I tried to ignore the two little voices in my head, the breathy, excited one that whispered,
But that wasn’t just any old sex
and the shrill, anxious one that fretted,
But what if the friendship’s been ruined already?
Jerry brought himself and his glass of brandy round to my side of the bar. ‘You’re looking worried, El.’
‘It’s nothing.’ I refilled Norman’s pint and gave both him and Jerry a fake smile. Norman looked happy enough to get it, but Jerry wasn’t fooled.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘How long have you been working here, Eleanor?’
‘Three years, maybe a little more.’
‘You must be worrying about money and that with the baby on the way. It’s about time I gave you a pay rise, eh? And, you know, if you want more hours before the baby comes, we can give you those.’
He was intensely uncomfortable, his face and scalp red and shiny under his buzz cut. Jerry didn’t talk about money much, but I knew how much he took on the nights I worked, and he was in no position to offer me a rise. Since he was the main bar staff aside from me, if he gave me the hours he normally worked, he’d be essentially paying me out of his pocket.
‘And I was thinking after the baby’s born, you don’t have to stop work if you don’t want to. We’ve got a spare room upstairs, we can put a cot in, and you can have one of them baby monitors behind the bar. The little one’d be fine of an evening.’
I leaned over and gave Jerry a hug. He looked both startled and pleased.
‘Jerry,’ I said, ‘you are a prince among men.’
‘Oh, well,’ he sputtered, ‘it’s the least—’
‘You don’t have to,’ I said. ‘I can keep working here till I get too pregnant, but I’ve got another job I can do with a baby at home.’
‘You do?’
‘I’ve never told anyone here this, but I write books. Erotic novels.’
Jerry’s face got redder, if it was possible. His eyes were wide and he broke into an enormous grin.
‘Erotic novels? Is that like porno?’
I’d kept this secret for as long as I’d been writing, dreading that exact question. But when it came to it, it wasn’t that bad.
It was actually a bit of a relief.
‘Not exactly. I mean, they don’t have pictures, and really they’re comedies. But they do have a lot of sex in, yes.’
‘And you’ve got them published? I could buy them in a shop?’
‘I’m working on my seventeenth to be published, and yes, you can buy them in a shop. My pen name is Estelle May.’
‘Paul! Phil!’ bellowed Jerry, immensely pleased. ‘Our Eleanor writes porno!’
Of course, after that I was the centre of a crowd of all the regulars and quite a few of the other punters, bombarded with questions and innuendo. Did I make it all up? How much did it pay? Was it hard to get published? Did I
really
make it all up? Could Phil show me a few tricks he knew? How about a story Martha knew about a friend of a friend and how he tied his girlfriend to the bed and dressed up as Superman and then got up on the dresser to jump and—
‘Why did you keep it a secret for so long?’ Maud asked me.
I looked at the smiling, curious, enthusiastic faces around me.
‘I’m not really sure,’ I said.
The door opened and Hugh walked in. He had a blonde with him.
My buoyant mood vanished.
‘Hugh!’ Paul called to him. ‘You’ll never guess what Eleanor has just told us!’
I saw suspicion flit into his eyes right away.
So much for that trust thing I’d been thinking about.
‘What sort of scandal has she let loose now?’ he asked carefully, already (I could see) readying his good-humoured expression as he approached the bar with his blonde. She wasn’t one I remembered, though that wasn’t saying much. They tended to blur together.
‘She’s written seventeen por—I mean, erotic novels,’ Jerry told him gleefully. ‘Who would have guessed our El was a sex guru, eh?’
‘I certainly never would have guessed it.’
‘Hugh knows, he was the one who made me send the first one to a publisher,’ I said quickly. ‘I don’t have any secrets from Hugh.’
Like the cold tone in his voice, the look he shot me escaped everyone else. Then he thawed instantly as he turned to his blonde.
‘What will you have to drink, Gail?’ he asked her, as if she were the most special person in the universe.
A ball of flames swirled in my chest. I got the drinks for Hugh and his blonde with the bare minimum of communication and eye contact and then I tried not to watch as he took her to his usual Hugh-and-girl corner.
‘Tell you what, we should keep those novels of yours away from Norman,’ Jerry said conspiratorially.
‘Either that, or we should buy him a stack so he has something to do with his hands,’ Phil said. They all laughed.
I stayed inside the circle of regulars and tried my best to bask in their warmth, their fond teasing. I laughed and I shot around some witty repartee and I recounted the plots of one or two of my books to a very appreciative audience. I proved that I did not care that Hugh was here with a date, just over twenty-four hours after he and I had ripped each other’s clothes off.
Until he came up to the bar for another drink.
‘That’s one less secret you and I have to keep,’ he said lightly, drumming his long fingers on the bar.
‘Nice to see that you’ve got your social life back on track.’
‘Jealous?’
I was so jealous I couldn’t see straight. ‘No. I’m used to you banging every bimbo in Reading.’
‘Didn’t you say something to me about being disparaging about people I didn’t know?’
I couldn’t think of a snappy answer to that. Especially as per my own remark, I was one of the bimbos.
