After the Party (16 page)

“Yeah.” Jem smiled. “Just behind Thai Dreams. Couldn't really miss it.”

She glanced around the flat quickly, taking in unpapered walls, cheap blinds, bicycles, washing hanging on radiators. It was very much the home of a single dad.

Joel offered Jem a cup of tea. “Yes, please,” she said, “it's miserable out there. I'm cold to the bone.”

He disappeared into a small galley kitchen that peered out into the living room through a rectangular opening. “You know, you can hop off in a minute, if you like. I'd be happy to oversee if there were things you needed to get done?”

Jem glanced down at the three-year-old girl wrapped around her left thigh and laughed. “Maybe I'll hang around for a bit,” she said lightly, “wait and see how these two hit it off.”

“Now! Now!” pleaded Jessica. “Will you come now? To my room?”

Scarlett looked at Jem beseechingly.

“Maybe Scarlett would like some juice first, and a muffin?” He directed this question at Jem.

Jem nodded enthusiastically.

“Is it a chocolate muffin?” Scarlett whispered in her ear.

“I don't know,” said Jem. “We'll have to ask Jessica's dad, won't we?”

Joel smiled and looked down at Scarlett. “It is indeed a chocolate muffin,” he said, “with extra chocolate chips inside.” He pulled apart the cellophane wrapping of a pack of four from Tesco. “Why don't you take off your coat and sit down and I'll bring it in in a minute.”

Jem could feel Scarlett's body starting to relax under her arm. She leaned down to help her with the fastenings of her parka and slipped it off her shoulders.

“So,” she said, “how long have you and Jessica lived here?”

Joel shrugged and poured boiling water from a white plastic kettle into a chipped brown teapot. “Well, I've been here for about ten years. It was my dad's place. He used to have a stand at the antique market on Northcote Road . . . used this place for storage. When he died I had to sell off everything else he owned to pay off his loans. This was all that was left. So now we call it home.” He smiled tightly, suggesting that he would not have chosen such a place to live if he'd had more options. “Sugar?”

Jem shook her head. “But your dad—I thought you were from up north?”

“No,” he replied simply, “why did you think that?”

“Your accent, I suppose,” she said, “there's a hint of something, and the fact that your son was brought up there?”

“No.” Joel piled cheap mugs, muffins and the teapot onto a tray and carried it into the living room. “I was at university in Sheffield. I was up there for five years in the end, it must have rubbed off a bit, but, no, I'm a south London boy, through and through, born and bred in Clapham Junction.”

“Really?” Jem brightened. “Whereabouts?”

“Just off Northcote Road. Lovely little house. I was gutted when I had to sell it after my dad went.”

“Ha! I used to live there. Do you know a little road called Almanac Road?”

“Yes!” Joel placed the tray on the coffee table. “I was in the next road up. When were you there?”

“Oh, God, about ten years ago, I was in a flatshare. It's where I met Ralph, actually.”

“Ah yes, Ralph of the missing mojo. You met him in a flatshare?”

“Yeah.” She smiled. “We were flatmates. It was an interesting way to get to know someone.”

“Well, I was long gone by the time you were living there then. In fact, yeah, I'd just moved in here. Me and Jessica's mum, starting our
new life
.” He smiled wryly and poured tea into mismatched mugs with business logos on them. His hands were pale and angular, his knuckles were slightly red and dry. From this angle Jem could see that his pale hair was thinning at the crown. There were moth holes in his lambswool sweater and his glasses were slightly crooked on the bridge of his nose. Jem wondered once more at her feelings for this man. What was it about him that kept him in her thoughts? Why had she even noticed him? Was it, as she had concluded a few nights ago, simply an ego boost or was it that she was reading too much into his recurrent appearances in her life, or did she actually want to have an affair with him? No—she threw the thought violently from her mind—she did not want to have an affair with him, she was just impressed by him, that was all. She found the sheer novelty of a man who could look after his own child without a woman enthralling. But somehow she had blurred the boundaries in her
head between respect and attraction. He was a nice-looking man, nothing special, but compared to Ralph he was surely a god.

