Sugar Mummy (45 page)

It's not Jane's words from last night that chase around my poor,
damaged mind, it's her expression. Disgust. Contempt. And I can't blame her. I look
around the room for a moment and think about the house I'm in. The five-million-pound
house in Belgravia. I've got the clothes. I've been to the restaurants. The truth
is I deserve that look of disgust and contempt. Perhaps this my reward for trying
to have my cake and eat it, have Jane and my glossy, five-star, designer-clad, business-class
lifestyle. Perhaps what I am actually cut out for is to be a bit of passive, brain-dead
arm candy for rich old women, after all. Like Mark, except that I haven't got the
guts to go that extra mile and make some real hard cash. I might be shocked at the
way he earns his living but he obviously doesn't care. Better than working in an
office. Two fingers to the lot of you. But I can't quite do it.

I can't help thinking about Jane, who does work for a weekly
salary fix, who does travel on the Tube, trying to open her book under someone else's
armpit, who does save up for cheap holidays on a Greek island and who does talk
about what was on telly last night with her colleagues. Jane, who does all the things
I used to do, used to think I was too good for. The kind of things that Vinny, Sami,
Pete and all my old friends do every day without thinking about them. Ordinary activities
that suddenly seem not just routine but comforting and normal. I used to hate them,
used to think I could find something better but now I want to do them again. With
Jane. I can't believe how easily I've slipped into this role. Lost my drive, my
energy, lost most of my interests, my friends, most of all my self-respect. Jane
said she had too much dignity to be the other woman but I've just got no dignity
at all.

What do people think when they see Marion and me eating in expensive
restaurants together? When they see us nosing our way up Sloane Street in that huge
black BMW with the peak-capped chauffeur - immaculately turned out (as I always
am now), rich and very bored? Not just a rich couple with nothing left to say to
each other but a rather strange, almost laughable, couple of beautifully dressed
oddballs.

I put my bathrobe on and open the door. Marion's bedroom door
is open and I can see that the bed is made.

I go into the main bathroom and let the tap run cold for a while
then I splash a few careless handfuls of water onto my face and round my neck. I
look up at my puffy bloodshot eyes. I don't bother to dry myself, too much effort,
besides my skin still feels very warm. Carefully holding onto the banister, I ease
myself down the stairs. Still no Marion. Thank God - she must have gone out for
the first appointment in her busy schedule.

I have to sit for a while on the bottom step. Then I pull myself
up again and walk over to the kitchen to find some cold orange juice. Just as I
am approaching the door it is thrown open and Marion appears. Suddenly it's all
too much: her look of surprise and then haughty disdain, the smell of her perfume,
the sadistic way she is pulling on her black leather gloves, the roar of the dishwasher
behind her and Ana Maria crashing pots and pans about on the draining board. I just
have that overwhelming need to get down very low, where I can't fall down any further,
where I belong. Somehow I sense that the floor is my only friend at the moment.

I squat for a few seconds, concentrating on not fainting or throwing
up and then look up to see them both staring down at me: Marion's face a picture
of loathing, Ana Maria partly intrigued, partly concerned.

'Can I have some orange juice please, Ana Maria?' I say in a
very small voice.

She looks at me for a moment and then mutters 'Yes, Mr Andrew.'

Marion is still staring. 'Oh, what?' I whine.

'Can I have a word?' she says, pushing me out of the kitchen.
She is surprisingly strong. Or am I just very weak?

As soon as the door closes she puts her face close to mine. 'Now
you listen to me, young man, and you listen good. When I invited you to come and
live with me I was making a big commitment and doing you an enormous favour, you
understand?' She pauses. 'Look around this house.' I keep my eyes firmly on the
floor. 'Look at it!' she hisses. I stare at her and then look around obediently,
unable to take anything in.

'Everything about it is just the way I like it, designed for
me, the best of its kind, absolutely perfect. Not a thing out of place. Everything
arranged exactly the way I like it. Just like my life. And I've worked fucking hard
for that. You, on the other hand, are beginning to bore me just a little bit. You're
the one thing that's messing things up round here and that's a real shame. You understand?
Do you understand?' I nod. 'Good.'

