The Birds and the Bees (10 page)

Adam sneered, like Elvis having a bad day.

‘Well, let’s hope you’re better at ho’ding onto your man than you are at dancing,’ he said gruffly as he let Stevie’s hands go and relinquished her to Will, who spun her round ‘Gay Gordon’ style for the last few bars of the reel. As soon as the final chord had sounded, Adam and Jo and Matthew were gone from the dance floor, three people united in their desperate desire to get right away from the lumpy woman with her sherry-stained skirt and scabby nose.

Catherine led her friend gently off into the shadows, leaving her flushed-face, exhilarated husband applauding. He had truly found his dancing legs and was skipping about like Rob Roy with fleas.

‘How awful was that?’ said Catherine. ‘I thought it would never end.’

‘Trust Murderous McKilt to be in our group,’ said Stevie, all sorts of sad and angry thoughts blasting through her body. ‘I didn’t expect to end up dancing with him when I set off with Will.’

‘Well, you got back with your original partner in the
end,’ said Catherine. ‘Maybe it’s symbolic,’ she added, trying to give Stevie a bit of hope, however weak it might sound.

‘Maybe,’ said Stevie.

Oh poor love, thought Catherine, watching her friend’s eyes follow Jo to a quiet table for two in the opposite corner. Matthew joined her tentatively a few moments afterwards in a move choreographed slickly as the sweetly named Birds and Bees dance.

Catherine could tell Stevie had had enough by now, but she continued to clap with the others at another jolly reel, watching the pairings split and repair. Eddie still hadn’t left the dance floor. Having refreshed his passion for square-dancing, he was presently flinging his bulk about with Auntie Madge and wondering if they sold men’s kilts on eBay.

‘I think I’ll slip away home now,’ said Stevie. ‘I don’t think my stiff upper lip can take any more.’

Catherine nodded and kissed her on the head.

‘I’m proud of you. You’ve acted like an absolute lady. Have a long lie-in tomorrow and pick Danny up whenever. He won’t thank you for being early.’

Stevie didn’t doubt it. It didn’t appear that she was high up on anyone’s list of ‘people to be happy to see’.

Stevie asked the lady on Reception to phone her a taxi, then she sat on the big squashy couch, listening to the jolly strains of the music next door. The taxi wasn’t long in coming but no sooner had she got to the glass exit doors than Matthew’s voice came from behind.

‘Stevie, Stevie, wait!’

She turned around, a hopeful flutter in her heart, but he wasn’t making much eye-contact, which wasn’t exactly an encouraging sign.

‘Sorry, bad timing. Your taxi’s here, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it is,’ she said. Her heart was thumping like a tom-tom issuing a distress signal.

‘Stevie, is it okay if I pop around tomorrow? About nine?’

‘In the morning?’

‘No, in the evening, when Danny’s in bed.’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

Outside, the taxi driver gave an impatient jab on his horn.

‘Okay, see you tomorrow then,’ said Matthew, then he waved weakly and disappeared quickly back inside to the party.

‘Yes, see you tomorrow,’ said Stevie to his cold slipstream.

A fortnight ago, Adam had never even seen the bloody woman, and now it seemed that everywhere he went, she was there as well. If her hatred of him hadn’t been so obvious, he would have thought she was stalking him. His gym, the wedding and now the supermarket on a quiet Sunday morning. Was there no peace?

He had been careful not to drink too much at the wedding last night. He didn’t want to give
her
or Matty Boy or Jo a speck of ammunition to use against him and he needed to keep control of the situation at all times. He had behaved impeccably and had even used the loo out in Reception so he wouldn’t bump into Matthew and scare him into making a mess of what looked like a very expensive suit.

He had been quite surprised at how controlled
she
had tried to be too, although she was really a bag of nerves, any fool could have seen that. What was it she had said when he asked her which side of the church she was to sit on?
Broom
? He had nearly laughed aloud at that.
Broom!

