His lightly freckled face erupts into a wide-awake smile. ‘What are you asking that for?’
‘Because I told you, it’s the middle of the night—’
‘No, about the doors.’ He rakes a hand through his dishevelled brown curls.
‘Oh. Er … to build up tension, I suppose, so it’s a surprise …’
‘But it’s a cuckoo, innit?
That’s
what’s behind the doors.’
Kerry blinks at her son. She is chilly now, despite the cashmere sweater, and goosebumps have sprung up on her bare legs.
‘You’re right,’ she says flatly. ‘It’s a cuckoo. It really couldn’t be anything else.’
Freddie grins triumphantly and starts swinging on the door. ‘Ha, I knew it was.
Now
can I phone Dad?’
Nadine’s flat might only be forty-odd miles from Rob’s new house by the sea, but the way he feels now, he might as well have landed on a different planet. The huge living room is girlie in the extreme, its sofa and chairs strewn with fluffy throws and an abundance of embroidered cushions. There are fairy lights, glowing red lamps and a multi-coloured chandelier. The effect, he muses as Nadine dispenses drinks (aided by a rather worse-for-wear Frank), is a little nauseating.
‘So d’you like my place?’ Nadine asks, curling up beside him on the vast purple velvet sofa.
‘It’s really, um, stylish,’ he tells her, enunciating carefully in the hope of appearing sober.
‘Thanks.’ She smiles prettily. ‘It’s a bit of a mish-mash but I like it.’
‘Yeah, but it’s not yours, is it?’ Eddy teases from his cross-legged position on the pink shag-pile rug. ‘It’s Daddy’s.’
Nadine rolls her eyes good naturedly. ‘Yep, but I’m here for the time being, darling. You don’t think I could live here on an editorial assistant’s salary, do you?’
‘Thank God for Daddy,’ Eddy guffaws, stretching the joke a little thin in Rob’s opinion. He glances down at the gnarled oak table on which the remains of his birthday cake look a little ravaged on a plain white plate, wondering why he’s suddenly feeling protective of Nadine. Her slight haughtiness in the office is, he suspects now, a desire to seem properly grown-up when she’s barely emerged from her teens.
‘So you’re off to your new place tomorrow?’ Ava asks Rob, rearranging her bony limbs on a giant floor cushion.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘after I’ve shown a couple of people round the house.’
She smiles, her teeth Tipp-Ex white against the blood red of her lipstick. ‘I don’t know if I could ever do that.’
‘Show people around a flat, you mean?’
‘No, silly! Leave London.’ Ava winces.
‘Well,’ Rob says, ‘it just seemed like the right time.’ He can’t explain about the education issue now, and how several friends have faked addresses and religions in order to get their children into decent schools. Mentioning that in front of all of these young things would make him sound about five hundred years old.
‘What’ll you
do
with yourself down there, Rob?’ Nadine’s voice cuts into his thoughts.
‘Er, just get on with life, I suppose. Get fit, start running, go for long walks on the beach …’ Agh, why is he saying that? Eddy will have him shovelled off to
Rambler’s Monthly
.
‘I love the sea,’ Nadine says wistfully, ‘but I can’t imagine living away from all the shops and bars.’
Typical, he thinks without bitterness. Just the kind of thing a privileged girl with nothing to think about but chandeliers and cushions would say. Rob, whose father is Italian and his mother a straight-talking Yorkshire woman, is at least aware that life happens north of Watford – or south of Croydon, come to that.
‘Well, I’ve been here for twenty years,’ he explains patiently. ‘The noise, the traffic – I’ve had my fill, to be honest.’
Now he’s sounding like Granddad again. Nadine nods, and at some point the others seem to drift away to different parts of the room, leaving just the two of them sitting very close on the sofa. She isn’t his type at all – too girlie and
far
too young with her silver cowrie shell necklace which was probably acquired on some gap year jaunt, or maybe Daddy bought that for her too. In fact the thought of having a ‘type’ hasn’t crossed Rob’s mind since he met Kerry. But now, having drunk more than in recent memory, he can’t help but notice how mesmerising her blue eyes are, framed by a sweep of dark lashes, and how her dainty nose is incredibly cute. For some reason, despite knowing the others for far longer, she has chosen to sit next to
him
. It no longer seems to matter that, while he was getting to grips with disposable nappies and jars of sludge-coloured baby food, Nadine was still in high school.
Exquisite
is the word that springs to mind now. This girl is exquisite, like a jewel.
