After Ever After (34 page)

‘It’s just, I totally understand how you feel but I’d hate you to turn what might have been the beginning of something, even if it was a difficult beginning, into an end … Because you’ve been carrying this around with you for so long. Don’t you think it would be marvellous if you could work things out and let it go?’

‘I’ll let you know,’ I repeat, closing my eyes and feeling the length of Fergus’s body lock in the contours of mine.

‘You are a wonderful woman, do you know that?’ Fergus whispers into my ear. ‘When I think of all that you’ve had to deal with, everything you’ve been through and are still going through, I’m amazed that you’ve managed to be such a warm, funny, compassionate person. And a wonderful mum, the best mum you could ever be, and the best wife. I’m sorry if sometimes I’m too tired or stressed to remember to tell you that, but I never stop thinking it, not for one second. Don’t ever let anything stop you believing that either, will you?’ He finishes by kissing my hair.

‘Thank you,’ I tell him, sinking into the warmth of his body. ‘I’m okay, I’m too tired to cry, even if I could.’

‘Don’t cry, my love. Just sleep, I’ll be here when you wake up.’

I love these kinds of Sundays. The kind when the hazy blue of the morning sky is light with the promise of a warm day, casting sharp black shadows into cut-glass relief. I especially like Sunday mornings like this one, a morning of pure bliss after a night when Fergus and I found each other again amongst the avalanche of complications that has become our lives. Or a few hours at least when we were just ourselves again, pure and simple. Even after Dad, even after accidentally telling my gardener in the middle of a family party that I wanted him sexually, and even when my best friend is sitting opposite me still dressed in the previous day’s clothes looking as if she’s been reconstituted in papier mâché whilst my baby and husband still slumber, it’s impossible not to feel tranquil. Fergus has made it impossible.

I’m practically living a reality version of the Waltons.

Dora moans faintly as she gently bangs her head on the counter, her long white arms folded over her tousled head.

‘Christ,’ she mumbles in an uncharacteristically gravelly voice. ‘Did you spike my vodka with something?’

I smile to myself, thinking of the countless Sunday mornings that she and I have huddled shivering over endless cups of tea, regarding each other warily with mascara-smudged eyes and tentatively dissecting the events of the previous evening with the uneasy caution customary for those with a fatally lapsed memory. Except that those Sunday post-mortems usually began after midday and not at 6.30 a.m. like today. I place a cup of thick black coffee within reach of Dora’s immobile hand.

‘Why don’t you go back to bed?’ I ask her. ‘I have to get up at this time even when Ella is sleeping – it’s some fucked-up motherhood thing. But you don’t. Go on, I’ll even lend you some pyjamas and stick that lot in the washer-dryer.’

Dora’s long fingers snake around the mug, and she raises her head as if she is drawing strength from its warmth and the aroma of caffeine. One dark eye regards me over the rim of the mug, squinting through the steam.

‘You must be in a good mood to offer to do washing for me, or has the prince finally brainwashed you into being his lackey?’

The effort of talking is clearly too much for her and she leans her cheek flat on the counter, which gives her an out-of-kilter look that seems oddly suitable.

‘That sort of layabout behaviour was only possible when my body was still young enough to knock back the toxins and elasticised enough to snap back into shape,’ she explains. ‘Now that I’m thirty I’m too old to sleep hangovers off any more. My age demands that I feel every terrible moment as penance for still behaving like a teenager when I should know better.’

As she finishes her speech she straightens up in her chair, the bones of her spine clicking back into place with an audible crack, and a red smudge appears on her alabaster skin where it met with the work surface. Evidence, at least, that she still has blood in her veins.

I covertly examine her arms for track marks, although I’m not altogether sure what track marks look like. All I can see is that she’s got a small bruise on the inside of her forearm, one that looks like a sex bruise, but that seems to be about all. The sun creeps across Gareth’s lawn as I wait for her to take a good few gulps of the scalding hot coffee. Discussing Dora’s life choices with her has never been easy, even at the best of times. Attempting to discuss them now when she’s still desiccated could be a fatal error, but the chances of me having her in front of me again in the near future are slim, and I have to make the most of the opportunity.

‘So … seen any more celebs lately?’ I ask casually.

Dora sighs, clearly forcing herself into conversational mode, and thinks for a minute.

