Vince and Joy (51 page)

‘What?’

She cast her eyes downwards and took a deep breath. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

Vince stopped for a moment and absorbed this new and unexpected fact. His face broke into a huge smile. ‘But, Jess – that’s fantastic! That’s amazing! This is just what we need! A fresh start. A new baby. Oh, God, this
is perfect – you’re perfect. Come here!’ He stood and opened up his arms to her, but she just stayed exactly where she was.

‘No, Vince,’ she said softly. ‘It’s not perfect because the baby… it’s not yours.’

Al & Emma’s Kitchen, 1.58 a.m.

Natalie unpeeled her handc from over her mouth. ‘Jess is pregnant – and it’s
not yours?’
she exhaled.

‘Yup,’ Vince shrugged, and picked up his wine glass.

‘Fuck,’ said Emma.

‘Shit,’ said Natalie.

‘Whose is it, then?’ said Claire. ‘Is it Jon Gavin’ s?’

Vince shook his head.

The girls gasped again. ‘Then who?’ said Claire.

Vince smiled. He was almost enjoying the impact his shocking news was having on his friends – it made him feel strangely useful to be able to inject a little high drama into their unexceptional lives. ‘It’ s Bobby’ s. The ex before me,’ he said. ‘The old one who wouldn’t leave his girlfriend for her. The one she went into therapy over. The married one. The
ugly
one.’

‘Nooo,’ said Natalie.

‘Uh-huh. All that time I spent feeling insecure about Jon Gavin, it never occurred to me that she might still have feelings for the old ugly one…’

‘See,’ slurred Emma, ‘that’ s the problem with men. You
assume
women are as shallow as you. That we’re as obsessed with looks as you are.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Claire, ‘because the old one might have been
ugly – but he was the One Who Got Away, wasn’ t he? The one who fucked her head up. The one she couldn’t have. And Jon Gavin might have looked like Matthew McConaughey, but he wasn’ t a challenge. She could have clicked her fingers and had him.’

The girls all nodded sagely.

‘So how far gone is she?’ asked Natalie.

‘Eight months. It’ s due next month.’

‘And was she having an affair with him?’ said Emma.

Vince nodded. ‘Pretty much for the whole time since Lara was born. They met up at the same hotel once a fortnight, had dinner, went upstairs, had sex, went home. I thought she was at yoga…’

‘0h, God,’ she said, ‘how tacky.’

‘I know,’ said Vince. ‘I know.’

‘So, what’ s she going to do? Has she told him?’

‘Yes. She told him. He wanted her to get rid of it. But she didn’t. She’s going to keep it. Live at her mother’s. Bring it up alone.’ Vince stopped and swallowed, feeling a wave of emotion threatening to engulf him.

‘But what about Lara?’ said Claire, looking horrified. ‘What’ s happening about Lara?’

‘She’ ll spend four nights a week with me and three nights a week with Jess.’

‘Oh, my God. And how do you feel about that? About not living with Lara any more?’

He shrugged again. ‘I’ m trying not think about it, really. The whole thing’ s just…’ He stopped briefly to control another sudden surge of emotion. ‘It’ s all my fault,’ he said. ‘I should never have got involved with Jess. I knew from the outset that she was all wrong for me, but I was so flattered and so desperate
to settle down and start a family, and she was so fucking good in bed.’ He smiled wryly. ‘I loved her more than she loved me, that was the problem. A basic imbalance. Relationships like that never last, however hard you try. And now she’ s pregnant and in love with a man who’ ll never love her the way she loves him. It’ s a series of vicious circles, and the only way to stop it is to find someone who loves you the same. Like you love Al, and like you love Simon. You know. No power struggle. No insecurities. Just friendship. Because you can never be friends with someone if you love them too much…’

‘Can I just say something?’ said the increasingly drunken Emma. ‘I’ ve wanted to say this for years. And I probably shouldn’t be saying it now. But I’ m drunk, so fuck it, but I
never
liked that Jess. From the first moment I met her, I thought – I
don’t like you.’

