A Spring Affair (3 page)

‘You can put in a good word for me when you’re a qualified accountant and running the place.’

‘Knickers, darling,’ said Karen, breezing out of the door, like the Queen on a day off. ‘Have a lovely long weekend and I’ll see you–without your burgundy suit, I hope–next Thursday.’

Phil liked a curry on Friday nights after he had been for his usual workout at the gym, so the kitchen had a warm and exotic air as Lou stirred a selection of her own mixed spices into the pot of chicken which was bubbling away in its garlicky tomato marinade.

Her text alarm went off. It was from her friend Michelle.
OFF OUT TO SNARE DAVE
.
WISH ME LUCK
That came as a bit of a surprise to Lou, as the last conversation they had had was that he was a complete dickhead and Michelle wouldn’t have him back if he walked across hot coals to deliver armfuls of rare orchids to her. Lou texted back
GOOD LUCK
! She knew in her heart of hearts though, that Michelle was heading for disappointment and would probably be on the phone tomorrow in tears.

Michelle had fancied rugged builder Dave for ages and had got lucky one night, two months ago, when he was exceedingly drunk. However, since then, he had made polite but hurried exits from her company. Michelle had convinced herself that the more she was in his face, the more he would realize she was the woman for him, and thus pursued him at every turn possible. He was apparently the most gorgeous man she had ever met, although
she had said the same about Colin–and Liam and John and Gaz and Jez, two Ians and a Daz. That wasn’t counting Death Row Dane she hooked up with on the internet (who was also a ‘kind, gentle soul in need of loving from a good Christian woman’ and had been falsely accused of slaughtering six gas-station owners). Lou’s advice to her that maybe she should be less keen had been interpreted in Michelle’s own special way, and now whenever she had managed to seek poor Dave out, she proceeded to ignore him–laughing loudly and flirting outrageously with anyone nearby. It was the sort of thing Lou had done with Andy Batty when she was fourteen. But then Lou was hardly an expert at relationships and, as such, in no place to preach.

The opening notes to
Coronation Street
played out on the portable TV in the corner, signifying the time that Lou called ‘wine o’clock’. She always had a glass of red whilst she was cooking, but when she went to get the corkscrew, it was as if she was looking at the cutlery drawer for the first time.

Lordy, this could do with a clear-out, she thought, looking down at the strange gadgets she had bought to experiment with and never used, including the miracle potato peeler abandoned at the first attempt and ancient spatulas she never used since Phil bought her a new set of them as part of his last Christmas present. She opened the drawer beneath it too–the one she used for scraps, string, Sellotape, nail clippers and all the motley collection of familiar bits and pieces which didn’t belong anywhere else. She picked out the old green scrunchie stained with ink from a leaky pen, a rusted-up padlock
and key which had been there for ever, and a pamphlet for the Indian takeaway in town which had been closed down last Christmas after maggots had been found in the bhajees. She dropped them in the bin and wondered why on earth she hadn’t done such a simple and easy thing as that before.

She pulled open the bottom drawer. It needed an extra tug because it was so crammed with cloths made from Phil’s old vests and cut-up tea towels. Did she really need so many? The timer buzzer went then, demanding her attention, and Lou closed all the drawers.

‘Tomorrow,’ she decided.

At the car lot, Phil shook his head in disgust and prepared to be in pain.

Sharon Higgins, the sum of two hundred and fifty pounds.

Whenever he wrote out the wording on these cheques his mind always whirred into calculations that plunged downwards like a big spoon and stirred up the contents of his stomach. Ten years of £200 per month was £24,000, plus another eight years of £250 per month brought the total to £48,000. Not counting the fact that the bitch might ask for another increase at some point. Then there was the possibility that they might carry on in full-time education until they were twenty-two. Or longer, if they were going to be doctors or something extra brainy. It was lukewarm comfort that he’d received no surprise letter from the CSA, who would demand a hell of a lot more money from him. He could only guess that she was on some sort of benefit fiddle.
Forty-eight thousand quid!

