‘’Cause everyone else has one.’
‘I’m sure they don’t.’
‘Yeah, they do! I’ve seen pictures.’
Pictures
of birthday cakes – because she wasn’t actually invited to see them for real. ‘Um … whose cake did you see a picture of?’
‘Cassandra’s.’
‘Just Cassandra’s?’
‘Yeah.’
We’re not talking ‘everyone’, then.
‘Will you cuddle me?’ Mia whispers.
‘Of course I will.’ Forgetting work, Kerry slips into the single bed, surrounded by a soft toy menagerie and holding her daughter close until she is breathing deeply, fast asleep.
It’s true, Harvey does know about dogs. Since he was a little boy, he’s instinctively known how to develop a mutual trust and understanding, leading to a sense of security: crucial for any animal if he’s to be a fine companion and not make a spectacle of himself, like Kerry said Buddy does from time to time. He seemed like a real character, though. As he climbs the steep hill with the huge, posh houses which leads up to the golf course, Harvey reflects how much he misses owning a dog of his own. The walks, the games and companionship – all those rituals are good for a person. However, it would appear that those days are over. Harvey has let his spare room to his friend Ethan, who leaves a scattering of worn socks, pants and other small, unsavoury items in his wake. A pain, yes, and Harvey would far rather have the place to himself. But unfortunately, dogs don’t pay a share of the rent.
‘How did your lesson go?’ Ethan asks, peering up from the sofa in the small, neat living room that’s lined with Harvey’s books, CDs and the vinyl he can’t quite manage to part with. Ethan’s wiry red hair is unkempt, his mouth full of last night’s home-made chicken curry which is visible as he speaks. On the coffee table, a gummy-looking bottle of mango chutney rests on Harvey’s treasured copy of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
– original seventies edition – and a small bowl is perched on Ethan’s lap.
‘It wasn’t a lesson,’ Harvey says. ‘Just a chat to see how we got on.’ He senses Ethan studying him with small, dark eyes – the eyes of a creature who rarely ventures out into daylight – as he hangs up his jacket on the hook by the door.
‘What was she like?’ Ethan asks.
‘Nice, y’know. Friendly. Interesting.’ Harvey shrugs, registering his flatmate’s naan bread draped over the arm of the sofa like an oily antimacassar. He could ignore this or snatch it away, inspecting the inevitable greasy patch beneath it and give his flatmate a lecture about his slovenly ways.
‘Old, was she?’ Ethan enquires.
‘No, not old. About our age, hard to tell really …’
‘Not one of those craggy old teachers who slams the piano lid on your fingers when you play a wrong note?’
‘Jesus,’ Harvey sniggers, deciding to let the naan thing go. ‘Did you have a teacher like that?’
‘Yeah, old battle-axe. Stank of violets and death. Still have the scars here.’ Ethan waggles his chubby hand, which Harvey knows to be scar-less because they’ve been friends since they were eighteen and started at drama college together. ‘So why are you having these lessons again?’ he enquires. ‘I thought you were skint.’
‘Just fancied it,’ Harvey says lightly.
‘’S’pose it could come in handy with the act,’ Ethan teases him. ‘A little musical interlude, make a change from the old one-man-band …’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
Ethan wipes a blob of mustard-coloured sauce from his chin. ‘Was she fit, then?’
‘Who?’
‘The
teacher
.’
Harvey blinks at Ethan, wondering whether to mention Kerry’s lovely green eyes and dark brown, wavy hair that tumbled around her slender shoulders. He wouldn’t have hesitated when they were younger. He’d have mentioned that strange moment in her kitchen, too, when it looked as if she were about to cry. How fragile she seemed, despite her breezy demeanour. Now, though, with no escape from Ethan and his arse-scratching tendencies, Harvey guards his privacy jealously.
‘She was nice-looking, yeah,’ he mutters with a shrug.
‘Married?’
‘Er, no, I don’t think so.’
‘Oh, so you
noticed
then.’ A bit of chicken flies out of Ethan’s mouth, which Harvey also chooses not to comment upon. The little shits who pelted him with sweets at the last party he did had better table manners.
‘Only because I was watching her hands while she was playing, okay?’
‘And you
just so happened
to check out her marital status.’
‘No, I wasn’t really thinking about that.’ Harvey rolls his eyes.
‘Oh, come on. Didn’t you want to make beautiful music with her?’ Ethan guffaws loudly and swigs from a bottle of beer. ‘You did, didn’t you? It’s obvious you fancied her …’
‘What’s obvious? Tell me one thing I’ve said that makes you think I was remotely attracted to her.’
