Not What They Were Expecting (18 page)

‘Who cares? Who are these people? Social workers can’t afford to come to places like this.’

‘Oh why not then? I’ll have a couple of shots, then you can come outside with the obviously pregnant woman for a quick fag, and maybe accompany her as she snorts a line of coke. That’d be a lovely image.’

‘I’m game if you are.’

They’d fitted into their roles as comfortably as usual: the amoral power woman and the prude. If James heard that description he’d probably draw them as a superhero and sidekick. Then, over Rebecca’s safe-for-Bompalomp’s garlic mushrooms starter and dull veggie pasta thing, and Sophie’s langoustines and beautifully pink lamb, they discussed Rebecca’s dad. Rebecca explained the charges, and how she’d been asked to provide evidence, in order to get her dad’s version of events in front of the police.

Sophie didn’t even ask if the charges were true or not, she just assumed they were, and would not even countenance a mix-up. And she seemed entirely comfortable with the idea that Rebecca would be perjuring herself so her dad could get away with it. That took Rebecca aback a bit. And she had already been taken aback because earlier Sophie bluntly mentioned it was odd that someone with James’s qualifications was struggling to get interviews for a new job in today’s market. She’d suggested he’d been sitting at home all day looking at porn instead of doing applications. Then before Rebecca could defend her husband on that, Sophie was back onto the subject of straying fathers. And, it being Sophie, the conversation had shifted to how it had affected her.

‘Y’know, it was a fact of life when I was growing up that Dad would have a bit on the side. Or rather, bits. I don’t think it was the same person for very long, which I think Mother saw as something of a personal triumph. You picked up a pattern. He’d be away as much as usual, but when he was having a fling the presents for us when he came home would get much better.

‘That’d carry on for a while until he started taking the piss about how long he could be away from his oh-so-loving family. There’d be a blazing row with Mum, and eventually they’d start getting on again. This was the bit I hated the most, they’d get all lovey-dovey with each other and the presents and attention for me and my bratty little sis completely went out the window. They’d fuck off on European city breaks leaving me and Ella with whoever was up on the au pair conveyor belt.

‘But at least that got interesting when I was getting a little older, and could sneak down and watch what Helga got up to on the sofa with their grimy local boyfriend.’

‘That sounds terrible,’ Rebecca had finally managed to squeeze in.

‘Not really,’ said Sophie spearing several tiny vegetables on a single fork but not, as far as Rebecca could tell, in a repressed anger kind of way, ‘just a fact of life when you’re growing up. You think you’re the centre of the universe, but grown-up life is going on around you, you’re just making it a bit more difficult. And by the time I started seeing the local boys myself, I was able to give them a bit of a surprise or two.’

‘Well, every cloud,’ said Rebecca.

‘So did your dad have lots of male colleagues around the house when you were a kid? Young men he’d met at the golf club?’

‘Oh please. Yes, Sophie, the house was constantly full of muscly construction workers who just hadn’t found the right woman yet. I loved it because they’d always bring us kids the latest Kylie CD.’

The thing was, there had been a lot of men around. But that was more to do with her dad’s institutionalised sexism, surely? And they had wives, they always had wives. Besides, it was what you did in his kind of work, you had people around to dinner or took them out or whatever. This was not how she’d hoped that this conversation would go. She hadn’t wanted to dwell on the cause of the trouble for her father, more the effect it was having on everyone around him. Sophie, not knowing her dad or his strange over-familiar way with strangers, couldn’t see how there could genuinely have been an awkward social scene in the gents. She also didn’t know about his infuriating stubbornness, which was contributing to the perfect storm that resulted in public protests and demands for his day in court.

She’d tried to get this point across to Sophie while she reluctantly defended her dad. He was being an inconsiderate idiot now, she acknowledged, but that didn’t mean the allegations were true or that he’d spent his life having a series of awkward illicit affairs.

Sophie was at least sufficiently aware of the social niceties of friendship to not say that she didn’t buy that for a second.

But the look on her face made the point very eloquently.

