by Fiona Gibson
‘And it’s better than spending Friday night with a tank of sea monkeys.’ I head towards the back door to round up the kids from the bottom of Sam’s garden. ‘Anyway,’ I say, glancing back at him, ‘what are you up to tonight?’
We have a joke, Sam and I, about our lamentable social lives, answering such questions with a blasé, ‘Oh, I thought I’d pop along to a private view at the ICA; then there’s an all-night party at Tracey Emin’s studio. Apart from that, nothing much.’
‘She’s, um … coming over,’ Sam says hesitantly. ‘Amelia’s due in about an hour’s time.’
My entire body seems to deflate. ‘That’s great!’ I say, mustering a wide, fake grin, the effort of which almost causes my face to crack.
Back home, I busy myself by packing the kids’ weekend bags. Lola is jammed by my side, helping to pair up socks from her drawer. Jake, who’s impatient for King Daddy’s arrival, keeps asking why he’s not here yet. Travis is in the garden, attempting to find further specimens for our bug collection. I plan to de-mother myself when they’ve gone. It’s less stressful than enduring their bathroom-door hammering and Travis catching me sprinting naked across the landing and going, ‘Eugh.’
He’s late. Martin is never late. When he finally shows up, at seven forty-five, he is creased around the eyes, as if severely sleep-deprived. His usually pristine hair looks as if it’s been sat on. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he mutters, giving me an unexpected kiss on the cheek, which shocks me, as if a stranger had lurched over and pecked me in the street.
‘You look awful,’ I tell him, having dispatched the kids to gather up their favourite toys. (No matter how ready we are, there’s always a scramble for last-minute ‘essentials’.)
‘Cheers.’ He smiles weakly and perches on the sofa arm.
I peer at him. In spite of how much I despise him, I’m concerned to see him looking so haggard. He will, after all, be in charge of our children for the next forty-eight hours. Right now, he barely looks up to the job.
‘Bad day at work?’ I persist.
‘I, um …’ He glances down at his shoes, then blinks up at me. ‘I haven’t been to work today. Me and Daisy have been having a few … problems.’
‘Oh dear.’ My heart bleeds.
‘Issues, I suppose you’d call them.’ Joyless chuckle. ‘About the kids …’
‘What about the kids?’
Here it comes: Sorry, but while I’m happy to pop round in the week bearing gifts, I’ll have to cut down on weekends. You know how it is. Space issues, ya-di-ya. And we’re going to be terribly busy building an annexe with en-suite bathroom for Pink Princess …
‘She … Daisy worries about the effect they’re having on Poppy. She’s been quite withdrawn at school and finds it hard to make friends and—’
‘And you’re saying this is our children’s fault? Christ, Martin, you only have them every other weekend. That’s when you’re not going to the theatre or Sardinia—’
‘I know, and I’m not saying that. She, Daisy …’
‘How are they affecting Pink—Poppy exactly?’
‘Just … by being there. It’s pretty awkward. Lola hardly speaks to Poppy.’
‘Well,’ I snap, ‘I’m really fucking sorry. What on earth d’you expect? That she’ll embrace her as a step-sister?’
He meets my gaze and his eyes looked desperately sad. My own left eyelid is reverberating, as if an insect has landed on it.
‘Mummy!’ Travis calls from the stairs. ‘Where’s my hook?’
I tear my eyes away from Martin and try to normalise my voice. ‘Probably in your bedroom, sweetie. I’ll help you find it in a minute.’
‘Cait,’ Martin hisses after me, ‘I’m not going to do anything. I won’t change how things are, with the kids staying with me. They’re my priority. I’ll make it work out.’
‘Yes,’ I growl under my breath, ‘you bloody will.’
As I embark on Operation Hook Hunt, with Travis making ineffectual forays into his pant and sock drawers, I try to ignore the feeling of dread that Slapper is planning to screw things up between the kids and their father. Whatever I feel about him, they adore him and need their time with him. Where men are concerned, kids are so unblaming. Mine seem to have forgiven him for seamlessly replacing me with Slapper. Martin only has to tell a feeble joke to have the three of them screeching with laughter, as if he warrants a one-man show on the comedy circuit. I suspect that, even if I were capable of fashioning life-sized prehistoric creatures from salt dough, I’d evoke only a lukewarm response.
