My Best Friend's Girl (16 page)

Luke gave me a derogatory once-over. “Yeah, I can see that.”

“Right, so, Kingdom of the Snakes,” I said, “go on, then, Luke, take us to your leader.”

chapter 18

W
e spent most of the day like that, Tegan dictating the order in which we saw the animals, Luke and I discussing work in hushed tones and taking every opportunity to snipe at each other. Tegan was oblivious to the atmosphere between her two accompanying adults, happy to be surrounded by nonhuman creatures.

In the car back to Leeds Tegan came up with the idea of a picnic in the park. It was late afternoon and she was too buoyed up to simply go home—she wanted to cram as much excitement into the day as possible.

“How about we save the picnic for another time, sweetie?” I replied. “We’ll have a mini one when we get home.” At home, I could rid myself of the man next to me.

“O-OK,” she replied, disappointment in her voice. “Can Luke come?”

“If he wants to,” I replied, knowing he would. Knowing it’d be too much to hope for him to slink away.

“Do you want to come to our picnic at home?” Tegan asked the back of Luke’s head.

His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, and his face once again lit up with a genuine smile at the girl in the pink and lilac with her red flower in her hair. “That would be lovely, thank you, Tegan,” he said.

I let us into our flat and busied myself making the picnic while Tegan and Luke sat at the dining table playing. They made a hundred-piece jigsaw, and then Tegan got Luke to inspect her collection of ten classic cars. Next, Tegan got out her box of papers and her red plastic bucket of pens and pencils and they drew pictures of the animals we’d seen at the zoo. In the depth of their playing, the picnic was forgotten. I left the sandwiches, salad and pop beside them on the table and flopped onto the sofa to watch television. Every so often I’d glance up, see the pair of them: he, a grown man, bent forward, colored pen in hand, concentrating on his drawing; she a smaller figure concentrating just as hard on her work of art. He was taking this seriously. Had thrown himself into playing with Tegan with the same intensity he would devising a new marketing strategy for Angeles. Had it been anyone else, his interest would have been endearing, but because it was him, I decided it was nice that Tegan had someone her own mental age to play with.

The second the clock hit eight I flicked off the television, stood up and announced, “OK, Tiga, bedtime.”

“Do I have to?” Tegan whined before letting out a huge yawn. Her tiny face was pale with tiredness and her eyes were virtually shut.

“You can hardly keep your eyes open. Come on, bed.” I turned to Luke. “You’ll have to go, Tegan really does have to go to bed.”

“OK,” Luke said, putting down his red pen and standing up.

“Will you come back tomorrow?” Tegan asked Luke, her tired eyes fixed on him.

“If I’m allowed to,” Luke replied.

Two sets of eyes shifted to me. “Time’s ticking on,” I said, tapping my watch while neatly sidestepping the issue. I wasn’t going to be made the bad guy because I didn’t want to spend my free time with someone from work. Someone I didn’t even like from work.

“You have to ask Mummy Ryn if you can come back tomorrow,” Tegan informed Luke. Her mouth opened, gaping into a yawn, her tiny hands clenched into fists as she stretched into it. “She won’t get cross. Mummy Ryn never gets cross, not even when I painted on the wall.”

“Is it OK if I come back tomorrow?” Luke asked.

“If you’ve really got nothing better to do,” I replied, without looking at him.

“Nothing that can’t wait,” he confirmed.

Don’t do us any favors, eh, mate?
I thought. “Right, that’s settled. Bye then, Luke.” I moved to Tiga and picked her up from the chair. She clamped her legs around my waist, laced her arms around my neck and snuggled her face against my neck.

Reluctantly, Luke moved toward the door. “Bye, Tegan,” he said.

“Bye bye,” she whispered. “See you tomorrow.”

As the door shut behind Luke, I placed Tegan on her bed. She was like a floppy rag doll as I tugged off her clothes and replaced them with her red and white gingham pajamas. I pulled back the top sheet on her bed and helped her slip inside. Her face nestled down into the pillow, her hair lying in a wavy formation around her face.

“Na-night,” I said.

“Na-night,” she whispered.

I reached for the bedside lamp, ready to shut out the orangey-yellow glow that lit the room.

