The Love Market (21 page)

Then I go into Newcastle and land myself at Jacqui’s office. I know that she and a few other staff were working the weekend, so I hold it in until we are in the toilet, then I burst into tears. ‘He’s gone!’

She watches me unfold for a long time. ‘And to think, I only just learned he was here.’

I pull a sorry face.

‘So how did you leave it? When are you going to see him again?’

I shake my head. ‘Probably never. We didn’t talk about it. We were so determined not to have the conversation, that we never had the conversation!’ I look up now, from my hankie. ‘What do I do Jacq?’

‘Run away with me! I think I’m going to have to get a new job. Maybe in a new city. We could move in together. I would work and you could stay home and be my housewife.’

I smile at her, through my snivels. It takes me a second to realise what she’s on about. ‘Why? Not because of this stupid Christian episode?’

She parks herself on a toilet lid. ‘Oh—him, Rich, everything really. I need a change. I have to try and find myself the life I have half an idea that I want, Celine. Newcastle’s not exactly the centre of the architectural design universe, either, is it? I mean I always knew when I finished Uni that I’d be limiting myself staying around here.’ She cocks her head and looks at me, sadly. ‘I really only stayed because of you.’

I am touched. And confused. And panicked. ‘But I thought you liked your job? I’ve never once heard you complain about it. I mean, you complain, but in a happy way.’

‘I kept thinking I was all right for now. But maybe now has expired. I do a lot of glorified administrative work really. I mean when I saw myself getting into architecture as a career, it was the creative side I was attracted to. If I’d known I’d be endlessly dealing with sexist contractors, cranky engineers, and basically being some middleman, then I’d have gone and got a masters degree in something else.’

‘But everyone has to pay their dues.’

She stabs an index finger into her chest. ‘I’ve overpaid. I’m owed a refund.’

She looks at me now. ‘Don’t you sometimes wish you’d been born stupid, ugly and smelly so that no one will want you, you’ll never get a boyfriend?’

‘Born smelly,’ I grin. ‘Now there’s an interesting idea.’

She beams. ‘I just envy people with simple lives! I just want a slice of that!’

I pat the top of her foot as she sits there looking rather funny on the toilet. ‘I don’t know anyone with a simple life, Jacq.’

She smiles at me and studies me for a moment or two. ‘What you do—my friend—back to your earlier question—is you wait. You wait for him.’

~ * * * ~

I don’t have to wait long. My mobile rings as I am driving out of Newcastle City Centre. ‘I miss you already,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to go home.’

Mike’s house is nothing much from the outside: a brick-built, Victorian mid-terrace in West Jesmond, just a short walk from the Metro stop. I go to pick up Aimee right from Jacqui’s office.

‘Have you met your neighbours yet? What are they like?’ I ask him, nodding next door.

Mike pulls a tiresome face. ‘A bunch of wankers really. Or, he is. Got uptight about my weeds coming through his fence. And they’re actually not weeds. It happens to be climbing wisteria. So much for what he knows about gardening.’

I study him, affectionately, remembering only too well the wind chimes. Our old neighbour and Mike had a vendetta going. Pat liked to hang wind chimes off his patio, which was fine until a windy night and you were trying to sleep. Instead of being direct, and telling Pat that they were bothering us, and he couldn’t sleep, Mike tried to subtly bring up the topic and the fact that he was a light sleeper. Still the chimes chimed on. Mike dropped progressively less subtle hints. Then one day when Pat was at work, Mike went and took them down. Pat bought new ones. Mike waited until he was out, and took them down too. When Pat brought up the subject of his mysteriously vanishing wind chimes, Mike admitted that he’d taken them down because Pat had failed to get all his hints about them. This pissed Pat off. Pat bought an even noisier set. So Mike started opening windows and blasting heavy metal the minute he saw that Pat was home from work. Mike only stopped his nonsense when he noticed Pat’s For Sale sign had gone up. I assume his moving out had nothing to do with us, but one never knows.

