Before I Met You (17 page)

Dom Jones did a double take when he saw Betty standing on
his
doorstep a moment later. He had a small baby in his arms and another small child attached to his ankle. His eyes took in the full length of Betty from her crown to her toes.

‘Fresh,’ he said eventually. ‘Come in.’

He held the door open for her, his eyes scanning the street outside his house in both directions before closing it quietly behind them.

‘Come in,’ he said again, ‘excuse the chaos. This house was never meant to have kids in it.’ He smiled drily and led her through a tiny hallway painted matt black, then through a tiny, half-panelled sitting room painted aubergine. The living room beyond was furnished with two oversized, vintage tan leather sofas, art deco in appearance, a huge chrome and crystal chandelier, a wide-screen TV, distressed wooden floorboards, brown shag-pile rugs and two rectangular fish tanks embedded into a wood-panelled wall at the far end. The walls were hung with outrageous pieces of art, one of which, at least, Betty recognised immediately as a Damien Hirst. The coffee table was glass and covered in Lego and plastic beakers and plates of half-eaten toast. Betty saw the table as it had been intended, as a place for drug-fuelled sex with nubile strangers, a place for cutting up lines of top-quality cocaine, for late night card games and for displaying interesting books about artists and film-makers and dead rock stars. It had not been intended as a resting place for children’s plastic ephemera.

‘Right,’ said Dom, leaning down to pick up the small child who was still attached to his lower leg, so he was now holding two of his children, ‘let’s do some introductions. This is Acacia,’ he nodded towards the toddler, ‘this is Astrid,’ he nodded at a ringleted baby who looked like an actual doll. ‘And somewhere over there,’ he looked over his shoulder, ‘is my big boy. Where are you, Donny?’ A small boy appeared in the doorway, holding aloft a large plastic gun, with a war stripe painted across his nose and a belt of bullets thrown across his chest. ‘This is Donovan.
Donovan,
this is …?’ He looked at her, aghast. ‘Jesus. I’m really sorry. I didn’t even ask you your name?’

‘Betty,’ she said, smiling from bemused child to bemused child. ‘Betty Dean.’

‘Cool name,’ he said, ‘excellent. Yeah. Kids, this is Betty. Betty lives just around the corner and she’s going to help me look after you all today until Mummy gets back. OK? So I want you all – especially you, Donny – to be really, really super-extra good today, OK?’

Donny narrowed his eyes at his father and then sat down heavily on the sofa behind him. ‘I want Mummy,’ he said.

Dom raised his eyebrows and turned to address him. ‘I know you do, mate, but Mummy’s busy today, Mummy’s working.’

‘Then I want Moira.’

Dom sighed and sat down next to him, a baby balanced on each knee. ‘Sorry, mate, but Moira had to go home, didn’t she? Moira had to go back to New Zealand.’

‘I wish there was no Noo Zeeling,’ he said, jutting out his lower lip and staring forlornly at the shag-pile rug.

Dom rubbed his hand across Donny’s thick blond shag cut and smiled. ‘Me too, buddy,’ he said. ‘Me too.’

‘So,’ said Betty, ‘how old are they all?’

‘Well, Astrid here is … shit, I dunno – how old is the baby, Donny?’

Donny shrugged.

‘It was just before I went to Hong Kong, so must have been December, so she’s about six months. Yeah, that’s right. December the sixth. Of course. And Acacia is a year older, she was December the twelfth, so she’s eighteen months, and big boy Donny here, he turned three in …’ he squinted, trying to conjure up the birth month of his first-born child. ‘September,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Yeah, he was three in September.’

‘Wow,’ said Betty. ‘You packed them in.’

Dom tucked the toddler, Acacia, between himself and Donny
on
the sofa and passed a beaker into her outstretched hands. ‘Well, yeah, not exactly planned that way. Cashie was supposed to be our last – well,
I
was happy for her to be our last – but it didn’t quite work out that way. Did it, little one?’ He looked down at the baby in his arms and smiled at her adoringly. ‘But still, you know, once they’re here, they’re here, and then there’s no going back. Forwards all the way, isn’t that right, troops?’

Donny put his hand to his head in a salute and Dom rubbed his hair again.

Betty stood, her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket, staring down at this family of three beautiful children and a handsome young father, and wondered for a moment what she was doing here. He didn’t need her here, surely. She was just an interloper, intruding into their beautiful world.

