It was just a case of female hormones working overtime.
I made some notes on possible locations for my office, sent some emails off to various letting agents, spent some time on Facebook and on Twitter. Then I googled JQA. Only out of idle curiosity, of course, just to see where Pat and Ben did – well, whatever stuff they did all day.
I let my fingers wander, watched to see what they would do. My clever, clever fingers, they soon found Pat’s department. Then they found his photograph, right-clicked on it and saved it to my album.
I read his bio – goodness, what a lot of letters and abbreviations, Professor Patrick Riley PhD. What a lot of publications, fellowships, awards. All that was missing was the Nobel Prize.
There were all his contact details, tempting, mocking me. What should I do? Well, nothing really, seriously stupid – obviously. I considered ringing him. Okay, what would I say? I didn’t know.
But then a passing fairy must have checked my balance wish-wise, saw I was in credit and allowed him to ring me.
No, that’s a lie. He didn’t ring to talk to me. He rang to speak to Ben, of course. I just picked up the phone. But when he realised it was me, not Tess, he asked how I was doing and how was my foot? He hoped it was okay?
‘It – it’s fine,’ I said, or rather rasped, because my mouth had suddenly gone as dry as the Sahara in a record-breaking heatwave. ‘It hurt a bit on Sunday, but it’s almost back to normal now.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ he said and then he paused for half a heartbeat. ‘I was kind of worried when you cried.’
‘It was the shock.’
‘I guess.’
‘Do want to speak to Ben?’
Why did I say that? I wanted him to talk to me!
‘Yeah, if he’s home, if he could take a break from the celestial dictation? I tried him on his cell, but seems like it’s turned off.’
‘I’ll fetch him for you.’ But then I took a chance, dived headlong into shallow water full of rocks and boulders and – I dare say – sharks. ‘Patrick, I …’
But then I paused. What was I going to say? Drop what you’re doing and come round to this apartment and baiser me to glory, could you? Tie me up and tie me down and then do anything you want with me?
‘… I’m sorry I made such a fuss on Saturday.’ What a brilliant conversationalist. Dorothy Parker would have been in fits of jealousy. ‘I don’t often cry.’
‘Oh, most anybody would have cried.’ Patrick Riley’s voice was warm as caramel, a perfect mocha latte on a freezing winter day. ‘If I’d run into that old rock, I would have cried myself. You’re one brave girl, you know. You did all right.’
I felt myself flush pink with pleasure. Multicoloured butterflies did aerial gymnastics in my stomach. I almost felt myself begin to glow, like I’d been plugged into the mains.
But what had I told myself? All this had to stop and stop right now. ‘Thank you,’ I said primly, like some Victorian lady saying thank you to a rude mechanical who’d swept the highway free of horse manure so she could cross the road. ‘I’ll go and get Ben.’
He wasn’t in his office after all. I found him in the den, his headphones on and watching baseball on his massive television screen. The den was an Aladdin’s cave reinterpreted by some ridiculously nerdish teenage boy. There were gadgets everywhere, wires trailing, stuff on charge, lights flashing, blinking—
‘What are you grinning at?’ he asked me when I tapped him on the shoulder to distract him from Joe Mauer and the Minnesota Twins.
‘I thought you were working?’
‘It’s research,’ he said.
PATRICK
Okay, I told myself, you don’t go visit Ben. You don’t go anywhere with him on weekends. You don’t give yourself a chance to see that over-privileged British girl whose ancestors most likely starved and persecuted your own Irish forebears so they had no choice but to set sail for the New World in rotting hulks.
All I had to do was concentrate on work and sorting out the personal stuff and spend time with my kids.
I saw my own attorney and he wrote my wife’s. The kid stuff was arranged to more or less my satisfaction. I’d see Joe and Polly early evenings and have them all day Sunday. There was no room for Rosie in my life. I told her so.
But Rosie paid no mind to me. She walked into my head while I was shaving, showering, fixing breakfast, driving, talking, seeing students, and she never rang the bell or knocked the door, she just came right on in, sat down and made herself at home like she belonged there. When I said she couldn’t stay, she smiled and asked who was I kidding, then?
