No Place For a Man (8 page)

‘Hello Jess!’ Matt got up and hugged her exuberantly as if he hadn’t seen her for a month. ‘We’ve got a great plan! We’re going to make all our fortunes!’

‘And it’s down to my new best mate here!’ Eddy said, hauling the cat round to his lap and tickling his ears. ‘We’re going to make him a shareholder.’

Jess moved Micky’s biker jacket from the back of a chair and sat down by her desk. ‘I can’t wait to hear, but whose is the baby? And is it all right out there in the hallway?’ she asked.

‘Oh that’s Eddy’s daughter’s littlest. He’s minding her while she fetches another one from the school. Go on, tell her the plan, Micky,’ Matt said. ‘I’ll make her a cup of tea. It’s what you do when the breadwinner comes home isn’t it?’

‘S’right, Matt,’ Eddy slurred, clearly the one on the outside of all the Budweiser. ‘You go and play the little house husband, put your pinny on.’

‘What have you done, hacked into the lottery system
and fixed it so you win?’ Jess was concerned about the sleeping baby, whether Eddy was fit to be in charge of her – could you be done for being drunk in charge of a child?

‘We invented something.’ Micky leaned forward and lowered his voice as if rival patentees were lurking outside the door. He looked so much smarter than the other two, in a sky blue linen shirt and elegant black trousers. Eddy wore a sweatshirt so ancient it was advertising a Cream concert. His jeans, inside which his plump thighs strained to get out, must have been bought in younger and leaner days too. Matt was heading the same unkempt way, she noticed, in a tee shirt that she was sure she’d given to Monica for the duster bag.

‘It’s a cat tracking system,’ Micky told her. ‘You know people are always losing their cats. And cats are always losing their collars. So what you want …’ Eddy leaned forward and cut in. ‘What you want is like you get in posh cars for when they’re nicked. You need a satellite tracking system. A sort of moggy GPS.’

Matt came back in slopping a mug of tea which dripped on Jess’s jacket as he handed it to her. ‘Guess what we’re going to call it,’ he said eagerly. ‘Just guess. You’ll like this.’

‘It’s going to be called …’ Eddy started and the others joined in, ‘the Cat Sat!’ They laughed like children who’d just heard their first real joke.

‘The Cat Sat?’ Jess said. ‘As in …’

‘Yeah, you’ve got it, as in The Cat Sat on the Mat!’ The fact they seemed to find this so screamingly hilarious confirmed it was definitely more than tobacco they’d been inhaling. So they were spending the day smoking dope like students. No wonder all the biscuits
had gone, they’d got post-spliff munchies.

‘Everyone will want one. They’ll be really expensive so everyone will think they’re
the
thing to have.’

‘And for lions too. Or have they already got them?’ Micky looked solemn.

‘Lions have.’ Eddy nodded his head too hard and the cat clung on tight looking alarmed. ‘I saw it on that vet thing with the Norwegian woman, the fanciable one.’

‘Yeah I like her,’ Micky agreed. ‘But she was scared of the lions, a real wuss about the puss. We just need smaller ones than the lions have got. Kitten size.’

‘Lions?’ They’d completely lost Jess. She didn’t want to put a downer on things but it was obviously one of those situations where you’d had to be
there
. All she longed to do was to go upstairs, put on some shoes that were more comfortable, brush an irritating shard of prawn from between a couple of top molars and let the end of the day creep quietly closer. Matt was leaning back with his hands behind his head, grinning as if he’d completed more work in this one short day than in the previous twenty years. He couldn’t be serious, she thought, surely to God he couldn’t think there was real mileage in this.

On her way home from school Zoe hesitated outside Angie’s house. It would be a huge betrayal to go in and inform her that her daughter was pregnant. Not that she’d do it quite like that, of course she wouldn’t. She couldn’t just march up the path, rat-tat-tat on the dragon’s-head knocker and come out with it the second Angie opened the door. Emily would never forgive her. But then why had Emily told her in the first place if she didn’t want her to take over doing something about it? As she dithered by the hedge, pulling leaves off and
shredding them as she tried to think what to do, her own front door across the road opened and a dishevelled-looking Eddy tottered out, pushing a baby in a buggy. Micky from the Leo followed him and together the two men ambled down the path and off up the road towards Eddy’s place. She could hear them laughing, kind of silly and loud like her parents and their friends towards the end of a long boozy Sunday lunch.

