Any Way You Want Me (29 page)

Two hours and mucho purchasing later, we both needed a skinny latte and a sit-down. Mum had just bought a new handbag from a rather swanky boutique we’d stumbled upon, and was already fretting about the price.

‘So if your dad asks, it was twenty pounds in the sale, all right?’ she instructed me. She leaned back in her chair and stretched her legs out. ‘Oh, I just know what he’s going to say when he sees it. He won’t notice its lovely shape, or how glossy it is, or how well cut the leather is. He’ll say, “Mary, you’ve already
got
a bag. Why in God’s name do you need another one?”’

I shook my head and sipped my coffee. ‘They don’t get it, do they?’ I said, patting my carrier bags happily. ‘They just have no idea.’

‘“Mary, you’ve already
got
a pair of shoes,”’ she went on, warming to her theme, and imitating Dad’s Belfast accent to a T. ‘“Why in God’s name do you need another pair?”’

I slipped into broad Leeds to mimic Alex. ‘Sadie, you’ve already got a T-shirt. Why the fook do you need another?’

We were both giggling by now. ‘Next time he says it – tomorrow, I bet you – I’m going to remind him, Ted, you’ve already seen one football match. “Why in God’s name do you need to watch another one?”’ she joked.

I sniggered. ‘Yeah, and I’ll say, Alex, you’ve already
got
one newspaper. Why the fook do you need to read another one?’

‘Exactly,’ Mum said. Then, as a cheerful, green-eyed waitress laughed about something at the next table, her expression turned wistful. ‘I wonder what Catherine’s doing now,’ she said. ‘Will they have landed yet, do you think?’

I checked my watch. ‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe she’s gone, Mum. I know it’s not for very long, but . . .’

‘I know. I feel the same,’ Mum said before I could get the sentence out. ‘My little baby girl, half the way around the world.’

I fiddled with my cup and saucer. Should I say something about Lizzie? Or should I keep schtum? The waitress was laughing about something else now, and the memory of Lizzie’s pale-faced misery opened my mouth for me. ‘Actually, Mum, I think Lizzie could do with getting away from it all too, you know,’ I confided. ‘Have you spoken to her lately?’

‘A quick chat last night at Catherine’s party, but not properly. Why? What’s wrong?’

There was a difficult line to tread when it came to Mum and passing on sisterly gossip. I wouldn’t tell her everything – she’d be too worried, for starters, not to mention the fact that she would also be inclined to go straight over to Balham and wallop Boring Steve in the nads with her handbag, before she’d even got to the truth of the matter. Yet, at the same time, as a parent myself, I couldn’t bear the idea of one of my children being miserable and my not knowing about it. I felt duty-bound to at least point her in the right direction.

‘She seems a bit down at the moment, that’s all,’ I said in the end. ‘You know what she’s like, though – she never says much.’

‘No.’ Mum pursed her lips thoughtfully. ‘Tell you what, I’ll pop round in the week and take Felix off her hands for a while, so she can go and do something nice. Or perhaps she can tell me what’s bothering her.’

I grinned at her. ‘That’s a good idea. She’d love that. In fact, I’ll drop my two off as well – you can set up a crèche, Mum.’

‘I’d have them like a shot, Sadie – seriously! Any time, you know that. I love being with them. They’re so
good
, your two, aren’t they?’

As she squeezed my hand across the table, the thought that leaped unbidden into my head was: Mark. I could leave the kids with Mum and sneak out to . . .

Then, the stab in the guts again. No, I couldn’t. Absolutely not! Hadn’t I just been thinking that I would choose Alex? How could I have forgotten what had just happened?

I had to break the habit of Mark. Had to get him out of my head. I was horrified that I had even gone along that thought path in the first place.

The ringing tone of my mobile jerked me out of my turmoil.

‘Where are you now? We’ve thrown just about all the pebbles on the beach into the sea now, and Molly’s had three goes on the little train. How’s the shopping?’

‘We’re having a break in Daniella’s,’ I said. ‘Come and meet us; you can admire all the things we’ve bought.’ I winked at my mum, and started giving Alex directions.

After Alex had rung off, I noticed I had a new text message. From Mark.

I opened it up, my mouth suddenly dry.

Sorry, Sadie,
I read.
So very sorry. I love you. Mark xxx

‘What did he say?’ my mum wanted to know.

‘What?’ I replied, dragging my eyes away from the words. ‘Who?’

She was smiling across the table at me. No. She didn’t mean Mark. Calm down.

