The Learning Curve (8 page)

When they heard Mark climbing the ladder, they screamed excitedly that no adults were allowed in.

‘What’s all this then?’ asked Mark, from halfway up.

‘I scored fifty-six goals!’ Oscar cried out.

‘Oh!’ laughed Mark. ‘I bet Daisy’s had a wonderful afternoon!’

They joined in the laughter. He reached the tree house and beamed at them. ‘Who wants to come inside, drink hot chocolate and watch a video?’ asked Mark. ‘Daisy, your mum’s here and she’s going to stay all evening. She’s brought
Johnny English
.’

Oscar and Daisy were down in minutes.

Oscar and Mark shared a giant pizza with extra tuna and
pineapple which no one else wanted, Daisy had mushroom pizza and Lilith had salad. They sat on boy and girl sofas, Mark’s arm round Oscar, Lilith’s round Daisy. Within moments, both parents were asleep. Daisy went to the playroom to find a puzzle, but Oscar didn’t move.

Meanwhile, Nicky was trying to piece together what the hell she was doing with her life.

Here she was, an attractive, if rather fuzzy-headed woman entering what could be the most exciting decade of her life. And how had she spent her Saturday? An idyllic morning, followed by an entire afternoon of marking essays, all of which had been written in the style of J.K. Rowling, and some preparation work for next week plus more work she’d been given by Miss James. The latter had sounded like a quick nothing when Miss James had asked her to ‘run it off’, but she’d wanted to do it properly. It had taken her three hours and had for the first time made her wonder if she would be up to the job of Deputy. And how was her day ending? With the blind date from hell. She wondered what Rob was up to tonight.

She looked at Whatever-His-Name-Was across the restaurant table. She must stop trusting her sister’s enthusiasm for her husband’s colleagues. What made Claire think that just because Nicky was single she was desperate? Why didn’t people understand that the chances were single people were
more
discerning, not less, than couples? Take her sister, for example. Nicky was absolutely convinced that one of the main reasons her big sister had married so young was not because she flukily happened to meet the man of her dreams so early, but because she was not fussy. Never had
been. It was just her nature. You only had to look at her clothes to see that. Nicky felt sure that if someone else had proposed to Claire first, Claire would now be married to him. It just so happened that Derek got there first. And Derek was not what Nicky would call a catch. If he’d been a fish, no fisherman would be boasting about him in the pub afterwards, put it that way. Derek had no social graces, no sense of humour and no hair. Mind you, the man did have sperm that could fly. Claire had once said she only had to look at him to get pregnant. Which was lucky, thought Nicky.

‘But the penalty,’ Whatever-His-Name-Was said, ‘was outrageous.’

‘Really,’ remarked Nicky.

Encouraged, Whatever-His-Name-Was continued. ‘We should go to a match sometime. I’ve got great tickets. I bet you’d like it if you tried. You’ve got to be open to new experiences.’

‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Nicky. ‘And then I’ll take you to one of my knitting fayres. I can tell you’d be a great knitter.’

He snorted. ‘Fuck off.’

The worst bit of a blind date was knowing that you had to get through all the social niceties that delayed getting your make-up off, undoing your tight jeans (by yourself) and climbing into bed. So Nicky didn’t bother with niceties any more. She stood up, put out her hand for a confident handshake, and said her usual line.

‘It’s been nice. But I don’t think it’s going to work.’

And then she put a twenty-pound note on the table and walked out, leaving him staring at the money. Only half an
hour later, she snuggled down in her bed and closed her eyes. And, to her surprise, saw Oscar getting into the car with his au pair. She turned over and snuggled down again.

If she’d known that Oscar was, at that moment, held fast against a warm heart, being carried upstairs, she might have fallen asleep more quickly than she did.

THE PHONE WOKE
Nicky early on Sunday morning. She picked it up and put it to her ear; two fruitless activities because she couldn’t yet speak. She tried to make a grunting noise and was rewarded with some phlegm lodging in her throat.

‘Auntie Nicky?’ asked Sarah-Jane into the silence.

Nicky’s mouth said, ‘Hello, darling,’ but no sound came out. There was a considerable pause.

‘Aunty Nicky?’

Nicky gave a cough and her voice woke with a start. ‘Yes, sweetheart,’ she bellowed.

‘Gosh, are you all right?’ asked Sarah-Jane. ‘You sound awful.’

Nicky smiled. Her eldest niece was taking after her mother more and more each day.

