by Fiona Gibson
‘Caitlin? Is that you?’ A reedy voice wavers over the fence.
‘Oh, hello, Mrs Catchpole. I was just, er …’
‘Isn’t it a bit late to be gardening?’
‘Yes, ha, ha. I, er, think I left something out here.’
‘What is it?’ she asks.
‘A … a hook.’
‘A book? What sort of book?’
I sense her raisiny eyes on me, and an unspoken voice: ‘For God’s sake, woman, where are your trousers? Are you trying to make a spectacle of yourself? Behaviour like this can bring house prices down. This used to be a respectable area, and now look at it. You never flaunted yourself when your husband lived here – that charming young man who screwed the legs on to my flat-pack table.’
Her face juts over the fence like a puppet’s. ‘Why don’t you look for it in the morning?’ she suggests.
Why don’t you go back inside? I think desperately.
‘I, I really need it now.’
‘Must be an important book,’ she rattles on. ‘Is it yours or one of the children’s?’
‘Mine.’ I flash a tight smile, my head flooding with a terrible image of Darren tiring of lying in wait in bed, venturing downstairs in his snow-white pants and coming face to face with Martin in the living room. It would be awkward at first, then there’d be some blokeish hur-hur-ing, and Martin would nip down to fetch some beers.
Darren: ‘So you were married to Caitlin?’
Martin: ‘Still am, at least legally, ha, ha … So, thought your luck was in tonight, did you?’
Darren: ‘Yeah, can you believe it? Have you seen what she looks like in that raincoat thing?’
Much hilarity, further cracking open of beers.
How I despise men. All men, Sam included, drifting back to Amelia like an untethered boat.
Trying to blot Mrs Catchpole from my vision (she’s wearing a candlewick dressing gown, is she trying to bring on pneumonia or what?), I rummage desperately through straggly lupins and sections of broken toy garage, cursing myself for letting the garden run wild. When Martin was here, it was tidily pruned. He’d spend hours snipping and tweaking, and had started to make noises about acquiring a shed. I plunder a weed-infested hebe, urging the wretched accessory to reveal itself. Is Toys ’R’ Us open at this hour? Maybe Martin might consider making an emergency detour.
Then I spot it. A glimmer of silver behind the dwarf rhododendron that Mum donated several years ago, and which has never produced a single flower although it had been smothered in blooms in her garden, so I can’t have looked after it properly. I snatch the hook and try to wipe it clean on the front of my Pac-a-Mac – it has become my Pac-a-Mac – and wave it gaily at Mrs Catchpole before hurtling back into the house.
Martin is standing stiffly in the middle of the living room with his hands clasped behind his back. ‘Here.’ I jab the hook at him.
‘Thank you.’ His gaze drops to my bare, muddy feet.
‘So you can go now,’ I add.
He twitches with the effort of making no further comment. I march to the hall, beyond caring about my appearance, and open the front door for him.
‘Caitlin!’ comes an eager male voice. ‘Are you coming to bed? Has he gone yet?’
I stare up. So does Martin. We both gawp at Darren, who – realising now that we still have company – has frozen, naked, at the top of the stairs.
‘Ah,’ Martin says.
‘Jesus.’ Darren slams his hands over his genitals.
‘Just … just go, Martin,’ I mumble, overcome by nausea.
He steps out into the night, clutching the hook, with an infuriating spring to his step. ‘Bit young for you, isn’t he?’ is his parting shot.
I sink on to the bottom stair. No amount of grinding my knuckles into my eye sockets can erase the terrible scene. I’m sweating profusely under the nylon, and my toes are gunked together with mud.
‘I assume that’s the ex,’ Darren says gently, parking himself beside me. Mercifully, he has snatched a towel from a radiator and swathed himself in it.
‘Yes, that’s Martin.’ My voice is emotionless. I could happily stab myself in the heart with Travis’s cutlass if that, too, hadn’t been lost.
‘Come on, don’t worry about him. Let’s go upstairs.’ Darren gives my shoulder a friendly squeeze and kisses my cheek.