Sorry, Sadie. So very sorry. I love you.

How could he even say that? How could he say that he loved me when he’d just put me through that whole charade in the restaurant?

‘Alex, you great nelly.’ She laughed. ‘Remember him?’

I deleted Mark’s message and stuffed the mobile back in my bag. ‘He’s coming to meet us,’ I said, trying to cast my mind back to the phone conversation we’d had. Somehow it seemed hours ago. ‘He sounds absolutely knackered.’

She caught my eye and we both laughed. ‘Bless him,’ she said fondly. ‘You’ve got a good one there, Sadie. Wasn’t it lovely of him to sort all this out?’ She waved a hand across the coffee bar, obviously intending to take in the whole of Brighton, plus her, plus our hotel. ‘You’ve got a good one there,’ she repeated. ‘Of the three of you girls – I probably shouldn’t say this, but bugger it,’ she said, in a confidential manner. ‘Of the three of you girls, I feel happiest with the relationship you and Alex have got. Two equals, that’s what you are. You’re a good team.’

Sorry, Sadie. So very sorry. I love you.

‘Oh, thanks, Mum, that’s a lovely thing to say,’ I told her, finishing the rest of my coffee so I didn’t have to look her in the eye. If only she knew. Or rather, thank God she didn’t know. If she knew, it would probably be me on the receiving end of the handbag walloping. And that would be just for starters.

There was another text message that evening. Then another. Alex had taken me to dinner at Edward’s, which was, according to someone he worked with, the coolest place to be seen in Brighton. It was hidden away in a row of Georgian terraces the far side of Kemp Town and, unless you were in the know, you wouldn’t have looked twice at the outside.

Inside, the bar was cosy and intimate. It was the front room of the house, so perhaps had once been a drawing room or a dining room for the family that had lived here one hundred or more years before. Now, there were large painted canvases on the walls and a long, high, chocolate-brown sofa that ran around the entire left side of the room as you walked in, with small square tables and caramel-coloured suede cubes lined up in front.

The bar itself had an enormous mirror behind it, glass shelves, and subtle back-lighting. The whole effect was like something from
Sex and the City
. Of course, to sit there without ordering a Cosmopolitan would have been unthinkable.

I’d taken my phone along for Mum’s benefit, with the promise that if she had any problem getting the kids off to sleep, she just had to ring, and I would jump in a taxi and sort them out, pronto. Alex and I had just settled into a good people-watching spot in front of the bay window, when there was a familiar-sounding bleep.

‘Is that your mobile?’ Alex asked. He sniffed suspiciously at the lurid purple cocktail he’d randomly selected from the menu.

‘Yeah, hang on,’ I said.

I am so sorry,
I read.
I made a mistake.

‘Is it your mum? Should I go back?’ Alex wanted to know.

‘No,’ I said, deleting it quickly before he could lean over my shoulder and have a look. Go away, Mark. ‘It’s just a text from Becca to say happy birthday,’ I lied.

Hey, slick. I shoved the phone back in my bag. ‘What were we talking about? Weren’t you saying something about how great my new top looked?’

He smirked and looked straight at my tits. ‘It looks very, very great,’ he said.

‘Very, very great?’ I repeated. ‘Call yourself a sub-editor? What sort of a compliment is that?’

He sniggered. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You’re absolutely right. I was so transfixed by the elegance and beauty of the stitching that—’

I elbowed him. ‘No, you weren’t. You were looking at my tits.’

He held up his hands. A fair cop, guv.‘All right, all right. But show me a straight man who wouldn’t. They look absolutely spectacular. In fact . . .’

His hand hovered dangerously close to my chest, and I squeaked and ducked back quickly. Overt boob-grabbing was probably not the thing to do in Edward’s. ‘Oi,’ I said. ‘Save that for later.’

‘Go on,’ he teased. ‘Just a quick squeeze. No one will notice.’

‘They bloody will,’ I told him primly, edging back even further. ‘Keep both hands on the table, please. And one foot on the floor at all times.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, taking a tentative swig of his cocktail. ‘Bloody hell. Think I’ll stick to lager next time. Now, going back to your breasts. It’s just that no-bra thing, that’s all. Somehow they look bigger than usual. And it’s the way that they . . . move when you walk. Or when you laugh. Actually, they move when you do anything, now that I come to think about it.’

‘What, and you seriously expect me to believe that you weren’t thinking about it before?’ I folded my hands across my chest and did my best to look stern. He was practically dribbling at the way the conversation was going.

