The Foster Husband (12 page)

I pulled the covers down from my face and squinted at Matt, who looked hideously fresh and awake, tanned against the white sheets.

‘Matt, if what you want to show me is your cock, I don’t want to see it until eight at the very earliest. Or feel it. Understood?’

‘Believe it or not,’ said Matt, grinning, ‘it’s not all about shagging.’

I snorted in disbelief. Since Matt and I got together at the Christmas party, it had been pretty much all about the shagging. I had been given a gold loyalty card at my local waxing salon, so
frequent were my visits there of late. We barely went out, we didn’t do coupley things, we weren’t hand-holding at the cinema or whispering sweet nothings over dinner. We were just
having sex. Lots of it.

‘I mean it, Kate,’ insisted Matt, yanking at the covers. ‘Irresistible though you are in the mornings, that’s not what this is about.’

I scowled. I’m not good at surprises, unless I’m the one in charge of them. ‘What is it about then?’

‘Get dressed and meet me out front in ten minutes,’ he said.

I sighed heavily. ‘I’ve got Sarah picking me up at ten,’ I warned him.

‘We’ll be back in time,’ Matt promised. ‘Trust me.’

And strangely I did trust him.

So, despite it being 6 a.m., and despite my lack of interest in doing anything other than sleeping, I dragged myself out of bed and pulled on a denim skirt and a vest top. I scraped my hair up
off my face, and covered my wincing eyes with sunglasses.

Outside, Matt sat on a scooter, revving the engine.

‘Do you know how to drive that thing?’ I asked nervously. Suddenly my outfit, which had seemed perfect for the warm morning, felt like insanity. As if I was offering up my bare arms
and legs to be cheese-gratered by the Spanish tarmac.

‘Nope.’ Matt grinned. ‘But how hard can it be? Put this on.’

He handed over a helmet. I took it reluctantly.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I promise I’ll be careful. I won’t let you get hurt.’

‘Oh, that’s what all the boys say,’ I teased, trying for a light-hearted tone to banish my fears. Matt patted the seat behind him and I told myself to get a grip.

Back home in London, if someone had said to me, ‘Why don’t you get on the back of a motorbike with someone who’s never ridden one before?’ I’d have said no without
even thinking about it. But Matt’s boyish enthusiasm was contagious, and the morning was beautiful; bright and clear and still cool enough to raise slight goose-bumps on my arms. Fuck it, I
thought.

I shouldn’t have worried. God knows where Matt had borrowed the scooter from – for work we were all ferried around in expensive air-conditioned cars that were loaned to us by the
sponsors – but it soon became clear we were in no danger of being done for speeding. The engine strained and spluttered as Matt urged the bike up the hill away from the villa, and by the time
we’d got to the end of the long stony drive that led to the main road, I’d relaxed enough to stop gripping his waist like a terrified baby monkey.

Instead of turning right towards San Antonio town, Matt steered away towards Santa Inés, or so the sign said. It’s weird, because I’ve been to Ibiza more times than I can
count, but it’s so much a place I come to for work that I’d never given any thought to exploring the island. I know there’s meant to be this amazing hidden Ibiza outside the
superclubs and foam parties and sunburned package trippers, but if I was going to go on holiday, there’s no way I’d come back here to find it. I liked to get in, do my job, get wasted
and get out. I could have been in Blackpool or Bognor for all the attention I paid to my surroundings.

As we chugged along at a comically slow speed I saw the island opening up before my eyes. Unable to speak to Matt over the sound of the popping engine, I let my mind wander along with my gaze.
Stray goats chewed on desiccated branches by the side of the road, unconcerned at our passing. I saw one ruminatively working away on a plastic bag. I wondered who lived in the isolated houses up
in the hills – not the glamorous gated villas for holiday visitors, but the whitewashed old ones with the washing pegged outside and a rusting water tank nearby. It seemed so remote and far
away from everything that mattered. I had the former country girl’s horror of life away from an urban centre.

My thoughts unfurled as the scenery spread out in front of me, the hypnotic buzz of the scooter drowning out any anxieties, and I’d entirely lost track of time when we started to descend
again, down towards the startlingly turquoise sea of a small bay. The water was so clear I could see the rocks and corals beneath, and the skeins of seaweed rocking gently back and forth with the
tide. Two small fishing boats were moored at buoys in the bay; paint peeled on their wooden hulls, and nets hung over their sides, drying in the sun. When Matt pulled the scooter up alongside a
weather-beaten old hut, a table of fishermen looked up from their breakfasts and nodded acknowledgement.

