The Other Woman's Shoes (27 page)

‘We’ve watched some great movies on DVD.’
Naked
. They watched films naked, films that Martha had never even heard of. The best bit was that they ate popcorn off each other’s bodies. This from a woman who used to lock the bathroom door when she took a shower and used to sleep in pyjamas. Now all she slept in was sweat. ‘At night he lulls me to sleep reciting Spike Milligan’s “
Silly Old Baboon
”. Do you remember? We read it as children.’

‘Yes, I remember it,’ Eliza said impatiently.

Jack usually recited Spike after he’d shagged Martha’s brains out, at least twice, but Martha sensed Eliza’s unwillingness to hear that type of detail.

‘I’ve played video games with him.’ Martha now knew what a console was and whilst it was unlikely that she’d ever remember the name of the speedy, spiky hedgehog, let alone help him save the world, she had played Rez, which was as near as she’d ever get to going to a trippy, ravey gig. They’d been naked for that too. But again, Martha thought this was a fact best kept to herself. ‘We put a bet on it being a white Christmas, in a betting shop. Have you ever been in a betting shop?’ They’d been dressed that time; after all, it was December.

‘What’s so special about Jack?’ demanded Eliza.

‘Haven’t I told you?’

‘No. Well, you mentioned that you turn to goo when you think of him, he has a large and expert penis, he kisses a lot, and it’s convenient that he works in Holland Park. Oh yeah, you said he dresses well and it’s good news that he doesn’t drink because he can give you lifts home, but no, beyond that I’m not sure if I know anything about him.’

‘How odd of me,’ said Martha. She was genuinely surprised. ‘Well, where to start? He’s a fantastic friend. Nothing is too much trouble for his mates. He’s never, ever been unfaithful. Not even kissed anyone else when he’s had a girlfriend.’

‘That’s rare.’

‘Rare? I thought it was extinct until I met Jack.’

‘But, he does have this naked-friends thing going on, so he has a free pass when he hasn’t got a steady girlfriend.’

Martha chose to ignore the interruption. ‘He had a less than easy upbringing. He could have ended up tough and cruel, he could have been a crook, but he took a more honourable path. He’s worked for everything he has; nothing’s been handed to him by adoring and rich parents. The only thing his parents could bequeath him was examples of right and wrong, which his father and mother personify respectively. He left school at sixteen, but he’s doing the same job as friends of mine who are Oxbridge graduates. He sold fruit and veg when he was a teenager to save up for a bike. He loves his cats, and he plays with my children with a tenderness that could split my heart. He’s special because when he walks into a room he holds his head up high and he has every right to do so.’

‘It’s pitiful, Martha, that you don’t see; there has to be a catch.’

‘It’s pitiful that you never see anything other.’

‘It just seems very quick to me.’

‘I realize what it looks like from the outside. But I don’t care. I don’t care what anyone thinks.’ Martha hadn’t realized this was the case until she said so, but having said it, she was sure.

‘Look, you’re scaring me. One moment you’re a Stepford wife, and the next you could be teaching Pammie A a thing or two about bedroom tricks. I’m not saying you suited being a Stepford wife – you didn’t – but you’re not behaving like yourself at all. I think you’re in shock.’

Martha turned to Eliza and slowly said, ‘I feel like I am being more myself than ever before.’

Eliza was disconcerted that such a little voice and little sentence could hold such force and conviction. She made a mental note to look up Post-Traumatic Stress on the web. Maybe Martha was suffering from that. ‘What about his other naked friends?’ she asked desperately. ‘Does he ever talk about them?’

‘I never ask.’

Jack didn’t tell lies to Martha. Sometimes she wished he could lie to her, it would be much easier. She’d once made the mistake of asking him if he’d slept with a friend of his. She’d liked the girl until she heard his reply, which was yes. Jack had kissed Martha as he told her the truth, and Martha couldn’t work out if the kiss was to silence her or comfort her. It did both. Jack had pulled Martha to her feet and then picked her up in the way that you carry a bride over a threshold. He rocked her to and fro. Martha had closed her eyes and held her tongue. Maybe
they could get over the threshold. If she didn’t ask too many questions. If she didn’t demand too many replies.