He also noticed how much her eyes were taken up with the three other main players in this ridiculous production. Admittedly, he himself had been fascinated to watch
Matthew and Jo stage-manage their ‘coming together’, just before ‘The Birds and the Bees’. He had suppressed a wry smile at their guile, although seeing Jo flirt with another man in that way poked at something ancient and violent within him. She and Matty Boy had stayed together all evening after that, careful not to give away any clues to their already established intimacy by making every move look casual, though this had been sabotaged somewhat as Jo kept having to sneak out her purse to pay for the drinks that Matthew went up to the bar to get. She wouldn’t have liked that one bit, and might have just won him Round 2 by default, which offset some of the feelings that were twisting in his gut like a blunt, rusty knife.

He saw that Matty Boy had run after his estranged partner when the time had come for her to leave, although he was gone less than a minute. Adam wondered what all that was about. Couldn’t have been much, because he went straight back to the table and there was a moment of discreet but heavy-duty talk between him and Jo. Not that he was watching them much. He was trying really hard to look as if he was unbothered and jolly. It was all part of his master-plan.

Dragging his thoughts back to the here and now, he watched
her
, hovering around the salad vegetables here in the local supermarket. She was wearing jeans and a green sweatshirt which complemented her ruffled blonde hair. She looked quite neat now and she had certainly scrubbed up
nae bad
in that little red suit and hat at the wedding, he had thought, although she must have wanted to die when Jo turned up in a reversal of the same colours. Jo looked so
gorgeous that he would not have been able to stop himself kissing her and carrying her home, if she had given him the slightest encouragement. Something inside him had creaked when he saw her looking so long and lovely in that beautifully expensive suit, although commonsense told him that it was his stomach making that sound through hunger. His heart knew different.

No little boy with
her
again–so who had she palmed him off onto today, Adam wondered. He just bet the Mother of the Year awards were stacked high on
her
mantelpiece. Mind you, the kid was better off away from a mother with a temper like that. It must have been sheer luck that he hadn’t been hurt in the crossfire when she threw pans in temper at Matthew.

She must have just come into the supermarket for she had only collected the one item so far–
and what an item!
She hadn’t seen him because she was concentrating on trying to guide a trolley with a demonically possessed front wheel, so the advantage was his. It was wicked, but he couldn’t resist charging deliberately into her trolley with his own, full of many bottles of spirits, mainly whisky, which rattled in rude protest. Then he gave her a look of mock surprise that wouldn’t have fooled the king of village idiots.

‘Well fancy meetin’ yooou here. Adjusting to single life verrry quickly, I see,’ he bellowed, pointing down to the very long cucumber standing erect in her trolley. She blushed immediately and threw the nearest thing to hand in beside it to dilute the embarrassment. A tray of stir-fry.

‘Oooh yum yum,’ he said puckishly. ‘Cucumber stir-fry, my favourite.’

‘Was there something you wanted, Mr MacLean?’ said Stevie haughtily, trying not to blush any harder.

‘No’ really,’ he said, trying not to be so amused that she was redder than the vine-ripened tomatoes nearby. She would be fun to torture, he thought. It might take his mind off what her man was doing with his woman.

‘Only I’ve far more important things to do than stand here being insulted by you.’

‘I wonder what they could be?’ he smiled like a barracuda, raised his eyebrows and cast a look at the impressive cucumber.

She
sooo
wanted to batter him round the head with it.

‘My fiancé is calling around later,’ Stevie said, ignoring his pathetic childish innuendos. He looked interested now and less piss-takey.

‘Oh really?’ he said, folding his arms. ‘Whit forrr?’

‘I don’t know, but he’s coming when my son is in bed so he obviously wants to talk. I’m quietly optimistic,’ which she was, surprisingly enough. After she got home from the wedding, she had looked up ‘winning your partner back’ on the internet and picked up a thread about ‘the power of positive thought’. Apparently, the trick was to visualize what she wanted to happen and focus on that. It was worth a try; anything was worth a try. So by that token, she had been telling herself since then that Matthew
was
coming home tonight for good. He had finished with Jo at the reception because she was so boring and uninteresting and had bad breath, and now they were back on track to get married and live happily ever after. And Adam MacLean would be kidnapped by aliens and whisked off to Saturn for painful medical experiments.