‘That’s why it’s obvious,’ Ethan declares. ‘You’re being all guarded and secretive, going over there to talk about, um, Chopin or whatever. You don’t even
like
classical music …’
‘Oh, fuck off.’
Ethan smirks and picks up the naan bread, ripping a chunk out of it with his teeth. Harvey was right; the sofa arm now looks as if it’s been licked by a huge, oily tongue.
‘So are you going to ask her out?’ Ethan wants to know.
Harvey glowers at him. ‘How old are you again? She’s going to be
teaching
me, for Christ’s sake. It’s a professional relationship.’
‘Oh, is that what you call it?’ Ethan calls after him as Harvey escapes to his bedroom. ‘It’s about time you found yourself a decent woman, Harv. I worry about you. There’s got to be
some
desperate bird out there who’d be willing to do it with a clown.’
Sinking onto the edge of his bed, Harvey takes a moment to compose his thoughts.
Lighten up
, he tells himself.
He doesn’t get out much. Don’t rise to the bait
… Plus, Harvey realises, he’s bloody starving, having forgotten to eat in his eagerness to meet Kerry. He gets up and pokes his head around the living room door. ‘Any of that curry left?’
‘Huh?’
‘The curry I made last night. Any left for me?’
‘Aw, no,’ Ethan says, dumping his empty bowl at his feet. ‘Sorry, mate, that was the last of it. But if you’re heading for the kitchen, could you get me another of those cold beers?’
Rob knew he’d been expecting too much for Eddy to keep Nadine’s pregnancy secret. There was no big announcement, no collective gasp: just the office grapevine yacking away, triggering the odd bemused ‘congratulations’, plus a sense, Rob notes, that he has finally been accepted by the new team. As if he’s not the stuffy old duffer after all, and that being a cheat and a liar and making a girl half his age pregnant has somehow made him more …
interesting
. He’s aware of Ava throwing him a bemused look as she stuffs her ‘Chocotastic’ Pop Tart into the office toaster, and Frank and Eddy halting their murmured discussion as he saunters past. Meanwhile, Nadine has acquired a dreamy demeanour. In fact, she seems to have given up working at all in favour of aligning her pots of pens with their various neon rubbers and fluffy gonks on their ends.
Although he tries not to stare openly, occasionally Rob sees her take a brush from her red patent bag and actually groom a gonk’s hair.
I’m going out with a girl who collects novelty pens
,
he muses, although ‘going out’ doesn’t really describe it. For one thing, on the nights he stays over at her place, they rarely venture out. They still don’t have a
great deal to talk about, he realises. But they’ve watched a
few movies, and she has taken to cooking strange meals – not triggered by any particular cravings but because, as far as he can gather, she’s never actually cooked much before. Last night she made some kind of Mexican beany starter, leaving an explosion of vegetable choppings and little puddles of bean juice in her wake. ‘I love cooking for you,’ she announced, reaching across the table to squeeze his hand as his eyes watered from all the chilli.
Then they went to bed. Rob has felt so wretched these past two months, it’s been a relief to lose himself with a sweet, young girl with a beautiful, delicate little body who seems, amazingly, to want him. What will happen, though, when the Bethnal Green house sale goes through? Although she seems to expect it, the thought of living at her place full-time makes him uneasy to say the least.
It takes an enormous amount of willpower for Rob to switch his attention back towards the half-written feature on the screen. His intro reads: ‘It’s Spring – get a six-pack in the time it takes to scoff a burger.’ Despite the gaudy Christmas lights winking outside, the issue they’re working on now is all ‘spring clean your body’ and ‘put the spring back into your love life’. (Eddy, ever fond of a cliché, has gone overboard for the ‘reinvent yourself’ angle.) Two issues containing Rob’s sex columns have already been on sale. To Eddy’s delight – ‘see, I said you’d be a natural, Robster!’ – they’ve provoked a flurry of emailed questions from readers, some of such a technical nature that Rob is flummoxed as to how to respond.
By 6 p.m. he’s almost finished the feature. It’s Thursday – late night shopping – and Nadine, who’s looking impatient now, wants to start checking out buggies and cots. It takes another half hour before he makes his way over to her desk.
‘Sorry about that,’ he says.
‘That’s okay.’ She smiles prettily, having reapplied her
cherry-red lipstick (how does she always get it so immacu
late? he wonders) and customary eyeliner flicks in preparation for the shops. As they head for the lift, Rob can’t resist taking Nadine’s small hand in his. God, this is weird, he thinks, a thought that darts across his brain without warning several times a day. Here we are, virtually a couple now, having a baby. A couple who, less than an hour later, have taken possession not just of a buggy but a car seat, cot, bouncy chair, play mat and wall hanging featuring hand-appliqued gambolling bunnies, all to be delivered within the next five working days.