“You don’t like Luke,” Tegan said.

My hand held the cord to switch off the light. Maybe she hadn’t been as oblivious to our animosity as I’d thought. “He’s all right,” I said.

“I like him,” she stated.

“I know you do, Tiga.”

“Can he be my friend?”

If he must, I wanted to say. Instead, I held my tongue. Waited and waited…Soon her chest was moving slowly up and down in sleep. I waited a few more minutes, just to make sure she was asleep, then I slipped out of her dark room, pulling the door almost shut.

We’d had fun today. And she seemed to have forgotten how much I let her down yesterday. I flopped down onto the sofa, laid my head on the armrest and closed my eyes. Despite Luke, we’d had the first bit of fun since Adele left us. I thought again of Luke. Tall, handsome and incredibly charming—to Tegan. I had to admit, she’d had fun
because
of Luke. Tegan had taken to him almost instantly. She’d laid eyes on him and decided she wanted him around, a kind of love at first sight. Maybe there was good in him, somewhere beneath his arrogance and his dislike of me there could be a decent person. One I could warm to. If Tegan liked him, then maybe I could too.

I awoke and the house was shrouded in middle-of-the-night silence. People had crawled back from pubs and clubs and the other places they’d visited and were now settled for the night. I blinked, groggy and exhausted, confused about where I was. My face was damp, I realized. I raised my hand to my cheek, stroked away the clamminess of tears. I’d been crying in my sleep. Again. Seconds passed before I could fight my way through the fug of slumber to work out why: Adele.

I sat bolt upright. Tegan. Was the house, the world, so quiet because something had happened to her? I got to my feet, left the living room and went to Tegan’s bedroom door. Carefully, I pushed it open and poked my head in. Tegan was in the same position as I had left her—face in profile on her cloud-covered pillow, hair splayed around her, hands up beside her head. She was sleeping peacefully. At least it looked like she was asleep. It could be…I squinted hard at her, willing her to move, to make a sound, to let me know she was still with me. Finally she inhaled, then slowly exhaled. I exhaled too. She was all right. Still here.

I removed my head from her room, pulled the door back into place, then stumbled back to the living room to turn off the lights.

Being a parent was exhausting. How anyone with a child closed their eyes at night and went to sleep when the world was beset with danger, I didn’t know. How could you relax for a second when the fear that something might happen to your child was hanging over you?

I staggered to the bathroom at the end of the hall, looked into the mirror over the sink. My eyes were puffy from the crying, the skin on my right cheek was tight from lying on a damp, salty patch on the sofa armrest for so long.

The sleep crying had to stop. It was no good for my eyes, no good for my skin. No good for my mind because I woke up more exhausted than when I went to sleep.

Once I entered dreamland, I couldn’t focus on something else. Couldn’t ignore the guilt that shadowed my every thought. I’d let Adele die with unresolved issues between us. I’d let her go without allowing her talk. Anguish wrenched through me whenever I thought that Adele’s last moments on earth might have been filled with her wishing I’d let her explain. It ached physically to think that when she asked Nancy to tell Tegan she loved her and to tell me goodbye that for a flicker of a moment she wondered if I still hated her. If I still blamed her.

The thought that her last moments might have been consumed with those doubts because of my pride and stubbornness was so unbearable I couldn’t examine it too long. I had to shove it aside and away, bury it in thoughts of work and making our money go further and watching television and cleaning the flat. Anything to avoid the gut-wrenching, big-dipper feeling that I had wronged my best friend; that I had managed to mortally hurt someone I cared about.

Even if I couldn’t forgive her, I could at least have listened. Let her explain. Because I’d never believed she was in love with Nate when she slept with him. Nor that she even fancied him. Nate would’ve been too nice in Adele’s eyes; she wanted a bastard she could tame—and Nate, as she knew him, wasn’t in need of taming.

I did a bad thing in not giving Adele a chance to explain.
I stopped looking at myself in the mirror, couldn’t gaze at the face of someone so awful any longer.
I am a bad person. No matter what I do, I am a bad, bad person.

chapter 19

S
o, this is where all the cool kids hang out,” Luke commented as he reclined on my picnic blanket. He broke a brown bread chicken salad sandwich in two and slipped a section between his lips.

