After the Party (20 page)

“You can do that, Miss Duck. Yes you can. And now you can relax and enjoy your weekend.”

Jem smiled ironically at her reflection. “Yes,” she said, “yes. I will. You too. And I'll speak to you next week after I've told the ITV people.”

“That'll be grand. I'll speak to you then.”

And then the line went dead.

Jem smiled and then broke into a spontaneous and rather peculiar happy dance. Scarlett watched her with concern from the kitchen doorway. “What are you
doing
?” she asked in horror.

“I'm dancing!” she replied. “Because I'm happy!”

“I don't like it,” said Scarlett.

Jem laughed. “Why not?”

“Because I don't. It makes me feel wrong. When's Daddy coming home? I want Daddy to come home. Then you won't do funny laughing and dancing anymore.”

Jem laughed again, amused by her daughter and her buttoned-up persona but slightly saddened by her inadvertent declaration of the poignant truth of the thing.

“Come on,” she said to Scarlett, “let's go and put some chips in bowls for our guests.”

But as she said it the doorbell rang and there was a shadow through the dimpled glass of the door and the sound of excitable girl-child from somewhere out of sight and they were here, their guests, the next paragraph in this slightly odd chapter of her life.

Joel smiled at her diffidently in the doorway. “I thought, curry, it should really be beer,” he began, handing her a thin blue bag, “but then I thought, wine is a nicer thing to bring to a person's home. So I brought both.”

She took the bags from him and let him in, helping him with Jessica's coat, taking his jacket, hanging them against her own family's coats on the coat pegs behind the door.

“Nice road you live on,” he said, rubbing his cold hands together.

“Yes,” she said, “we like it. Come in, come in.”

Jem had expressed three bottles of milk so would not need to breastfeed Blake until at least tomorrow morning. Jem was not a big fan of expressing (it made her feel like something very slightly less than human, somewhere between woman and cow) and Blake was not a big fan of being bottle-fed. It was not a perfect arrangement and Jem had felt guilty for a moment about making her infant son suckle from a rubber teat just so that she could let her hair down with a man who wasn't his father, but then she'd thought about Ralph, his week of lie-ins and days on the beach, his nights out drinking freely and staying out late, and stopped feeling guilty immediately.

“Can I get you a beer?” she said, emptying Joel's bag of bottled Beck's and £8.99 Chablis into the fridge.

“That would be great, thank you.”

She opened two Tiger beers and handed one to him.

The radio in the kitchen was tuned to Xfm, which was playing something bouncy and feel-good by Jack Johnson, and there was still some early spring sunshine left in the sky, and the window was open a crack to let the curry smells out. Smith the cat lay curled up on the sofa and in this light, with that sound track, with a cold beer in her hand and good news still lifting her spirits, Jem felt something like youthful euphoria pass through her like a seltzer. Yes, she thought to herself, yes, this is all right. This is good. I am glad he came. I am glad he is here. She smiled and lifted her beer bottle to his. “Cheers,” she said.

“Cheers,” he said. “Thank you for having us.”

“It's a pleasure,” she said. “And I hope you don't mind but I got a bit inspired in the new and improved Sainsbury's and thought I'd cook rather than order out. Are you okay with Thai food?”

“I love Thai food.” He smiled.

“Great! And what about Jessica?”

“Oh, she's eaten already.” He leaned down and smiled at Jessica and she smiled back. “Hey,” he said, “why don't you go and say hello to Scarlett?”

She looked up at him and smiled again. “Okay,” she said, losing her uncharacteristic shyness and bouncing over to where Scarlett was still skulking in the corner.

Jem watched as they bonded gently over the cat, both taking it in turns to stroke him very slowly and very seriously.

“So,” said Joel, turning back to Jem, who was slicing up chicken breasts into thin slivers. “You must be looking forward to seeing your partner tomorrow then?”

Jem smiled grimly. “Yes and no,” she said. She didn't look up to see how he'd responded to this admission, carried on slicing the pink meat. Realizing that she didn't have a clue how to
explain her response to Joel, she softened. “No,” she smiled, “I am looking forward to seeing him. Definitely. It's been a good week, but it's a bit lonely, you know. Well,” she said, slightly apologetically, “obviously . . .”

