One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (13 page)

Interest was proving slow to develop, and actual bookings were worryingly thin on the ground. Gavin blamed this on the frustrating inability to fully convey what kind of holiday experience the resort had to offer. Simone wasn’t so sure, reckoning the failure to fully convey what people would be letting themselves in for might be the only reason anyone had been daft enough to book at all. And despite his continued profession that time and bloody‐
word‐
of‐
fucking‐
mouth would ultimately prove the resort ‘a money‐
rig’, Simone suspected Gavin had begun to suffer his own pangs of doubt, most clearly manifest in this school‐
reunion nonsense. Admittedly, it was something he’d often talked of organising, but in Simone’s opinion, the reason he’d never actually done so before was the on‐
going thought that if he waited another few years, he’d be even more impressively successful. Far more than the hosting opportunity afforded by this unique and available venue, she guessed the reason he’d bitten the bullet now was the secret fear that this might be the last time he could play king of the castle.

One angry dwarf right enough.

Gavin had, as the Americans might say, ‘some issues’ regarding his schooldays.

Simone had known him since pre‐
nursery age, their mothers being sufficiently close friends for each other’s children to call them ‘auntie’. So although Gavin wasn’t literally the boy next door, the pair of them did have that ambiguous childhood pseudo‐
cousin status, which diminishes through the primary‐
school years but can kick back in when mid‐
teen awkwardness renders everyone else of the opposite sex an unapproachable alien.

No‐
one would say Gavin was bullied at school; at St Michael’s, all but a select few behemoths were subject to violence and ridicule on a rotating and fairly equal basis. He didn’t find himself singled out for doings, like the unfortunately effeminate Martin Clark or the loathsome and suicidally obnoxious Kenny Collins. Neither did he suffer more than the average volume of verbal abuse, such as was levelled at Tommy Milligan for his academic prowess or Paddy Greig for his apparent aversion to modern toiletries. In fact, Gavin didn’t stand out for
any
reason, and that was the root of the problem.

He wasn’t a hard‐
man like Davie Murdoch; he wasn’t a great footballer like Charlie O’Neill; he wasn’t trendy and good‐
looking like Barry Cassidy; he wasn’t funny like Ally McQuade; he wasn’t a brainbox like Tommy Milligan. He was just Gavin Hutchison, skint in the currencies that purchased popularity, notoriety or even merely distinction. An unremarkable wee guy to whom nobody paid over‐
much attention.

People might remember him as quiet, probably because they didn’t recall much of what he said. They might also assume he was shy, and maybe he had been a little, but just because Gavin was never in the limelight didn’t mean he wasn’t jealous of those who were. In truth, Simone now knew Gavin had craved the limelight – he just hadn’t had any means of attracting it.

He’d made a bid for cred at primary school by trying to get himself nicknamed ‘Hutch’, in the days when David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser reigned supreme over the Saturday night viewing schedule. None of his classmates cooperated. Kids grasp every stick they can to beat each other, so an irretrievably uncool handle like ‘Gavin’ was not a handicap they were prepared to relieve him of. Paul Stark got to be ‘Starsky’, but Paul Stark was in the school team
and
he had a Raleigh Grifter.

Brainbox, hard case, beauty, athlete, psycho, slut … in every school there would always be those who achieved prominence for certain remarkable properties, good or bad, but only within that limited context: both of circumstance and of age. For that reason, social microcosm that it might be, school was no reliable predictor for later life, not even simply on a physical level. Simone’s now head‐
turning friend Alison had once been a fifth‐
year ugly duckling like herself, while conversely (and with not a little
schadenfreude
), she had seen the adolescent faces, bodies and dress‐
sense of certain others fail to realise the early‐
teen promise that had once granted them unassailable in‐
crowd credentials. And, of course, there were those who found success – even fame – in the real world following comparative anonymity at school (Matthew Black, she remembered, had always been well behind Ally McQuade in the class‐
comedian stakes). This was often due to late development, but sometimes it was because school had offered no vehicle for these people’s talents. Gavin, clearly, fell into this latter category, ‘travel industry visionary’ not having been one of the archetypes in
The Breakfast Club
. However, the difference between him and everyone else who made their mark later in life was that
they
never looked back.

