You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (23 page)

There was a ring on the bell at precisely three o’clock as Neve was furiously dabbing powder on her face. The mask may have minimised her pores but had left the rest of her red and blotchy, and as she tiptoed down the stairs at great speed to answer the door, she realised she was still wearing her strictly ‘round the house’ jeans with the saggy knees and stretched-out waistband instead of her ‘can just about walk in them’ jeans. It was too late to go back and change now.

Neve took a deep, centring breath, then opened the door with a fixed smile, which turned into a grin of sheer delight when Keith leaped up to lick her hands and wag his stumpy tail.

‘Hello, my precious little boy,’ Neve clucked, taking his front paws in her hands so they could do a little two-step.

‘And hello to you too,’ Max said, stepping past them and shutting the door with his foot as he was laden down with two holdalls, a carrier bag, a bunch of flowers and a dog bed.

‘So you and Keith are definitely staying over, then?’ Neve let go of Keith’s paws, so she could assess the sheer amount of stuff Max deemed essential for sleeping over. Even though she’d spent most of the morning panicking about bedlinen and sleepwear, she’d half-hoped that Max would have some good reason why he couldn’t spend the night.

‘I thought Keith could act as a chaperone but his requirements for an overnight stay rival any Hollywood celebrity,’ Max complained, as he started up the stairs. ‘Dog bed, special blanket, a selection of his favourite toys and he’ll only drink and eat out of his own bowls. I even had to bring some smoked salmon paté to disguise the taste of his worming tablets and vitamins.’

‘You’re a very high-maintenance doggy,’ Neve told Keith, who was making progress very slow by climbing a stair then stopping and looking round to make sure that Neve and Max were still behind him. ‘I’ve got you some lovely doggy treats.’

‘Please don’t talk to him in that creepy voice. He’s a dog, not a five year old with learning difficulties.’

‘No pudding for you, mister,’ Neve snapped, bumping Max with her hip as they reached her landing. She waited until he’d retrieved the dog bed, which had fallen to the floor, then gestured at the open door. ‘Just go through, you know where everything is.’

She winced at the reminder of that awful, drunken night – but then again, if it hadn’t been for that awful, drunken night then Max wouldn’t be dropping his bags on the floor so he could take her in his arms.

‘Hey,’ he whispered, kissing the blotchiest patch of skin across her left cheekbone.

‘Hey yourself,’ Neve said, then they were kissing in her tiny hall with the door still wide open and Keith bashing his head against their shins.

It was absolutely perfect – or it was until Neve heard a loud thumping sound, followed by a door crashing back on its hinges and the thud, thud, thud of footsteps. Keith started barking and chasing around in circles as Neve tried to wriggle out of Max’s arms because …

‘For fuck’s sake! What the fuck is going on up there?’

Charlotte was still on the half-landing between their two floors, foot raised to complete the climb to Neve’s flat when she stopped and stared, her mouth hanging open.

Neve could feel her heart pounding and her face firing up so it would be impossible to tell where the blushing started and the blotching stopped. She took a step backwards and blundered into Max, while she willed herself to stay calm. She had back-up and she had a fierce-looking dog who flattened his ears and growled when Charlotte decided to climb another stair.

Charlotte hurriedly backed away to the safety of the landing. ‘Could you keep the noise down?’ she asked politely, as if the screaming harridan of thirty seconds ago had just been an hallucination. ‘I have a headache.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Max purred, taking his hands off Neve’s shoulders so he could come forward and give Charlotte a good telling-off because it was what boyfriends did when they met their girlfriends’ arch nemeses. ‘Keith, stop that!’

Keith let out a volley of defiant barks, then slunk behind Max’s legs.

‘I’m sorry,’ Max repeated. ‘All my fault. I don’t think we’ve been introduced. I’m Neve’s special friend and I can’t believe she forgot to tell me that there’s another gorgeous Slater sister walking the earth.’

