Zoe felt burdened by other people’s secrets. She wished she could just sick them up and flush them away like a bulimic with a chicken sandwich. She wondered if this was how Emily felt about food, that when it got inside her it was a sort of contamination that had to be got rid of as soon as possible. It was as if she was carrying round in her head more than just her own life, but had had the nastier bits of other people’s dumped on her as well. She needed to get on with having fun and mucking about with her mates at school. She wanted to get into her own trouble over forgotten homework and for wearing her uniform in a messed-about way and doing text messages on her mobile in Physics. Instead she felt she had to be good, just in case if one thing went wrong, everyone else’s badnesses that she was carrying would all tumble out too. It was like hearing the ‘call waiting’ message all the time when you were trying to get connected, completely frustrating and time-wasting.
She hadn’t wanted to know about Emily and the baby (the baby that wasn’t) in the first place, and now she knew something even worse about her. Babies got themselves born or miscarried or whatever given time, but the anorexia thing wouldn’t go away, not without a lot of other people being involved and years of awfulness. Emily had phoned a couple of times from school and said she was fine, everything really, really was fine. There was nothing to worry about. For a second or two Zoe had relaxed, thought, well maybe that woman at the clinic had frightened her into eating properly again. Maybe they could just get back to seeing each other a bit in the holidays, with no big deal and none of that new-best-friend stuff, but then Emily had admitted she was ringing from the school medical wing: she’d fainted in Maths. ‘I faked it, I was just messing about. I hate geometry,’ she’d giggled. Zoe had gone cold.
There’d been a girl at her school who’d nearly died of starving. She used to sit with everyone else and eat lunch because the staff had been warned to keep an eye on her, but she’d always raced straight off to the bogs after and smelled of sick all afternoon. No-one had wanted to be her partner in Chemistry when it was experiments. That girl had fainted all the time, and she’d had to stay indoors on games afternoons because she was just too shivery and feeble to be allowed to get chilled. She’d gone to be locked up somewhere in the end, everyone said. Her mother had come to the school and cried and shouted at the Head. You could hear her all down the corridor. She’d screamed about why had no-one said anything, why had she been the last to know, which they all had thought was stupid, how was everyone else supposed to see what was happening if her own mother couldn’t?
Zoe thought about Angie, thought about going round and telling her that her little girl was a way-off nutter fast heading for death, but it would come out sounding as if it was Zoe herself who’d lost the plot. Anyway, surely Angie, even flaky, smiley, happy-as-a-sunflower Angie would notice that Emily was just bloody ill? Emily would be back for the holidays soon. From then on, Zoe decided, she wasn’t going to take on any more of her problems.
Zoe lay in her bed with her hands over her ears, wishing she was one of those sleepers that even bombs don’t disturb. She didn’t want to hear Natasha’s window sliding open. She didn’t want to hear the secret giggles and whisperings that were none of her business. She was having to sleep with her head under the pillow because Tom and Tash talked all the time. They thought they were being really quiet and she couldn’t hear any actual words (or anything else, thank God), but it was a bit like having a mad moth in the room. It just drove you crazy. They’d get caught one day, she was certain. The thought made her tremble and sweat. One day Tom would sleep through Tash’s alarm and Mum or Dad would come in to wake her for school and find him there in bed with her. She scrunched up her knees and waggled her toes in horror at what would happen then. It would be her fault. Somehow she’d get the blame, she was sure. If no-one had told her anything, there’d be nothing for her to know. Nothing to stress about.
‘Love the new pieces, darling. You’re tremendously good at this, you know.’ Jess was amazed: Paula rarely commented on anything she’d written these days unless she’d gone over length and she wanted to check if Jess had any preference for which bits were cut. Even that, Matt had once pointed out when Jess was just beginning, was a privilege.
That’s what the subs are for. There’s never usually time to consult the writer. Once the copy is in it’s theirs and writers aren’t supposed to be precious about their works.’
‘You make it sound like I’m selling tea bags or something,’ she’d smiled, back in the days when she’d seriously agonized about which adjective, which participle, only to find that her careful infinitives were as often as not split by some trainee sub-editor on work experience.
‘Tea bags would be about right,’ Matthew had agreed, dispiritingly. ‘If you want creative agony you should go into fiction. Don’t look for it in journalism.’
Looking back, now, on that conversation, she should have picked up the hint that he was pretty jaded about his own job. All that contact with the fickle sensation-seeking press, the effort of trying to get them to put into print the gist of what his clients were trying to sell, only to know deep down that the world wasn’t going to give any idea, any product more than its few minutes of fame and none of it really mattered anyway.