‘That’s nothing,’ Nicky said, feeling her hair. ‘You should see me. I look like a badger’s bottom. And not in a good way.’

Sarah-Jane snorted with laughter. ‘Mummy says can you bring your swimming costume today?’ she asked eventually.

‘Why? Are we having a bathing beauties competition?’

‘No. We’re going swimming.’

‘Phew. For a minute there I’d thought I’d have to wax my legs.’

Sarah-Jane had hysterics. Nicky did enjoy making her ten-year-old niece laugh. All you had to do was be honest.

‘What’s the time?’ she asked.

‘Nine o’clock.’

It was Nicky’s turn to pause. ‘Are you trying to tell me,’ she asked slowly and clearly, ‘that you woke me at nine o’clock on a
Sunday
?’

‘Yes.’ Increasingly hysterical laughter.

‘Say bye bye.’

‘Badger’s bottom,’ came the giggled response.

‘That’s good enough for me,’ mumbled Nicky, and rang off.

She pressed the off button on her phone and dropped it to the floor. She tried to leave it there, but it was no good. She hung out of her bed to put it back in its holder, her body half in, half out of the bed, her hair skimming the floor. She found to her surprise that this was a spectacularly comfortable position, stretching her back out like a cat. She lay there for a while, eyes shut, smile on her face, before extracting the other half of her body out of bed. She scrunched her neat, pink feet into the beaded, embroidered slippers which lay, ever ready, under the bed, and flip-flopped to the kitchen.

Radio on, kettle on, toaster on. Sunday was on.

After she’d finished a thorough clean of her house, she drove to her sister Claire’s house to the
Desert Island Discs
theme tune, wondering idly why none of the radio guests had ever asked for a five-star hotel as their luxury item. This guest – the latest lad-lit novelist to have written a startlingly
honest book about contemporary masculine alienation – had just asked for a football, so he could practise ‘keepie-uppie’.

‘Twat,’ muttered Nicky as she parked outside her sister’s house.

Nicky often asked the girls to come and visit her at her flat, and when they did, they loved it there, but Claire always found it so much easier for Nicky to come to her place. On the few occasions when Nicky had insisted, Claire had either turned up late or phoned at the last minute to explain why one of the girls was refusing to get into the car. Eventually Nicky just accepted that this was the way it was. She was the free-and-single Mohammed, Claire the mother-of-three mountain.

She opened the wrought-iron gate and walked down the path to her sister’s front garden, waving at niece number two, Isabel, at the window. Niece number three, Abigail, answered the door.

‘You came!’ she jumped on the spot.

‘No I didn’t!’ cried Nicky, mirroring her tone. ‘I left him in the restaurant.’

Abigail laughed without knowing why.

Isabel leapt out of the front room into the hall, Sarah-Jane appeared at the top of the stairs and their mother, Nicky’s older sister by six years, appeared at the kitchen doorway, tea-towel in hand.

‘Please don’t teach them new words,’ she said with a weary smile.

‘And a hello to you too!’

Nicky turned back to her nieces. ‘Right!’ she cried. ‘I want kisses from everyone.’

The girls rushed forward and Nicky kissed her nieces in turn, hung up her coat, took off her shoes and then approached her sister. They went into the kitchen.

‘You don’t mind taking them swimming, do you?’ asked Claire. ‘They loved it so much last time.’

‘Nope.’

‘Can we go to the cinema afterwards?’ asked Sarah-Jane.

Claire made the unique sound of an unimpressed mother, a cross between ‘Um’ and ‘Up’. A sort of ‘Uhgpt’ the
hgpt
silent.

‘Please,’ added Sarah-Jane quickly. ‘If you’ve got time.’

‘Hmm, we’ll see,’ said Nicky. ‘But what film would a ten-year-old, an eight-year-old and a six-year-old all want to watch?’

They were happy to tell her and she found that her Sunday was mapped out.

Eight hours later, Oscar was having dinner with his dad, and he was not going to eat the Brussels sprouts.

‘They look like bogeys,’ he told his dad.

‘Crikey.’ Mark grimaced. ‘I don’t want to see your bogeys.’

Oscar laughed and then scowled. He did not want to find his dad funny tonight. He was angry, and determined to stay angry. Being the last one to be picked up from a friend’s birthday party was one thing, but when he’d specifically asked his dad to be on time because his friend was a dork was
well
annoying. His dad had never been on time. But half an hour late! He’d had to sit with the family while his schoolmate had opened all his presents. His schoolmate’s mum had made ridiculous clucking noises of worry for him which had made him want to hit her. And then, when it got to half an hour,
she’d actually come over to give him a cuddle. He’d thought he was being buried alive. Then finally his dad had arrived.

