No Place For a Man (16 page)

Zoe thought about Angie, thought about going round and telling her that her little girl was a way-off nutter fast heading for death, but it would come out sounding as if it was Zoe herself who’d lost the plot. Anyway, surely Angie, even flaky, smiley, happy-as-a-sunflower Angie would notice that Emily was just bloody ill? Emily would be back for the holidays soon. From then on, Zoe decided, she wasn’t going to take on any more of her problems.

Zoe lay in her bed with her hands over her ears, wishing she was one of those sleepers that even bombs don’t disturb. She didn’t want to hear Natasha’s window sliding open. She didn’t want to hear the secret giggles and whisperings that were none of her business. She was having to sleep with her head under the pillow because Tom and Tash talked all the time. They thought they were being really quiet and she couldn’t hear any actual words (or anything else, thank God), but it was a bit like having a mad moth in the room. It just drove you crazy. They’d get caught one day, she was certain. The thought made her tremble and sweat. One day Tom would sleep through Tash’s alarm and Mum or Dad would come in to wake her for school and find him there in bed with her. She scrunched up her knees and waggled her toes in horror at what would happen then. It would be her fault. Somehow she’d get the blame, she was sure. If no-one had told her anything, there’d be nothing for her to know. Nothing to stress about.

‘Love the new pieces, darling. You’re tremendously good at this, you know.’ Jess was amazed: Paula rarely
commented on anything she’d written these days unless she’d gone over length and she wanted to check if Jess had any preference for which bits were cut. Even that, Matt had once pointed out when Jess was just beginning, was a privilege.

That’s what the subs are for. There’s never usually time to consult the writer. Once the copy is in it’s theirs and writers aren’t supposed to be precious about their works.’

‘You make it sound like I’m selling tea bags or something,’ she’d smiled, back in the days when she’d seriously agonized about which adjective, which participle, only to find that her careful infinitives were as often as not split by some trainee sub-editor on work experience.

‘Tea bags would be about right,’ Matthew had agreed, dispiritingly. ‘If you want creative agony you should go into fiction. Don’t look for it in journalism.’

Looking back, now, on that conversation, she should have picked up the hint that he was pretty jaded about his own job. All that contact with the fickle sensation-seeking press, the effort of trying to get them to put into print the gist of what his clients were trying to sell, only to know deep down that the world wasn’t going to give any idea, any product more than its few minutes of fame and none of it really mattered anyway.

Jess, feeling buoyed up by Paula’s praise, said to Matthew as they were clearing up from breakfast, ‘We haven’t had Paula here for supper for a long time. She likes coming here, she told me she enjoys getting a dose of family life without having to produce one of her own.’

‘It probably puts her off, that’s why. I bet she gets into her taxi and breathes a big “thank goodness” sigh.’
Matt laughed. ‘But OK, I’m up for it.’

‘What about this weekend?’

‘Sure, but just Paula? Can’t we dilute her with a few others?’ Matt pulled a face. He wasn’t sure about her, Jess knew. She was one of those women who couldn’t talk to a man without touching him, making little claiming dabs with her fingers all over his arm. She was a strong woman too, seriously keen on skiing and sailing: the dabs on the arm could be quite hard. The last time he’d met her, at the
Gazette’s
Christmas drinks party, he’d said he felt as if she’d left dents all over his skin.

‘No, not just Paula. She’d feel like an aunt being given duty food.’ Jess thought for a minute. ‘She’s between men, as it were, at the moment.’

‘I’m not surprised. She’s probably put them all in traction.’ Matt laughed. ‘I’d be happier if we have a sort of walkabout party, then I wouldn’t have to sit next to her and get injured.’

Jess considered for a few moments. The word ‘party’, sounding so jolly and spontaneous, always involved more expense than you thought it was going to. You started off with a list that said ‘booze and food’ and the next thing you knew you were looking up Delia’s canapés, wondering about hiring more plates and ordering crates of the sparkling stuff from Oddbins.

Matthew must have been thinking along the same lines. ‘What about a barbecue?’ he suggested. ‘I know it’s a long way to midsummer but the weather forecast’s good for the weekend. We could do Friday, early evening with the kids, have Eddy and maybe Wandering Wilf and a couple of the blokes round as well. I quite fancy that.’ He was looking thoroughly enthusiastic now. ‘I’ll shop. I’ll cook,’ he volunteered.
‘You can just get on with work and not have any reason to have a go at me for doing nothing.’

