The Importance of Being a Bachelor (12 page)

Drinks in hand, Adam turned to head back towards his brothers but then froze as he glimpsed out of the corner of his eye, sitting amongst a group of thirtysomethings at a table covered in tapas, was Steph. Adam nearly said something but then he saw that it wasn’t Steph at all, just a someone who looked like her. The Steph-a-like was wearing a black top and jeans and even though there were half a dozen better looking girls in her vicinity Adam couldn’t take his eyes off her. The Steph-a-like was talking animatedly to a tall, clean-cut guy who was obviously her boyfriend. Adam found himself wondering what his Steph, the real Steph, was doing right now and for a moment or two he actually missed her. Then he brutally pushed all thoughts of Steph from his mind and headed back to his brothers.

Back home an hour later, Adam faced a dilemma. Although he had agreed to undertake further questioning of his dad he was well aware that if his mum was the queen of stubbornness then his dad was undoubtedly the king; it was highly unlikely that he would get any information until his father was ready to give it up of his own accord. At the same time, if Adam even popped his head in to say a simple hello, his dad would undoubtedly ask him a million and one questions about his mum and brothers and who said what to whom and why, and Adam wasn’t up to playing messenger boy. No, he would leave his dad to his own devices for a while longer. He was heading quietly up to his bedroom when the door to the front room opened and his dad stepped out.

‘Dad,’ said Adam guiltily. ‘I was just . . .’ His voice trailed off. He still found it impossible to lie to his dad. He came back down the stairs. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘I’m not really all that hungry. I had some more toast earlier, then I had a rummage in your cupboards and helped myself to a can of tomato soup. You’re not a big fan of food shopping are you? There was barely anything in the cupboards.’

‘I eat out a lot,’ explained Adam.

Dad nodded but his face made it clear that this was definitely an alien concept.

‘I could murder another cup of tea though.’

‘One cup of tea coming up,’ said Adam with forced cheeriness.

Adam put on the kettle, grabbed a couple of slices of wholemeal bread and dropped them into the toaster, then leaned back against the kitchen counter and tried to work out exactly how he was feeling about everything that had happened. There was something about his dad’s manner that smacked of guilt. And yet, self-created as these problems no doubt were, his dad seemed somehow diminished, older and more vulnerable than he’d ever seen him. Adam wanted to lecture his father about bucking his ideas up and sorting things out, but even more, he wanted to sit down with his old man and tell him not to worry, everything was going to be OK.

‘King-sized or normal?’

‘So what have you got to say for yourself?’

Russell looked blankly at Jeanette Nicholls, his middle-aged and needlessly aggressive boss, and briefly pondered a response. Of course she didn’t really want an answer. All she wanted was to make him feel small. And even if she had wanted a response, she wouldn’t have accepted that the reason he had messed up on the figures he was working on was because in the last seven days alone not only he had got off with his best friend and then not heard a word from her since but he had also learned that the nigh-on forty-year marriage of his parents had come to a very dramatic and upsetting conclusion.

‘You do realise,’ continued Jeanette, ‘that if I’d let these figures through without checking them it would have cost us the tender?’

Russell (well versed in being reprimanded by Jeanette) noted that the change of tone and inflection meant she had stopped being rhetorical and wanted some kind of acknowledgement that he wasn’t – mentally speaking – jabbing his fingers in his ears and screaming ‘La, la, la!’ at the top of his voice and was indeed listening.

‘Yes, Jeanette,’ he said sombrely. ‘I completely understand. It was totally and utterly my fault and you have my assurance that it won’t happen again.’

‘I should hope not!’ snapped Jeanette. ‘I haven’t got the time or the resources to be constantly checking and double-checking your work. This isn’t the student union, Russell, you’re at work now and all your actions have consequences. I’ll be making an official note of everything that I’ve said to you this morning for the record and passing it on to Human Resources. Is there anything that you’d like to add in your defence?’