‘Oh, look at that!’ she cries. He’d been trying to casually manoeuvre her out of the baby department of the store before his credit card melts in the machine.
‘We don’t need that, do we?’ He eyes the cripplingly expensive quilt.
‘Well, I suppose it’s not
essential
, but we don’t want our baby sleeping under a tatty old blanket, do we?’
‘No, of course not, but I’m sure there are cheaper—’ He stops abruptly as she picks up the quilt. The bags he’s clutching already contain a changing mat, several fleecy rompers in gender-unspecific lemon and mint, plus a knitted toy mouse in a scratchy red coat which doesn’t look terribly baby-friendly to Rob (but hey, what does he know?). And now Nadine is choosing a rotating night light which projects pictures of sheep, and cooing over a hand-painted wooden trolley filled with bricks (which the child won’t be capable of pushing until he or she is at least a year old – but again, he says nothing). Rob is flagging now, but Nadine is showing no sign of ever wanting to stop. He chews his lip as she browses anti-stretch-mark oils in a mums-to-be boutique off Oxford Street, and stuffs his traumatised Visa card back into his wallet as she chats with the salesgirl.
‘Massage in the oil at least twice a day,’ the woman advises her. ‘That way, you’ll keep the skin supple so it’ll accommodate your growing bump.’ She beams at Rob. ‘You’ll do that for her, won’t you?’
‘Of course,’ he blusters, sensing himself flushing. At least she didn’t assume he was her dad, dragged out on bag-carrying duties.
‘God, you’re so uptight,’ Nadine chastises him as they leave the shop.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Looking all embarrassed when that woman said you should massage me.’ She laughs disparagingly. ‘It is natural, you know, to take care of your pregnant girlfriend …’
The carrier-bag handles are biting into Rob’s hands, and he dumps them on the pavement as he scans Oxford Street for a cab. ‘I’m not embarrassed. It just a bit public, that’s all.’
‘Hmmm.’ She narrows her eyes at him. ‘Maybe it’s just an age thing. I guess men of your generation just aren’t that comfortable with nudity.’
Rob snorts involuntarily. ‘Oh, right, so I’ve become a man of
my generation
now, have I? Well, I’m sorry but there’s not much I can do about that.’ Funny how his age didn’t seem to matter while she was ravaging him in his drunken stupor. He glances down at the numerous shopping bags at his feet. ‘Those night lights are rubbish,’ he adds. ‘Mia had one and it broke within two days.’
‘Well, we’ll be more careful, won’t we?’
‘No,’ he insists, ‘I mean they have a design flaw. The rotating bit rests on a little spike and it’s just not sturdy enough to withstand any knocks—’
‘Rob,’ she cuts in, ‘I don’t feel too good.’
‘There are other kinds of night lights,’ he continues, still scanning the street for a cab. ‘They’re little glowing things to plug in which seem to work better and are less complicated …’
‘My stomach hurts,’ Nadine murmurs.
He looks down at her, realising now how pale she is, and how fragile-looking in her little black jacket and red knitted dress. ‘Maybe it’s that bean thing you made last night. To be honest, I’ve been a bit, um, flatulent in the office …’
‘I’m not
flatulent
,’ she snaps, waving as a cab approaches while Rob gathers up their bags. ‘I’ve got a pain in my stomach, okay? I’m worried, Rob. This doesn’t feel right.’
‘You don’t think something’s wrong with the baby?’ He feels sick with panic as the cab pulls up alongside them.
‘I don’t know. I’ve just got these pains …’
Something changes then, and Rob no longer cares that she’s chosen a silly sheep night light or seems overly hung-up about stretch marks as they climb into the cab. He puts an arm around her and holds her hand tightly as they speed towards the hospital.
Whenever Rob is due to pick up the children, Kerry experiences the same dilemma. Should she be polished and fully made-up, suggesting that she’s swishing off on a lunch date followed by copious afternoon sex the instant his car’s pulled away? Or slump to the door in scabby jogging bottoms, hair unwashed and face raw from sobbing? Reminding herself that trying to project some kind of image would imply that she actually
cares
what he thinks, she quickly pulls on a corduroy skirt, pale grey sweater and brushes on mascara and tinted lipgloss. Harvey-the-Clown is coming for his first proper lesson today and, after her watery-eyed moment last time he was here, it feels important to present herself as a properly functioning human being.