The Other Side of the Story (38 page)

I frowned at my screen to show that I meant business, and off I went. I did my best. I typed words, yes, they were definitely words - but were they any good?

I yawned. Sleepiness settled on me like a blanket and I found it hard to concentrate. I had had very interrupted sleep the night before. And the night before. And the night before that…

Most nights Ema woke two or three times and even though, in theory, Anton and I shared the getting-up, in practice I did most of it. Partly my own fault — I had to check for myself that she was OK; and partly her fault — in the middle of the night she preferred me to Anton.

I would make myself a cup of coffee. Just as soon as Zulema went out for the afternoon; I simply could not bear to have to stand in the 'kitchen' and make 'conversation' with her while I waited for the kettle to boil. Alert for noises of her departure, I waited. I longed to put my head down and have a short nap but, inevitably, Zulema would catch me and she thought I was pitiful enough as it was.

Then I heard her frogmarching Ema back out. I hurried to the kitchen, made my coffee, then resumed 'work'.

When my word-counter told me I had done five hundred words, I stopped. But in my heart I knew that about four hundred and seventy of the five hundred were rubbish. If only this book would not persist in being a sad one.

Looking for advice — or at least distraction - I rang Miranda. Yes, Miranda England,
that
Miranda. When we had met at my catastrophic first signing, I had thought she was as faraway and remote as the stars. But we had run into each other at a couple of subsequent publishing events - the Dalkin Emery sales conference and the author party - and she had been a lot warmer. Anton said she was only being nice because I was a success now, and perhaps there was some truth in that. But she was different to the person I had first thought she was, and when I discovered she had been having a terrible time trying to have a baby, it humanized her for me.

She had finally managed to get pregnant and had taken time off from writing to avoid having a miscarriage, but she was still available to listen to my writing woes.

'I'm stuck,' I said, and explained my dilemma.

'When in doubt,' she advised, 'put in a sex scene.' But I could not write a sex scene. Dad might read it.

All at once, I became aware of the noise of a lorry chugging outside. At that moment the doorbell rang and voices sounded from the front step. Male voices. Shouty, tarry, cement-coated male voices. I thought I overheard the word 'cunt'. Could it be… ?

I glanced through my little window. They had arrived! Macko and his team had finally arrived to fix my house!

'Miranda, I must go! Thank you.'

It had been worth losing my toner and night-cream. I could have kissed Zulema. Had I not been afraid of being turned into a pillar of salt.

I opened the front door and let the Mad Paddys stomp in. Because they all looked the same, I was never sure exactly how many there were but today there appeared to be four. The pick-up that chugged on the spot outside contained big, thick pieces of wood — the elusive lintels! Shouting and trying to order each other about, the Mad Paddys carried them upstairs, dislodging lumps from the walls and sizeable chips from the coving. (Original, irreplaceable, but at the time I was happy enough to overlook it.)

I rang Anton. 'They're here! With the lintels! They're removing the old ones as we speak! Leaving enormous holes in the walls!'

Silence. More silence. 'Anton? Did you hear me?'

'Oh, I heard you alright. I'm just so happy I might puke.' For the rest of the day I sat in my study trying to write while a team of builders swarmed over my house shouting, banging and calling each other 'cunts'. I sighed happily. All was well with the world.

When Anton came home from work he looked around furtively and mouthed, 'Is she still here?' He meant Zulema.

'She's left for the day but the boys are still here!'

'Jayzus.' He was impressed. On the rare days they came, they tended to slope off at about four.

'I have a suggestion,' I said. 'But you're not going to like it.'

He eyed me warily.

'Because they're here in person, let's have a word with them,' I said. 'It will have more impact than doing it over the phone. We need to praise them for the good work they've done.' I had read this in some article on how to manage staff. 'Then we have to, you know,
scare
them into finishing off the work. Kind of like good cop, bad cop. How about it?'

'So long as I can be the good cop.'

'No.'

'Arse.'

'Come on.' I led him into our front room, where the lads were sitting on the new lintels, drinking tea, ankle-deep in sugar granules.

'Macko, Bonzo, Tommo, Spazzo.' I nodded at each one politely. (I was
fairly
sure these were their names.)' Thank you for coming back, and removing the old lintels. Those lintels are well and truly, er… removed. If you replace the new lintels as efficiently as you removed the old ones, we will be very happy.'

Then I dug Anton in the back and urged him forward. 'As you know, lads, you were meant to be finished more than three weeks ago,' he said sternly, then seemed to lose his nerve. He clutched his head and said, 'Please, lads, we're going mad here. There's a small child involved. Er, thank you.'

We took our leave, and as soon as we had closed the door, the room exploded with guffaws. I swung the door open again; Macko was wiping his eyes and saying, 'Poor cunts.'

We backed out once more. Anton and I presented wary looks to each other and I was the first to speak. Well,' I said. 'I think that went rather well.'

