All That Mullarkey (18 page)

In view of the pathetic state of her food supplies, she took herself off for lunch at The Three Fishes. With her boxes tucked under the table, she munched her way through a substantial Ploughman’s, mentally cruising through the rooms of what used to be her home to decide what to take.

Must be fair to Gav and leave the place reasonable for him. Newly bereaved, it would be horrible for him to come back to a home stripped of all the best kit. It wasn’t going to be very nice in any case. She shivered. He might remain at 11 Port Road, they might be near neighbours, and she didn’t want him howling round the corner to claim custody of the teapot.

Breaking up a home was a big job and had to be thought hard about. But first …

… knickers drawer. She gathered up her boxes and made for home, where she fished out the flat blue box of the pregnancy testing kit and took it into the bathroom, tearing at the polythene with her teeth.

Chapter Twenty-One

There were two blue lines.

Positively positive. She was pregnant.

Even though it was what she was expecting, she trembled as she went slowly down and made coffee, sitting very still on the sofa, blowing and sipping, and thinking.

It was an hour before she stopped feeling sorry for herself and blotted up the tears tipping from her lashes.

She was too busy to sit around bawling; she had to move out. Boxes, bags, TV, stereo. In the car, round the corner, out of the car, into the new house. Back to the old house, begin again.

By evening everything was moved, somehow, anyhow, but the worst job was still hanging over her. Reluctantly, she picked up her mobile phone and sent a text to Justin.

Would like 2 talk. Could we meet? Suggest Fri night at Muggies. Cleo

Friday night at Muggie’s. Having spent half the week chewing it over, Cleo decided to go to Muggie’s alone.

Much to Liza’s disgust. ‘I won’t be in the way! C’mon Cleo, you don’t want to meet him on your own, he turned awkward last time.’ Her delicately arched eyebrows lifted in entreaty.

Cleo thought of the doorway, the shadows, Justin, his anger pinning her to the door while ... She shivered. ‘I’d rather be alone this time, Lize. OK?’

‘It’s not OK, really. You need a bit of backup.’ Liza pretended to pout, but Cleo could read the concern in her sister’s eyes.

‘Not this time.’ Cleo gave her sister a quick, guilty hug. Thing was that, in all the soul-baring about her marriage, her affair, Gav’s affair, Gav’s infertility and consequent cover-up, Cleo hadn’t quite got around to telling her sister that she was pregnant. In fact, she had an old-fashioned idea about telling the father first; and it would be appropriate on a Friday night at noisy old Muggie’s, where it had all begun.

Cleo got herself a glass of fizzy water and hovered, watching the stairs. She waited. And waited. By ten o’clock she was uneasy. Justin hadn’t shown. She combed every section of the throbbing nightclub, peeping around every nook and nib and onto the dance floor.

Gradually, her heart turned to lead. He wasn’t coming. She tipped back her head and drained her drink, letting the ice chink-plop into her mouth. Last look round, big sigh, no Justin. Just when she’d been daring to let herself think of him, of his smile, daring to think, ‘I’m separated now. There’s nothing to stop me and Justin …’

Her palms got hot at the thought.

And then her heart jumped. There, at least, were the two platinum blonds Justin hung out with, slouching about in the no-man’s-land between the stairs and the bar. Relief! She wriggled her way between backs and shoulders, brushing shirts and catching handbags, trying to keep her eyes on the blond heads before they could move away. Maybe they’d have a message, maybe Justin had been held up.

She grabbed the forearm of the one she reached first. ‘Hi!’

He nodded, without showing enthusiasm at seeing her.

‘Martin, isn’t it?’

He nodded again. ‘And you’re the woman from the lake. Wet T-shirt.’

‘The married one,’ the other one, Drew, added.

She flicked her hair out of her eyes and tried her best, wide, smile, the one she used to begin her workshops, the one that made people she’d never met before smile back. ‘Do you know where Justin is?’

‘He’s –’

Drew butted in. ‘Justin who?’

Cleo stared, and they faced her, gazing back, hands in pockets, shoulders rounded. She opened her mouth and then closed it.

