Any Way You Want Me (37 page)
I couldn’t believe I had done this to my children, the very people I wanted to protect from all the hurt in the world.
I couldn’t believe I was staring single parenthood full in the face.
‘I know you want him back,’ I said. ‘I do, too.’ I did, I really did. I wanted him back more than anything. He had his faults, sure, but so did I. And I’d hurt him far worse than he had ever hurt me.
I sighed again as I glanced over to the empty chair at the table. ‘We’ll have to do lots of fun things together, just us three until he comes back. OK? We’ll just have to have a nice time without him.’
Nineteen
Dear Danny,
Glad you’re still coping with the cut-and-thrust world of recruitment. It’s a glamorous job but someone’s gotta do it, that’s what I say. And no worries about the amorous thing. I was more offended that you asked me to dance to ‘Seasons in the Sun’, to be honest. How could you even think such a thing? Have you no shame?!
Things have gone a bit strange here but it’s not really something I can explain in an email. Let me know next time you’re down south and we can have a proper heart to heart.
It really was great to catch up the other week. Big kiss to your mum. I always knew she was a woman with taste.
Love Sadie xxx
PS And you can leave out all that ‘callow youth’ bollocks. Don’t give me that, Cooper!
I only ever saw Mark once after our affair finished, and it was purely by chance. I had taken the kids out to the playground on Clapham Common for the morning, and after Molly had swung and slid and scaled the peaks of every climbing frame, we were strolling along the High Street looking for somewhere for lunch, when I saw him.
And her.
It was a sunshiny April day, T-shirt weather under the aquamarine sky, and all the cafes had put their dinky two-seater tables out on the pavement in an attempt to look Mediterranean, although, if you were a cynic, you could say that the effect was somewhat spoiled by the fume-belching West-End-bound traffic queuing back from the lights.
I saw him before he saw me. He was drinking coffee outside a French restaurant and wearing a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled up. I could see the dark hairs on his arms. The way he held his cup with both hands. The light glancing off his rings. His suit jacket hanging on the back of his chair, sleeves dangling in a slight breeze. He was laughing at something his companion was saying.
I was waiting at the pedestrian crossing, a small island in the middle of the road. I watched the way his smile widened, how his eyes crinkled at the sides. His face seemed so familiar and yet so strange. I had kissed that face, held it in my hands. Now my eyes stung to look at it.
I punished myself by looking at the woman he was with instead. The woman who once would have been my competition. Or had he been seeing her, too, all along? Were we both two of many conquests? Was it all a game?
She had dark hair, cut in a funky, gamine style, with coppery lowlights which shone in the sunshine. She was wearing a burnt orange shirt with a natty pointed collar and three-quarter-length sleeves. Silver bangles. French-manicured nails. Wedding ring. She waved her hands a lot when she spoke. She was teasing him about something, I guessed, from the mischievous grin on her face.
His lover.
People were crossing the road but I stood there, oblivious, watching them chatting and laughing and touching each other’s hands across the table. My heart thumped painfully inside me, but I couldn’t look away. I was transfixed, drinking in every detail. Her high-heeled boots. The sound of her laugh. The kitschy PVC handbag at her feet.
Go, go. Go, before they see you.
‘We go, Mummy?’ Molly inquired, drumming her feet on the buggy.
Then Mark looked up, just as the green man gave its last flash and vanished again. The red man appeared. Stop. Do not cross the road.
There was an air of triumph in Mark’s eyes. See? they gloated. I didn’t waste any time getting over you. I’ve traded up to a better model, now – look!
Just in case I hadn’t got the message, he leaned over and whispered in the woman’s ear, and then she was looking straight across at me, too, brown eyes curious. And she was laughing, and he was too, and then they were kissing, eyes closed, touching each other’s faces.
Two cars zoomed between us and I shivered. I could no longer see them, but the kiss went on and on in my mind, playing endlessly like a loop of film.
Cheeks burning, I lumbered the buggy round and crossed back to the far side of the road, and then wheeled it to the row of bus stops. I glanced down at myself – cut-off jeans, old white T-shirt that had been over-washed and was now thin and greying, ancient, beaten-up trainers that smelled of ripe Camembert up close. I had no make-up on to cover my sleep-deprived skin and I knew that the dark circles under my eyes were like twin, crescent-shaped bruises. My hair needed cutting, my eyebrows needed tweezing, there was yellow poster paint wedged down the sides of my fingernails.
I sighed. I was out of the game as far as flirty coffees went. I was back where I belonged. ‘Tell you what, Molls,’ I said, leaning over to kiss her head. ‘Let’s go home and have a picnic lunch in our garden instead.’
It was the last time I ever saw him. Laughing at me with another woman. It was some kind of closure, at least. I certainly wasn’t left in any doubt that we could ever be in love again. And that was a relief. He had moved on, and I had been left behind. It was over.
I didn’t feel jealous. I felt as if I had escaped.
Alex stayed away until Sunday, when he appeared without warning, clutching a pile of Sunday papers, milk and bread. I stared at the milk and bread while Molly shrieked with delight to see her dad again. If he had brought groceries, surely that was a good sign? Surely that meant he was going to . . .?
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘How are you?’ We were standing a respectable distance from each other in the kitchen and all I wanted to do was fling myself across the vast chasm between us into his arms.
‘I’m all right.’ He looked me in the face and I examined him hungrily. He was unshaven and his clothes were crumpled, but other than that, it was Alex. In our kitchen. Home. ‘You?’
‘Yeah, OK.’ I bit my lip. ‘Apart from missing you and wishing I’d never been so stupid.’