He hadn’t always been that way: his pursuit of success was not driven by a crusade in search of self‐
vindication. Rather, it was his success that indirectly drove him to start looking back in, if not exactly anger, then at least ill‐
concealed indignation. Simone didn’t remember Gavin as being a particularly egotistical teenager, adolescent or even ‘young man’, but when the money and the status began to accumulate in his mid‐
twenties, his sense of self‐
importance started growing in proportion. Then out of proportion.

It was as though his late‐
blooming ego had back‐
dated itself, expanding to claim his past because there wasn’t enough room left for it in the present. Grown used to people taking him
dreadfully
seriously, he became retrospectively outraged at the indignity, disrespect and – worst of all – lack of recognition endured by the younger Gavin. Consequently, he began to harbour a resentment towards all the people who had, back then, failed to appreciate what a remarkable person Gavin Hutchison was. And this number included – perhaps not as bizarrely as it might seem – himself: the self who’d put up with all that crap, the self who’d so under‐
represented his potential, and, most loathed of all, the self who’d been content to land Simone Draper when he could have done a lot better than that.

She and Gavin had started dating over that summer between when she finished fifth year at St Mick’s and started at uni. The remnants of that one‐
time pesudo‐
cousin status had probably made it easier for him to ask her out, and certainly easier for her to accept: the whole boyfriend‐
girlfriend thing seemed very daunting at that age, so the fact that they were pals made being stumbling beginners that bit less awkward. In fact, it was quite exciting really, as well as pleasantly flattering. She hadn’t imagined anyone was crying himself to sleep at night over Simone Draper, certainly not the guys she’d had her own curious thoughts about, such as Andrew Reilly (already driving, already seeing the very gorgeous Laura Heaton from Auchenlea High) or Matthew Black (
far
too wittily cerebral to take any interest in a dweeb like her). Gavin wasn’t the man of her dreams, but she knew she could do a sight worse too. She realised that having never previously been made to think of him that way, she did actually find him quite attractive, but more importantly she enjoyed his company and he clearly liked her, which was what truly made her feel good.

No thunderbolts, though. No shooting stars.

She’d thought about that the night before their wedding. No thunderbolts, no shooting stars. She’d never been swept off her feet, never met that tall, dark and handsome stranger, never been consumed by some passion that meant the world made no sense without
him
. But then who did any of that really happen to? What she did have was a good man, someone who loved her, someone who’d been a faithful companion on the road they’d travelled so far, and would be on the longer one ahead.

They’d known each other since they were toddlers – perhaps they were always meant to be together. Perhaps all that passion and pyrotechnics stuff was just people getting a concentrated dose of the sense of togetherness she and Gavin had built over years.

Yeah, right. Shame no‐
one told him that.

The affairs started soon after the twins were born. Golly, what a surprise. He’d hit that ‘Oh Christ’ realisation so many new fathers go through when they see living, binding proof that this marriage business is now for real. But what made it worse for Gavin was that this realisation dawned at the same time as his financial success. The moment at which he found himself with the money, the respect and the kudos to attract all kinds of women was also the one at which he found himself tied down to dull wee Simone, plain of face and sagging round the middle following her recent dual tummy‐
tenancy.

It was always the glamorous types he went for. Simone would think of them as bimbos but they usually weren’t. They tended to be career women he met through work: attractive, intelligent and single. After the initial hurt of finding out he was cheating, that was what made it easier to feign ignorance, hide the pain and think of the twins. He wasn’t going to run away with any of them: he wasn’t fucking them because he loved them, he was fucking them because he wanted to feel like a guy who could bed attractive, intelligent single women.

He didn’t love her either, though: that was increasingly clear. He even stopped buying her flowers, once the guilt‐
tinged giveaway that he’d been a naughty boy on his latest foreign trip. Not, of course, that there weren’t plenty of other giveaways. Discretion wasn’t something Gavin had ever mastered, or if he had he’d evidently thought Simone too stupid for it to be worth the effort, a misapprehension she’d admittedly worsened through pretending not to notice. In truth she’d thought she could get used to it, even that in time he’d get over it, his childhood inadequacies one day finally compensated. She knew that sounded dippy and pathetic, but when you’ve given up your job and there are two toddlers at your feet, it’s hard to see yourself as spoiled for options.

