No Place For a Man (2 page)

Jess almost wavered. There was plenty of space to absorb the collecting of teenage clutter. Natasha was very good at that: filling those extra square metres wouldn’t even begin to present a challenge. In no time, if she took over this room, there would be new mountains of magazines, a minefield of shoes, a jumble of school books, cosmetics and underwear – in other words, exactly what was in her own room right now only more, much more, all spread about, an invasion, a positive coup d’état, of clutter. The thought was too depressing, but not quite as depressing as the certainty that if she gave in, it would be like admitting that Oliver had really gone for good, would only join them from now on as a short-term visitor. She wasn’t ready for that, not yet.

‘No I don’t think you can.’ Jess was going to be firm. ‘After all, he is coming back you know.’

Natasha frowned. ‘Yeah but not for ages, and even then not for long. He’ll only be here for a few weeks and then it’ll be time for university.’ But she could see the battle was being lost and the voice rose to a wail,
‘You know I’ve been wanting this room the whole of my
life
.’

‘But did he say you could? You can’t just …’

‘He didn’t say I couldn’t.’ Natasha flashed back fast, sensing a loophole. ‘If he didn’t want me to have it he’d have locked the door, wouldn’t he, and put a note on it saying “Hands off, especially Tash”. I mean what are you going to do with it? Leave it exactly like he left it like some sort of shrine? Cos if you are that’s just grisly.’

Jess laughed. ‘What, leave it like this to gather even more dust? Are you mad? No I just thought I’d tidy it up a bit and, well …’

‘Yeah like I said, just leave it for when the perfect prodigal deigns to come back.’

Natasha, furious at not getting her immediate own way, swept past Jess, crashing against the door frame as she hurtled out. She whizzed into her own room (second biggest, peaceful, overlooking the back garden and the railway line beyond) and slammed the door shut after her. Jess felt the house shake and made her way downstairs, holding on tight to the banister rail in case the whole building collapsed as one day it surely must beneath the accumulated force of so many years of door-slammings. Natasha would be looking into the mirror now and trying to force herself to cry. The bang on the shoulder from the door frame would help, for even drama-queen Natasha found it difficult, now that she was close to sixteen, to force a tear simply from a feeling of being slightly hard done by. She wouldn’t come out now, Jess reckoned, until she’d worked up a good half-hour’s calculated sobbing and her puffed-up, pinked-up face would later descend to the kitchen for supper, apparently subdued and miserably
acquiescent, to give Jess an opportunity to reconsider, because for sure this wouldn’t be the last they’d hear of it.

Down in the sitting room fourteen-year-old Zoe was apparently peacefully doing her homework at Jess’s desk by the big front window. She looked like someone posing as Girl Being Studious, her long flat fair hair trailing prettily over her hand as she wrote fast in her book. The television wasn’t on, and that, coupled with the fact that Zoe usually did her homework either sprawled across the conservatory table or upstairs on her bedroom floor with music drowning out most of her thought processes, made Jess suspicious. It exhausted her, this feeling of being on her guard the whole time, wary that The Girls were constantly up to something. They made a formidable team, capable of serious manipulations in the interests of getting what they wanted. Sometimes she suspected they crept out of the house in the dead of night, shimmied down to the hazel copse on the common to call up witches and devils and concoct spells.

‘Sorry Mum, did you want to use your desk?’ Zoe looked up and smiled at her. Such a sweet smile, so artless. The confidence of truly perfect teeth. Jess almost relaxed.

‘No, don’t worry for now. You’re OK there. What’s wrong with your own room?’ Too late, Jess realized she’d walked into a trap. Zoe’s smile broadened. Triumph, Jess assumed.

‘Oh, it’s a bit cramped up there, especially for this geography stuff. You have to spread out the maps and things and then there’s all the pages of statistics. It kept falling off the bed and I kept treading on it. Just not enough space really.’ Zoe’s face turned back to her
books, the carefully nurtured seed planted. If Natasha had Oliver’s room, she could move up to Tash’s …