Blake began wriggling in the sling and she unpopped the fastenings. Then she took a handful of small toys from her handbag and laid him on the floor, where he stared in awe at the rather ugly mother-of-pearl lightshade over the central light, rolling gently from side to side in his fleecy all-in-one.

The girls ate in silence, occasionally lifting plastic cups of juice to their lips, gingerly, with two cupped hands. Jem sipped her tea, which was very good, and wondered if it was her turn to speak.

“So,” said Jem, looking at the monitor screen behind him, “what is it that you do, exactly?”

Joel turned and glanced at the screen. “Oh, that. That's not work, that's household accounts. Just been working out if we can afford to eat next month.”

“And?” Jem asked.

He took a sharp intake of breath and smiled drily. “Just about,” he sighed. “Just about. So really, I need to spend more time working and less time working out our household accounts.”

“And working is . . . ?”

“Well, working is the problem. Because really I don't. I do some work for a youth center on Electric Avenue. I get paid for it, but not really enough to live a proper life. And I do some research here and there for think tanks, about youth and drugs and crime, and a bit of stuff for the
Brixton Times
, but it's all very piecemeal. I've just sort of put everything on hold for this one.” He gestured toward Jessica. “I need to sort myself out. She'll be starting nursery full time in September. Then it's school. Then, well,” he smiled sadly, “my work here will be done.”

“No it won't!” rejoined Jessica. “You still have to give me baths. And brush my teeth. You still have to carry on being my daddy!”

Jem and Joel laughed. “That is very true, munchkin,” said Joel. “Very true indeed. I will have to carry on being your daddy for a very long time indeed.”

“Good,” said Jessica, “that's good.”

“But,” continued Joel, “once you're at school all day, your daddy will need to start thinking about ways to earn more money, so that you and I can have all the things we need.”

“Like pink paint in my bedroom?”

“Yes, like pink paint in your bedroom.”

“Whoo-hoo!” Jessica got to her feet and performed a victorious air thump. “Come on, Scarlett. Let's go an' PLAY!”

Scarlett looked at Jem beseechingly but Jem just blinked at her reassuringly. “Go on,” she said, “I'm just in here.”

For a moment it seemed as though Scarlett were on the brink of one of her magnificent and immovable refusals, but after a moment she allowed herself to be pulled forcibly from the room by her hand and suddenly Jem and Joel were alone.

“I didn't offer you a muffin!” said Joel, getting to his feet, slightly panicked.

“Oh, no, honestly, it's fine. I'm sort of off the muffins for now.”

“Oh.” He looked at her for a moment, clearly not sure how to respond to a comment plucked from the murky pond of women and their weight issues. “More tea?”

“No”—she waved her half-full mug at him—“I'm fine. Thank you.”

They both smiled at the sound of Jessica's shrieking laughter coming from elsewhere in the house. Jem was glad of the diversion
from the slightly awkward fact of their aloneness. “She's such a lovely little thing,” she said, “your Jessica. So full of life and so friendly.”

“Yeah.” He smiled proudly. “I know. No idea where she gets it from!”

Jem laughed.

“Yes, she's had a tough start in life—not easy, you know—but here she is, mad and glorious and just full of wonder. I thank God for her every minute of every day. I really do. Without her . . . well . . .” He tailed off and smiled weakly at Jem. His eyes were glossy with tears. Jem looked away, surprised and shocked. This sudden show of emotion in a man whom she had previously imagined to be rather cool and steely was the last thing she had expected. “I tell you what,” he said, getting to his feet again, “I know it's early, but it's raining, we're killing time together, I think it would be perfectly acceptable to have a glass of wine, don't you?”

Jem breathed in sharply. There it was. The offer of wine. There was a sense of inevitability about it. And the moment was pivotal. Say no and it would be tantamount to saying, “This is just a playdate, back off, buddy.” Say yes, and, well, it wasn't tantamount to saying, “Sex? Now? Oh, yes please!” but it certainly left things a bit more open. “Well,” she said, “I'm still breastfeeding so I can't really go to town, but a small glass would be nice.” She sighed with relief. She felt she'd made a sound compromise.