Mike he has on a tight white T-shirt with his black drainpipe jeans. He looks like he’s not shaved in a day or two. Unlike most men, Mike was always his most attractive when he’d done absolutely nothing with himself. It was a look that somehow suited him.

‘Aimee,’ I shout past him up the stairs, wondering when she’s coming down. When there’s no answer Mike says, ‘Look, will you come in? I want to talk to you.’

I gaze past him down the skinny, dark passageway, into the house that I can already tell has none of the home comforts he’s used to. Then I follow him inside.

‘Is it about Aimee?’ I ask him.

He meets my eyes. ‘No, it’s about Jennifer.’

I’m startled. He leads me into the living room, which is boxy and devoid of redeeming features, except for a seldom-used fireplace. He’s bought an uneventful brown leather sofa—a cheaper-looking version of the one we picked together for our place, and an oversized chair. There is a coffee table, and a brass mirror hung above the fireplace. A wilted plant sits on the sill of the curtainless bay window.

‘I don’t know if asking her out again tonight is too much,’ he says. ‘I’d like to, but I don’t want to come on too strong. I’m not sure what the etiquette for these things is.’

‘Oh,’ I say, looking anywhere but into his eyes.

‘What do you think I should do?’

He seems to have lost the little paunch he developed in his late thirties and is wire thin now, almost like Mick Jagger.

‘When is keen too keen?’ he presses.

I am inexplicably exasperated. ‘Well, I… perhaps you should wait a few days. It seems a bit… fast.’

He glances over my denim dress that I’m wearing again. ‘Thanks,’ he says. Then he nods his head to the door. ‘Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the place. It’s not Buckingham Palace but you can have a look.’

In the hall he gestures for me to walk ahead of him up the stairs. I really don’t want a guided tour, but now have no choice. As I mount the stairs, I’m aware of his eyes on my bare legs.

‘This is my room,’ he says, squeezing past me on the small high-ceilinged landing, and pushing open a door. I take one step toward the room and then he edges around me again, so that I am almost in the bedroom, and he’s got me hemmed in there. I take a peek. It’s just a room with a chest of drawers and a bed in it. Only the bed is unmade. On both sides. Mike always sleeps on the left. And Mike has never been known, in all the years I have been with him, to make a bed. Did Jennifer stay here Friday night? Have they slept together already? Surely not.

‘Sorry it’s a mess,’ he says. I am aware of how close he is behind me.

‘Very nice,’ I tell him, feeling my face burn up. I turn around, hoping he’ll move, but he continues to stand there, blocking me, our faces now only inches apart. A complex energy passes between us. ‘Please,’ I say, wanting to shut down my mind and the picture I now have of Mike immersing himself happily between Jennifer’s legs and, at the same time, wondering why this picture is bothering me. ‘Can I get past?’

His gaze is level with my throat. He moves barely half a foot, enough for me to brush past him, out of the suffocating confines of his bedroom and onto the small landing again. My heart is racing.

‘The bathroom,’ he says, pushing open another door. Then, ‘this is Aimee’s room.’

It’s clear he’s given Aimee the best room. It has a beige-painted drop ceiling on both sides, making a V shape above her bed, a small window, and a double bed, with a dark green eiderdown on it and a collection of fetching patchwork pillows. Aimee sits parked in the middle of the bed, legs crossed, with her back to us.

‘What’s the matter?’ Mike and I both say together when we realise that Aimee is actually in tears.

‘I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to stay here. I want us to be a family! I don’t want two homes, I want one home with all of us in it.’

I sit on the carpet by her legs, letting my head rest beside her knee, in its holey pink leggings, with the denim shorts on top
.
Mike stands there, watching us, like a man who is first on the scene of an accident and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. I know in years to come that Aimee will remember today, and this feeling of being split between two people. Like I remember. The anger I harboured for years at my parents—toward my dad for having to have other women, and toward my mum not forgiving him, and just getting him to come back. My wishes were borne of a simple, naïve heart. I just wanted them back together again. I didn’t care how.