Martin’s role is that of entertainment manager and dispenser of impromptu gifts. Mine is to delve around the dusty pipe at the back of the toilet hunting for lost toys. The Mum-Dad equation is, I feel, horribly unbalanced.
They leave, with Travis scowling through the back window of Martin’s car, as if blaming me personally for the disappearance of his hook.
‘This is Caitlin, the famous writer.’ Darren kisses my hot cheek and beckons me to join his friends at their table in the corner of the bustling pub. I laugh, and he introduces me to each face in turn: fresh-faced boys (not men but boys) and girls who undoubtedly read Elle and Glamour, and wouldn’t touch Bambino even if they found it abandoned on the train. I’ll bet there’s not a stretch mark or a thread vein between them.
This is where I want to be – not trapped with Bev Hartnett and her perimenopause.
Drinks are flowing at an impressive pace. Within minutes any smidgen of self-consciousness has ebbed away, and I’ve stopped fretting about Slapper objecting to our kids’ presence, and Jake finding me so objectionable, and the fact that Sam is probably immersed in a passionate deep-throat snoggy scenario with Amelia right now. None of that matters. I feel like Cait, my pre-motherhood self.
A girl with golden streaks running through her chestnut hair bubbles with excitement about her new job as a PA in the City. Her first job; she’s just starting out in life. I feel a twang of envy. Another is moving out from her parents’ place and in with her boyfriend. ‘We’re thinking of going for a vintage look,’ she announces, ‘with one of those cool sixties lamps that curves over in an arc, and maybe beaded curtains.’
I love the frivolity of it all. Lamps and beaded curtains. Not pedal bins and blocked waste pipes. Darren’s friends discuss films, music and clubs, and I don’t bother to pretend that I’m familiar with a wide array of recreational drugs or have exotic body piercings. I soak it in, temporarily inhabiting a fish-finger-free world. There’s no swapping of recipes, no talk of guess-the-stuffed-bunny’s-birthday stalls. With Martin showing up so late, I didn’t have time to dress up, and now I’m relieved. Everyone is wearing skinny tops and low-slung jeans. Maybe dressing up is something you have to do only when you’re starting to crumble around the edges. When you have ‘flaws’ (magazine-speak) to ‘conceal’. Anyway, I feel fine in my faded jeans and baby-blue lambswool sweater.
The Crown is noisy and pleasingly old-fashioned. It’s the kind of cosy, unpretentious place that Martin and I frequented during our early years, when we’d left college and taken to throwing occasional sickies from work to spend extra time together. I feel myself slithering towards mild giddiness, as I did during those ever-stretching afternoons.
‘I can’t believe you have three children, Caitlin,’ the PA girl announces. ‘I thought you were around the same age as us.’
‘It’s the lighting in here,’ I reply, laughing, not minding that she’s lying through her pearly teeth.
As we leave the pub, someone shouts, ‘See you again, Caitlin!’ I feel ridiculously happy, as if I have left all my worries behind on the Crown’s battered oak table.
‘So,’ Darren says eagerly, ‘where to now?’
I like that. The assumption that I needn’t scamper home before I turn into a pumpkin.
‘We could have a coffee at mine,’ I venture. (The old ‘coffee’ line! Martin used to tease me that the first night he’d come back to my flat, said promised hot beverage had
never materialised).
Darren grins, and his fingers curl around mine. His friends have dispersed; it’s just us, on a warm, lazy May night. ‘That sounds good,’ he says.
We don’t talk much as we stroll along my road. I steal glances at him; his mouth is full, curved and sensuous, highly kissable. My heart quickens as I remember that I’m wearing a black-and-white spotty bra, mismatched pink knickers and haven’t shaved my legs.
Oh, well. Relationships aren’t made or broken over stubbly shins.
I fish out my keys at the front door and realise I’m trembling slightly. Will I have the nerve to go through with this? Surely sex is one of those things that you soon get the hang of again – like riding a bike. You’re rather wobbly at first, and might fall off and graze yourself, but as far as the basic mechanics go – which bit goes where – I feel reasonably confident that it’ll all come flooding back to me. Like helping Jake with his fractions.
No, no. I’m bloody crap at fractions.
