As Good As It Gets? (6 page)

‘No,’ Will exclaims, followed by a derisive laugh. ‘God, Charlotte.’

‘Why not?’

‘Mum, no!’ Rosie cries. ‘You can’t just march over there. You don’t know them.’

‘I wouldn’t
march
. I’d just walk normally …’

‘What would you say?’ she demands.

I smirk. ‘How about, “Hello”? I find that’s usually a good way to start things off.’ Outside, the woman tosses back her head and laughs long and hard at something one of the men has said.

‘Mum’s so nosy,’ Ollie sniggers to his dad.

‘Yeah, she’s turned into a curtain-twitcher,’ Will agrees, which prickles me; we’re
all
standing here, peering out, after all.

‘Well,’ I announce, ‘I’m going out to welcome them. C’mon, Will, let’s be neighbourly.’

‘You can’t!’ Rosie cries. But I’m already making for the door, with Rosie shouting, ‘Dad, stop her!’ and actually
grabbing
at my arm, as if I were naked and about to ruin her young life.

Chapter Five

The woman and boy are chatting companionably at their front door. As we approach, I realise her trousers aren’t in fact jeans, but black leather. How very racy.

‘This is a bit embarrassing,’ Will mutters.

‘No it’s not. It’s just a nice thing to do,’ I whisper back, rearranging my face into a wide smile. ‘Hello,’ I say brightly. ‘We live across the road. Just thought we’d come over and say hi.’

‘Oh, hi,’ the woman says, seeming genuinely pleased. ‘Lovely to meet you.’

‘I’m Charlotte and this is my husband Will …’

‘I’m Sabrina,’ the woman says, ‘and my husband …’ She turns to the open front door and yells: ‘Tommy? Come outside! Our new neighbours are here …’

A tall, broad-chested man in a faded black Rolling Stones T-shirt and jeans a tad on the tight side emerges and greets us warmly. While Sabrina is tiny and astonishingly pretty – early forties at a guess – Tommy is a hulking bear of a man, perhaps heading for fifty, with clippered greying hair and a bone-crushing handshake. ‘Great to meet you both. Lovely area this is.’ He has the kind of deep, gravelly voice that’s perfect for relating dirty jokes.

‘It really is,’ I agree, glancing at the boy who’s now perched on the low front wall, lighting a roll-up. ‘That’s our son Zach,’ Sabrina adds with an eye roll. ‘Helping enormously as you can tell.’

We all laugh, and I can’t help being transfixed by the way he’s puffing nonchalantly in full view of his parents. He can’t be much older than Rosie. Will would have a heart attack if he ever saw her with a ciggie in her mouth. ‘D’you have to smoke that out here?’ Tommy growls, which Zach chooses to ignore.

‘Er, are you going to be starting at Harrington High, Zach?’ I ask him.

He shakes his head. ‘Nah.’

‘Oh, are you going to St Jude’s?’

Another head shake, causing his mop of black hair to flop into his dark, guarded eyes. ‘I’m not at school.’

‘He left last year,’ Sabrina explains. ‘Wants to pursue music …’

‘Are you going to music college?’ I ask, sensing Will shooting me a sharp look.

‘He’s doing his own thing,’ his mother explains with a resigned smile.

‘Meaning sod all, basically,’ Tommy chortles. ‘He’s studying at the college of fuck-all, then possibly graduating to the university of sitting-on-his-arse. Bloody exhausting, isn’t it, Zach?’

We laugh again, and Zach gazes at us as if we’re a collection of random strangers waiting for a bus. ‘Well,’ Will says, growing impatient now, ‘if there’s anything you need …’

‘Great, thanks,’ Sabrina says warmly.

‘There
is
something,’ Tommy adds. ‘Don’t suppose you know if there are any good cycling trails around here? Trail biking, I mean.’

I pause for Will to answer this time, thinking that perhaps he might like to contribute, seeing as he’s the one who zooms around parks and marshlands on his foraging expeditions. But he just stands there, mute, as if Tommy had enquired about some obscure local facility – an accordion supplier, perhaps, or a breeder of guinea pigs. ‘Er, you cycle a lot, don’t you?’ I prompt Will, widening my eyes.

‘Um, yeah, just round and about really,’ he says vaguely. Oh, for Christ’s sake. I know he’s eager to get away, but he doesn’t have to be so uncommunicative. It’s like having another teenager in tow.

‘Would you say the marshes are the best place?’ I suggest.

‘Yeah.’ Will nods. ‘Depends what you’re looking for really …’

‘Well, I guess we’d better let you get on.’ I smile brightly, realising I’m trying to compensate for Will’s standoffishness, and feel decidedly out of sorts as we troop back to our house.

