A Daughter's Secret (19 page)

Jim leans down, kisses my left breast, his hand slipping inside my bra to cup the other one. My nipple stiffens at the feel of his cold fingers. I kiss him, trying to peel off my tights at the same time, wobbling around on one unsteady leg like a crane. The bath’s close to overflowing. I whip off my knickers and my skirt, diving under the water before he can get too close a look at my nakedness. I’ve never let him see all of me.

He strips off, utterly unselfconscious. I’ve never seen an erection either, his or anyone else’s, all our fumbling having taken place in the dark or through clothes. I can only glance at it, my eyes flicking quickly to his beautiful face. He dives in, kisses me, his hands, slippery with bubbles, roving all over me. I try and lose myself to it, block out the fear and the anticipation. I love his kisses: there’s something almost professional about how skilled they are. He makes soft noises, his fingers growing bolder, then stands up, his erection right there in my eyeline. He hauls me out, wraps me in a towel.

‘I can’t wait any longer,’ he says, urgent, manoeuvring me towards the bed.

‘We can’t. Not here!’

‘It’s a king size. Lots of room to roll around,’ he says, laughing, kissing me some more. I think I’m enjoying this.

We lie there afterwards, my head on Jim’s caramel-coloured chest, a few straggly hairs around his nipples. I’m not a virgin any more. I’m sixteen years old and I’ve had sex. It felt sharp and painful at first, but then I started to get used to the feeling of it. I think I could start to like it, although I’m not quite sure what the fuss is about yet. I liked how close we were, although my fear didn’t leave me. It was almost like he was a different version of himself, animalistic and hard to find. He muttered filth into my ear all the time, getting louder and louder, his groans reverberating round the room as he came, his eyes glazed and rolling.

‘You need mopping up,’ he says, reaching for a handful of tissues from the box on Gloria’s side. I do; there’s a puddle of his white stickiness on my stomach.

‘Are you sure I won’t get pregnant?’ I’m an idiot. I should have made him wear a condom, but he swore to me that everyone does this. ‘You’re my girlfriend,’ he said. ‘I want to feel you properly. Don’t you want us to be able to feel every inch?’ I couldn’t think of a good way to say no to that.

‘Course you won’t,’ he says, soaking the cold mess off me, kissing me as he does it. ‘Look at your gorgeous stomach.’

‘My fat stomach.’ I’ve not eaten breakfast all week, trying to make sure there wouldn’t be an inch of podge when I exposed it.

‘Shush,’ says Jim, then crosses to the bath to get the champagne. He’s so unabashed about his nakedness. He tops up our glasses, snuggles back up to me. ‘Did you come?’ he asks me, his voice low in my ear.

I don’t really understand about girls coming. I’ve read about it, like I’ve read about everything, but how it would feel is another matter. I tried a little exploratory touching, but I felt too ridiculous and shame-filled, not turned on at all. I wait a few seconds, the silence starting to congeal like cold custard.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I think so.’

‘You think so?’ says Jim, peering down at me, nestled in the crease of his shoulder. ‘How does that work?’

‘I’ve never done it before.’

‘Well we know that,’ he says, an edge to his voice. One thing I’m very good at is hearing the edges. ‘Don’t you ever diddle yourself?’

I can feel myself blushing, which is ridiculous. He’s my boyfriend. I should be able to find the words.

‘Not really, no.’

‘Wow, so you’re like a
super
virgin.’

‘Girls aren’t like boys. They don’t spend their whole time wanking,’ I say, anger splashing my words, despite my best efforts.

‘Trust me,’ says Jim, swinging himself out of the bed, ‘some of them do.’

He pulls on his boxer shorts, grabs Gordon’s robe, leaves the room. The bed feels huge to me. I hug the pillow his head was lying on, try not to put every single sentence we uttered through the computer. I don’t want to read the report.

When we do it again, later that night, I copy him. I learn his noises, learn how to gasp, claw at his back like I’m his fellow animal. Like we’re properly mating. My eyes are fixed on the light fitting, my brain on a pair of Chinese pandas I saw on the news this week, forced to breed at London Zoo, the world’s eyes trained on their performance.

‘That was supercalifragilisticexpialidotious!’ he says afterwards. He rolls towards me, his hands tangled up in my hair, his perfect mouth covering mine.

‘Wasn’t it just?’ I say, kissing him back, making the weird, alien words a little breathy.

‘There’s hope for you yet,’ he says, slapping my naked bum.

Don’t think, just feel. Don’t think, just feel.