She knew I didn’t want her to go.
‘What’s eating you, Professor Riley?’ Ben demanded when I saw him in college on Wednesday afternoon. Why was he in college on a Wednesday afternoon? He didn’t teach on Wednesday afternoons. So did he have a meeting with a member of the faculty?
Yeah, I guessed he must, no doubt with that cute and curvy blonde from Idaho who’s into Robert Frost – on whom Ben is an expert – and probably into Ben as well.
‘What should be eating me?’ I asked.
‘You look like you bet a thousand dollars on a game of tic-tac-toe and lost. There is a skill to it, you know. You start off in—’
‘I’m running late. I’ll catch you Friday.’
As I drove out of the parking lot, I played tic-tac-toe and other games with Rosie Denham in my head, and she always beat me, even though I wrote some near-perfect winning algorithms for them all while I was still a high school student and until I played these games with Rosie no one ever beat me, even a computer.
But I figured even Joe or Polly could beat me nowadays.
There were times when I was out of it, had to ask a student to repeat a question, found myself on highways or at intersections without knowing how I came there. This could not go on.
Once a month, I did some outreach work on one of the reservations north of Minneapolis, teaching basic IT skills to disadvantaged kids on a pro bono basis.
Some of those kids were pretty smart and I saw no reason why they should not go to college, be engineers, attorneys, scientists. There were grants and scholarships. You just had to track them down and I could help with that, like my high school teachers once helped me.
I was driving home late Thursday evening when I got a flat. I pulled into a buggy lane – I guessed there’d be no Amish on the blacktop at this time of night – and then got out.
It was getting cold and I was tired. I’d had a very long and busy day and I was looking forward to being home again, even in my empty, dark apartment with my takeout pizza, coleslaw, shake.
It didn’t take me long to fix the flat. But as I stowed the jack back in the trunk then cleaned my dirty hands with Polly’s wipes, something made me look up at the sky.
Outside of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, the night sky is awesome. The hard, white constellations shine so bright. Where was the Bear tonight and where was Cassiopeia? Where were the Northern Lights, the Death Dance of the Spirits?
I recalled one Friday afternoon. I was in school back in Recovery, Missouri. A couple dozen other kids and I were kind of listening to our teacher. I say kind of listening, because we were absorbing rather than attending – hypnotised, I guess you’d call it, literally spellbound while Miss Ellie read:
Many things Nokomis taught him
Of the stars that shine in heaven;
Showed him Ishkoodah, the comet,
Ishkoodah, with fiery tresses;
Showed the Death-Dance of the spirits,
Warriors with their plumes and war-clubs …
Bada bada, bada bada – as I said the words out loud, I tingled with a toxic mix of good and bad emotions, of shameful memories. I was taunted by my failure to protect the person I most loved. But The Song of Hiawatha and the other poetry I learned by heart while I was still in elementary school sure did me a lot of good because it helped me to escape, to block the bastard out. Now I wanted someon
e who could say those comforting, familiar words with me.
So did I want Ben?
No. Ben hated Hiawatha, called it sentimental, racist, pseudo-liberal trash. He said it was a punishment to read it and such garbage should be banned. If Longfellow had been alive today, said Ben, he would have been an adman, writing jingles for suppositories.
Lexie?
No. I didn’t want my wife. If I’d started quoting any poetry at Lex, she would have told me to shut up. I wanted Rosie Denham to be here, looking at these bright white stars with me. I wanted Rosie, period. So, eureka – in plain English—
‘You okay there, bud?’
A police cruiser stopped behind me and two cops got out. One was short and fat, one tall and thin. They loped toward me looking hard and mean, a practised double act, the one they must have learned in cop school or from Miami Vice.
‘What’s up?’ asked the fat one.
‘I had a flat,’ I said.
‘So you fixed it now?’ demanded thin cop.
‘Yeah, all fixed.’
‘You was gazing up into the sky and kind of rockin’, like you was in a trance.’
‘You was talkin’ to yourself.’
‘Or castin’ spells.’
‘Or communicatin’ with an alien civilisation.’
‘You some kind of voodoo-hoodoo freak, and we don’t mean the brand of bike?’
