The Chocolate Run (27 page)

Eric did The Thing With His Eyes. His head would still be dipped because, say, he was looking into his pint, and you’d utter something he didn’t agree with and, without moving his head
at all
, he’d blink, then be staring at you. In that moment of blinking he’d have redirected his gaze and would suddenly be staring at you. It was cool but unnerving. It always made me jump, as if he’d rounded on me physically. ‘Has Jen fixed any more blind dates for you?’

‘Not since the day Matt moved in.’

‘Weren’t her attempts to fix you up at one point averaging one or two a week?’

‘Yes.’

‘And they’ve stopped?’

‘Yes.’

‘In three months, nothing?’

‘Yes.’

‘I bet she’s been off with you of late, too, leaving you out of things. Ignoring you. Not calling as much. Basically treating you like she did when you were going out with that other bloke?’ (Even Eric, who had spoken to Sean and remembered most of my boyfriends from first year at uni, couldn’t remember Sean’s name.)

‘You mean Sean?’ I said.

‘Yeah, him. Is she treating you like that?’

‘I suppose.’

‘She knows. Subconsciously, she knows. And, subconsciously, she’s waiting for you to tell her, so she can . . .’ Eric stopped. ‘Anyway, we’ve spent way too much time talking about you,
hen
, let’s talk about me.’

If The Thing With His Eyes was unnerving, Eric’s ability to start a sentence, leave it half-finished but still get his point across was downright scary. And irritating. There was no point questioning him either, to try to find out if you’d understood what he’d almost said because he’d plead, ‘I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.’

‘Don’t think I didn’t notice you slipping that “you and Greg are in love” nonsense into the conversation. I love Greg as a friend. Nothing else.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Do I get to meet him this weekend?’

Ha!
I’d
be lucky to see him again, let alone you
. We hadn’t spoken and hadn’t seen each other since Wednesday night when he walked out. Usually we’d speak at least twice a day, but we hadn’t and I hadn’t got as anxious as usual. I didn’t know why. Maybe because he’d done it before and he’d come back. Or maybe because I pushed it to the back of my mind with cleaning. Or maybe because this was my chance to call Mr Chocolate Sniffer. I hadn’t, but it was my chance to. ‘I thought we were going to talk about you,’ I said.

‘What’s to talk about? Wife, fine. Work, could be better. Cottage, falling down.’

Eric’s relationship with his wife, Arrianne, was the antithesis of my real parents’ relationship. Every time I saw them, I’d meet Eric at work, we’d go back to his cottage which was an hour’s drive from the centre of Edinburgh and she got a better reception than me. As though they hadn’t seen each other in months, they’d practically leap into each other’s arms, snog each other’s faces off, talk excitedly, giggle.
Giggle
. I’d once asked Eric if they were always like that. And he’d shrugged and said: ‘Yeah, course,’ like it was the most natural thing on earth.

Freaks
, I’d thought and asked about the rows.

‘So, have you and Arrianne managed to have an argument yet?’ I asked jokingly. Whenever I asked he told me they didn’t argue. Ever: ‘
We agree about everything
.’

Eric gave me a long hard look, as though sizing me up. Seeing if I could handle what he was about to tell me.

‘Do you think I’d make a good father?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, course. What’s that got to do with . . .’ Oh no. That’s why he’d looked at me like that, he was trying to work out if I could handle this information. Eric was very sensitive with me when it came to arguments or splitting up. When he and Arrianne split up years and years ago, he’d rung me to tell me and to reassure me that they were still friends, that she definitely wouldn’t vanish from my life. He might as well have saved himself the trouble if they were going to split up now. Sickness speared my stomach. I didn’t want Eric and Arrianne to split up. Or argue. It was freakish not to argue, but I could put up with that; I could deal with no arguing as averse to screaming rows.

Eric gulped his pint. ‘All we do now is argue. First time in twelve years. Y’know, even when we split up, we
didnae
argue. It was decision we made because we both wanted to see other people. And now . . . now . . . oh, fuck it. Just fuck it.’

My heart rate increased at Eric’s frustrated, despairing tone. Please no. I didn’t want them to tear each other apart. I loved Arrianne. She was like the sister I’d never had. Jen and I were close, but we’d chosen each other. Arrianne had been brought into my life by a relative, like a real sibling, and I loved her. Her and Eric had met on the first day of college, in Edinburgh, and they’d been friends for years. When they finished college, they’d got together and settled just outside Edinburgh, where Arrianne’s from. They’d split up once, six years ago, started seeing other people, but got back together after a year. In that year Arrianne still called me and wrote to me like she’d always done. When they got back together they’d married less than six months later.