Luke meant it literally, of course. The last Saturday of the summer holidays, a few select members of Tegan’s playgroup had a picnic in Horsforth Park. They played games of rounders, ate food, drank pop and generally enjoyed themselves before the new school term started. I’d basked in the reflected glory of Tegan’s popularity. I’d never been part of the cool or popular anything, but Tiga was. The other children—Crystal, Matilda and Ingrid—were the core gang, and with their brothers and sisters, we ended up with nearly twenty children. My basking had lasted right up until Tegan demanded Luke’s number to invite him.

“Do we have to?” I’d whined.

“Yes, he’ll really like it,” she’d replied. He had, of course, accepted and said he would bring the food. He had more money than sense because it looked like he’d picked up his local Tesco and emptied several varieties of sandwiches, dips, crisps, sausage rolls, mini sausages, chocolate bites and biscuits into a picnic hamper. It was sufficient for everyone at the picnic with enough left over for dinner for the rest of the week.

Despite that, it hadn’t made me like him. There was very little my boss could do to endear himself to me. I was comforted by the fact that the feeling was mutual. Relations between us had declined in direct proportion to the amount of time we spent together. “I’ve never seen two people who dislike each other as much as you two,” Betsy commented after a meeting with Luke.

“It’s not my imagination, then, it is a two-way thing?” I asked.

“Too right! It’s not even that smoldering hatred that’s a cover for wanting to shag each other stupid, it’s actual, genuine hatred.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Did you wrong him in another life or something?” Betsy mused.

“Not that I can remember.”

“He’s perfectly pleasant to the rest of us…Why does he hate you so much?”

“He thinks I look like a dog,” I replied. My stomach flipped as I voiced this thought. I’d always known it, the look in his eyes the first time we met had told me so, but I hadn’t named it. Now I had, I couldn’t deny it. His sole reason for not liking me was he thought I was ugly.

The worst part was, I couldn’t leave him at work, couldn’t find a way to consign all thoughts of him to the walls of Angeles, because Tegan kept asking him to come back. Three Saturdays and two Sundays in a row he’d dropped by to draw or put together a jigsaw with Tegan. And the one weekend he couldn’t visit, he came by in the evening the following week. I suspected he’d started visiting because he wanted to check that I was treating Tegan properly, but now he just liked coming over to see her. Tegan hadn’t been this taken with anyone for as long as I could remember so I found it impossible to turn him away. I was stuck with him. I had grown to respect his friendship with my five-year-old. There was nothing about him that suggested he had an ulterior motive for hanging around, and while I didn’t leave them alone together, it was mainly because there weren’t too many places to go in my flat. Despite how much he disliked me, I could glean that Luke was one of the good guys. We restricted our sniping to work hours—outside of the nine-to-five we spoke very little. Or at all. Like now.

I lay back on the red, green and blue tartan blanket, propped up by my elbows, my legs outstretched and my head up so I could see the kids running around. Most of the other parents got involved with the game, were on a team with their child, hit and chased the ball, tried hard to score. When it came to that sort of thing, I was a backseat parent. “So, this is where the cool kids hang out,” Luke repeated.

“Yup, my kid is really cool,” I replied.

We lapsed into the silence that was usual when we saw each other outside of work. After a few minutes, he tried again, “So…”

If you add, “this is where the cool kids hang out” again, I will punch you
, I thought. But he didn’t. He left the sentence at that one word. That one, simple word: “So.”

“So…?” I questioned, turning to him. His lithe body, clothed in knee-length chino shorts and a white T-shirt, was also stretched out on his back, propped up by his elbows. His D&G sunglasses hid half his face.

Embarrassment swept briefly across his features. We had nothing good or even inane to say to each other. I returned my attention to the game. Tiga was wearing blue tracksuit bottoms with a white stripe down the side and a red T-shirt, and her blue baseball cap was pushed firmly down on her head. She stood near first base, her body poised to catch the ball when the pitcher threw it to the batter. I was so proud of her at that moment. Not only was she good at games, she was a natural at fitting in, and she threw herself completely into the activity—there were no half measures with Tegan, she gave one hundred percent to everything she did.