‘We mean like in voodoo-hoodoo-juju, all that stuff?’
‘I was just taking five,’ I said.
‘Okay, so now you took ’em, why don’t you head on home?’ Fat cop had his right hand on his gun. ‘You’re not in a meditation centre now – ain’t no ashrams on the public highway.’
‘So you got no call to be here, bayin’ at the moon,’ said thin cop, fondling his piece.
I remembered Rosie telling me the cops aren’t armed in the UK, or they’re not routinely, anyway. Rosie would be going back to Britain soon. Rosie should be here with me now.
ROSIE
‘I thought you said your foot was better?’ Tess said crossly.
‘It still hurts a bit.’
‘I think you should go to hospital and get an X-ray. It won’t cost you anything, not if you have medical insurance. You do have insurance, don’t you?’
‘Tess, I can’t come out with you today.’
‘Why not?’
‘I need to do some work.’
‘I thought you were on holiday?’
‘I am, but I still ought to think about what I’ll be doing when I get back to London.’
‘Rosie, honeybun, are you okay?’ Tess crouched down beside me and laid her cool hand upon my forehead. ‘Do you have a temperature?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I replied and turned my laptop screen away so Tess couldn’t see what I’d been googling. My goodness, who’d have guessed there’d be so many photographs of Patrick Riley on the web? Brad Pitt, Aidan Turner, eat your livers. At conferences, giving lectures, looking formal in a business suit, looking casual but stylish, I was pleased to note – yes, I know I’m shallower than a children’s paddling pool – in dark jeans and a blue weekend shirt on a reservation near Duluth with a group of smiling, black-haired teenagers – what was that about?
‘I’m fine,’ I added, when she didn’t get up.
‘Come out with me, then?’ she wheedled. Tess was truly brilliant at doing pleading Labrador impressions. It was her superpower. ‘I’ll take you to this really ace new restaurant for lunch and put it on Ben’s card. You must be sick of chicken soup,’ she added, with a little twinkle in her eyes.
‘Yes, I am – a bit.’
‘Me too,’ she said ruefully. ‘It’s pretty rubbish, isn’t it? Cooking-wise, I take after my mother. Dad calls her Lucrezia Borgia, says it’s just as well we’ve got a chip shop on the corner of our road. Me and all my brothers, we grew up on chips and pies. Let’s go out and have a decent lunch that’s made by someone who can cook?’
‘All right, you’ve talked me into it.’ No more chicken bones and gristle soup for me, hurrah! ‘What are we doing this weekend?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I thought we might invite Professor Riley round. All have dinner Friday evening somewhere nice downtown? Go out Saturday or Sunday in a foursome? Bowling, cinema, a concert – do you have a preference?’
‘Any or all of that’s okay with me. I don’t know if I could manage bowling, but I don’t mind watching you lot.’ I shrugged or tried to shrug indifferently.
But it’s hard to shrug indifferently when all you want to do is jump up grinning like a loon and punch the air.
A whole weekend!
PATRICK
‘Pat, you made such a song and dance about losing your kids: how you were going to fight me, stop me taking them out of the state and set the FBI on me – a whole bunch of crazy stuff like that. But now—’
‘What do you mean, I made a song and dance?’
‘It’s something Stephen says. It means you’re moaning, kvetching, just because I’ve asked you to take care of Joe and Polly for a couple days. My attorney says if you don’t want to see your children—’
‘Okay, okay, I’ll have them.’
‘You mean for the whole weekend?’
‘Yeah, for the entire, complete weekend. Friday afternoon through Sunday evening, is that what you want? What will you be doing, that’s if I’m allowed to ask?’
‘We’re going to San Francisco. One of Stephen’s friends is getting married and partners are invited. It’s going to be very smart. Stephen said to go look for a special outfit, has to be designer, and before you say it, he’s picking up the tab.’
‘How extremely generous of him.’
‘Pat, don’t be so childish, please? If we both behave like we’re adults, if everybody can be civilised, this whole thing will be much easier for all concerned.’
‘Yeah, easier for you and Mr Wonderful, perhaps. But maybe it’s not quite so fine and dandy for the kids and me.’
