Never Too Late (26 page)

face was eager, the green eyes crinkled up attractively at

the corners. Cara could see how he scored so high on so

many drunken lists from the Yoshi girls.

She considered what she’d be doing on Sunday. Under

normal circumstances, she and Phoebe would stagger off to

Flames restaurant at about one for a huge brunch of fat

chips, nuclear-missile-sized sausages or maybe a Flames

special burger, which they’d consume while squabbling

good-naturedly over the papers.

But since the advent of Ricky, the Sunday morning ritual

now consisted of Cara leaving the flat to get breakfast after

listening to much heaving and giggling from Phoebe’s

room. Going to Flames wasn’t so much fun on her own

either and finding funny bits in the papers was boring

when there was nobody to read them out to.

She looked at Ewan, smiled and said as casually as she

could: ‘I’d love to.’

‘A date? You’ve got a date with him!’ squeaked Phoebe in

delight when Cara got home to find her and Ricky

ensconced in the kitchen making toasted cheese sandwiches

with some Cheddar that looked dangerously gone

off.

‘It’s not a date.’ she protested. ‘It’s an … outing. He

knows I like football and going for a few drinks, that’s all.’

‘What, and that’s not a date?’ said Ricky, his mouth full

of toasted sandwich. ‘He’ll get you plastered at the piss up

and try to score!’ Laughing happily at his own lame joke,

Ricky spewed sandwich all over the counter.

“I thought you were going to a party,’ Cara said, ignoring

him. Ricky was good-looking hut, God, he was dense. Not

to mention annoying.

‘We did but the music was awful, there was no free

booze and they had nothing but about ten packets of salt

and vinegar crisps to eat. I only like cheese and onion and we were ravenous. Plus, we’re too broke to go out to the pub,’ Phoebe revealed with a bite to her voice.

‘I don’t understand you pair,’ Cara said, wriggling past to

get a Mars Bar ice cream out of the freezer box. ‘You both

work in the bank, you deal with money all day, you get

well paid - and you never have a bean. My bank account is

healthier than yours, Phoebe, and I’m hopeless with

money.’

Ricky finished his mouthful and licked his full lips clean

with the pink tongue Phoebe claimed left her weak with

excitement. ‘Yeah, er … talking of money, you couldn’t

lend us a tenner?’

Cara looked at his beautiful vacant face. ‘You’re right,

Ricky, I couldn’t. You still owe me a fiver after the night

we went to Brady’s.’

‘Did you borrow money off Cara?’ squealed Phoebe,

turning to her boyfriend.

‘Yeah,’ he muttered sheepishly. ‘I haven’t forgotten it,

Cara.’

Not like he’d conveniently forgotten the previous fifteen

quid she’d lent him, Cara reflected grimly. She’d learnt her

lesson with Ricky. Neither a borrower nor a lender be, etc,

etc.
Especially to Ricky. It was obvious that he was never

going to dazzle the banking world with his business

acumen and would always be stony broke unless he figured

out how to get into modelling. It was a complete mystery

to Cara how he’d managed to get a job in the bank in the

first place. After a few months of seeing him every second

day, she’d come to the conclusion that Phoebe’s joy in

going out with such a perfect physical specimen had

blunted every other sense in her. Like her common sense,

for example.

Ricky was glorious-looking, had a body to die for and

had enough sex appeal for four normal people but the

space between his two perfectly shaped ears was entirely

empty.

Ewan, she reminded herself smugly, was good-looking and clever. Not in Ricky’s cover-of-GQ league, but still damn good-looking. Ricky was too smooth, anyway. Too

perfect. Ewan had that tough edge to him, a sort of

don’t-mess-with-mc edge.

She wondered where he’d got it. She didn’t know that

much about him, really, or why he had the indefinable

air of danger about him. Maybe she’d find out more

tomorrow.