‘I hope you don’t mind me saying,’ she murmurs, shuffling even closer with her feet tucked under her neat little bottom, ‘but you seem like your heart’s not really in this seaside thing, Rob.’
‘Er …’ A wave of dizziness engulfs him as he blows out air. ‘Yeah, it’s freaking me out a bit. The
practical
side, the train and stuff – that’ll be okay …’ Hell, he
is
slurring now. Is he even making sense?
‘But …?’ She smiles sympathetically.
Rob blinks at her. ‘God, I don’t know, Nadine. It’s half two in the morning …’ She nods, encouraging him to go on. ‘Am I ready to move? I don’t know. It started off as a vague idea, something we might do when we were properly grown-up’ – he laughs self-consciously, feeling a little sick – ‘then wham, it’s happened, Kerry and the kids are there already and there’s this awful pressure to sell the London house …’
No, stop it, that came out all wrong. What about that lovely day on the beach with the kite? It had felt completely right then …
Nadine is studying his face. ‘Does Kerry know you’re having doubts, Rob?’
‘It’s too late to stop it now. We’ve taken the kids out of their London school and enrolled them in Shorling. And anyway, she’s convinced we can make it work. It’ll just take time, she reckons …’ He takes a big gulp from his glass, grateful that the others have wandered through to the kitchen in search of something to eat.
‘You poor darling.’ Nadine places a delicate hand on his knee. ‘So you feel trapped …’
‘Well, um, kind of …’ Rob looks down at her hand, feeling no less startled than he would if a rare butterfly landed there. He can hardly swat it away, but nor does he feel entirely comfortable with her leaving it there for much longer. Anyway, why is he grumbling about the move? Is it the vodka, or a pathetic desire to say what he
thinks
he should say to a girl who can barely have turned twenty? Her hand is showing no sign of removing itself from his knee, and he wonders what the others will think as they come back into the room, armed with a lump of Cheddar and some crackers on a pink chopping board (clearly, neon pink is a theme around the flat). Of course, they won’t think anything. Eddy’s new team are always hugging and mauling each other. It’s not unusual for Ava to give Eddy a languorous shoulder massage in the middle of a features meeting.
Rob swallows hard and tries to centre himself by picturing Mia and Freddie on the beach last weekend, sculpting a sand mermaid with seaweed for hair. He attempts to think of ordinary things: the numerous cracks and leaks he must fix in the Shorling house, and the lone nit Freddie made him examine with a magnifying glass as it writhed on a sheet of white paper.
By the time Eddy, Frank and Ava get up to leave, Rob realises he’s even more inebriated than he first thought. Nadine springs up to fling her skinny arms around her friends before resuming her position on the sofa.
‘So, Rob,’ she starts, ‘what are you going to do?’
He drains the last of his vodka and tonic. ‘I have no fucking idea.’
‘Well,’ she says, ‘for what it’s worth, I have this mantra, okay? And it’s that we should all be true to ourselves …’
Normally, Rob would snort at the kind of fluffy sound-bite so beloved of women’s magazines:
Follow your dreams. Life’s not a rehearsal. Be true to yourself
… But it’s approaching 3 a.m. and her eyes are incredible – piercing blue, emphasised with the kind of flicked black eyeliner which makes him think of sexy French girls in arthouse movies.
‘You’re right,’ he blurts out. ‘The thought of leaving London …’
‘It’s like leaving a part of yourself,’ she suggests.
‘Yes! That’s exactly it. It’s where I’ve lived and worked my whole adult life …’
‘And you’ve done really well, Rob.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ he murmurs bashfully.
‘But you have! You virtually run the office … I’ve always
found you a bit intimidating, to be honest.’
‘God, I hope not.’
‘No, that’s just me being silly.’
‘Well,’ he says with a grin, ‘I’ll try to be less intimidating in future …’
And so the night goes on, Rob now too drunk to care about whether he’s slurring or not, and sensing the little knots of tension starting to loosen in his shoulders and neck. He knows he should call a cab, but being here with Nadine is so much nicer especially as, with most of his family’s possessions transported to Shorling, ‘home’ feels like a bleak shell with a bed and a sofa plonked in it.
‘Look, Rob,’ Nadine is saying, looking sleepy now, ‘you can crash out here if you like. This is a sofa bed and I’ve got plenty of spare bedding.’
‘I …’ he starts, knowing he should continue:
Thanks, but
I’d better go home.
