After Ever After (21 page)

‘Yep,’ Gareth nods, ‘and it’s not much cheaper either, except I know this bloke who got me something off, so even though you’ve got your sugar daddy hard at work you don’t have to worry about it too much.’

I half laugh at his bad joke, feeling suddenly guilty that I’m standing here in the sunshine with another man while Fergus is slaving away under the strip lighting of his office. A trickle of sweat shivers down my back and I shake off the feeling, telling myself that, after all, this is exactly what Fergus wants, although maybe without the soft and curvy comments.

I watch, mesmerised, as Gareth begins to lay the piece down, resting his knees on a plank of wood and tapping it gently into place.

‘It’s fabulous,’ I say. ‘I never thought I’d see the day when I got all excited about grass. Especially the kind of grass that you walk on!’

Gareth laughs.

‘I’ve got some of the other kind if you fancy a smoke?’ he says mildly. I blink obscurely, affronted at the suggestion and surprised by my reaction. I haven’t smoked in years, but I’ve never been bothered by other people doing it. Yet somehow Gareth’s suggestion seems unseemly. Maybe since Dora no drug seems harmless to me any more.

‘Um, no, not for me, breastfeeding.’ I smile, feeling prudish.

‘Oh yeah, I forgot about that.’ Gareth’s smile is slow and sweet and not for the first time today perfectly ambiguous. ‘Right, well, it’s best I get this laid this afternoon or else it’ll spoil if I leave it overnight. You going to get down here with me?’ he enquires.

I shake my head. ‘Oh no, I’ve got stuff to do in the house … Clare’s coming over. You should come in and say hello.’

He nods, turns back to his work and begins to whistle again. I turn back to the kitchen feeling sort of … dismissed.

Once I’m back inside, the cool of the kitchen helps me put everything back into perspective. Gareth sort of jangles me; for starters he’s good looking in an irresponsible way. The kind of handsome that shouldn’t really be allowed outside of movies and books. He’s a bit flirty, true – in his native habitat probably a smooth operator, and he enjoys saying what he thinks – stuff like that curvy and soft comment. He also enjoys getting a reaction, I can see that. But you just have to see him out there laying his cheeks on grass to know what kind of person he really is. Sometimes a bit too bold, a bit of a lad, but a gentle person and kind. I mean, he has to be, otherwise he wouldn’t have faffed around potting up the few shrubs left in the garden, and building them a makeshift shelter where they can recuperate as he regularly feeds them up with plant food. It’s as if he imagines that his charges might one day climb as high as the sky and open a door to a land full of giants.

I pick Ella up and take her upstairs to feed her. Settling Ella on my lap, I lean back into the pillows. I am shocked by how bereft I felt when Mr Crawley left, an emotion which I haven’t been able to think about until now. I suppose I don’t need a degree in psychology to rationalise how attached I’ve become to him. He reminds me so much of my dad – not my dad now but my dad back then, before Mum was murdered.

Back then he was a kind of TV dad: big and handsome. The sort who takes you to the park and teaches you to ride your bike. The kind who reads you a story even if he’s really tired and even if you want it halfway through his favourite TV show. He’d take me to the pictures, and pick me up when I was supposed to be running in the father and daughter peg-leg race just because he knew how much I wanted to break the coloured tape that stretched across the finishing line. I wanted that more than I wanted to win fair and square. But now that Dad’s disappeared behind the depression and the drinking and the years and years on disability benefit. That dad was murdered along with my mum and now I can hardly bear to see him. He’s only seen the baby once since she was born, and it’s my fault – I
should
ring him, I know. I
should
take her to see him. I
should
invite him down here to stay, but I can’t. I can’t because wherever he goes he brings the cloud of the past with him as if it’s attached permanently above his head, and sometimes it seems he won’t be satisfied until he can suffocate me with it as well as himself.

It wasn’t an instant transformation. For a few weeks he was the proverbial tower of strength – everyone around him admired him and leant on him. Everyone said how well he was coping under the circumstances, how strong he was being for me. All of it: the funeral arrangements, the move to a new flat, the grief. For a long time it all went on above my head until one day I said to my nan, ‘Nan, when’s Mum coming back from being dead?’ I mean, I knew that she was dead. I’d been told that she was dead, I’d seen it myself with my very own eyes, but I don’t think I understood what dead meant. I think I thought it was like going on holiday feeling poorly and coming back all better. My nan didn’t answer me for a long time, and I watched her bury her face in her hands, her salt and pepper roller-set curls creeping over her bony fingers. If she cried then, she never let me see those tears.