‘Me neither,’ said Natalie, raising her hand sheepishly. ‘Nowhere near good enough for you.’

‘Can I third that?’ said Claire, much to Vince’ s surprise, as he’d never heard Claire say a bad word against anyone in all the years he’ d known her.

‘Really?’ he said.

‘Yeah. She’ s not horrible or anything. I just thought she was a bit…
self-centred.
A bit wrapped up in herself. That’ s all.’

Vince gulped and nodded. He’d always suspected that Jess wasn’t the type of woman other women warmed to, but it was still a bit startling to hear it stated so bluntly.

‘But anyway,’ Claire conciliated, ‘she’ s the mother of your child and we shouldn’ t slag her off. It’ s not respectful.’

‘Also,’ said Vince, ‘it’ s not always that cut and dried, is it? Jess isn’ t actually a
bad
person as such. She was just the wrong girl for me.’

‘And what about you? What are you going to do?’

‘That’ s a very good question,’ he replied grimly. Because he could just about cope with the fact that his wife was pregnant by another man and that his daughter was only going to be living with him for half the week, but living back at his mum’s, sharing a bedroom with Kyle and still teaching people to drive every day was more than he could bear. ‘I’ m going away for a while,’ he said, ‘on holiday. I need a couple of weeks by myself, on a beach, somewhere quiet. I need to decide what happens next.’

‘0h,’ said Emma, ‘that’ s a fantastic idea. And you never know,’ she winked, ‘you might meet someone while you’ re out there.’

Vince smiled wryly. ‘I don’ t think so,’ he said. ‘I’ m not sure that’ s really what I need in my life right now.’

Simon walked into the kitchen and sat on his wife’s lap. ‘What are you girls gossiping about?’ he said, as Natalie promptly pushed him off her lap good-humouredly.

‘Life, love, destiny and everything in between,’ she replied.

‘Fuck,’ he said, ‘we’ ve been talking about fucking pensions for the past half an hour. I should have stayed in here.’

The other men wandered in one by one, and the conversation splintered. Cabs were called and coats were collected and the evening drew to a gentle halt.

Emma and Al saw Vince off at the door. Emma drew Vince towards her for a hug as he left. ‘Hang on in there,’ she said into his ear. ‘You are the nicest bloke I know. You’ll get your happy ending. I know you will.’

Vince nodded and headed towards his taxi, turning to wave before he got in.

‘Oh,’ Emma shouted into the still night air. ‘And don’t forget – keep your eyes peeled for cats!’

He smiled at her and waved. And then he got into the cab and headed back to his mum’ s and a sleeping bag on Kyle’ s bedroom floor.

Cass never usually bought glossy magazines. Cass despised glossy magazines. As far as Cass was concerned, glossy magazines were the root cause of every case of anorexia, bulimia and body dysmorphic disorder in the entire western world, so the fact that she picked up a copy of
Company
on the platform at Northampton station for her journey back to London was entirely out of character.

It was one of the cover strap lines that had caught her attention:

THE INTERNET CHANGED MY LIFE!

It caught her attention because the Internet had indeed changed her life. She’d met Hayden on the Internet. Hayden Moyses. Twenty-six years old, a landscape gardener, beautiful inside and out. They’d chatted for weeks in a chatroom for amateur psychics. He stood out from the rest because he was sane while everyone else was mad. They had so much in common – tarot, gardening, veganism, the occult, a love of cats – and eventually they’d arranged to meet up. And now here they were, eighteen months down the line, insanely in love, deliriously happy and about to move in together. They’d just bought a cottage, in the Northamptonshire countryside. It had two
bedrooms, a chicken coop and a genuine Victorian pet cemetery at the bottom of the garden. It was beautiful. They’d exchanged contracts two days ago and now Cass was on her way back to London to pack up her stuff and say goodbye to city life for ever.