Jess, feeling buoyed up by Paula’s praise, said to Matthew as they were clearing up from breakfast, ‘We haven’t had Paula here for supper for a long time. She likes coming here, she told me she enjoys getting a dose of family life without having to produce one of her own.’
‘It probably puts her off, that’s why. I bet she gets into her taxi and breathes a big “thank goodness” sigh.’ Matt laughed. ‘But OK, I’m up for it.’
‘What about this weekend?’
‘Sure, but just Paula? Can’t we dilute her with a few others?’ Matt pulled a face. He wasn’t sure about her, Jess knew. She was one of those women who couldn’t talk to a man without touching him, making little claiming dabs with her fingers all over his arm. She was a strong woman too, seriously keen on skiing and sailing: the dabs on the arm could be quite hard. The last time he’d met her, at the Gazette’s Christmas drinks party, he’d said he felt as if she’d left dents all over his skin.
‘No, not just Paula. She’d feel like an aunt being given duty food.’ Jess thought for a minute. ‘She’s between men, as it were, at the moment.’
‘I’m not surprised. She’s probably put them all in traction.’ Matt laughed. ‘I’d be happier if we have a sort of walkabout party, then I wouldn’t have to sit next to her and get injured.’
Jess considered for a few moments. The word ‘party’, sounding so jolly and spontaneous, always involved more expense than you thought it was going to. You started off with a list that said ‘booze and food’ and the next thing you knew you were looking up Delia’s canapés, wondering about hiring more plates and ordering crates of the sparkling stuff from Oddbins.
Matthew must have been thinking along the same lines. ‘What about a barbecue?’ he suggested. ‘I know it’s a long way to midsummer but the weather forecast’s good for the weekend. We could do Friday, early evening with the kids, have Eddy and maybe Wandering Wilf and a couple of the blokes round as well. I quite fancy that.’ He was looking thoroughly enthusiastic now. ‘I’ll shop. I’ll cook,’ he volunteered. ‘You can just get on with work and not have any reason to have a go at me for doing nothing.’
Jess didn’t honestly think Paula would much enjoy a barbecue, unless it was on a kind of irony level. Although she thought it was fun to sit in their kitchen and listen in to the mild family bickering that passed for conversation in the Nelson household, she was a woman of decidedly urban pursuits and preferred the sort of social gatherings at which she could wear very high-heeled shoes with bejewelled and minimal straps. Jess was quite well aware that Paula’s idea of an alfresco feast would be having coffee and a Danish beneath the chic heat lamps outside the Bluebird café on the Kings Road. Nor was she sure about Eddy, who still was of the belief that as he’d been a rock star he must therefore be irresistible to any woman he set his sights on. Paula, being still under forty (just), would probably never have heard of him and might well cut him dead with an icy sneer. On the other hand, Matthew was showing more enthusiasm for a slice of home life than he had since the Redundancy Day and besides, she thought, Paula knew a lot of people in the newspaper business. Loosened up by plenty of wine and with Matthew at his most hospitable and charming, Paula might just have heard of some freelance work going …
‘OK, let’s do that then. And we’ll have Angie over as well if she wants to come. Luke and Emily will be just back from school and I know she likes them to see our lot. For some reason she has them down under “suitable”.’
‘That’s only because they don’t go to Briar’s Lane. She’s a typical first-generation snob,’ Matt chuckled. ‘She wouldn’t care if they mugged old ladies and had the Grove franchise for cocaine dealing as long as they speak nicely and say please and thank you.’
Matthew ripped a page out of one of Zoe’s abandoned maths books and started making a list. Jess looked over his shoulder at what he’d written. ‘Booze, more booze and food.’
‘Mmm, that should just about cover it.’ She grinned at him.
The lad, Tom, was taking boxes out of the old Sierra’s boot and transferring them to a scruffy white Nissan Micra parked on the edge of the allotments. From the way he was carrying them it was obvious they were on the heavy side. George carried on with the weeding and pretended he wasn’t watching him. They seemed to be ordinary cardboard supermarket boxes, labelled for things like bananas and baked beans. He’d have worried if the labels had been for new hi-fi equipment, mobile phones, anything like that. So far he hadn’t had to know anything tricky about the boy and he wanted to keep it that way. If Tom was in the business of liberating goods from the rich to redistribute to his impoverished self then it was best not to know. He felt he understood him, understood that some people don’t want to live with their families, just couldn’t face it. You read about the reasons for that every day in the papers. With young boys it so often tended to be about stepfathers, men who wouldn’t share their woman with her son and mothers who feared a lonely, near-destitute time of it if they took their boy’s side – for after all, a teenager would be moving on soon anyway, wouldn’t he?
