The Playdate (31 page)
It is a few hours before I can bring myself to go to bed after he leaves.
The oven clock ticks against the hum of the fridge.
I walk around my flat, slowly, aimlessly, licking my scraped lip, hating these walls that someone else painted. Vaguely, I recall there was something nice about this flat once. Something to do with the light. And then Suzy asked me to fetch some things from her house while she was in the hospital having the twins, and I walked in with Henry and Rae in tow to find Jez walking around naked and jet-lagged, straight off the plane from Australia. Jez, the man I never thought I’d see again. Then this flat became a place with no light. A place of secrets. A place where lies are locked away at night.
I survey each room, mentally packing all that Rae and I own. It doesn’t come to much. All that work, for so little.
So, this is it. The end.
Can you have an end to something that had no beginning?
I wander into Rae’s room, sit down, and rest my head on her duvet to watch her sleeping.
She murmurs. The curl of her top lip is lying sweetly pushed up against the pillow, and I drift off into darkness, recalling the first time I saw it.
* * *
Friday night in Soho. I am sitting in Ellroy’s with Guy, Sophie, and all the boys from the studio, so drunk that the street outside is now just silver flashes of moving light streaked with the red lights of late-night cars and the blue neon of a lap-dancing club opposite.
“Oh-weyo-wey. Oh-wey-yo-weh!” Sophie sings, grabbing my hand and making me hold up the sound design gong I received at tonight’s advertising awards.
“Shh!” I admonish as Guy glances over. He is shaking the hand of a man who has just walked in, with a hearty laugh, while shooting stern looks at me. However pleased he was with me, and however much champagne he bought us all tonight to celebrate, I know he expects me to represent Rocket at all times and that does not include me or my paralytic flatmate throwing up on the floor of his private members’ club.
“Right, guys, taxis are outside!” Rob behind the bar shouts, leaving us to drunkenly organize ourselves into different London postcode groups for the ride home.
“Give me a sec, Soph,” I say. “Got to get my coat.” I arrive back to find they have all gone.
“Sophie—you twat,” I murmur, knowing she’ll think I’ve gone in the other cab to North London with Guy, and won’t even notice I am missing till she gets home. And she’s left my award on the table.
The bar is still half-full, so I wander to the counter, ask Rob
to order me another taxi, and buy a fizzy water to sober up with while I wait.
I sit holding the silver block, finally allowing myself to look at it. I can feel the tears welling, and know that once I get home I can crawl into bed and let them flow, away from the eyes of my colleagues who think I should be pleased to have my work validated so publicly.
When all I can think is, Mum won’t see it. And without Mum, pushing me to take all those opportunities she never had, I wouldn’t have this stupid thing.
As I stare at it, I become aware of a tall man taking the seat next to me, where he takes off his coat and orders a bourbon.
“Yours?” he says after a minute, looking at the award.
I nod.
“Congratulations,” he says.
“Hmm,” I mutter, sipping my water. “Were you there? At the awards?”
“Me? No. I’m staying here,” he says, nodding upstairs. “On business, from the States.”
I turn to focus on him, as best as I can. He is wearing a sharp-cut suit, and from this side angle I can only see a dark sideburn and a tanned jaw under a sweep of hair.
“Funny, you sound English,” I murmur into my water, wondering whether it would be polite to rest my chin on the counter till my car gets here.
“I’m from London.” He smiles, taking his whisky from Rob with a nod. “I live in Denver.”
“Denver. Really. Wow. So what’s wrong with London, eh?” I mumble in a drunken attempt to make a joke. I decide to rest my chin on my hand instead.
“No, I like London—I have a business over there.”
“God, I love London,” I slur. “I love it.”
And with that my face slips off my hand. He smiles and points at my empty glass. “Can I get you another drink?”
“Um . . .” I mumble, trying to compose myself and finally getting his face into focus.
When I do, I think at first that I know him. And then I realize that I don’t. It’s just that his face is a face I was always going to see one day. There is some familiar combination of skin and color and bone that was always on its way to this moment. And for a second, just for a second, being so sure of that one thing takes away the pain of Mum.
“Sorry, Callie,” Rob says. “Taxi’s going to be another forty.”
I nod, as if I am annoyed. But all I can think is that I want the pain to go away some more.
It is only as I wake the next morning beside the man upstairs at Ellroy’s that I notice his wedding ring, on the hand lying on the pillow.
It lies pointing up at his mouth, which has fallen open in sleep. There is an indolent curl to his top lip, which I have already learned to love brushing hungrily between my own, and I shake my head as I realize that even though I have now seen that gold ring, it does not stop me from wanting to do it again.
So I leave before he wakes. Before I can find out his surname or his mobile number. Because that way, if I am gripped by this mad notion of wanting to kiss this man again, I’ll never be able to find him, however much I want to.
And I sneak out, unaware of the mark he has made on me.
* * *
Rae shifts her head and rolls over. So I stand up and then crawl into my own bed, still in my clothes.
I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling. I lie there for a while, realizing it is two and a half years since I looked at this Victorian ceiling rose and thought how pretty it was. I stare at the intricate latticework of the plaster, my mind slipping forward to four years after that fateful night in Ellroy’s.
