The Playdate (9 page)
“Suzy. You know I’m here for you. And I’ll stay here till we find out what you need to know.”
She thought for a second.
“OK, can you just give him another hour. See if she turns up?”
“I will. And Suzy, one more thing. I’ve been checking on those bank accounts as you asked . . . Do you know of a Flock Ventures?”
“Uh . . .” said Suzy, searching her mind. “There’s something familiar about it, but . . . no, I don’t know. He doesn’t let me near the business. Why, is it important?”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Vondra said. “Nothing to worry about now, anyway. Now listen, my love. Go and have yourself a nice hot bath and relax. We’ll get to the bottom of this, and everything will be fine. Remember what I told you. Whatever happens, you’re back in control.” She lifted her voice to a singsong, chanting tone, like a preacher at church. “And THAT, my darling, is where we ladies HAVE TO BE!”
* * *
Ten minutes later, Suzy went to brush her teeth, Vondra’s words still repeating in her head. She looked up at the razors, then spat a mouthful of toothpaste into the sink, closed the cabinet door, and climbed into bed.
She pulled her knees close to her, and tried to close her
eyes. But the image of where Jez was right now—what he was doing—made them spring open again, and an involuntary groan come from her lips.
Sitting up, she stepped back out of bed, and looked out of the bedroom window. Callie’s light shone softly in her sitting room.
Jez was leaving her, and Callie was going back to work.
She padded down the hall and climbed quietly into Henry’s bed, pulling his sleepy little body close for warmth.
I’d forgotten how much fun shopping could be.
Rae and I arrive home on Sunday afternoon from Brent Cross, our crisp new shopping bags filling up the communal hall as I pick out the silver key to our flat from the ring.
Just as I put it in the door and turn it to the left, I sense someone behind me. I turn to see the Somali woman from the rented flat upstairs coming in the front door behind us, holding a plastic bag filled with what looks like meat wrapped in anonymous white paper and a cluster of tall, knobbly cream vegetables I don’t recognize.
“Oh, hello. How are you?” I ask, waving a hand, already knowing there’s no point asking.
She waves back, and touches Rae’s cheek, looking at her with gentle brown eyes.
“Ah,” she says, smiling.
Rae stares at the woman’s pregnant stomach, and then at me, shifting her eyes sideways for me to have a look. The
woman laughs, and holds up four fingers. I think this means she has four months to go. But it could mean she is four months’ pregnant. I nod and smile, and hold up a thumb to say “good luck.”
I tried to exchange names when we first met, but she spoke back Arabic words at me in this gentle voice and I couldn’t work out which of the words were her name. I checked her post once, and worked out it is probably Nadifa, but, as that isn’t one of the words she said to me, I’m too scared to use it in case it’s her surname. And now it feels too late, too rude, to ask again.
So, I think to myself, with a nagging sense of failure, our lives will probably pass by one another’s, with no connection between us other than a street name, like the woman with the wrought-iron window boxes.
The woman waves and heads up the stairs, her long dress swishing around her feet, to her shy husband who also smiles but never looks me in the eye, and a world that I know nothing about, apart from the soft footsteps above my head, and occasional interesting cooking smells that drift down into my flat and make me nostalgic for something I don’t even understand.
“Can you try on your dresses now, Mummy?” Rae shouts, rushing ahead into the flat. She loved Brent Cross, grabbing a hundred different items in ten different shops and shouting, “What about this, Mum?” till I had to tell her to stop because the shop assistants were starting to look cross. She also persuaded me to have my makeup done in John Lewis and now it sits oddly on my face in thick powdery layers. It is so long since I’ve worn makeup, I feel like I’ve been colored in with crayons.
“OK, come on then.” I smile. I need a cup of tea but, to be honest, it’s better to keep going. Every time I stop and allow
myself to imagine walking into Guy’s studio in Soho tomorrow, an electric shock of nerves bolts through my stomach.
We go straight into my bedroom and lay out the new things on my bed. There are two dresses, a pair of dark, well-cut jeans, three tops, a pair of sandals, and some makeup. My purchases have the effect of cut flowers, filling the room with a new, fresh smell and bright, unadulterated colors.
“The shiny one first,” Rae says, clapping her hands gleefully. She is wearing the pink sunglasses I bought her, with a lollipop for “being good” sticking out of her mouth.
I pull off my T-shirt and pick up a silver shift dress. It took me three visits to the shop before I felt brave enough to buy it. It is made of silver sequins, which gives it the effect of being beaded with a thousand tiny lightbulbs. I pull it on carefully over my made-up face, enjoying the factory-fresh chemical odor of new clothes and the sensation of how it clings to me, crisp and unsagging, unlike my old T-shirts.
Rae stands back and stares at me.
“What?” I say.
“Don’t know,” she replies, looking shy.
“What?” I repeat more forcefully.
She shrugs, and comes over and falls into me, pulling my arm around her.
I bend down to look in the dressing table mirror and see why she has gone quiet. I look completely different.
With a shock I recognize this woman. I am looking at myself before Rae. I blink heavily, focusing through the thick mascara.
“You are all lighted up,” Rae finally blurts out.
“Hmm,” I say. I’m not sure I like her seeing me like this. I realize what she’s thinking. That the woman in the mirror is taking me away from her.
