Separate Lives (21 page)

“Typically charming, Alex.” Interesting that in the same way as the children became “my” children when he was feeling distanced from them, so the Dream Home was now “his” when he was distanced from me.

And the phone went dead. An hour later, when Chuck was asleep and I was at the bottom of the third glass, the phone rang again.

“Will?”

“Susie. Are you all right?”

“I'm . . . Yeah. Whatever. I don't know. No, I'm not.”

“I'm on my way.”

“Don't be ridiculous! Of course you're not. It's your brother's wedding, for fuck's sake.”

“They won't even notice—they're in their own little wedding bubble. Everybody's fine. I'm on my way.”

And I touched “End Call” and stared at the phone. And then, within a minute or two, it rang again, the caller identified as “Bridget.” I watched it ring for a while, guiltily, before letting it go to voicemail. I wanted to speak to Bridge, just not right now. Instead, very slowly and deliberately, I poured myself another glass of wine.

Dearest Mum,

As fast as possible, I determined to put all the Alex nonsense behind me, even if I was tiring of constantly putting things behind me. I was even briefly tempted to extract the bloody iPhone—the
body
—from its hiding place and wander along the Grand Union canal under cover of darkness before discreetly dumping it. However, in the end I couldn't quite bring myself to dispose of the phone, even though its presence, even its invisible presence, tucked away in my wardrobe, still felt like having one of those “trophies” that murderers like to hang on to as a scene-of-crime keepsake.

And even if, as “crime-scene trophies” go, Alex's iPhone wasn't exactly up there with the lock of hair or the bloodied knife, it was nonetheless properly haunted by the sound of Susie's voice—and, what's more, Susie's voice lying—which gave it an extra shivers-down-my-backbone quality, because I felt as though I was hanging on to a ghost of Susie's DNA, captured in the ether. Not of course that Susie was dead,
or planning to be, and not that I wished her dead either. I am, you'll be relieved to learn, not suddenly about to reveal a secret that exposes me as part time Belsize Park yummy-mummy, part time killer. No, all that had happened was that I'd “acquired” my ex-lover's lost mobile phone in order to listen to his old messages and discover if his wife was cheating on him, that's all. Could have happened to anybody, right?

Anyway, as the summer wore on, I successfully distracted myself from those rapidly receding memories and their concomitant moments of madness, and lost myself in the here-and-now. I spent two out of my three child-free August weeks while Hal was at his dad's place on the Côte d'Azur, staying at the same hotel as Lisa and Guy and the twins, in Ibiza—where I indulged in a lot of sleep, three novels, a few gallons of Rioja and (to my considerable surprise), after being chatted up over a margarita at sunset by a man with a nice smile and a winning way with a cheesy one-liner, an unexpected fling with a recently divorced ex-DJ d'un certain age, called Nik.

Nik had apparently been converted to the Balearic lifestyle after 1988's “Second Summer of Love”—a pop cultural event (one among many) that had entirely passed me by because I'd been living in a shoebox in Tokyo at the time. I also suspected that Nik called me “babes” because it saved him the bother of having to remember my name. But that was fine because even though he'd tragically lost his “c,” Nik was sweet and funny and undemanding (apart from when he was demanding, although that was fine too) and obviously there's nothing wrong with having a holiday fling with a fiftyish DJ, even one called Nik who in turn calls you “babes” . . . especially if you're a forty-whatever “babe” who
assumed that her shagging-on-the-beach days were behind her. Hurrah, in fact, for Nik, who was also conceivably the only fiftyish bloke on (or even near) the Balearics who wasn't busily hankering after twenty-year-olds. Of either sex. Or both.

“Nah, not my style. I prefer women to girls,” said Nik after I raised the subject of his unfashionable predilection while we were poolside and post-coital at his villa near St. Joan. “Course, a youngster's flesh may be a bit tauter, but so fucking what? Your
brain
is taut, babes—and you've got a great arse.” Nik made me laugh and the sex was fun without ever being earth-moving. He was just what the doctor ordered.

“You have a lovely life, babes—you deserve it, big style,” he said to me when he saw me off at the airport, unsentimentally but not un-sweetly. He gave me a present, too—a simple, rather lovely silver bangle with a tiny Ibiza-shaped charm attached—and then he gave me a kiss and, finally (clever, this), instead of waiting for me to turn around and walk away from him through passport control, which is what somebody who loves you does when they say good-bye, Nik simply winked and smiled before turning away and wandering off through Departures. I didn't expect him to turn around and, as far as I know, he didn't.

