Eggshell Days (3 page)

Not as frightened as Sita had been when she witnessed a mugging at the end of their street, though. Three men, two of them standing over a third, kicking him. She, a doctor, had run for her life. For nights and nights afterward, she could not forget the clicking of her heels on the pavement, racing blindly for home in the dark, round the corner and up the steps to safety, knowing that she should have offered her help. Later, she read in the paper that the victim had died in the ambulance, of a punctured lung.

Jonathan had lain awake next to her all those nights, too, taking deep, measured breaths and feigning sleep, too depressed to ask his wife why she was troubled, too obsessed with his boss's newly cold shoulder and his secretary's suspicious sick leave to take on anyone else's pain. All he needed to ask was “Are you okay?” but they were three little words he couldn't muster.

Things could hardly have been worse between them but then Jay's persistent truancy came to light, when they were in the grip of the worst bout of flu either of them had ever experienced, and they hardly had the energy to get down to the school to discuss it. In fact, for the first appointment, they didn't.

In the end, there was no contest. There was no point in hanging on to their sanity for dear life. Life was simply too dear. If Emmy was brave enough to give it a go, so were they.

“Is it socially interesting that the women take an entirely different view from the men on this?” Niall asked now, taking an unlit cigarette from his mouth for the second time and dipping the tip in and out of the candle flame.

Emmy didn't know whether she couldn't believe they were living under the same roof again—a leaky moss-lined slate roof with missing tiles, from which you could see the sea one way and green fields the other—or whether she had always known it would be so. It was just a shame Kat was such a wrench in the works.

“We don't.”

Niall raised his eyebrows. Both knew damn well he'd only asked the question to get an argument going.

“Would ye come out of denial? Jonathan and I are totally fatalistic about it, whereas you and Sita keep going off on some great romantic journey about the what ifs.”

“Sita has never gone on a romantic journey in her life,” Jonathan said affectionately, “have you, darling?”

“Don't have time,” she answered. “Not with four children to look after.”

“Three,” Kat corrected.

“She means me,” he whispered. “It's an old joke.”

She might as well wear a neon sign over her head saying “I don't fit in,” Emmy thought.

“So what ‘what ifs' do the women do that you don't?” Sita asked Niall.

“What if we had got the train? What if you hadn't witnessed that mugging? What if Jay hadn't been picked up by the police in the middle of a school day?”

“What if your flat hadn't been burgled? What if your computer hadn't been nicked? What if you hadn't met Kat?”

Kat purred. “Do I make you feel reckless, darling?”

“Wrecked, more like it,” Niall said. “Anyway, those aren't what ifs, they're why nots. That bloody larcenist took so much of my stuff I had nothing to lose, did I? No, I'm right. The men do the why nots, and the women do the what ifs.”

“So why not do a what if for a change and see what happens?” Sita said quickly.

As Niall tried to work out what she had just asked him to do, Sita licked her finger and air-painted one point to her. It was a relief to remind herself that she was still the clever one, even though she was so often drunk with tiredness nowadays. Lila, living proof that even a doctor can make a contraceptive mistake, finally dropped off her breast, and she quietly adjusted her bra. There was no need for discretion; it was just the way she was. Whenever Emmy had fed Maya ten years previously, it had been an orgy of leaking nipples and tangled straps.

“Is she asleep?” Jonathan asked.

Sita nodded, tucking some of her dark, thick bob behind her ear and revealing one of the curls of gold he had given her the day Lila was born. Jewelry on the birth of a child, flowers on wedding anniversaries, a savings account for godchildren. Jonathan did everything by a book that Niall didn't even know how to open. And here they all were, banking on the fact that their differences were their strengths.

“Jaysus, Sita, that baby could suck for Britain. Ye must be knackered.”

“What's with all this sudden Irishness then, Niall?” Kat asked, inspecting her toenails. Jonathan wasn't sure it was exactly what he wanted to watch at suppertime, but there were clearly going to have to be compromises. “Are you hoping for Celtic solidarity or something? E-mail me when he starts chewing straw, will you?”