Jess didn’t honestly think Paula would much enjoy a barbecue, unless it was on a kind of irony level. Although she thought it was fun to sit in their kitchen and listen in to the mild family bickering that passed for conversation in the Nelson household, she was a woman of decidedly urban pursuits and preferred the sort of social gatherings at which she could wear very high-heeled shoes with bejewelled and minimal straps. Jess was quite well aware that Paula’s idea of an alfresco feast would be having coffee and a Danish beneath the chic heat lamps outside the Bluebird café on the Kings Road. Nor was she sure about Eddy, who still was of the belief that as he’d been a rock star he must therefore be irresistible to any woman he set his sights on. Paula, being still under forty (just), would probably never have heard of him and might well cut him dead with an icy sneer. On the other hand, Matthew was showing more enthusiasm for a slice of home life than he had since the Redundancy Day and besides, she thought, Paula knew a lot of people in the newspaper business. Loosened up by plenty of wine and with Matthew at his most hospitable and charming, Paula might just have heard of some freelance work going …

‘OK, let’s do that then. And we’ll have Angie over as well if she wants to come. Luke and Emily will be just back from school and I know she likes them to see our lot. For some reason she has them down under “suitable”.’

‘That’s only because they don’t go to Briar’s Lane. She’s a typical first-generation snob,’ Matt chuckled. ‘She wouldn’t care if they mugged old ladies and had
the Grove franchise for cocaine dealing as long as they speak nicely and say please and thank you.’

Matthew ripped a page out of one of Zoe’s abandoned maths books and started making a list. Jess looked over his shoulder at what he’d written. ‘Booze, more booze and food.’

‘Mmm, that should just about cover it.’ She grinned at him.

The lad, Tom, was taking boxes out of the old Sierra’s boot and transferring them to a scruffy white Nissan Micra parked on the edge of the allotments. From the way he was carrying them it was obvious they were on the heavy side. George carried on with the weeding and pretended he wasn’t watching him. They seemed to be ordinary cardboard supermarket boxes, labelled for things like bananas and baked beans. He’d have worried if the labels had been for new hi-fi equipment, mobile phones, anything like that. So far he hadn’t had to know anything
tricky
about the boy and he wanted to keep it that way. If Tom was in the business of liberating goods from the rich to redistribute to his impoverished self then it was best not to know. He felt he understood him, understood that some people don’t want to live with their families, just couldn’t face it. You read about the reasons for that every day in the papers. With young boys it so often tended to be about stepfathers, men who wouldn’t share their woman with her son and mothers who feared a lonely, near-destitute time of it if they took their boy’s side – for after all, a teenager would be moving on soon anyway, wouldn’t he?

Living in the old car, with George keeping an eye on him, had to be better than living with the old winos
under the bridge by the railway and the kid seemed to be able to cope without whinging, without unduly suffering and without spending his days hanging round Leicester Square either busking or begging or risking his life as a rent boy.

‘Begging’s degrading,’ Tom had said when George had brought up the subject, in a roundabout and generalized sort of way, while the two of them were taking a break from planting out the carrots. ‘Busking’s OK, at least you’re offering a service. People can take it or leave it. I’m not musical though.’

‘Me neither,’ George had agreed, though he’d wondered if it was true. He liked music, he could sing well enough and remembered, note-perfect, pieces he’d heard from years back. Tom might be the same, just another kid who hadn’t come across the opportunity to take it up, or any other skill that might give him a respected place in the world. Zoe and Natasha and Oliver, they’d been given opportunities by the dozen, everything on a plate like a sort of activity cheese-board: ballet and gymnastics, swimming, riding and sailing. Oliver had joined the London Scottish juniors for rugby training and Zoe, after a flu-ridden afternoon spent on the sofa idly watching the Olympics on TV, had briefly taken up fencing. By the time they were ten they’d tried out piano, violin, guitar and flute, giving all of them up in a petulant strop when they found they weren’t instant experts. Oliver kept the guitar up for a while, getting the hang of it sufficiently to enable him to strum it therapeutically when he wanted to do the lone-teenager thing of skulking in his room. The way music education was these days, there might be a thousand potential Jacqueline du Prés out there wasting their talent for the sake of a couple of recorder
lessons and the presence of an old piano in the corner of the home to thump out a few first notes on. It was the same with cricket, he thought as he watched Tom cramming the boot lid of the Micra down on the last of the boxes. If just the few rich prep-school kids got to learn the game, and the state-educated lot only got to have a go if the school field hadn’t been sold for executive housing or to put up a mobile phone mast, it didn’t provide much of a pool of choice for the next decade’s England eleven. No wonder the current middle-order batting was rubbish.