‘Did you have to do that?’ Will hisses as we cross the road.

‘Do what?’

‘Interrogate the boy …’

I gawp at him as we reach our house. ‘I didn’t interrogate him. I just asked a few questions. At least I was interested.
It’s better than being rude, like you were, pretending you couldn’t quite remember what a bicycle is …’

Will emits a gasp of irritation.

‘Charlotte! Just a minute …’ I turn to see Sabrina, her ravishing hair shining like copper as she hurries towards us. ‘Sorry,’ she adds, ‘I should’ve said. We’re having a few friends around for a barbecue next Saturday. A sort of christen-the-house thing. It’d be great if you and your family could come … we’d love to meet you all properly.’

Clearly,
she
wasn’t appalled by me ‘interrogating’ her son. ‘That’s kind of you,’ I reply. ‘We’d love to, wouldn’t we, Will?’

‘Uh … yeah,’ he says, in an overly bright voice, unable to disguise the fact that he’d rather clean our tiling grout than fraternise with the new neighbours.

*

Will’s mood has lifted by the time we’re all installed in our favourite local Malaysian restaurant for his birthday dinner (well, it’s everyone’s favourite apart from Ollie’s – he nagged to go to the Harvester and is beyond thrilled that Rosie’s best friend Nina started working there recently). ‘You should have heard Mum, grilling the poor boy,’ Will chuckles.

‘I only asked a few polite questions,’ I correct him, not minding a bit of light ribbing as long as we have a fun evening out.

Will laughs, tucking into fiery prawns. ‘You didn’t
ask
questions. You fired them at him like a machine gun. He was virtually ducking for cover.’ He shields his head with his hands and grins at Ollie. ‘She wanted to know all about his future career plans, what he intends to do with the rest of his life …’

Rosie sniggers. ‘Yeah. You were out there for ages, Mum. And they were obviously dead busy …’

‘… And the boy—’ Will starts.

‘Zach,’ I cut in. ‘His name’s Zach.’

‘… he was smoking in front of his parents,’ Will goes on, ‘and it wasn’t just a roll-up either.’

‘Wasn’t it?’ I ask.

‘What was it then?’ Ollie demands, eyes wide.

‘D’you mean it was pot?’ I blurt out, at which Rosie snorts with laughter.

‘Pot? Who calls it
pot
?’

Everyone is sniggering now as the waiter clears our table. ‘Mum does, obviously,’ Will says with a grin. ‘She thinks it’s still 1972.’

‘I wasn’t even
born
in 1972, Will. And what am I meant to call it?’

‘Pot!’ Ollie mimics me. ‘Look, we’re having a groovy night out! Would anyone like some
pot
?’

The waiter glances back and smirks.

‘Hash, then?’ I suggest with a shrug. ‘Ganja? Whacky baccy?
Assassin of youth
?’

Ollie and Rosie convulse with laughter. ‘Where d’you hear that?’ she exclaims.

‘In a film,’ I reply, in mock indignation, to which Ollie enquires – of course, I should have sensed the question hurtling towards me, like the thundering rock in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
– ‘Have
you
ever smoked pot, Mum?’

I sip my wine while formulating an appropriate response. Outright lying doesn’t feel right – but then, do my children need a full inventory of every misdemeanour from my distant past? Anyway, as far as they’re concerned I was never a young person. I was born a middle-aged woman forever stuffing sweaty pants into the washing machine and moaning about the loo being left unflushed. ‘I, uh … had a nibble of a space cake once,’ I say, hoping that’ll satisfy them.

‘What’s a space cake?’ Ollie asks eagerly.

‘It’s a little bun with, er, stuff
baked into it.’

‘Like
pot
?’ Rosie giggles.

‘That’s right,’ I say in a small, regretful voice. ‘I thought it was an ordinary cake actually.’

‘Like from Starbucks?’ Will smirks.

‘Yes. A sort of …
herbal muffin
.’

‘No, you didn’t,’ Ollie teases. ‘You knew it was drugs, Mum. You wanted that cake, I can tell …’

‘She only had a little nibble,’ Will adds, his mouth twitching with mirth.

‘Where did you have it?’ Rosie asks. ‘At a party?’