Surely she must know Justin’s surname? Of course she did! Didn’t she? She pummelled her memory. A hot, dark flush swelled up her neck. ‘Justin,’ she repeated, weakly.

Drew and Martin shrugged at each other, looked back at Cleo, carefully blank.

‘You
know
,’ she stammered. ‘
Justin
.’

‘Justin?’ They shrugged elaborately at each other again. ‘Justin?’

Theatrically, Martin clapped his hand to his head. ‘I know who she means – Just-in time!’

With a laugh, Drew fished theatrically in his back pocket and held up a condom packet. ‘Or, Just-in case?’

Martin produced his wallet. ‘Just-in it for the money.’

Drew gave Martin a mock shove. ‘Just-in the way!’

Martin stuck his finger in Drew’s ear. ‘Just-in ’ere.’

Drew crowed with helpless laughter. ‘Just-in the USA, not available in England. And all that mullarkey!’ So side-splittingly funny they were, they had to prop one another up.

Cleo shrank with humiliation, watching the blond bombshells shuffling off to the bar, still giggling. ‘Gits!’ She sent burning thoughts of revenge after them as she turned hollowly to the stairs. Might as well go home.

It had been a funny week. Cleo cleared her desk, dropping files and pads into drawers. She’d had to inform Nathan of her change of address, flushing at the palpable surprise flitting from face to face around the office. Worse, on Monday morning, taking a deep breath, she’d had to ring Gav at his dad’s house and give him the same information. That had been
horrible.

The pause on the other end of the phone had been accusing. ‘You didn’t waste much time.’

‘Sorry.’ Why did she apologise? ‘I didn’t want you to come home and find out the hard way.’

The silence was longer and more despondent. The sigh before he spoke was huge. ‘Aren’t you being hasty? We both had affairs, they can be forgiven, it happens.’ Cleo heard the catch in Gav’s voice. ‘And I think that if you put yourself in my place about the Klinefelter’s and had any, any …
compassion
you’d understand why I hid it. Can you imagine how it was for me? Chatting a girl up, taking her out, to bed, falling in love, wanting to marry … just where do you interpose, “by the way, I have no sperm”?’

Cleo sighed back. ‘Immensely difficult, I agree – but you should’ve found a way. It was just dishonest. Infertility is a joint problem. I can’t accept that you decided on behalf of both of us that we’d live a lie. That was worse than the Lillian thing.’

He moved away from the subject of his infertility. ‘I’ve phoned Bob Chester and arranged to make my statement. Lillian has already made hers and, in my absence, been allowed back to work. I get to see a copy of her statement after I’ve made mine. So I’m coming home tomorrow, seeing Bob on Wednesday.’ He stumbled over the word ‘home’.

Cleo searched for something that might make his homecoming easier for him, trying feebly, ‘I could buy milk and bread to leave in your … the kitchen, if you like?’

His breath hissed. ‘I fucking don’t like! You won’t forgive me, you won’t stay – but you’ll do me a bit of shopping? Big deal. Haven’t you got any feelings left for me at all?’

Her side of the conversation could be heard by the whole office; so she didn’t point out that she no longer loved him and was definitely carrying another man’s child.

‘Sorry,’ she said again. Why hadn’t she simply bought the few essentials and left them in the kitchen? Putting the idea into words had rubbed his nose in the crappy situation. What a mess, what a jumble of guilt and regret. But the relief was there. The relief at being free topped everything.

On Tuesday, as she was staring blindly at her screen and wondering whether Gav had set off, Nathan came to her desk. ‘Tom’s taking a team-building workshop at an insurance company but he’s developed one of his killer migraines. You’ll have to rescue the poor bloke, Cleo. He’s got a plan so you should be able to pick up where he leaves off.’

‘Give me the address.’ She was quite pleased. A workshop would distract her; stop her mind whirring about Gav, infidelity and infertility. Relieved, she grabbed her briefcase and rushed to the rescue.