“Why does Tegan call you Mummy Ryn?” Luke asked.

I refocused on him. “Because I am. I didn’t give birth to her but she thinks of me as her mother.”

“I meant the Ryn part. Why Ryn and not Kamryn or even Kam?”

“When Tegan was tiny, people often called me Kam, which I hate.” The second the words left my mouth I knew he would call me Kam until the day I died. “And, I was always correcting them, saying, ‘Ryn. My name is Kam
ryn
.’ Tegan thought my name was Ryn because she heard me say it so many times. So when she started to speak she’d call me ‘Win’ then it became Ryn. And stuck.”

“That’s a good story,” Luke said; he even managed a small, genuine smile. “What do her friends call you?”

“I don’t know, ‘That Weird Lady Who Lives with Tegan?’”

Luke’s face creased as he laughed out loud, which made me laugh. We both laughed while looking at each other. Maybe he wasn’t so bad. “You know, you should smile more often,” he mused, looking at me. “Your smile suits you. And if you lost a bit of weight…”

My expression hardened as my grin evaporated. I jerked upright, raised my knees, hunching forward, trying to hide my frame. I stared down at the blanket, my face hot with embarrassment, my eyes burning with a desperation to start crying. He thought I was fat as well as ugly. But I didn’t understand why it hurt when this man said those things. I’d heard them all my life: overtly and subtly men had told me those things and I’d white-noised them. Made them insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But this man could hurt me. Was it because no one had been so blatant about disliking me in years? Was it because I was concentrating so hard on staying strong I had no real defenses against an attack of this nature?

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he justified, not recanting it: he might not have meant it the way it sounded, but he still meant it.

I hid my face and my hurt from him. I wasn’t going down this road again. It’d taken years for me to build up some confidence, to believe I was worth something, I didn’t need to let this man do this to me.

Trying to blank him from my mind, I glanced up just as a yellow ball whizzed through the air at me. I ducked my head away but Luke wasn’t so quick and the ball glanced off the side of his face, knocking his glasses askew before it landed on the blanket. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t have caused him anything more than the slightest sting.

Everyone from the game waited expectantly, their bodies frozen to see how Luke would react. He peeled off his sunglasses while raising a hand to his face, then he grinned at the players. Everyone in the game laughed, and Luke jumped up to his feet, picked up the ball. Throwing, “I’ll just return the ball,” in my direction, he sped off across the grass to join the game. Once he was gone my body unfurled as I relaxed. He had that effect on me, every time I was with him I was on edge, waiting for the next insult, for the next look. I lay down on my side, propped up on one elbow, watching Tiga. Every few minutes she would take her eyes off the game and seek me out. As we made eye contact a toothy smile would spread across her face, she’d lift her right hand, wave it briskly at me, wait for me to wave back and then return to the game.

There might be better ways to spend a Saturday, but at that moment, I couldn’t think of a single one.

We’ve got a long walk home
, I thought once the game had broken up. Tegan looked as if she was going to fall asleep where she was kneeling, helping me to pack up the leftover food. I was starting to wonder how we would get all this back without Luke’s help. He’d said, “I’ll be right back,” and had headed off in the direction of the park’s restrooms when the game had finished, and I was eager to leave before he returned.

Maybe I should just leave the hamper. I glanced at Tiga, her messed-up hair peeked out in unruly, random strands from under her blue baseball cap as she concentrated on resealing food in packets. There was no way she would let me leave behind something of Luke’s.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Brannon?” a female voice said. Tiga and I both glanced upward.

Beside us stood one of the mothers from the picnic, one of the people I often saw when I arrived at the school to collect Tiga. We’d only ever exchanged smiles on those days we made eye contact. She had a slender face with accentuated cheekbones, warm brown eyes and shoulder-length raven-black hair. She was a full-size version of one of Tegan’s friends.

“Mrs. Brannon?” she repeated.

I got to my feet, brushing bits of grass and dried dirt off my hands. “I’m not Mrs. Brannon. I’m Ms. Matika—Kamryn Matika. Tegan’s guardian.”

