As It Is On Telly (5 page)

‘Jason, let me tell you a bit about the business you’re trying to get into.’ Bunty planted her hands on the table. ‘First of all, all the money in the world would not persuade me to sleep with you. In any kind of deal, as far as I’m aware, your business partner needs to want something out of it too. And by the way, men – boys – peak at nineteen, so you’re already past your sell-by date.’ Jason’s mouth fell open as Bunty picked up the champagne and tipped it neatly into his crotch. ‘Furthermore, if you’re not very, very careful, you’ll end up with warts on your willy, and nobody will want to do business with you, ever, ever again. Good night.’

And she stalked off across the pub, hardly aware of Jason’s admiring stare and his cold-crotched groan: ‘I like your style! Come back!’

*

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Priscilla

I think you should be aware that ‘Jason’ is actually a little boy wearing his dad’s suit, and a sex maniac to boot. If I hadn’t found it quite so funny I’d be highly offended at what went on at my rendezvous. Please tell me they’re not all like that!

Bunty (which Jason/Jammy obviously thought meant ‘Bounty’)

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Dearest Bunty,

I am disappointed that your meeting was not to your liking. Jason was rather taken with you and was hoping to meet with you again. If he does not meet with your approval, however, we will move on to your second rendezvous.

Priscilla

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

But Priscilla, he’s 23!

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

And you’re 38, I believe. Age is not a barrier to love, in our view.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Okay, okay. So I cut a couple of years off my age. He cut off a couple of decades! And it’s not all he needs to cut off. Could the next one be someone who doesn’t live with his mum?

CHAPTER FIVE

Bunty lay in bed, one eye open, eyeing up Graham in as surreptitious a fashion as she could. One of his Shrek ears had a red weal across it where it had been folded against the pillow, and she had to resist the unbearable urge to get the scissors out of the bedside table and cut along the line. It looked like one of those paper cutouts that with a few deft folds would turn into a pyramid, or a swan. Maybe a small pig, given the porcine nature of the wobbly top of Graham’s ear.

There was much less of him that wobbled though, she noticed. The mounds under the duvet were definitely lower in profile – the Pennines instead of the Cairngorms. Or more like those things they use to talk about in O-level geography – drumlins, was it? Little hills like a basket of eggs. Bunty’s mind went off in two directions at once, one part visualising Graham’s body as containers of various eggs, all shrouded by the duvet. His legs and feet were links of half Easter eggs, like the Flower Pot men; his body a washing basket like Mary’s piled high with ostrich eggs; his head one enormous dinosaur egg, the ridiculous ears stuck on too low, too much at right angles.

Her other train of thought chugged through the mystery of adolescent exams. She doubted very much whether anyone Charlotte knew remembered O-levels, ‘A-levels, and even S-levels for the uber-clever like Cally had been. In fact, she doubted whether any of Charlotte’s teachers even remembered O-levels. It was all rather worrying, as she wasn’t entirely – no, not even slightly – au fait with what had taken their place. GCSEs seemed to be some combination of the exams Bunty had done at school, but there was so little emphasis on them these days. Charlotte, she was sure, could get a high grade just from turning up most days and avoiding getting arrested at the mall, yet she clearly wasn’t lacking in intelligence. She’d hacked into the computer like a pro, for Christ’s sake. Netnurse. Remember the Netnurse.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ Graham had the matching eye open and was now watching her across the pillow. ‘Fancy a bit?’

‘Since you put it so nicely,’ said Bunty, deepening the duvet valley between them, ‘no thanks.’

‘Bunny,’ crooned Graham. ‘Come on, it’s been ages. And you’ve got that look in your eye.’

How little he knew her, to somehow mistake parental concern for lust. ‘You’re sick,’ she said, then stopped.

It wasn’t entirely fair to assume that he’d known what she was thinking; sometimes she hardly knew herself what she was thinking these days. Too much time on her own had somehow turned her into Walter Mitty. What would the female of Walter be? Waltette? Walta? And there she went again, inventing a new persona for herself – borrowing an old persona and turning it into her own, in fact. Whatever the case, she was back inside her head, not in bed with her husband, whose increasing libido seemed to be snaking through the duvet valley and nibbling at her thigh.

‘Graham, no,’ she said softly.

He looked at her once, wounded, and turned onto his other side.

Serves you right, she thought viciously. Expecting me to come up with the goods when you’re porking some Lycra-bottomed bimbo from the squash club. It was quite possible that it was last night’s indiscretions that had given him this extra boost in the first place. She distinctly remembered Kat telling her in the throes of an affair with her married boss that she could take the claim for reviving their love life. Not hers and the boss’s, but the boss and Mrs Boss’s. ‘I was so happy after shagging you and it all going so well that I actually went home and boffed my wife!’ he’d told her in tones of great pride. Needless to say, the affair didn’t last much longer, and Kat quickly said goodbye to the boss, her bonus and ultimately her job.

