Pedigree Mum (37 page)

‘But Harvey—’

‘Good
night
, Brigid. Sleep well.’ He plants a brief kiss on her greasy cheek and turns away.

He starts walking, past his car, past the scruffy bow-fronted houses to the end of her street. He doesn’t care that he’s freezing – he’s left his favourite black sweater in there – or that, right now, his nice, tidy living room will be a fug of smoke and bikers’ farts.

‘Harvey, wait!’ He whirls round. Brigid’s out in the street now, marching after him with a small black bundle in her hand.

‘What is it?’

‘I said, wait!’

As he watches her approaching, it strikes him that, while she’s thinking clown sex, he’s concerned only about her being out with bare legs in the middle of winter.

‘You’ll freeze,’ he hisses. ‘Go back inside, you’ll catch your death …’

Across the street, a smartly dressed couple has stopped to observe the proceedings. ‘My God,’ the woman sniggers. ‘It’s one of those scary clown movies come to life.’

‘Watch out, mate,’ the man cries. ‘There’s a freaky Pierrot after you … need any help?’

They convulse with laughter, clearly enjoying the show. ‘We’re fine, thanks,’ Harvey barks across the road, willing them to move on.

‘I
know
you,’ the woman announces. On the plus side, at least she’s stopped laughing. Less happily, she’s now grabbed her partner by the hand and is trotting across the road towards them. ‘You’re Charlie Chuckles, aren’t you? Remember I booked you for my daughter’s party in the community centre – the one where you made the scary testicle dog from a sausage balloon …?’

‘Er, yeah, yeah,’ he says, not even bothering to correct her as Brigid gawps at him uncomprehendingly.

The woman sniggers. ‘Isn’t it sweet,’ she says, turning to her husband, ‘that he’s got a clown girlfriend? To be honest, Charlie, I assumed you just shoved on your costume to make a quick buck, but you really immerse yourself in the part!’

They beam at a shivering Brigid. ‘That’s what I call method acting,’ the man says with an infuriating whinnying laugh.

‘Yes, well, nice seeing you again,’ Harvey says quickly, putting an arm around Brigid’s shoulders and guiding her back down the street towards her house.

‘I wonder if he has an elephant as well?’ the woman muses as they walk away.

Having shaken off Harvey’s arm, Brigid is stomping back home at an impressive speed. ‘You forgot your sweater,’ she says sulkily, thrusting the soft black bundle at him.

Harvey takes it from her. ‘Thank you.’

‘You know what? You’re no fun at all.’

Harvey smiles, pulling on his sweater as they walk and giving her a quick hug as they reach her front door. ‘You’re probably right. I always suspected I wasn’t really cut out to be a clown. Now go back inside and see to Roxy, okay? She didn’t seem too happy being shut in the kitchen.’

‘Erm … I can’t.’ Brigid shivers and rubs her bare arms.

‘Why not?’

She gazes up at him, her white-painted face looking chilled and faintly unwell under the silvery light of the streetlamp. ‘I left my key inside, Harvey. I’ve locked myself out.’

While Kerry launches herself down the biggest slide in the pool – she
loves
flumes, the sensation of whooshing down a huge plastic tube – Rob is lying on a rather hard, leopard-patterned couch in his stockinged feet in a flat in Hackney. It’s a damp Sunday morning and by rights he should be having a lie-in, drinking coffee and leafing idly through the papers – i.e. attempting to have a normal, couply time with Nadine. Unable to face anymore squabbling and bitterness, he has decided to accept her version of events – at least until the baby’s born.

Yet even last night, they ended up bickering again. ‘Oh, so you’re smoking in the car now?’ she’d announced, detecting a whiff as he’d let himself into the flat. ‘The car I have to sit in and, more importantly, our baby will travel home from hospital in.’

‘Yes, in five months’ time,’ he’d snapped back. ‘I think the smell will have gone by then and if it hasn’t, I’ll buy a bloody air freshener.’ And so it had escalated, a stupid row about how she had no intention of subjecting the baby to the disgusting synthetic fumes of a pine-scented thing dangling from the rearview mirror, and Rob alerting her to the fact that you can now buy ones that emit a new car smell, no matter how old your vehicle is. Which Nadine interpreted as him taking the piss, triggering her to make an urgent call to Jade.