But he can’t. He is physically incapable of coherent speech because every fibre of his being is focused on Nadine’s red lips.
They are getting closer and closer and Rob knows without doubt that she is going to kiss him. He also knows there is no way he’ll be able to resist kissing her back. Then they
are
kissing – snogging, actually – the just-turned-forty-year-old father-of-two with undeniable talents in the Lego department, and the beautiful rich girl who lives in Daddy’s flat and trots off to India whenever she feels like it. They pull apart, laughing in disbelief, and immediately she’s up on her feet, making up the sofa bed while he stares into space, wondering what the hell just happened. Perhaps it was a hallucination. He’s never kissed anyone but Kerry – not for over thirteen bloody years. But it’s okay, it didn’t mean anything …
Dizzy and overwhelmingly tired now, Rob is vaguely aware of saying goodnight to Nadine, then undressing to his boxers and falling into bed alone as the mauve-tinted dawn creeps into the room. Yet, when he wakes at 8.47 a.m., with his dried-out tongue gummed to the roof of his mouth, a tiny and naked Nadine is curled up on the sofa bed beside him.
Kerry was up early – 6.35 a.m. – despite Freddie’s nocturnal wakening and that
Cuckoo Clock
theme tune chirping away in her brain for much of the night. But at least she has been able to shower uninterrupted and even managed to blow-dry her hair. Normally she lets it dry naturally, which makes it sound like a considered move, in the way a celeb might share a beauty tip:
‘I try to avoid exposing my hair to heat.’
However, it’s more to do with the fact that, since having Mia, and
especially
since having Freddie, Kerry’s
‘beauty regime’ (she can’t help twitching with mirth when
ever she hears that term) has been whittled down to a spot of Nivea on her face before bed. Rob is more high-maintenance than she is these days.
Kerry has also managed to unearth her old favourite red shift dress, plus glossy heels that match – not the dress, obviously (that would be too much red) but each other, which feels like a major achievement. It’s a bit much for daytime, she suspects. But Kerry is hoping for maximum impact when she shows up to surprise Rob.
She’s at the bathroom mirror now, applying make-up under the watchful gaze of Mia, who rarely sees her mother beautifying herself.
Teeth
, Kerry thinks a little late in the proceedings, prompting Freddie to bellow, ‘Why are you
sawing your mouth
?’
‘I’m not sawing. I’m just cleaning the little gaps between my teeth.’ She has a fleeting memory of a time when she could perform bathroom-related duties alone.
‘Why?’ Mia asks.
‘Er, so my breath’s nice and fresh.’ Explaining about plaque and mouth germs seems a little unnecessary at this early hour.
A sly smile creeps across Freddie’s face. ‘That’s ’cause you’re gonna kiss Dad.’
Kerry drops her used dental floss strip into the bin. ‘Yes, well, I hope so, sweetheart. That’s the general idea, seeing as it’s his birthday.’
‘Can we phone Daddy now?’ he asks, plucking her used floss from the bin and bringing it up to his own mouth.
‘Freddie, put that back in the bin! It’s dirty …’
He throws it down at his feet. ‘Can I, Mum?’
‘Yeah, I wanna call Dad,’ Mia exclaims.
‘In a little while,’ Kerry says, brushing on mascara. ‘It’s only half eight and he might be having a lie in, seeing as it’s Saturday.’ She tries to remember what time he said the first people were coming round to look at the house. Around ten, was it? ‘We’ll call in about half an hour, okay?’
Mia sucks her teeth. ‘You never let us phone him.’
‘Sweetheart, that’s not true. Ow.’ Kerry jabs the mascara wand into her left eye, causing it to fill with tears. ‘We speak to Daddy nearly every evening …’
‘Yeah, but …’ She makes a little
pfff
sound.
‘Come on, darling. Dad’ll soon be living with us, then you’ll see him every day.’ Dabbing her watery eye with some loo roll, she glances down at her children who are perched on the edge of the shabby enamelled bath. Still friendless in Shorling, Kerry has taken to counting the days until Rob comes home for the weekends. Yet, when he is here, she detects a sense of distance between them, almost as if they’ve forgotten how to fit together.
’Cause you’re gonna kiss Dad.
Freddie’s words echo in Kerry’s mind as she dabs away the mascara smears from around her eye and packs away her make-up. Actually, she can’t remember the last time they kissed properly, and wonders how Rob will react to her black lacy lingerie. She’s slightly worried that he might claim to be tired or, worse, not even react at all. What would she do then?