‘No one good. Oh, hang on, I did see that geezer from breakfast telly. The quite cute one who looks like he should be gay but isn’t?’

I smile encouragingly. ‘Oh yeah? Whereabouts?’ I try not to sound like I’m quizzing her, but covert operations have never been my forte.

‘Oh, at that place, um, you know. Whatsits, supposed to be “the reincarnation of the world’s greatest ever rock venue” – more like a post-modern granny’s tea room. Total shite actually. I went there thinking “yeah I’m hard core” and I came out close to losing the will to … got it, the Marquee. I saw him there. Which just proves he’s not gay ’cos he’s got no taste.’ She offers me a weak smile which I return as I sit opposite her, my own cup of coffee in hand.

‘At least you still go to clubs,’ I say, sipping my drink, tasting its bitterness on my tongue.

‘You still go to clubs,’ Dora tells me happily. ‘It’s just that they’re populated by fat people with kids, that’s all.’

I purse my lips and refuse to rise to her bait. ‘Talking of exclusive membership – what about at NA? Seen any more celebs there?’

It has taken me an age to get around to the point, which is to find out if she is still going to meetings. Dora looks absently out of the window for a while, her semi-glazed eyes following the flight of a crow across the sky.

‘I thought you’d get more country birds out here, like, you know, pheasants. Or peasants. One or the other. Or maybe both,’ she tells me earnestly. I back up my pursed lips with a schoolmarmish squint and she rolls her eyes. ‘I haven’t been for a bit, all right? It doesn’t mean the world’s going to stop turning. And anyway there’s no point. I mean, I practically have my own NA group what with the girls, even if they are a right pair of idiots, and, well, Bruce’s been in the same boat, so we just, you know, we keep each other within the right boundaries.’ She shrugs and rolls her stiff and crackling neck.

‘Okay. So what are the right boundaries?’ I ask her, trying and failing not to sound judgemental. ‘What does this “Bruce” think is acceptable behaviour?’

‘Oh fuck off, Kits,’ Dora says mildly, just a hint of agitation seeping into her voice. ‘I gave up smack, not my whole fucking life. We help each other not to overdo it, not to be stupid, that sort of thing …’

Her voice trails off, and she avoids meeting my eye. Nothing she says rings true and I’m not sure if it’s a legacy from the past or the present that’s thrown her out of kilter.

‘Are you using again?’ I ask her at last.

Dora slumps down on her stool and tips her head right back so that I can see the faintly blue throbbing pulse in her neck.

‘I can’t believe you’re asking me that,’ she says to the ceiling.

‘Well, Dora, the last time you were I didn’t ask you outright and you nearly died. I love you. I don’t want you to die. I know you’re smoking again, and I know you’re lacing your lager with vodka …’

Dora laughs suddenly, shaking her head like a rag doll.

‘Fuck! This from the girl I did two grams of coke with in two hours. Have you totally forgotten what it’s like to have a good time! I had some vodka – big deal. Don’t get into acting out your mum fantasy on me, you’ve got you own poor little kid to fuck up now,’ she laughs. She’s not angry or aggressive, she just seems exhausted.

She’s right, of course. The first time Dora took an amphetamine we were together. We had some speed we’d bought off this kid from the sixth form. I’m fairly sure it was eighty per cent baking soda, but in any case we’d rubbed it into our gums and giggled all the way through double maths until the last bell rang. We were fifteen: half of our lives ago. And it wasn’t so long ago that in the heat of a club or a party Dora and I would exchange ‘I dare you’ looks before taking another pill or another line, both seeking the same kind of oblivion. The only difference is that when I started to get bored with the three-day come-downs and the empty wasted nights talking about fuck-all to strangers, Dora had started to need it. At some point when I was getting less and less interested in that whole scene, she was unable to define herself without it any more. She was no one unless she was high. In some ways, whatever is happening to her now is happening to me too. I just need to know what it is.

‘Dora, how long have you known me? We’ve always told each other everything, right? I told you about how my CDT teacher felt up my tits in the stockroom cupboard, and you were the one who told him to lay off me. God only knows what you said to him. You told me about when you shagged both Martin Kennedy and John Coombes at Beccy Archer’s sixteenth, and I was the one who beat the shit out of Beccy for calling you a whore, although you were, actually.’

Dora shakes her head and smiles.