‘It’s simple, Eliza. It’s straightforward. We’re having fun and the way I see it, we can continue to have fun indefinitely. There’s no reason why not.’ Martha was parroting the conversation she’d had with Jack the night before; in fact it had been Jack who’d suggested that they have fun indefinitely.

Martha had asked, ‘Is indefinitely the same as for ever?’

And he’d replied, ‘Maybe, Baby.’

The ‘maybe not’ had been left unspoken.

They had lots of fun, and Martha reminded herself that this was probably because neither of them wanted to fall in love. Sometimes Martha thought she might want that. She’d try to imagine what it would be like if she could magically fast-forward her life to a point where he asked her to marry him, and they would all live happily ever after; it would be a neater life. Then she’d remember it didn’t make any difference. Marriage wasn’t a guarantee. Husbands could still up and off. The bit of paper that she’d always believed was an unrepeatable lifelong commitment – the only available magic in a secular world driven by technology, profitability and bottom lines – was, after all, a bit of paper. How do you trust in this century? The century of mobile-phone theft and Internet porn? How do you believe that there is someone out there who transcends all that is mechanical, all that is diabolical, all that is robotic, and is love?

Martha knew there weren’t any guarantees, just lots of get-out clauses. Naked friends was just one. For ever was
a long time; maybe indefinitely was a good offer. Indefinite fun. It sounded OK. Why over-complicate it?

Martha held her arms wide open and Maisie stumbled from her aunt towards her mother, one unsure foot in front of the other.

‘That’s a girl. Steady as you go,’ Martha encouraged Maisie. ‘Look up, not down.’

Maisie and Martha were both learning to walk. One foot in front of the other. One day at a time, there was no other way. It was best not to think about anything else other than the here-and-now. Martha just had to concentrate on being happy.

It was because of Jack that Martha noticed posters on the Tube advertising new bands or restaurants. She read new books and talked about them. She even re-read her old favourites, which meant that she never had time to hoover in the cupboard under the stairs any more. Because Jack was in her life she found the courage to visit stores that she’d never even dared look in the window of, and they turned out to be anything other than horrible. The girls in Miss Sixty seemed to think that she was entitled to try on the funky ‘distressed’ jeans. In fact, they envied Martha’s size 26 waist and asked her which diet she followed. She told them the cabbage soup one; she thought it would sound churlish to say the deserted-wife diet. In Diesel, the male assistants positively flirted with her – well, at least the straight ones did – and she smiled back in a sort of flirtatious way. No one seemed to think Martha’s status as a mother and soon-to-be-ex-wife disqualified her from looking cool. In fact, when she did say the children were hers
the response was always amazement. ‘Really, I thought you were their aunt or nanny or something’, followed by admiration: ‘Wow, how did you get your figure back?’

And Martha knew they were sales assistants, paid to flatter and make her feel good so that she’d whip out her plastic. They probably worked on commission, but still it was nice. The snobby sales assistants in the designer sections of the large department stores had never made her feel good.

Since Michael’s departure, Martha had skipped her monthly hair appointment; sometimes it had been all she could do to get dressed in the morning, and the level of commitment necessary for grooming – visits to the beautician, hair appointments and the like – was beyond Martha’s resources. But just before Christmas she decided that she did need to do something about her hair. When she mentioned, just in passing to Jack, that she was going to the hairdresser’s, he asked, ‘What are you having done?’

‘Oh, probably the usual, a trim. I’ve worn my hair this way – well, a bit neater and shorter than this but more or less this way – for ages now. For ever actually. I am thinking of growing it.’ Martha hadn’t realized she was thinking of growing it until she heard herself say so.

‘Cool,’ smiled Jack, ‘you’d suit it shaggy and a bit messier. Then again, I bet you’d look gorgeous however you wore your hair.’ Then he kissed her, and then they had sex on the kitchen table.

The kitchen table!

Martha contemplated that the most fun she’d had on the kitchen table in the past was making the invites for Maisie’s party. There was no competition.

Jack always wanted to know what she’d bought in the shops that day, what she and the kids had for lunch. He asked her what her plans were for the weekend, what she’d bought as Christmas presents for her parents. He asked her what he should read, whether she liked the Fun Lovin’ Criminals CD, their second album,
100% Colombian
. He assumed she’d have a viewpoint, and she was surprised to find that she did. He was the only person she knew who didn’t think of her as Michael’s, which somehow (and she couldn’t explain this either) allowed her to talk about anything from the mystery of why there was an increase in peanut allergies (Martha and Jack agreed that they hadn’t known anyone with a peanut allergy when they were at school), to whether she thought it would be erotic to wear a blindfold during sex (yeah, probably, just the once, just to try). The sheets they loved on soaked up her pain and past like blotting paper.