‘OK,’ I say wearily, although the last thing I feel capable of is lashings of energetic sex. We trail upstairs, and I perch on the edge of my bed, trying to summon up a smidge of that lovely tipsiness that had made me feel so sparkly on the walk home. But no – I am utterly sober. Beyond sober in fact. My faded bed-spread, my pallid legs – everything looks horribly drab, as if we’re inhabiting some bleak reality-TV show. Any glimmer of desire whooshed off to another continent the second Martin pressed the bell. Being confronted by his fish-eye face through the spyhole acted like some newfangled sober-up pill.
‘Maybe you should wash your feet,’ Darren remarks with a chuckle.
‘God, yes. Won’t be a minute.’ I head to the bathroom to de-mud and try to dredge up some saucy thoughts. Sluicing each foot under the bath tap, I flinch under the cold water. There are no saucy thoughts. Nothing. My head’s too full of shame to accommodate anything sexy or fun. I attempt to substitute Darren for Sam, but all I can visualise is him marauding his naked ex, which makes me feel even more desolate. It’s as if some joker has slammed down a gigantic lever – the kind you find in cobweb-strewn cellars – rendering me sexless, destined to die alone, surrounded by piles of yellowing newspapers.
It wasn’t always like this. In the early years of Martin and me, I’d only had to climb into bed with him for my pyjamas to fly off. ‘You’d better buy some stronger pyjamas,’ he’d joked, and I’d told him that I’d searched London for the strongest pyjamas known to womankind – made from cast iron, impregnated with willpower – but nothing could stop me from wanting him. ‘Good,’ he’d said, smothering me in kisses.
By the time I return to the bedroom, Darren is reclining, minus towel, on my bed. ‘Come here,’ he murmurs, patting the space beside him.
‘Let me take this thing off,’ I murmur, starting to hock the Pac-a-Mac over my head.
‘No. No. Keep it on.’ He smirks.
‘What?’ I almost laugh.
‘Leave it on. It’s kind of … sexy.’
‘Are you joking? I’m all sweaty inside and—’
‘Good,’ he growls, beckoning me closer. I sit awkwardly beside him, and a hand worms up the front of the Pac-a-Mac. We start kissing, and I try to relax, but all I can hear are the amplified sounds of rustling nylon. My head fills with Pac-a-Mac thoughts – of camping, trying to put up the tent and blow up the airbeds and ripping the foot pump. I pull away and turn my back on him.
‘Hey,’ he says softly.
‘I’m sorry, Darren. This doesn’t feel right.’
He runs a finger down the back of my neck. ‘Relax, Caitlin. You’re so pretty, you know. I’ve always liked –’ he clears his throat ‘– older women.’
Older women? I swing round to face him. He wants to sleep with me because I’m older? ‘What do you mean?’ I ask weakly.
‘Older women. I just like older women.’ He tries the neck-stroking thing again, but I shrink away.
Jesus. Maybe I should be flattered, but it doesn’t seem right – like being found attractive because you’re a size 24 or a dwarf or something. It feels freakish. When men make lustful noises about ‘mature’ women, they’re usually referring to Joanna Lumley or Susan Sarandon, but I am barely of the same species.
I am Caitlin Brown, clammy from the Pac-a-Mac, with the tops of my thighs sticking together.
‘You older women,’ Darren continues, his eyes glazing alarmingly, ‘really turn me on. You’re experienced, you’ve been around, you know your onions.’
Oh, save me.
‘You’ve seen life …’
Hot breath gusts into my ear, and an arm slides round my waist
.
‘Darren,’ I announce, scrambling up from the bed, ‘I think you should go home.’
23
The instant he’s gone, I rip off the Pac-a-Mac, scrunch it into a ball and fling it across the room. My entire upper body is pink and clammy. The zip has left a livid imprint on my décolleté.
I storm through to the bathroom. Usually, I let the shower gush for a few moments, only stepping in when it’s steamy and hot. Tonight, to punish myself for supreme idiocy, I barge right in, shuddering as the icy water hits my body. Twithead woman, thinking I can possibly have a normal social life – a sex life, dammit – like just about everyone else on earth. I shower for ages, trying to sluice away my anger and mortification. It doesn’t work. Not even my lilac-scented body-wash raises my spirits, because it can’t wash out my head.
