you know.’ He hauled some tracksuit bottoms out of a drawer and staggered around the bedroom getting into them in too much of a hurry.

  ‘I bet you weren’t,’ said Bunty sourly. Already getting plenty, no doubt. ‘And that’s typical, that is. It was nothing to do with you. Nothing. You didn’t see Madame Vanya wrapped in duct tape. Or maybe you did! It was on your laptop, for Chrissakes!’

  ‘Not that again!’ roared Graham, bouncing into his trainers. ‘There’s nothing dodgy on my fucking laptop!’

  ‘Well, tell that to your daughter, and to … to Social Services when they come round,’ screamed Bunty, so infuriated that she grabbed his abandoned pillow and thwacked him with it, ‘and to whoever you’re dashing off to now, while she …’ (thwack) ‘cuts off …’ (thwack to the left, parry to the right) ‘your scrotum!’

  Graham caught hold of the other end of the pillow and stared at her as she panted, her logic muddled, her emotions coursing. It was the first, the only time that either of them had ever resorted to violence, other than the odd tiny foray into Madame Vanya territory. ‘You’ve gone mad,’ he said eventually, thrusting the pillow to one side. ‘Completely fucking barking. Now, let’s just calm down, eh? I have to go to play squash,’ he said, pulling a tee-shirt over his almost-defined shoulders. And no, it’s not with Ryan. And no, it’s not with some nutty woman who is going to neuter me. I suggest you have a cup of tea, take a few deep breaths, and get a sense of perspective.’

  ‘Don’t tell me to get a perspective, you patronising arsehole.’ And for some reason, after shrieking the last word at Graham, she burst into loud sobs. ‘You get one! You!’

  Charlotte appeared at the door. ‘You two okay?’ she said quietly. She looked like she might be thinking about crying. ‘You woke me up.’

  ‘Sorry, love,’ said Graham. ‘Think we might have had a bad glass of wine last night or something. I’m going out to, um, you know, play squash. Hey,’ he said, ruffling Charlotte’s hair, ‘why don’t you come with me?’

  She looked up at him under her fringe. ‘I don’t have to, like, play, do I?’

  ‘Nah. Bring a book or something. I’ll buy you a hot chocolate afterwards.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Charlotte wandered off behind Graham to get dressed, trying to look nonchalant but evidently very pleased at getting some ‘dad’ time. Bunty sank her head onto her knees. ‘Great start,’ she moaned. So that was how it was to be – battling for Charlotte’s attention, bribing her with bigger and bigger incentives to spend time with him. It was a far cry from the days when Charlotte never wanted to leave her side. But then, there had been days – and how she’d detested them – when Graham never wanted to leave her side either. And where were they going? Was he introducing Charlotte to the other woman? Had Charlotte already met her? God! It could be someone they already knew, someone Charlotte wouldn’t consider odd to be meeting for a hot chocolate on a Sunday morning. Who could that be? Petra? A neighbour? Kat?

  With all this tumbling through her head Bunty stumbled out of bed, hearing the door slam and her phone ring on the dressing table at the exact same moment. The screen showed 0064 … A New Zealand number again. It made sense – roughly ten hours later; it would be late evening in New Zealand, and Cally would know she’d be up by now.

  ‘Okay, okay, I can promise you that we’ve just been asleep,’ she said in as perky a tone as she could muster. ‘Definitely no more bondage or vibrators since we spoke.’

  There was a long pause, during which Bunty worried for a second that Cally might have her on loudspeaker so that Paige, Pete, possibly even the baby would be looking at each other in shocked bewilderment. Then a deep voice said, ‘You know, I have absolutely no idea how to respond to that.’

  ‘Oh God. Ben.’ Finally. ‘I thought you were someone else.’ She knew as she said it that it was ambiguous, that he might think there had actually been some bondage going on with another person, another man . But sod it, she thought. Let him. She’d every right to get it on – or off – with someone else since he’d disappeared out of her life. No opportunity, but every right.

  Ben clearly took it the wrong way, almost as she’d intended. ‘Right. Well, I deserve that, I guess.’

  ‘You do a bit.’