I pour myself a glass of sparkling water to prove how
pure
I am now, and not the type to consume suspect bakery goods of any description. ‘Yes,’ I reply simply, ‘it was at a party.’ In fact it was Fraser, Rosie’s real father, who I’d sampled space cakes with – in Amsterdam, unsurprisingly, on our Inter-railing trip. It had become ‘our’ trip by chance. I’d planned to travel with Angie, a school friend, and when she’d contracted glandular fever I’d decided to go on my own. En route to Paris I’d met Fraser, whose refined features and floppy fair hair suggested a privileged upbringing involving rugby and cricket and an expensive education. Certainly, he had enough cash in the seemingly bottomless pockets of his khaki shorts to spend four months drifting around Europe, stopping off to see various wealthy friends, whereas I’d only been able to scrape together enough for three weeks. From then on we’d travelled together, and by the time we rolled up at an Amsterdam hostel, we were in love.

‘What was it like?’ Ollie wants to know, making my heart jolt.
Oh my God, it was heaven. Lying in Vondelpark with him kissing crumbs from my lips, and not knowing if it was the druggy cake making my head swirl, or the beautiful blond boy who looked like one of those carved marble angels you see in cathedrals …

‘Mum?’ Ollie prompts me.

‘Er, yes?’ I nearly knock over my glass of water.

‘What did it taste of?’

I take a fortifying glug of wine. ‘It was horrible,’ I fib. ‘The most disgusting thing I ever ate. It made me very, very sick, and if either of you are ever offered anything like that, just say no.’

Rosie grins. ‘They actually call it weed these days, Mum. Weed or spliff or cheese.’

‘Cheese?’ I repeat, feeling decrepit. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah, you hear people saying they’re gonna score some cheese …’

I splutter involuntarily. ‘Who are these people?’

She shrugs. ‘Just
people
.’

‘Are you sure that’s what they mean, though?’ I ask.

‘They could just be going to buy a Camembert,’ Will offers, sending the kids into hysterics again.

I smile and squeeze his hand under the table. If only it could always be like this, with Will being funny and sweet, like he used to be, before redundancy and angry-mowing and refusing to talk to me about anything important. Yet the fact that our marriage is hardly sparkly these days isn’t
all
his fault; it’s mine too. Occasionally, when Liza mentions a date she’s been on, I can’t help sensing a twinge of envy. Life can feel terribly grown up sometimes, when I come home to a barely communicative husband, then get on with the business of shovelling Guinness’s droppings out of his hutch (Rosie refuses to involve herself in his toileting. What kind of vet will she make, if she can’t bring herself to deal with a few innocuous pebble-like poos?).

Sometimes, I tell myself, this is just how adult life is, and I should stop mourning the loss of spontaneity and passion and accept how things are. The way Will flinches when I touch him in bed, as if jabbed with a red hot toasting fork with a smouldering marshmallow on the end … at our age it’s just normal, isn’t it? Everyone looks back at their younger selves occasionally, and feels all dreamy and wistful. Then they give themselves a mental slap and get on with hoiking a mass of gunky hair out of the shower drain and book in the car for its MOT.

‘Good birthday, sweetheart?’ I ask, my hand still wrapped around his.

Will smiles warmly. ‘Lovely, thanks.’

‘So, am I forgiven interrogating our new neighbours?’

‘Guess so.’ He squeezes my hand back.

‘What did you think of Sabrina? Isn’t she beautiful?’

‘Hmm, s’pose so,’ he says with a shrug.

‘Come on,’ I tease him. ‘What about that stunning red hair? And her body! So slim and fit-looking. D’you think she’s a dancer?’

Will looks genuinely baffled. ‘I’ve no idea. Why d’you say that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know – she has that lean, sinewy vibe about her, a bit like Liza …’ I pause. ‘Maybe she’s something to do with the music business? Or a make-up artist?’

Rosie chuckles. ‘Why d’you do this, Mum?’

‘Do what?’

‘Take such a massive interest in other people’s lives.’

‘I don’t,’ I retort. ‘I’m just interested. So, are we all going to their party next Saturday?’

‘Oh, I’m not sure,’ Will says with a shrug. ‘We won’t know anyone, will we?’

‘But we could
get
to know them,’ I point out.

‘Will there be anyone my age?’ Ollie wants to know.

‘I’ve no idea,’ I say briskly, ‘but anyway,
I’m
looking forward to it, and I’d appreciate it if you could all be positive because I’d really like us to all go as a family.’ I cough and sip my wine. In fact, I’m not that desperate myself. I’m out of practice when it comes to strangers’ parties; what to wear, what to say, how to
be
… I can’t recall the last time Will and I went to a social event where we didn’t know practically everyone. In fact, the last party I went to was my work Christmas do – seven months ago. The factory guys tore into the cheap fizz, and Frank, a strapping six-footer with a deep Spanish accent, remarked, ‘You’re very attractive, Charlotte …
for your age
.’