After the Party (32 page)

“A packet of green Rizlas, please.”

She could barely remember the last time she'd uttered those words.

“Let's walk across the bridge,” she said, grabbing Ralph's hand outside. “I've got a surprise for you!”

Jem missed Battersea Bridge. For so long the traversing of the bridge, north to south, south to north, had been a constant marker of her days. For so long she had seen the river, her river, twice, sometimes four times a day, through changing seasons and changing times. She'd see it glimmering like crystal on spring mornings and black as tar at midnight. Battersea Bridge was her youth. And now she wanted to walk across it, late at night, hand in hand with Ralph, like they'd done a hundred times before.

Jem felt a kind of magic in the air as they headed east down Battersea Park Road. In her coat pocket she had a little plastic bag. Lulu had gotten it for her. Lulu, for some reason, still knew people who could procure drugs for her. It was yet another mystery about the endlessly mysterious Lulu. At the edge of the river, Jem pulled the bag from her pocket and showed it to Ralph.

“Where the hell did you get that from?” he asked, his eyebrows raised in surprise.

Jem shrugged. “Just some guy in an alley,” she teased.

“What!” Ralph threw her a look of alarm.

“Joking,” she reassured. “Lulu. Of course.”

She took a cigarette from Ralph's back pocket and then, crouching in the shadows of the bridge, she went through the ritual, the tearing off of a strip of cigarette, the licking and the piecing together of the flimsy Rizlas, the separating of the tobacco and the sprinkling of the pungent green herb, then the rolling and the licking and the twisting of the tip and the curling up of card and the inserting of the roach and there it was, perfect and ready to smoke, as if it hadn't really been five years since she'd last made herself a spliff.

“Like riding a bike.” She smiled.

“Are you serious about smoking that?” said Ralph.

“Yeah,” she said, “of course. Why not?”

He gestured toward the bridge. “But what if we get caught?”

“We will not get caught,” she laughed.

“How do you know?” he said.

She laughed again. “Because we won't.”

He frowned at her. “Christ, Jem, just think about it. Just think if we got stopped. They could take us into a station. They could keep us there for hours. And how the fuck would we explain that to the babysitter?”

“Well, given that the babysitter sold this stuff to me I don't suppose she'd have much to say at all. Oh, come on, look at us—do you honestly think that the police force of south London have nothing better to do with their time than pull in thirtysomething parents off the streets of Battersea for having a little smoke?”

She lit the spliff and she inhaled. Ralph looked at her forlornly. She looked at him wantonly. The smoke hit the soft lining of her lungs and burned. She coughed and laughed. “Jesus,” she said, “I've lost the knack. My poor lungs!” She passed the
spliff to Ralph, who eyed it, eyed Jem and then took it from her reluctantly. “Why are you doing this?” he said, inhaling.

Jem didn't say: “Because this is what we used to do when we were in love with each other and I want us to be in love with each other again.” Instead she grabbed his hand and said: “Come on, let's hop on a bus, let's go into Soho. It's not even ten!”

Ralph glanced down at the spliff in his hand and then up at his partner and Jem knew immediately that he did not want to hop on a bus and go into Soho with her.

Jem sighed. “Is that a stupid idea?” she asked.

Ralph shrugged. “Come on,” he said, holding out his hand for her, “it's late. Let's go home.”

Jem let her shoulders fall and acquiesced. Halfway back across the bridge, she flicked the burning spliff into the river below and watched it float away, a small white speck of nothing.

•  •  •

Jem pushed the door to her son's bedroom open a crack and peered through it. The room was dark, lit only by a small nightlight plugged into a socket above the skirting and the light from the hallway behind her. Blake was zipped into a pink sleep sack (at £30 a pop Jem had felt no need to invest in a new one after producing a boy child—he would never know). He had somehow managed to wedge himself into a corner of his crib against the (pink) crib bumpers and Jem swayed a little drunkenly into his room and pulled him back to the bottom of the crib. He stirred very slightly and rubbed at his cheek with a balled-up fist before settling back into a deep sleep. Jem stood straight and stared into his crib. Sober, she would have been out of here in a nanosecond, neurotic about the possibility of waking him, but drunk and vaguely stoned she was quietly hoping that he would stir, that she would have cause to pick him up and hold him to
her and soothe him home to sleep again. But he did not stir, he slumbered, and Jem stood above him and smiled and felt an ache inside her where a few days ago there had been another one, not slumbering and stirring but slowly, perfectly fading away.

