A Minor Indiscretion (25 page)

C
hristian was sitting in front of the television with a cup of hot chocolate snuggled in his lap, flicking through the TV channels trying to find some late-night viewing that might involve gratuitous sex or football. Currently both were eluding him. He was missing Ali and feeling distinctly uneasy about the thought of her spending the night back in her own bed in the bosom of her family, and him banished to the outside of this cozy enclave with his nose pressed against the cold glass. The hot chocolate and a Channel 4 documentary about the life and times of Benny Hill were not providing the comfort he sought.

Rebecca came in wearing a minimalist skirt and a top that looked like two Dairylea Cheese triangle wrappers joined together by a piece of glittery dental floss. She stopped in midstride.

“You are not staying in on a Saturday night,” she tutted, grabbing some money from her handbag on the table.

“So what if I am?” Christian tried to look engrossed in
Heroes of Comedy.
“I'm waiting for
Match of the Day
to start.”

There was an outpouring of the most forced, empty canned laughter he'd ever heard.

Rebecca put her hand on her tiny, jutty-out hip. “Who's playing?”

“Er…”

Rebecca wagged her finger at him. “She is turning you into a boring old git,” she said.

“Just because I don't want to get off my face every weekend anymore? It's called growing up, Becs. You ought to try it.”

“So where is Lady Bountiful tonight?”

“At home. With her children.”

“And your presence wasn't required?”

Christian wished he'd got a bottle of Vodka Absolut in his hand—you couldn't do mean and moody with hot chocolate.

“It must feel very different for you to be at someone else's beck and call,” Rebecca continued when he didn't answer. “I have to hand it to her, she's certainly got you where she wants you.”

Christian sank lower into the sofa.

“Come out with us,” Rebecca said.

“I haven't got any money.”

“It's never stopped you before.” Rebecca sat on the arm of the sofa and twisted one of Christian's curls through her fingers. “Raid piggy.”

“Piggy helped us out of our last predicament, remember?”

Rebecca tutted again. “I'll sub you,” she said. “In fact, I'll treat you. Call it my way of saying that I forgive you for dumping me because you couldn't stand commitment and then shacking up with someone old enough to be my mother with three brats in tow.”

“You're all heart, Becs,” Christian sighed.

“Come on. I'm only going to The Rat to meet Robbie and a few mates.”

“Why are you dressed like that?”

“Because I live in the vain hope that there might be someone there worth pulling,” she said. “Come on. We'll just get there in time for last orders. It'll cheer you up.”

“I'm not depressed.”

“Yeah, right.” They both looked at Benny Hill. “It's ages since the three of us have been out on the town together. As mates.”

“Since Ali arrived,” Christian said pointedly.

“Well, now that you come to mention it…” Rebecca risked a smile.

Christian put down his hot chocolate. “I'll have to come out to keep you quiet, won't I?”

“There is one other way, Chris,” she said. “Kiss me.” She
leaned forward, threatening to burst free of her triangles, and covered his mouth with hers. The kiss was long and searching and pleasantly familiar.

Rebecca broke away from him and pressed her lips together, tracing round them with her tongue. She looked at him ruefully. “But I guess that's not on the agenda.”

Christian stood up. “Let's go to The Rat,” he said.

 

The Rat was the pub that closing time forgot. Christian remembered his last drink. Or at least he thought he did. Robbie bought it for him, and possibly the ten previous ones. It was a Tequila Stuntman, Robbie's invention, which was a sadistic progression from a Tequila Slammer that had seemed like a really good idea at the time. Instead of licking the salt from the back of his hand, downing the tequila in one and then squirting the lime juice in his mouth, his “friend”—and it was pertinent to use the word in quotation marks—had persuaded him to snort the salt, down two shots of tequila and then squirt himself in the eye with the lime juice. In hindsight, it was probably that which made him fall off the table.

