A Friend of the Family (11 page)

‘You don’t have to come, you know. It’s fine. I’ve given you a get-out clause. No one will mind.’

‘No, no. I want to. I really want to. It’s just a bit
daunting,
that’s all.’

Sean looked at his older woman, then, standing on his Catford balcony in her Portobello jumper and inherited earrings, nervously clutching her champagne and looking up at him as if she were about to be introduced to the Royal family, and felt a huge, overwhelming surge of love for her that started in his stomach and went all the way to his tearducts.

‘Aw, come here,’ he said, holding his arms out to her. ‘They’re going to love you, you know that. They’ll adore you.’ She smiled warmly and stepped into his embrace and he hugged her tightly to him, inhaling her aroma.
Now,
said a little voice in his head.
Now, do it now.
There could never be a better moment; a mild April evening, London beneath them, the sun setting above and a whole bottle of chilled champagne left to drink.

He held her hands in his and looked at the ginger flecks in her olive eyes, the laugh lines that grew from the corners of her eyes, the little scar just above her top lip, the little imperfections he’d grown to love almost more than her perfection over the past eight weeks, and as he looked he found himself doing it, saying it, without even having to think about it:

‘Millie – will you marry me?’

She looked at him in shock for a brief moment, a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth.

‘What?!’

‘I said,’ he got down on his knee this time, ‘Millie, I know we haven’t known each other long, but we know each other well enough for me to know that I want to spend the rest of my life with you so I’d like to ask you – will you please marry me?’

He stared up at her, feeling slightly foolish but very excited, and waited for her to react. She stared at him blankly for a moment. And then she threw her head back and started to laugh.

‘Are you winding me up?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘
You
want to marry
me?’

‘Yup.’

She laughed out loud. ‘But,
nobody
wants to marry me. That’s the whole point of me. You can’t possibly want to marry me.’

‘Oh, but I do.’

‘But I’m a spinster. I’m an old maid. I’ve never even
lived
with anyone. Are you sure about this?’

‘Never been surer.’

‘And I’m six years older than you. You do realize that?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And whatever happens in this world, I will
always
be six years older. In four years’ time I’m going to be forty. And you’ll only be thirty-four.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not going to miraculously turn into a twentythree-year-old
when you have your midlife crisis, you know?’

‘Oh, Jesus Christ, Millie…’ Sean smiled wryly and got to his feet.

‘Ooh. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m just supposed to say “Yes” really enigmatically and gracefully, like I always knew you’d want to marry me, aren’t I?’

‘Well, yes, that’s the…’

‘Yes! Yes! Double yes! Yes, I’d love to marry you. If you’re sure you know what you’re doing and you’ve really thought about this and you don’t mind hanging out with an old woman and…’

‘Millie!’

‘Sorry.’

‘So that’s a yes, then?’

‘Yes! Oh God, yes, definitely!’

‘Do you want your ring, then?’

‘Oh my God! You got me a ring?’ She brought her hands to her mouth and Sean could see tears shining in her eyes.

‘Uh-huh.’ He headed indoors to retrieve the ring from its drawer, his heart thumping with excitement.

She gasped in wonder when he presented her with the box. ‘You’re really serious aren’t you?’ She opened it, slowly and reverentially, and sucked in her breath when she caught sight of the diamond baguette. And then Sean slipped it on to her finger and she burst into tears.

‘Oh God,’ she snivelled through tears and laughter, ‘I’m getting married.’ She turned to face the world,
cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted across the London skyline, ‘I’m getting married!’And then she turned back to Sean and looked at him with tear-streaked eyes. ‘I love you so much, Sean London. We are going to be so incredibly happy together. You know that, don’t you?’

And Sean smiled because he did know that. ‘Come on,’ he said, wiping some tears away from under her eyes, let’s go into my dank, musty hovel of a bedroom and have fantastic post-proposal, engaged-to-be-married sex.’

He didn’t need to ask twice.

Just What He Always Wanted

‘Happy birthday, Tony.’ Ness handed him a huge and very heavy gift, wrapped in lurid green holographic paper topped with a fuchsia bow.

‘Thanks.’

‘Thirty-five,’ she said, for about the hundredth time that evening, ‘I can’t believe you’re thirty-five.’