Anton and I were in bed. It was only eight o'clock but we were in the back bedroom, the only room in the house with intact walls. We had moved the television in three weeks earlier and since then we pretty much lived in there. Because there was nothing for us to sit on, we were in bed.

I was flicking through the Jo Malone catalogue, wishing I could climb through the glossy pages and live in it; it was a serene, fragrant, dust-free world. Anton was watching a sitcom because he was putting together a deal with Chloe Drew, the young, hot lead, and Ema was marching about purposefully in her vest and pants combo and favourite pink wellies that she even slept in. Her round, squeezy thighs could have been made of latex.

'Ema, you look like the circus strongman,' Anton flicked his eyes from the TV. 'All you're missing is the handlebar moustache.'

Ema had a selection of her favourite things — Jessie, her beloved wrench; a curly dog, which Viv, Baz and Jez had given her, also called 'Jessie' and an old moccasin of Anton's, which
also
answered to the name 'Jessie' - which she was moving from one part of the room to the other, lining them up according to some vision only she was privy to. 'Dinky,' she said.

Her hair grew strangely with two long pieces framing her face, but shorter at the back and on top. She looked like a mod — even at times like Paul Weller - but was the most adorable creature. I could have watched her for ever.

I waited until Anton's programme had finished before showing him the piece in
Book News
about Gemma. I watched him reading it, studying his face, trying to gauge his response.

'What do you think?' I asked. 'And please don't be all optimistic and say it means nothing.'

'OK,' he said. 'It's a bit freaky. How did she manage to get both your agent and your editor?'

If Anton, optimist of the century, thought it a bit freaky, it must be catastrophic.

'The book isn't about us,' Jojo said.

'Well, that's good. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.'

'But Gemma told Jojo to say hello to me. The whole thing… I know it's illogical but I feel this awful…
dread
. Like something terrible is going to happen.'

'What sort of something terrible?'

'I don't know. Just a feeling I have, that she's going to destroy everything for us, for you and me.'

'You and me? She can't touch us.'

'Tell me that you will always love me and never leave me.'

He looked at me with the utmost seriousness. 'But you know that.'

'So say it.'

'Lily, I will always love you and never leave you.'

I nodded. Good. That should help.

'Would it make you feel any bit more secure if we got married?' Anton asked.

I winced. Getting married would fast-track any dormant disasters.

'I'll take that as a no, then. Better take the twenty-grand ring back to Tiffany's in that case.'

Ema shoved her wrench at me; it clanged off my teeth. 'Lily, kiss.'

I gave the wrench a big smacker.

Entirely unprovoked, Ema had started calling Anton and me by our first names. This had alarmed us terribly, we did not want people thinking we were liberal Islington types. To lead by example, we had taken to calling each other Mum and Dad.

'Now bring your wrench and get a kiss from Dad.'

'Anton,' she corrected me, with a frown.

'Dad,' I said.

'Anton.'

After Anton had kissed the wrench, he said, 'I have a present for you.'

'Not a twenty-grand ring from Tiffany's, I hope.'

He fished his arm under the bed on his side and produced a Jo Malone bag. It was a replacement of the toner I had given Zulema.

'Anton! We're skint!'

'Not for ever. When me and Mikey pull off this deal, we'll be loaded. And there's your royalty dosh coming at the end of September.'

'OK,' I was already mollified. 'My pores thank you. But why are you giving me a present?'

'We have to live a little. And I'm hoping you'll have sex with me.'

'You don't have to give me presents to get me to have sex with you.' I smiled. He smiled back.

'Just ring the builders for my next three turns,' I said. 'And I'll do anything you want.'

'Deal.'

26

Another week passed. And another. Macko and the boys continued to appear spasmodically and unexpectedly — enough to keep us balanced precariously on a knife-edge of hope — but not so often that anything meaningful was achieved. They had removed the old lintels, but done very little about installing the new ones.

Having holes in the bedroom wall is fine in July and August — agreeable even — but not when it is almost September and the weather is heading towards autumn.

Every morning, I felt as though I was holding my breath until one of them arrived and Anton rang me about twenty times a day to see if anyone had showed.

I bartered away most of my phone obligations -I was having
a lot
of sex with Anton, and Zulema had just about cleared me out — so I did not get to hear most of the builders' inventive excuses, but according to Anton they were good; Spazzo broke his wrist, Macko's uncle died, Bonzo's uncle died, Tommo's van was stolen, then
his
uncle died.

'What is this?' Anton raged. 'Dead Uncle Week?'

Then, just when we managed to get a couple of days without anyone's uncle dying, it rained; the new lintels could not go in while it was raining. For four unprecedented weeks the weather had been glorious but as soon as we needed it to be dry, it rained.

I was being dragged, dragged up from the bottom of the sea. With effort I broke the surface of sleep. Woken by the sound of Ema crying, the fourth time tonight. It had been a bad night, even by Ema's standards.

'I'll go,' Anton said.