She looked at her son and then she looked at her flat belly and then she looked at her son again. It hadn't been that bad, had it? Her time being pregnant with Blake? It hadn't been so awful nursing him in the night; it had been quite beautiful, in fact—the silence, the softness of it. And really, now, in retrospect, it hadn't taken so long to get to this point, to get to the point where she and Ralph could find time for each other again. So why had she been in such a desperate panic to stop her pregnancy? If anything she felt less close to Ralph since the baby had gone than she had beforehand. She felt tears rise up in her eyes, but she pulled them back. She did not want to have to explain tears to Ralph. She could not tell him that she might have been wrong. Instead she sucked it all in, the emotion, the rawness, the sadness, sucked it all back inside herself and headed for her bed.

Ralph was lying down. He was on his side, his back facing her side of the bed. He turned when he heard her come in and glanced at her.

“Where've you been?”

“Looking at Blake.” She smiled.

“Is he okay?”

She nodded. “He's gorgeous,” she said. And then she took off her clothes and didn't put on her pajamas. Instead she climbed naked into bed alongside her partner and spooned her naked body up against his seminaked body. They may not have had a laugh and gotten stoned and hopped onto a bus into Soho, but they could still salvage something valuable from their date.
She rubbed the tip of her nose against the bare skin of his back and she smelled him and he smelled good. She touched her lips to his skin and she felt herself, for the first time in a long time, properly aroused, not just pleasing her man, not just maintaining the status quo, not even just enjoying herself, but wanting him, wanting it, insanely.

She ran her lips up and down his back and into the crook of his neck, until finally, he turned toward her, onto his back and he put his hand into her hair and stared into her eyes and Jem leaned down to kiss him and suddenly his other hand was against her breastbone, pushing her away. And he whispered, into the soft darkness of their marital bed, “No, Jem, no. I can't.”

She raised herself to her knees and looked down at him. “What?” she gasped.

“I can't. I . . . just. It doesn't feel right.”

She sank to a kneeling position and felt the sweet new rose of her passion shriveling up.

“Sorry,” she said, “I don't get it. What doesn't feel right?”

“This,” said Ralph, gesturing at their nakedness. “I feel, wrong. I feel . . .”

Jem watched him, desperately hoping that he would somehow find the words from somewhere to explain his rejection of her advances. But words had never been Ralph's strong point. “I don't know,” he said finally. “I don't know. I'm just tired. That's all.”

Jem stared at him for a moment longer, wishing there was something she could say or do that would reverse the last two minutes of her life. Her skin crawled with humiliation. Her heart raced with embarrassment. It was not only the first time that Ralph had rejected her sexual advances; it was the first time that any man, full stop, had rejected her sexual advances. She felt raw and exposed.

“Fine,” she said, climbing from the bed and toward her pajamas on a chair in the window. “Fine.” She pulled on her camisole and her bottoms and she slipped back into the bed. “All those bloody months . . .” she wanted to say, “all those bloody months you put me on a guilt trip because I wouldn't have sex with you,” but then she stopped herself. He was punishing her, she surmised. This was his way of saying, you made me suffer, now don't expect me just to roll over and let you call the shots.

She pulled the duvet up around her shoulders and she turned away from him. She couldn't look at him. She couldn't talk to him. He had broken her in half, this new barely formed person she'd been trying to become. Tonight was the night that she was going to make sense of everything: of Joel, of the baby, of the trip to California, of getting married. It had all hinged on tonight. And now there was nothing left to see. The girl in the chiffon dress in the photograph faded from sight. The evening, the rebirth, the imagined night of spontaneity, sex and fun—it had imploded. Suddenly she was hard and full of resentment again.