Now it was some ungodly hour in the morning and he was propping up the wall by the front door of the house, with no idea how the journey back from the pub had been accomplished. His eyes were still smarting from their lime-juice assault and the salt had dried out the inside of his nose so that he was having to breathe through his mouth. Robbie stood in the road singing “Land of Hope and Glory” at the top of his voice, sucking, still, at a wedge of well-chewed lime. A window opened farther down the street and a voice shouted, “Shut the fuck up!” And, perhaps surprisingly, Robbie did.

Rebecca was searching all her pockets for her key, while Robbie took the opportunity to urinate loudly on the black plastic bin bag next door had left unwisely on their path.

When Rebecca finally opened the door, they all fell inside, sprawling on the welcome mat and the black and white Victorian tiles of the porch. Christian was giggling loudly.

“Toast,” Robbie croaked. “I need toast.” And he staggered off toward the kitchen, feeling along the wall for support as he went.

“Count me out, mate,” Christian slurred. “I need my bed.”

“Me too,” Rebecca said. Christian put his arm round her and
somehow managed to haul her up without falling over himself again. They stumbled up the stairs, tripping over each other, laughing, falling down and finally crawling on all fours to the top of the landing.

Rebecca straightened herself up, leaning against the door frame in an attempt to stop swaying and pulled Christian up toward her. He stopped, arms round her waist, their breathing audible in the sudden stillness. Her hair smelt of cigarettes and her mouth of booze and cheese-and-onion crisps. The triangles of her top were very skewed. She rolled her eyes slightly as she tried to maintain a steady focus.

Rebecca traced her finger across his cheek in a line that wasn't altogether straight. “Tonight was just like old times,” she said, smiling lopsidedly, a mixture of drunkenness and sadness. Coy, girlish, bold.

“Yeah,” Christian said. He should have taken his hands off her waist, but he had forgotten how he could almost touch the tips of his fingers together in the small of her back and the urge to see how far they could go was gluing them there.

The stubborn remains of Rebecca's lipstick had stained her lips red. The black smear of her eyeliner had given her dark shadows under her eyes, making her look like a heroin addict, vulnerable and vaguely unhealthy. Her fingers grasped for Christian's T-shirt at his shoulder. They were tiny, slender, like the rest of her, the nails painted scarlet. Temptation. “Do you still have that drawing of me over your bed?”

“Huh, huh.”

“What does Ali think of it?”

Christian shrugged. “She's never said.”

Rebecca wet her lips, and her eyes fixed in a steady stare on his. “Can I come in and look at it?”

“You want to see my etchings?” Christian looked solemn. If he could have found a laugh from somewhere, it might have broken the moment, but like the canned laughter on the television, he couldn't make the right sound. “It's a very old line, Becs.”

“It's the best one I can think of,” she said, and taking Christian's hand followed him into the bedroom.

N
eil parked his aging Citroën half on and half off the curb outside Jemma's shop in the vain hope that if there was a late-night clamping service, they would give him the benefit of the doubt and pass by without troubling him with a yellow boot. Also, Citroëns were bastards to clamp. It had been the main reason he bought one. That and the fact that he couldn't afford a Ferrari.

He had tried to phone Jemma all day yesterday, but had been distracted by Years Five to Eight of St. Apsley's Middle School. The agenda had been sports photos—football, hockey and netball. It was a nightmare taking team photos. Despite the fact that each child had been sent home with a letter duly requesting that parents equip them with their appropriate team garments, invariably half of them turned up without kits. Consequently, on the team photos they came out looking like they'd been dressed from the Lost Property box—which they usually had.

Every time he had actually managed to call Jemma, her phone had been engaged. Or if it wasn't engaged and his heart leapt joyously as it rang, it would only be dashed again by the answerphone cutting in. Last week when he'd rushed away from Ed's and the appealing Miss Jones, he was heading for Jemma's for another “strategy” meeting in the quest to reunite Alicia and Ed. Halfway to her house, his mobile had rung, and Jemma had bro
ken the arrangement, citing a streaming cold as the excuse. And she did sniff convincingly. Since then, he had heard nothing.