There is a pause during which I begin to hear that hissing sound
that you get just before you faint. 'Andrew,' she says gently. 'You're a real disappointment
to me. I thought you and I could have a proper relationship, that I could teach
you things, show you another world, help you to grow, but now I'm not so sure. Please
prove me wrong.'

She pauses again and adjusts her gloves and then adds in a jolly
way, 'OK, I'm going for a cranial massage and then to the reflexologist and then
my usual epidermal rehydration session. Call me on the mobile if you want to have
lunch.' She strides off towards the front door, stopping briefly to rearrange a
stray lily.

Getting dressed very slowly, still in the spare bedroom, I stop
for a moment and hold my thumping head in my hands. That was probably one of the
worst bollockings of my life but what spooked me about our encounter was the fact
that when she saw me appear at the kitchen door it wasn't just revulsion on Marion's
face, she seemed to be rather amused.

After a couple of glasses of orange juice and two aspirin I begin
to feel a bit better and so I sit down to watch a bit of I Love Lucy and some American
chat show in which a girl called Shanaya, who is wearing huge gold loop earrings
and a hairstyle that looks like a fairground helter skelter, is telling the heavily
lip-glossed hostess that she won't have sex with her boyfriend until he stops doing
her mother as well. 'Go on, girl,' shouts someone from the audience and everybody
whoops and claps.

Ana Maria, meanwhile, is warming to her task: 'Here you are -
breakfast for bery sick baby,' she says, bringing a pot of coffee and two slices
of toast dripping with butter and marmalade. As my initial nausea begins to subside
I realise that I am really quite hungry. The toast is delicious.

'Thanks, Ana Maria, you're a life saver,' I say, watching her
pour some coffee.

'Here - more sugar make you well,' she says, adding two spoonfuls.

'Thank you.'

'Oh, poor sick baby,' she laughs.

'God, I'll say,' I agree, holding the cup m both hands.

'Marion's furious with me, isn't she?'

'Madam is old bag.'

'Ana Maria!' I say in mock outrage. This provokes more giggles.
We both laugh, glad to release the tension.

'Madam say "Don't be kind Mr Andrew, he bring it on himself.
His own fault drinking whisky".'

'Don't remind me, I think I drank half that bottle.'

'Half bottle of whisky?' shrieks Ana Maria. 'You bery sick. My
poor husband.'

Oh, fuck. Why did she have to say that? I'd almost forgotten.
I look up at her. 'Sorry,' she says, embarrassed. She looks away for a moment, then
picks up the toast plate and goes quickly back into the kitchen. I look down at
my coffee in my gilt-rimmed china cup and realise how quickly I've got used to having
someone make it and pour it for me. When did I last wash up a cup?

I find myself thinking about Jane walking back to the Tube station
trying not to cry like a little girl. Then I imagine having this toast and coffee
in bed with her. Like I used to do with Helen at college and when she came to see
me at weekends in London. Would toast taste the same with Jane? I imagine going
down to the kitchen in Fulham and making it. Odd mugs and chipped plates. Bringing
my badly buttered slices up to her. Eating it in bed, getting into trouble for dropping
crumbs everywhere - giggling and wiping the butter from her chin. Snuggling down
and making love again.

Will that ever happen? I'm phoning to marry someone else, someone
I don't love. Someone I can't even bear to look at anymore. Would I tell Jane -
or any other girl - what I'd done? I couldn't spend the rest of my life without
telling her that I'd been married before, could I?

I watch a bit more telly and listen to Shanaya's sister reveal
that she is also sleeping with Shanaya's boyfriend and then I get up and go into
the kitchen to break the news to Ana Maria.

She is sitting at the kitchen table looking at a clothes catalogue.
I sit down opposite her. She knows something is up.

'Ana Maria, this marriage thing. I've been thinking about it.
I-' Her reaction catches me and she just bursts into tears, pushes the magazine
out of the way and puts her head on the table. 'Ana Maria, listen ... I ...'