Seeing her like this, I suddenly ache for our old life back. Haven’t I done to my daughter the one thing I promised myself I never would: failed her as a parent, as I always felt I had been failed, as a child?

‘How about if she stays tonight?’ Mike says.

‘No! I want us all to stay!’ Aimee says.

‘Aimee, we can’t all stay!’ I want to hug her but can tell she’s angry with me. ‘What about Molly, darling?’ I get up off the floor. ‘We can’t leave Molly.’

‘I forgot about Molly,’ she says, softer now.

I reach and stroke the top of her warm little head. ‘Look, I’m happy to go home and see to Molly, if you want to stay here with your dad. Just for tonight.’

Aimee nods, calming right down, then she says, ‘It’s okay. I want to come home with you.’

In the car she says nothing. But I am aware of her every breath, her every tiny sniffle. Her hands are lock together in her lap. She sits barely moving a muscle. At a traffic light I look at my own eyes in the rear view and just see oceans of confusion.

‘His name is James,’ I phone Trish at work. ‘I’m not going to tell you any more, except that you’re never going to meet anyone else who is as right for you.’

‘Seriously?’ she sounds excited. ‘Is he going to be able to afford a parking meter?’

‘Several parking meters.’

She laughs. ‘Speaking of James, have you been in touch with James? As in my James? Do you have a match for him yet?’

‘I have, yes. I think he’s going to really like her but I don’t want to say any more. Client confidentiality.’

‘Good then.’ She sounds a bit deflated. ‘Now back to this other James…’

‘To love and other mistakes,’ I raise a glass of wine to Jacqui, across the pub table. We’ve not been out for a drink in months.

‘Don’t keep looking at your phone,’ she tells me as I look, almost obsessively, at my phone.

‘He hasn’t rang me in nearly a week.’

‘Look at me,’ she instructs me, when she sees my sad face. ‘You know he had to go.’

‘I know. I just didn’t think it would feel so much like… like he’s gone.’

‘But you know he’ll be coming back.’

‘Well, that’s easy to say. What’s to come back for? More walking around London? More endless fantastic sex? More strange encounters with my peculiar family members?’

‘I’d take more sex, and less of the peculiar family members!’

‘No you wouldn’t. You said he was middle-aged and ordinary with an unsociable job.’

‘I never said he was ordinary.’ She beams at me. ‘He’s attractive, in a very takes-life-quite-seriously way. And from my brief meeting with him, I think he’s nice too. Exceptionally nice.’

‘He has a lot to sort out, Jacq. His entire career is hanging in the balance. He says he’s done with working abroad, but I’m not so sure it’s done with him.’

‘But one thing’s for sure, he’s definitely not done with you.’ She beams, as though all her fairytales have suddenly come true. ‘He’s in love with you.’

I wag my wine glass at her before drinking, bummed that he hasn’t called. ‘Ah but he’s never actually said it.’

‘Some things don’t have to be said.’

‘Not all the time. But they should be, once.’

She can’t contradict me. ‘So what does he really think of us lot, then?’ she changes the subject. ‘I mean, there’s your old man who molests models, then there’s me who is about to get engaged, who attempts but fails to molest a co-worker. And we both seem to gravitate to your house to tell you what disasters we are, any time of the day or night, not really caring whether we’ve been invited. Actually preferring that we haven’t because it somehow adds to our drama.’

I beam. ‘At least he knows who we really are. What he’d be taking on. Not that he is going to take us on.’

Duffy is singing
Mercy
and I have to shout over the music. ‘Too much stacked against us. We don’t even live in the same country. He’s got a great career over there, which he wouldn’t have over here. Aimee is still in school, so I couldn’t uproot her even if I wanted to. And besides, there’s no way I could move her thousands of miles away from her father. That would be so unfair to Mike, and to her. She’d hate me for the rest of my life.’ I throw up my hands. ‘Plus I have my job here. What would I do over there? I couldn’t even legally work in Canada!’