Matthew Nelson hadn’t expected to feel so elated. He was pretty sure that wasn’t the usual reaction to being made redundant. Instead he felt as if he’d been let out of prison early, without even having to go to the trouble of good behaviour. He should be feeling depressed. He should be thinking in terms of scrap heaps and hopelessness and hiring someone expensive and slick to make the grovelling best of his CV. Right now, driving west along the Cromwell Road, he felt an overwhelming delight at being alive. ‘
I’m free!
’ he sang along to an old Who track on the radio. ‘…
freedom tastes of reality
…’ He punched the air out through the Audi’s open sun roof and laughed, loud and madly. A passenger in a cab that pulled up next to him at the lights stared at him nervously as if he might be nuts enough to leap out and make a grab for him. Matt could tell from an awkward shoulder-wriggle that the man was surreptitiously checking that the door was locked and he grinned at him, including the alarmed stranger in his all-embracing new-found love for his fellow humans. We are all one, he thought in his euphoria, brothers and sisters beneath our over-important clothes and our tender skin, grafting away our short lives with not enough time to stop and smell the roses. Well, he’d have time now. He’d have time to tend them and prune them and deadhead them and mulch, spray and propagate as well if he felt like it. Everyone should have that kind of time. And an allocation of gorgeous, full-bloom, metaphorical roses. It should be neither a privilege nor a surprise.

Matt watched his fellow drivers hurtling along the
busy road, cutting in where they could, overtaking pointlessly just to be slowed at the next junction. Too many looked miserable, too many were gabbling anxiously into silly little phones, making sure they kept in contact, convincing themselves they were essential. That had been him yesterday, this morning even, before The Meeting, before, as had been euphemistically stated, ‘Options’ (which were no such thing) had been ‘Put’. Now he knew better. Those who were hired could always be fired. The truly tricky bit was going to be telling Jess.

The boy was out by the railway again. It was the third time she’d seen him this week. Natasha wiped the tears away quickly and stared out of the window. She knew he couldn’t see as much of her as she could see of him, but she still didn’t want to look like some snivelly little kid. He might have super-vision, might be able to see the spot that was building itself up like a disgusting pus-filled volcano just under the skin above her left eyebrow. Even as she knew she was thinking the ridiculous, she flicked her hair about so fronds hung down over where she was sure the spot was pushing its way to the surface.

From her window the boy looked more than interesting: for one thing he shouldn’t be where he was, down there on the rail side of the fence. It was dangerous, there were notices up everywhere about keeping off. He looked mysterious, unsettled. He wasn’t really doing anything, he never was, he was just being there, mooching about as if he was deciding something that really mattered but was going to take his time over it. He must have walked along from the level crossing up by the main road, past the allotments where her
grandad dug his vegetables most days. There was nowhere else you could get through on to the embankment, unless he’d come through someone else’s garden and found a gap in the fence. She didn’t think it would be his own garden he’d walked through. She didn’t exactly know all the neighbours, nobody did – even the parents just said hello and not much else unless it was Christmas – but she hadn’t seen him around before this week and no-one had done any house-moving. He wasn’t wearing anything like a school uniform: even up at Briar’s Lane Comp you weren’t allowed to wear jeans with holey knees. Natasha ducked behind her curtain as he looked towards her window. She wondered if he’d actually seen her and hoped he hadn’t. If he ever did look right at her, she wanted to be ready. If she put her light on he could hardly miss seeing her now that it was getting dusk, but with the remains of the tears, and the spot …

‘Tasha! Supper’s ready!’ Zoe’s voice bellowed up the stairs. Natasha was hungry, she realized, though she minded Zoe breaking the spell. She liked it being just her and the railway boy. They shared, if it was possible, their solitude. They were both alone, both lonely, both, she was sure, with stuff on their minds. She could have stayed and watched him, made a point to her mother that principles were more important than mere food. The problem was that they weren’t. She was ravenous. She switched off the light and wondered if the boy had noticed. Perhaps he was looking at her window and hoping she’d be there again tomorrow.

‘So, Olly got off all right?’ Matt didn’t go in for hello-and-how-was-the-day, he just walked in through the
door and launched straight in as if he’d nipped out of the kitchen five minutes ago to fetch something. It was a trick that tended to wrong-foot visitors who would wonder if they’d missed an earlier entrance, or if they were invisible or if Matt just hadn’t had the kind of mother who believed in teaching basic manners at a more formative age. Jess used to find it endearing, this eagerness to get on with conversation and bypass time-wasting pleasantries. Way back, in younger and more passionate times, he’d stride into the house and enquire loudly if she fancied a quickie without bothering to check if there was some stranger peering into the cellar to read a meter or Angie from across the road guzzling coffee in the kitchen. Just now, Jess was adding basil to a salad and wondering whether Natasha had stopped sulking yet. Matt reached over and picked a piece of lettuce out of the bowl.