But as she thought this, the baby began to cry and the toddler dropped her beaker, spilling water onto the shag-pile rug, and Donny lifted his gun to his shoulder, and marched from the room. Then Dom looked up at Betty with his big brown eyes and said, ‘Thank God you’re here.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘what can I do first?’

He got to his feet and handed her the baby. ‘You hold her,’ he said, ‘I’ll make us some tea.’

She took the baby from his arms. She was warm and solid and a little damp. ‘Does she …’ Betty began, hesitantly, ‘… does she need a change?’

Dom looked at her blankly, and then with realisation. ‘Oh God, yeah, she probably does. Sorry, yeah, um, there’s some changing stuff in the bathroom,’ he said, going to switch on a light on the staircase and pointing her in the direction of upstairs. ‘First door on the left. Light comes on automatically.’

She nodded and looked again at the baby. The baby looked back at her with a look that said, ‘I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care, just do what you have to do.’

‘Er, OK.’

Dom poked his head back into the hallway and said, ‘Are you OK doing this? I mean, have you changed a nappy before?’

She nodded. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘no problem.’ She thought it only polite not to mention that it had been an incontinence nappy on a doolally old lady.

‘Just shout if you need anything.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, lacing her words with cool, calm and collection.

The stairs were dark, bare floorboards with a thin piece of black and cream striped carpet running up the middle. At the top of the stairs, steps went off in two directions. The steps on the right led to what looked like it must be Dom’s bedroom. Through a gap in the door she could see black bedding, a low-slung chrome ceiling light, a fan of discarded newspapers, a huge art deco mirror, a sculpture of some description that looked like it had been built out of motorbike parts, and another fish tank, this one built into a unit that also contained a flat-screen television.

She stood for a while and watched the bubbles rise up through the water, silent and nubile, mesmerising and calming.

In Dom Jones’s bedroom
.

She shook the thought from her head and turned left.

The bathroom was tiled in floor-to-ceiling gold mosaic. A bejewelled bronze Moroccan lamp hung overhead, and in the middle of the room was a free-standing bath made of copper with an enormous rectangular copper shower head hung above it. Free-floating glass shelves housed piles of fresh white towels; there was a row of three white orchids in gold-leafed pots on the window sill. And there, in the corner, a tatty, plastic-covered changing mat, a packet of Huggies, three packets of Johnson’s wipes, a basket full of plastic bath toys, and three small towelling robes with chocolate stains on them.

Why had one of the most famous people in the whole country
let
a total stranger into his home? Only three weeks ago this man’s house had been staked out by paparazzi. Only three weeks ago, Betty had been awoken by a police car sent to keep people away from Dom Jones’s house. He had seen her twice from his back window. He had bumped into her once outside her flat. And now, after just their fourth meeting he had invited her into his home. He had let her take his precious baby girl out of sight. How did he know she wasn’t a journalist? A stalker? How did he know she wasn’t up here poisoning his baby or drowning his baby because she was, in fact, a psychopath? Why did he trust her?

But she knew why he trusted her. He trusted her because they’d made a connection. Not just now, in the café, but weeks ago, across the courtyard. He’d seen her and she’d seen him and they had seen that they were equals. He’d seen a girl he could be friends with, a girl he might know in his real life, a girl he might once, possibly, have fallen in love with, but certainly a girl he could trust.

She placed the baby on her lap and then put everything back exactly where she’d found it, then she carried her down the stairs and into the kitchen at the back of the house, a dry, smiling baby in one arm and a balled-up nappy in the other.

‘Where does this go?’ she asked Dom, who was slicing up carrots into batons at a rough-hewn wooden surface next to a butler’s sink.

He glanced at the balled-up nappy and then at Betty and the baby, and said, ‘Well done, excellent! Bung it in here.’ He held open the lid of a large chrome bin and she dropped it in, on top of carrot peelings, beer cans, takeaway containers, old pizza and the contents of an ash tray.

Dom Jones’s rubbish
.

Stop it, she told herself sternly, just stop it.

Donny was sitting on a very tall barstool, at a zinc-topped counter in the middle of the room, cutting paper into strips with
a
pair of blunt-ended scissors. He looked up at Betty with his big sad eyes and then turned back to his paper.