Neve contemplated shoving Max head first down the stairs, but settled for a thousand silent curse words as she glared at his back. Charlotte tossed her hair back and made a horrible sound, half giggle and half simper. ‘I’m only a Slater by marriage,’ she said conspiratorially, as if confessing to some terrible crime. She gave Max a long look, eyes narrowed, as if he was a huge uncut diamond and she was trying to estimate how many carats he was worth. ‘I’m Charlotte, Neve’s sister-in-law.’

It was probably the first time that Charlotte had ever admitted they were tenuously related. Neve twitched with anger. Charlotte had obviously decided that Max was heterosexual, handsome and wasted on Neve because she flicked her long, shiny, stupid hair back from her face again, then stuck out her chest in her stupid Juicy Couture track-suit. Celia and Yuri had once tried to guess how many Juicy Couture tracksuits Charlotte owned, but they’d given up once they’d hit double figures.

‘Why are all the beautiful ones already taken?’ Max sighed. ‘At least tell me that your marriage is on the rocks and there’s a chance you might rebound into the arms of another man.’

‘Oh, there’s every chance,’ Charlotte said, looking at Neve, which was why she probably stopped giggling, simpering and sticking her breasts out and sounded more like her usual, sullen self. Then she gave Keith another anxious glance, even though he was now lying on Neve’s doormat and scratching behind his ear. ‘Is that a Rottweiler?’

‘No,
he’s
not,’ Neve said indignantly. ‘He’s a Staffordshire Bull Terrier.’

Neve jumping into the fray reminded Charlotte why she was there in the first place. ‘Well, just try not to bang about so much. Honestly, it’s like having an
elephant
living above me.’

And with that parting shot, Charlotte went back to her lair, swinging her hips more than was strictly necessary.

‘You never said anything about a sister-in-law,’ Max remarked, and Neve realised she was so tense that it felt as if her bones would shatter. ‘She’s quite cute once you get past the orange tan and the hair extensions.’

‘Oh, I can think of a few other ways to describe her,’ Neve said bitterly, slamming the front door shut. ‘I know you feel obligated to flirt with anyone and anything that crosses your path, but I wish that sometimes you could be a bit more discerning.’

‘Oh, Neevy, so I flirt. It’s what I do. Don’t tell me you’re jealous,’ Max said teasingly. ‘OK, chatting up your sister-in-law was a bit close to home, but I was only having a bit of fun.’

‘Did you not hear her shouting at me?’ Neve asked Max. ‘If you had the willpower to hold off the charm for five seconds, it might have occurred to you that she doesn’t like me and I certainly don’t like her.’

From the puzzled expression on Max’s face, it was clear that he was hard-wired to charm whatever the circumstances. ‘Well, yeah,’ he muttered. ‘I suppose she was giving you a hard time. Does she do that a lot?’

‘She’s been doing that for ever,’ Neve said, as she walked towards the kitchen. ‘I was at school with her and she made my life a living hell every day for five years. I’m going to put the kettle on, do you want a drink?’

‘Coffee, please.’ Max sat down on a chair and scooped up Keith. ‘What did she do to you?’

Neve didn’t answer at first. She was carefully spooning fresh ground coffee beans into the cafetière she’d bought in honour of Max’s visit. Normally she made do with a jar of Kenco, but Max seemed to run on multiple tiny cups of espresso.

‘Neve? What did she do?’ Max prompted gently.

‘What didn’t she do?’ Neve said bitterly, all set to launch into a blistering rant about the times that Charlotte and her cronies had followed her home from school, calling her names and throwing stones at her, and when she’d finally reached the safety of her house, the back of her blazer was always studded with globs of spit. There were the times they’d cornered her in the showers at school, until Neve had persuaded her mum to write her a note to excuse her from games. There was even the time that Charlotte had come over to Neve in the school canteen, poured a whole can of Diet Coke over her packed lunch and said, ‘If you swapped your full-fat Coke for this, maybe you wouldn’t be such a porker.’

Neve had spent most Sunday evenings throwing up and crying at the thought of school the next morning and the new tortures that Charlotte had had a whole weekend to devise. But now she wasn’t going to cry because she’d already wasted too many tears on Charlotte in her life. ‘She had this nickname for me,’ she said finally. ‘I think it’s probably the only flash of genius Charlotte’s ever had. She used to call me “Heave”. And then everyone at school called me Heave. Once even Miss Harris, our games teacher, said it, though she pretended she hadn’t.’

