Chapter 15

15

Tommy isn’t one of those hapless men who exists on bowls of cereal whenever his partner is away. He has several friends who fit this description: full-grown adults with whom he went to boarding school. Men who have somehow reached their fifties and can still barely boil an egg. They boast about it, affecting a ‘wife’s-away’ swagger as if maintaining a smooth-running home is baffling and actually beneath them. Briefly liberated, they allow the washing up to accumulate to gargantuan levels, to be attacked like an enemy battalion as ‘the wife’ drives home from her weekend in the Cotswolds with the girls.

Now Tommy looks around the living room, trying to reassure himself that everything is just so. At least, his and Lena’s version of just so – because this little 1960s flat has been furnished on a budget. ‘I needed to start afresh,’ she’d explained the first time he came here. ‘I couldn’t be surrounded by all the stuff Max and I had chosen together.’

Tommy admires her ingenuity and he loves this place, because it’s Lena’s. However, now he worries that it might appear a little shabby – studenty even – in the eyes of someone seeing it for the first time.

He re-plumps a tangerine cushion unnecessarily and picks a tiny speck of something off the candy-striped rug. Burrowing into the muddle under the sink, he manages to locate a duster and runs it over the extendable table where they sit to eat, and where Lena often works. While she does her copy writing mainly from home, as a manager at a high-end recruitment company Tommy is expected to be present in the office. Just as well, as it would be a squeeze for both of them to work in the flat.

Tommy straightens up the books on the over-crammed bookshelf. There are loads about society and politics and world affairs; brainy stuff of Lena’s that Tommy wouldn’t even pretend to understand (his taste is more pacy thrillers). He wonders what she’s doing now with her friends in the Highlands. He remembers visits up there when he was a child, to an aunt and uncle who had a terrifying housekeeper called Miss Maud. Lena has messaged Tommy to let him know they arrived safely, and that everything is wonderful. That was last night. He yearns to hear her voice, but she’s told him the signal is patchy, and he doesn’t want to be the pesky boyfriend constantly calling to remind her that he exists. But still, he misses her already.

Tommy checks the time on the cheap digital clock on the shelf, wondering if he should have told Lena what’s happening today when he messaged. But for some reason, he didn’t. He held the information back because he wasn’t sure how she’d react. And he doesn’t want anything to unsettle her on her trip. Anyway, there was no need to mention it because there’s nothing to tell! Absolutely nothing at all! Yet Tommy feels uncomfortable now, as if he has lied by omission. Which he has of course. This is Lena’s home, so of course he should have told her.

He worries now that if they speak while she’s away, and he tells her after the event, she’ll wonder why he didn’t mention it earlier. And then what will he tell her?

And now Tommy realises he is absent-mindedly polishing the flex of the wobbly desk lamp. He throws down the duster, marches to the living room window and rubs a smear off it with the cuff of his sweater sleeve.

Calm down, he tells himself. This is not a big deal, you great big idiot. Just calm down and get a grip on yourself.

Across town, lying flat out on his sofa, Joel replies to Shelley’s message from earlier.

Joel

Glad you’re having fun! Sounds amazing. All fine here don’t worry. Remember to take loads of pics!

Fin wanders into the living room and looks quizzically at the Christmas tree that’s leaning even more drunkenly than before. Then he glances over at his father, stretched out in a tracksuit and slippers, poking idly at his phone. At fifteen, Fin is starting to formulate some understanding of how a marriage works, and he’s noted a marked difference in his dad since his mum went away yesterday morning.

The main thing is, his dad is no longer hiding away upstairs in his studio. It’s like the re-wilding thing, Fin reckons, that happened during Covid. Goats venturing off mountains in Wales and wandering through towns, nibbling hedges. Deer strolling through an east London housing estate. Fin is a smart kid and he’s figured out that, if you remove the main controlling factor – traffic, society, his mum – then environments re-shape themselves and everything is different. It’s a little unsettling, especially his dad being downstairs so much. But now that he’s adjusted a little, Fin is finding this new state of affairs pretty interesting. It feels as if there might be cameras concealed around the house, filming a documentary entitled ‘Home Without Mum’.

‘All right, Fin?’ Finally his dad seems to notice that he’s there.

‘Yeah, I’m all right.’ Fin glances briefly at the parcels all arranged under the tree by his mum. They look so enticing with their gold ribbons and bows, and Fin is still young enough to be excited by presents. He has already fondled and rattled a fair few, trying to guess at their contents. ‘What’re you doing tonight again?’ he asks.

‘What?’ Joel sets his phone face down on the sofa. ‘Oh, um… I’m going out actually. Just to a boring gallery opening thing.’ As if he has only just remembered. ‘Why d’you ask?’

‘No reason!’ Fin says in an overly casual manner.

Joel peers at him suspiciously and sits up, tugging down the tracksuit bottoms which had ridden up over his calves. It’s not the kind of cheap tracksuit worn by local lads who hang around their nearest shopping centre. This is leisure wear, vastly expensive and bought by Joel in the hope that he might have the opportunity to wear it at leisure with Carmel at some point. He is growing a little frustrated by these dive-in-dive-out-again sessions, and occasionally he wonders if that’s all he is to her: some kind of sex machine. Which is why he has built up tonight – ‘our sleepover’, as she mockingly called it – into such a monumental event.

‘So, what are you doing tonight?’ Joel asks, keen to switch the focus away from himself.

‘Nothing!’ Fin starts to leave the room, but Joel calls him back.

‘Hey, hang on a minute. You know I’ve told Martha that she needs to be in tonight, don’t you? To look after you. So if you go out you’ve got to let her know?—’

‘I don’t need looking after,’ Fin retorts.