After a few moments she looks up at me, her breath still slightly
irregular. 'Please Mr Andrew ... look what I get.' From the pocket of her uniform
she extracts a folded letter. It is very flattened and the edges are well worn.
I open it carefully and immediately recognise the Home Office logo. It basically
tells her that she has less than a month to leave the country or give a reason why
she can stay. 'I cannot go back dere,' she sobs again.

'Ana Maria, I know.' I reach across the table and take her hand
with its stubby fingers and bright red nail polish. 'I'm sorry, I just don't think
I'm the one ...'

'You want more money, I have money,' she says quickly.

'Oh no, it's not the money, I don't care about the money,' I
hear myself saying. Did I really say that? 'It's just that ...' I don't actually
want to explain that going through this illegal charade makes me feel sick and that
I'm afraid of us both getting caught by the police and that it might rob me of the
possibility of a real wedding at some point in the future. Or force me to live a
lie. Ana Maria's probably more worried about food and sending money to her family
than she is about issues like flowers, choral music and making my mum happy. As
I watch her shoulders heaving and tears falling on the catalogue pages I ask her,
'Isn't there someone else who could do it? Mark? Don't you know someone?' All of
which sounds bloody insulting but the whole situation is too weird to worry about
that.

'No, we try. My friend, Maria, she might know a guy who do it,
but he want too much money and madam won't pay him because she don't trust him and
there is no time.' She fingers the letter as if it were a death warrant. We sit
in silence as I try and think of anyone I know but then I realise that every single
one of my friends, hip, urban, fun though they might be, would be just simply appalled
at the idea of doing this. I've got to try and remember how normal people think,
difficult though it is these days.

Then I think about the ceremony - ten minutes, horrible, a bit
like going to the dentist, but then I get £15,000, yes fifteen thousand quid, let
Jerry sort out the legal stuff, Ana Maria's dream is fulfilled and a year later
the divorce thing comes through and no one is any the wiser. I'm single again. After
all the hassle I've been through over the last few months, I'll finally have something
to show for it. I look at Ana Maria again, she is staring up at me through huge,
brown, watery eyes. Oh, God, I've come this far, raised her hopes, made plans for
myself with it, let's just do it.

People do worse things for money.

I nod at her. 'OK,' I almost whisper. I try to smile.

She smiles back up at me and then begins to cry again. I squeeze
her hand and wander out of the kitchen.

Back in the living room I stare out of the window for a while
and think about Jane. I'm about as low in her estimation as I could be, so it's
not like this marriage thing, even if she ever possibly knew about it, could make
things much worse. OK, Jane, with your shared flat in a crappy old house in Holloway
and your job at Paperchase, your nights in front of the telly with tea or cheap
white wine and your friends who bring their own cans of lager to barbecues - you've
got it made. Congratulations!

 
It's no good, I start
envying her again. That's the life I know.

I lean forward and let the cool glass of the window soothe my
aching, burning forehead. Then I reach for the phone and start to ring Mark's number
but I hang up quickly before it rings, realizing that I need to talk to a real person
about this, someone who would understand that you might want to spend some time
with someone without crisp fifties being involved so I ring my old direct line at
the office. Unsurprisingly I don't recognize the voice that answers. I ask to speak
to Sami.

'Who?' says the voice.

'Sami. That is Classified Ads, isn't it?'

'Yes, but I don't think there's anyone here called Sami.'

'There must be: Sami, Asian girl with long hair, sits at the
end by the photocopier.'

'Look, I'm sorry, there's no one here called Sami,' says the
voice, obviously getting pretty irritated that I'm stopping him using his phone
to do what God put him on earth to do – sell space. 'Can't help you, goodbye. Oh,
hang on ... What's your name?'

'Andrew. Andrew Collins. I used to work there.' I hear my name
being repeated to someone else. I decide that if it's Debbie I'll just put the phone
down but it isn't, it's Maria. 'Andrew, look, I can't really talk because Debbie
will be back in a minute but Sami's sort of disappeared.'

'What?' I get up quickly and start to pace around the room.

'What do you mean she's disappeared?'

Maria sighs deeply. 'Oh, God. Listen, you mustn't ring here again,
OK and please don't try and do anything because you'll make things worse.'