He nodded. There was no light in his eyes, no spark of humour or anything that gave me any additional hope. I glanced back at the milk and bread just to reassure myself that they, at least, were there and I hadn’t simply invented them as part of a crazed delusion.
‘All right if I make a cup of tea?’ he asked.
I started at the formality of his words. ‘Of course you can! You don’t have to
ask
!’
‘Do you want one?’
‘What, a cup of tea?’ I was trying to joke, but it completely bombed. He stared at me as if I’d insulted him.
‘Yes, a cup of tea.’
‘No, thanks.’
Molly meanwhile was trying to tell Alex every single thing that had happened while he’d been away. ‘I saw ladybird, Daddy. With spots. We had chips. I watch
Monsters
with Mummy. We played houses. And babies. And shops. Nathan had a bump.’ She paused thoughtfully and then turned her face up to him, beaming. ‘You had a nice course, Daddy?’
He said nothing for a few moments, just knelt down and cuddled her. ‘I have missed you so-o-o much, Molls,’ he said tightly. ‘The best girl in the world.’ He picked her up and swung her round so that she screamed with giggles. It was a noise I hadn’t heard all week, and for some reason, it made me want to weep. It was a noise that had been part of the soundtrack to our life for so long, and I hadn’t realized, until then, how much I had missed it. Only Alex could make her incoherent and hysterical like that. He was the only one. We both needed him here. We all needed him here.
Alex looked over at me. ‘Do you mind if I take them out for a bit, Sade? Just to the park or something. It feels like ages since I’ve seen them.’
I bit my lip again. This seemed horribly like ‘visiting rights’, where Dad came along once a fortnight and took the kids to McDonald’s and binge-fed them in the hope that it would make them love him for it. ‘Yeah, ’course,’ I said, in as bright a voice as I could muster, turning away so that he couldn’t see my face.
‘Hey, d’you hear that, Molls? Shall we go out to the park?’
‘YEAH!’ she cried. ‘I get my shoes,’ she said, racing out to the hall.
‘Do you want to come, too?’
For a second, I thought he was asking Nathan, but then I remembered Nathan was actually asleep upstairs. So he had to be talking to me. ‘Well, I . . .’
‘Shall we all go? Get a bit of fresh air? Do the family thing?’
My heart sank. Do the family thing – that sounded so awful. Like we had to pretend to be a family, all of a sudden. ‘Yeah, if you want,’ I said tonelessly. Don’t cry, I told myself fiercely. Don’t start crying all over again. My eyes and cheeks still hadn’t recovered from the tear-marathon of the week before.
‘Yeah, I do want,’ he was saying. ‘I want to sort this out, you know.’
Something jumped inside me at his words. A tiny flicker of hope. I swung round to look at him. ‘You do?’
His eyes were hard; he didn’t look like my Alex any more. This was the new, damaged version. ‘Of course I do. We need to talk about it, try and find out where things went so wrong that you had to . . . That you wanted to . . .’ He shrugged unhappily. His hands were flapping at his sides as if they weren’t sure what to do. ‘We need to talk. You need to tell me. I’ve been so angry with you for what you’ve done. I trusted you and you—’
‘I know.’ I didn’t want him to say it. ‘I know I hurt you. And I wrecked everything. And I wish that—’
‘I wear my WELLY BOOTS,’ Molly announced proudly, strutting in with her boots on the wrong feet. ‘I put them on by MYSELF, Daddy.’
Alex came over and took my hand. Not a hug or a kiss, just his fingers around mine, but that was OK. That would do for now. ‘We’ll talk,’ he said again. Then his voice rose as he smiled down at Molly. ‘Aren’t you clever? Wow! Look at those boots!’
‘Thank you,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘Thank you for giving me another chance.’
I would make it work, I vowed, pulling my own boots on seconds later, and wedging hats onto the children’s heads.
I would so make it work, I told myself, unfolding the buggy and flicking the dried bits of mud off the wheels onto the pavement.
It
had
to work, I thought with a pang, watching Alex nuzzling Nathan’s belly with his chin until Nathan was helpless with chuckles.
‘Right, kids,’ Alex said, bouncing a football in his hands. ‘Who’s gonna kick this down the road with me? Are you coming, Nath?’
‘No, ME coming, Daddy. I coming!’
‘What, you? Molly? You think you can kick this ball, do you? Think you can get it off Hot-Shot Dad?’
And they were off, just like that, father and daughter, running and giggling and kicking the ball to each other down the road.
I pushed Nathan behind them with the sun on my face. ‘GOAL!’ Alex was yelling. ‘And she’s scored on the Ford Focus!’
We could do it, I thought, with a flare of optimism. Alex and I, Molly and Nathan. The very people I loved most in the world. We would talk later and we would start again. I watched him, the man I loved, as he showed our daughter how to dribble a football, and I was struck with the realization of how much I had missed him in my life. His smell. His laugh. His hands on me.
I smiled at the outrage on Molly’s face as he tackled her and won the ball. He was so competitive, it was ridiculous. ‘Come and get it, Molls,’ he was shouting over his shoulder. ‘Try and get it off me!’
I had nearly lost him, but now he was back. There was no way I was going to make that mistake again. No way on earth. I picked up the pace in an attempt to catch up with the footballers, who were almost at the bottom of the road. Good times ahead. That was what Alex had said, wasn’t it? Good times ahead. And hadn’t I always said he was right about everything?
Any Way You Want Me
Lucy Diamond is the pseudonym of Sue Mongredien,
author of many successful children’s series. She lives in
Brighton with her partner and their three young children.
Any Way You Want Me
is her first adult novel.