She let hot wet tears take her painfully into sleep.

I
t was a warm May afternoon. Ralph had finished another painting and decided to celebrate by taking a walk and smoking three cigarettes, back-to-back. These days Ralph tried to limit his smoking very strictly to ten a day. One after breakfast, with a coffee. One ten minutes later to get his bowels moving. Two between breakfast and lunch, then one right after lunch. Then he was allowed two between lunch and teatime, one after tea and two between teatime and bedtime. There was never an opportunity to smoke three in a row. Three in a row was like a glass of Dom Perignon, a heavy-bottomed tumbler full of the finest ten-year-old malt whisky. Standing on his balcony puffing away would have felt a bit hollow, but walking through the streets of south London, the sun on his back, the world on the pavement, he felt like the king of the world.

It was just as he'd put his second cigarette to the tip of his third cigarette and drawn in the warm leafy smoke that he saw them.

Jem and Joel.

They were standing outside the playground. Joel had a pink scooter in one hand and with the other he was stroking Jem's arm. Jem had one hand on the handle of Blake's buggy and the two girls were involved in some kind of skipping activity behind them.

Ralph caught his breath and coughed slightly as the smoke went down the wrong way. He stamped the finished butt to the ground with his booted foot and moved behind a parked van, his hand over his mouth to mask his coughing. Peering from behind the van he could see that Jem and Joel were involved in some kind of rather intense conversation. Jem, it was clear, was engrossed in what Joel was saying and at one point she covered his hand on her arm with hers. They both stopped talking then for a moment and looked at the ground, then they looked up at each other and Joel said something and suddenly he was falling against Jem and Jem put her arms out to hold him and the two of them stood like that for a good ten seconds, Ralph estimated, before finally pulling apart. Then the man called Joel put one hand out and stroked Jem's hair with it and Jem's body language, which should at this point have recoiled in horror, seemed to curl toward him, her eyes lowered coquettishly. Then they smiled at each other and rather than saying good-bye and going their separate ways, they strolled together in the direction of Ask pizza restaurant, where Joel held open the door for Jem and the buggy and followed in behind her.

Ralph scuttled from behind the van and took a position opposite Ask, this time partially obscured by a phone booth. They'd taken a seat in the window. Jem was hoisting Blake into a high chair, a girl with a dark ponytail was handing out a fan of oversized menus. Everyone was smiling at everyone. If you didn't know better, Ralph thought, if you were just a stranger walking past, you'd be thinking: how nice, a family out for a teatime treat. (You might also think: what is that hot woman doing with that dweeb, but that was not really the point.) Ralph stood behind the phone booth for exactly twenty-eight minutes. He smoked ten cigarettes, back-to-back, and he didn't enjoy one of
them. He was going to wait until they left before moving along, returning home, but all the smoking and all the adrenaline had loosened him up inside. His bowels were wriggling with discomfort and fear, and he walked home at high speed.

•  •  •

“Nice afternoon?” he asked when Jem got home half an hour later.

“Yeah, lovely.”

“Good, what did you do?”

“Oh, the usual. Playground. Pizza.”

Ralph waited a beat, waited to see if Jem would offer the information, give him something innocent to grab hold of before he reached the worst possible conclusion.

“Just you lot?” he said.

He saw Jem pause for just a second before glancing down at Scarlett. She would not be able to lie in front of Scarlett, but he could tell she wanted to. “No, actually we bumped into Jessica in the playground, didn't we, Scarlett?”

“Yes. And we all went and had a pizza together and Jessica's dad let me eat his ice cream from his cake because he says he doesn't like vanilla.”

Ralph nodded and smiled at her. “Is Jessica's daddy nice, Scarlett?”

She shrugged. Scarlett was always the litmus test for the substance of people. She liked only about five people in the world, three of whom were her immediate family. If Scarlett liked someone it meant something. “Yes,” she said eventually, pulling at a black spiral of hair. “I think he is. He's got a nice voice.”

“A nice voice.”

“Yes, he sounds like Daddy Pig. Except . . . not so fat.”