‘God,’ he’d heard Mark say to the mum in the hall, ‘I’m
so
sorry.’

‘No, don’t worry! We’ve been having fun.’

‘I just had to get something finished –’

‘Yes of course you did. I don’t know how you manage.’

Why did they always say that? fumed Oscar. What did he have to
manage
? Most of the kids in his school only had one parent, so why was his dad the only one who was crap at it? Was he a more difficult child to manage than all the other kids at school? He was definitely not more difficult to manage than Stan Smith who could spit from the sandpit to the back of the swings and kept showing you his willy in the playground. He bet no one ever told Stan Smith’s mum that they didn’t know how she coped. So his dad just must be the most crap parent ever.

So he stopped laughing at the bogey joke and instead tutted, huffed and pushed his plate away.

‘Oscar!’ cried Mark.

‘I hate Brussels sprouts.’

‘OK. No need to be so rude. I did cook them for you.’

Oscar sort of snarled, his upper lip curling up. ‘Am I supposed to be grateful?’

Mark sighed. He didn’t know the answer to that.

‘I hate them too,’ he said quietly. ‘But they’re good for you and I want you to be strong and healthy.’ He sighed. ‘Because I love you.’

Oscar pulled the skin off the corner of his thumbnail and kicked the table leg with his foot while Mark took his plate away.

After the girls were tucked up in bed, Claire and Nicky sat down in the kitchen with a candle flickering in the middle of the table, a celebratory bottle of wine for Nicky’s promotion and a Janis Ian CD of lilting desperation on in the background, which was doing an excellent job of bringing them both crashing down into depression just in time for Monday morning.

‘We should go away,’ suggested Claire suddenly. ‘Have a week’s holiday somewhere together.’

Nicky raised her eyebrows. They’d never gone on holiday together. She was surprised – by the offer and by how touched she felt. Mind you, it would be hell.

‘Mm.’ She nodded eagerly. ‘Where d’you have in mind?’

‘Who bloody cares?’ snorted Claire. ‘Let Derek see what it’s like to do everything –
everything
– breakfast, laundry, ironing, cleaning, lunches, bath-time, night shift,’ she counted them off on her fingers, ‘completely on his own.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Nicky. She started counting on her fingers. ‘Swimming, lunch, cinema. All by yours truly. I believe you’ve just had seven hours to yourself today.’

Claire’s face expanded as she prepared for more finger-counting. ‘I did the vacuuming, washing, ironing, prepared one ballet bag, one Brownie bag, three lunchboxes and two tea boxes, and arranged two play-dates. I’d hardly sat down when you got back.’

Nicky frowned. ‘Shouldn’t you be having this conversation with Derek instead of me?’

Claire grimaced. ‘Thanks for your sense of sisterhood.’

‘Exactly!’ retorted Nicky. ‘I’m your sister, not your partner.’

They downed their celebratory wine in antagonistic silence for a while before Claire spoke. ‘Sorry. I must sound so ungrateful. To you, I mean.’

Nicky bristled. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Well, I just, you know.’ She shrugged. ‘Here I am, with a husband and three healthy children – three healthy
daughters
– and yet I’m complaining.’

Nicky spoke slowly and clearly. ‘I would not want to be married to Derek.’

‘Well, of course not!’ exploded Claire. ‘Because he’s not bloody here most of the time! And when he is he’s playing bloody golf! Of all the hobbies to take up! He has to pick the one that takes up a whole day. I said to him yesterday, “Are you just unhappy here?” And you know what he said?’

Nicky shook her head.

‘He said, “No, darling, but you do get so
angry
nowadays.”’ Claire stared at Nicky. Nicky stared back. Claire let out a splurt of annoyance. Nicky blinked.

‘“
Angry
!”’ repeated Claire angrily. Nicky nodded. ‘“
ANGRY
!”’ she repeated again. ‘I nearly knifed him in the bloody face!’ she cried.

Nicky looked down to hide her smile.

‘Ooh, how was your date last night?’ asked Claire suddenly. ‘I can’t believe I haven’t asked.’

‘Two.’

‘Out of five or ten?’

‘Twenty.’

Claire’s jaw dropped. ‘Derek thought he was great.’