‘Well, good luck,’ said Adam MacLean, ‘but will ye take a piece of advice?’

‘No,’ said Stevie and started to wheel away, but he grabbed her handlebar forcefully and made sure she wasn’t going anywhere.

‘Well, I’m givin’ it tae ya anyway, so take it or leave it.
Basic psychology
. Play it exactly the opposite tae how he’d expect you tae behave. It’s yoor only weapon.’

Whether or not he meant to imply that her looks or her personality wouldn’t do much in a head-to-head with Jo, that’s the way she took it.

‘Yes, well thank you, Professor Platitude,’ she huffed belligerently. ‘I look forward to your next lecture with great eagerness. What will it be, I wonder? Jung’s theory of the Absolutely Bloody Obvious?’

Not that he’d know who Jung was. Probably thought she meant the old DJ whose first name was Jimmy. And with that, Stevie and her enormous cucumber weaved off in the direction of the celery, whilst her trolley headed for Fresh Meats.

She turned up at Catherine’s just after half past eleven to find the kitchen in chaos and Danny tucking into a full English breakfast.

‘How the hell did you get him to eat that?’ said Stevie, after she had given him a big ‘hello’ kiss. ‘I can hardly get him to eat anything except for Coco Pops and chicken–and his flaming collars of course!’

‘Ah, the wonderful mystery of children,’ said Catherine. ‘Violet doesn’t eat eggs usually, she’s only eating them
because Danny is, and he’s only eating them because Kate is. James obviously eats nothing because he never gets up.’

‘Does Violet eat them when Kate eats them then?’

‘Naw, doesn’t work like that–they’re related,’ said Catherine with a sniff, leading her pal off for a coffee in a quieter corner after swiping bits of uneaten bacon from the twins, Sarah and Robbie. ‘Mmm, why is it that food stolen from kids always tastes so good?’ she said, smacking her lips in neo-orgasmic delight. ‘Oh, by the way, Danny’s got a snaggy toenail, Kate said, but he wouldn’t let her cut it off. He said the Toenail Pixie will get it later, is that right?’

‘He’s scared of getting his toenails cut, so I do them in the middle of the night when he’s asleep. He thinks a pixie comes and does it,’ explained Stevie.

‘I don’t know how you think of these things,’ said Catherine. ‘I haven’t a creative bone in my body.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, I think you’ve created quite a lot,’ said Stevie, looking at the kitchen scene, which looked like a Waltons family reunion, with Danny playing the special guest-star part. ‘He looks so happy here,’ she said, as he giggled at Eddie who was trying to pretend that one of them had stolen the sausage that he had just fed to Boot under the table.

‘You worry too much,’ said Catherine.

‘He was in front of the headmaster last week for smacking Curtis Ryder.’

‘…Who was trying to pull his trousers down,’ said Catherine sternly, because she knew where this was going. ‘That’s why Curtis Ryder got a thump, not because Danny’s doolally because Matthew’s gone. The lad’s
standing up for himself, like you always tell him to. Take a chill pill, gal’. And she shoved a packet of medicinal chocolate digestives at her to break open with her nails.

‘I don’t know how he’ll react if Matthew and I don’t get back together, Cath. He takes disappointment so badly.’

Catherine gave her a comforting tap tap on the shoulder. ‘All kids take disappointment badly, Steve. It’s not just Danny; he’s a normal little kid with little kid funny little ways. Some carry comfort blankets, some suck their thumbs, sleeves or collars–it’s what they do at four. You are a
GOOD MOTHER
. He gets more love and attention from you than most kids do with two parents, and if the worst happens, he’ll cope. He’ll have to, and so will you.’