'Thanks.' I tumbled back into a coma. Then someone was shaking my shoulder and I was a dead weight, trying to hoist myself to consciousness. It was Anton. 'She's sick. She's puked on herself.'

'Change her clothes and bedclothes.'

It felt only two seconds later when I was again pulled up from the bottom of the ocean. 'I'm sorry, baby, she wants you.'

I must wake up, I must wake up, I must wake up
.

I forced myself from my bed, one of the hardest things I have ever done and went to Ema. Her face was bright red, her room smelt of sick and she was still grinning like a loon.

'Lily!' She was thrilled to see me, even though it was only fifty minutes since the last time.

I lifted her to me; she was so hot. She rarely got ill. She was a hardy little creature who, when she fell over and sustained the kind of bumps that had other children shrieking the house down, just rubbed her wounded limb and got up. In fact she was so hardy that there were times when she mocked other children who had hurt themselves and were crying: she laughed at them, then screwed her knuckles in her eyes and went, 'Boo hoo, hoo,' mimicking their wails. (I had tried to stop her from doing this because it went down extraordinarily badly with the other mothers.)

'Let's take your temperature.'

Her armpit temperature was 98.1, ear 98.3, oral, 98.5, rectal - 'Sorry, darling' - 98.6. In every orifice, no matter what way you looked at it, she was OK.

I checked for a rash, then lifted her neck to see if it was stiff. 'Oi,' she said. That worried me, so I did it a few more times, until she began to laugh.

'You're fine,' I told her. 'Go back to sleep. I have to write a book tomorrow.'

She placed her hand over her eyes and sang, 'I see you.'

'Darling, it's quarter past four in the morning, visibility is terrible.'

I sat down in the rocking chair, hoping to lull her back to sleep when, to my enormous astonishment, a head appeared at the bedroom window. A man who looked to be in his early forties. It was a moment before I realized he was a burglar. I had always thought burgling was a young man's game. Evidently, he had climbed up the scaffolding. We looked at each other through the window, frozen in surprise.

'Don't bother,' I said. 'We have nothing.'

He did not move.

'Our Venezuelan au pair refused to live in,' I called, holding Ema tight to me. 'She would prefer to stay in Cricklewood with a man she barely knows. A man called Bloggers. I had some expensive skin-care but she's cleaned me out. It's all in Cricklewood now.'

I let that information settle and when I looked again, the burglar had gone as silently as he had arrived. Then I went back to my bedroom, woke Anton and told him what had happened.

'This is fucking ridiculous,' he said. 'I'll talk to Macko in the morning.'

True to his word, first thing, Anton got on the phone with jauntiness born of terrible rage.

'
Morning
, Macko. Any chance of seeing you and your colleagues today? No? Why's that then? A death in the family?Don't tell me who, let me guess. Your dog? Your fourteenth cousin, once removed? Oh, your father? That must be, ooh, the third time this month your old man has passed over. Another bout of death, eh? He really should try a course of cod liver oil.'

Anton fell silent, listened, listened some more, then muttered something and hung up. 'Shit!'

'What?'

'Macko's father really has died. He was crying. They'll never come back now.'

I was in despair. I could not blame Gemma for this, but I decided I would anyway.

Later that morning, I had reason to think once more of Gemma: Tania Teal biked over a completed copy of
Crystal Clear
. It was a beauty, an impressively weighty hardback with a cover similar to
Mimi's Remedies
. That cover had been a slightly blurry oil-painting of a pretty, witchy woman against a background of duck-egg blue. This was a slightly blurry oil-painting of a pretty, witchy woman against a lavender background. It actually looked like the
same
slightly blurry oil-painting until I compared it with
Mimi's Remedies
and saw there were tons of differences. The
Mimi's Remedies
woman had blue eyes. The
Crystal Clear
lady had green eyes. The
Mimi's Remedies
woman wore button boots. The
Crystal Charwoman
wore kitten heels.
Tons
of differences.

It would go on sale in two months' time, on the twenty-fifth of October, but from tomorrow would be on sale in the airports. 'Good luck, little book,' I said and kissed it, trying to protect it from whatever black magic Gemma had spun.

If I had not died of exhaustion by tonight, I would bring it to Irina's.

Irina's circumstances had changed. She had met a Ukrainian 'businessman' called Vassily who had plucked her from grim old Gospel Oak and installed her in a serviced apartment in St John's Wood. He was bonkers about her. She still worked part-time but that was only out of love of Clinique, not because she needed the money. 'I think of having to live without the free semples and I think I might die.' (She had struck her breast dramatically, then flipped a compact to examine her Upline.)

I had already visited her in her new home: a large, three-bedroomed apartment in a purpose-built block boasting a service entrance. Green leaves clustered at the second-floor windows and even though this was the home of a Russian kept-woman who was being bankrolled by a Ukrainian gangster, it felt terribly respectable. A little bit more gold than I would choose, but all in all, it was very nice. I especially admired the lack of dust.