He grimaced and began peeling away the holographic paper. Inside was a cardboard box. It had the words ‘Organically Grown Pineapples’ printed on it. ‘Cool,’ he said, ‘pineapples.’

Ness threw him a withering smile. ‘Come on,’ she urged, ‘open it.’ She was almost quivering with excitement as Tony ripped the parcel tape off the box and pulled open the flaps.

Tony looked inside. It was some kind of electronic thing. It was black and clunky. He pulled it out and examined it.

Ness was looking at him, anticipation shining from her eyes. ‘Don’t you know what it is?’

Tony examined it further. ‘Erm, some kind of time machine?’

‘No! It’s a Betamax video player! For you to watch all your old Betamax tapes on!’

‘Aaah,’ said Tony, realization dawning. ‘Aaah! God, Ness, that’s brilliant. That’s so brilliant. Thank you.’And it really was brilliant. The Londons had owned a Betamax back in the seventies when nobody knew any better and Tony had recorded all his favourite programmes religiously for a couple of years, until the VHS had taken off and they got rid of it. But he’d kept his Betamax tapes for all these years; determined that one day he’d get himself a player and have a stride down memory lane. ‘Where the hell did you get it from?’

‘Well – it was a bit of a mare, actually. I started looking about six months ago and nearly got one at a car-boot sale, but it was completely knackered so I had a look on the Internet, but it all got a bit complicated. And then I got this one at the electric shop on Church Road. Just happened to be driving past, went in, there it was.’

‘God, Ness, thank you,’ he leant over to kiss her and she clamped her hands on to his cheeks and gave him a big smacker on the lips.

‘You are very welcome indeed.’ She grinned at him happily and Tony felt a creeping sense of unease in his gut. She’d gone to so much trouble, been so thoughtful, bought him the best kind of gift, the gift you really, really wanted but didn’t know you wanted. A gift that showed that she listened to him, that she remembered things he said, that what was important to him was important to her.

A gift that showed she cared.

Way too much.

Tony felt a plume of guilt rising in his chest. ‘Come
on,’ he said, looking at his watch and putting the Beta-max back in the pineapple box, ‘we’d better get moving. We’re going to be late.’

The Loneliest Penguin

Mum had made it lovely in the living room – candles, a huge fire, Sinatra playing in the background. It was just the five of them right now: Mum, Dad, Ned, Ness and him. Hands darted in and out of bowls of nuts and Bombay mix, Dad threw pistachio shells on to the fire where they hissed and crackled, Mum sat radiant with joy at the prospect of having her whole brood together under her roof again.

Tony perched himself on the arm of a sofa and ignored the feel of Ness’s arm as it fell across his lap and gripped his kneecap affectionately. He accepted a glass of red wine from his mother and took a large gulp, swilling it around his mouth, letting the lukewarm liquid reach into every crevice, numbing him.

The fire in the grate was throwing off far too much heat and Tony felt himself melting inside his fleece. He was just about to take it off when the doorbell rang. Jesus. It was them. He pulled his fleece back down, touched his hair, adjusted his posture, tried his hardest to look natural – which was nigh on impossible when every nerve in his body was jangling with anticipation.

He eyed the living-room door nonchalantly, drumming
his fingertips casually against the side of his wine glass. And then there she was, standing in the doorway, just behind Sean. Everything else seemed to fade away, then – the introduction, the laughter, the sheer joyful volume of familial reunion. He was deaf to it all. All he was aware of was this beautiful perfect person standing uncertainly in the doorway, smiling at what was happening in front of her, looking as excited as everyone else in the room, even though she was a stranger.

‘Everyone, this is Millie. Millie, this is everyone.’

‘Sean, honestly, what sort of an introduction is that?’ scolded Bernie, taking Millie by the hand and introducing her to everyone properly. Tony could barely breathe. She looked even better than he remembered, in an embroidered suede skirt, leather boots and a tight red sweater. Her hair was clipped back with a few mahogany strands hanging loose around her face. And she was wearing red lipstick.

‘And you’ve met Tony and Ness, haven’t you?’

‘Yes. Of course. Hi again,’ she beamed at them both, and then leant in towards Tony and grabbed his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek, properly, so that he could feel the ridges in her lips against his skin. ‘Happy birthday!’