“Good. Good.” He clapped his hands together and headed for the kitchen. “Red? White?”

“Whatever you're having,” she said.

“And what about you?” he said, appearing from the fridge with a bottle of something white. “How long have you lived round here?”

“About four years, I suppose. We were in the flatshare in Almanac Road for about a month after we got together, then things there got a bit awkward so we got a flat in Lurline Gardens, you know, the mansion flats just behind Battersea Park. Then we bought here when I was pregnant with Scarlett. Only place we could afford a proper house.”

“The classic maneuver,” said Joel, inspecting two wineglasses for smudges. “What is it about us English and our need for
stairs
. Seriously. Don't you think they're overrated?”

Jem laughed. “I guess so. But it's not just about stairs, is it, it's about gardens.”

“Yes, there is that, although I have raised my own child quite happily without a garden for nearly four years. That's the beauty of London: green stuff everywhere; you don't have to walk too far. And Lurline Gardens, wow, right on Battersea Park.”

“One-bedroom flat,” she said.

“Ah,” he conceded, “fair enough.”

He placed the glass of wine in front of her and she picked it up.

“Cheers,” said Joel, “here's to killing time.”

“Yes, indeed, killing time.”

The first sip of wine seemed to bypass all the usual channels, hitting her somewhere around the left side of her head like an affectionate punch. She smiled at Joel. He smiled at her. “All quiet on the girl front,” he said.

“So far, so good. She's a funny one, my Scarlett. A big fan of her own company. A big fan of home. Makes her easy to manage in some ways—she can just spend hours pottering around doing her own thing—but socially, she can be a bit awkward.”

“And where does she get that from, do you think?”

Jem shrugged. “No idea. I'm pretty sociable. So's Ralph. Well, he
used
to be!” She laughed and rubbed her forearm.

“Before he lost his mojo?”

“Yes, indeed, before he lost his mojo.”

“Will you ever forgive him?” he asked abruptly.

“Excuse me?”

“Ralph. Will you ever forgive him?” He was staring at her, not as intently as the question he'd just asked might have suggested, but rather in fond concern.

“For what?”

“For buggering off to California and leaving you on your own with two kids?”

Jem put her glass down and got to her knees to pluck the increasingly complaining Blake from the carpet and consider the question. Should she be offended? Outraged? Perturbed? She didn't know. She just knew that she felt relieved that he'd asked it.

She brought Blake to the sofa and sat him on her lap. “Interesting question,” she said. “And you know, I'm not sure I will. Although I will say that I have enjoyed some time to myself. I think I needed a break too. Though I would quite like it to have been me having the break in paradise!”

“Hmm.” Joel tented his fingers and appraised her over them.

“Hmm, what?” She smiled.

“I just find it really interesting.”

“What?”

“The whole setup. You, your single-mother persona, your artist partner, the mojo-hunting. It just makes me wonder about stuff, that's all.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Well, the nuclear family, the truth of it. I suppose I've always seen myself as set apart from that kind of normality, I've always been the outsider, the single dad. And I've made assumptions
about the people I've seen doing things the conventional way, that they've had it easier than me, that they're somehow, not superior, but just kind of elevated from me. The dichotomy, that life would be easier if I lived with the mother of my child, but that also it wouldn't be as challenging, as interesting, that somehow my experience of parenting is more
valid
than yours because I've got all these issues. But you're making me question all that. You know, you've got the house, the two kids, the nice little family-of-four thing going on. Except it's not as perfect as it looks, is it?”

Jem smiled. “No,” she said, “it's not. And there are times when I wonder if it wouldn't be easier if I did it by myself. I mean, this week, for example. It's been a revelation. It took approximately twenty-four hours to get used to him not being around. Because really, and this is a hard thing to say, but really, even when he is there, he's not. You know?”

Oh, my husband doesn't understand me
. Jem checked herself. That was enough personal stuff. She was giving this stranger too much. It felt dangerous and strangely disloyal.