Not merely one of Nadine’s
best friends in the whole world
, Jade is also a qualified hypnotist. What did that mean anyway? Which university course in advanced mind-fuckery had she actually completed? Anyway, Nadine was adamant and, after a quick call, announced that Jade would be happy to ‘treat’ Rob the next day.

‘You’re lucky,’ Jade says now, placing her cold fingers on his slightly clammy forehead. ‘I’m chock-a-block at this time of year with everyone trying to give up something for New Year.’

Rob mulls this over as she stops prodding at his head and potters over to a wonky, cheap-looking unit stuffed with books and CDs. Is that what New Year is about, then – not looking ahead with a positive frame of mind (which he is desperately trying to do), but denying himself the one little puff of pleasure he enjoys twice, maybe three times a day? Okay, it has escalated to more like fifteen a day, but still … stressful times.

‘It’s here somewhere,’ Jade mutters, grabbing a bunch of CDs from the unit and flipping through the plastic boxes.

Whale music, Rob decides with absolute certainty. Or someone singing in Sanskrit …

‘Here it is.’ Grinning, she holds up a CD entitled
Stop Smoking With Self-Hypnosis
. ‘I wondered where it had gone.’

‘But …’ Rob peers at her from his prone position on the couch. ‘Aren’t you going to hypnotise me personally?’
I’m paying you fifty quid to put on a sodding CD?
is what he wants to say.
You’re planning to leave me lying on this grubby couch while you fuck off and have a bath, or phone your mum, or go back to bed and eat cake?

‘This is just as effective,’ she says. ‘It burrows deep into the subconscious mind.’

‘Mmm. Like a little rabbit.’

‘Ha. You are funny.’ She smiles unconvincingly.

‘But, er …’ Rob continues, ‘isn’t that what hypnosis is supposed to do? I mean, real hypnosis, done by an actual person?’

‘Oh, you know a bit about it then?’

About as much as you do, probably
… ‘Erm, not really,’ he mutters.

‘The thing is, Rob’ – she switches on the CD and plugs in some headphones, which she hands to him – ‘you’re bound to have your own, personal beliefs about smoking. Like, you think it makes you look cool …’

Cool? How old does she think he is, fifteen?

‘… So the whole purpose of hypnosis is to forge a channel through all that and bore right into your brain.’ Then, with a sugary smile, she clamps the large, not especially hygienic-looking plastic headphones onto his ears and trots out of the room.

Rob lies there, wondering what possessed him to think he could be cured of an addiction in a twenty-year-old’s rather nasty living room. The smell of fried egg hangs in the air, and a solitary goldfish drifts in a bowl full of algae on the bookshelf. The voice has started, but Rob isn’t listening because all he can think is, she reckons I smoke to look
cool
? No, he smokes because he’s fallen into a fully-fledged relationship with a girl he doesn’t love, who doesn’t even know who the Wombles are, and in three days’ time he’ll have to go back to the office he despises and work for an arsehole who, until about ten minutes before Rob’s 40
^th
birthday, was also sleeping with Nadine. How terribly cosy. Is it any wonder he finds solace in an occasional nicotine rush?

…
To help you achieve a state of deep relaxation
, the man’s voice drones on.

That’s a laugh. Rob feels as if he hasn’t been deeply relaxed since he was about eight years old and tucked up in bed with
The Beano
.

…
I’ll help to loosen those nicotine ties that bind you, freeing you to a healthier, happier, longer life in which you’ll experience no irritation, just a blissful state in which you no longer need poison surging through your blood… .

On and on he goes, regurgitating gobbledegook for what feels like weeks on end. Yet, perhaps due to being unable to sleep lately, Rob finds himself floating away from the leopard print sofa and depressed goldfish. And now he’s no longer in a sordid Hackney flat, but Jack’s, the private members’ club he doesn’t even belong to. It’s his fortieth birthday. There is lemon cake and he’s with Eddy and the crowd. Ava is there, looking like a corpse with lipstick, and everyone is making a fuss of him and telling him what a great bloke he is.

The scene changes, and they’re at Nadine’s flat. He’s woozy – he actually feels drunk in his semi-conscious state – and it happens, it actually happens … she’s there beside him on the sofa bed, this young thing with her hair like Kerry used to wear it when they first met. A little impish crop that shows off a slender neck and striking cheekbones. It happens, briefly, and there’s a flicker of horror as Rob realises what he’s done. He’s had sex with Nadine – accidentally cheated on his beautiful wife – so he does the only thing he can think of. He fires off a drunken instruction to his brain to erase this moment, as if it has never happened, and when he wakes in the morning he’ll go back to Bethnal Green, a little hungover but still a decent, grown-up man.