It was ridiculous, but Neil seriously felt like he was halfway toward being in love with her. He had missed her so much this week, and he'd found himself looking dewy-eyed at St. Apsley's netball team and not for the reasons you might think. Was it only women whose biological clocks ticked? He had a feeling his might be winding itself up for a chime or two.

He hadn't been able to call today because the wedding season, it seemed, had begun in earnest, and from now until September he would be spending his Saturdays knee-deep in brides draped in satin and raw silk every conceivable color of the rainbow and grumbling wedding parties. It was late and he was on his way back from a particularly boisterous bash in Bermondsey, where the bride had looked big enough to give birth before the priest had pronounced the couple husband and wife and the best man was wearing his tails with an intimidating scowl. It had been a long and busy day, and Neil rubbed the tiredness from his eyes.

Notting Hill was not what you'd call especially “en route” to Camden. But then, where is? In fact, if he'd decided to go through Nottingham, it might have been a less circuitous route, but Jemma wasn't to know that, and he could casually say that he'd dropped in on the off chance, such was his concern over the state of his brother's marriage. Which wasn't actually a million miles from the truth.

The light in her upstairs flat was on and the curtains open, which boded well. Jemma was a girl-about-town, and he had realized as he turned the ignition off that, given it was a Saturday night, she might well have been out on it.

Neil checked his hair in the rearview mirror, spat on his hand and plastered it over his hair to no good effect. He tutted at his image, got out of the car and rubbed his fingers in the chill night air. He should have thought to bring a jacket, but then again he didn't plan on standing out in the cold for too long. Striding across the pavement with his hands in his pockets, he shivered against the freshness of the night. He rang Jemma's bell and lounged against the wall, waiting for her to come. The lights were bright in Calzone's restaurant across the street, and the windows were misting with condensation. He should have tried to phone her before he set off, and then they might have been able
to go out to dinner again. Neil glanced at his watch. Maybe it wasn't too late. When there was still no sound of encouraging footsteps, Neil rang the doorbell again. It was freezing out here.

He was torn between ringing the bell again and giving it up as a bad job. Neil backed away from the door and looked up at the window. Jemma was peeping out, trying to see who was downstairs. He waved up at her helpfully, and he thought he saw her frown. A minute later the patter of her feet came down the stairs and she opened the door.

God, she looked fabulous. She was wearing a cream silk kimono, short, with precious little else. Her feet were bare and her tiny toes were painted with pearly peachy polish, which did very strange things to his insides. And her hair was all tangled, although she was trying to smooth it, and she looked even more like Alicia than she normally did.

“Hi,” he said.

Jemma pulled her kimono round her. Neil could tell she was cold too. “What are you doing here?”

“Did I get you out of bed?”

Jemma looked round. “Sort of.”

“Still got your cold then?”

“What?”

“Your cold.”

“Oh, yes,” Jemma said, and she sniffed.

“I wanted to talk some more about Ed and Alicia.”

“Now?”

“No time like the present,” Neil said hopefully.

Jemma looked like she felt differently. More
any
time but the present.

“Ed's going away with another woman,” he said. “And Ali is off to the Maldives with her schoolboy.”

“She's not?” Jemma let an unhappy stream of air out of her nostrils, which curled like smoke in the cold night. “She didn't tell me.”

He was getting a little chilly in his shirtsleeves. “I think this calls for a crisis meeting,” he ventured.

“Not now,” she said. “I can't. I don't feel up to it.”

“Oh.” Neil tried his Princess Diana cute eyes. “I'm so worried about them.”

“Me too,” she said. “But there's nothing I can do now. I'll call you.”

He couldn't believe this! He was being given the brush-off. He'd driven miles through driving rain and snow—well, not really—to get here and she wasn't even going to let him in for a quick cuppa. “When?” he said pathetically.

