Growing Up Twice (21 page)

However, these aren’t normal circumstances because something happened today that has jangled me, something that might be nothing to worry about or might be, something that might not be my business at all but something that I know I won’t be able to prevent myself from becoming involved in.

Things had gone fine after the scan, we were all in a good mood, and Josh took Selin back to work as arranged although he
did
try to offer us a lift into town.

‘Don’t be mental,’ I’d said. ‘We’ll get a cab.’ His new-found gentlemanly behaviour was getting on my nerves. Rosie had wanted to call Kaled but I persuaded her it wasn’t really fair to make him come all the way across town when we could get a mini-cab over the road.

‘But he’d love to see the scan photos!’ she’d protested before eventually seeing sense.

Rosie gets pretty tired pretty quickly these days but a big street full of shops seems to revitalise her in a way that ten hours’ sleep and a nice cup of decaff just can’t manage.

We went from one maternity department to the next. We discovered items called sleep bras, maternity thongs and, most alarmingly, nipple pads and breast pumps. We went from floral frock to linen shift to wide-legged stretchy pants more times than I can remember and by the third set of denim dungaree shorts I could see Rosie was desperate for designer.

‘Why doesn’t Donna Karan make maternity wear?’ she sighed, sinking on to an MDF platform sporting a foam rubber mum-to-be in M&S.

‘Well, they might well do. We haven’t even been to Selfridges yet,’ I said brightly.

‘It’s all, well, it’s all so
mumsy
,’ she complained, ‘Madonna never looks mumsy when she’s preggers.’ Her shell-pink glossed lip formed a pout. ‘I need a drink and a big piece of cake.’

‘I sort of think mumsy is the point,’ I told her, and taking her by the hand I led her out of the store and off Oxford Street, walking silently past Browns and Karen Millen, carefully averting our eyes from a rose-pink flounced frock embroidered with silk and sequins.

If I was in a more frivolous mood I’d say there was something, a siren call or an inner compass that guided us towards our true North, but at any rate something altogether heavenly brought us to a boutique called Formes, Collection for Pregnant Women, Paris.

‘
Paris
,’ Rosie breathed and before I could say ‘Eighty pounds for a T-shirt’ I was installed on a stool sipping cappuccino as two sales assistants brought Rosie an array of clothes to make her heart sing. I’m the sort of girl who feels as if I’d be letting the sales ladies down if I didn’t buy something after they had been so nice to me but Rosie was doing no one but herself a favour when after forty-five minutes and four hundred and twenty pounds she left the store flushed and triumphant, the proud possessor of no less than four waxed paper bags swinging from twisted cord handles.

‘Now we really need a drink,’ she said, and we headed for the nearest café giggling like two schoolgirls who had just come off a roller-coaster ride. Who says you need to be high up and going fast to get an adrenalin rush?

‘Yeah, we do,’ I agree, thinking about a large gin and tonic.

‘Not you, you and me! We.’ She pats her tummy. ‘Me and my little baby in here. I wonder how long it will be before I feel it move. Remind me to look that up in the book when I get back.’ I nod and smile. Now that she’s had the scan and seen her baby the reality of her pregnancy seems to have lit her up from the inside.

So everything was fine until we went into the café.

I saw him first. Actually, I saw the woman first. If I’m completely honest I saw her legs stretched out across the aisle between two tables in a long shapely taunt, then I saw her immaculately tailored suit and the back of her head, a work of art in retro-eighties City greed, finished off with a little velvet bow. I took her in for a couple of moments and then sitting opposite her I saw Chris.

Rosie’s-ex-husband-father-of-her-child Chris. His hair had grown a little too long around the collar, his square jaw had become weighed down by the early onset of jowls, and the eyes that Rosie had swooned over seemed to have retreated just a little behind droopy eyelids. But it was unmistakably him.

By this time Rosie had taken a seat by the window and I could see her peering into one of her bags, debating whether or not to break the seal on the tissue-bound parcel inside to re-examine her purchases, and I had a mini brown tray replete with two pieces of carrot cake, a
latte
and an orange juice for Rosie.

I couldn’t get her out of there without her seeing him and we couldn’t stay here without her seeing him. I had to tell her he was here. Stalling, I took the long way to our table and slid into the seat opposite her.

‘Rosie, don’t panic but …’ Before I could finish the sentence his unmistakable voice boomed across the café and in two seconds he was at our table.