The next morning, Ricky had gone by the time Cara

arrived back from the shop with the Sunday papers, having abstained from her usual fry up in Flames in favour of a pot of Blue Javan and a croissant in a tiny

coffee shop that played mellow jazz music and served

every type of coffee imaginable. In the living room

Phoebe was aimlessly watching the box and eating cornflakes

at the same time.

When the Wonder Woman music blared after the ad

break, Cara’s immediate reaction was to dump the papers,

forget about her plan to tidy up her bedroom and sink into

seventies-induced catatonia on the couch. Wonder Woman had been her favourite TV programme as a child.

She’d dreamed of having heavy gold bangles that could

deflect bullets and a lasso that could knock a villain to his

knees with one expert flick of the wrist. But when she

threw the papers on to the coffee table and half an inch of dust and fluff shot up into the air like startled dandelion heads, she changed her mind.

‘This place is a pit, Phoebe,’ she said in disgust. Piles of

old magazines and papers were scattered around the floor

so that you could - mercifully - only see bits of the

puke-coloured carpet with its putrid green paisley design.

The previous night’s glasses and mugs still sat on the coffee

table and a few of an even earlier vintage littered the

mantelpiece alongside several used up boxes of matches, a

candle that had melted down completely and the detritus

of several bales of briquettes.

Even the fire burning merrily in the grate couldn’t inject

a bit of cosiness into the untidy and unloved squalor of the

room. It hadn’t had a good spring clean for months. Cara

leaned against the couch in despair and immediately found

her black combats decorated with marmalade fur.

‘And how come we have cat hairs on everything when

we don’t have a cat?’

‘Ricky has,’ mumbled Phoebe, not taking her eyes off the

telly.

Cara gave up. She tied her hair back from her face, rolled

up her sleeves and set to work. After half an hour of hauling papers off the floor and removing all the dust, dirt and ash from the fireplace, the room had started to

improve. Once she’d started, Cara couldn’t stop and she

scrubbed, polished and cleaned demonically while Phoebe

still sat slumped in front of the box.

When the drone of the Hoover didn’t move her, Cara

knew something was up.

‘What’s wrong, Phoebs?’ she asked. It wasn’t like her

flatmate to shirk her half of the cleaning up - once they

actually got round to it, that was.

Phoebe snuffled. ‘We had a fight.’

‘What about?’ asked Cara, still not relinquishing her

grasp on the handle of the Hoover.

‘Money.’

‘Oh.’ Cara let go of the Hoover and sat down beside her

friend.

‘He keeps borrowing money from me but I didn’t know

he’d been borrowing from you too. I said something and he

got cross and said I couldn’t love him if I felt like that.’

Cara kept her mouth shut. Saying the wrong thing at

this stage would be fatal.

‘I said I did love him but I didn’t want him taking your

money because he doesn’t pay it back.’ continued Phoebe

miserably. ‘He owes me over a hundred pounds now and

I’ve paid the last four times we went out. That’s really

why we didn’t stay at the party. I thought Ricky was

bringing a bottle and he didn’t. I was so embarrassed

when I realised.’

Beside her, Cara winced. In her opinion, there was

nothing worse than a relentless borrower, someone who

was perpetually broke and perpetually on the scrounge.

Even worse was the sort of bloke who never coughed up

for an evening out. It wasn’t that Cara was one of those

women who expected men to pay every time. Far from it.

Rut a fifty:fifty ratio was reasonable when it came to a

couple paying the bill. With Ricky, the ratio was obviously

twenty:eighty in his favour. And he had to borrow to pay

his twenty per cent.

‘Why is he always broke?’ she asked in a neutral voice.

Phoebe shrugged. ‘He buys loads of clothes.’

He does? goggled Cara, thinking of Ricky’s selection of

ultra-casual togs that looked as if they’d been bought from

an outdoor market during a downpour. ‘What’s he buy nothing

but Gucci underpants?’ she joked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Phoebe, her face crumpling miserably.

‘He says it’s over between us because he needs

affection and doesn’t think I love him properly.’ And she

started crying.

Hugging Phoebe, Cara did her best to provide comfort.