‘What are you making?’ she asked, balancing the baby on her hip.

He said nothing.

‘Don,’ said Dom, a carrot in his hand, ‘Betty asked you something …’

Donny shrugged. ‘I just want Moira,’ he said.

Dom sighed and put down the carrot. He put a hand on Donny’s shoulder and squeezed it. ‘Guess where Betty works?’ he said into his ear.

Donny shrugged.

‘Betty works at a burger restaurant.’

Donny turned and glanced at her. ‘McDonald’s?’ he asked, with even bigger eyes.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit like McDonald’s but it’s called Wendy’s.’

His face fell. He shrugged again.

Dom looked at Betty and smiled. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘one day, when you’re big, you’ll know what Wendy’s is and you’ll be really impressed.’

Betty took the baby and sat down on a big leather armchair in the corner with her on her lap. The toddler, whose name she had already forgotten (although she suspected it was tree-related), was sitting on the counter next to Dom, picking up carrot batons and putting them in her mouth. Unlike her baby sister and her big brother, this child had fine blond hair and a less exuberant-looking physiology. This child, in fact, looked nothing at all like Dom or Amy, but like a slightly consumptive orphan with eczema. But still, she was not without her own appeal, not the least of which was her enormous blue eyes and ladylike posture. She was dressed in a smock top and leggings, both black, which struck Betty as a strange way to dress a tiny child until she remembered that this was not any child.

This child was rock royalty
.

‘I love your house,’ said Betty.

‘Thanks,’ said Dom. ‘It was always the big dream, the place in Soho. Ever since I was young.’

‘Yeah, me too.’

Dom looked at her with interest. ‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Yes. My mum brought me to London when I was fifteen. We ended up getting kind of lost in the backstreets. And I remember just feeling all this kind of
electricity
fizzing up through me, just wanting to get more and more lost, to never find my way out again …’

‘Yeah,’ Dom nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s exactly it. Same here. Probably when I was about twelve. I remember walking past this basement, just this shabby set of stairs leading down into this kind of manky pit. The windows were all dirty and there was this little blue neon light pinned to the wall, saying “Members Only”. Christ, I wanted to know what was down those steps
so badly
, wanted to be a member. Didn’t care what it was, could have been anything. And when we got our first advance, when we signed our first contract, I knew what I wanted to spend it on.’ He looked around the kitchen. ‘My own little slice of Soho.’ He smiled.

‘Wow,’ said Betty. ‘And you did.’

‘Yup. And whatever happens, I’ll never sell this place. Not ever.’

‘No,’ said Betty, with wide eyes. ‘No, you mustn’t. Never.’

She smiled, feeling the loose strands of their connection growing stronger and stronger.

Dom pulled a spoon out of a drawer, took the lid off a huge brown teapot and stirred the contents. ‘Milk?’ he said. ‘Sugar?’

‘Both, please,’ she replied. ‘Three sugars.’

He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Girl after my own heart,’ he said. ‘I used to have five. Cut it down to two and a half. How’s your hangover?’

She considered her hangover. She’d completely forgotten she had one from the moment she’d said ‘hi’ to Dom in the café two hours ago.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I was, er, I was sick last night. Big time. Think it saved me from the worst of it.’

He smiled at her and passed her a large white mug full of tea. She put it down on a small table to the side of the armchair. The baby on her lap sat still and compliant, playing with the plastic bangle on Betty’s wrist. A small radio was broadcasting Xfm. They were playing the new single by Supergrass; the lyrics were all about smoking fags and being young. Dom turned it up.

‘Have you heard this?’ he said.

She shook her head.

‘This is going to be massive,’ he said. He put a finger to his chin and listened intently. ‘Seriously,’ he continued. ‘These guys are good. Look like a bunch of chimps, but they’re good. Did you like “Caught by the Fuzz”?’

She shrugged and tried to look like she may or may not have liked it but really couldn’t say.

‘Absolute
gem
, that song. Total gem. Wish I’d written it. Do you like this song, Don?’ he asked his small son.

Donny looked up from his pile of slivered paper and said, ‘Hmm, yes, it’s like a holiday.’

Dom laughed. ‘
Exactly
!’ he cried. ‘Spot on, mate. That’s exactly what it’s like. It’s like listening to a holiday. A holiday from being old.’