You, Me and Him (3 page)

He runs up to his bedroom, slams the door and turns his music on loudly. I follow minutes later and find him curled up in a ball on his bed, sucking his thumb, a corner of his pale blue cot blanket poked in his nose. Long-suffering Rocky is fighting to breathe against his chest, his big eyes almost popping out with the pressure of being squished into this awkward position by his master. George is breathing heavily, trying to inhale the comforting smell of the blanket. He calls it ‘Baby’ because it has travelled everywhere with him since he was born. He even takes it to school, hiding it in his PE bag. I remember the panic we’d once had after leaving it behind. I’d been pushing George in his buggy in the supermarket and nothing I said could make the absence of Baby less painful. Then he had fallen quiet. We were in the checkout queue and he’d grabbed a lady’s jersey skirt, the exact same pale blue as Baby, taken the hem and pressed it to his nose, his eyes shut, the pain instantly taken away.

I walk to my bedroom, clutching the pregnancy kits with clammy hands. I have to know before Finn comes home.
Finding out you are pregnant can be a joyous moment for you and your partner
, I read on the back of the pregnancy kit box.

I take the test and pray.

The line turns blue.

I take the test again. Best out of three.

Another blue line.

I sit down at my desk and write an email to Emma, my ADHD friend. I met her through a website support group for ADHD mums and dads. George was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder when he was five, nearly six years old. Emma has a seventeen-year-old boy called Nat with ADHD. She’s so proud because he’s just become an apprentice at British Gas.

Fingers trembling against the keys, I tap, ‘
Emma, if I have another child, what are the chances he or she could have ADHD? Am terrified. Have just found out I’m pregnant. Gene is stronger in boys, isn’t it?
’

I pick up the phone, too restless to wait for a reply. I key in a mobile number. Pick up. ‘Thank God you’re there,’ I say.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Are you free?’

‘What, now?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, I’m about to go to rehearsals.’

‘Oh, don’t worry.’ I can feel tears coming on.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Everything. George nearly got run over today.’

‘Is he all right?’

‘He’s in his room.’

‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

‘I’m pregnant.’

‘I’ll be round in a minute.’

‘But your rehearsals …’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he cuts in.

‘Thanks, Clarky.’ Already I feel relieved. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

A message appears in my outbox from Emma. ‘
Josie, congratulations first, although can see it’s terrifying prospect too. The condition is two point five times more common among boys than girls. There’s always a possibility but try not to worry. Easier said than done, I know
 …’

I go back into my bedroom and lie face down against the pillow. Sometimes I wish I could rewind time and go back to those carefree days. If I had a magic carpet I would fly back to that world with no responsibilities. No fear. No George. The world of smoky pepperoni pizzas and warm beer; lazy days by the river and drinking coffee in run-down cafes.

When it was just Finn and me.

And Clarky.

CHAPTER THREE

I met Finn when I was eighteen and living in Cambridge. I thought it was going to be another ordinary day at the restaurant, washing the glasses, laying the tables, renewing the flowers, refilling the olive oil bottles, writing the specials on the board. I was too busy to think about meeting anyone, my face flushed from the hot ovens in the kitchen and my feet sore from racing around while I tried to remember what everyone had ordered. Look and you never find. Don’t look and they walk through the door.

I was living with Clarky, my old neighbour from home. Growing up, he was like the brother I’d never had. After me, Mum couldn’t have more children so instead she’d decided to have dogs. She’d bought an Alsatian called Molly and a mongrel called Tinker who was a mixture, we thought, of Bassett hound and Jack Russell. Tinker had a strong chest and sturdy front legs. She took
us
for walks.

Clarky’s real name was Justin Clarke but I called him Clarky. He’d always been popular at school; not in an obvious way, he was just different from all the other children. The other boys loved football and sport – which he liked, too – but Clarky was also a brilliant musician. He started playing the violin when he was four. ‘I only began to talk properly when I was four,’ I’d told him.

‘Yes, but I wasn’t really serious at four,’ he’d explained dismissively, with a little wrinkle of his nose, ‘I only started playing seriously when I was seven.’

