A Perfect Match (3 page)

‘Donal, it may have escaped your notice, but you are now in your thirties. It’s time to take down the teenage posters. Not to mention the fact that you are about to embark on a new living arrangement which includes me, your girlfriend, sharing your bedroom. If you want to look at someone’s breasts, look at mine.’

Donal looked down at Lucy’s chest. ‘Lucy, it may have escaped your notice that two fried eggs do not have the same impact as two large melons.’

Lucy’s first night living with Donal was spent alone in his bed, while he slept in Annie’s room. When she woke up the next morning Donal was standing beside the bed with a tray.

‘Breakfast in bed,’ he announced as he placed the tray on her lap. ‘As you will see to the left we have a mound of shredded paper which was formerly the lovely Ms Anderson with the horrible big plasticky boobs. To the right we have two perfectly rounded, beautifully shaped fried eggs and a rose. You have to say you forgive me because I can’t spend another night in that tiny bed. My legs were frozen. I’m an athlete and we sportsmen need our limbs to be kept warm at all times.’

‘You’re a world-class idiot all right,’ said Lucy, smiling. ‘You’re forgiven – this time.’

Donal hopped into the bed and snuggled up to Lucy. Placing his hands on her fried eggs he asked, ‘Any chance of some action?’

Lucy elbowed him sharply in die ribs.

‘Ouch.’

‘Don’t push your luck, sunshine. You’re lucky to be allowed to lie beside me. Sex is not on the menu this morning. You’ll have to do a lot more grovelling first.’

Donal hopped up and knelt in front of her, ‘I’m so sorry, Lucy, I will never mention Pammie again. You’re the most beautiful girl in the world, not only have you a sensational body but you are also a beautiful person inside. You are the woman I have dreamt of meeting all my life. I had given up all hope of meeting someone special until I met you. You, Lucy, have changed my life. I cannot believe how lucky I am. Now can we have sex?’

What die hell, thought Lucy. She was only depriving herself as well.

3

A week later I received an official-looking letter addressed to Mrs Hamilton. I still hadn’t got used to being called Mrs Hamilton. Mind you, I had been delighted to be able to change to Hamilton, because my maiden name was Burke. When your name is Burke, you have to try harder to fit in than other people with nice normal-sounding surnames. ‘Oi, Burke head’ was the highly amusing nickname that Sandra Teehan called me on my first day in senior school. The first day at a new school is difficult enough without being singled out during roll call and sniggered at by the entire class. Although Lucy, my best friend from down the road, joined the school at the same time as me, she was in a different class – the one with all the other geniuses. I was in the class with the just-about-average girls, only one class up from the real thickos.

Sandra made my life fairly miserable in the first few months of school. She was the ‘cool’ girl in the class, in the way that at twelve years of age the loudest girl in the class always is. She had a group of mates who laughed at everything she said and a lot of their time was spent poking fun at me and my stupid name. Meanwhile, I was sitting beside the class super-swot Fiona, who constantly followed the teachers around, trying to befriend them, and regularly snitched on her classmates. The last thing I needed was to be lumbered with a snitch. I was desperate to be in with the ‘cool’ gang, but they were having none of me. Lucy meanwhile was hanging out with her classmates and having a ball. All the clever girls stuck together, even at lunch break. Lucy, I’m sorry to say, gave Judas Iscariot some stiff competition – she completely disowned me. As if that wasn’t bad enough, after blanking me during school hours, she’d call around to my house at the weekends to hang out with me.

And so I spent my lunch breaks being ignored by my so-called best mate, trying to avoid Sandra and her gang and also running away from Fiona so as not to be tarnished with her super-grass reputation, which left me pretty much alone. I used to take refuge in the loo, and read
Little Women
, feeling a great kinship with the main character Jo. I, like her, was an outsider. I felt very sorry for myself indeed. I lay awake at night dreaming up different ways of torturing Sandra. I wanted to inflict pain on her, I wanted her to suffer. I agonized over how I could get out from under her when it suddenly came to me – if I studied hard every night and did really well in my Christmas exams, I’d be moved up a class. Sandra was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so the likelihood of her ever following me up a grade was slim to none. I lay in bed and grinned; all I had to do was study.