Living in the old car, with George keeping an eye on him, had to be better than living with the old winos under the bridge by the railway and the kid seemed to be able to cope without whinging, without unduly suffering and without spending his days hanging round Leicester Square either busking or begging or risking his life as a rent boy.
‘Begging’s degrading,’ Tom had said when George had brought up the subject, in a roundabout and generalized sort of way, while the two of them were taking a break from planting out the carrots. ‘Busking’s OK, at least you’re offering a service. People can take it or leave it. I’m not musical though.’
‘Me neither,’ George had agreed, though he’d wondered if it was true. He liked music, he could sing well enough and remembered, note-perfect, pieces he’d heard from years back. Tom might be the same, just another kid who hadn’t come across the opportunity to take it up, or any other skill that might give him a respected place in the world. Zoe and Natasha and Oliver, they’d been given opportunities by the dozen, everything on a plate like a sort of activity cheese-board: ballet and gymnastics, swimming, riding and sailing. Oliver had joined the London Scottish juniors for rugby training and Zoe, after a flu-ridden afternoon spent on the sofa idly watching the Olympics on TV, had briefly taken up fencing. By the time they were ten they’d tried out piano, violin, guitar and flute, giving all of them up in a petulant strop when they found they weren’t instant experts. Oliver kept the guitar up for a while, getting the hang of it sufficiently to enable him to strum it therapeutically when he wanted to do the lone-teenager thing of skulking in his room. The way music education was these days, there might be a thousand potential Jacqueline du Prés out there wasting their talent for the sake of a couple of recorder lessons and the presence of an old piano in the corner of the home to thump out a few first notes on. It was the same with cricket, he thought as he watched Tom cramming the boot lid of the Micra down on the last of the boxes. If just the few rich prep-school kids got to learn the game, and the state-educated lot only got to have a go if the school field hadn’t been sold for executive housing or to put up a mobile phone mast, it didn’t provide much of a pool of choice for the next decade’s England eleven. No wonder the current middle-order batting was rubbish.
‘You moving house?’ he called out as Tom wandered back towards the Sierra.
‘Just got some things to take somewhere,’ Tom replied. He didn’t look old enough to drive, George thought. He looked a good couple of years younger than Oliver. And where did he get the car?
‘The car’s my brother’s in case you were wondering.’ Tom sidestepped the suspicion before George could voice it.
‘But does he know you’ve got it?’ George asked.
‘He will when he gets home.’ Tom grinned cheekily. ‘But he’ll get it back.’
‘I won’t ask about a driving licence.’ George turned back to the weeds that hid among the spinach.
‘You can if you want.’ Tom shrugged, then said, ‘You’ve missed a few over there. Give us the hoe, I’ll get them.’
Matthew, ambling across the square in the direction of the High Street and the friendly Italian greengrocer, almost didn’t recognize Natasha coming towards him with one of her friends. He’d certainly noticed her, the long slim legs were quite unmissable, leading in one direction to a skirt that was surely short enough to merit detention at school and in the other to incongruously clumpy shoes that gave her a childlike fragility. She hadn’t seen him; she had her arm linked through her friend’s (Cathy? Carla?) and they were leaning in towards each other, laughing at some private joke, oblivious to everyone on the street. It was one of those shock moments that children land on you, he realized, as if they do a sneaky extra amount of maturing in the night and you’re suddenly faced with an image for whom you had to fast-forward the mental picture from someone five years younger. Oliver had done that all the time, he remembered, but then boys did – they grew so frighteningly fast which, he thought, perhaps accounted for the frequent look of bewilderment on the adolescent male face.
‘Hi Dad!’ Natasha detached herself from her friend and dashed over the last few yards of pavement to kiss Matt. He felt deeply touched that she wasn’t too embarrassed to do that. ‘You remember Claire, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Hello love. Yes of course I do. How are you, Claire?’
‘Fine thanks Mr Nelson.’
‘Call me Matt, please. Otherwise I feel old.’
‘OK.’ Claire smiled, a long, slow, perfect-toothed smile. She was going to be a stunner, Matthew recognized; they both were. For a second or two he imagined the pair of them out at night, in a pub, in full pulling-power make-up and wearing little string-strapped dresses and the kind of silly gorgeous shoes that had to be kept on with will power. It wasn’t a comfortable picture. This was his daughter and the best friend he’d known since she was eleven and submerged in a school uniform bought for several years of growing into. He had one of those blood-rushing moments, where he could feel the swift approach of the day he had to realize that some other male being had permanent priority in Natasha’s affections. It was surely still a long way off, but the day wasn’t as distant as he’d have liked.
