After the Party (6 page)

Jem's hair was loose, apart from a small diamanté clip to the side of her parting which she'd contemplated momentarily before leaving the house—at what age should a woman stop wearing things in her hair, particularly sparkly things?—but decided, on balance, that she wasn't forty yet and that maybe one day when she was forty she'd wish she'd worn more sparkles in her hair when she was thirty-eight.

She was glad of the diamonds in her hair now, as she approached the man called Joel walking toward her, his girl, Jessica, careering toward them determinedly on a small pink scooter. Jem had made little effort with her wardrobe this morning:
skinny jeans, zip-up hoodie, sheepskin boots and a huge knitted scarf. The fact of a small baby attached to her body added little to her overall allure, she imagined, but maybe, just maybe, the touch of glamour in her hair would provide enough of a distraction.

She questioned her need to look pretty for a strange man. And then she questioned her lack of physical interest in Ralph. Did it mean that she didn't love him anymore? Did it mean that she wanted to be with someone else? She considered the question for a second or two and decided that no, it just meant that she wanted someone to notice her and see her for what she used to be rather than what she'd become.

The gap between the two sets of people was growing smaller and Jem needed to decide how to approach the oncoming moment. Should she acknowledge their close encounter of last week by being extra fulsome with her greeting, or just revert to her old-style nod and 50 percent smile? She stole a look at him and then made a show of rearranging Blake's hat. Joel really was a most unspectacular-looking man, almost bland, but clearly, if the rapid pulse of her heart beneath Blake's warm body was anything to go by, he had a certain something.

Joel and Jessica closed upon them. There was, in Jem's opinion, too much space between father and child, especially as the pavement had a slight downward camber to it. She would not feel comfortable if that was her small child looping side to side across the paving stones, inches from the curb on occasion.

She could see concern start to etch itself onto Joel's face and for a moment felt a flicker of relief: there would be no encounter, he would pass them by, distracted by his daughter's reckless scootering, and Jem would be able to breathe properly again. But instead Jessica, looking up and seeing her small friend
Scarlett, broke out an enormous smile, cried out, “Scarlett!
Scar
lett!” and lost all concentration and came off the pavement between two parked cars.

“Oh, Jesus!” Joel abandoned his usual soft-shoe shuffle and broke into a long-legged gallop. “Oh my God!” Jem ran forward, forgetting that she had fifteen pounds of baby on her chest. An oncoming car swerved gently to avoid the pink scooter, which had rolled into its path. Jessica wailed.

Joel scooped her up from the gutter with one strong arm, picked up the errant scooter with the other. He held her on his lap and pulled her fine blond hair from her cheeks. “Jessie, Jessie, Jessie, what were you thinking? What were you
doing
?”

He glanced up at Jem, his expression a mix of relief and embarrassment.

“Is she all right?” asked Jem.

He pulled back her bangs and looked into her eyes. “Are you okay, pops?”

She wrinkled her nose and sniffed. “My knee hurts,” she cried.

Jem breathed a sigh of relief. A hurt knee, considering the alternatives, was a glorious thing indeed.

Joel was flustered, making too much of the hurt knee, avoiding Jem's gaze. She could tell he was mortified, not just by what had happened, but by the fact that Jem had witnessed it; all dads knew that their parenting skills were being judged constantly, not only by their own wives but by every mother they passed on the street, in this case quite literally. Men spent much less time imagining their children dying than women, which was, Jem felt, both a good thing and a bad thing, but on this occasion, clearly, he could have done better.

He looked up at her and smiled. “Oops,” he said.

Jem smiled back. “I have to say, I was half expecting that to happen.” She smiled again, not wanting to come across as hectoring.

“Yup, well . . .” he tailed off, gently bringing Jessica to her feet.

“Let's have a look at that knee, shall we?” said Jem.

Jessica rolled up the leg of her jeans and Jem and Joel peered at it. It was scraped and raw and showed the beginnings of a bruise, but was not bleeding.

“That's not a very big ow,” Scarlett interjected haughtily from her stroller.

Jessica looked at her crossly, her cheeks streaked with tears. “But it
hurts
!” she wailed, throwing herself against her father's legs and howling into them. Jem and Joel threw each other a look of amusement.