‘Did she call you that because … because … of the way you looked, or …?’ Max was treading carefully, trying to pick his way through a minefield of words, and really there was no easy way to say it so Neve said it for him.

‘I was fat, or fatter,’ Neve said baldly. ‘And the beauty of that nickname was that it meant all things to all people. Like, I was so fat that I made people want to be sick or that I should have made myself sick instead of digesting huge amounts of food or I was so fat that I huffed when I walked or I was so fat that I’d have made a great end member of a tug-of-war team. Take your pick.’

‘But you’re not the same person any more,’ Max said. ‘So why do you still let her get to you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Neve pushed down on the cafetière. ‘She always manages to make me feel as if I’m fifteen again, and it doesn’t matter how much weight I lose, the fat me is still lurking just below the surface and Charlotte always makes her rise to the top.’

She placed a cup of coffee in front of Max and let him put Keith on the floor so he could take her hand and trace patterns on her palm with his thumb, even though she didn’t really want to be touched. ‘I promise I’ll never flirt with her again,’ he said earnestly. ‘God, it must have been a shock when she started dating your brother.’

‘I was at university and Mum didn’t tell me because she thought it wouldn’t last. Douglas’s girlfriends never stuck around for long, but Charlotte – boy, did she stick.’ She could still remember coming home after Finals and bumping into Charlotte sneaking out of Douglas’s room at the same time that Neve was heading to the kitchen for a snack. Neither of them had said a word, though Neve could still feel the sickening jolt her heart had given.

Then there had been other things to worry about, and when Douglas and Charlotte had gone to Vegas and got married, Neve had simply been expected to deal with the fact that her adolescent tormenter was living one floor below her and sharing her surname.

Max didn’t say anything, he just kept stroking her palm, and when Neve made a move to tug her hand away, he refused to let go.

‘We were never going to become best friends,’ Neve said, ‘but I’d have accepted her apology, except she’s never once said sorry. Hasn’t even hinted at anything that comes close to sorry, and her tactics might have become a bit more psychological but she’s still bullying me and I let her because I’m weak and ineffectual and—’

‘Bollocks,’ Max said. ‘You wouldn’t be my pancake girlfriend if you were a loser.’

She didn’t want to, but Neve was smiling. ‘Excuse me? I think you’ll find that I was the originator of the whole pancake relationship concept. Stop bogarting it.’

‘How do you even know what “bogart” means?’ Max asked. ‘If you tell me that you smoke spliffs, my entire belief system will collapse.’

‘I might smoke spliffs for all you know.’ Except she never had, not at university and certainly not now, because she’d seen Celia and Yuri rampaging through her fridge when they had an attack of the munchies and that was something that Neve and her hips could do without.

‘But you don’t?’ Max gave her a plaintive look, brow creased with consternation.

‘I don’t,’ Neve confirmed. ‘I just read a lot.’ And it wasn’t as if the nasty encounter with Charlotte, or the subsequent emotional fall-out, had been forgotten but Neve had moved past it because Max had skilfully steered her away from the rocks. She wished she knew how he did it; it would come in very handy the next time Celia was having an existential crisis or Philip was having relationship problems.

Before she turned her attention back to her beef casserole, which had been neglected in all the excitement, Neve dropped an impulsive kiss on the top of Max’s head just to say thank you. Then she waited until he’d stopped looking at her in surprise, to surreptitiously wipe her lips free of hair gunk.

*

Neve was a little subdued during dinner and Max was so uncharacteristically polite, praising the tenderness of the beef in the casserole, complimenting her on the daring choice of fennel and asking for seconds, that Neve wondered if it was some new game of his. He even insisted on helping to clear the table and do the dishes and kissed her every time she handed him a plate or a bowl to dry.

‘What do you want to do now?’ Max asked after the last teaspoon had been put away. ‘I thought we could pencil in another session on the sofa.’

‘Well, the sofa does feature quite highly in my plans for the evening,’ Neve agreed. ‘I’m going to initiate you into the rituals of Treat Sunday.’