The house was a tip. There were shoes lying abandoned just inside the front door, a pile of newspapers and a dirty mug at the bottom of the stairs.
Looking through to the kitchen, she could see the sink stacked with unwashed saucepans and plates, and the laundry basket full of dirty clothes had been sitting on the table since yesterday. The leg of Daniel’s school trousers dangled over the side of the basket, a reminder that he’d had no clean uniform to wear this morning so Eve had sent him into school wearing his PE shirt and yesterday’s crumpled, mud-splattered trousers, hastily sprayed with Febreze.
She’d been intending to write a note for his teacher, but had forgotten to do that as well in the rush to leave the house.
She was on her way to Three Elms to see Flora, but had popped in at home on the off-chance that some birthday cards might have come in the post. One friend had called earlier and sung Happy Birthday and a few others had texted, but it hadn’t been the most exciting of birthdays. Disappointingly, there were only two cards on the mat: one was from an elderly friend of her mother’s – Eve recognised the writing – and, ripping open the other, she saw it was from her old university friend Cath. Sweet of her to remember.
There was an unpleasant, sour smell that got stronger as she walked down the hall: as soon as she saw the screwed-up J-cloth on the worktop, she remembered the spilt milk that had been nothing whatsoever to do with Daniel.
‘Bugger.’ She threw the stinking cloth into the sink on top of the pans. She’d love to be able to blame someone else for this, but sadly it was all down to her.
The landline answerphone was giving out an insistent bleep, so she pressed play. Her heart gave a little jolt when she saw there were five messages: this was more like it.
The first message was from British Gas about an overdue boiler service. The second was from another friend of Flora’s, asking for her new address. The third, fourth and fifth were automated recordings from the same company, informing Eve that she’d recently been involved in a car accident, and could win substantial damages if she put in a claim through their no win, no fee system.
She pressed the delete button and stared at the display for a moment as it reset itself. She wasn’t sure who she’d been expecting to hear from anyway – most of her friends didn’t use the landline anymore: they sent texts or WhatsApp messages, or wrote emails from abroad, passing on six months’ worth of news in a dozen tightly packed lines. She was no good at remembering other people’s birthdays, so it was unfair to expect them to think about hers.
It was only four o’clock, but she fancied a beer. What the hell, it was her birthday. She pulled a bottle from the fridge, opened the back door and stepped out onto the patio.
Daniel had left his new red truck on the grass a couple of days ago, and she could see a white splodge of bird poo trailing down the side. The truck had a flashing light and siren, but there had been so much rain last night that the battery compartment would probably be full of water; if it worked again, it would be a miracle.
She ought to bring the truck inside and clean it. Ben had only bought it a couple of weeks ago, and he’d be furious if he saw Daniel had left it out here.
But that could wait. She slumped down onto the bench outside the kitchen door, feeling the wooden struts creak ominously beneath her.
‘Cheers, me!’ she said out loud, lifting up the bottle towards the garden in a toast, before raising it to her lips.
‘Cheers, you!’ said a voice.
Eve jumped, then spluttered and choked as her mouthful of beer went down the wrong way.
‘Oops, sorry.’
She turned and saw a face staring at her over the fence.
‘Jake! You gave me a shock.’
‘It’s just an automatic thing, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘When someone says cheers, you say cheers back?’
Eve grinned, wiping a dribble of beer from her chin. ‘Maybe when you’re sitting in a pub. But not when they’re in the garden next door!’
He laughed and wandered up to the fence, resting his arms on it. ‘Sorry. Did I disturb you having a private alcoholic moment? How have you been?’
‘No! Of course not. Fine, thanks,’ she said. ‘And you?’
This was the sort of conversation they always had. They’d lived next door for years, but the relationship had never progressed any further than a neighbourly chat over the shared boundary.
Jake and Ben had been out for a couple of drinks, years ago when they first moved in, but it had felt like the sort of blokey thing they ought to do, rather than something either of them really wanted. Ben worked in insurance; Jake was a housing officer with the local council. Ben liked cars and rugby, Jake cycled to work and had been taking an evening course in life drawing. She wondered if he’d ever completed it.
‘He’s nice enough, but a bit dull,’ she remembered Ben saying. ‘We’ve got nothing in common.’