“I see,” she replied, although lines of confusion crisscrossed her eyes.

“It’s complicated,” I said. “And you are?”

“Mrs. Kaye, Della Kaye.” She paused. “I was wondering…You see, Matilda—I’m her mother by the way—she keeps asking if Tegan can come to her house, I mean, our house.”

“Of course,” I said, then realized I’d been hasty. Who was this woman? Where was their house? “I mean, Tegan’s never mentioned…” Tegan’s eyes were filled with apprehension as she stared up at Mrs. Kaye; anyone who hadn’t heard the conversation would think she was being told off by her headmistress. “Tegan?” Her fearful gaze switched to me.

“I know you’re really busy at your work,” Tegan deflected.

“I wouldn’t mind you going to your friend’s house,” I said. “You can go any time you want.” I turned to Mrs. Kaye. “Any time she wants. When would be convenient for you?”

“I was thinking,” Mrs. Kaye began, “Matilda and Tegan are best friends, what if I take Tegan when I pick up the girls and she stays with us for a couple of hours every afternoon until you come home from work? It’ll be easier for you when school starts again next week and the kids have to be picked up by four o’clock.”

“Erm,” I replied, hijacked by the kindness of the offer.

“Really, it’s no problem. We’d love to have Tegan over.”

“And you wouldn’t mind?”

“I look after six children already, one more won’t make a difference.”

Tegan was still looking fearful. Maybe she didn’t want to go to Matilda’s house, which was the real reason she didn’t mention it. “How about I talk it over with Tegan and then get back to you?”

Mrs. Kaye seemed pleased with this, then after giving me their phone number and saying her goodbyes, she walked away.

As I watched her leave, a heavy, lead feeling filled my mouth and weighted down on my chest. Why hadn’t Tegan asked me this? What else was she keeping from me?

I unfolded the blanket, sat down then patted the area of wool beside me. “Let’s sit and talk a minute,” I said, trying not to let my hurt come through in my voice. Tegan bit her inner lower lip as she crossed her left leg over her right and sat down.

“Tiga, you know you can tell me anything, don’t you?” I said. I thought about what I’d just said, I’d told her she wasn’t scared of me. “I mean, Tiga, I don’t mind if you want to go to your friends’ houses for a few hours after school. I mean, somewhere along the line you, you,” I licked my lips, “you can even stay over at their houses. You just have to tell me and we’ll arrange it.”

“But I know you’re busy,” she said in a small voice.

“That doesn’t matter. We’ll find a way around it. I mean it, if you want to go to your friends’ houses or…” My voice trailed off as I realized that she’d probably missed out on more than a few birthday parties because she hadn’t told me about them. “Or anything. Just tell me and we’ll find a way to get you there. OK?”

Tiga thought about it for a second, two, three…Then nodded. “OK,” she said, her voice even quieter.

“I’m not cross,” I clarified. “Not even a little.”

Her shoulders fell suddenly as she relaxed.

“Do you want to go to Matilda’s house after school, then?” I asked. It would save us a lot of money on the after-school club if she did. Plus I could relax a little about getting back after work—I wouldn’t take advantage of the Kayes’ generosity, but I wouldn’t want to disembowel the whole of the UK’s rail system every time a train was even slightly delayed. I’d have breathing room.

“Would I be ’lowed?” she asked.

“Yes, sweetheart, as long as you want to. And if you don’t want to, all you have to do is tell me and you can go to the after-school club as planned.”

“OK, I want to go.”

I grinned at her. More than anything I wanted her to have a friend apart from me. And not just Luke. Content as I was with my limited circle of friends and previously work-centered life, it’d be criminal to re-create it in a child as gregarious as Tegan. I had to get her to trust people, and after her recent experiences, that wasn’t going to be easy.

“Good, I’m glad,” I said to her decision to go to Matilda’s after school.

“You’re not sad?” Tiga asked.

“Not if you’re going to be happy. And I’ll make sure Mrs. Kaye knows that you have to ring me every day at four-thirty.” This was our agreement since the incident where I forgot her. Every day she rang me to find out what time I was going to pick her up, what we’d have for dinner and to tell me what she’d done so far that day. In other words, to make sure I never forgot again.