His father, short and severe with a dark beard, had taught him every day for at least two hours. He looked like the type who’d own a long wooden ruler which he’d rap against your knuckles if you weren’t behaving. When I was younger I didn’t like going round to Clarky’s for tea because I’d be told off if I didn’t sit upright in my chair. I didn’t dare lean my elbows on the table either. Clarky’s dad played the flute and his mother was an opera singer so it wasn’t surprising that they wanted their son to follow in their exalted musical footsteps. My parents’ jobs hadn’t seemed nearly so interesting. Mum had looked after me full-time when I was very young but when I was at primary school she’d started to run a Bed and Breakfast. Before she married, she was secretary to an eccentric scientist who had worked in a shed at the bottom of his garden. My father was a solicitor. He looked important in his dark suit and polished shoes but, growing up, I hadn’t seen much of him. He’d commute into London and stay with his sister during the week, only to return grumpy and tired on a Friday evening. By Sunday he was full of laughter and fun, back to himself, either in the garden or sitting at the kitchen table making things out of wood. That was his passion. He’d made me a tree house where as a teenager I’d sit for hours, painting and drawing. On Sunday evening he had to go back to the ‘big smoke’ as he called it. ‘London leaves you grey by the end of the week,’ he’d admitted.

Clarky had been a mini-celebrity at school. His name was often read out during assembly. One day the headmistress, wearing her usual plum-coloured dress, beamed with pride, saying we must all congratulate Justin for being accepted into the Junior Royal Academy of Music. Each Saturday after that he’d travel by train to London wearing sensible trousers, a white shirt buttoned so high at the collar it looked like it was choking him, and a round-necked patterned jumper. He always carried a dark brown leather case that held his sheet music. I used to love the smell of that leather case. I would press it against my nose. ‘Josie, you’re mad!’ he’d say, trying to claw it back from my fingers.

‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I once asked him.

‘I want to go to Cambridge, like my grandfather, and read music. You?’

‘I want to be an artist, like … Michelangelo! Or Leonardo da Vinci, that wouldn’t be so bad.’

‘He invented flying.’

‘Yes, I want to be like him.’

Clarky had the unfortunate label ‘teacher’s pet’, but miraculously this hadn’t annoyed the other boys because he wasn’t big-headed about his success. I think he’d been embarrassed by the attention. The others were in awe of him, though, just as I was. I would watch him staring out of the window during a maths class, in his own world. I used to long to know what he was thinking. Whatever it was, I’d imagined it to be mysterious and interesting compared to my own dizzy thoughts about what was going to happen in the next episode of
Dallas
. Clarky had pale grey eyes, a neat thin nose, and a mop of curly fair hair that went all fluffy when it was washed. ‘He’s like an angelic choirboy,’ Mum used to say, ‘and he always helps me with the washing up.’

He wasn’t perfect, though. When he was ten he went through a weird phase of not talking to me in class. We caught the big coach to school together but he wouldn’t sit next to me on the lurid red and purple-patterned seats. He’d sit at the back with all the other boys instead, so I sat next to Tatiana Prickman who was pale-skinned with bright blue eyes, and appeared homesick from the moment she stepped on. She was slight with long blonde hair caught limply at the sides of her head with plastic green hairclips. My hair was in a pudding-bowl cut. I have never forgiven Mum for that look, but she told me it was the most practical style to maintain. Tatiana was a gymnastics freak. She could bend and twist her body into any shape and would fly across the gym mats in a slick combination of somersaults, bends, flips and cartwheels while the rest of the class did handstands and forward rolls. We didn’t talk much on the school bus. Her arms were always firmly crossed as if she were guarding herself from any intrusion into her world.

I couldn’t understand why Clarky didn’t like me at school when we’d have such fun at the weekends. We’d watch Mum’s Bed and Breakfast guests from between the banisters at the top of the stairs. There was a Japanese man who patiently taught us origami. There was a rich American couple who couldn’t get the hang of our old-fashioned loo chain. Clarky and I would listen to them pulling it and then holding it down without letting go. We’d giggle as we watched Mum and Dad take it in turns to stand outside the door telling them to, ‘Release! Let go!’