For the next five weeks I studied late into the night. My parents were surprised by the sudden turnaround. No longer was I interested in watching TV and listening to records, I dashed up the stairs after school and didn’t reappear. I sat the exams at Christmas, and for the first time in my life knew the answers to everything. My results shocked both my parents and me, and I was duly upgraded a class. I was now in the second cleverest class as opposed to the second thickest. My parents were delighted, as was I.

When we went back to school after the Christmas holidays I felt like a new person. Over mince pies and cream in my house, I had confronted Lucy on her disloyal behaviour and she had promised to be an in-school friend as well as an out-of-school friend, provided I started behaving a bit more normally and stopped hiding in the loo at lunchtime.

‘I know it’s mean, Emma, but everyone thinks you’re a bit odd and if I hang around with you I’ll get slagged too. So just try to be more normal and hang out with the cool people in your new class. Jess Curran’s quite cool, so try and be in her gang.’

Harsh words, but good advice. Jess was very cool – she had spiky hair and was going steady with a boy called Mark. We became great friends – so much so, that Lucy ended up being jealous of our friendship and felt decidedly left out. After letting her sweat it out for a few weeks, I eventually invited her over to hang out at my house with Jess and we became the Three Amigos. When Sandra tried to slag me, Jess told her that as she was both fat and ugly, she’d really need to work on her personality or she’d end up an old spinster with a dried-up fanny. Coming from a girl who actually had a boyfriend, this was a crushing put-down. Sandra never bothered me again.

I still occasionally raise this Judas interlude with Lucy over a bottle or three of wine and she lurches from teary apologies to telling me to get over myself, reminding me that it happened over two decades ago and that she has spent the last twenty-three years making up for it by being a top friend – which is true.

I opened the letter addressed to Mrs Hamilton. It was from the adoption board thanking me for my enquiry in relation to intercountry adoption and saying it would be processed in accordance with standard procedures. They enclosed two booklets to provide me with some information – James would be pleased with that – and an application form for assessment. Along with the application form we were required to provide originals of: long-form birth certificates, a long-form marriage certificate and any documents relating to previous marriages.

The application form was accompanied by three pages of application guidance notes. I skimmed over them, most of them didn’t relate to us. They were things like – if we were not married then only one of us could apply to adopt, we had to be resident in the country for at least a year before adopting … but the last point caught my attention. It was about providing referees. The referees we chose had to know us both very well and know our families and at least one of the referees had to have children.

Yikes. The only couples we knew well who had children were James’s brother Henry and his awful wife Imogen who lived in England, and my friends Jess and Tony who had two kids. The only problem was that I hadn’t spent a whole lot of time with Jess’s kids. Truth be told, I had kind of avoided seeing them. I found it really difficult to be around babies, so I barely knew little Sally and Roy. As for Imogen’s children, her son Thomas was a brat, but I was fond of her twin girls, especially my goddaughter Sophie, although I hadn’t actually seen her since the christening, nearly a year before. By the looks of things, James and I would have to start hanging out at Jess and Tony’s to try to bond with their kids. The notes said that our referees would have to send in a written reference and be visited by a social worker to discuss the reference more thoroughly. Obviously that ruled out Henry and Imogen – I doubted somehow that the adoption board were going to fork out for a social worker to pop over to Sussex for a few days to interview them. It’d have to be Jess and Tony and I’d get Lucy to be the other referee.

I filled James in about the letter and the need for two referees over dinner, and then told him who they were going to be. He looked up at me and shook his head.

‘Hold on, Emma. Deciding who our referees are going to be is not a snap decision. We need to think about it.’

‘What’s to think about? I’ve just told you who they’re going to be. We don’t need to analyse it for hours, it’s been decided.’

‘By you, without consulting me.’

‘For goodness sake, it’s no big deal, they’ll be great referees.’

James picked up the form and began to read the notes on referees.

‘It says here that the referees should know both partners very well. Jess, Tony and Lucy are all your friends. We need someone who knows me and my family well.’

‘Like who?’

‘Like my brother,’ said James. ‘Oh no, it says they can’t be family members.’