  Ben laughed. ‘I know. I owe you a massive apology. That day we were meant to meet I found out that my ex was introducing my kids to, you know, the new bloke. It sort of screwed with my head a bit.’

  ‘Oh, Ben.’ So that was it. It was perfectly reasonable. He’d been upset and gone to ground. And wasn’t she going through the very same thing, right at that very moment? ‘That’s awful. I totally understand. So you’re back in New Zealand now?’

  ‘No,’ said Ben, sounding puzzled. ‘Oh, the phone number. That’s my old phone. I bought a new one to use here but I’m afraid I got a bit mad when my ex rang to tell me the lovely news, and I …’ He laughed softly, as if he could hardly believe it himself. ‘Well, to be honest I threw the phone on the ground and jumped up and down on it. I really, really lost it.’

  ‘Aw,’ said Bunty, trying to sound sympathetic but also going slightly mushy inside at how cute he sounded saying, ‘Rurly, rurly lost ut.’ He wasn’t in New Zealand. He was still around. And he was calling her! Suddenly the morning looked so much brighter.

  Easy does it, though, Bunty, she thought. ‘So have you got your head back together then?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad. And I do understand, you know, Ben. You could have just told me.’

  Ben groaned. ‘I know. I just wasn’t thinking straight. But I am now, and I was just wondering if your ex has your daughter today. I mean, are you free now? I shouldn’t even ask.’

  ‘No! I mean, yes. Yes, he does have Charlotte right now, so I suppose … I suppose I’m free.’ She moved the phone closer to her mouth so he wouldn’t hear the pulse throbbing in her throat.

  ‘It’s a beautiful day. Maybe you could find that picnic blanket again.’

  Bunty restrained the squeal that was about to erupt from her. ‘Fine,’ she said lightly. ‘I’ll bring coffee and some sandwiches – cold lamb all right?’

  ‘You’re asking a Kiwi if lamb’s all right?’ Ben laughed. ‘I practically am one.’

  Well, I’ll eat you then, thought Bunty, but she just said, ‘See you in twenty minutes, and then I have to be home by twelve.’

  ‘Or you turn into a pumpkin?’

  ‘Midday, not midnight. And never you mind what I turn into.’

  There was a long pause, during which Bunty knew that Ben was imagining the bondage, the vibrators, and goodness knew what else. ‘Okay. Twenty minutes,’ said Ben breathily.

  Bunty grinned, squeezed herself, and grinned again as she sprinted down the stairs to the dinner party r
emains. Very cool, Bunty. Breezy, she told herself. It was back! Her flirt gland had re-engaged. And the recipient was fully engaged too, she guessed. Grabbing the plaid blanket and the picnic, she whisked out to the car.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  If Bunty had rolled together every romantic film, every ‘will-they-won’t-they’ kiss ever seen on a soap, every single perfect moment of breathy-bosomed costume drama she had ever seen in her life, the sum, to her mind, would still not have matched the pinnacle of exquisite romance that was her reunion kiss with Ben. It was almost exactly as she’d pictured it on the internal movie viewer of her brain as she’d driven at break-neck speed to the hotel at which she’d met Mallory:

  1: She rounded the grand facade of the hotel and headed out towards the copse of trees. Ben was standing under one, looking the wrong way. Fantastic. She could check out what he was wearing (long board-shorts, navy polo shirt, flip flops) and admire the ratio of his enormous shoulders to his hand-span waist, take in the still-damp, curly dark hair resting on his collar, and compose herself, all without him knowing.

  2. Smiling, she smoothed down her plain white tee-shirt – thrown on in haste with the same jeans she’d worn all night, and the same underwear did he but know it; not that he would have any cause to know it (the trick, she realised, was to leave them wanting) – and called out his name.

  3. He turned, smiling, watching her face for signs of annoyance then smiling more broadly as he saw there was none. Then he picked her up, straight off her feet, with his nose in the soft space behind her ear, breathing her in, murmuring, ‘Thank you! Thank you for not being mad.’

  4. As Bunty laughed and kicked a little to be put down, he set her back expertly on her slender, ‘not-really-suitable-for-picnics’ heels, then gave her a quick kiss on the lips.

  5. She kissed him back.

  6. He kissed her back.

  7. She kissed him back more.