By the time I got home, under a cloud of warm, dense summer drizzle, to my empty, pristine house, Nik was already a blur, if not actually a Manga-ish cartoon of the whole concept of a modern middle-aged “holiday romance.” But thanks to the miracle of digital photography, once I'd downloaded my snaps on to the laptop the essence of Nik came sharply back into focus, and then, of course, I sort of missed him.

Photographs have an extraordinary capacity to rose-tint our inner spectacles. War photographers or gritty documentarists aside, most of us take pictures of nice stuff: of pretty places, of people we like, looking, for the most part, happy. It's why those photographs you see in newspapers in the context of some dreadful crime are, for all their bromide banality, so painful to look at. The three freshly ironed and hair-brushed siblings in their school uniform, captured grinning against a photo-studio backdrop of clouds, for example . . . all of whom, one discovers, were dosed up on Calpol and then bludgeoned to death by their devoted dad shortly before he set the family home alight, the kids' mum and, finally, himself. Those sort of formal, posed photographs tell so many . . . if not lies, precisely, then certainly untruths. Here, for example, were Nik and I cheek-to-cheek, grinning, snapped by Nik in an arm's-length close-up. And of course if you'd shown somebody the picture and told them we'd been married sixteen years (rather than shagging for six days, at that point), there's no reason why they wouldn't have believed it.

So I've always been wary of photographs. Some of that must be to do with my professional relationship with photography, but not all of it. modeling itself wasn't particularly painful, just boring, though I suppose it gave me an insight into the potential gulf between a picture and the “moment” it purports to capture. In fashion, that gulf can be huge, of course—a model may be standing in front of the camera nursing her period pains, hunger pangs and a tongue like the bottom of a birdcage, not to mention having had three hours' sleep/three grams of coke the night before, but all the viewer sees—indeed wants to see, or is meant to see—is just how perfect her legs look . . . how great that
frock is . . . how awesome those shoes are . . . and that's how it should be. It's show-business, after all.

Anyway, after August's high-jinkery, I even started to forget about the iPhone, presumably simply as a result of having worked so hard to “forget” about Alex. I couldn't, in fact, completely forget Alex, memories of whom sometimes bounced themselves into my frontal lobe unbidden, but whenever this happened I could—and did—actively choose to put them to the back of my mind, and thus Alex found himself a kind of semi-permanent hiding place alongside all the other things which, over the years, I've decided need to be “filed.” You, for example, Mum. And Dad of course. And even Simon and Beth. Basically, I just got on with stuff.

In the second week of an Indian summer of a September, the day after an afternoon's paintballing with his mates and an evening of turning their guitars up to at least 11, Hal started at his new school, College Hall.

I'd assumed the transition would be pretty effortless because several of his friends were moving on to the same school. Not only was it close by, it was effectively more of the same, at least in theory. Obviously it would take a bit of time for Hal to settle in simply because he'd been at his previous school since nursery. However, I assumed—because I think parents of freshly minted teens, especially boys, do an awful lot of “assuming” on the grounds that there's not a lot else to go on if you don't speak “grunt” or communicate via text—that all would be well by half-term, if not before.

But it wasn't. Hal was a classic “Only”—resourceful, mature, a bit too comfortable in adult company, slightly secretive—but all these traits were exacerbated in the first few weeks of Big School. Far from embracing the grunting and door-slamming years, he started becoming a bit clingy.
At first I kind of liked it because any parent of a turbo-teen with go-faster stripes is likely to enjoy the novelty of having one hang around on the same sofa as them, actually watching the same program while bonding over the nachos-dipping. But after we'd moved into the third week of it, I had to say something.

“Hal, you haven't sat and watched a cookery program with me ever in your entire life. It's not that I don't like it—I do—but maybe we should talk?”

Hal swiftly defaulted to teen—shrugged, dipped a nacho in the guacamole and said, “Maybe I like cooking?”

“Well, maybe you do. And if so that's great; let's go and cook—but maybe you don't? Is something wrong? Is it school?”

That was all it took. There I was, busily respecting Hal's newly erected teenage boundaries, not wanting to pry, and it turns out he just wanted to be asked.

“Yeah, Mum. I don't like it. It's . . . different.”

