But I seemed to lack feminine wiles. As I collected glasses I tried to remember how I’d managed to seduce the men I’d slept with in the past.
I’d hardly done anything with George except get drunk, and that avenue was closed to me at the moment.
In the heady early days of infatuation with my former boyfriend Michael, I’d spent hours listening to him strum his guitar and read his own poetry aloud. I remembered trying something similar with David, who was this super-genius philosophy student, except I was listening to him expound on Kierkegaard or suchlike. Eventually, they’d stopped talking or playing and got around to taking my clothes off, enflamed by my superior listening skills.
Both of those relationships had fizzled out at about the time I realised I wasn’t actually that interested in what they were saying after all. Their special, god-like talents had shrunk once I got to know them, and I guess once I stopped listening to them, they stopped being turned on by me.
In fact, most of my relationships seemed to go that way. I got disenchanted. I didn’t know whether this was because the men I chose weren’t all that great in the first place, or because I had impossibly high expectations. I wanted someone extra-special, and it seemed that men who were mega-talented or super-intelligent or uber-handsome or ultra-successful all knew that they were. And a big ego automatically made a man
not
extra-special.
Or maybe I just didn’t have sticking power when it came to relationships. In any case, all of this was another good argument for me not starting up anything with Hugh.
Nevertheless, I went and sat beside him after I’d collected all the glasses. He was talking to Paul and two students about his interview with the head chef at the Harris, a story I’d heard already, immediately after it had happened.
I listened, though. I listened hard. I tilted my head and turned my body towards Hugh.
‘He wanted to know why I’d spent so long in I.T. if I wanted to be a chef,’ Hugh was telling Paul, ‘and I told him about an epiphany I had, in a team meeting about the roll-out of a new software initiative. It was an impossible project. Management were putting pressure on us to get it done, while at the same time blocking any actual ideas we had about how to get it done, and everybody in that room had been working twelve-hour days at least. We were all angry and fed up.’
I arranged my face into an expression of sympathy and concern. I laid the tips of my fingers on Hugh’s wrist and made a subtle ‘tsk’ing sound. He glanced at me in surprise and then went back to his story.
‘In the corner of the boardroom there was a table, and on that table was a box of macaroons that one of the team had brought back from their trip to France. That box of biscuits was the only spot of joy in that room. They were broken and the box was a little crushed from where the bloke who’d brought it back on Eurostar had dropped his carry-on on top of it, but they were perfect macaroons. Like a feather, and delicious.’
I rolled my eyes in sympathetic ecstasy about how perfect those macaroons must have been. ‘So how did that affect you?’ I asked him.
Hugh turned to me. ‘Are you all right, El? You’ve heard this story before.’
Dazzling smile. I was a supportive listener. The best, and sexiest, listener Hugh had ever had.
‘But it’s such a good story, I love hearing it.’
Hugh’s gaze was deep and intense. Lust spiralled up through my body. Desire surely made my eyes sultry, my lips lush.
‘Are you all right, mate?’ Hugh asked. ‘You’re not getting morning sickness again, are you?’
What hope did I have if desire made me appear both nauseated and insane?
‘Must be the beer fumes,’ I mumbled, getting back up and going to the bar.
That was it. I’d used up all my natural resources. Considering half of my DNA came from June Connor, those resources were very scant indeed. I didn’t know how to be coy, or how to shimmy and flirt, and it didn’t help that I wasn’t built like a delicate female flower. Even the tits I’d been suddenly blessed with were balanced out by a rapidly expanding belly.
Horny/Angry motioned for another pint, licking his lips as he did so; the inevitable and only result of my pathetic seduction attempt. I sighed and brought his pint to him.
‘Having a good night tonight, Norman?’ I asked.
I didn’t usually make small talk with Horny/Angry. This half-hearted question made him sit up a little straighter. Or maybe it was because he could see down my blouse better like that, I wasn’t sure.
‘Not bad,’ he said, and smiled at me, his eyes firmly fixed on my breasts. He had the red, pitted skin of a habitual drinker. The tips of the fingers of his right hand were stained yellow. Since Jerry’s non-smoking edict, he had been shuffling to the door to smoke outside every half an hour or so. Maybe the extra exercise and fresh air made him metabolise the alcohol more quickly, but he seemed less blurry than normal, though equally as horny.
‘Norman, do you remember a while ago when I asked you if you’d seen me talking to a man here in the pub? On the eighteenth of September?’
He rolled his eyes in the semblance of someone who was thinking hard. ‘Don’t remember,’ he said finally.
‘You said he was a bastard,’ I pursued. It seemed a shame to waste one of his rare lucid moments, especially as I was making the effort to talk with him.
‘They’re all bastards,’ he replied. For a moment his face was hard with anger, and then he seemed to change his mind and smiled at me again. ‘You look beautiful,’ he said.
Well, hell. I’d been about to abandon him if he couldn’t give me any leads on George, but now I felt guilty.
‘Thank you,’ I said, and then, so he knew he didn’t have a chance with me, added, ‘I’m sure you’ve heard that I’m going to have a baby.’
‘Loved it when my wife was expecting.’
The sentence was accompanied by a rasping, hawking clearing of the throat that three weeks before would have sent me running for the ladies’ room. But there was something else in his voice besides smoker’s phlegm.