And whilst they talked about everything, Eliza warned Martha not to talk to Jack about her relationship with Michael. She said he’d tire of it. And Martha did try to keep that sad, messy side of her life quite separate from the fun, indulgent bit. She didn’t want to pollute the fairytale world they were constructing, but it was hard not to talk about it after, say, she’d just had a conversation with Michael that went along the lines:

‘We need to talk about money, Martha.’

‘Oh.’ Martha rarely thought about money.

‘Yes. As you know, I’m renting and that’s certainly not cheap.’ Whose fault was that? ‘And this place is far too big for just the three of you.’

‘There’s four of us including Eliza.’

‘Well, Eliza isn’t a permanent fixture, is she?’ Who was? ‘We have to put the house on the market.’

Martha called Jack, and he told her that he’d had a dream about Kylie the night before, and at the critical moment of penetration, Kylie had turned into Martha.

It cheered her up.

‘Don’t worry about him, Little Miss E. He’s the same old show.’

‘That’s a song title – Basement Jaxx.’ Martha grinned; she was getting the hang of this, she had the measure of him.

‘No, it was me. I meant it for real.’

And Martha would call Jack if she’d completed all the tasks on her day’s list and was lapsing into grim feelings of purposelessness because she was reminded of how her role as a wife had been wiped away. If, like at Mathew’s playschool nativity play, she ached with loneliness and an unbearable, overwhelming feeling of emptiness because Mathew was the only one there without a daddy and Martha the only one there without a husband, she would ring up Jack.

‘God, life sucks, doesn’t it? “Your father was a hamster, your mother stinks of elderberries”,’ said Jack.

‘Sorry?’

‘Monty Python, Babe, don’t you recognize it?’

‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ giggled Martha, and for a moment she forgot that her life had veered away from her plan. For a moment she just enjoyed herself.

‘The roads, the sanitation,’ replied Jack, and then he suggested all sorts of other roles Martha could play besides housewife: nurse, schoolgirl, straightforward tart.

He wanted her. He lusted after her. She made him laugh. He thought she was sexy. He thought she was clever. He thought she was interesting. And if he thought it, this beautiful, intelligent Sex God, then maybe, just maybe, it might be true.

He always called when he said he would, which was often several times a day. He always visited when he said he would, which was frequently, and he’d arrive bearing dinner, instead of expecting Martha to cook for him. It was the party season so it was nearly impossible to secure a babysitter, but Jack didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t think staying in with Martha was boring. He didn’t rush to do other jobs, to call friends, to go on line, he didn’t read trade journals and ignore her. At first Martha found these stretches of time that they spent together – doing, well, nothing really, nothing very constructive – intimidating. She wanted to dash about the kitchen and bake cakes, or wrap Christmas presents or clean cupboards. She liked doing things that proved, categorically, that she was useful, purposeful. But Jack seemed happy just hanging, as he called it. Chatting, laughing, telling stories, just being. Sometimes, if they were feeling really energetic, she might get out an old photo album and entertain him with photos of herself at college.

‘You haven’t changed at all, have you?’ He smiled.

Martha looked at the photo that Jack was holding. A slim giggling girl beamed back at her. The girl was wearing a clingy white T-shirt and a pair of ripped and faded jeans, she was sporting huge hoop earrings, which had been fashionable in the early nineties, she wasn’t wearing socks, just trainers. The girl was in a bar with a group of friends.
Martha knew when the photograph had been taken: just minutes after she’d finished the last exam in her finals. That girl believed all of life’s tests were over; that’s why she was giggling with such confidence and abandon.

Little did she know that her life was going to be a series of tests. And that she’d fail the biggest one before she was even thirty-three. Martha hadn’t been able to hold her marriage together despite trying so hard, despite wanting it so much. Martha felt a huge wave of nausea wash over her body. She felt like she’d let down the girl in the photo. Her life was a catastrophe, she’d flunked.