‘You moving house?’ he called out as Tom wandered back towards the Sierra.

‘Just got some things to take somewhere,’ Tom replied. He didn’t look old enough to drive, George thought. He looked a good couple of years younger than Oliver. And where did he get the car?

‘The car’s my brother’s in case you were wondering.’ Tom sidestepped the suspicion before George could voice it.

‘But does he know you’ve got it?’ George asked.

‘He will when he gets home.’ Tom grinned cheekily. ‘But he’ll get it back.’

‘I won’t ask about a driving licence.’ George turned back to the weeds that hid among the spinach.

‘You can if you want.’ Tom shrugged, then said, ‘You’ve missed a few over there. Give us the hoe, I’ll get them.’

Matthew, ambling across the square in the direction of the High Street and the friendly Italian greengrocer, almost didn’t recognize Natasha coming towards him with one of her friends. He’d certainly noticed her, the long slim legs were quite unmissable, leading in one
direction to a skirt that was surely short enough to merit detention at school and in the other to incongruously clumpy shoes that gave her a childlike fragility. She hadn’t seen him; she had her arm linked through her friend’s (Cathy? Carla?) and they were leaning in towards each other, laughing at some private joke, oblivious to everyone on the street. It was one of those shock moments that children land on you, he realized, as if they do a sneaky extra amount of maturing in the night and you’re suddenly faced with an image for whom you had to fast-forward the mental picture from someone five years younger. Oliver had done that all the time, he remembered, but then boys did – they grew so frighteningly fast which, he thought, perhaps accounted for the frequent look of bewilderment on the adolescent male face.

‘Hi Dad!’ Natasha detached herself from her friend and dashed over the last few yards of pavement to kiss Matt. He felt deeply touched that she wasn’t too embarrassed to do that. ‘You remember Claire, don’t you?’ she said.

‘Hello love. Yes of course I do. How are you, Claire?’

‘Fine thanks Mr Nelson.’

‘Call me Matt, please. Otherwise I feel old.’

‘OK.’ Claire smiled, a long, slow, perfect-toothed smile. She was going to be a stunner, Matthew recognized; they both were. For a second or two he imagined the pair of them out at night, in a pub, in full pulling-power make-up and wearing little string-strapped dresses and the kind of silly gorgeous shoes that had to be kept on with will power. It wasn’t a comfortable picture. This was his daughter and the best friend he’d known since she was eleven and submerged in a school uniform bought for several years of
growing into. He had one of those blood-rushing moments, where he could feel the swift approach of the day he had to realize that some other male being had permanent priority in Natasha’s affections. It was surely still a long way off, but the day wasn’t as distant as he’d have liked.

‘Gotta go. Ring me.’ Claire and Natasha kissed each other like lunching ladies and Claire moved away. ‘Bye
Matt
!’ she called, looking back and he wondered if he was imagining a bit of flirting impertinence in her voice.

‘So Dad, where were you going?’ Natasha put her arm through his and they walked on along the broad pavement in front of the shops.

‘Buying supplies. We’re having a barbecue on Friday night. Mum’s boss Paula’s coming and I’m doing the cooking.’

‘How typically male!’ she mocked. ‘What are we having, charred dinosaur?’

‘I can cook. You know I can. I thought we’d have some little chicken kebabs marinaded in a sort of pineapple and chilli thing and then … well down at the Leo the other day the lads and I came up with this upmarket fast-food idea. I’ve just had a word with them and we thought we’d try out a few recipes, see if anyone thinks the idea’s marketable.’

‘What, like McDonald’s? Mum won’t want that.’ Natasha’s face was a vision of scepticism.