She opened up a packet of pumpkin seeds and flicked through twenty pages of adverts full of seventeen-year-old girls with eating disorders wearing dresses that cost as much as holidays until she finally found the article she was looking for.

The first story was about a secretary from Kent who’d found love with a Palestinian car mechanic in an Internet chatroom for fans of Michael Jackson. It was a sweet story and they were obviously genuinely in love, but, try as she might, Cass couldn’t see a happy ending for them.

The second story was about a lesbian from Dundee who’d found the courage to come out of her closet at the age of thirty-two after joining a chatroom for Scottish lesbians and was now a successful stand-up comedian.

But it was the third story that really caught Cass’s attention. A story about a thirty-four-year-old Internet MD from London – a story about a girl called
Joy Downer.

It had to be her. It was an unusual name, the age was about right and the photograph of a petite, stylish, dark-haired girl with slightly oriental features perfectly matched the mental image that Vince’s description had left her with.

Cass tipped a handful of pumpkin seeds into her mouth and started to read:

I found my father – then I found myself
joy Downer, 34, was a thirty-something divorcée,
living at home with her mother and working in a photo lab
when a chance find in her parents’ loft changed the course of her life
for ever. She now runs
Whateverhappenedto.com
,
the UK’s most
successful search and reunion website for friends, families and lovers.

‘My marriage was a disaster,’ says Joy, thirty-four. ‘I’d married in haste, barely giving a thought to the consequences, and of course it went horribly wrong very quickly. My parents had had a difficult marriage, too. They eventually divorced and, on the day that my father remarried, I found myself rooting around in the loft in my parents’ house. Within minutes I’d found a photo that I believed held the key to all the confusion in my life. It was a picture of a handsome young half-Tibetan boy, and I knew for certain the moment I saw the photograph that he was my real father. My mother later told me that he was a gardener in the apartment block where they lived in Singapore, that they’d had a passionate affair and that he was indeed my father. For some reason I didn’t feel all that surprised by the discovery. I’d always felt displaced, as if I didn’t quite belong in my environment. I was like a human chameleon – always trying to fit in with what other people expected of me, never being true to myself. I really didn’t know who I was, and my immediate and overwhelming reaction on hearing about my father was that I wanted to meet him.

‘My mother encouraged me and the very next day I went on-line to see if I could track him down. All I knew about him was his name and age, but in less than three hours I’d found him. I sent him an e-mail immediately, which he replied
to the very next day. He sounded warm and friendly, and very soon I was organizing a trip to stay with him and his family in Columbus, Ohio.

‘I had no idea what to expect as I set off for America, but the minute I walked through customs at Columbus and saw my father standing there, I knew I’d done the right thing. He was everything I could have hoped for – sweet-natured, gentle, clever and family-minded. His wife made me feel incredibly welcome and, even though it felt a bit strange at first, being in a foreign country, living in a stranger’s house, I soon came to feel as if I was one of the family. I extended my trip from two weeks to two months so that I could spend as much time as possible with my father. I found that we had so much in common – it was little things, such as the fact that we both love people watching, we both pick our toenails and we both hate the smell of Scotch. We shared mannerisms, too, and his feet were exactly the same shape as mine!

‘When I eventually came home I felt like a different person, like I finally made sense. So instead of finding another job in a photo lab I decided to try something different with my newfound confidence. My experience of looking for my father on the Internet had inspired me. I’d been lucky – it had only taken me three hours to find my father. But it could have taken me much, much longer, or I might not have found him at all. It occurred to me that instead of trawling randomly through search engine results for a missing person, wouldn’t it be great if there was a website that did all the hard work for you. I mentioned the idea to my father in America and he loved it – so much so that he offered to lend me the money to start it up! Eight months later, the website finally went live. We now get over ten thousand hits a day and have been respon
sible for reuniting hundreds of people, from ex-colleagues and first loves to old mates and adopted children. If we can’t find the person you’re looking for, you don’t pay a penny. I employ ten people and we have just won an industry award.