‘Exactly,’ I said, pretending I had read the small print. Phew - that totally ruled out Henry and Imogen. Thank God, because I knew that Imogen didn’t like me at all. She was one of those loud, overbearing, horsey types, and every time she rang or saw me she’d demand to know why I wasn’t pregnant. Thankfully I had geography on my side, so I only saw her once a year when we went over to visit James’ parents.

‘All right then, I’ll ask Donal.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s a male chauvinist pig.’

‘This is the man you set your best friend up with.’

‘Yes, because Lucy is well able for him. She gives as good as she gets. He’d frighten the life out of some poor gentle social worker.’

‘Apart from the fact that Donal has been my best friend since we met seven years ago, he’s also bringing up Annie pretty much on his own. He’s the perfect candidate.’

‘As is Lucy as stepmother to Annie, on top of which she spends all day negotiating and dealing with difficult clients. Lucy can be very persuasive, you know, which is exactly what we need. We want the social worker to be convinced that we will be ideal parents.’

‘Having your two best friends as referees is simply not going to work. It has to be balanced, Emma. It says so here,’ said James, tapping his finger on the form. ‘The referees need to know both of us very well. What about Paddy and Sarah? They’ve got kids.’

Paddy was the full-back on James’s team and was a nice guy, but his wife Sarah was the most almighty handbrake you ever met and aggressive to boot. I have actually never seen her with her coat off. When we go out, she sits there with a puss on her face, coat on, handbag in her lap sipping a fizzy water, unless she’s feeling particularly wild in which case it’ll be a pineapple juice. The first time I met her, I had only just started seeing James and was still at the stage where I had to down at least three sneaky drinks at home for Dutch courage before meeting up with him. By the time I met Sarah I had had an additional three drinks on an empty stomach. (That’s the other thing about the early dates – I wouldn’t eat all day in a lame attempt to have a flat stomach.) Anyway, James introduced me to Sarah who was, as usual, sitting down with her coat on. I went to sit down beside her in an attempt to be friendly. I was trying to make all James’s friends like me, so that they’d tell him what a great bird I was.

‘Hi, Sarah, nice to meet you,’ I said in super friendly mode, trying not to slur my words.

She sort of smiled, in that mean way where the person just about raises the ends of their lips, but shows no teeth. I like to see a set of gnashers myself. I find it a lot more genuine.

‘I heard James had a new girlfriend,’ she said, yanking her coat tail from under my bum. ‘So what do you do?’

‘I’ve just given up my job and am training to be a make-up artist. Isn’t that cool?’ I was still on a high from having made the decision. I had agonized over it for three years, so it was a huge relief to have finally made the break and resigned from my mind-numbingly boring job as a recruitment consultant. I was thoroughly enjoying my make-up classes. I had finally found something I was really good at … if I say so myself.

‘Make-up artist?’ said Sarah, not exactly whipping out the pom poms to cheer me on in my new career path.

Thankfully I was so delighted with myself that I didn’t really notice - although that could have had more to do with the drink than the happiness.

‘What do you do?’ I asked politely.

‘I’m one of the directors at Jones Kelly and McDonald. I’m the first woman ever to be made a director,’ she announced, assuming I knew the famous JKM firm. Needless to say, I had never heard of them.

‘Good for you,’ I enthused. ‘What do they do?’

She looked horrified. ‘They are the most prestigious public relations firm in the country – everyone has heard of them. Bernard Jones advises the president.’

‘Well, I’ve never needed publicity so I’m not au fait with the top dogs,’ I said, beginning to wonder how to make a quick escape. I was clearly wasting my time trying to impress this one. Maybe if I had been the CEO of Lancome she wouldn’t be glaring at me as if I was pond scum.

‘So how exactly did you meet James?’

‘I picked him up in a bar, took him home and gave him the best night of his life,’ I whooped as I drained my drink in one long swallow. ‘Oh, will you look at that, I need another drink. Well, cheerio then,’ I said bouncing to my feet.

James told me later that night that Sarah had said I was a live wire. James in his innocence and goodness took it as a compliment. Having grown up with one brother and then gone to an all-male boarding school, James didn’t really get it when women were being subtly bitchy and Sarah was always super-nice to him so he thought she was fine, which really got up my goat. Anyway, suffice to say that Sarah was not my favourite person and, although we were civil to each other, hell would freeze over before she was a referee for this adoption.