‘Fine. He just … sort of fled; in fact it wasn’t very flattering, he could hardly wait.’

‘No big farewells then?’ Matt kissed the back of her neck. She caught a hint of Scotch, along with the warm smoky musk of pubs. ‘You should have sent him off to the airport by himself on the bus. If you don’t get the full-scale “Gonna miss you, Mom” scene, then what’s the point of going with them?’ He chuckled in a private-joke sort of way. Jess frowned. He was going to miss Oliver just as much as she was, he didn’t need to pretend to be beyond that … what? girly? stuff.

‘Have you been to the pub?’ she asked. Matt was leaning against the sink, very much in her way, and looking strangely pleased with himself. He was a tall, broad man who enjoyed the fact that people assumed he was younger than his forty-eight years. He’d taken off his tie. Jess could see it trailing from his jacket
pocket, crammed in roughly the way a schoolboy embarrassed about his uniform would. As she watched, he took off the jacket and hurled it at the back door.

‘What was that for?’ she asked, mystified. ‘It’s fallen on the cat’s bowl!’

He shrugged and laughed and went to sit at the table, ignoring the crumpled jacket ‘Who cares? I don’t intend ever to wear a suit again.’ He reached across the table, pulled the opened bottle of wine towards him and poured himself a glass. Pausing suddenly, he looked anxious for a moment. ‘You won’t bury me in one, will you, Jess? People tend to, I’ve heard. Promise you won’t?’

She laughed. ‘Of course I won’t! You can wear the full Manchester United strip if you want. What’s all this about? You’re being very peculiar.’

‘It would have to be the away strip, I suppose. Going to meet God is hardly a home fixture,’ he mused, then admitted, ‘yes I have had a drink. I dropped in at the Leo for a quick sharpener just now.’

‘So you left work early then.’ He could have had a drink at home, with me, Jess thought. He could have used a bit of imagination, worked out that she’d like a bit of sympathetic company on the day their eldest child took off for Australia for several months. It was surely an important end to something, a start to a new stage.

‘You could have …’ she began, then stopped. No point nagging. It only made her sound like a control freak. ‘So why no suits? Has the firm gone in for a dress-down policy? You’ll have to spend a fortune at Paul Smith to get the look right.’

‘No. I’m just not going back.’

‘Not going back where, Dad?’ Natasha breezed into the kitchen and joined her father at the table. ‘What’s for supper?’ she asked, leaning back on her chair and looking as if she was expecting full-scale waitress service, an attitude guaranteed to get Jess steaming mad.

‘Nothing if you don’t get the plates out of the oven,’ Jess snapped. Matt topped up his wine glass and poured one for her, though rather, she noticed, as an afterthought.

‘Not going back to work?’ she asked him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Why aren’t you?’ Zoe, catching up quickly, joined them in the kitchen.

Matt surveyed his audience, whose attention he certainly had, and smiled. ‘Because I’ve been made redundant, that’s why. I have cleared my desk, brought home the metaphorical spider plant and I’m out of there. For good.’

Jess stared at him as if gazing on a stranger. Matt had worked at Cranbourne Communications for twenty-two years. Public relations, editorial advising and journalists’ jollies were part of his identity. His was the face that had launched a thousand press parties for everyone from political apologists to minor royalty and TV moguls with excuses to sell.

‘Why? What have you done?’ Natasha’s face was full of excitement, as if her dad was a schoolboy caught smoking dope behind the gym and heading for expulsion.

‘Nothing. I’ve been downsized. Down-and-out-sized. It’s that simple. The computer revolution has finally kicked in so less of us are needed. That and the fact that younger people are cheaper, of course.’

Jess bent down to take the jacket potatoes out of the
oven. Her hands were shaking. She wished he’d told her earlier, come home and taken her out (to the Leo maybe …) so there would be just the two of them discussing this, talking through it, getting themselves past the shock stage. Instead she felt he’d cheated more than a bit, picked his moment when she was occupied, diddling about with domestic stuff and her concentration was divided. The girls were there too, as he’d known they would be. Did they really need to be for this?