Darren touches my face, nudging back a loose strand of hair as I try to stab my key into the lock. Then he kisses me. It’s a languid kiss that makes me shiver all over and drop my keys on the flagstone with a clatter. I imagine Mrs Catchpole peering out and sucking in her lips. A mother of three, the youngest of whom often runs about in the garden stark naked. Look at her now, making an exhibition of herself with a man, in full view of our street! That family’s gone to the dogs since that nice Martin left.
A rogue thought flashes into my mind as I retrieve my keys. Darren is twenty-five, which means he was born in the 1980s. Good God. We step into the house, and I flick on the hall light.
‘Ugh,’ he says with a shudder.
Damn, this is where it all comes crashing down. I’d looked OK in the corner of the dimly lit pub. Now, faced with the sight of me close up beneath the dazzling bulb, he is sickened.
‘What are these?’ he asks, peering at the bug jars that the kids lined up on the shelf.
‘Oh, those.’ I laugh, awash with relief. ‘They’re our pets.’
It happens quickly then. There isn’t much chat, and coffee is certainly absent. In fact, the kettle doesn’t feature at all. We are kissing on the sofa like teenagers, kissing and kissing with a keenness that I haven’t experienced since the early days of Martin and me.
We’re undressing each other and I no longer care that my underwear clashes and my shins are bristly and I haven’t had the chance to slather my body in extract of papaya, or whatever you’re meant to do prior to such an event. Darren’s body is lean, lightly muscled, clad only in snow-white briefs.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he murmurs.
‘Yes,’ says the eighteen-year-old that I’ve become. Desire whirls in my stomach as I stagger up from the sofa, knocking Travis’s Playmobil airport from the coffee table on to the floor. We arrive in the hall, holding hands and giggling and shivering slightly.
‘Hey, gorgeous,’ Darren says, pulling me towards him. His mouth is on mine, tasting beery and faintly cigaretty in a strangely pleasant way. ‘You,’ he murmurs, ‘are so sexy.’
‘Come on,’ I murmur, tugging his hand, ‘let’s go up—’
Driiiiing!
Jesus, the bloody doorbell. We spring apart.
‘Who’s that?’ I whisper, staring wildly from the front door to Darren, as if he’d have the faintest idea.
Driiiing! Driiiiiiiiiing!
Shit. Bollocks. I mime, ‘Shhh,’ with a finger pressed over my mouth. My eyes are bulging, about to pop.
If we stand there, deadly silent, whoever it is will go away.
‘Who …?’ Darren mouths, rubbing his goosepimpled upper arms.
I mime a flamboyant, ‘How the hell should I know?’ and conceal as much of my body as I can by folding my arms over myself. Trapped in my own hallway, in clashing bra and knickers. A draught sneaks in under the door. Someone is out there, no longer jabbing the doorbell, but waiting.
Someone staggering home pissed from the pub and winding up at the wrong house. Or a burglar casing the joint, as they say on TV. Or the person who sends pubic-hair trimmings to agony aunts.
Or a madman with an axe.
Darren’s mouth has tightened, his eyes clouded with exasperation. The commotion that had been going on in his snow-white pants appears to have dwindled to nothing. I feel chilled, and horribly underdressed. In one of the jars, Jake’s shiny-backed beetle crawls over a leaf.
Glancing fearfully at Darren, I creep towards the door, trying to silence my breathing as I peer through the spyhole.
It’s a hideous thing that looms there, distorted by a fish-eye lens. It stands with its mouth set in a grim line and its eyebrows swooped down in frustration. The draught teases my bare toes.
It’s Martin.
22
Something awful has happened. It must be one of the kids. If it was a minor accident or illness, he’d have phoned or dealt with it himself. Martin wouldn’t show up like this unannounced.
‘Go upstairs,’ I hiss at Darren, flapping him away as if he were a wasp. ‘My bedroom’s first on the right. Go up and be quiet.’
He opens his mouth as if to protest, then shrugs and trips lightly upstairs. I watch his white-pant-clad bottom until it disappears into my room.
Slowly, I open the door a few inches and poke my head round it. ‘What’s happened?’ I demand.
‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing terrible,’ Martin says distractedly. He takes a step forward as if to come in, but I stop the door with my bare foot.
‘So what are you doing here? It’s nearly midnight—’
‘Aren’t you going to let me in?’ He knows, I’m certain, that I’m sporting nothing but my ancient pink pants that are losing their elasticity and a spotty bra that’s gone bobbly on the cups. I can feel his eyes boring through the three-inch-thick door, mocking me.