‘Just stick to your story about his bladder, and they can’t do a thing to you. Act assertively enough and you’ll be fine –
of course
a father and daughter would discuss their toilet habits. No one’s going to believe it for a second, and unless they let him off because they feel sorry for you it won’t make a blind bit of difference. But they wouldn’t have enough to prosecute you so you’ll be fine. You’d know all that, though.’

Rebecca had stared down bleakly at her ice cream and the reality of the trial had seeped into her veins. What was she doing? Why had she agreed to this? In a way, she’d almost started to believe she had actually had this conversation with her dad. That maybe it had all been a mix-up. Maybe she still needed that to be true.

‘You know,’ Sophie continued over her overwhelmingly unpasteurised cheese plate, ‘I’m kind of seeing a guy with a family at the minute.’

This, Rebecca knew, was not a first. When Sophie had spilled the beans on her dalliances with married men in the past, Rebecca had always responded with a big ‘No!’ that conveyed surprise, outrage and a little delight, like it was a shock development on a soap opera. She made the same noise this time, and followed up with the same questions, but she felt different. It actually made her queasy, the idea of a young family (and the kids were apparently really quite young) being so vulnerable to events outside the home. She worried about the wife more than she ever had, and what she must be going through. And she worried about her friend and how people must think of her for acting like this – and how she herself was thinking about her for doing this. Pity and disdain is an uncomfortable combination when it comes to one of your oldest pals.

After one last attempt by Sophie to get Rebecca to have a liqueur coffee, they’d paid the bill and parted. There were promises not to leave it so long again, hugs, and expressions of love that always made Rebecca feel a little awkward, even when she’d been matching Sophie drink for drink. Her dominant feeling had been one of relief the evening was done. On the Tube home she’d decided it was probably because she wasn’t drinking that the night had felt off-kilter. But Sophie always had a way of unsettling her and her assumptions. Normally this was a good thing, but this time…

James had been asleep by the time she got in, and in the morning she broke tradition and didn’t tell him all the gory details of Sophie’s complicated life. He’d seemed satisfied knowing that she was the same old Sophie, and could presumably fill in most of the blanks himself. It was because of how unsettled Sophie made her feel that Rebecca didn’t go into detail about her friend’s affair, or views on the court case, ahead of the much anticipated, and retrospectively doomed, IKEA trip to get furniture for Bompalomp’s room.

And it was because of how unsettled Sophie made her feel that she was sitting at her desk on Monday morning, trying not to think about why James was temping and hadn’t got anywhere with his proper applications.

Eleven-thirty and he still hadn’t called or texted. She hoped the job wasn’t really like they’d imagined on yesterday’s trip to IKEA…

Chapter 23

‘Would you like me to do your inside leg now, dear?’

‘Perhaps we could use it to try and discover my waist.’

It was an integral part of their trips to the furniture shop that James would do his impressions with the free stuff they gave you. The little pencil would go behind his ear, and he’d do his teeth-sucking plumber who answered every question with ‘ooh it’s gonna cost ya’. Then the paper tape measure would go around his neck like a scarf, and he’d turn into Mr Humphries from
Are You Being Served?
. This one could actually be a bit awkward sometimes – he wouldn’t really take into account who was around before he started mincing about and Rebecca often worried that the couple of guys across the aisle looking at soft furnishings might think he was taking the piss.

‘Don’t push me!’ he said in a low growly mumble, the tape measure tied around his head like a bandana.

‘Eh?’

‘Sorry. Stallone. Watched Rambo after you went to bed the other night.’

‘Just don’t do your Michael Hutchence. There’s people with kids around.’

They always got a bit giddy at the start of a trip around IKEA. Rebecca unashamedly loved the place, while James would make noises about how much he disliked it. But as soon as they got there together there was a certain excitement with the novelty. James would start planning how many meatballs he would have at the restaurant – because you have to have meatballs in the restaurant – without spoiling his appetite for the bargain hot dogs and ice cream after the checkout. Because you can never turn down hot dogs and ice cream. Rebecca always thought that there’d be nowhere else in the world where her husband would consider eating meat that cheap. His reasoning, apparently, was that the whole food side of things was a loss leader to get people in and spending more money, and, if he had enough, one day he’d be able to bring their entire empire down on the basis of extortionate losses on vats of unnaturally yellow mustard.