Despite being more than a little irked by Jeanette’s ‘student union’ comment (exactly how old did she think he was?) Russell kept quiet. This was his second reprimand (the first had been after a trip to Glastonbury festival the previous summer that had resulted in him going AWOL for a week) and he was determined to stick this job out after Angie had pointed out that in the time she had known him he had had at least fifteen different jobs (everything from a bank teller through to trainee park-keeper).

‘Right then,’ said Jeanette, holding eye contact just long enough for Russell to feel it necessary to look away, ‘I’m sure you’ve got work to be getting on with, haven’t you?’

Russell offered Jeanette a barely perceptible nod and left the room, closing the door firmly behind him. He grabbed his jacket and headed in the direction of the exit.

‘Are you doing a shop run, Russ?’ asked Debbie on reception. ‘Because if you are I’m gagging for a Twix.’

Russell considered the question. It had been his intention to walk out the door, take an early lunch break and have a long hard think about his future but now that Debbie was asking him about shop runs and confectionery he realised there was no point in hiding his head in the sand every time things got tough. This messy stuff – parents splitting up, mates getting off with each other, being in love with people you shouldn’t be and now cocking up the figures – was simply the stuff of life.

Russell looked at Debbie. ‘King-sized or normal?’

‘Normal.’ She immediately corrected herself. ‘No, king-sized . . . I’m quite hungry.’ She thought again. ‘I’ll tell you what, Russ, why don’t you just surprise me?’

Russell felt his mood change for the better. ‘I might do that. Don’t get your hopes up but I reckon a pack of salt and vinegar might be coming your way too.’

Twenty minutes later, having had enough time out of his airless workplace to feel almost like a regular human being again Russell returned to the office, dropped off an ordinary Twix plus a packet of crisps and a can of Fruit Twist Fanta with Debbie and decided that the best thing he could possibly do was keep his head down and hope for the best.

Waking up his computer to check his online diary against Jeanette’s, Russell was about to book as many meetings with outside agencies as he possibly could to coincide with times he knew Jeanette would be in the office when his mobile phone vibrated gently. Russell was so cheered when he saw that it was a message from Angie, he almost let out an audible whoop of joy.

Even though it had been over a week Russell still found it hard to believe that he and Angie had actually snogged. And it had been a snog rather than a kiss. A huge, big, open-mouthed snog tantamount to a battle of sucking, licking, darting and probing. He hadn’t been able to get enough of her. And she hadn’t been able to get enough of him. All through the kiss his brain had been so aware of the momentous nature of the occasion that he had felt himself trying to seize snippets of the experience and permanently record them. He had wanted to remember for ever the taste of her mouth, the sensation of her chest pressing against his own, the softness of her skin against his fingertips. It had been an amazing moment: two friends standing in the middle of a packed nightclub dance floor, limbs and lips locked together while everyone around them danced along to ‘Leave Before the Lights Come On’.

The moment the song came to a close and the DJ played an upbeat dance track that heralded a change of personnel on the dance floor everything was lost. Their hands separated, the self-consciousness returned and Angie’s friends who had been on the other side of the club and had missed the whole event suddenly appeared from nowhere and swept her away. And while they all stood gossiping about some girl who had just turned up with a guy in tow who apparently wasn’t her boyfriend, Russell had stood at the edge of the huddle wondering what exactly had just occurred and why. He didn’t give it long with the thinking and the mulling (three, maybe four minutes tops) before coming to the conclusion that it had been a mistake of colossal proportions.

Whispering in Angie’s ear that he was just going to the loo Russell did a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, grabbed his work bag from the cloakroom and made his way home secure in the knowledge it would be at least a few hours before he would have to face the music. The moment never came. Angie didn’t call or text and even though he carefully monitored her Facebook status update over the days that followed there wasn’t even the faintest allusion to what had happened.