He had only laid eyes on the leech children once,
when he and Lou were shopping one Christmas at Meadowhall five years ago. They had literally bumped into Sharon and her mother and the kids outside the Father Christmas grotto. No words had been exchanged. Sharon had whipped the kids away with a sort of panic that suggested he might immediately bond with them, although nothing could have been further from the truth. To him, they were just two small, ordinary, dark-eyed, blonde-haired kids who he hadn’t felt a thing for then, or since. Nothing positive anyway, only resentment that they were probably going to take at least £48,000 out of his bank account–and that wasn’t including interest. He groaned.

Two nights he had spent with Sharon. One of which he couldn’t remember at all, he was so drunk. But apparently they’d done
it
three times,
which would work out at sixteen thousand pounds per shag!

He first met her on a night out in Chesterfield a couple of years before Lou came on the scene. Sharon was the clichéd twenty-year-old bimbo barmaid with long legs, massive tits, blonde hair and eyes like big blue sapphires. She was a bit weighty around the hips but that was easily forgiven in view of all her other attributes. He hypnotized her easily by flashing a bit of cash, and three posh meals, a silver bracelet, a four-foot teddy bear and two bottles of champagne later, she was in his bed.

She had said that the champagne was too dry (why didn’t the silly cow tell him that in the first place and save him fifty quid then?), and had a Diet Coke instead, so he was lumbered with it, and he wasn’t going to waste it at those prices despite the fact that it didn’t sit happily with the lager and the vodkas already sloshing
around his system. She assured him he had been fantastic though.

The second time, he made sure he was stone cold sober but the sex had been a bit of a let-down, to say the least. She might have had a lovely bod, but she was one of those annoying types who wanted cuddling and hours of foreplay before he could get anywhere near the main target area. The conversation was like wading through treacle in concrete boots. Plus it didn’t help when he’d pleasured her and she refused to reciprocate in the same way because apparently she didn’t do blow jobs. He was, quite frankly, bored by the morning and decided, over their post-coital Little Chef breakfast, that she had to go. He had a feeling she might have turned out to be too clingy and expensive if he didn’t sever it, although he didn’t realize just how expensive until she turned up unannounced at the car lot that he managed five months later waddling like a fat duck and supporting her back, not only pregnant with one sprog, but two. They were his apparently, without a doubt. There was a history of twins in the Winter family which added immediate credibility to her claim. But anyway, she had a supporting ultrasound-scan picture for proof.

To his insurmountable relief she said she didn’t want him to assume any responsibility, he wouldn’t be named on the birth certificate as father and she didn’t want him in the twins’ life and confusing them with periodic duty visits. Then she undid all her good work by saying she expected him to contribute to some
costs
. She dropped the word into the waters of their conversation like a two-ton pebble and he felt the ripples all the way to the bank. She named her price–£200 per calendar month.
Payment on the dot and she would promise to keep the CSA out of it. It was at that point that he asked her if she was sure he was the father.

She spun on him like a Tasmanian Devil.

‘What do you think I am!’ she screamed as he tried desperately to shush her up. ‘You seduced me with lines like “you’ve got the most beautiful blue eyes I’ve ever seen”’ (which he remembered saying), ‘and “we don’t need to bother with condoms because I’ve had the snip!”’ (which he couldn’t remember saying at all)!

‘You used me,’ she spat, ‘then when you got what you wanted, you buggered off and didn’t want to know me. I believed you so much about the snip, it never crossed my mind I could be pregnant–and when I found out I was, it was too bloody late to abort. So this is all your fault, you lying tosser.’

She might have been thick as pigshit for believing that line, presuming he did use it, but Phil did actually have a stab of guilt at that point, especially when she started crying, although it didn’t stop her ranting. If he wanted proof, she had no worries about getting DNA samples and going down the CSA route, she raved. She threatened him with her uncles, her dad, the newspapers, Jerry Springer…He pacified her with a coffee and a Kit-Kat and the promise of a taxi home, and made a mental note never to have casual unprotected sex again.