Chapter Ten

I’m surrounded by cardboard. Box after box, the bookshelves bare and gaping, the cupboards half empty. When the buzzer goes, it sounds like something alien, shrill and dangerous. My heart lurches in my chest before my brain catches up. I know perfectly well it’s just Lysette.

‘Look at you!’ she says, shoving a bottle of Prosecco in my direction as she walks in. ‘This is actually messy! And it hasn’t killed you stone dead.’

‘Oh shut up,’ I say, laughing. ‘The bad news is I think I’ve packed the glasses. We might have to share my tooth mug.’

‘Colgate Bellini doesn’t sound so bad,’ she says, crossing to the kitchen. It’s open plan, my little flat, the living room giving way to a galley kitchen, a balcony opening off it where in summer I grow geraniums, red and cheery, in terracotta pots. The bedroom’s up some precarious stairs, a raised platform in the eaves. The fridge has no outside space. I’ll have to leave the pots behind for the tenants, even though the thought of doing it makes me feel like an unfit mother.

‘Sorry, I’m still in hideous chaos. I thought we could go round to the pub for supper.’

Lysette takes it all in, looks at me. I’m covered in a layer of dust, my hair scraped back, my nails black. I’m suddenly so happy she’s here that I could actually weep.

‘It’s your last weekend. End of an era. Let’s just order a pizza and have it here. We can eat it off that awful Sade CD you bought to “make love” to.’

Sometimes, when she’s so silly that I get a stitch from laughing, I can’t help missing Jim. The fun of their family was so utterly infectious.

‘I’m totally taking that with me. Marcus won’t know what’s hit him.’

The packing’s both better and worse now that there’s two of us. I love the company, but it makes the whole fact that I’m leaving my home behind seem more weighty and significant. I pull out a hideous brown-wool dress, an expensive potato sack, and try and put it on the Oxfam pile.

‘Do it!’ says Lysette, fingering the weird jewelled neckline as I cling on to the hem. ‘The Millennium called. It wants its outfits back.’

‘Do you remember David?’ I say.

‘David?’

‘That artist. I was seeing him for about three months. I was wearing this the night I broke up with him.’

‘Oh my God, you were crazy about him for a bit. He did those awful abstract things Saffron could make with macaroni and he lived in a tunnel.’

‘A shed. A posh shed in Chiswick. It was in his uncle’s garden. We could hear the foxes making love,’ I add, sniggering.

Lysette deftly manoeuvres it from me and drops it on the pile. We’re in my bedroom, ghostly marks on the wall where my pictures hung until an hour ago. My antique gilt-framed mirror is still up, and I catch sight of the two of us in profile, same but different.

‘What’s your point, Mia?’

‘I don’t know. You know that thing people say, about how the only thing that’s inevitable is change? I did really like him for a bit.’

‘What, you’re wishing you were back in his potting shed?’

‘No! But – when you got married, you believed in it, didn’t you?’

Lysette sits down on the bed, taking a thoughtful sip of the rapidly dwindling Prosecco.

‘Yeah, but I hadn’t met Ged. And if I hadn’t married Ian I wouldn’t have had Barney. I mean, it was grim when we broke up, but I learnt tons. I appreciate what I’ve got with Ged a lot more because of it, rather than getting hung up on the fact that he’s a bit like a stoned tomcat.’

She’s half smiling to herself as she says it, like she’s unconsciously wrapping herself up in the thought of him. He would exasperate me. I’d exasperate him even more.

‘So you don’t mind that you got divorced?’

‘I’m not saying that. It’s passed, it happened. We’ve all had a clean bill of health, even Ian. Although that woman he’s married has an arse like a sideboard.’

‘I’m not being judgemental, I’m just—’

‘We can’t always get it right first time. Or second time. It’s OK to fuck up a bit.’

‘I know.’

I do know. In principle. I wonder how Marcus’s packing is going? Something tells me he’ll have paid his cleaner double time and washed his hands of the task. I wish I believed in fate. It sounds so comforting, a benign blue sky with puffy white clouds. When you’ve been holding on to the wheel this tightly, for this long, it’s hard to stay alert. I start in on the chest of drawers, pulling out a handful of my knickers and chucking them into the big suitcase that’s lying open. Lysette springs up.

‘You need a system,’ she says, grabbing a cloth shoe bag and putting them in. ‘You of all people know that!’ She reaches up and squeezes my hand. ‘What’s going on in there?’

I keep sorting through the drawers, untangling pairs of tights, knotted together like secret nylon lovers.

‘I don’t know. I . . . I don’t feel entirely like myself at the moment.’