It is a rainy day in Greek Street. I am running down the street in a blur of tears, searching in vain for Sophie in the Coach and Horses because her mobile number is no longer working. And then there he is, in the middle of the street—Guy.
“Bloody hell, mate, what’s up with you?”
“Tom wants me to move out,” I whisper, as he pulls me into a steamy café where two girls with beehives and red lipstick sit drinking tea. “He’s given me a week to find somewhere else.”
“Oh, mate,” he murmurs, unable to keep himself from glancing at his watch, his mind half back at the studio. “Must be in the air. You heard me and Claire have split up?”
I nod a sorry, sipping my tea. Tom and I had already heard through the Soho grapevine about Ankya, the leggy Polish photographer.
He pulls out his mobile. “Listen, bloke opposite me in Ally Pally’s got a cheap flat for rent—it’s a bit run-down but it would do you for a couple of months.”
I nod tearfully while he begins to make calls to neighbors to track down the landlord’s number.
“Here you go.” Guy grins, writing down the number for me and standing up, his duty done. “Shame. I’ve just sold my place to a bloke I used to be at school with, or we’d be neighbors!”
It was a month later as I walked back into my new flat in Churchill Road, reeling with shock after bumping into a naked Jez in Suzy’s house, that an image finally came into focus in my mind.
The night we celebrated my sound design award in Ellroy’s bar.
Of Guy shaking the hand of a man who walked in with a hearty laugh of surprised recognition, just before he and everyone else left to go home.
A tall man, in a black coat, who five minutes later would remove his coat and offer to buy me a drink.
The bloke who, four years later, would bump into his old schoolmate, Guy, in Ellroy’s again, and mention he was moving his family back from the States to London and would be looking for a house.
Apparently, Guy told me, the private sale saved him a couple of thousand pounds in estate agent fees, so he and Jez split the difference.
What a deal.
* * *
Is it cold tonight, or is it me? Pulling the duvet over me from the side, I turn off the bedside lamp and try to shut out any more images of this mess I have made of my life.
But there’s one I can’t shut out. Of the shock on Tom’s face, when I met him by the bright lights of the London Eye for a drink on a freezing, dark night and tearfully told him I was stupidly, unbelievably pregnant with Rae, two months after we started seeing each other at Sophie’s party.
“But I had really bad mumps when I was a kid,” he said in disbelief. “The doctor says this wasn’t supposed to happen.”
I meant to tell him about my one-night stand with Jez, I really did. Then Tom smiled, bewildered. His smile grew, full of shock and wonder. Around us, armies of tense-faced commuters marched to Waterloo. The Thames roared beside us, streaked with the liquid-gold leak of river lights along the banks. Things
became distorted in all that blinding light and blackness and noise. Tom mistook my tears for fear about him and his intent. He pulled me into the railings, away from the crowds, and whispered into my ear that whatever happened, he would look after me and this baby for the rest of his life.
I hid inside his big arms, and allowed myself to hear what he was saying. It was going to be OK.
So when I opened my mouth to tell him the truth, I hesitated. And as I hesitated, I watched the truth float silently out of my mouth in a misty cloud of frozen breath and disappear into a pitch-black sky.
A second of hesitation that turned into a life sentence, for me, for Rae, for Tom.
I lick a small spot of blood from my lip again. Jez likes to leave his mark. And, not for the first time, it hurts.
Debs started to hear noises at nine-forty-five the next morning, when the American woman’s children and husband had left the house.
It started with a tapping on the wall. A gentle tapping that followed her up the stairs and then into the bedroom.
“It’s nothing,” Debs whispered to herself, recalling Alison’s words. “You’re anxious. It’s in your imagination.”
Then the Hoover joined in. Leaning against the wall upstairs, its tortured whine vibrating through brick. In the kitchen, it was the blender. Every other minute, for one minute, shrieking with high-pitched hysteria. A radio started in the downstairs hall at such a volume that the Radio 4 speaker’s clearly enunciated consonants were obliterated into a sibilant rumble.
“Stay calm,” Debs whispered to herself, cleaning the bathroom blinds one by one with a wet cloth, wiping dust from one end to the other and back again. “It’s just normal noise. This is the type of noise families make.”
But by 1:30
P.M.,
there were no more gaps between the noises. A telly was now blaring upstairs, along with a hair dryer. They had harmonized into one continuous, painful drone, like the work of some new young avant-garde composer, percussion provided by an explosion of banging doors.
Then, at 2
P.M.,
there were new noises.
At first Debs didn’t know what she was listening to. As she lay on her bed, trying to read a book, it crept through the walls with vicious intent. Horrified, she put the book down. Unmistakable.
“No,” she moaned, stuffing her earplugs farther into her ears till the cartilage felt stretched, pulling the pillow more tightly round her head.
She couldn’t be imagining this. She couldn’t be.
Shortly after she turned off the telly in her bedroom, Suzy walked slowly downstairs, running her hands through her freshly dried hair, checking that Jez had not arrived back from lunch at his parents’ in Hampstead with the kids. Typical, the first time he had ever taken all three kids at once by himself, and yet all she could feel was unease.