“Course it's different, Hal—it's secondary school. But you've probably met half your year group somewhere or other, over the years, at parties or matches, or . . . ?”

Hal shrugged. “Whatever. I don't like it.”

“But specifically what don't you like about it? It obviously takes time to settle in.”

“Well I don't like being called ‘Gaylord' by a bunch of Year Tens every single break. I don't like that much. And Dom is now best friends with Zak Brody. And Zak Brody is, like, a complete arse and totally up himself.”

“Dom is best friends with
Zak Brody
?”

Now this was news. Far from being just another privileged, privately educated north London thirteen-year-old, equal parts RP and a sense of entitlement, Zak Brody was a
privileged north London thirteen-year-old blessed with RP, a sense of entitlement and . . . a three-film deal with Disney. A child actor since he was six, when he was eleven Zak had been plucked from the relative obscurity of a CBBC sitcom to star in the “Now a Major Motion Picture” adaptation of the cultish
Sick Boy
series of children's books. The movie had been a huge hit last year and having just filmed the second during the summer holidays, Zak was now back at school—Hal's school. The same school, incidentally, where Zak's dad (a so-so ex-soap actor turned excellent teacher) just happened to be Head of Drama.

And now, according to Hal, Zak was “playing guitar—my guitar. Well not my actual guitar; he's got his own” in The Expelled, formerly known as Expelliarmus, from which, there being no call for two lead guitarists in any group, it appeared Hal had himself been expelled. I don't consider myself to be a particularly competitive mum, but I felt this was a pretty horrible thing to have happened to Hal, because being thirteen is tough enough even before you have to get to grips with the arrival of a new sibling—due in December—or your best mate since Reception dumping you for the shallow thrill of sharing his amps with a movie star.

“Oh Hal, that's rubbish, Dom doing that. Properly rubbish. I might call Patsy.”

“No, please don't, Mum! No way. Whatever you do, don't do that.”

Hal looked almost panic-stricken, and why wouldn't he? Mums may conceivably make those cringey sort of phone calls on behalf of their kids when they're still twelve, but apparently not at thirteen—and probably never again. Anyway, the point was that this was merely the first of several conversations I had on the same subject with Hal, and
then—after revealing he'd had phone conversations on the same subject with his dad—I had to have them with David, too. All of which eventually resulted in a three-way Skyped summit meeting and then, after much driving to visit schools, a mutual agreement—though I had to be talked into it—that Hal would leave College Hall at Christmas and, come January, would head for Somerset and his new, very groovy (not to mention staggeringly expensive) co-ed. boarding school.

So many thoughts, not the least of which was that I hadn't expected to be a nearly-empty-nester just yet. I'd resisted it of course, selfishly, when Hal had mentioned boarding. But I came round eventually, though only once I'd established that Hal's desire to board wasn't a passing £30,000-a-year fad, or an overreaction to some typical (if you factored out the movie-star element) teenage argy-bargy and name-calling. Children seem to be hyper-aware about “bullying” though I'm a bit more old-school about what it actually constitutes. Kids can be pretty tough on each other, after all, and though the vocabulary may be different, I do hold with the old “sticks and stones” adage. It's tough out there in the grown-up world; the sooner you develop a few hard edges the better.

Anyway, after establishing that he wanted to go for all the “right” reasons and given that money wasn't exactly an issue and I really liked the school, I gave Project Boarding my blessing. What else could I do?

Hal's half-sister, Kiki (a pretty name, unless it instantly calls to mind the frog from
Hector's House
, which it did for me) was born in December and so at the end of term Hal flew out to meet her and spend Christmas with David, the current Mrs. Ashford and the rest of the Ashford clan, leaving
me to what I fully anticipated was going to be a write-off of an un-Christmas, home-alone wearing elephant-arsed jogging bottoms and with nothing but a turkey “crown” and Sky Plus for company. However, I figured that if I was going to sit around wearing old jogging bottoms and pushing food around my plate, I may as well do it in style, so I seized the moment and booked five days at a spa in the Canaries.

A few days before Christmas and a couple of days before I left, I was invited round to Guy and Lisa's for ye olde traditional pre-Christmas spag bol—a “tradition” that was all of three years old, admittedly, but you have to start somewhere. I hadn't seen very much of them for months, as the whole Alex business had driven a wedge—or had appeared to, at least—between us. But enough time had now elapsed . . . and anyway I was keen to know if they were any nearer setting a date for their alleged wedding.