‘Thank you,’ he muttered, breathing in deeply. She smelt of fresh air and London rain.

He watched in awe as she leant in again to kiss Ness. Everything was still there, just as he remembered: the flecked eyes, the thick hair, the plump lips, the tawny
skin, the blunt nails, the silver rings… But, hold on, one more silver ring than last time. A slender, silver ring, embracing a large diamond, third finger, left hand. The same finger on which he’d worn a band for eight years. An heirloom, he supposed dismissively, a grandmother’s ring, something she wore on special occasions, probably the only finger it fit.

‘Lovely to see you again, Ness,’ she said, and the sound of her lips smacking against Ness’s cheeks reverberated around Tony’s head.

Sean leant in to hug him, then – a quick slap on the back, Happy Birthday, mate, a gift of some sort thrust into his hands – but all he was aware of was the fact that
she
was in the room. The woman he’d been fantasizing about for nearly two weeks. She was sitting over there, drinking wine, her legs crossed, in his parents’ home. And she was going to be around all night.

Someone cracked a joke about the state of Goldie. ‘Oh no,’ said Millie, petting him furiously, ‘I think he’s lovely.’ Goldie rolled over and offered up his horrible old belly, which Millie tickled obligingly, and Tony could never have imagined that the day would come when he would want, more than anything in the world, to be a senile, malodorous golden retriever.

‘At least he’s passed the age of the involuntary penile emergence,’ said Sean, and everyone laughed.

Tony laughed too but stopped abruptly when he caught sight of his reflection in the glass doors of a cabinet and almost didn’t recognize himself. And then he remembered – this was who he was now, a fat and
very nearly middle-aged man, sweating lightly inside too many clothes, his cheeks flushed from the fire and the wine, his hair unkempt and woolly where he’d pulled his T-shirt over his head when he was getting ready.

His dad wandered around the room with a bottle of wine, a roll-up hanging from the corner of his mouth. ‘Top up?’ he said to Tony.

‘Yeah, please.’ He let his dad top his glass up to the rim and then took a big gulp.

‘Tony?’

‘What?’ He snapped out of his reverie as he felt Ness banging his kneecap.

‘Funny, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘About the card?’

‘What card?’

Ness rolled her eyes. ‘Wakey wakey,’ she teased, ‘Millie was just saying that the first card she bought for Sean – it was one of yours.’

‘No. Really? Which one?’

Millie sat forward on the sofa and readied herself to describe the card to him. ‘It’s this sort of shape,’ she said, describing a thin rectangle, ‘and it’s got a cartoon drawing of a penguin on the front, a really
tiny ”
’ she indicated the tininess between thumb and index finger – ‘little penguin with this sad little expression on his face and he’s sitting all on his own on this glacier, nothing around for miles and it says…’

‘ “I’m feeling lonely”,’ Tony finished.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s right. But not because I was
lonely or anything. I just really liked the expression on the little penguin’s face. It just – got me. Did you draw it, Tony?’

‘No,’ said Tony, wishing more than anything that he had. ‘No. I commissioned it, though. It was by a woman, actually – a woman called… called…’ he clicked his fingers, desperately trying to recall the name of the artist, ‘Sybil? Something? Something French. “S” something…’ He racked his brain so hard it hurt, wanting,
needing,
to give Millie the information she wanted, to give her anything, anything at all.

‘Oh,’ she said, watching him struggle, ‘don’t worry about it – it’ll say on the back of the card. I’ll look at it when we get back to Sean’s.’

‘You’re staying at Sean’s tonight?’ he asked in surprise. He just couldn’t quite imagine Millie walking through Sean’s estate, taking that aluminium-lined, graffiti-ed lift up to his grotty little flat that always smelt of stale bedsheets.

‘Yes,’ she nodded and smiled, ‘I was there on Wednesday as well, wasn’t I, Sean?’ she winked at him.

‘You most certainly were, Millie,’ he said, returning her wink.

‘Shall we…?’ she wiggled her eyebrows at him.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘d’you think…?’

‘It’s up to you,’ she said.

‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

And they held hands and turned to face everyone and it looked as if their faces were about to split open with excitement and Sean squeezed Millie’s hand and Millie
beamed and he said, ‘We’ve got something we’d like to tell you.’