I picture normal people’s fun Friday nights: Sam and Amelia, squished up close on his velvety sofa, reminiscing about their early years, when they were still happy, still a family, and mulling over whether it might be possible to have all of that again; Martin returning with Travis’s hook (all hail Superdad!) and making Daisy wet her fancy knickers with laughter over my Pac-a-Mac display; Millie and some man in advertising whom she met in a bar last week, tottering around Soho, enjoying London, enjoying life; Darren arranging to meet friends at a club and telling them, amidst much hilarity, how it went arse over tit with that older woman with the Stone Age TV; even Rachel, cosied up with gingery Guy after a hard day’s baking; even my mother, for crying out loud, oblivious to the world beyond Mimosa House as she wanders the corridors, stopping to chat with the night-shift girls; the whole of London, relishing its Friday night. And me, worn out and faded, like a T-shirt after too many washes.
I pull on my dressing gown, make a mug of strong tea in the kitchen and glare into its depths. It’s 1.15 a.m. From outside comes a mass giggle as a crowd of young people head home – or, worse, are just setting out. Too depressed to contemplate sleep, I wonder what to do with myself. This is, after all, my child-free weekend, supposedly offering limitless potential for fun. What would I choose to do more than anything? I picture Sam and me lying on a damp blanket watching shooting stars and quickly bat the image away.
Rachel once confided that whenever she can’t sleep, she gets up and batch-cooks an entire week’s worth of meals. I could do that. Whip up a pasta sauce or a stack of tuna fishcakes while everyone else in this city is getting drunk and dancing and copping off with each other. I could make a fucking marinade. Perhaps I could saw off my own humiliated head and marinate that.
I could, if I so desired, rifle through the drinks cupboard and have myself a party. Who needs other people to have fun? I yank open the cupboard door and glare in. Disappointingly, there’s only weird stuff in there that no one ever drinks, like Kahlua and Noilly Prat, which Martin insisted on buying in duty-free for the drinks parties we never had. Anyway, glugging such concoctions would surely lead to a vomiting/passing-out/stomach-pump situation – a level to which even I, in my wretched state, have no wish to plummet.
Whatever I choose to do, I will not sit hunched over the computer at 1.27 a.m. like some tragic Nora-No-Mates. I will not check my emails with a desperate gleam in my eye. NO emails. NO computer. I am a strong thirty-five-year-old mother of three, in charge of my own destiny.
I log on. Nothing. Not a damn thing. Even R thinks I’m a laughing stock, and he’s not even a real person.
No readers’ emails either. They’ve figured that I’m a phoney and have sent their woes to Dorothy Hindman at Your Baby and Toddler magazine.
Maybe my connection is down, or there’s some blockage in the wire, like the time Lola used flannels to wipe her bottom and the Dyno-Rod man had to clear the obstruction in our pipe.
Bing! An email pops in. I click on it hungrily:
Worried about the loss of erection? EVEN if you have no erection problem, buy CIALIS to bring back romantic moments that u lost in past. CIALIS! Make your lovemaking incradible today. Ladyes will say thank you! Visit now for 70% discount oofer!
I scowl at the screen. What the hell is this stuff? Some kind of plant extract, or one of those pumping devices that can supposedly increase a penis’s length and girth? I am an agony aunt. I’m supposed to know this stuff. Whatever it is, it seems to have an unfortunate effect on the part of the brain responsible for spelling things correctly.
I Google Cialis and learn that it is, in fact, an almond-shaped pill to counteract erectile dysfunction, and that thirty pills can be whizzed to my home address – ‘in discreet packaging’ – for $395.
Why am I reading this tripe? I don’t even own a penis, let alone one that malfunctions. At least that’s one thing I don’t have to worry about. Another email pings in:
Tired with flakid penis?
Want sex all night long?
Girls don’t love u no more?
No need doctor forget problems now! Viagra shipped to you direct!!!!!
More sex! It’s everywhere you look. You can’t leave the house without being confronted with some snogging couple who look as if they’ve either just done it or are pelting home to disrobe as soon as humanly possible. It’s a wonder anyone gets any work done. Even Sam is getting some, a factlet that could well propel me towards the Noilly Prat were it not for another email that pings my way:
Hi, Cait,
Well, it’s nearly two in the morning and here I am, sitting at my PC after a pretty disastrous date. I hope you don’t mind if I share it with you.