It took three cups of very sweet tea, a pack of Hob Nobs

and a lengthy discussion on why men were such shits to do

it. Once they’d gone through the ritual male bashing, Phoebe’s natural exuberance returned. She began to talk about how crazy she was about Ricky, how sweet he was to

her and how much she loved the way he scrunched his

face up adorably when he didn’t understand something.

Which was most of the time, Cara thought with a

grimace she managed to turn into a sympathetic smile.

‘You’re right, Cara,’ Phoebe said firmly, wiping away the

remains of her tears with a tissue. ‘I’ve got to talk to him

about money and say I love him, but I worry about him

when he never has a penny’

It wasn’t exactly the advice Cara had given. (‘Tell him

you can’t support him while he squanders his money - it’s

just not on.’

Cheered up. Phoebe got off the couch and headed for

the bathroom, while Cara, worn out by her role as chief

cleaner, comforter and tea-maker, lay back and yawned.

She glanced idly at her watch and froze with horror.

In a mere three-quarters of an hour she had to be

standing on the sidelines of Ewan’s soccer match cheering

him on. A soccer match that was at least an hour away by

bus. She’d have to order a taxi and that’d take half an hour

to get there which left … fifteen minutes to get ready.

Shit. Double shit.

Despite offhandedly telling Phoebe the night before that

she planned to go in her combats and big woolly sheepskin

coat ‘because it’ll be freezing and it’s hardly a date’, Cara

had still toyed with the idea of dressing up a bit. Just to

show Ewan that she could look like a girl as distinct from a

tough cookie with size eight boots and SAS gear.

Time constraints meant the glamour puss look would

have to wait, she realised, leaping to her feet.

‘Phoebe,’ she roared as she grabbed the phone to ring for

a taxi, ‘get out of the shower. It’s an emergency!’

The match had started by the time she belted up to the sidelines, no longer shivering in the cold because she’d ended up getting the taxi to drop her in the wrong place,

necessitating a five-minute jog through the grounds to the

soccer pitches.

A. big crowd of people were gathered watching the

match, stamping their feet to get warm and “huddled close

together as the biting wind whipped down the pitch far

faster than the ball. It was a bitterly cold February day,

even though a watery winter sun shone low in the sky.

Her eyes stinging in the breeze, Cara stood beside a

couple of heavily made-up women and tried to figure out

which one of the players was Ewan. She didn’t even know

which colour his team wore. They all looked the same in

their white shorts, twenty-two men in either red or black

jerseys, hairy legs purple with the cold.

The men in red appeared to be losing as their opponents

had possession of the ball most of the time and kept

almost scoring. The goalie for the black-clad team certainly

wasn’t cold: he was running around like a maniac as the

bail rattled around dangerously near his goal.

‘Come on, St Helen’s!’ shrieked one of the women

beside her, a tiny blonde huddled up in a giant blue anorak.

‘Get your finger out!’ yelled her companion, a red head

in a black puffa.

St Helen’s. That sounded a bit familiar, Cara thought.

She peered at the players in red more closely. The St

Helen’s forward on the far side of the pitch looked a bit

like Ewan. His hair was flopping all over the place and

he was wirily athletic. Fast, too, she thought approvingly,

as he whizzed up the pitch alongside a team mate,

waiting for the ball. The crowd perked up as St Helen’s

took possession of the ball and the shouting grew more

frenzied.

Shrieks of ‘Come on, St Helen’s, score, score!’ mingled

with enraged ‘Get it away, Dems!’ as the other team’s

supporters howled with rage.

Unfortunately, Ewan’s team mate’s shot at the goal went wide and the Anorak Girlies beside Cara slumped dejectedly.

‘Better

luck next time, Michael and Ewan,’ yelled the

red head, glossy crimson lips quivering with cold.

Ewan turned his head at her voice and noticed Cara for

the first time.

‘Hi,’ he yelled, and waved.

The nearby supporters turned to see who he was waving