He got a birth announcement seven and a half months after the shag he couldn’t remember. It was a perfunctory note with her bank details at the bottom. The babies were premature but doing well, she said. The unsaid message was:
start the payments
. Though he would never admit this to anyone, Phil secretly hoped they were pre
mature enough to slip quietly away and free him of at least eighteen years of cheque sending–plus the stamps (it all mounted up!). He didn’t hear anything from her again until the children were ten, when she asked for fifty pounds more per month. He complied because it wasn’t worth rocking the boat over, especially as the business was doing so well and the CSA payments would have been sickening. In fact, until he and Lou had bumped into Sharon in Meadowhall that Christmas, he didn’t even know that she’d had one of each. Sharon hadn’t changed much; she was a bit harder-looking in the face maybe and she’d lost the lard off her arse. He remembered no details about the kids except for their eyes, which were round and brown like a pair of fledgling owls, or should that be cuckoos. Bloody evil cuckoos nesting in his bank account, open-mouthed, demanding and insatiable, bleeding him fucking dry.

The Sharon and kids episode had been a great shake-up for Phil. He’d had a charmed life until then. When Phil and Celia, his sister, were very small, their parents split up and compensated their children by spoiling them rotten with the best things money could buy. The Winter children had grown up with an inflated sense of their own worth, a habit of getting all their own way and an obsession with hard cash. They smoothly entered adulthood under the impression that they were invincible–which was compounded when business success and money gravitated to them. Their confidence helped them attract the attentions of the opposite sex, but Sharon’s outsmarting of Phil had knocked his self-belief and shaken him to the core. Since then he had striven for bigger and better deals than anyone else, to prove to
himself that he was once again top dog and he clung on for grim death to all he owned. Nor did he ever again get out of his depth when flirting with a woman. Everything that happened to Phil Winter, Sharon Higgins excepted, had to be on Phil Winter’s terms. That included pulling the rug from under his wife’s feet every so often. That she never failed to climb back on it for him was the biggest indication he had that he was back on the right track.

Just as he had sealed the envelope and thumped a second-class stamp on it, Bradley, his second-in-command, popped his head around the door and grinned, waving a log book.

‘Got it!’

‘The MG?’

‘Yep. Daft old cow took the twelve hundred cash, and young Colin’s taking it over to Fat Jack’s in the morning.’

‘You bloody star! Nice bonus for you this week, cocker.’

Not too nice, though–a hundred quid was fair, especially as he himself had more or less made the deal and it was only up to Bradley to do the formalities and get the dithering owner to stick her signature on the paperwork. Twelve hundred in cash, for a vehicle that would be worth four times that by the time it came back from Fat Jack’s body shop. And that wasn’t counting the best bit–the personalized number-plate that was worth at least ten grand. The pensioner who sold it thought she was getting a good deal, too. Which she was, since by taking away that ‘old banger’ of hers he had effectively freed up a big space in her garage and relieved her of the worry of taxing and insuring it. Plus she probably
wouldn’t live long enough to spend twelve hundred quid anyway.

Maybe there was a God after all. A good old capitalist God Who helped those who helped themselves.

As Lou snapped on her Marigolds on Saturday morning, the phone rang. It was exactly eight o’clock on a fine March laundry day for anyone with beds to change–i.e. bright and breezy. The frying pan was still hot from Phil’s cooked breakfast, the man himself was barely out of the drive and Lou didn’t need to check the number display to know it was Michelle.

‘Hello, how are you?’ said an over-chirpy voice.

‘I’m OK. You’re up early. You all right?’

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ although the crescendo of sniffs told otherwise.

‘Sure?’

‘Nooo…’

Michelle was never all right. Well, that wasn’t quite true, for she had been quite all right three years ago when they had first met at the Advanced Indian Cuisine course, on which Lou had enrolled to please Phil. This was at a time when she was desperately seeking to make herself more indispensable in his eyes–and in the absence of an Advanced Blow Job course, that was the next best thing.