‘I suppose they think they represent fine upstanding examples of the male of the species!’ Angie’s rather little-girly voice, coming from far too close to the hedge, startled Zoe. There wasn’t time to make a run for it. ‘And what are you doing, hovering among the leaves? Are you waiting for the coast to be clear?’ Angie appeared, wearing one of those special multi-pocketed gardener’s overalls that Zoe had seen advertised in the
Gazette’s
magazine. There was always a picture of some smiling clean woman in a straw hat with a trug-thing full of roses. Angie was clearly making full use of her purchase: Zoe could see at least five implement handles as well as a ball of string and some pink suede gloves festooned about her body.

‘Don’t you have to be careful when you bend?’ Zoe pointed to a fork sticking upwards from close to Angie’s waist, aiming dangerously towards her left breast.

Angie looked down at the prongs. ‘Oh I do. One wrong move and all my silicone will leak out!’ she giggled. ‘Listen, do you fancy a glass of orange or something? I do miss Emily and Luke when they’re off at school – I could do with some young company to make up for it.’

Zoe felt trapped. In Angie’s maple and mint-green
kitchen she felt as if the only words that could form themselves in her head were ‘Emily’ and ‘Baby’. It was always the way when there was something you really didn’t want to say. It was like when her mum had confided to her, a couple of years back, that she was going to buy Natasha the suede boots she’d been craving for her birthday. The word ‘boots’ had seemed to be everywhere. It was in things like the computer, needing to be rebooted when it crashed, in the bootleg Stones album that Eddy-up-the-road had given her dad, in her mum asking her to get the shopping from the boot of the car. She’d almost gone faint with the effort of not telling. She felt just the same now, perched nervously on the edge of one of Angie’s chrome and pale wood chairs, tracing her name on the glass table-top in drops of orange juice that she’d spilled because her hands were trembly. She bit her lip as the finger and the drop of juice started forming the word ‘baby’ on the glass and she hurriedly smudged her hand over it before Angie, who was opening a packet of Sainsbury’s scones, could see.

‘They’ll be back for the Easter holidays soon. I can hardly wait!’ Angie bustled around with plates and strawberry jam and found a pot of clotted cream in the fridge.

‘Why can’t they go to school here like me and Natasha?’ Zoe asked as if she’d just thought of it.

‘Here? But where?’ Angie looked puzzled.

‘Emily could be with us, at Julia Perry’s.’

Angie laughed. ‘I don’t suppose you remember, but there was an entrance exam! Emily took it but didn’t pass. Simple as that.’

‘But there’s …’

‘Yes. Briar’s Lane comprehensive.’ Angie gave her a
look that was obviously supposed to imply something. Zoe immediately got the gist but made herself look as if she didn’t understand, just for the meagre delight of seeing Angie wriggle about trying not to admit to snobbery.

‘I mean, I’m sure some people do awfully well there,’ Angie stammered as she poured herself a cup of tea from a tiny silver pot. ‘It’s just, that, we felt Emily might need a bit of extra help to achieve her potential, you know, and well, we could afford it. And you must have noticed,’ she lowered her voice as if the kitchen had filled up with people who’d disagree. ‘Some of the behaviour, and the things some of the girls wear, and so young …’

Zoe smiled, no longer worried that she’d blurt out anything about Emily’s pregnancy. Angie lived in a total fantasy land. Zoe would rather slit her wrists than tell her what really went on. But it did mean she and Emily would have to deal with things by themselves.

‘…
and sometimes the friends they bring home resemble strayed pets: slightly lost-looking, underfed and a bit grubby round the edges. Always they’re in need of a good meal. If you offer one the answer will be a decided ‘no’ as if they’d prefer starvation to the terrifying prospect of sitting at your table and being cross-examined about their GCSE options, but later when you’re looking in the fridge and there’s no sign of the last bit of Cheddar and all the yoghourts
…’

But there were always exceptions.

‘Mum! I’m back and …’ Natasha crashed into the house, pulling with her the boy who’d been in the house a few days before ‘… what’s for supper and is there enough for Tom?’ Feeling almost guilty, for it had been this strange boy Tom she’d had in mind as she wrote, Jess quickly closed down the computer. Even so, she could feel her face going pink, as if his unfathomable blue eyes could read behind the darkened screen.

‘Hello Tom,’ she said. ‘You’re very welcome to stay. It’s only a sort of posh sausage thing but there’s plenty of it.’ Tom grinned at her. He had, she thought, one of those smiles that looks as if it’s been worked on. At some stage in his young life he must have spent time gazing in the mirror and perfecting the ‘guaranteed to charm’ version. She hoped it wasn’t so calculated when he used it on Natasha.