‘Rosie!’

She looked up and her face blanched, she swallowed and smiled nervously and in that moment I could see, despite everything she’d said, that she was still not ‘so over him’. Her eyes slid from his face and over his shoulder to the woman he had been sitting with and then back to him.

‘Chris!’ she said with brittle bravado. ‘How nice to see you.’

He took a chair at our table and, just as I knew he would, he flipped it to face him and straddled it, folding his arms across the backrest.

‘And you, sweetheart, and you. God, I haven’t seen you since …’ He clicked his fingers as if to jog a memory.

‘Since the Vickers & Walmsley do,’ Rosie finished for him. His memory caught and he threw back his head and laughed.

‘Now
that
was a reunion.’ He winked at her and to my horror she smiled coyly in reply and fluttered her lashes.

‘How’s Melanie?’ I asked, maybe a little cruelly. Melanie was the ‘love of his life’. The woman he had met shortly after Rosie and he were married. The woman he could not live without.

‘Well, you know. It didn’t work out,’ he mumbled and he shifted a little in his seat and grinned sheepishly.

Seeing first hand that her life had been laid to waste for the sake of another empty affair, Rosie bristled.

‘Well, we’d better be going,’ she said, standing and beginning to gather up her bags.

Chris seemed keen to find a way to make her stay.

‘Oh God, I can see you’ve been going shopping crazy again! How much money have you spent this time? The usual suspects, is it?’ he patronised, but as he picked up one of the bags to examine it the grin froze on his face. ‘Pregnant Women? Paris? Who’s pregnant?’

Rosie sank back down into her chair.

‘I am!’ I said gamely, but Chris never took his eyes off her.

‘I am,’ Rosie said quietly.

‘You’re pregnant? How far? Whose?’ A fleeting expression of shock quickly transformed itself into a still, proprietorial air combined with a hint of jealousy which ignited Rosie’s temper.

‘Yes,
me
. About fourteen weeks. Who’s the father? Well, let me think, I last had sex in the bogs at a work do. Oh, I think it must be you.’ Her green eyes sparkled with rage and the beginnings of tears. The knuckles on her hand bleached white as she clenched the edge of the table. Chris stood up, turned his chair back the right way and sat down.

‘Are you sure it’s mine?’ he said quietly and without the arrogance I would have expected.

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Rosie spat. ‘Some of us don’t fall in and out of love quite as easily as others. There hasn’t been anyone else since you.’

To his credit he didn’t argue but only sat staring at his hands. After a few moments he asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ His voice was gentle and calm.

‘Let me see … maybe I didn’t think the man who ran out on his wife after only a few months of marriage would make the best father in the world?’

He rubbed his hand across his forehead and pinched his brows. ‘Rosie, I’ve wanted to talk to you about that, to explain. I’ve been meaning to, and now this has happened … We have to talk now. No time to stall any more.’

During this exchange I obviously had more to say than the average fundamentalist on Hyde Park Corner but I managed to keep my mouth shut. Just.

‘Look, we need to discuss this properly. Alone.’ He looked pointedly at me.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I said staunchly. Rosie looked out of the window for a moment, took a couple of deep breaths to steady her temper and tears, and then turned back to look at me.

‘Jen, he’s right. Look, I’ll be OK.’

I eyed her meaningfully but obviously not meaningfully enough for her to read ‘Don’t do this, he’ll hurt you’ in my eyes. Or if she read it she ignored it.

‘Jen, I’ve been putting off the inevitable. We have to make some kind of arrangement. If only for the baby’s sake.’

And yours, I thought. I suppose that in reality we had been kidding ourselves that Chris would never find out. Rosie wanted to wait to tell anyone at work until after she had the scan, but as soon as she did the bushfire would ignite and it would only be a matter of time before Chris heard about the baby and began to wonder.

Chris stood suddenly and went back to his table. After a short and heated whispered conversation with long-leg woman he returned and she slammed out of the café. There’s always a silver lining.

‘Come on.’ He held out a hand to Rosie.

‘Are you sure?’ I said, looking at her.

‘Yes. We have to do this,’ she said and as I watched them leave my heart sank.

I finished my coffee and then her juice and phoned Selin at work.

She listened in silence as I told her what had happened.

‘Bollocks,’ she said.