Tom, white and disorientated, glasses in his top pocket, was pathetically grateful to see her, as much as he could see anything for double vision and flashes of colour. ‘Thanks, Cleo, I’ve had to leave the room twice to barf.’ He flipped his notes open. ‘They’re in four groups, each comprising three decision makers and an observer. This is the problem outline they’ve been given.’ He tapped the page. Sweat glistened suddenly on his upper lip. ‘Gotta go!’

Cleo watched Tom dash off, wrinkling her nose in sympathy, then turned back to her getting-restless group, junior management, eight men and four women, wearing suits and banging their ankles on each other’s briefcases. ‘Right,’ she began with a wide smile. ‘I’m Cleo Callaway, sorry to barge in on your party! We’ll start this activity while poor Tom suffers.’ They looked at her expectantly. ‘I’ll just plunge in as best I can, because you’re probably woefully behind schedule anyway. Can the observer in each group please identify themselves? Right, thank you.

‘What I’d like everyone to do is listen to the scenario I outline, then the decision makers in each group must confer and come up with the best solution they feel that the circumstances allow. OK?’ She helped herself to a plastic cup of mineral water from the nearby stand.

‘Here’s the outline: we have twelve people in a boat on a high sea.’ She mimed waves with her hands. ‘Far away from land.’ She shaded her eyes and pretended to peer into the distance. ‘Twelve, OK? These twelve are …’ Everyone snatched up their pens to jot down what they obviously recognised as the meat of the problem. ‘… A priest, a timber worker and his pregnant wife, a nuclear physicist, an SAS soldier and his wife who is not pregnant, a ferry boat captain, a rocket scientist, two miners, an engineer, and a carpenter. OK, everyone got that?’ A few moments while the slower people finished scribbling, then she continued, ‘Of these twelve, only seven can reach the faraway desert island and begin a new community.’

A dark man in a grey suit and crimson tie raised his pen. ‘What happens to the other five?’

Cleo spread her hands. ‘The surviving seven have to eat.’ Everyone laughed, a couple of women wrinkled fastidious noses.

‘So you have forty minutes to discuss, in your groups, which seven are going to survive – and be prepared to substantiate your decisions.

‘Observers, your purpose is to observe and formulate conclusions as to whether your group functions, or not, and why. Be prepared to make suggestions at the end, but please don’t make any during the exercise. Go!’

The designated observers turned to fresh sheets in their A4 pads and prepared to listen earnestly as the decision makers blew out their cheeks, tapped their pens and searched for obvious sacrificial lambs. Cleo walked very slowly around the groups, listening, watching.

Experience told her they’d make a complete arse of their early attempts. The assertive would dominate, the quiet give up, the exercise culminate in disagreement and disarray.

But this lot weren’t too bad. Enough of them had suffered such workshops before to appoint a timekeeper to keep them on schedule or maybe a chairperson to make sure everyone got their say. But one group – there was almost always one – were falling out big style over the pregnant woman. Sonia, a woman with a no-nonsense manner and a navy suit, felt it non-negotiable that the unit of pregnant woman and timber worker should survive.

‘It’s
obvious
,’ she snapped, glaring tight-lipped at her colleague, Frankie. ‘They’re an embryonic family unit. His timber-working skills will be important for building shelter.’

Frankie glared back. ‘The carpenter’s skills are
more
appropriate to building shelter.’

‘What about the pregnant woman?’

‘We take her, too.’

‘But she’s married to the timber worker. Why separate baby and father?’

Cleo watched Frankie’s dark eyes light up. ‘Nobody said the timber worker is the father. His wife is pregnant but how do you know that the baby his?’

Sonia tutted. ‘Do you disagree with me on principle?’

‘My point’s just as valid as yours. Suppose it’s not the husband’s? Is there hostility between him and his wife? It’s a very small community for them to hate one another.
And
,’ Frankie persisted as Sonia opened her mouth once more, ‘the pregnant woman might even be a liability because her history is uncertain.’

And, in spite of her trained neutrality, Cleo found herself offering, ‘But isn’t new life paramount?’

The group paused in their glaring at each other to stare at Cleo. A blush crept out from her collar. She would normally never dream of interfering like that. She had new life on her mind – and in her abdomen, apparently. Although she still had trouble believing that.