I’d thought I might see Rosie on the weekend, find out how she was doing, if her foot was better now. But didn’t I want to see my children? Yes, of course I did. So possibly we could head over – no, I couldn’t take the kids to Ben’s. They’d wreck the place. Polly would leave sticky marks or worse on everything. Joe would go maul all Ben’s memorabilia of the Minnesota Twins or break one of his precious gadgets – Ben is the original Gadget Man, yet he calls me a geek – and then there would be blood.
So when Ben called me up, suggested dinner, I said I couldn’t make it. Sorry, I was busy. Yeah, for the whole weekend.
‘You fixed yourself up with some dates?’
‘You got it.’
‘Man, I’m proud of you! Who are the lucky girls?’
‘Beyoncé’s stopping by and bringing Katy Perry. I made a gallon of tequila slammers so we’re going to have a blast. I’m watching Joe and Polly. I’d have liked to come—’
‘But Lex has spoken.’
I didn’t know my kids had so much stuff.
Well, I guess I did. It all lived here not so long ago. It was just seeing it dumped in one great pile on the carpet in the living room that made me double-take.
Stroller, clothes and toys and diapers – why is Polly still in diapers, shouldn’t she be out of them by now, she’s almost three – backpacks, special mugs and plates, special cushions, special pillows, special comforters. I could have stocked a store.
‘Be good for Daddy.’ Lexie kissed them both goodbye. ‘Joseph, don’t forget to brush your teeth, and just quit trying to get that loose one out until it’s good and ready. Polly, when you need the bathroom, tell your daddy, don’t—’
‘We’ll be fine,’ I said, wondering if Mr Wonderful was going to show his face, make my acquaintance?
It soon became apparent he was not. What was his problem? I thought we were being civilised? Did that not mean if we should meet I had to shake the bastard by the hand? Yeah, right, in Lexie’s dreams. I’d sooner—
‘Patrick, ar
e you listening?’ Lexie’s voice stabbed into my reflections. ‘No fast food – no shakes, no sodas, ice creams, burgers, pizzas, chicken fingers, do you hear me?’
‘Yeah, I hear you.’
‘No grilled cheese sandwiches for Joe because they’re way too high in salt and remember Polly is allergic to anything with soy in it. I think she might be getting a wheat intolerance, too.’
‘What is the kid allowed to eat?’
‘Oh, a ton of stuff! Most fruit except for strawberries – don’t give her any strawberries – most vegetables, all oat-and-corn-and-rice-based products, any kind of salad.’
‘So, this wheat intolerance, how do I find out—’
‘All you need to do is check that everything you give these kids – I think Joe is getting to be wheat intolerant too – is gluten-free. It will say so on the labelling. Oh, and please don’t get them any fries.’
‘Say goodbye to Mommy,’ I told Joe and Polly.
‘Goodbye, Mom,’ said Joe, while Polly chewed her thumb and gazed from me to Lex with big round puzzled eyes.
‘Do as Daddy tells you now,’ said Lexie. ‘I’ll see you guys on Sunday.’
‘You happy to be home, kids?’ I asked when Lex had gone.
‘I guess,’ said Joe and shrugged unhappily. ‘But my stuff’s all gone, except my bed, and Mom says home’s with her and Stephen now. Dad, I want to see The Terminator.’
‘Yeah, you go say hey. He missed you, Joe.’
‘I missed him, too.’
The Terminator hadn’t moved to Mr Wonderful’s real house with its real yard. Lex said Mr Wonderful was phobic when it came to rats and mice and hamsters, all those little guys with tails and whiskers.
What a coward.
Joe went to check his rodent out. Polly stood there looking lost, bewildered, and my heart ached for my baby girl. I scooped her up and held her tight, inhaling her sweet cotton candy scent.
‘What shall we do?’ I asked her as she threaded chubby, sticky fingers through my hair, something she had done since she was tiny. ‘We could watch a movie, play a game? Or read a book?’
‘I’m hungry, Daddy.’
‘Let’s go get pizza, then. Joe, what do you say to pizza, ice cream floats and fries?’
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