‘Embarrassing to have to serve them eggs sunny-side up now,’ Dad had laughed as he skipped downstairs, loose change rattling in his trouser pockets.

Dad called us ‘Justin ’n’ Josie’. ‘You’re like two peas in a pod,’ he’d say. ‘I almost think of him as my own son now. Might send his parents a bill for his food.’

‘Why don’t you talk to me at school?’ I’d confronted Clarky one Sunday afternoon when we were singing and dancing in our sitting room. I was dressed up as Madonna with black lace gloves that I’d pinched from Mum’s drawers and an old pink suede mini skirt. Clarky was Freddie Mercury, dressed in one of my dad’s Hawaiian shirts. He looked nothing like him.

‘I do talk to you,’ he’d lied, jumping up and down on the sofa with an old white and navy Slazenger tennis racket held in front of him as a fake guitar.

‘No, you don’t.’ I stumbled in Mum’s knee-high black boots.

‘I certainly do.’

‘You don’t.’ I placed one hand on my hip. ‘One day, Clarky, I might not be around, then you’ll be sorry.’

He’d laughed. ‘Where will you be?’

‘Just … gone.’ I lifted my chin high and with a dramatic sniff turned away from him.

‘Dead?’

‘No, stupid, I mean I might play with someone else.’

Clarky stopped jumping. ‘None of the boys talk to the girls at school,’ he had reasoned. ‘It’s the way it is. It’s not because I don’t like you.’

‘Show me then,’ I’d said.

*

There was a definitive moment when I decided I would love Justin Clarke for ever. I was terrified as I stepped onto the coach one morning wearing a strange orthodontic helmet with thick black elastic bands and wires looped through hooks at the front of my teeth.

I took my place next to Tatiana, knowing she wouldn’t say anything but even she had looked shocked, putting a hand over her mouth and asking loudly, ‘Blimey, does it hurt?’

I’d turned to her in surprise. ‘Kills,’ I’d replied, enjoying the sympathy. ‘I have to wear it at night too.’

We were sitting in the front seat, level with the driver, Terry, who looked like he ate too many doughnuts.

‘Did you see Josie?’ I heard one of the boys saying, followed by roars of laughter. I stared ahead. One of them was walking back down the middle of the bus; my heartbeat quickened. Then he stuck his pimpled face right in front of me. It was Kevin, the leader of the pack. ‘Can you kiss with that thing? Wanna give it a try?’ More laughter from the back. ‘Are you a virgin?’ he’d continued. Terry ordered the boy to return to his seat immediately but Kevin ignored him.

I hesitated. ‘Of course I’m not!’ I finally replied, sure my voice had a lisp.

‘She’s not a virgin!’ he shouted down the bus.

‘Shut up, Kevin,’ Tatiana shouted back. ‘Crawl back into your dirty hole.’ I turned to her with amazement, almost envy.

‘What did you say,
Prickman
?’

‘She said, shut up and push off,’ I told him with renewed confidence.

‘SIT DOWN!’ yelled Terry, one eye on us, the other on the road. The coach swerved, tyres screeching against the tarmac. I heard more footsteps. Kevin grabbed one of the straps on my head and gave it a sharp yank.

‘Kevin, leave Josie alone.’ I turned round and there he was. Justin. My hero. Through the wires, I smiled at him and he smiled back. I was glowing inside. It was true love. But there was something equally pressing on my mind. ‘What’s a virgin?’ I whispered to Tatiana when the boys sat back down.

‘Someone who hasn’t had sex, stupid. You know, kissing a boy and all that stuff. Justin wants to kiss you,’ she’d added with a sharp dig in my stomach from her bony elbow.

‘No, he doesn’t!’ But I had felt an excited kick inside me, a punch of pure happiness.

‘I can tell you all about sex,’ she’d informed me before pulling a horrified face. ‘I saw my parents doing it.’