He sighed melodramatically, one hand clapped to his forehead. ‘God, I tell you what, Sade,’ he said, ‘we’re going to have to stop talking about your boobs, or I’ll have to drag you down to the beach for a quick how’s-your-father before we’ve even ordered our starter.’

‘Let’s talk about Mrs Thatcher instead,’ I put in quickly. ‘That should cool your ardour.’

‘Is that your phone going again?’ he said.

‘God, it is as well,’ I grumbled. ‘Anyone would think it was my birthday or something.’ I felt a quick flip of panic as I pulled it out of my bag. Was Mark going to keep this up all night? I wouldn’t even be able to switch the wretched thing off, as I needed to keep the line open for Mum.

Sadie, I’m going mad. Pls tell me u forgive me.

‘Lizzie this time, saying happy birthday blah blah,’ I lied, feeling my cheeks flush with the mixture of deceit and alcohol.

Alex stood up, rather awkwardly, I couldn’t help noticing. ‘Just going to the gents,’ he said.

I was so relieved to have a minute to myself that I refrained from making any jokes about him going for an Armitage Shank.

‘OK,’ I said. I watched him go, then frantically started texting Mark back.

OK. C U Monday. Don’t txt again.

I glanced at the message. Shit, the ‘C U Monday’ looked horribly like ‘CUM on’ at first glance. I deleted the whole thing, started again.

OK. It’s cool. Don’t txt again.

I pressed Send just as Alex came back, and then slid the phone back into my bag.

‘Alex and Sadie? Your table’s ready,’ said a man who looked so art-house and trendy it was hard to believe he was actually a waiter.

Alex took my arm and in we went.

Brighton had been so fresh and lively and fun – birthday lunches aside – that I was gutted to pack up our things and go home on the Sunday. The meal had been delicious: carefully stacked towers of treats on enormous white plates, circled perfectly by hard-to-pronounce sauces. The four-poster had been sexy: my wrists were still chafed and red-ringed from some over-enthusiastic tying up. Hell, the kids had even been well behaved for my mum. The whole weekend had been a blast of sea air into our London-choked lungs.

Leaving was a wrench. The smell of the car was enough to make me feel physically sick before Alex had even started up the engine. There was something about returning to London that I always found vaguely depressing. Perhaps it was the volume of traffic, even on a Sunday, the long, slow haul through the Croydon stretch of the A23 and all the stressed-out Sunday IKEA shoppers queuing up for miles. Perhaps it was the way that litter blew across the road in front of us whenever we stopped at traffic lights, the way that people leaned in doorways clutching their cans of Special Brew with nowhere else to go. Perhaps it was the narrowing of the streets, the dirt on the pavements, the gangs of hard-faced kids scowling out from under their hooded tops as we drove to our road after dropping off Mum. Suddenly Brighton, with its wide, far-reaching skies, the slow ssshhh of the grey waves onto the pebbled beach, and the bright lights on the pier, seemed very far away.

‘Back to reality,’ Alex commented, parking the car.

‘Mmmm,’ I said, glancing up at the front of our house and noticing just how grimy the windows were. ‘You can say that again.’

The phone started ringing almost as soon as we’d got in and I made a run for it, still holding Nathan. I was worried that it would be Mark again. After the last couple of days, nothing would have surprised me. In fact, it was rather a relief to see he wasn’t camped out on our front doorstep.

‘Hiya, Sadie – happy birthday for yesterday!’

‘Cat!’ I glanced at the photo of her on our mantelpiece in surprised delight. It was a picture that had been taken a couple of Christmases ago of me, Lizzie and Cat all wearing party hats and looking pink-cheeked and tipsy. ‘It’s so fab to hear your voice! I wasn’t expecting you to ring. Where are you?’

‘We’re here, we’re in Goa. Got in last night, Indian time. The hotel’s so sweet. I wasn’t going to ring for a few days, but I’ve got some news and I just couldn’t wait to tell you.’

‘What? What’s the news?’ I hoisted Nathan higher on my shoulder, pressing my face against him. I knew. I already knew from the way her words were bubbling excitedly down the phone line. My face was splitting into a smile before she’d even told me.

‘I’m pregnant! I can’t believe it, Sadie – it was a bit of an accident to be honest – I found out in the ladies’ toilets at bloody Heathrow airport, can you believe? Bought a test kit from Boots and . . . I was late, you see, you know me, never late. And anyway, I did that whole weeing on the white stick thing, and yeah, I’m pregnant! We’re going to have a baby!’