Understatement of the century. The one thing – the one place – I’ve always trusted myself is at work. I had another session with Gemma yesterday, one in which she barely spoke, her face twisted into a permanent sneer, her rudeness bordering on abuse. Maybe I have made her life worse, not better. Given her less certainties not more.

‘It’s a massive life change, moving in with someone.’

‘Yeah.’ I sit down, still untangling. I smooth the static-y fabric across my knee.

‘Mia, are you having second thoughts about this? It’s not compulsory, you know.’

‘I don’t know what’s nerves and what’s a tiny, stupid tremor of muffin love.’

‘Hang on,’ she says, grabbing me round the waist. ‘Muffin love?’

‘Pointless muffin – not love, a tiny muffin crumb – with someone who’s out of the question. I’m just being a fuck-up,’ I say, balling up some socks and aiming them into the cavernous suitcase. It’s snuck up on me, the thinking about Patrick. He’s texted a couple of times suggesting coffee but I’ve pleaded busyness, my brittle messages my best defence. I’m out of my depth, on so many fronts. The most stupid thing I could do is start to think that he’s some kind of anchor.

‘I hate it when you talk to yourself like that.’

‘Even if I wasn’t about to move in with my actual boyfriend, it would be completely unethical.’

‘What, is he a client?’

I wish I could tell her absolutely everything. I grab the bottle, top us both up and sit back down. I love this bed linen, it’s white and lacy without being twee. There’s no way it’s going to fit on Lila’s perfectly constructed oak masterpiece. I can’t believe I let Marcus talk me into letting him bring his marital bed, but I could hardly get emotional about it when neither of us has found the time to go furniture shopping. Our nest is not so much unfeathered as feathered by last year’s jackdaws.

‘As good as – he’s connected to that girl I’m seeing. I actually can’t talk about it.’

‘Tell me some bits you can tell me – how’s it going with her?’ I shrug, stay silent. ‘Tell you what, tell me in German. There’s got to be some reason you insisted on taking it.’

‘Guten tag mein liebling,’ I say, laughing. I chink my glass against hers. ‘She’s being an absolute fucking nightmare, but that’s probably my fault.’

‘It probably is,’ says Lysette, ironic. ‘Most things are.’

‘I feel like I’m screwing up everything, all at once. I’m like the world’s most incompetent juggler.’

Lysette doesn’t smile, she just watches my face. ‘What?’ I demand.

‘I’ve never seen you like this over a client. Even that night you got me pissed on Martinis and stayed stone cold sober. I could see it then. It is only work. I mean – I know I’m not really qualified to tell anyone about work – but . . . You don’t have to give it like - your bone marrow.’

‘I just want to help her, but maybe the truth is that I can’t.’

‘I know
you
don’t, but I like it when you’re human.’

‘Don’t say that! I’m not a bloody cyborg.’

‘I didn’t mean that. But if you let yourself be a little bit less impeccable the rest of the time, it wouldn’t be such a shock.’

‘Trust me, I am the opposite of impeccable right now. I’ve been thinking about someone who isn’t my boyfriend. I’m unprofessional. My nails are dirty. I’m drunk. Not to mention the state of my sock packing.’

‘And you own a Sade CD, don’t forget.’

‘I let someone hold me, the very day I was signing up for the flat. What’s wrong with me?’

Thanks to the fact I was wasting time with Patrick, I was half an hour late to the estate agents. I thought that Marcus would be angry: the fact that he wasn’t made me feel like a con artist. ‘Did your six o’clock crazy have a meltdown?’ he said, kissing me in that uniquely Marcus way – like the people around us are a grateful audience. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said too fervently, but by now a slimy man in a pinstriped suit was shoving paperwork across the desk. ‘Just sign here, here and here,’ he said, crosses already marking the spots, and I stood there, frozen, watching Marcus’s fountain pen glide seamlessly across the contract. Suddenly I wanted to turn tail, hare across Ladbroke Grove, dodge the cars like I was in a video game. But even more than that, I didn’t want to be Lorcan, blue eyes constantly checking the horizon. ‘Give me the pen,’ I demanded, and watched my hand like it was an alien object, the letters of my name trailing out after it like vapour from an aeroplane.

‘You can’t honestly think that counts?’ says Lysette, incredulous, once I’ve described what happened. Two extended hugs does sound pretty tame, truth be told, but it was more the weird sense of intimacy that rattled me. ‘I pretty much snogged our next-door neighbour the New Year before last. I blamed the absinthe, forgot about it.’