When she said things like that, even Niall was relieved she hadn't chosen to go the whole Cornish hog. She had kept them all guessing, though. Yes, she would come, no she wouldn't, yes she would. In the end, she had agreed to keep her lucrative modeling work going, and live with him at weekends and holidays only. It seemed a perfect compromise.

“What's that?” Emmy asked, watching her fiddle with a piece of blue foam.

“A toe separator. Do you want me to get you one?”

“I don't paint my toenails.”

“So I noticed. Maybe you should start.”

Niall waved his cigarette in the air. “No, no, no, stop. A toe separator is not an essential for simple living.”

“It is in my book.”

“Well, your book is too feckin' high-maintenance by half.”

“Speak English, sweetie. Pass me a candle. I need more light.”

“Okay, Sita. Here's me doing a what if. Which single thing that went wrong that morning conspired to save us?” he persisted. He was going to have the train-crash conversation again if it killed him.

“The milk tanker!” all four others shouted, as they'd done a hundred times, but even as they did, the image of the colossal steel beast, nose in hedge and tank skewed across the narrow country lane, still shook them.

“It should never have tried to pull over to let us pass.”

“It was my fault. I made our cabbie flash his lights. I remember asking him.”

“Ah, you're all obsessed with the milk tanker. That's just because it was a big fecker. What about all the other little twists and turns?”

“Five minutes, tops. The milk tanker delayed us by fifteen,” Jonathan said.

Emmy went to fill his glass but his hand planed automatically over the rim.

“Go on, you're not going anywhere, not for three months, anyway,” she coaxed.

He relented by showing her an inch with his fingers as the discussion rolled on, and only Sita saw him rub his chest with the flat of his hand. It didn't make any difference how many times she told him the tightness was just stress. The one shelf that ran round the crumbling walls of their antiquated bathroom upstairs was already piled with his mail-order vitamins and health supplements.

“Except they weren't the crucial minutes,” Niall argued, dragging on his cigarette as if his life depended on it. Sita realized Jonathan had been rubbing his chest in anticipation of smoke. “How many times has your plane left late and made up the delay during the flight? It wasn't the milk tanker. It's too obvious.”

“Why did it jack-knife, then?”

“Because the roads were wet, for feck's sake.”

“Niall, that's three fucks in the last two minutes,” Kat pointed out. “That shows you think you're losing the argument.”

“Or that I'm frighteningly sexually prolific.”

“Hello? This is your live-in partner speaking.”

Emmy wanted to laugh. They'd only known each other for nine weeks.

“Not anymore, you're not.”

“I will be when it suits me. That's the beauty of a recreational relationship.”

“A
what
?”

“A recreational relationship. Didn't you know? That's what our sort of arrangement is called.”

“By who?
Cosmo
feckin
politan
?”

“I wouldn't bother finding work, Sita. Just go out and buy a swear box.”

“Actually,” Niall said, “I think one of the rules for the next three months should be that we use the word ‘feck' a bit
more
.”

“You couldn't use it a bit more. You'd never finish a sentence.”

“It's very therapeutic, the linguistic combination of an ‘f' followed by a hard stop. And you know, we could all do worse than give way to the occasional feck.”

Niall winked at Kat. Jonathan raised his eyebrows at Sita. Emmy looked at the floor.

“That's so eighties,” Kat said. “Hasn't anyone told you no one cares about the word anymore? It's lost its power to shock. It doesn't sound cool these days, it just sounds goddamn rude. And you must try harder not to do it in front of the children. Don't let him do it in front of the children, Emmy.”

“I don't,” Niall said.

“You did today.”

“Come back and sit on my lap, you bossy tart.”

“My nails aren't dry yet.”

“So, had we already missed the train by the time the cabbies made their detour?”