‘Great, oh and Tom that’s my dad,’ Natasha said, hauling Tom out of the room before Matthew, whose steps she could hear approaching from the kitchen, got the chance to say or do anything dad-like and embarrassing.

‘Where are you off to?’ Jess heard them clattering up the stairs and called after them.

‘Only my room!’ Natasha yelled back. ‘Got CDs to play!’

‘“Only my room!”’ Matthew looked at Jess. ‘Is that OK do you think?’

She shrugged. ‘Well, we let her go up there with her female friends.’

‘Isn’t that different?’

‘It depends on whether you trust her or not.’

‘It’s not her …’

‘No, I know, I know. Well, they won’t do anything with us around the house. Though we could suddenly find there are things we need from upstairs, that should unsettle them.’

‘I do need to phone Micky about tomorrow, I’ll do it from the bedroom.’

‘Tomorrow?’ Jess queried, but Matt was already halfway up the stairs.

In the kitchen Jess hunted through her shelf of cookery books, took the sausages out of the fridge and
poured olive oil into a pan. Even with Tom there would be more than enough: she was still catering, mentally, for Oliver. She missed having him around. He enjoyed cooking and ever since he was old enough to be trusted with a knife he’d been a comfortable kitchen-companion, never getting in the way and being happy to do the boring, mundane necessities like peeling potatoes and grating cheese. She smiled to herself as she remembered his confusion over the term ‘
sous-chef
’ as Matthew had nicknamed him when he was about eight. He’d interpreted it as ‘Sioux-chef’ and asked her if she’d get him a full Indian brave headdress (or
native American
, she reprimanded herself, in these PC days).

Matt came back into the kitchen, grinning as if Micky had told him a joke too filthy to share. She’d ask him about the progress of the Cat Sat once she could trust herself to try and take it seriously. Angie had been cross with her that morning at the gym for treating it as a joke. ‘It’s important not to undermine their confidence, even if they’re living in complete fantasy,’ she’d said, as if she had experience of nothing but suddenly redundant men. Besides, the change in her own career was still very much on Jess’s mind. Since the meeting with Paula before the weekend she’d woken in the middle of each night, convinced she too no longer had a job.

‘In fact,’ Jess now said to Matthew as she splashed cider onto the page telling her how to achieve Delia Smith’s perfect braised sausages, ‘I’ll probably end up a good bit worse off if you think of it on a rate-per-hour basis, once the column is defunct.’ The cider had smudged the recipe where it told you how many apples were needed and Delia did like to be so precise.
Jess took four large Bramleys from the fruit rack and started on the peeling and coring.

‘Yeah, but,’ Matthew reasoned, ‘it’s not as if you were spending the free time doing something else that earned money, is it? So can’t you think of it more as a pay rise, pure and simple?’

Jess laughed. ‘“Free time!” What do you think I do all day? Loll about on the sofa scoffing booze and biscuits and smoking spliffs like you and your pals? Some of us are keeping the ol’ homestead running! The entire contents of Sainsbury’s don’t get here by themselves.’

Matthew opened the fridge and took out a pint of milk. He looked at it for a second and then at Jess and then went to the dresser cupboard and took out a glass to pour some into.

‘You’d have drunk that out of the carton if I hadn’t been here, wouldn’t you?’ She pointed the apple corer at him. ‘Doesn’t take long for a man to descend into yobbery.’

Matthew’s upper lip now had a slender moustache of milk, just like, she thought, Oliver when he guzzled his drink too fast when he was little. She must check the e-mails again, see if he felt like telling them what he was up to.

‘Would I do that?’ He dodged the corer and slapped a milky kiss on her cheek. ‘And Sainsbury’s could get here by itself. You should try on-line shopping. I’ll do it for you if you like. All you have to do is make the list and leave it to me.’

‘Huh! “All you have to do …!”’ she spluttered, searching in a cupboard and wondering if Delia’s spirit would appear in a puff of furious smoke if she left out the tablespoonful of cider vinegar. There didn’t seem to be any. There were balsamic, red wine, tarragon,
malt, rice, white wine and Jerez vinegars but none with ‘cider’ on the label and a cute design of beaming, ruddy-faced farmer and lush, fat apples. Typical. Jess scribbled ‘cider vinegar’ on a purple Post-it note and slapped it onto the fridge door where it joined several other memory joggers that had mostly not been heeded. Theirs was not a kitchen that ran on hyper-organized lines: at any given time there might well be four loaves of bread gathering mould in the bread crock, but quite possibly no butter to put on them.