I got him his drinks.
‘Are you sure that nothing’s changed?’ he asked me when I came back.
‘I think you’ve just confirmed it.’
He inclined his head, and held his pint up to me like a toast.
‘Here’s to one-night stands,’ he said, drank, and then went back to his blonde.
I laughed twice as hard at everyone’s jokes. I made twice as many of my own. When Hugh and his blonde stood up to leave, I couldn’t take it any longer.
‘Jerry, I’m popping to the kitchen,’ I said. I went straight through the kitchen, out the pub’s back door, and through the concrete back beer garden to the alley round the side of the pub. When I got to the end of it I could see Hugh and the girl standing in front of the pub, talking.
It wasn’t dignified, but I flattened myself against the wall of the pub in the shadows, watching them. I tried to plan what I would do if I saw them kissing. Tackle them? Cry ‘fire!’? Get a grip and admit I’d made a horrible mistake by letting myself fancy Hugh?
I tried to hear what they were talking about, but they were speaking low and I was too far away. The girl giggled and nodded and I clenched my hands into fists. Hugh put his hand on the small of her back to walk with her and I tried to decide how the hell I could interrupt them without looking like a psycho jealous ex-girlfriend.
They went to what I could see was a mini-cab and Hugh opened the door for her. I poised myself to sprint forward and somehow leap into the cab between them, belly and all, and then Hugh shut the door behind her without getting in himself. He waved to the cab as it pulled away.
I sagged back against the wall with relief and watched him walk, hands in pockets, down the road towards our houses, alone.
I was kidding myself. Something had definitely changed.
28
‘It’s normal,’ Roisin said as soon as she picked up the phone.
I’d been expecting a ‘hello’. ‘What’s normal?’ I asked.
‘Whatever you called to ask me about. I don’t need to know what it is - if it’s strange, it’s normal. You’re pregnant.’
I slumped back against the lime-green vinyl seat of my booth, the mobile phone to my ear.
None of this was normal.
My sister was my mother and was on the lam. My mother was my grandmother and fancied the vicar. All of the Mouse and Duck regulars were pointing me out as a local celebrity, and half the time when I looked in the mirror I expected to see Lucy Sharpe.
My best friend had become my lover and was now, apparently, my ex-friend, as we had been avoiding each other for two days. I hadn’t seen him, talked with him, or even heard anything through the walls since The Blonde Incident.
‘I don’t think it’s the pregnancy that’s causing this weirdness,’ I said.
‘Believe me, it is. Last night I had a peanut butter and bacon sandwich.’
‘That’s not too strange.’
‘It is when it’s dipped in porridge. So what is it with you? And what’s that noise in the background?’
‘I think the tea urn is broken.’ I looked around the café. The tables were sticky, the seats were lumpy, the food on my plate was congealed. The tea urn made a sound like the beginning of the theme tune to
The X Files.
Everything was exactly the same as it always was, except the seat across from me was empty.
‘I’m in Mr Tasty’s,’ I said.
‘Ew, really? Now that is a strange craving.’
I wasn’t craving food. I wanted familiarity.
But the familiarity only emphasised how much everything was different. And exactly how big that hole was that I’d kicked in my life.
The hell of it was, the only person I wanted to talk with about my situation with Hugh was Hugh himself.
I bit my lip and the baby moved.
‘I wanted to talk to you about those childbirth classes,’ I said. ‘I feel like I want to understand at least one part of what’s happening to me.’
‘Great! You’ll love the role plays. Hold on, I’ll get the schedule.’
Ten minutes later I’d agreed dates with Roisin, and when I said goodbye I felt a little bit better. Maybe it was unlikely that I could have a child without messing it up, but at least I’d made a step towards doing it right.
There was one more step I could take towards doing the right thing. I went up to the counter and ordered another cup of tea. ‘And do you happen to have a
Yellow Pages?
’ I asked.
The girl working there handed it over without the faintest trace of curiosity, and I took it back to my table, pushing my nearly untouched breakfast aside to make room. First I looked under P for ‘Private’, but there was nothing there, so I tried D.
By the time my tea arrived I was scrutinising the ads for detective agencies.
Three days later, I was sitting at the most isolated table in the furthest corner of Coffee Republic, across from a small, neat woman in a business suit.
Sophie Tennant had had the least elaborate listing in the phone book, a good thing as far as I was concerned; the large ads about surveillance and marital infidelity in the
Yellow Pages
made me feel as if the whole thing were even more sordid. I was also glad she’d asked to meet me in a central, brightly lit place, the sort of place you would never think anything sneaky was going on. She was friendly and matter-of-fact and had asked me to call her by her first name.
She’d also reassured me with her physical appearance. Sophie was pretty but understated; she didn’t appear to be the sort of person who would pull out a gun at the smallest opportunity. I could picture her maybe doing a bit of lurking, but she wouldn’t be eating doughnuts and making dirty remarks while she did it, if that makes sense. If I was going to go as far as hiring a private investigator, it was nice that she wasn’t a cliché.