Lou and Michelle seemed to be the only ones capable of boiling an egg in the class, and the constant exasperations of their easily inflamed Indian tutor with his strange half-Asian, half-broad Barnsley accent, sent them into flurries of giggles which they carried to the college coffee-bar after class. They swapped phone numbers and met outside class a couple of times, and the increasingly frequent calls between their houses were as light and frothy as a six-egg sponge cake. There was a big fat space waiting in Lou’s heart for a friend after Deb had gone from her life, and Michelle filled it perfectly. Well, in the beginning anyway. The foundations of their budding friendship had been so strong that Lou hadn’t really noticed the first cracks appearing. Cracks that quickly seemed to deepen to fissures, and before long there were Grand Canyons springing up everywhere.

Sometimes Lou was ashamed that she felt so drained by Michelle’s constant depressions, especially when she thought back to the giggles and the fun they’d had in their cookery class, before their friendship had been tested by any outside traumas. Then again, she remembered her own neediness in those awful months when Deb was there to listen to her, often in the middle of the night when she couldn’t bear the thought of going to sleep and dreaming distorted dreams. When she woke up to find herself in a huge, empty, cold bed. When she felt half-insane: selfish, self-obsessed, unable to see anything past her own pain. When she thought her head would explode from the questions that tormented her. When she grabbed at anything that might fill some of the great hungry hollow inside her. She had clung to Deb like a vine, as Michelle now clung to her. True friends stuck
around when the going got tough, so how could Lou even think of turning her back on Michelle in her hour (well, many hours) of need?

‘Well, I got to the pub,’ snuffled Michelle. ‘And Dave was there.’

‘Yes?’

‘All I said was, “Hello there”.’

‘I’m listening.’

The dénouement was coming; Lou could feel the sobs crescendo-ing.

‘And he turned around in front of everyone,’ more tears and sniffs, ‘and he said…he said…’

‘Go on,’ urged Lou.

‘And he said, “Stop stalking me, get a life and piss off, you bunny-boiling bitch!”’

Lou cringed on her side of the phone. What on earth would be the right thing to say to that? She decided, unwisely in retrospect, to respond with: ‘Oh well, that’s that then.’

‘Is that all you can say?’ Michelle half-screamed at her.

‘I…I didn’t mean…mean it like that,’ Lou stuttered. ‘I just meant that now you’re in no doubt that…’
He’s not interested
, she was going to say. ‘He’s not the man for you,’ sounded kinder. ‘Now you can finally move on.’

‘But what if this morning he’s thinking, God, I was a bit hard on her last night–and now he feels guilty and really sorry for me?’

‘Do you really want a man who feels sorry for you?’

‘I don’t care, I just want him.’

‘Michelle, let him go,’ Lou said as warmly and supportively as she could. ‘Maybe you should stay totally
away from men until you have given yourself some time to get strong. Are you really in the right place to fall in love again?’

‘I’m not the sort of person who can survive without a man. Some people aren’t. I’m not meant to be alone!’ Michelle bleated.

‘You don’t want just any man though, do you? You’re giving out signals that say, “Hello, idiots of the world! Come and get me–I’m vulnerable”!’ said Lou.

‘Nobody loves me though, Lou. I’m so lonely,’ said Michelle, snorting back tears. ‘Anyway, men like vulnerable women and no one is more vulnerable than me.’

Oh, how Lou wished she had the courage to say, ‘Please grow up, Michelle,’ after twelve exasperating loops of the same conversation, but she could no more have said it aloud than lap-danced in front of Prince William.

‘Isn’t loneliness a little better than being tormented like this?’ said Lou eventually.

‘How do you know what loneliness is? You’re married!’ Michelle cried. Which was so funny, Lou almost cried herself.

‘Look, Lou,’ said Michelle, after another ten minutes of the same self-pitying rant. ‘This is silly, wasting money talking on the phone. Why don’t you come round for a bit and I’ll cook lunch?’

‘I can’t this morning,’ said Lou. ‘I’ve got stuff to do.’

‘Like what?’ Michelle replied with a little huff.

‘Well, domestic things, then I’ll be making Phil’s lunch,’ Lou said, wondering why she was explaining but still doing it all the same.