‘This is it,’ he beamed, as proud as if he had created this picture postcard scene all by himself. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s amazing,’ I sighed, drinking it all in.

The rocky shore rose up sharply all around us, so that we were hidden away from the rest of the island, protected in this tiny inlet. It was hard to imagine the high-rises of San Antonio were
only a few miles down the coast. From here all that was visible beyond the stony embrace of the inlet was the sea, stretching out uninterrupted to the horizon, as if it went on forever.

Matt leaned over and dropped a kiss on the tip of my nose. ‘You know, you even look cute in a bike helmet.’

‘Oh shut up,’ I laughed, taking it off as quickly as possible. No one looks cute in a bike helmet, and I knew it.

Matt grabbed my hand and led me over to the only other table outside the hut, a rusting metal one with alarmingly rickety legs. Squinting inside the hut, dark and dim in contrast to the bright
outside, I could see two more tables and a rough bar, at which a few more fishermen stood, their yellow waterproof trousers hanging over chairs behind them while they drank. Their work was already
done for the day and their relaxation was contagious. I could almost forget I had a full day of work ahead of me; it felt like I’d left it far behind. I stretched my arms up over my head,
yawning loudly in the sunshine.

‘Bored already?’ asked Matt, a slow smile spreading over his face as he watched me visibly unwind.

‘Yeah, massively,’ I said, smiling back. ‘I can’t believe you’d bring me somewhere so hideous. Look at this place. I mean, they don’t even have a
DJ.’

He laughed. ‘I knew you’d love it. The food’s pretty much fish or fish, by the way, with a side order of fish. But they do a ferocious coffee.’

‘Sounds good,’ I said. And though I normally ate little more for breakfast than half a piece of toast on my way to the bus stop, I could feel my stomach growling in anticipation as
the smell of frying fish wafted over to us from the kitchen.

The patron stepped outside, wiping his beefy hands on the front of a stained apron. His darkly tanned face was wrinkled by the sun and wind, and he squinted at us underneath impressively huge
black eyebrows. He didn’t bother with anything like menus, just lumbered over to stand by our table, raising one heavy brow expectantly.

‘
Si
?’

I smiled as winningly as possible, hoping a cheery demeanour would compensate for a complete lack of Spanish vocabulary. He merely raised the other eyebrow.

To my amazement, Matt suddenly began speaking in what sounded, to my uneducated ears, like perfect Spanish. He pointed over at the fishermen, indicated the two of us, and answered the
patron’s gruff questions with confidence. I stared at him open mouthed.

The patron’s face broke into a vast smile, exposing a gold tooth that winked in the sun, like a shiny reward for Matt’s unexpected fluency. He slapped Matt heartily on the back and
burst into a torrent of words, of which I could understand not one. The fishermen over at the next table looked up, laughing, and one of them raised his glass to us.

‘Since when did you speak Spanish?’ I asked, as the patron retreated back inside, still chuckling.

‘Impressed?’

‘Of course I am,’ I said. ‘You’re a man of hidden talents, Matt Martell.’

‘I’m glad you’re beginning to see it,’ he said, leaning forwards. Our lips touched and the fishermen started whistling. We broke apart, grinning and holding hands under
the table where they couldn’t see.

‘So what was your big drama last night?’ asked Matt, tickling my palm with his thumb.

I squinted at him in the sunshine. ‘I thought you said I told you all about it last night?’

‘You did. I didn’t say I listened, though.’

‘Ugh, there was just a load of hassle with one of the presenters,’ I said, pulling my hand away and leaning back in my chair. ‘She had some eye problem – probably just
one of her stupid false eyelashes got stuck in her eye, but she made a massive song and dance about it. Refused to go on stage without eye drops, but she didn’t have any. And of course we
couldn’t give her any.’

‘Why not?’ asked Matt.

I stared at him. Sometimes I wondered if Matt and I worked at an entirely different company – he never seemed to understand the compromises and underhand manoeuvres that were second nature
to me.