So maybe this was where Graham was at right now. Some blockage had been cleared. It had, after all, been some months since they’d got round to anything other than a cursory kiss on the cheek in the morning. He’d got his plunger out, cleared the drain, and he was off. Which reminded her. ‘Oh my God, Dan will be here in five minutes.’

Graham sat bolt upright. ‘Dan? Who the hell’s Dan?’

And who the hell’s Lycra-bum, Bunty wanted to retort, but instead she smiled mysteriously. ‘Just a man I need to see. Isn’t it time you were going?’

Graham’s eyes narrowed, then he threw back the duvet in a huff. Bunty watched, bemused, as he made a huge show of putting on his shirt, stowing his arms in the sleeves bicep-up, slowly, one arm deliberately after the other, sucking in his gut so the outline of his ribs was the last thing to disappear under the white cotton as he buttoned his shirt from the bottom up.

She propped herself up on her elbow. ‘Have you been at that lap dancing club again?’

‘I’ve never been to one,’ said Graham, throwing a sly glance in her direction. ‘Why, was that sexy?’

At which Bunty howled with laughter as she clambered out of bed. It had actually reminded her of shoving a pillow into its case. ‘Yes, darling. You red hot lover, you.’ She patted his stomach – definitely smaller – and headed for the ensuite.

When the bell rang a few minutes later Charlotte beat her to the door. Bunty could almost hear her hormones surging from halfway up the stairs.

‘Hi, I’m Dan.’

‘Oh, hi-i-i-i-i. I’m Charlotte, but call me Charlie.’

Charlie? When had that come about? She’d been Lottie as a little girl, then Charlotte since seven or eight (and an introduction to
Charlotte’s
Web
). The heaving-bosomed teen version of her daughter was reinventing herself yet again. She had a genetic predisposition towards it, after all.

‘Thank you, Charlotte,’ said Bunty, throwing open the door to a slightly pink-faced Dan, studying his bucket rather hard in an attempt to avoid Charlotte’s appraisal of his shoulders and lightly stubbled chin. ‘Dan, why don’t you go down the side path?’

‘Sure.’ Dan took off with alacrity down the gravel path at the side of the house, while Charlotte chewed on a piece of hair.

Bunty slapped her fingers out of her mouth. ‘Shouldn’t you be at the bus stop?’

‘I’m too late. Can I have a lift?’

‘No.’ It was too bad, and a hard lesson to learn, but Charlotte was already far too willing to wait for everything to be handed to her on a plate, preferably in metallic fuchsia pink. Where she’d got that attitude from was hard to establish. ‘You’ll just have to be late. You’ll get in trouble, maybe even get a detention, and then you’ll know that next time you have to get yourself ready in time.’

‘You’re growing up now, Charlotte. We won’t always be here to pick up the pieces, Charlotte. You have to start to do things for yourself, Charlotte,’ whined her daughter, finishing Bunty’s lecture for her with almost the exact words she had been about to use. ‘Thing is, Mum, you don’t like it when I do things for myself really, do you?’

‘Don’t talk rubbish. Go to school,’ said Bunty abruptly.

‘I’ll take you, Char,’ said Graham, wafting down the stairs in a breeze of some new aftershave. Some expensive new aftershave, unless she was very much mistaken. She’d only just trained him out of the overpowering astringency of Lynx, and now he was shopping at the Gucci store? She felt a grudging admiration for Lycra-bum.

‘Graham, I’m trying to teach her a lesson.’

‘I’m going past the door.’ Graham straightened his tie in the mirror and waved Charlotte on. ‘Teach her a lesson tomorrow.’

Charlotte shot Bunty a small, triumphant glance then plumped into the passenger seat.

‘Both of you,’ said Bunty under her breath. ‘I’ll teach both of you a lesson.’

They both deserved one, in her view, having both struck a nerve. That Graham – perfumed, provocative, posturing Graham – was due his comeuppance was a given. And Charlotte? Well, it was true that the last time Charlotte had taken matters into her own hands it had been on a rather spectacular scale. After overhearing one of their arguments when Graham had accused Bunty of ‘getting off’ with Cally’s then boyfriend (now, oddly, Cally’s stepson), Charlotte had taken it into her head that she was the love-child of the liaison that never was. She was fairly sure she would not be able to investigate herself, so she had inveigled her younger friend Paige – Alan’s
actual
love child – into collecting DNA for her to do a paternity test. In New Zealand –
CSI
:
New
Zealand
. For the millionth time in the last few days, it occurred to Bunty that Charlotte knew far too much about biology.