‘Phil, Phil, Phil–all you think about is Phil,’ Michelle
snapped, which Lou thought was a bit rich, coming from someone who had just been called ‘a bunny-boiling bitch’. But Lou also knew how easy it was to slip into obsession until it felt like normal daily behaviour.

‘I’m sorry–that was mean,’ said Michelle, dissolving again. ‘I’m such a horrible person. No wonder I’m by myself.’

‘Don’t be silly, you aren’t horrible at all and you’ll find someone lovely one day very soon, I’m absolutely sure of it.’

‘OK, I’ll go now then.’

‘Listen, I’ll ring you later. Go and do something nice. Cheer yourself up by buying something frivolous in town.’

‘Yes, I will,’ Michelle wobbled.

‘Chin up–he wasn’t worth it. You can do
so
much better,’ said Lou, although she did happen to think the bloke had been remarkably patient in the circumstances. Being stalked by a middle-aged woman in a leather mini-skirt and anaemic-white legs wasn’t exactly a popular male fantasy.

‘Bye then, Lou,’ Michelle snuffled.

‘Bye, Mish.’

‘See you when you’re not so busy dusting.’ The phone went down hard at Michelle’s end.
Ouch
, thought Lou, although she didn’t have time to wallow in guilt, as the phone rang again in a breath.

‘I had you on ringback–you’ve been ages,’ huffed her mother.

‘I was talking to Michelle.’

‘Oh,
her
,’ said Renee Casserly disapprovingly. ‘When are you going to the supermarket?’

‘Well, not this morning anyway, I’ve got stuff to do.’

‘Victorianna wants to know if your email’s broken. She’s written to you but she’s not had a reply yet so she’s told me what she wants instead.’

Lou crossed her fingers and lied. ‘No, I don’t think anything’s arrived yet.’

Lou had heard from her sister and it was another Victorianna classic. Her email had said,
Hi there, weather fab here as usual. I’m now a size zero, can you believe, and it feels just great. How’s your diet going? Can you help mum to send a couple of things over?
(Diet? Little bitch!) There followed a shopping list longer than a giraffe’s leg, and no please or thank you, as usual. Most of the stuff on the list she could get in the States anyway. She just wanted the kudos of getting a ‘home-parcel’. Victorianna liked the point of difference her Englishness gave her. She played Lady Muck with Oscar-winning skill.

This was the umpteenth ‘hamper’ she’d sent for. Lou had received a T-shirt by way of a thanks once that would have fitted around a small infant school. The words ‘thank you’ weren’t actually said. Victorianna would have spontaneously combusted, had she had to say them. Her mum got a framed photo of Victorianna posing formally with live-in lover Edward J.R. Winkelstein the Third and his expensive hairweave, which wasn’t dissimilar in texture nor colour from Shredded Wheat. Victorianna looked like a younger, more glamorous version of Renee. He looked the way Lou would expect an Edward J.R. Winkelstein the Third to look.

‘Well, let me know when you’re going and I’ll come with you. She’s got a dinner-party soon and wants some
of the stuff for then. I’ve got the mint chocolate disc things.’

‘OK, Mum. How about Tuesday?’

‘Yes, but no later otherwise she won’t get the stuff in time.’

How tragic, thought Lou.

‘We could have been and gone in the amount of time you’ve been talking to that Michelle. You must have been on half an hour. And you want to check that email thing of yours. Your sister said she wrote two days ago.’

‘Well, I do have other things to do besides jump when Victorianna asks, Mum. And a please and thank you and a cheque for you wouldn’t go amiss. Doesn’t she realize how much you spend on these flaming hampers?’ said Lou. ‘You could have taken the stuff over yourself for how much it’s cost you in postage and packing.’
If your beloved daughter ever had the decency to invite you over there
, she stopped herself from adding.

‘I
am
her mother. I don’t expect anything in return,’ said Renee pointedly.

‘Yes, but it’s not as if she’s poor. She’s always bragging about how loaded she and Baron Frankenstein are. Surely there’s room for you in one of the twelve bedrooms?’

