One Night Stand (27 page)

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Authors: Julie Cohen

BOOK: One Night Stand
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Against all reason, he said, ‘I’m George.’
 
No you’re not
, I was about to say, but I remembered at the last moment that that would probably make me sound insane.
 
‘June’s friend?’ he prompted. ‘You rang me earlier?’
 
He evidently thought I was insane anyway, but I rallied enough to nod and offer him another Guinness.
 
‘Don’t worry, this isn’t him,’ I muttered to Hugh as we followed George to the corner table.
 
‘Why did you think it was?’
 
Good question. I stared at the back of George’s head, trying to remember the conversation I’d had with June, and the answer hit me.
 
‘Oh my God. Who does he look like to you?’
 
Hugh looked. ‘Someone who’s had a fight with a paper shredder?’
 
‘No. Boy George? Culture Club? The hair, the make-up, the hat?’
 
Hugh looked again. ‘Maybe if you squint. Why is this relevant?’
 
‘June said he looked like an eighties pop star, and I said George Michael. She must have got them confused. George Michael? Boy George? They’re quite similar, I guess.’
 
Hugh had to stop for a moment and lean on a table in silent laughter.
 
‘Thanks for coming, I really appreciate it, but you don’t have to stick around,’ I told him, and went to the corner table without him.
 
‘So, Eleanor, what was the important thing you needed to talk to me about?’ George asked when I sat down.
 
Oh, shit. I’d said that, hadn’t I?
 
‘I’m looking for June,’ I said. ‘She was staying with me, and she disappeared, on the same day she rang you twice. Do you know where she’s gone?’
 
George looked cagey underneath his make-up. ‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked.
 
‘Mainly because she’s family and I love her and we want to make sure she’s all right. But also because her violent ex-boyfriend broke into my house a few weeks ago trying to track her down.’
 
George nodded. The motion made the ribbons in his hair bob.
 
Hugh slid into a seat next to me. I gave him a look that clearly said,
I told you to go away
and he gave me a look back that clearly said,
I’m going to stay and hear every word so I can take the piss out of you later.
 
‘I drove her to Heathrow,’ George said. ‘She had a flight going somewhere; she wouldn’t say where or when she was coming back. I got the impression she was going abroad.’
 
Going on a holiday with the fifty thousand pounds she’d stolen from Jojo? - typical. Also typical that she got her friend to drive her to the airport rather than spend any of the fifty thousand pounds on a bus.
 
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Thanks for meeting me.’
 
I started to stand, but then I stopped. I was here, so I might as well ask.
 
‘Just out of interest, you didn’t happen to have slept with June sometime in 1980, did you?’
 
George laughed, and while he was laughing he didn’t look like a former pop-star wannabe with questionable taste. He looked like a nice, cheerful bloke.
 
‘I would have been seven years old,’ he said. ‘Quite apart from other considerations.’
 
‘Okay,’ I said, and this time I did stand up. I held out my hand and he shook it. ‘Thanks.’
 
25
 
The clock was institutional, dull white like everything else in the room, and it had a jump to its minute hand. We’d been waiting thirty-eight minutes for the technician to call my name. It felt as if I’d been doing nothing but waiting lately.
 
For example, it had been three weeks since kissing Hugh and it was driving me absolutely crazy.
 
At first, I’d tried to convince myself that I’d only wanted Hugh to show an interest in me to gratify my ego, to prove that I could still attract a man if I wanted to. If that were true, I should have been satisfied with knowing that he wanted, despite his better judgement, to have sex with me. I should have made a note of his erection after our kiss (appreciating its dimensions purely on an aesthetic level) and gone blithely on my way, able to ignore my own feelings of desire for him.
 
But it wasn’t that way. My ego felt a little bit better, sure. But my libido felt a hell of a lot worse.
 
At least I hadn’t heard him having sex with any of his lady friends, nor had I seen him with any, although I saw him nearly every day. So I didn’t have to deal with jealousy as well. I had the satisfaction of believing that he was as sexually frustrated as I was.
 
We didn’t talk about it.
 
At the present moment, instead of talking about it, we were at the Royal Berkshire Hospital together for the second time, except this time we were sitting in a waiting room in the maternity block rather than in the STD clinic. Hugh had volunteered to come to my twenty-week ultrasound scan with me.
 
‘It should be an interesting show,’ I told him, my hand on my belly where the baby seemed to be doing cartwheels and star jumps all at once. ‘This child never stops moving.’
 
Hugh nodded. He was taking my word for it, because he hadn’t laid a hand on my belly since the kissing incident, even though Martha, Maud, Jerry, and Paul had all felt the baby kicking. (Phil claimed he had watched
Alien
too many times and the whole idea made him feel sick.) He looked tense, even though it had been his idea to come with me.
 
I was tense, too. ‘Damn happy couples,’ I muttered to Hugh under my breath. The waiting room was full of them. ‘Why do they have to look so smug?’
 
‘I don’t think they mean to.’
 
It was a testament to the power of the hormones passing through my body that I was sexually aware of Hugh even though we were both sitting on hard plastic chairs, surrounded by people and
Auto Car
magazines, only minutes away from looking at my insides.
 
‘Eleanor Connor?’ the technician called, and we both got up and went into one of the ultrasound rooms. She was a tiny, round lady with tightly curled hair. ‘If Mummy wants to lie on that couch and get her belly bare,’ she said, ‘Daddy can sit in that chair over there.’
 