It was the set-up of the shop as you went in, rather than the cut-price cuisine, that got to Rebecca. First thing through the door, there was the big yellow price tags boldly declaring a ridiculously cheap price for a quite nice coffee table that she’d be more than happy to have in her house. If they had room for a coffee table. But it didn’t matter, the signs just screamed of the potential for more great stuff that they could easily afford just at the top of the stairs. There were
Nice Things
everywhere, and she didn’t care at that particular moment that the nicest of them would probably also be owned by everyone they knew.

But the main thing she loved, that meant she giggled and joined in rather than sighed when James did his impressions, was the little rooms laid out before her on the first floor. It was like a giant doll’s house and you got to play in it. Living rooms for lying around in, being angsty while watching Scandinavian detective shows. Home offices where she could be a highly regarded architect working at a desk with a top that tilted up and down, instead of a dull solicitor. The kitchens in which it would be morally wrong to use a stir-in sauce. When she’d been a little girl they hadn’t really had this stuff. IKEA opened nearby when she was in secondary school, but by then she didn’t want to hang out with her parents at the weekend, and the importance of lighting design somehow wasn’t making any impact on her teenage brain. That was almost entirely being used for hating French (the language, not the people) and thinking about *NSYNC. Besides, her parents had always been more John Lewis people.

So now, in the mid-morning quiet of the store, with migrating shoppers still only arriving in ones and twos, she felt like a kid again. James, meanwhile, having exhausted the impressions he could do with his props, was now doing his version of the same play-acting, treating every display as a Hollywood sound stage.

‘Hi honey, I’m home!’ he cheesily beamed as he stepped into a living room delicately decorated with well-structured but still comfy-looking sofas and chairs.

‘Oh hi dear, good day at the office?

‘Up at the warehouse? Say it’s great! Only seven work-related injuries all day. And I still have all six toes!’

‘Well that’s lovely dear, let me get you a Marti—’

Rebecca stopped as a middle-aged couple came murmuring into the room, smiling briefly at them as they took over the space, pointing at side tables and poring over a catalogue.

As the older couple circulated, taking over the display, James gestured to the cocktail shaker on the side table and silently mouthed ‘offer them one?’ to Rebecca.

‘C’mon,’ she mouthed back with an amused reproachful smile, gesturing towards the next section.

‘
Mi casa es tu casa’
, James mumbled cheerily as he manoeuvred past the husband, who was squeezing a sofa cushion to test its firmness.

‘Would you like to come up to my room?’ James whispered seductively in Rebecca’s ear as they stood in the aisle.

‘Why, we’ve only just met.’

‘I’d like to show you my environmentally friendly cardboard laptop and television.’

‘It’s all so sudden…’

‘Perhaps…you could stay over.’

‘I shouldn’t… But I can’t resist… Yes. You’ve got me. But I’m getting top bunk.’

They looked around the teenager’s bedroom, marvelling at the idea it could have a sleeping area, a homework area and a chillout zone in a tiny space.

‘Like any teenager would ever have a room as tidy and organised as this,’ said Rebecca.

‘We might get one,’ said James, ‘I always did.’

‘You always were a rebel.’

‘Admittedly it never smelled quite like this once I hit thirteen.’

‘Urgh, James!’ said Rebecca. ‘I’m starting to hope Bomp’s a girl now. Sweaty horrible teenage boys…’

‘Like teenage girls are all sugar and spice.’

‘I’m not even going to think about it. Bompalomp’ll be different. We’ll focus on the baby bit first. I guess that’s why no one’s ever said, “Great news! We’re going to be having an adolescent!”’

The fantasising and role-playing had kept them both cheerful as they slowly made their way around the shop. The game was sprinkled, as the shop got busier, with observations of the other couples prowling the displays who might not be having as much fun.

‘You go through and talk to them,’ said James from a stainless steel kitchen, looking through at a grumpy husband and wife team glaring at each other over the table in an adjacent dining room.