I gained another lifelong friend that day in Tatiana Prickman. She told me she’d always been quiet and self-contained because other people thought she was weird. ‘Do you have an invisible friend?’ she once asked me. I said yes, his name was Casper and he wore a green velvet cap. ‘He’s your guardian angel,’ she’d confirmed. ‘What’s your star sign?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m a Capricorn, a mountain goat. And, by the way, call me Tiana.’

Tiana taught me a game that would help me calculate just how much Justin Clarke loved Josie Mason. It worked out at 12 per cent. ‘It’s a stupid game,’ she’d assured me afterwards. ‘He definitely likes you.’

But she’d been wrong. We never went out together. Instead he went out with Rosie, a quiet mousy girl. I was consumed with jealousy when they shared a desk together, passed secret notes or exchanged coy glances.

‘Why don’t you fancy me?’ I’d asked him once.

‘You’re like my sister … ugh!’ So I went out with Kevin instead. It turned out his attention had been for a reason.

*

I had a rich uncle in Cambridge who had given Clarky and me his home to ‘housesit’ during our gap year. He had bought a three-month round-the-world air ticket. We watered the purple pansies in his window boxes, forwarded his mail, made sure the house didn’t get dusty and smell like a nursing home, and in return stayed there rent-free. He lived on a long residential road that ran into the city.

We needed to earn some money before we bought tickets ourselves to travel across Europe. I wanted to go to Barcelona, Madrid and Paris; Clarky wanted to go to Venice. He was working in the shop at the Fitzwilliam Museum, taken on for the run up to Christmas. His main job was stacking cards on the shelves and working the till.

I found work in a baking hot Italian restaurant called Momo’s. It was on a street running off King’s Parade, opposite King’s College. Momo’s was small and rundown, I was sure there were mice, and the walls were more like cave stone with small crystals visible inside them. It was romantic at night, lit by white candles stuck into dark green bottles with great wedges of wax spilling over the sides. The food was simple, flavoured with lots of garlic and chilli. There was constant noise from the students huddled around the tables. Momo looked like a giant bear with his dark hair and bushy eyebrows.

‘Josie!’ he roared across the room one day.

‘Yes?’

‘What’s wrong with this table?’

He was standing in front of a wooden table laid for four. Knives and forks were in the correct places. Olive oil bottle refilled. The menu was wedged into a loaf of crusty bread on the middle of the table.

‘I can’t see anything wrong.’

‘Look again,’ came the gruff response.

Another of the waiters, Mikey, came to the table and examined it carefully.

‘Take a look at the coasters,’ Momo commanded, his breathing fiercer than usual.

Momo had just been to Italy and had returned with new coasters depicting Italian scenes. The Ponte Vecchio graced this table, as did the gondolas of Venice.

‘The leaning tower of Pisa is upside down!’ he said, gesticulating vehemently. ‘Don’t laugh.’

‘There, it’s tilting the correct way now.’ Mikey winked at me. He was a year older, had worked at Momo’s for six months and liked to look out for me.

‘Very good.’ Momo nodded his head, tension gone, before he started to inspect the other tables. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I’m having a meeting any minute. Some student wants to rent downstairs for his music.’

‘His music?’ I was interested. ‘What do you mean?’

He shook his head stubbornly as if to say, don’t ask questions, wait and see.

*

A group of students piled through the door. I was in the kitchen operating the cappuccino machine. It loved to break down just before the lunch rush.

Chairs were scraped back. I peered through the crack in the door and saw one of the boys who’d just entered taking a wooden chair, turning it round and sitting on it back-to-front. He was wearing a dark hooded top with jeans and trainers. I wanted to see his face. Take your hood off, come on, what have you got to hide? And it was as if he heard me because he did, before briefly turning around as if aware of someone watching him. Momentarily I edged back from the door before leaning close to it again. He had dark brown hair with a shock of peroxide blond falling across his forehead. He was wearing dark jeans that showed off the top of a pair of checked boxer shorts and a patch of bare skin. He waved one arm expressively, saying that Momo’s was perfect for what he had in mind.