“It’s going to be fine, you know,” I say as she wraps herself silently around my neck. “Listen, Hannah will be at after-school club and that will be fun, and I’ll be at work, so we can have more money to do nice things by ourselves, like go on holiday, maybe.”
“Can I have a party if we have money,” she murmurs in my ear, “a big one for all my class?”
“Well . . .” I pause. She’s only been invited to two class parties this year, both of them thrown open to all thirty children by parents rich enough to do it, or too uncomfortable to leave anyone out. The thought that Rae might invite the whole class to her party and find no one wants to come apart from Henry, and maybe Hannah, is too painful to contemplate. “Let’s see how we get on, but it’s nice of you to think about doing that. I hope your friends realize how lucky they are to have such a generous girl in their class.”
I take her into the kitchen to get a drink, then put her in front of a DVD. Back in my bedroom I look at myself again in the mirror.
I can’t stop staring. If I subtract the wan, tired woman in the dark clothes from this shining, made-up woman I am now in the mirror, I am left with five years of loss. That’s what the difference is. Five years of lost everything.
I hear the Somali woman padding about above my head.
Idly, I pick up my address book and flick through it again, trying to remember. Wasn’t friendship easy before Rae, evolving gently and meaningfully out of one moment of laughter at school, a long talk in the pub after college, or a shared moment of late-night drama at work?
Now, it simply doesn’t exist. On any level. Apart from with Suzy.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Suzy this past week.
Sometimes, in the dead of night, I feel bad. One of the reasons I feel bad is that I have always known something about Suzy that I have told no one. It became clear to me after those first few flurried, intense weeks when we met that, apart from babies and children, we had nothing else in common. A cursory glance at each other’s CDs, and music was never discussed. There are no books to share. Suzy owns none, apart from London guides and baby books. Even the wide-open spaces that we both experienced growing up as children—the ones she still craves—are the very ones that I ran away from when I came to London. So we talk about me and my problems. And we talk about her latest purchase from Heal’s or her new car. And we talk about school corridors and park swings, fish fingers and period pains, and make jokes about a relationship that is never going to happen with Matt, the Hot Dude That Callie Must Get It On With, because it would take Matt precisely one evening of chat to realize that I am an empty husk inside with nothing to offer. Eaten up by myself. Incapable of a normal relationship even with my so-called best friend.
I have been pretending for a long time that it is OK for me to depend on Suzy, to allow her to believe we are so close. But in the black of the night, I know it is not right. Our friendship is not a friendship of choice, but one of need. An American stranger in London and a lonely single mum stuck together. It’s wrong to rely on her so heavily when I am not honest with her about who I really am; to allow the truth to stay hidden in a dark corner, like a ghoul, waiting. But I carry on because I need Suzy. I can’t survive without her. Not yet.
And what makes it worse is that she appears to have no idea. Crucial elements are missing from our friendship, but she doesn’t even seem to notice. She seems happy just the way we are.
Yes. Some nights, I feel very guilty indeed about Suzy.
I look in the mirror some more.
Rae is right. There is something about this dress. The iridescent sheen seems to be lighting me up. Charging me up. Giving me power to return, finally, after five years, to the world outside.
I need this. I need to get back to Rocket. I need this to make things right.
Nerves shoot through my stomach with such intensity, I get up and go to find some food.
The children had been screaming for an hour now.
Debs checked the old clock in the hallway. Nearly seven o’clock. What time did those boys go to bed on a Sunday night? Didn’t they have school tomorrow?
“Don’t want my hair washed!” she heard the older one scream, followed by a long, agonized cry like he was being tortured.
“Hold still, hon!” she heard the American woman shout. “Nearly done.”
By the sound of it they were all having their hair washed. If one wasn’t screaming, the other was.
She had walked all round the house trying to escape it. Allen didn’t seem to notice, sitting in the front room doing his crossword.
“Gosh, those little boys don’t like having their hair washed, do they?” she exclaimed cheerfully, checking him with sharp eyes.
“Hmm,” he said. “Sorry?”
“The little boys next door. Screaming about having their hair washed?”
“Really?” he said, turning back to his newspaper. “You know me, love, I’m a bit deaf.”
She turned away, frustrated. How could he not hear it? The anguished howls were bursting through their hall wall, upstairs and down, as if one child was upstairs and another one or two downstairs. She walked up the stairs trying to escape it, trying her bedroom at the front first. That was just as bad. A child seemed to be in the bedroom next door and there was a roar of a hair dryer.
The spare room. That might be the best idea. It shared no walls with the American woman’s house and was as far away from their bathroom as it could be.
She hadn’t been in this room much. It was long and narrow with a sash window that overlooked their garden, with its little lawn and shed. A bare lightbulb hung above. The room felt as if it hadn’t been used much. The Hendersons’ children had left long ago to get married, they had told her, so it had probably been the couple’s spare room, too.
She sat on the old oak bed she and Allen had brought from his mother’s house, opposite its matching oak wardrobe. The new plastic-covered mattress squeaked beneath her weight. That was one item of his mother’s she had refused to hold on to—the mattress where the woman had lain for twenty years, shouting for her uncomplaining son to fetch and carry for her. Allen hadn’t argued with Debs’s plans for the old mattress at all. He’d taken it to the dump in her car, both of them averting their eyes from the sallow stains that seeped among the faded stripes.