‘Rob?’ Jade’s voice snaps him awake.

‘Huh?’ he barks, heart pounding.

‘That’s the end of the CO. Take your time before you get up, okay? You might be a little woozy.’

He opens his eyes and squints at her.

‘How do you feel?’ she asks, gnawing spearmint gum.

‘Er … okay, I think. Kind of drowsy.’

Jade nods sagely. ‘It’s a very powerful CD.’

Yeah, he thinks, one I could have bought for £6.99 but never mind that now. He hands over five crisp tenners, bids her a terse goodbye and sees himself down the three flights of stairs and into the busy, dirty street.

The sky is the colour of pale ash, and across the road is a scruffy little newsagent’s … a newsagent’s full of cigarettes. He wants one as strongly as ever – no,
more
urgently if anything. His gums are tingling and he feels the slight light-headedness that only a big hit of nicotine can dispel. He crosses the road and stands outside the shop, studying its pitiful window display of packets of crayons and tennis balls. But he manages to walk on by, preparing himself to report that Jade’s ‘treatment’ was indeed miraculous and that he has no intention of involving himself with another nasty, stinky cancer stick for the rest of his life.

First, though, he’ll nip into the beleaguered mini-market by the bus stop and treat himself to his very last packet of ten.

‘You’re beautiful, Mummy!’ Freddie cries from the hallway as Kerry heads downstairs towards him. ‘You’re like a queen, but nicer.’

‘Oh, thank you, sweetheart. I’m so glad you think so.’

‘I want to
marry
you.’

‘You can’t marry Mummy, stupid,’ Mia retorts, appearing from the living room with a fistful of felt pens. ‘Mummy can only marry a grown-up man.’

‘Hmmm,’ Kerry murmurs with a smile. ‘Anyway, we’d better get over to the art club, okay? It starts in twenty minutes. You do remember I’m not going to stay there with you, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Freddie shrugs, affecting nonchalance.

‘Lara will be there, though, and she says she’ll look after you both.’

‘Okay, Mummy,’ Mia says brightly. Kerry is overcome with relief that, since the party, there’s no doubt in her mind that her children have been accepted around here. Audrey-Jane and Tabitha have both been round to play, and were still enthusing over the contents of their party bags. There’s even talk of a sleepover before the holiday’s out.

‘Is Joe going?’ Freddie asks.

‘Erm, I’m not sure, Brigid hasn’t mentioned it. There’ll be plenty of people you know, though. The idea is, everyone will
be given part of the wall to paint and all the pictures will
make a huge mural. So maybe start thinking about what you’d like to do.’

As she takes the children’s coats from their hooks, Kerry wonders why Brigid was clearly not in the mood for chatting when Kerry dropped off Joe after swimming yesterday. Kerry hadn’t particularly wanted a prolonged discussion, in case Brigid had felt compelled to deliver a blow-by-blow account of her nocturnal frolics with Harvey – but she’d also found her briskness a little odd. Kerry still feels pretty reliant on her for company, and anyway, she reminds herself sternly, it’s none of her business who she – or Harvey for that matter – sleeps with.

As it turns out, Brigid is the first person Kerry sees as she and the children enter the church hall.

‘Hi,’ she booms, hurrying over with her hair scooped up prettily and an oilcloth apron over her sequinned top and faded jeans. ‘Didn’t know you were coming today.’

‘Mummy’s not staying,’ Mia announces.

‘Oh?’ Brigid grins and raises a brow. ‘Escaping, are you? I thought you were looking especially lovely today.’ Kerry laughs, feeling suddenly self-conscious in a favourite cornflower-blue dress from last summer, plus a black lace-knit cardi that’s a little more decorative than her usual style.

‘Just meeting a friend for lunch,’ she says casually as Mia and Freddie rush off to join the other children. ‘It’s James,’ she adds in a whisper.

‘I
knew
it! Told you he was keen. He wasn’t going to be put off by a bit of corn in an ear or us assuming he ran over his poor wife. So where are you going?’

‘
Only
The Glasshouse …’

‘Get you,’ Brigid grins. ‘Oh, and listen … I’m sorry I necked all your wine the other night. Not terribly good behaviour at a children’s party.’

‘You were fine. Anyway, the kids’ part had officially finished by then. Um … so did Harvey drop you off okay?’