Russell eyed his phone suspiciously as though it was Angie incarnate. He checked the message. She was asking if he was ‘still’ up for their usual Friday night drink. Was this a loaded question? Was this her way of asking what was going on between them? Russell wasn’t sure. What he really wanted was for someone to make the decision for him. For all he cared a complete stranger could flip a coin, draw straws or even play a few rounds of Rock, Paper, Scissors. As long as it wasn’t down to him because this was simply too big to involve someone as flaky as him in the process.

That was why he had left the nightclub without telling Angie he was going.

That was why he hadn’t called Angie the morning after the kiss.

That was why right at this moment he wanted to throw his phone away and move to Brazil.

He took a deep breath and then typed his reply: ‘Can’t make it tonight, mate. Have got something on. But let’s do it next week for sure.’ Double-checking the message for spelling mistakes and accuracy he pressed send and switched off his phone.

‘It was you, only you.’

Russell looked up at his mum as she rose to her feet during the ad break. ‘I’m going to make myself another cup of tea,’ she said. ‘And you need to go home now, son. That’s an order!’

It was just after eight and Russell had been in the front room at his parents’ house since just after six that evening having invited himself round late in the afternoon. Armed with a bottle of wine he had arrived straight from his nightmare day at work and had been thoroughly heartened by the fact that his mum had pulled out all the stops just for him: chicken and ham pie, broccoli and new potatoes followed by apple crumble and ice cream. The simple but satisfying meal had allowed Russell to forget his troubles and just be. He didn’t say a word about his dad and his mum allowed him to get away with the response ‘It was OK,’ to the question ‘How was work today?’ Thus he had a small respite from the idea that he was letting Angie down badly.

Now though, having sat through a constant stream of consumer shows, soap operas and nature programmes his mum was finally turfing him out and he would have to face the music alone, which was why he was planning on heading straight home, cracking open the bottle of wine that he had brought for his mum (which she had declined for reasons of indifference) and getting as drunk and maudlin as humanly possible.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked as his mum hovered in the doorway absent-mindedly watching an advert for a local sofa warehouse. ‘Because I can stay longer if you want me to.’

‘Absolutely,’ she replied. ‘All I really want to do is have a bath, get into bed and settle down with the Catherine Cookson I started last night.’

Russell left the room to get his shoes, jacket and work bag and returned moments later to kiss his mum goodbye.

‘So you’ll call me if you need anything?’

‘Of course I will.’

‘Promise?’

‘Cross my heart.’ She looked as though she was about to kiss him on the cheek but obviously had something on her mind. ‘Russell,’ she began. ‘About this Sunday lunch. Do you and your brothers mind if we give it a miss? I was thinking that I might just go to the mid-morning service at church and not bother with the usual rigmarole.’

Russell wondered if she was going to unburden herself of the mystery of why Dad was no longer at home but when the gap that he left in the conversation was filled with silence he eventually assured her that it would be fine with them all.

Outside it was still light although the weather had turned for the worse and the temperature was more like that of late November. Russell turned on his phone. There were a couple of text messages from his housemates but nothing at all from Angie. He took her lack of communication as a bad sign because Angie never needed much of an excuse to communicate with anyone about anything. She must be on the warpath. What form her displeasure would take was anyone’s guess; in the past Russell had witnessed everything from Angie punching in the face a guy who made one suggestive comment too many right through to her refusing to speak to an ex-housemate for six months because she’d borrowed Angie’s favourite top without asking. Shuddering at the thought of whatever punishment awaited him he zipped up his jacket, plugged the headphones of his iPod into his ears and started for home.

The song ‘We Will Become Silhouettes’ was coming to a close and Russell was feeling more than a little bit depressed as he turned into his road. He felt bad. Really bad. He should never have sent Angie that text. What had he been thinking? How could lying to her about being busy make things any better between them? As he crossed the road he was considering calling her and confessing all but then he saw a familiar figure sitting on the wall and knew that he was officially too late to beg for mercy.