Please do. More sex talk is precisely what I need right now.
It was arranged by a friend who seems to have got it into his head that I need ‘fixing up’, as if I’m a leaky roof. So off I went to meet this girl – let’s call her S – and she’s drop-dead gorgeous. Long, fair hair …
So R fancies blondes. Zzz.
… with an amazing sexy mouth and big blue eyes.
I consider switching off the PC and trying that head-marinating thing instead. Would it fit into our biggest salad bowl, I wonder?
Anyway, things start off well enough. Bit of chat, filling in our backgrounds – you know the kind of thing.
Actually, I don’t. What I like to do on a date is prance about in age nine-to-ten rainwear with my arse hanging out.
So, after a couple of hours, I ask her back for coffee.
Two hours? Fast work, mister.
Which she does. Things are going nicely when she starts wandering around my living room, which is pretty dishevelled, as you can imagine, and says, ‘Hmm, I wouldn’t have gone for the cold palette in here, not with that north-facing window. I’d have chosen honey tones to bring in some warmth.’
I hadn’t realised I’d gone for the cool palette, or even that I had a north-facing window. By now she’s started touching the curtains, which are too heavy and opaque, apparently – I should have gone for a lighter texture and tone. And while doing this, she’s saying, ‘I can see that you have a storage problem,’ while eyeing Billy’s towering stack of videos and DVDs. I start thinking, I just want you to go home. Please. Now. I don’t want to talk about cold palettes or have you tweaking my curtains and scrunching your pretty little nose up. I don’t even want to go to bed with you.
I start to feel old, Cait. Old and past it. We have a little kiss, but it’s going nowhere. It’s a bloody disaster. I feel wooden and stiff, and not in a good way. Can you believe what I do next?
Please, please don’t tell me what you got up to in bed. I can’t bear it.
I feign a migraine. Jacqui, my ex, used to have them so I know the drill: blinding pain, needing quiet and darkness. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I tell her, ‘but I’m going to have to call you a cab.’
‘Ice cream’s good for migraines!’ my lunatic date announces, barging through to the kitchen and rummaging in the freezer. No ice cream. ‘Not very organised, is it?’ she shouts. ‘There are sausages out of their packet and loose peas everywhere … Ooh, look, here’s an Arctic roll. I suppose it’s better than
nothing.’ She brings it out, peels off the spongy layer and forces me to eat the ice-cream middle.
Despite my blinding headache – which is genuine now – I manage to phone a taxi and deposit her in it. And that’s it. Thanks for listening, Cait. It’s so good just knowing you’re there.
R x
I smile, flooded with warmth. Actually, I feel all right again. Almost normal. Sipping my tepid tea, I tap out a condensed version of my own debacle. His reply is almost instant:
God, Cait, I’d never thought of anything you’d buy in those outdoor shops having erotic appeal. I’m not really the outdoorsy sort myself – tried camping once, with Billy, and woke up in what I can only describe as a small lake at our feet. (The only time I went to Glastonbury, I booked into a B&B.) Anyway, better luck next time! You deserve it. I’m sorry, but Darren is obviously a dickhead.
R x
P.S. Would you like to meet for coffee sometime?
I stare at the last line. Coffee? No big deal. At least, not compared with parading myself in tangerine nylon and having Mrs Catchpole scowling at my crotch.
It’s just coffee, isn’t it? Just hot, brown liquid. Nothing to flip out about. It’s not ‘Let’s pretend hot beverages will be involved when we’re really just going to bed.’
Then I remember Millie’s warnings about cling-filmed pubes and how I mustn’t get into any personal stuff. I type:
Sorry, but life is pretty hectic at the moment, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to meet up. If it’s OK with you, I would prefer for us to remain email buddies.
C x
The cursor dithers over the ‘send’ icon. Taking a deep breath, I zap it to him. There. For once in my life, I have taken the sensible option. It’s something to be proud of – like writing everyone’s names in indelible pen in their gym shoes, or washing out the salad ‘crisper’ from the fridge. Mature, grown-up. Something I have always aspired to be. Like Rachel, with her model child and home-made tagliatelle.
I should be proud of myself. So why do I wish I could snatch back my email and scream, ‘Yes’?