Eve didn’t think he was dull; she just didn’t know him very well. Their over-the-fence chats revealed very little, other than that he took better care of his garden than she did of hers, and he had pretty awful dress sense: today he was wearing a blue checked shirt under a brown and beige tank top. The collar of the shirt was tucked underneath the tank top on one side and her hand itched to reach out and pull it straight. He had a mop of dirty blond hair, which looked as if it hadn’t been brushed for days, and his fringe was slightly too long, so he had to keep swiping it out of his eyes.
‘How’s Katie?’ she asked, for lack of anything else to say. Eve had asked his teenage daughter to babysit a few times recently, but after handing over a couple of hard-earned tenners at the end of an evening, she’d been relieved to shut the front door on Katie’s scowls and teenage shrugs.
When she was that age, Eve had been a prolific babysitter, keeping a wall chart in her bedroom crammed with future bookings. At the age of sixteen, she’d already started to save most of the money given to her by grateful, exhausted parents. But looking after small children clearly wasn’t Katie’s idea of fun, and Eve suspected the money she earned would be blown on make-up and the vapes she smelt drifting out through her open bedroom window.
‘Oh, she’s fine,’ Jake said, nodding. ‘Don’t see much of her at the moment, to be honest. She’s got a new boyfriend and they spend most of their time at the park, doing God knows what.’
Eve snorted. ‘Do you mind that?’
‘I don’t have much choice,’ he said with a shrug. ‘My daughter is a law unto herself. If I tell her to stop doing something, you can guarantee she’ll make a huge effort to do it twice as much.’
Eve had no idea where Katie’s mother was – or whether she even had a mother anymore. Ben had never asked about anything personal during their boys’ nights out – much to Eve’s frustration – and, after living next door to Jake for all this time, it now felt as if it was far too late to bring up the subject.
‘All good with Daniel?’ he asked. He had a nice voice, she realised: deep and measured. He could be a television announcer.
‘Yes, fine.’ She nodded. She stared down at the bottle of beer in her hand, imagining Jake reading out the football results on a Saturday afternoon: Sheffield Wednesday 3… West Bromwich Albion 1. Or maybe he could present the BBC’s six o’clock news: And now, live from Westminster, our reporter…
She looked back to the fence: Jake was staring at her. She blushed and took a swig of the beer, turning her eyes towards her garden, which was hideously overgrown. Weeding and pruning were way down her list of priorities; not even on the list, if she was honest. She got up and stepped onto what had once been a lawn, picking up the red truck and holding it at an angle while the water flooded out of it.
‘Jake, do you have a lawnmower I could borrow?’ she asked. ‘I don’t mean right now, just at some stage. Ours is rubbish. In fact, I don’t think it even works anymore. But this garden is in such a state I need to do something about it.’
‘Of course,’ he said, nodding. ‘I’ll pop it round at the weekend. I can give you a hand if you like. It might be tough getting through that long stuff at the edges – you’ll be better off strimming it.’
‘Good idea,’ she said, wondering if it would be cheeky to ask if he could lend her a strimmer at the same time.
‘I’ll lend you a strimmer too,’ he said, grinning.
She felt herself blushing again – was she that easy to read? He did have a very nice smile.
She suddenly remembered she was supposed to be on her way to Three Elms. ‘Shit, got to go!’ she said. ‘I promised to see my mother. That’s great about the weekend, thank you. Are you sure you can spare the time?’
‘Yup, not a problem. Good to see you.’
‘You too,’ she called, as she turned back towards the house. Should she have mentioned that the collar of his shirt was tucked in?
Hey, guess what? she wanted to add. It’s my birthday today, Jake with the lovely voice! That’s why I’m having a beer – I don’t normally drink alcohol this early in the day, you’re not living next door to a sad old soak.
But the words stayed in her head and it was probably just as well; he might have felt awkward if she’d mentioned her birthday. Although it would have been nice to have just one more card to put on the shelf above the fireplace. She shook off the self-pity, putting the half-empty beer bottle on the worktop. There was no point feeling low; by the time you got to this age – horrible, going-nowhere forty-five – a birthday was just another day.
As she walked past the answerphone, she saw the red light was flashing again: she’d missed another call while she was outside. Things were definitely looking up. She pressed the play button, trying to second-guess who else might be about to sing Happy Birthday.
It was another message from the company that was offering help after her recent car accident.