“Why did Sara get married on a Sunday not a Saturday like normal people? When else would we be busting a gut to get back to London on a Monday morning, for God's sake?”

“Why didn't we drive?”

“And if we weren't meant to be dead, how come we booked those train seats in the first place?”

“That's what I mean,” Niall said, flinging his arms into the air and letting his Camel cigarette drop its ash behind him. “Which link mattered? Which one was it that saved us?”

“The milk tanker!” they all shouted again, as he leaned back in his chair and inhaled again, grinning through the smoke like the devil's favorite advocate.

“Right,” Emmy said, banging her hands on the table, “that's it. That really was the last time, okay? The last.”

She supposed they had to go through it all again, to mark the remarkable just one more time. Eight weeks ago, the prospect of an evening like this hadn't existed in so much as a flicker of a candle flame. Eight weeks ago, it was going to be just her and Maya. But then, of course, her fairy godfather had made them miss the train.

Prodding a puddle of freshly spilt wax, she reminded herself that the candles were hers. So were the candlesticks, the drawers and cabinets she'd found them in, the tables and sideboards—and even the bricks and mortar, for that matter. Or they would be for the next three months. That was the deal. If things worked out the way they should, Bodinnick would eventually belong to them all. The finer details of who would own what stake rested with the sale of Sita and Jonathan's home in Fulham, but the general idea was that they would probably end up owning half, Emmy would own the other half, and Niall would buy into her share with whatever he thought he could afford, which might be anything between ten and two hundred thousand, depending on the state of his wine-importing business. It was a loose arrangement, to say the least, and that was the way she liked it. The small print didn't interest her. What was hers was theirs.

She picked up some stapled sheets and fanned them in the air. Everyone knew what they were. On the long and boring journey down, Maya had given them a title sheet.
Rules
, she had written in neon gel pen.

“Right, to shut you up about the bloody train crash, I'm going to read these out.”

“Could you add a ban on toe separators?” Niall asked.

“And put in swear boxes,” Kat said.

“Of course. We can have monthly subscriptions to
Cosmo
feckin
politan
if we want. This is a work in progress, remember?”

“No, thanks. It takes me all month to get through
What
feckin
Car
,” Niall said.

Everyone had to admit it, he was good at making them laugh.

“Are you sitting comfortably?”

“Not yet.” Niall lifted a buttock from his chair.

Well, he made them laugh sometimes.

“Are you sure you want to come down at weekends, Kat?”

“I'm sure.”

“'Course she does,” he said, winking across her.

Emmy cleared her throat as Kat pushed her chair back, moved across and settled her tiny frame back on Niall's.

“Toes dry, are they, darling?”

She nodded and pulled his arms round her waist again. He put his hand up her shirt and left it there.

“So,” Emmy said quickly, “are we all up to speed with the legalities?” She was overconcentrating on the first sheet. She didn't want to see Niall's hand up Kat's shirt.

“What legalities?” Kat pounced.

“Well, just the private mortgage, really.”

“What private mortgage?”

“Oh. Didn't you tell her, Niall?”

“No, he didn't,” Kat answered.

“Well, to be fair, we only finalized it yesterday. I thought Sita was going to tell everybody, or maybe, well, I think I assumed Niall would.”

“No. No one told me anything.”

“Oh.”

They all sat there in their first awkward silence, everyone waiting for someone else to break it.

“Emmy?” Sita said at last.

“Oh, well, I mean, is there any need for Kat to take it on board anyway? She's not implicated in any way.”

“No, but I think it's important we all know everything,” Niall said, “so that there's no sense of, you know, someone feeling they have a bigger right to be here and all that.”

“Okay, that's fine.” Emmy shrugged. “Well, Jonathan and Sita are putting in forty thousand from their savings.”

“Not
from
our savings, that
is
our savings. We're cleaned out.”

“Jeez,” said Kat. “What for?”

“To carry out urgent repairs to the roof, the plumbing and, er, the wiring,” Sita said, waving at the darkness around them.