“Yes, I think I know what you mean.” He laughed. “It is lonely living alone, even when you have a child. Lonelier in a way, because you can't get out and find some life to live, you know. You're tied to your child, tied to your home, tied to the routines. And you're just
desperate
for an adult to have a conversation with, even if it's only about getting the drains cleared. You're lucky,” he said, “lucky to have built-in company.”

Jem poured some chips into a bowl and boiled the kettle for the rice.

“So,” said Joel. “This is a very nice house you have here.” He glanced around. “Ralph is not your typical impoverished artist in a drafty garret then?”

Jem smiled. “Not quite. He was when I met him, and quite literally, in fact. He spent two weeks living in an unheated studio in east London, finished twenty paintings, came home emaciated and feverish. Which of course makes him sound like some kind of tortured genius. Which he isn't. He was just . . .
in love
.”

“With you?”

“Yes. With me. Ha.”

“Wow,” said Joel, “that's quite something. What girl could resist?”

“Quite,” said Jem. “I could not. I knew nothing about it until the day the exhibition opened, and there I was, in a room in Notting Hill, surrounded by paintings of myself.”

“Seriously? He locked himself in a garret for two weeks to paint you? Exclusively?”

“Uh-huh. It seems unthinkable now. It seems so long ago,
another world, another lifetime, and of course children bring so much to your life, so much joy, so much magic, but they take stuff away too. They take
that
away, you know, that passion that you had for each other. That
madness
. It's like, before the kids were born, the worst thing I could possibly imagine happening to me would have been losing Ralph, you know, getting that phone call in the night, the knock at the door: ‘We're so sorry, it's your partner, he's been knocked down, there was nothing we could do . . .' Just the thought of it.” She shuddered. “And then you have a baby and suddenly you think, Christ, there is something
much much
worse than losing Ralph. My sister said to me, before I had Scarlett, she said: You know once you have a baby, Ralph won't be your baby anymore? And I said: Rubbish, he'll always be my baby. And she shook her head, very slowly, said: No, he won't. And she was right. It really is just a matter of him having to look after himself now. It's not my job anymore. And I think he hates me for it.” She looked up at Joel and smiled sadly. “Sorry,” she said, “way too much information.”

“No, no, not at all,” he reassured, “I suppose if he went away to find himself, he was probably hoping that you would do some soul-searching too.”

“Yes.” Jem nodded. “Yes. I hadn't thought of that. You're absolutely right. I suppose he did. I've been so busy being cross with him for going and then so busy unexpectedly enjoying him not being here that I hadn't really considered the depths of my soul. I've just been kind of, well, waiting for him to come back, I suppose. Waiting to see what he'll have to say for himself. Anyway,” she continued overbrightly, “how are you with spicy food?”

“Average,” he said.

“Average?” she repeated.

“Yes. For example, when I'm eating at Nando's I tend to order it medium.”

“You do not!” she exclaimed.

“I do!” he laughed. “Why, what's so funny about that?”

“Nothing. I just never met anyone who ordered medium in Nando's before! I always wondered why they even bothered making a medium sauce. I thought everyone had it extra hot.”

Joel folded his arms across his chest and eyed her defensively, but with a smile. “Well, now you know. It's me! The phantom medium peri-peri eater of south London.” He pretended to unmask himself and Jem laughed.

“Well,” she said, “in this house we like our food very, very hot. So, are you up for the challenge?”

He rubbed his hands together. “Bring it on,” he said. “I will not be known as that wimp who came over for dinner and asked for it medium for the rest of my life!”

“Okay,” Jem laughed, and fried the chicken in a wok with two mounds of dung-green paste until it released acrid smoke into the air. Then she added a can of coconut milk and a cup of water and let it all simmer for just long enough to give Blake his bedtime bottle and get him into his pajamas.

Joel played with the girls while she dealt with the baby, and by the time Blake was in bed and the food was ready, the girls were installed in Scarlett's bedroom, the sun had fully set and Jem was pleasantly drunk. She turned off the overhead halogen lights and set the table.

“This all smells fantastic,” said Joel, eyeing the green curry, the tomato and coriander salad and the pile of fluffy white rice enthusiastically. “Would it make me sound really quite pathetically tragic if I said that this was the first meal that has been cooked for me in about three years?”

“What, not even your mum?”

“No, not even my mum. She bought herself a microwave in 1990 and never used her cooker again. So this is a real, real treat. Thank you so much.”