“Soon,” she promised, but he didn't like the way she looked over her shoulder when she said it.

“This is important to me, Jemma.”

“And to me,” she replied. “We'll get together soon. Night, Neil.” And she shut the door rather too hastily for his liking. Her feet pattered away from him back up the stairs to the warmth of her flat. Neil stood looking bemused at the closed door, wind whipping round his neck.

He hunched his shoulders and shuffled back to his car. This was not how it was supposed to go. He was supposed to go inside for one thing, have a few sociable drinks and then they'd have a brief chat about what twits their respective siblings were, by which time he'd have drunk far too much to be able to drive, and where could you get a cab at this time of night, wasn't it always a problem, and Jemma was supposed to have offered to share her bed for the night. So, what was wrong with fantasizing? Nothing except that fantasies rarely came true.

That's why he was climbing back into his car with nothing to look forward to but the joy of a bag of soggy chips from the Chinese chippy at the end of his road. If it was still open. Knowing his luck, it would probably close as he drew in sight of it. He sighed as he went to start the engine. At that moment, Jemma came to the window and looked out. Perhaps she had changed her mind? Neil thought joyously. A bit of Night Nurse could work wonders. Then he noticed the shock of blond hair go past the window behind her and sucked in his breath without meaning to. There was someone else in the flat. No wonder she was looking so tousled—she'd got a bloke in there! Another bloke. A bloke who wasn't him! Had all that flirting, all that fluttering of eyelids, just been a con? He'd thought there was at least a chance that Jemma had felt the same way he did. He'd worn a suede jacket for that woman! And flared trousers. He couldn't believe that all the time she'd been playing with someone else's ball. Perhaps it was just a mate she had in there. But then, if it was a mate, why couldn't he have gone in too? Surely he wasn't so embarrassing, despite his dress sense?

There was only one way to find out whether the potential love of his life was getting jiggy with someone other than him. Stake-out time. Neil clicked on the ignition, tuned the radio into Virgin FM and hunkered down in his seat, wishing, not for the first time, that he'd brought a nice, warm coat.

 

There was a knocking sound going on in his head. Neil sat bolt upright and banged his knees on the steering wheel, struggling to get his eyes to focus. A breakfast presenter on the radio was chattering wildly about nothing in particular, and Neil realized with a shock that it was rather more daylight than he had expected it to be. The sun streamed through the windscreen, making him wince. The knocking came again. It wasn't in his head, it was on the window of his car. Jemma was standing in the road with a cup of tea in her hand.

Neil wound the window down.

“I brought this for you,” she said.

Neil looked grateful. It felt like a canary had fallen asleep in his mouth during the night, and he was as stiff as a board. It had to be said that a Citroën wasn't quite as comfortable as a Slumberland when it came to a good night's sleep.

“Thanks,” he croaked, and reached out for the cup, which Jemma didn't seem keen to relinquish.

“Why are you still here?” she asked.

“Er…” Neil said, not even sure why he was there himself. A steady stream of traffic buffeted the car as it drove by.

“Wouldn't your car start?”

“Er…yes. Er…no.”

“Or were you spying on me, Neil?”

“Er…yes,” he admitted sheepishly.

“Do you think you had any right to?”

“Er…probably not.”

“Definitely not, I'd say.”

“I can explain,” Neil said.

Jemma was wearing jeans and a beaded jacket, and the color of the beads picked out the flames in her luxuriant red hair and the round red patches of anger on her cheeks. “Can you?”

“No. Not really.” He smiled wanly.

“Don't ever sit outside my flat again, Neil,” she said. “Not for any reason.”

Jemma threw the cup of tea in his face and then handed him the cup and saucer through the window.

“Right,” he said as he dripped tea into his lap. Then Jemma flounced off and got into a huge silver Mercedes parked farther down the pavement. And as it drove away, Neil felt a little light go out in his heart.