Instead, after what seemed like for ever, she pulled me on to her lap and held me close to her chest, and told me, ‘Mummy’s
never
coming back, darling, she’s gone for ever. A bad person hurt her and she can’t come back … not because she doesn’t love you or doesn’t want to – she just can’t. She’s gone to be with her dad, Grampy. They’ll have a rare old time together, won’t they? Laughing and joking all day long, I shouldn’t wonder, and looking down on you to make sure you’re all right.’ She took my chin between the rough skin of her thumb and forefinger and looked me in the eyes.

‘It’s just you and Daddy now, love, and you’ve got to be a good girl for Daddy. A good, big, grown-up girl for Daddy, and look after him like your mum would if she was here, okay?’

That moment when I realised that Mum wasn’t coming back, that she really wasn’t ever coming back, was the first time that I knew I should cry. I cried for a long time. I cried for my mummy and I cried for myself.

‘But Nan, who will look after
me
?’ I sobbed into her shoulder.

‘I’ll look after you, darling,’ Nan told me. ‘I’ll always look after you, never you fret.’ But losing her daughter had broken my nanna’s heart, and she was dead by Christmas.

It was after that that Dad stopped being a TV dad and started being my dependent. For the next nine years we lived on whatever I could conjure up out of tins, or eventually a second-hand microwave, and although I did all his washing and ironing, all of my best efforts couldn’t keep him in his job and he was on disability after only a few years. I washed the floors and windows, took the neighbours hand-me-downs and when, at the age of eleven, my period started I asked the lady in the chemist’s if she would tell me what to do. She’d taken me in the back and given me a cup of tea and talked it through with me. I didn’t feel sorry for myself because by then I’d forgotten what it was like to have my mum. It wasn’t until the day I left my dad’s flat for good that I felt free again. Free at last to miss her.

I draw Ella’s curtains and creep out of her nursery, adeptly jumping the creaking floorboard with a new professionalism that I am quietly proud of, and retreat back into my room, picking up the phone.

‘Starbrite Records, Human Resources Department, Camille speaking, how may I help you?’

I laugh at the way Camille rattles off this unwieldy greeting with cheery sing-song efficiency. I affect a terrible accent.

‘Oh hi, it’s Madonna here, I’m ringing to see where my pay cheque is – I have to buy Rocco some new diapers!’

‘Oh hi, Kits, what’s up?’ Camille has never been fooled by me, and for five of the most nerve-wracking moments of my life she once had me believe I was discussing UK tax law with Jennifer Lopez, and she’s not even signed to Starbrite.

‘Not bad, quite good actually. You’ll never guess what I’m doing tonight!’ I tell her, and I’m still listening to her hysteria five minutes later.

‘Oh my God, I can’t wait to see this! I can’t wait! Book me my ticket now, front and centre!’

I roll my eyes. ‘Well, don’t get too excited, I haven’t even auditioned yet, and I’m only going to be in the chorus and maybe help sweep up a bit.’

Camille giggles. ‘Oh, bless you and your efforts to get involved in small-town life!’

Her city slicker comment smarts, but I hide it well.

‘Well, it’s not so bad here. I’ve got a new friend called Clare. She’s lovely, you’d like her and, well, it’s not so bad.’ I think of the surfeit of street cafés and estate agents that the high street bristles with. ‘Almost cosmopolitan, and if Fergus and I could spend a bit of time together it might even be perfect. Pros and cons, I suppose,’ I sigh.

‘Well, speaking as one who only ever sees her boyfriend when he’s on a London stopover, I think absence makes the heart grow fonder.’

I consider her relationship with Alex: in the four years they’ve been together it’s been a non-stop whirlwind of romance and sex, so why isn’t it like that with Fergus and me? Why is it that pretty much every time he walks in the front door my libido picks up its briefcase and hops on the love train to London? For a heartbeat I feel the hot panic that rises in my chest whenever I allow myself to consider the possibility that I may never feel that way about Fergus again.

‘Yeah, well, that’s because you’re not so knackered you can’t even muster the energy to sleep,’ I say. ‘Do you think I should get done up in sexy underwear and flounce about on the bed or something?’