‘I’m not the daddy,’ Hugh said quickly. ‘I’m just a friend.’
 
Thanks, Hugh
, I thought. As if it would have hurt him to pretend for fifteen minutes that we were a normal couple instead of a flaming harlot and her studmuffin neighbour. I toed off my shoes, climbed on to the couch, and pulled up my shirt. My belly gleamed large and pale in the dim light.
 
‘Do you want to know if you’re having a little boy or a little girl?’ the technician asked.
 
‘I don’t know.’ It seemed wrong, somehow, to know what gender of baby I was having when I didn’t know the father’s name. On the other hand, it would help me pick out clothes.
 
‘Tell me if it’s obvious,’ I said.
 
‘This will be a little cold.’ The technician squirted some clear gel on my stomach and I flinched at the temperature. Then she put the scanner on my belly and I saw grey and white shadows on the screen.
 
A head, immediately. I saw two eye sockets, the cheekbones, more like a skull than a face, but then the scanner moved and I caught a swift-moving glimpse of nose and lips.
 
‘Oh my God,’ I said.
 
The words were totally inadequate.
 
There was a hand, waving slowly in the fluid world, catching at a foot. A precise, geometric spine. A strong, throbbing heart. A leg jerked at the same time I felt a kick.
 
Hugh’s hand curled around mine.
 
‘That’s my baby,’ I said.
 
‘I know.’ He sounded awed.
 
‘It’s all looking fine and normal,’ the technician said. She moved the scanner quickly, too quickly for me to focus or fully understand the pictures, but sometimes the ghostly images would coalesce into my baby, and my heart would leap. ‘It’s got its legs crossed, I’m afraid,’ she added.
 
‘Sensible child,’ I murmured. But there were tears in my eyes and the words had to be forced out past a lump in my throat.
 
A few more sweeps, and we were done. Too soon. She handed me a black-and-white photo, not as clear as the other images I’d seen. ‘That’s its hand and its face and its arm,’ the woman said, though I could only actually see the hand. I wiped my belly and got up off the table.
 
I stared at the photograph all the way out of the room, down the corridor, and out of the hospital. My heart was pounding, my hands shaking.
 
‘It was perfect,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be a perfect baby.’ I hadn’t known I was frightened till now, when I felt the relief.
 
Suddenly I was laughing and throwing my arms around Hugh. The sun was high and bright and there was life everywhere, and Hugh was laughing. There was only one thing to do and so I did it.
 
I kissed him. He swept me up, pulling my feet off the pavement, and kissed me back. At first it was purely joyful, part of the sun and the birds singing and the laughter and the kicking healthy baby.
 
And then it became about us.
 
He broke the kiss after a small eternity, but he didn’t put me down.
 
‘This not having sex with each other thing is doing my head in,’ he said.
 
‘Let’s go home.’
 
Thankfully, my belly was still small enough so that I could half run, half trot next to him through the streets of Reading to our houses. The sun was everywhere, my hand was in his, and even though it was still winter, I swear that flowers burst into bloom as we passed.
 
‘Whose house?’ Hugh asked, panting, as we turned into our street.
 
‘Mine is closer.’
 
My neighbour on the other side, Alice, was going into her house as we got to mine. She opened her mouth to speak to us, but I unlocked the door and pulled Hugh in after me so fast that she couldn’t get a word out.
 
And then we were kissing again, with no pretence of it being anything other than pure sexual desire. As soon as we were through the door I grabbed his jacket and tugged it off his shoulders so I could feel how his chest felt against my palms, through the cotton of his shirt. He took hold of my top. For a brief moment we had to separate so he could get my shirt over my head.
 
‘God, you can kiss,’ I gasped.
 
‘I can do a lot of things,’ he said, and he began pushing me through the living room and up the stairs, me walking backwards, my face towards him so I could kiss him some more. My feet, my belly and my arms got in the way, but then we made it upstairs and into my bedroom.
 
I’d had an elaborate fantasy of undressing Hugh bit by bit. I’d written about Lucy doing that to the Chancellor. I’d wanted to fully appreciate his body, properly look at him for the first time ever.
 
Not a chance. My hands were too eager: they pushed and tore and tugged, and at one point I think I even used my teeth to unfasten a stubborn button. Every time I exposed an inch of skin, I tasted it with my lips and tongue. As he was pushing down my maternity jeans I bit his shoulder to test the sinew and bone. I touched and touched and touched him as if I’d never touched a man before and I wriggled to help him remove my clothes and then I saw his eyes and I stopped.
 
He was looking at me, his expression even more naked than his body.
 
I’d been too frantic to think but, with that look, I remembered who I was. Plain old, good, foolish Eleanor Connor with her pregnant belly, Eleanor Connor who had no idea how to seduce a man, and who was about to shag her best friend.
 
And I nearly glanced back over my shoulder to see who Hugh could be looking at in that way, because every little bit of his expression said,
You are the most beautiful woman in the world.
 
‘What?’ I said, because he couldn’t be looking at me like that.
 
‘I’m just appreciating you.’
 
‘I don’t usually look like this.’ I gestured at all the round bits.
 
‘You’re gorgeous.’ He touched me gently above my navel, moulding his hand to me, and then, with the tips of his fingers, my breast.

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