Dan’s face swam into view. ‘Could you hook me up?’ Hook me up? Wasn’t that what Charlotte’s generation called getting together for a shag? Booty call, hooking up, friends with benefits – a whole range of unfathomable, uncommitted, sleazy options for the modern courtship. She should have taken lessons from Jason the Jammy.

Dan wanted to be hooked up with her? Bunty’s breath caught in her throat. It was a very tempting thought. He was a bit younger than her, for sure, but not a decade and a half. He liked fencing. He had that rugged outdoors look – no stripy arms from tanning in a sleeved T-shirt, just the slightly ruddy look of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. Or maybe it was rust. Or worse, thought Bunty, suddenly remembering that Dan was not a sensitive Diarmud Gavin gardener type, heaving concrete one day and delicately stroking a cyclamen petal the next. This was Dan. Dan, the drainage man, up to his armpits in crap most days.

‘Um, kitchen tap?’ Dan waved the hosepipe under her nose.

‘Oh! Oh, yes, hook up the hose. I’ll … I’ll meet you at the back window. Near the sink. Kitchen tap. Right there.’

Dan nodded slowly. ‘Right. Back window. Are you … are you okay?’

‘Yes! Fine. Sorry, just a bit distracted.’ By your curiously blue eyes and black eyelashes. No! ‘Bit of an argument with my daughter.’

With something that looked very much like relief, Dan nodded vigorously. ‘God, they’re hard at that age, aren’t they? My son’s fourteen. Sometimes I wonder if we’re even related. I think my ex had an affair with Ronnie Biggs. He’s like this small criminal mastermind.’

‘You have a fourteen-year-old son?’

‘I know, I know. Don’t look old enough, do I?’ Dan leaned on the doorframe with a cheeky grin. ‘I was only twenty when he was born.’

‘First girlfriend?’

‘Nah!’ Dan laughed. ‘First proper relationship, though. We lasted eight years. Not bad these days, is it?’ He smiled again, disarmingly frank.

He was nice, Bunty decided. Their expectations of life were completely different. For her marriage had meant forever, and the house, and the two cars, not ‘anything over five years is good enough’. But she liked him, nonetheless. Dan was honest, cared about his son, worked hard at his job … And waited patiently for distracted women to attach his hosepipe to the water supply.

‘Back window,’ she said again, and closed the front door.

Mary was peeking meekly over the tumbledown fence when Bunty joined Dan for his verdict. ‘Is it in my garden?’ she asked, her voice quavering.

‘Dan, this is Mary, my … friend,’ said Bunty. Dan wiped his hand, then reached across the fence and shook Mary’s delicate veined fingers. ‘Dan’s just seeing exactly what happens when the water goes through. Is that right, Dan?’

He nodded. ‘I had a poke around with the camera last time I was here, but it was a bit inconclusive. Thought I’d try it the old-fashioned way, with water. The only trouble is, I can’t feed the hose through under the fence. The hole’s too small.’

Bunty gave Dan’s hands a furtive glance. They were enormous, twice the size of her own. One false shove with one of those and her fence would be over in a second. ‘Allow me,’ she said, and got to her knees.

The tiny grid covering the offending pipe was sitting in the tight angle between the ground and the leaning fence, which was now so far over that a rush of wind from Mary’s rapidly rotating dryer could push it right to the ground. Grabbing the end of the hose from Dan, Bunty winkled her way under her prized, denim-blue Waney Lap, head first, on her elbows. She felt like an action hero – Angelina Jolie, or someone – belly-crawling into ‘Nam,’ planting the decoy, saving her side from sure decimation. With her cheek to the damp ground, she finally lay alongside the grid. As gently as if it were a hand grenade, she levered off the metal lid and nosed the hosepipe down into its depths.

She wriggled out, bottom first. ‘Done,’ she said, brushing herself down. ‘I’ll go and turn the tap on.’

Dan and Mary waited with matching admiring expressions as Bunty trotted up the boggy garden and into the kitchen. She watched for the thumbs up, leaning against the sink. Dan and Mary were in deep conversation, then Mary headed off into her own house and Dan made his way towards Bunty.

‘It’s definitely in Mary’s garden,’ said Dan through the open kitchen window. ‘This little spring developed right beside the apple tree.’

‘Her cat’s buried there,’ said Bunty, nodding. ‘They must have disturbed something when they put Flinders in the ground.’

‘Oh God.’ Dan dropped his head onto his hands. ‘That is the worst of this job. I can stand all the shit – ’scuse me – and the smell and everything, but having to tell little old ladies we need to dig up their kitty is just awful.’

Bunty smiled. What a gentle giant. A sweet, brightly shining, rough diamond. ‘I’ll tell her,’ she said.