‘Just look at you now, who’d ever have thought you used to be hard,’ she muses. I sigh with exasperation. ‘And if you tell me everything, why won’t you talk about your dad? You know it’s fucking you up. You should go and see him. I think in his own fucked-up way he was trying to sort things out between you …’

‘Dora! Don’t make this about me. What I’m trying to say is that we have both done some stupid things in our time, sometimes because we didn’t think about things and sometimes because things just happened. But you took the biscuit, all right, because
you
nearly killed yourself. Now tell me, what are you into right now? I won’t judge you, I just don’t want you to keep anything from me, okay?’ I say as convincingly as I am able to in front of the friend who has been my mirror over the years.

Dora looks me right in the eyes.

‘I am not using any Class A drugs,’ she says, with half a smile. We watch each other for a moment longer. ‘Now, can I get a shower, and what time is the first train out of this dump anyhow?’

I’ve offended her, pushed her too far, but with someone like Dora sometimes that’s the only approach to take. I don’t know if she is telling the truth. I do know there is nothing more I can do right now, but I need Dora alive and I’m not going to let her kill herself. Not again.

‘Talking of doing stupid things,’ Dora says as she stops in the door frame. ‘If you fuck up what you’ve got with Fergus for some scraggy bit of pretty-boy stuff then you are more stupid than all of us, all right?’

I open my mouth, but before I can think of anything to say she is gone.

My Nan always said time waits for no man, and that a watched pot never boils and that a stitch in time saves nine. My mum always used to say ‘cobblers’ and roll her eyes at me behind Nana’s back, and I always used to wonder exactly how it was that a person could put a stitch into time? Would it be someone like Doctor Who, who would somehow be able to loop space around to make things happen faster? And save nine of what, I wondered. Light years? I asked my mum and nan this very question once, but the pair of them just laughed, and kept laughing until the tears sparkled in their eyes.

‘Oh Ellie,’ my nan had said, ‘she’s a proper one, your girl.’ It wasn’t until very recently that I understood that the domestic practicality of the saying had nothing to do with the space–time continuum at all. Shame really.

Nan probably would have something to say about me sitting watching the microwave clock, too, waiting for it to be 10.30. I’ve chosen it as my official deadline. If Gareth’s not here by ten thirty then he’s not coming and I have sacked him. I have officially put that whole kitchen moment behind me and I am moving my life on.

It’s 10.27 and I’ve been willing and dreading each minute that has gone by for the last half an hour.

If he had turned up at say nineish, I was prepared for that. After all, in the rush and the heat of the moment I’d forgotten to tell Fergus that I’d sacked him, not to mention engaged in extramarital intense staring at him. With the distance of two days between us, that moment in the kitchen seems oddly unreal and dreamlike now, as if I watched it happening to someone else on the evening news. The frisson of excitement wore quickly away, and the lingering sense of unease merged seamlessly into refusal to think about everything Dad had said, or even to acknowledge it.

At 09.01 this morning I could have handled Gareth turning up. I would have simply told him straight out that if he wanted to finish the job in the way we originally agreed then he could, but that I was categorically not interested in anything else from him. Otherwise he could send the bill for the work to date to my husband. And I would have stressed the word husband.

He still wasn’t here when the microwave clock read 10.00, and I found that I was feeling rather low as I realised that I’d actually been looking forward to seeing him, to laying down the ground rules with a friendly but firm smile. He has never come later than ten before, except for that day when he didn’t show up, and so when the microwave clock read 10.01 and I was certain that he wasn’t coming and I hadn’t felt the relief I had expected, I decided to take my mind off of myself for a change and engage in some actual housework. Then I decided to take Ella out into the garden and sat with her on the grass Gareth and I had laid together, letting her pick at the dew-damp blades until her leggings were soaked and I had to bring her in to change her.

Finally, at 10:21 I ran out of excuses and vacuumed the parquet hallway floor while Ella sat on the doormat chewing at the corners of the telephone bill. For a few trance-like moments I found myself actively enjoying the rhythmless drone as I kept one eye on Ella and one eye on the frosted glass in the door. I let the mundane task lull me away from that strung-out kind of tense feeling that I haven’t experienced since the night after I first slept with Fergus. Waiting and
waiting
the whole day for him to call me, hoping it would be soon and not a predictable Wednesday later. He’d called at eight o’clock that evening.