‘Health and safety?’ I said. ‘Do you know how much we could get sued for if she had an allergic reaction to the eye drops?’

‘Pretty unlikely, though, isn’t it?’ Matt scoffed.

‘Well, you say that, but it’s not you who’s had to do all the risk assessments. It’s more than my—’ I stopped myself.

Matt started laughing, throwing his head back in the sunshine. ‘More than your job’s worth? Were you actually going to say that?’

‘Shut up,’ I said, pretending to sulk. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘Oh I try very hard to understand you, Basher Bailey,’ he said. ‘So tell me what happened next.’

‘Well,’ I explained. ‘I sent one of the interns out to the pharmacy and got her to buy every single kind of eye drops they had.’

Matt nodded.

‘And then I put them all in her dressing room when she went to the loo. And when she came back I just said, ‘Aren’t those some eye drops over there?’ And she used them
and everything was fine.’

Matt shook his head, ‘What a load of fuss over nothing. I don’t understand why you couldn’t just give her the eye drops without all the subterfuge. I mean, it’s Hitz does
Ibiza, not passing on microfilm in Cold War Berlin.’

‘It doesn’t work like that, Matt,’ I said testily. I was rather proud of how I’d solved the problem; I thought he’d be impressed with my quick thinking rather than
dismissive.

‘It can work like that if you want it to,’ he said. ‘I think you get off on the drama of it all.’

‘Oh fuck off,’ I scoffed. ‘I do not!’

He never understood that you couldn’t say no to the celebrities directly. It didn’t work like that. You had to find a way of making them do what you needed, while letting them think
it was their idea all along.

Before we could really get stuck into an argument, the patron arrived with an enormous platter of tiny battered fish, fried whole, accompanied by nothing more than half a lemon and two cloth
napkins.

I made a gesture for a knife and fork and the patron roared with laughter, slapped me on the back, and walked off, as if I’d made a particularly hilarious joke.

After we’d eaten, I sat licking the last few lemony, salty traces from my fingers. We were alone outside the shack now. The fishermen had left a few minutes ago, coming over to shake our
hands farewell now that we were all best friends, clambering back onto their boats and motoring out of the bay with shouts of goodbye.

I stared out at the sea, watching the waves roll up onto the rocky shore. The sound of the stones being pulled back by the retreating water was restful and calming. The hectic pace of Hitz Does
Ibiza seemed to belong to another island altogether.

The patron, clearing our plates, called out to someone behind the bar, and a moment later two tiny glasses, full to the brim with a suspiciously cloudy green liquid, were placed in front of
us.

‘Oh gosh, no, I really don’t think—’ I protested, still suffering from the beers last night.

‘Come on, Kate.’ Matt laughed. ‘I thought you were the hardcore party girl? Don’t show me up in front of my new mates.’

‘But it’s
breakfast
. And you’re
driving
.’

Matt shrugged, picking up his glass. ‘It’s just one; live a little.’

The patron nudged my glass towards me with a finger that shared the dimensions of a fatly stuffed farmhouse sausage.

‘Hierbas Ibicencas. I make it myself,’ he said, proudly pointing to his chest.

Matt held out his glass to me and I picked up my own. We clinked them together in the sunshine and downed our drinks in one. I felt a burning aniseedy flame rush down my throat all the way into
my stomach, where it spread out until I swore I could feel it down in my toes.

The patron watched us eagerly.

‘
Gracias
,’ I coughed in my best Spanish, feeling my cheeks redden with the sudden rush of alcohol. ‘
Gracias
, it was, er,
muy delicioso
.’

He beamed happily and rubbed his stomach, saying something I couldn’t catch, but the gist of it was that my digestion would be grateful for this early-morning shot of booze. My digestion,
churning from last night’s excesses, begged to differ.

‘I’m just going inside for a sec,’ said Matt, standing up and pulling his wallet out of his shorts pocket. He was sweet like that, he’d always step in and pay for things
without even mentioning it. I’d objected for a while, but he told me he liked doing it, so these days I just let him. I watched him disappear into the cool darkness of the bar.

The patron collected our glasses in the palm of his meaty hand. ‘
Una mas
?’ he asked.

‘Oh, no,
gracias
,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Your boyfriend?’ he asked, nodding his head towards the shack. ‘One more for your boyfriend?’