I didn’t want to see two people I loved go through the ritual my parents went through. That ‘anything to hurt the other one’ battle that only ended when one of the fighters was so wounded they didn’t have enough left to fight with. ‘But you said everything was fine,’ I whined.

‘It is. It will be.’

‘What’s the problem, Ez? Why don’t you want to have kids?’

Eric slid down in his bit of the booth, raised his pint glass to hide his face. ‘Dunno.’

‘Like hell you don’t. Tell me.’

Eric ignored me, started looking around the pub.

‘If you don’t tell me I’ll mention in front of Mum that you don’t want to make her a grandmother. Heaven knows she’s given up on me ever getting married, let alone having children, so  . . .’

‘ All right, I’ll tell you. But you mustn’t tell anyone, not Mum, not Dad, not Arri. No one.’

‘I swear,’ I replied.

He drank more of his light-coloured pint until all that was left was a hint of pale liquid and islands of white froth all around the glass. For a man who liked neat whisky, he surprisingly liked lager too. ‘All right.’ Deep breath from big brother. ‘It’s going to sound awful, but I don’t want to be married to someone’s mother. I don’t want to end up superfluous to our life. I talk to men every day who find it almost impossible to go home because they feel shut out of the life their wives have with the new baby. They’re knackered and get depressed and have nobody to talk to. I don’t want to lose Arri to that. She’s my best friend. A baby will wreck that.’

‘Then of course there’s the fact your mother ran off to start a new life a year after you were born and died before she could come back.’

Eric’s face tightened in displeasure. ‘My
mother
is on her way here as we speak, with my father,’ he spat, his voice challenging me to argue.

‘You know what I mean,’ I suggested gently.

‘No. I. Don’t.’ Eric refused to acknowledge his birth mother. Dad2 had tried to talk to him about her but Eric always said he didn’t want to know. I knew about her, what little Dad2 would tell me, but Eric had decided she didn’t exist. That encompassed his mother’s side of his family. They tried to contact him over the years and sometimes he’d speak to them but he made it clear it was for Dad2’s sake, not because he wanted to know them. It was such an unEric way of behaving but I didn’t want to upset him by asking him about it.

I touched his arm, didn’t want to alienate him. ‘Ez, your relationship with Arri will change, course it will. But you’ll adjust. We all adjust to circumstances good or bad. Like me and Greg. I never thought I’d go near him, or anyone like him, but here I am, seeing him. Actually, not just “seeing him”, having a relationship with him.’
I think
.

Eric stared into the mid-distance as I talked. He didn’t move or react.

‘Look how well you take care of me. You’re depriving at least one child of all that love and sensibleness and all-round irritating goodness you personify. You’d be a great father. Don’t let the things that might never happen stop you from becoming the fantastic things you can be.’

We sat in silence for a while. ‘I never thought of it like that,’ Eric eventually replied. He looked me up and down in wonderment. ‘Although, must say, you should take a bit of your own advice,
hen
. OK, my round. Then we’d better get back to yours to shower and change before Mum gets here and gives us the six-hour version of the passive smoking lecture.’

Eric slid out of the booth, headed for the bar.

I watched him flirt with the barmaid. Not a patch on Arrianne, but Eric, like Greg, found it necessary to befriend or flirt with most people he met. He might grow to dislike them, but it was his intention to get on with everyone . . .

When we first met, one summer’s day when the rain was coming down in sheets outside, Eric was going to be ten in ten days; I was going to be ten in three months and ten days. Mum and Dad2 had been ‘going out’ for two weeks and I’d met Dad2 twice. To me he was a tallish white man with blondish hair and a permanent smile.

Eric was the same height as me, but puffy around the face, circular around the body and Dad2 had, rather cruelly, dressed him in green and white horizontal stripes so he appeared more circular than he was, with smart blue trousers and shiny black shoes.

I was wearing a red and white gingham, puffy-sleeved dress with black tights and equally shiny black shoes.

Eric Hampton, aged nine and eleven months, held out the white paper bag in his right hand instead of saying ‘Hello, Amber’ as instructed to by his father. ‘Would you like a Cola Cube?’ he asked, as though he’d practised the line for a school play.