‘Yeah, exactly,’ I replied.

‘What shall we do?’ She was just closing up at work and I could hear her pull the shutters down as she spoke. I pictured her with the phone tucked under her chin, the curly cord stretched to its limit as she moved around the office.

‘Wait for her to come home, I suppose. I was supposed to meet Mi … a friend from work tonight to see a film but I guess I could cancel.’ I thought of Michael already on the train from Twickenham and my heart sank a little further.

‘No, don’t do that. You shouldn’t drop everything for one of Rosie’s escapades. Look, I’ll go over to yours after work. I’ve got the spare key. If she comes back before you I’ll be there and if she doesn’t we can worry about her together when you get home. OK?’

I smiled. ‘OK, mate. Cheers.’

‘No probs, sweetheart, I’ll see you later.’

And so here I am now, having waited a grand total of twenty minutes for Michael’s distinctive head to appear in the crowd, waiting to find a way to shake off the feeling of gloom.

Finally he appears by my side and grabs my shoulders as he kisses me firmly on the mouth. His lips are cold and dry.

‘I can’t tell you why I’m late, you’ll chuck me for sure.’ His confident laughter makes me smile straight away and the background annoyance of the last twenty minutes vanishes in a flash.

‘Go on, you can tell me. I’ve had enough emotional conflict for one day. I can’t face the hassle of binning you yet. Maybe after the film.’

He flops his arm across my shoulders and his breath tickles the back of my neck as his lips brush my ear.

‘Detention,’ he whispers.

The film Michael has picked would not have been my first choice. I had expected some kind of sci-fi extravaganza with billion-dollar special effects and maybe Keanu Reeves thrown in for good measure. Instead I’m watching a movie about two American teenage boys trying to have sex with as many American teenage girls as they can, teenage girls with improbably pert breasts that they don’t seem to have any career quandaries over exposing at the drop of a pair of string panties. There seems to be a running joke involving sperm and at some point it looks as though teenage American Boy B is going to be tricked into having sex with a goat.

This was never really going to be my scene, but the subtle torture of knowing that Johnny Depp is showing one screen over, playing a fey Italian love-lorn poet, makes it all the more difficult to enjoy.

Michael’s hand is resting on my thigh, his forefinger absently running along the seam of my jeans, back and forth, back and forth. He rests his chin in his other hand and at every punchline throws his head back with a deep husky laugh that makes me smile despite myself. Throughout my entire and, it’s probably fair to say, extensive dating career I have never yet managed to spend a date necking in the back of a cinema. I suppose at the back of my mind I thought that this was going to be the day, but instead we have a centre aisle seat and Michael’s hand on my thigh is the nearest thing to making out that I’m likely to get. To console myself I watch his profile out of the corner of my eye, the contours and shadows of his face flickering and altering with reflected Hollywood light.

The last few weeks with and without him have certainly been unusual, preoccupying I suppose. It seems that the higher his sun has risen in the sphere of my existence, the colder and darker the year has become and the further and more distant thoughts of Owen seem to be. This has become exactly the diversion, the distraction, that I was looking for – but now what?

A miscellaneous teenage American boy skids through a slimy patch of vomit that for some reason is strategically placed outside a teenage American girl-occupied shower cubicle and careers headlong into the steam. More breast-exposing antics ensue. Michael’s mouth curls into an appreciative teenage English boy’s leer and then, feeling my eyes on him, he turns to face me looking a little sheepish.

‘What do you think of the film?’ he whispers, taking his hand from my thigh and sliding it around my shoulders.

‘Yeah, funny. You?’ I whisper back, awarding him points for deliberately taking his eyes off the near-naked girl. His fingers slide inside the neck of my shirt and rest at the back of my neck.

‘It’s all right,’ he says, leaning closer and looking at my mouth. ‘I’m a bit bored with it now, it’s basically just one joke anyway.’ He closes the last few millimetres between our lips and to my horror and delight his free hand clamps itself over my left breast. Before I relax fully into my first-ever full-on cinema snog experience I check for people sitting behind us (the seats are empty) and wonder fleetingly if this sudden interest comes from feeling frisky because of the total of naked girls to date in the film. Deciding not to debate it, I sink a little further into my seat and stifle a giggle as Michael’s hand slides up the inside of my shirt and his fingers find their way inside my bra with an almost imperceptible tear of lace.