“Okay, pops,” he soothed, stroking her hair, “let's get you home. Let's go home and make you a nice big cup of hot chocolate, eh? Would you like that?”

Jessica nodded her head up and down against his legs and Joel smiled at Jem again.

There was a moment's silence. Joel touched his dry lips with the tip of his tongue. “I saw you,” he said, “the other day.”

Jem flinched slightly, feeling exposed. “Oh, yes . . . ?”

“Yes, on the tube.”

“Ah, yes,” she feigned a slow-dawning memory.

“You were . . .” he made a gesture with his shoulders and arms that Jem thought might have been suggestive of a jacket.

“Smart?” she asked.

“Well, yes, smart, not that you're not always . . .”

“No, actually, I'm not always, very rarely, in fact.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Yes,” she continued, knowing that it was very much time to say good-bye and be on her way, but wanting him to know something about her anyway. “It was my first day back at work.”

“Oh,” he replied, his eyebrows raised, “maternity leave over then?” He gestured at the wriggling Blake.

“Kind of. I'm only doing the odd day, just here and there, when I can squeeze it in. And what about you?”

“Oh, kind of the same really. The odd day, here and there, when I can squeeze it in. And a kind of rolling, ongoing maternity leave the rest of the time. Heh.” He smiled and rubbed the back of Jessica's head again.

Jem wanted to ask him more, find out what he did for a living,
here and there
, why he looked after his daughter, if he had a wife, where he had been, where he was going, but her daughter, with more sense than she had, saved her from herself.

“I want to go now, Mummy, can we go now, Mummy, now, Mummy?”

They smiled at each other apologetically. “Well, yes, you're absolutely right, of course,” Joel said to Scarlett, who looked mildly embarrassed to be spoken to by a strange father. “Time for us to go too. Time for hot chocolate. And Barbie Band-Aids.”

Jessica gripped his hand and smiled up at Jem. “What's your name?” she asked.

“She's called Jem,” Scarlett called from her stroller, like a cantankerous old lady in a Bath chair. “Jem is her name.”

“That's a pretty name,” said Jessica.

“Why, thank you, Jessica, and so is yours.”

Jessica smiled shyly and then they both turned to leave, father and daughter, hand in hand, homeward bound, for hot chocolate and soothed knees.

“Can we go now, please?” moaned Scarlett.

“Yes, sweetheart, we're going now,” she replied.

“Did that Jessica nearly die?” she asked thoughtfully.

“Well,” said Jem, “she was going a bit too fast on her scooter and her daddy wasn't really paying enough attention but it could have been a lot worse.”

“Is he a bad daddy, then?”

Jem smiled. “Yes,” she laughed, “he's a rubbish daddy.”

“Not like mine, then?”

“No,” Jem sighed, “no. Not like yours.”

“'Cause my daddy's the bestest, bestest, bestest daddy, ever, ever, ever.”

Jem smiled again. And then, as she walked, as the distance between them grew out again and the length of time she would have to wait until she saw him again increased, the smile fell slowly from her lips.

•  •  •

When she was younger, Jem had had a recurring dream. In this dream she walked down a quiet street, alone, under a full moon. In this dream she stopped outside a house and glanced down into a window just below street level and through that window she saw a man with a neat skull, facing away from her, smoking a cigarette. It was, though she didn't know it at the time, a glimpse of her future, it was a glimpse of the man she would meet and fall in love with and live happily ever together with. It was a glimpse of Ralph. She had dreamed him before she'd met him. What more assurance could a girl want that the man she was with was the right man than to have a string of vivid precognitive premonitions?

These sorts of things had happened to her when she was young, when her head was light with indefinites and nebulas, when her world was floaty and haphazard and totally lacking
in any form of ballast. She'd been able to open her mind and imagination to the foibles of the future, she'd had time to analyze her dreams, and her life had been unstructured enough to allow for fortuitous meetings and romantic serendipities. Not now. From the moment Scarlett had been handed to her in the hospital three years ago her life had been firmly pinned down, like tiny weights inserted into the hem of a flyaway dress. It was still a pretty dress, but it no longer flipped out wantonly at the edges, it didn't ruffle in the wind, it hung straight and serious, a grown-up dress, a modest dress. Jem didn't mind this sudden straitening of her existence. She'd been expecting it. She was ready for it. If anything, she'd expected motherhood to curtail her essential spirit more than it actually had.