Camille snorts laughter down the phone. ‘Look, this is you and Fergus we’re talking about here. One of the world’s definitive romantic couples – like Rome and Juliet! Anthony and Cleopatra. Cathy and Heathcliff. You don’t need sex tips already, do you?’

I open and close my mouth.

‘Didn’t pretty much all of those couples end horribly, usually in a violent death?’ I ask her, perturbed.

‘Oh yeah, but you know what I mean. You and Fergus, you’re solid.’

‘Yeah, of course we are. We just need some time together.’ I’m not sure that that’s all we need, but it’s pretty near the truth.

‘Well then, get the old bag to sit for you.’ I can hear Camille begin to tap at her keyboard. My old boss must be within reach of her radar.

‘I suppose I could, it’s just that after last time … listen, how’s Dora? I spoke to her a few days ago and she had some bloke in the sack. Have you seen her?’

‘Ahhhhhh. That makes a lot of sense. No, no I haven’t. She’s got all pally with those NA birds, and she wouldn’t say but I guessed she was seeing some bloke.’

‘Well, she told me it was as boring as watching paint dry, so he must have done something pretty good to impress her. That’s good then, I guess she’s getting herself together. Maybe her NA friends are the people she needs to be around at the moment.’ I look at myself in the wardrobe mirror, hoping to see the soft and curvy person Gareth described, but his vision of me has lost its magic and all I can see is that I’ve burnt the bridge of my nose and look indelibly embarrassed.

‘Maybe, maybe.’ Camille sounds dubious. ‘It’s just not like Dora to ditch her friends for a man. I miss her.’

I turn away from my unsatisfactory reflection, look out of the bedroom window and see the entirely satisfactory expanse of lawn that is spreading over my garden. Gareth sees me and waves, beckoning for me to come down.

‘Camille, I’ve got to go. Come and see me. Come and see me soon! I’ve got grass we can lie on!’ I say. Hanging up the phone, I lean out of the window.

‘It looks great!’ I call out.

Gareth shades his eyes and regards me. ‘Yeah, it does, doesn’t it!’ He laughs with boyish delight. ‘See where I’ve created the beds – gorgeous, all curvy and soft, just like a good garden should be.’ I smile lamely. Somehow, now he’s applied that term to a flowerbed it’s lost its charm. Oh well. ‘And tomorrow we’ll need to water it if it hasn’t rained by tonight. In the meantime don’t you walk on it, okay?’

I shake my head. ‘Are you off then?’ I look at my watch, it’s not quite five.

‘Yeah, stuff to do, but I’ll see you later!’ I watch him disappear into the house and then a few minutes later hear the front door close. At least he’s learnt not to slam it.

I don’t mind him going early, but I feel sorry that he won’t be here when Clare gets here. I’d half sort of promised her he would be, and now I’ve let her down. I’ll just have to find another way to get them together.

I’m spinning Ella around and around and around.

‘Clever girl!’ I tell her, kissing her much more than she thinks is appropriate, which is not at all. She screws up her face and bats my affection away with her fists. I laugh and plonk her down on the floor.

‘Go on then – do it again for Daddy.’ Fergus crouches over the other side of the room and reaches out his hands.

‘Come on then, come on, clever!’ Ella grins at her daddy and then begins to crawl – forward! She looks a bit clumsy, her arms and legs aren’t exactly co-ordinated, but yes, she is defiantly going forward.

‘I’m so glad she isn’t a lost cause,’ I say to Fergus. ‘I mean, of course, I’d still love it if she never crawled forward, it’s just that bloody Calista is about to sit her GCSEs and she’s only two and a half.

‘Is she really?’ Fergus looks impressed.

‘No.’ I say. ‘But whenever I go down there it’s “Calista was doing handstands by three months, blah blah blah blah”.’ I stick my fingers down my throat and mimic vomiting.

‘Careful, Kits, you want to be holding on to that anger and resentment, it’ll help you get into character.’ Fergus grins and Ella finally reaches him; he lifts her high above his head, pretending to drop her until she’s hysterical. I laugh with delight; he seems more like his old self this evening, light-hearted and actually here in spirit as well as body. It’s a shame it happens to be the evening I’m going out.

‘What, as a cowgirl? Will you give her her tea?’ I ask him. Fergus nods and carries her away to the kitchen just as Canterbury Cathedral rings out its tinny bells.

‘Are you ready then?’ Clare says as I open the door to her. She has blow-dried her hair and put on just enough make-up to intensify the green of her eyes.