I looked to my mother for guidance. Was I allowed to accept the proffered confection? Mum, with her hair pinned back into a bun, smiled and nodded. I took an orangey-red cube, covered in crushed sugar.

‘Would you like to play Ludo?’ I asked in the same school-play-rehearsed voice.

Eric looked at his dad for the same guidance I’d looked to Mum for. Dad2 smiled and nodded too, then we ran off to play. He became my weekend best friend and then my brother when they moved in.

The woman behind the bar flushed as Eric paid her a compliment. I moved my bag onto my lap, took out my mobile.
Take my own advice
, I thought.
Take my own advice
.

‘
Sunday Chronicle
, hello?’ the voice said as they answered the phone.

‘It’s me,’ I said.

‘Hi,’ Greg replied, frost in his voice.

‘What are you up to tonight?’ I asked.

‘This and that.’

‘Oh. I was wondering if you’d like to come to my place for dinner?’

Greg said nothing.

‘Well, it’ll be my place for dumping stuff and getting changed. We’ll go out for dinner tonight. Then we’ll go shopping tomorrow, have lunch in town and back to my place for dinner. We usually all lie in on Sundays, pad around in our pyjamas, eat late breakfast, then they all leave.’

Greg still said nothing.

‘You don’t have to be around for all of it. Mum’ll freak if you see her braless and in her pyjamas, but you’re welcome to come out tonight and see if you could stand a whole weekend with my family.’

Still silence.
Isn’t this what he wanted? A piece of me. A piece of my family. That mythical something very few people got? Why was I getting the silent treatment?

‘Greg?’

‘Are you sure about this?’

‘I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t sure,’ I lied. But it was only a small lie.

‘Shall I come round to yours for about seven-thirty?’

‘Perfect, see you later, darling.’

‘See you later, gorgeous.’

As Eric put our drinks on the table I realised I’d unintentionally called him ‘darling’. He was, I suppose. He was my darling. Special. He was going to go where no man had gone before.

‘You didn’t answer my question, am I going to meet Greg this weekend?’

‘Yup.’
You are now
.

chapter twenty-two

parental guidance

Mum and I have an odd relationship. ‘Reserved’ is one word for it.

I’m always pleased to see her, our ‘reunions’ are usually a laugh, and Christmas, holidays, times we spend together are good, but I do often wonder what things would be like if Dad2 or Eric weren’t there as well.

I knew Mum before them, she knew me before them; when she was perpetually unhappy and I was constantly afraid. I knew Mum when she spent more time shouting than she did sleeping. When she could ignore me for days because I hadn’t finished all the food on my plate at dinner. When she tore apart my favourite book because I’d given her a look. I knew Mum when everything she did was full of resentment and bitterness.

Eric looked like peanut brittle; Mum
was
peanut brittle, except to look at her small, round body with her curly black hair you’d think she was fudge. You thought she was soft, my mum, but she was hard as nails. Most people think of their mothers as fudgy – all sugary and comforting – inside and out, not mine.

My mum had become hardened during her time with my dad, Dad1. She was difficult to get to know, to get close to. I’d never seen her cry, not once. She found it easy to be angry; easy to be independent; hard to show her joy. Anything good I did was snatched away from me, made into something she did that got me it. Like when I got a 2:1 for my degree. Dad1 had been disappointed I hadn’t got a first; Mum had told me she’d been praying non-stop for twenty-four hours for me to do well. I wasn’t good enough in Dad’s eyes; I hadn’t spent months slaving over books in Mum’s eyes. And on graduation day . . . Dad, in a rare moment of unDadness, told me he was proud of me. Before those words had a chance to penetrate the shield of calm I’d constructed to get through a day of my parents being in the same three-mile radius, Mum had snapped at him, ‘You should’ve told her that years ago, it’s too late to say it now.’

So, sometimes it’d take me a while to warm up to Mum. Not only because I remembered her when she was unhappy, mainly because I remembered how resentful I was of her when she was unhappy. Guilt, I suppose. I spent so much time alone, worried that something I did or said would set my parents off, that it became difficult, if not nigh on impossible, to look at either of my parents when I spoke to them. Yes, as an adult, I understood what they were going through. Didn’t stop me, though, for the first few hours of seeing them, feeling like that girl sat in the back room while they went at it in the front room: shouting, smashing and everything that went with it.