Catherine knew, of course, what was mostly on her friend’s troubled mind as she continued, ‘Stevie, he didn’t know Mick and he hardly got used to Matthew. He won’t be damaged.’

‘But he asks me, if his daddy loved him, why did he die and leave him? Then he’ll see that another man who supposedly loved him has left him too. It’s laying down a pattern for him. He’ll be in therapy by the time he’s six, thinking he’s been rejected by two fathers.’ Stevie suddenly stamped her foot as a bubble of frustration burst inside her. ‘You know, I’m really angry at Matthew for putting Danny through this more than I am for myself. All the time we were living together, supposedly happily becoming a family, he was carrying on with
her
. Didn’t it even cross his mind that Danny was getting closer to him every day and would get hurt?’

‘Well, blokes don’t think past their dicks half the time,’ said Catherine, ‘and we don’t know when they started
getting it together, do we? I’m sure Matthew wouldn’t have moved you in if he wasn’t serious about you, which makes me think it’s a pretty recent thing so there’s a good chance it will be like a cheap firework and die quickly. Good news you’re getting angry, though. It’s far more healing than getting upset.’

‘Thanks for helping me out so much and for having Danny, Cath.’

‘Don’t be daft, he’s no trouble at all–it’s just one more plate on the table for me. In fact, the kids behave better when he’s here. Outsiders divert them from killing each other. Anyway, I think I owe you a few, after all you’ve done for me in your time.’

Catherine’s family, close as they purported themselves to be, were never that keen on helping in practical ways. Before Kate was old enough to extort massive babysitting fees in exchange for the job, it had been Stevie who looked after them sometimes, to give Catherine and Eddie a few hours’ break together. It had been Stevie who did most of the vacuuming and washing and ironing in the background when Catherine’s babies arrived, whilst the relatives were sitting on their fat backsides drinking tea and cooing. Catherine never forgot that.

‘Matthew’s coming round later when Danny goes to bed,’ said Stevie. ‘He came after me yesterday and caught me up in the foyer, just before I got my taxi home.’

Catherine stopped mid-pour. ‘Did he say what for?’

‘No, he just made arrangements to come over and then disappeared. How were
they
after I’d gone?’ She knew Matthew hadn’t been slaughtered en route back to the table
because she’d checked the local news on Ceefax first thing that morning and there was no mention of ‘Mad Highland Nutter Axeman Kills Love Rival at Wedding’.

‘Much the same,’ said Catherine, plonking the biscuits in front of Stevie. ‘They were just talking, nothing else.’

‘Did they leave together?’

Catherine didn’t answer, which answered the question anyway.

Stevie sighed heavily. ‘Do you know, one minute I think he might be coming round to tell me he doesn’t want me to move out, and then the next…I mean, if they left together, that means it’s still on between them, doesn’t it? He’s not alone at that B&B, is he?’
Oy, you, think positive!
reminded her inner mantra, but it was so very difficult.

‘I don’t know, Steve, but there’s no point in driving yourself barmy speculating; you’ll have to wait and see what he has to say. Have you eaten? You hardly had a thing yesterday.’ She pushed the biscuits almost up Stevie’s still-tender nose.

‘I’ve not got much appetite. I went into the supermarket first thing this morning to see if I could find anything to tempt it back, and only bumped straight into that flaming man MacLean again, didn’t I.’

‘Didn’t have anything embarrassing in your trolley, did you?’ Catherine laughed gently. ‘Like a monster pack of All Bran and loads of toilet rolls.’

‘Worse,’ said Stevie.

‘Oh God, no! Not pile cream!’

‘Not even close.’

‘What?’

‘Only the world’s largest cucumber.’

‘No!’ Catherine let loose a peal of horrified laughter.

‘His trolley was so full of booze the wheels were nearly flat. Typical piss-head Scot.’

‘A cucumber! NO! Did he say anything? Sorry!’ she apologized for not being able to control herself. She was shaking with laughter.

‘Yes, he made some crack about “adjusting to single life quickly”.’