‘I’m … I’m a bit busy right now,’ I bluster. ‘If it’s nothing urgent …’
‘It’s just … Travis is really upset. He can’t get to sleep without his hook.’
‘His hook? You’ve driven over here for that?’
‘Yes.’ His voice is flat, and faintly accusing. After all, I lost the hook. Bad, bad mother.
‘You came for a toy? Jesus, Martin! He’d have gone to sleep eventually. You could have given him something else – doesn’t Poppy have toys? – or lain down with him until …’ I tail off as a particularly rancid image flashes into my mind: Slapper cradling Travis and saying, ‘There, there, darling, Mummy’s been silly, but don’t worry, we’ll make everything all right … Off you go, Martin, there’s a poppet, see if that idiot ex of yours can find it.’
I could vomit right here on my doorstep.
‘He won’t go to sleep,’ Martin insists. ‘He’s beside himself. Wet the bed and everything.’
‘Wasn’t he wearing his night-time pants?’
‘He was too distraught for night-time pants!’
‘Too distraught for night-time pants!’ shrieks a boy on the opposite pavement, and his girlfriend’s laughter ricochets down the street.
‘All right,’ I snap. ‘I’ll see if I can find it.’
‘Can I come in, for God’s sake? It’s raining.’
Fine droplets are speckling the shoulders of his suede jacket.
‘Just a minute,’ I mutter, groping the overloaded coat hooks for something with which to cover myself. Lola’s stripy poncho drops to the floor. I snatch Jake’s despised orange Pac-a-Mac – a waterproof garment that Bev insisted on donating to us in a bulging carrier bag of cast-offs, ‘Because I imagine times are pretty hard for you, Caitlin, and you must be stretched financially.’ I pull it over my head and yank it down with difficulty. It’s age nine to ten. It barely covers the gusset of my knickers. Transmitting a desperate plea to Darren (Please, please stay up there until Shagpants has gone), I let Martin in.
His mouth twitches with mirth as he appraises my nylon covering. ‘Interesting attire, Cait. Going somewhere special?’
> ‘It’s raining,’ I mutter.
‘Yes, but not inside. It’s quite dry in here. Were you about to have a shower but didn’t want to get wet?’ The guffaw explodes out of his nose as he tails me into the living room. It would be no trouble at all to turn round and slap him. I’m horribly aware that my arse is sticking out below the Pac-a-Mac.
Martin settles himself on the sofa, his eyes lighting upon the tumble of clothes strewn all over the floor. Darren’s socks are bunched up, clearly having been pulled off in haste. They are large, fluffy-soled, obviously man-socks. There’s a T-shirt, his jeans, his jacket flung on to the table. Why should I explain? Why?
‘Wait here,’ I say sternly, ‘and I’ll have a rummage through the toybox in the kitchen.’
I leg it downstairs, upend the box – ‘Can’t your children keep their toys in their bedrooms?’ Bev once enquired, when she’d barged in and demanded coffee – and rake through the mountain of tat. No hook. A gorgeous, sexy young man waiting upstairs in my bedroom and no fucking hook.
Think. Think. When did Travis last have it? Please, please let him not have left it at Sam’s. No, he’d worn it on the way home. I’d pointed out that it would get scratched and ruined if he kept running it along walls, and then it had fallen off and nearly been run over by a car. He’d poked Lola in the bottom with it as we’d come into the house. Then I’d packed the kids’ weekend bags, and they’d been squabbling in the kitchen, except … Travis had gone out into the garden. That was it. He’d been using it to rake through the soil to find worms. Shit, that means going outside in the dark and the rain – we have no outside light – and stumbling through the borders.
I scan the kitchen for suitable footwear, but all I can find are Lola’s size-11 denim sandals with plastic daisies on the front.
Barefoot, I unlock the back door and creep out, squinting into the gloom. My mild drunkenness has worn off, my libido scooted away to find some other woman to attach itself to – a proper grown-up woman who deserves to be pleasured in bed. I tread on something hard and spiky and let out a squeal. It’s the tusk of a small plastic elephant. My hair hangs limply around my face, and the damp Pac-a-Mac feels disgusting against my bare flesh.