‘Yeah, I know son.’ Joel’s tone softens and he pulls an it’s-not-me-it’s-your-mum face, despite Shelley currently being 500 miles away. ‘It’s just, I’d feel better, okay? I know it’s silly. Please humour your crazy old man…’

Fin grunts. ‘Yeah, okay.’ Then, frowning: ‘You were out last night as well.’

‘I know.’ Joel chuckles. ‘Two nights in a row. Just like the old days, heheh!’ Tension flickers in Fin’s pale blue eyes now, as if he’s afraid that his father might launch into the dancing-and-disco-biscuit routine that he subjected them to a few weeks ago.

‘You weren’t on about Martha babysitting me then,’ Fin reminds him and stalks out of the room.

Joel jumps off the sofa and scrambles after him. ‘No, but tonight I might end up staying out west. It’s such a pain getting home at that time?—’

‘At what time?’ Fin stares at him.

‘I don’t know,’ Joel blusters. ‘Late, probably. I think there’s an after party.’

‘An after party?’ Martha crows from the landing. ‘At an art exhibition?’

‘Well, after it,’ Joel mutters, blushing.

‘I thought you said it was going to be boring?’ Fin remarks.

‘It will. It’ll probably will be deathly dull. You know these things.’ His kids stare at him. They don’t know these things.

‘If it’s going to be so bad,’ Martha says with a sly edge to her voice, ‘then why are you bothering going?’

‘I just feel obliged to,’ he says hotly, as if he is the teenager being grilled.

She smirks. ‘Dad, you look really freaked out. Like, you’re sweating. Are you worried about us being home without you?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘We’ll be fine ,’ she declares. ‘I’ll put him to bed at seven-thirty?—’

‘You will not ,’ Fin exclaims.

‘Six-thirty then.’ She sniggers.

‘Shut up, Marth!’ He runs upstairs to meet her on the landing where they launch into a ramshackle play fight which Joel senses is being acted out for his benefit.

‘Stop it, you two.’ He glares up as they swing each other around ineffectually. ‘Is this what’s going to happen when I’m out tonight?’

They stop instantly. ‘No,’ Fin mutters.

He can sense Martha studying him from her vantage point. ‘So, you won’t be back until morning, then?’

‘Maybe. Not definitely. But it’s a possibility…’ Joel winces as if to underline the fact that the event he’s conjured up is an utter inconvenience to him.

‘Are you going to “get on one”, Dad? Like, take a pill?’ Martha teases, and his cheeks flare.

‘Don’t be silly. It’s a cultural thing.’

‘Oooh,’ she teases. ‘ Cultural!’

Ignoring this mockery, he pushes back the slightly thinning hair that he still wears a little bit spiky, styled with gel. ‘I’ll message to let you know if I’m staying over. Is that all right?’ he asks.

She gazes down at him with an inscrutable look on her face. Smart, sassy Martha, who seems to have given up on school of late, but could run rings around many of her teachers with her intellect. ‘Sure, Dad,’ she says, eyes glazing now, signalling that she has lost interest in his evening plans already.

‘So, lunch!’ Joel announces with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. ‘How about I order us a Nando’s?’

‘For lunch ?’ Martha gasps.

‘Can we have KFC?’ Fin asks, and Joel sees a glance exchanged between brother and sister.

‘All right,’ she concedes, as if it’s her who’s paying.

‘Okay, why not?’ Joel swaggers up to the landing and pulls up the menu on his phone. An extensive order is placed – mains, sides and desserts, for lunch! Are they taking the piss? Then the kids disperse to their rooms and Joel heads back to his preferred stretched-out position on the sofa, telling himself that sixty-five quid should settle his guilt about heading over to Carmel’s tonight. He’ll leave them money for a McDonald’s later too. They’ll be wishing their mum went away more often.

Now Joel checks his phone again for the umpteenth time, to see if Carmel has messaged – she hasn’t – and reassures himself that Fin and Martha are capable of looking after themselves for one night. In recent times, Joel and Shelley have occasionally left them alone, when there’s been something like a big birthday party out of town (there’s been a raft of fiftieths lately). Shelley has checked in with the kids throughout the evening, and everything has been fine. But on this, the last Saturday before Christmas, something feels off kilter. Slightly anxiety-making, as if Joel would actually be better off cancelling his overnighter with Carmel and staying at home instead – or at the very least popping an extra Citalopram. Because something is happening inside his brain, whether serotonin-related or due to something else. And he can’t put his finger on what it is.

He leaps up when the delivery guy arrives and summons his kids downstairs for their feast. However, even as Martha and Fin tear into their chicken and fries like starving street dogs, the conscience-clearing effect hasn’t quite worked in the way that Joel hoped it would.

Food devoured, the kids scarper, leaving him with an explosion of boxes and smeared paper napkins and greasy bones. Joel is seeing Carmel tonight so he should be delirious with excitement. But something is sitting uneasily in his gut, and it’s not just the fried chicken. For the first time since the affair started, Joel seems to have swallowed a side order of guilt.

He goes through to the hallway and calls upstairs. ‘Martha? Marth, can I have a word please?’

She emerges, radiating suspicion, from her room. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing, hon. Nothing really. I just wanted to say thanks for looking after Fin tonight?—’

‘That’s all right.’

‘No, love, I really mean it,’ he says, wanting so much for things to feel right here, so he can be free to enjoy the night. ‘I appreciate it,’ he adds. ‘You really are a brilliant girl. Thanks so much for holding the fort.’