‘Jealousy won’t get you anywhere, Elouise,’ said Renee, totally missing the point.

Lou surrendered. ‘Tuesday then Mum, definitely,’ she said with a sigh.

‘Don’t go to any trouble if you’re busy. I can get a bus down.’

If you can get someone to unnail you from your cross
first, thought Lou. ‘It’s no trouble, I’ll pick you up Tuesday at nine,’ she said wearily.

She put the phone down and vowed she wouldn’t answer it again. Everyone she seemed to speak to on it made her feel unreasonable and selfish. She badly needed this clutter-clearing session to make her feel as good as she had done cleaning out her drawer at work.

‘Right, to business,’ she said to herself with a big smile and a clap of the hands, and shook open a large black binliner in preparation.

The spatulas were the first to go, then some tongs that had gone rusty in the dishwasher, then some grimy-looking toothpicks that had wriggled out of their packets. She aimed the old ice-cube tray that she never used into the bag. Used lolly sticks–what the hell had she kept those for? A broken melon-baller, a stencil brush, a once-used rice ball and a blunt vegetable peeler joined them.

Be ruthless
, the article had said.
Ask yourself,
‘
Have I used it in the last six months (seasonal goods–allow one year? Am I likely to ever use it in the future?’ If the answer is no, can it go in a recycling bin, or to charity, or to a car-boot sale or be sold on eBay? No? Then throw it away without a second glance.

Some things she questioned, such as the ancient can-opener that looked more like a medieval instrument of torture. It hadn’t worked for years, but had a handy bottle-opener at the top. But as she couldn’t remember the last time she had opened a bottle with it, she launched it at the binliner with the accuracy of a seven-foot-tall basketball player.

When the drawer was completely emptied, she
scrubbed it down, washed the utensils she was keeping and slotted the whole thing back. It was crazy how something as simple as throwing out some old rubbish gave her such a sense of accomplishment.

Next she tipped out the odds and sods drawer, suspecting she might be putting very little of it back. A broken mirror, five combs (none of which had a complete set of teeth), some grubby Sellotape, cheap pencils that had needed sharpening for about four years, a yellowing pattern for a cricket jumper she would never knit, an incomplete set of playing cards, sixteen CDs and DVDs given away as freebies with various newspapers, cracker novelty prizes from last Christmas…Into the bin went everything but the scissors and a pair of tweezers that she thought she’d lost months ago. She collected all the loose paperclips into an empty matchbox that she also found in the drawer and took them to the desk in the small study next door.

Clear and redeploy as you go
, the article dictated. And the newest disciple to the religion of clutter-clearing obeyed.

Next she tackled the cloth drawer, throwing out all the old vest bits and tatty floorcloths because she had just found three new packets of J-cloths that had been hidden under everything. She had just got on her knees for the under-sink cupboard, when the doorbell rang.

She hoped it wasn’t Michelle, then felt immediately mean and treacherous. She had really started to enjoy herself and just for once didn’t want to talk over and over about what a man
really
means when he tells you to piss off because you’re a bunny-boiling bitch. Then again, it could have been the postman. She stole over to the
window and sneaked a look. It was a lot worse than Michelle and her mother combined. It was Mr Halloween himself–her brother-in-law, Des.

‘Oh knickers,’ Lou said, and quickly stepped back against the wall, confident that she hadn’t been seen.

Luckily for Lou, there was no detectable sign that she was in–no TV or radio on, and her car was safely hidden away in the garage so, to all intents and purposes, she didn’t look at home. She waited in the silence until she was pretty sure he must have gone–then, to her anger and amazement, she heard the key in the lock, the door opening and footsteps in the hall. She really would kill Phil when he got home. He’d obviously done what she told him never to do again, and lent Des his key There was nothing for it now, no place to hide. And even worse, she’d got the old white T-shirt on that made her boobs look massive.

Lou braced herself, burst into the hallway and, hands going to her chest, feigned a big shock to try and get the point across that this really wasn’t on, without actually daring to spell it out directly. Lou was just too soft for confrontations these days.