Nonetheless, it still
was
dippy and pathetic. The twins were nearly school‐
age, and with such emancipation at hand, her vision was cleared enough for her to see the single most salient fact that she’d been missing:
she
didn’t love
him
.

If she needed proof of this, then it came in spades when she discovered the identity of his latest concubine: Catherine O’Rourke, the face that filled a thousand hankies once upon a time in Auchenlea. She felt amused by this rather than hurt. Put together with the school reunion, there was just something so embarrassingly desperate about it.

Gavin had crossed paths with Catherine after all these years because she was working at the PR firm handling publicity for the resort project. She was still quite the clothes horse, but if truth be told she was no longer the knock‐
out Simone remembered. However, that wouldn’t have proven any deterrent to Gavin. Poor Catherine – he wasn’t screwing her, he was screwing a memory. Screwing what she represented, and no doubt frustrated that everyone in their fifth‐
year Chemistry class couldn’t be there to see it.

But soon enough they would be.

Simone knew that was why Gavin had tried so hard to put her off attending the reunion. He wanted all his ex‐
classmates gathered here on this marvellous creation of his, where they would see how much more successful than they he had been, and where they would see also that Catherine O’Rourke, who the boys had all fancied and the girls had all envied, only had eyes for him. It would slightly spoil the effect if wee Simone Draper was hanging around, pointing out that she was the one he was actually married to, but that was something Gavin had been forced to get grudgingly used to.

Little did he know that there would be a couple more things spoiling the effect, too. Such as the fact that she’d secretly added David Murdoch and Matthew Black to the list of individuals Gavin had instructed the PR firm to track down and invite. How very odd, she’d thought, that their names should slip his mind, considering they were the two people from Gavin’s yeargroup who had, in their different ways, gone on to achieve the most renown.

And, of course, there would be one further upstaging that evening.

Simone walked back inside the suite to the bathroom, where she turned on the shower and stripped off her clothes. She looked at the black dress hanging up against the wall, then with satisfaction at her taut, flat stomach and lithe, slim thighs. Several hours in the gym every day, while the girls were at nursery school. Gavin hadn’t been the only one doing plenty of preparing for this party. Couldn’t do much about the boobs, right enough, apart from firm things up a bit, but then that’s what she’d brought the wonderbra for.

She had decided it wouldn’t be enough merely to leave him, even in front of all those people and in his moment of triumph. She wanted him, and everyone he’d been so keen to assemble there, to see exactly who was leaving him: the smartest, brightest, sexiest woman in the room.

Simone Draper.

McGregor wasn’t enjoying his retirement much any more. He sat in the interview room, arms folded, malevolently eyeing a lukewarm polystyrene cup of watery tea, his simmering gaze occasionally straying to PC Carrot‐
Cruncher on the other side of the desk. Carrot‐
Cruncher didn’t seem very comfortable either, nervously glancing at the door every few seconds as he impatiently awaited his superior, Sergeant Mutton‐
Molester, who was presumably about to bring his unique teuchter policing genius to bear upon this perplexing matter. The juvenile‐
looking cop flinched every time McGregor shifted in his chair, seemingly terrified of becoming the Beast of Kilbokie’s next mutilated victim. At one point McGregor had coughed and the skinny drink of water involuntarily slid his chair back from the table. It was hard to tell whether the accompanying shriek came from the chair legs or the post‐
pubescent polisman.

The irony was coming out his arse. His first official civilian day in close on four decades and here he was on the wrong side of the interview table, faced with a far‐
from‐
inspiring representative of the future of the force. He was beginning to appreciate a certain twisted plausibility to the Pink Panther films, understanding vividly how Chief Inspector Dreyfus could progress from respected senior police official to misanthropic arch‐
criminal. It didn’t take a Clouseau; it just took a day like this.