But now it was time to search inside the fluff of her head again, see what her unknowing mind had to say about dream men who turned into unsupportive partners who mocked your job, left you with all the cruddy chores, pestered you for sex and then thought it okay to disappear to America for weeklong birthday parties, what it had to say about innocuous crushes on strangers who made you blush and how you squared the whole cycle of falling in and out of love with the reality of a three-year-old in a stroller telling you how much she loved her daddy, because she was, she suddenly realized, faced with finding an answer to a terrifying question:
If Ralph and I can't find a way to reconnect with each other, then what the hell happens next?

J
em turns the key uncertainly in the lock of Ralph's front door. She has never used this key in this lock before, although the key has been hanging from a peg in her kitchenette for months. The kids are with Lulu, thoroughly exhausted after a birthday party in a soft play center in West Norwood. Lulu is giving them lentils, beans and brown rice for their supper, the only dish that all four of them will eat, mainly so that they can have a farting competition afterward.

Jem pushes open the main door to the house and feels a chill against her skin. The communal hallway is large and under-furnished, piles of unclaimed junk mail sit on a crude MDF shelf nailed into the wall, and a bike, divided into two parts and folded in on itself, rests against the wall, tethered to a water pipe. The front door of the ground-floor flat is painted turquoise and has a “Beware of the Dog” sign taped to it. Jem can hear an animal growling ominously from behind it.

She takes the dun-colored steps up to the first floor and inserts the next of the two keys into the white door there. The door has four dimpled glass panels in it and a vertical chrome letter box. She inhales greedily before she pushes open the door,
taking in extra air to see her through the next moment or two of her life. She has been to this flat on only three other occasions and each time it was full and alive with her children and their father. Now it is empty, and Jem is not entirely certain of what she will find on the other side of the door.

It is seven days since she last spoke to Ralph. It is seven days since he was in his car, headed somewhere dark and mysterious, and it is two hours since he was due once more at Lulu's house to collect Scarlett and Blake. Jem has been oscillating crazily between anger and fear. She is angry in the moments when she looks at her children and tries to imagine what there could possibly be out there in the big wide world that is more alluring, more compelling than being with them. And then she is fearful in the moments when she knows there is nothing and that the only thing that could be keeping Ralph from his children is foul play, madness or tragedy.

Ralph has not been answering either of his phones, he has not been in touch with his father and he has not been in touch with his friends. This morning Jem was even moved to email Smith, in California, to see if he knew anything about the whereabouts of the errant Ralph. She has yet to hear back from him.

Ralph gave her his keys a few months ago,
not
so that she could let herself in in the event of his disappearing off the face of the earth, but in her capacity as his nearest neighbor, in the event of his locking himself out. It was Lulu's idea to use it. “Go,” she said, as the hour of Ralph's promised reappearance and collection of his children came and went, “go now. Leave the kids here. It's lentils and farting tonight—they'll be fine.”

Jem peers into the hallway and moves a large pile of mail to one side with her foot. The flat smells bare and unlived in, slightly damp. Ralph's shoes and sneakers sit in a row on
a wooden shelf outside the living room. She glances at them and feels a wave of tender sadness.
Ralph's shoes
. She's always had a thing about Ralph's disembodied footwear. When they'd shared the flat in Almanac Road, she would anthropomorphize his shoes when he was out. Shoes were such intimate things when they were disconnected from their wearers. When she was younger, Jem had used the “empty shoe” test to judge whether or not she would want to sleep with a man. She would look at his shoes, then imagine them empty by the side of her bed the next morning. More often than not, this would be sufficient to extinguish any misplaced sexual interest. It had been the opposite with Ralph's shoes. Every time she saw them she felt a glow of warmth and desire, and when she'd awoken the morning after their first night together and seen them there, his shoes, separate from him, the insides worn smooth with the imprint of his socked feet, she'd felt complete.