‘You have children?’ I asked. I didn’t dare ask about his wife, because I strongly suspected that a man who drank alone every evening from four till he was kicked out of the pub could not be married any more.
‘Two sons,’ he said. ‘Joined the army.’
‘Really?’ I said brightly. ‘You must be very proud of them.’
His face darkened, and I could see I’d said the wrong thing. ‘Fucking bastards,’ he growled. He grabbed his packet of cigarettes and shoved himself off his chair to stomp towards the door.
Well. My listening skills weren’t even good enough for Horny/Angry. I let one of my hands settle on my stomach.
This baby was hardly a bulge; in the drawings in my how-to book it still had a definite resemblance to an alien. But once upon a time, even Horny/Angry had been like that: innocent, new, floating inside his mother. What had happened to him to make him who he was? A lonely, bitter man who spent his entire life drinking in a place where the people merely tolerated him up till the point where he became obnoxious enough to be tossed out on his arse?
I rubbed my stomach. ‘It’s not going to happen to you,’ I whispered.
Hugh leaned on the bar across from me. ‘Are you all right? Has Horny/Angry been bothering you?’
His face was flushed with success and having drunk two pints quickly. He still didn’t spare a glance for my chest.
‘Did you know he had kids?’ I asked. ‘Two sons.’
Hugh nodded. ‘He hasn’t spoken to them since 1989, when his wife left him.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘I talked to him one afternoon.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s one thing my childhood gave me; I can talk to anyone. Had to, or I would’ve been alone.’ He gave me a crooked smile. ‘Guess I’ll have to thank my mum for that next time I ring her.’
I was probably vulnerable anyway because of the baby and Norman’s sad life, but Hugh’s crooked smile zoomed straight into my heart and twisted it round.
I was being stupid trying to seduce him. Not because it was never going to work, but because if it did work, I might lose him. And he was too precious to me. I wanted him in my life, and I wanted him in my baby’s life, too, because this baby needed as much love as it could get so it would not turn out like Norman.
‘El? Are you okay? Why are you staring at me like that? You look terrible.’
So that was the outcome of my seduction attempt: I looked terrible.
Good. That was much safer.
‘I was just thinking about my book,’ I told him. ‘The relationship in it isn’t working out. I think my heroine’s going to have a lot of evenings alone with the sex toys.’
20
Reading was hell at Christmastime. Hundreds and thousands and millions of people all descending on the town centre to do their shopping, queues of traffic clogging up the roads, and car parks practically bulging at the sides.
I didn’t have to drive to get to the high street, but I did have to squeeze my way through crowds of screaming children and grumpy shoppers whenever I walked into a shop, a task made even more unpleasant by my growing belly, threatened by other people’s sharp elbows and unwieldy shopping bags. At one point I had to leap backwards to keep my foetus from being stabbed by a man carrying a fake Christmas tree. In my rational mind, I knew the baby couldn’t be hurt by a jostle or two. But my rational mind had little to no influence over me when it came to being pregnant. My mind erected an imaginary two-foot safety barrier between my belly and strangers, and when anyone breached it, I felt ready to kill.
And a weird thing: there were pregnant women everywhere.
What had happened? Had there been some sort of massive fertility boom in Berkshire in the past nine months? Or had there always been so much breeding going on around me and I’d just never noticed till now?
There were dozens of them. Waddling, sway-backed and rounded. Looking tired, or distracted, but mostly serene. As if the world could go crazy around them, it didn’t matter, because inside their wombs there was something perfect.
I didn’t feel serene.
I fought my way out of the Oracle shopping centre, holding my shopping bags full of presents like a shield, and ducked down Duke Street towards one of the only oases of calm and civilised behaviour left in Reading at this time of year: Jackson’s department store.
I wasn’t sure how old Jackson’s was but I did know it was the only large shop in Reading that wasn’t a chain. It inhabited a corner (known as Jackson’s Corner) between the library and Market Square, just out of the orbit of the frenzy of capitalism that was jostling and bumping up Broad Street. The shoppers here were local and had been patronising Jackson’s for years, buying wool and embroidery floss, school uniforms, and clothes that knew not the vagaries of fashion.
Hugh and I had a long-standing tradition, much like Mr Tasty’s lunches: as a Christmas gift every year we had to buy each other something that had featured in Jackson’s window display at some time in the past twelve months. I’d had my eye on a jaunty felt hat that had been worn by one of the stiff window mannequins in November, or possibly a pair of driving gloves that had been draped, neatly labelled with price, in the window last spring.
Jackson’s departments were laid out on different levels, each one a small microcosm of shoes or workwear or towels. I visited Men’s Fashion, made my purchases, admired the system of overhead tubes that delivered my change, and wandered up and down steps, browsing. It was busy here, but nowhere near like the bigger, flasher shops. I relaxed my hug-hold on my shopping bags and perused a rack of women’s slippers. One of my pregnancy books said slippers were necessary for the hospital.
‘James!’ A voice pierced over the contented hum of Jackson’ s shoppers. ‘Come back here, please!’
It sounded familiar. I craned my neck over the slippers and saw a young auburn-haired woman clad in layers of jumpers and looking hassled.
‘Roisin,’ I greeted her.
She spotted me and came round the rack of slippers. ‘Eleanor, I haven’t seen you in an age.’ She gave me an air-kiss and then shouted again, ‘James!’