“It's a pleasure. It's nice to cook again. I haven't really cooked a proper meal since I was pregnant.”

“So Ralph doesn't get this treatment then?”

Jem grimaced. “Poor bugger,” she said. “No. I do try but I just got out of the habit of it because it was too painful for me to stand when I was heavily pregnant and then having a small baby demanding my attention put paid to it after he was born and then, I suppose I've just been lazy. But it's just—I don't know—I do so much already, I just resent having to add something else to my infinite to-do list. I suppose I would have to feel more warmly disposed toward him to want to make the effort and . . .” she stopped. Two Tiger beers and her mouth had found a way of operating without her permission. “I'm sorry,” she said, “I'm doing it again. You must think I invited you over here just so I could moan about Ralph, but I really didn't. Anyway. How's the curry, not too hot?”

He was chewing and fanning his mouth with the side of his hand. “Wooph,” he said, “it is a bit hot. But no”—he swallowed and reached for his Tiger—“it's fine. It's delicious. Really. Not too hot at all.”

Jem looked at his red watering eyes and laughed out loud. “Are you sure?” she said.

“Yeah!” he exhaled, breathlessly. “I love it. Honestly.”

Jem smiled at him. She thought about the packet of red-hot Thai bird's-eye chilies in the vegetable drawer of the fridge. There were loads left. She thought about making a suggestion, about taking Joel on in a head-to-head chili challenge, about
re-creating the madness and pandemonium of the night she and Ralph had first bonded together over spicy food, but she couldn't bring herself to. As distant as she was feeling from her partner of eleven years, and as many unresolved issues as they still had to deal with, that would not be right. That would, in some strange way, be worse than physical adultery. Instead she opened the lid on her third Tiger beer and changed the subject. “So, I hope you don't think I'm being incredibly nosy, and just say if you'd rather not talk about it but—Jessica's mum? What's the deal with that?”

She looked up at him, to gauge his reaction.

“Ah,” he said, “yes, well, that's some story.”

“I mean, you don't have to, if you don't want to . . .”

“No, it's fine. It's just, it's a bit messy, a bit depressing. If you're okay with messy and depressing?”

“I am,” she nodded.

“Well”—he put down his spoon for a moment and picked up his beer—“Paulette and I, God, we were a car crash. I met her in 1996, so I suppose around the same time that you met your Ralph. She was working as a nanny when I met her, living in this nice little house in Dulwich, so I had no external clues as to what she was really like. But, ha! Turns out she was a junkie, turns out she'd been on smack since she was thirteen years old and was down to methadone then, when she was nannying. I mean—a nanny! Who the hell employs some ex-user junkie from Bristol to look after their kids? By the time I found out, I was in love with her and, bleeding-heart arsehole that I am, I thought I could save her. You know, that's my work, saving youth from the folly of themselves. That's what I'm trained to do. Not that she was young—she was, you know, nearly thirty by the time I really knew the score. And once I knew she kind of let it all
hang out, lost her job, quit the methadone, back on the smack and expected me to keep the whole act hanging together, and I was this close”—he measured a smidgen of space between his thumb and his index finger—“this close to ending it when she got pregnant. And I thought, yes! Yes, a baby, you know, that's exactly what she needs, exactly what we need, and she was brilliant. Cleaned herself up the minute she found out, did everything you're supposed to do when you're carrying a baby, didn't even have a drink or a can of Coke. I mean, you can see it in that photo, that's why I keep it; it's the only photo I've got of her when she looks like a real human being. Her hair, her skin, her figure. That's the person she would have been if it hadn't been for the smack. And then, well, Jessica came and we did the whole happy family thing for a few months, and then I knew, I just knew, she was back on it. And I would look at our girl,
that
”—he pointed at the ceiling, indicating the rooms above—“that girl and I just could not understand how anyone with that in their lives could possibly want anything else. Especially, something so, you know,
dirty
, something evil. Why? It didn't make any sense. Anyway. I kicked her out in the end. I didn't want that for our girl. I didn't want that for me. And now she's kind of cut herself off from us. She'll never forgive me for kicking her out and uses that as an excuse not to see her daughter.” He shook his head sadly. “It's pathetic really. A grown woman. A woman who had everything. And she'd rather have that. She'll end up dead before she's forty.”