‘Gotta go. Ring me.’ Claire and Natasha kissed each other like lunching ladies and Claire moved away. ‘Bye Matt!’ she called, looking back and he wondered if he was imagining a bit of flirting impertinence in her voice.
‘So Dad, where were you going?’ Natasha put her arm through his and they walked on along the broad pavement in front of the shops.
‘Buying supplies. We’re having a barbecue on Friday night. Mum’s boss Paula’s coming and I’m doing the cooking.’
‘How typically male!’ she mocked. ‘What are we having, charred dinosaur?’
‘I can cook. You know I can. I thought we’d have some little chicken kebabs marinaded in a sort of pineapple and chilli thing and then … well down at the Leo the other day the lads and I came up with this upmarket fast-food idea. I’ve just had a word with them and we thought we’d try out a few recipes, see if anyone thinks the idea’s marketable.’
‘What, like McDonald’s? Mum won’t want that.’ Natasha’s face was a vision of scepticism.
‘No. Well yes, I suppose so in a way. Though appealing to a different client base, let’s say.’
‘Everyone likes McDonald’s though. Even posh people.’
‘Posh children, you mean. I’m thinking of something aimed at the parents, the organic free-range sort. Well, wait till Friday, you’ll see.’
‘Ah, well, I haven’t actually mentioned it, not as such. It might be just as well to sort of …’
‘Keep quiet?’
‘Yes. If she asks about food I’ll just say I’m going to surprise her and she’s not to get involved.’
‘OK, I’ll keep out of it. Can Tom come?’
Another blood-rushing moment threatened, then subsided. There was no need to feel like that yet, surely? She wasn’t even sixteen …
‘Yes of course he can. Any friend of yours, all that.’
‘… mistake to think it’s a way to get teenagers to join in a social event. Barbecues bring out the worst: Zoe won’t eat anything with a crumb of a charred edge – black bits being carcinogenic and she wants to survive past A levels. Natasha thinks it’s all too primitive and …’
Jess stopped typing and thought about Oliver and barbecues. He was just like his father with them: happy to battle with the blazing coals, to prod at slabs of meat, cheery enough about getting crushed garlic all over his fingers, slooshing out the olive oil for a marinade and completely oblivious of the fact that the meal required more than just the stuff you cook on the fire. If it was just for the family she would more or less trust Matt to get it right and buy enough salad, potatoes, rice and vegetables to put together an entire meal. Anything he’d forgotten, well there was plenty of last-minute stuff in the cupboards. But there now seemed to be quite a lot of people coming, and he was up to something in the kitchen, something that involved the food processor and a lot of herbs. She could smell coriander and basil and coconut and there was something that reminded her of a Thai chicken dish they’d had in a restaurant and tried unsuccessfully to re-create at home. She hoped, as she worked, that whatever exciting new taste sensation he was concocting he’d also remember that you needed something else to go with it.
‘Do you want any help?’ She ventured into the kitchen and filled the kettle, having a swift look round to see what he was up to.
Matt, poring over a notebook with a frown of concentration and a biro between his teeth, looked up at her with an expression of worrying alarm.
‘No!’ he said rather too quickly. ‘It’s fine. You just carry on working and I’ll take care of everything. It’s all in hand.’
She laughed. ‘Now why does that make me feel …’ then she stopped and continued making the tea. She’d been about to say ‘redundant’, but stopped herself just in time.
‘Feel what?’ he asked.
‘Nothing. Makes me feel wonderful. Really. I’ll leave you to it then.’
‘Hmm. Good. Off you go and get your nails painted or something,’ he murmured, back into the depths of his notebook. And I was trying so hard not to be patronizing, she thought.
‘OK, so what have we got?’ Ben and Micky, leaving the Leo for a few hours in the hands of grumbling and resentful Friday-night bar staff, peered at the trayful of uneven and unmatched burgers on Matt’s worktop. Matt looked at them thoughtfully, trying to recall which were which. He’d made three different sorts, one lot according to a combination of his and Jamie Oliver’s imaginations, one with a choice of spices plagiarized from Ken Horn and the third following instructions from Micky.
‘I think these are chilli,’ he said eventually, pointing to the selection that had a distinctly orange look about them.
‘And which are my sun-dried tomato ones? These pink things?’
‘Yep. Only – well I used those oily half-grilled ones instead. I thought they’d go better in the processor, no sharp-edged bits.’
‘Good thinking,’ Ben said. ‘We’ll have you sweating on the early shift in our kitchen yet. How was it on costings?’
Matt scrabbled through a pile of bills and mail on the dresser. ‘It’s all here, written down. Obviously unit-price-wise it would come down a lot if we bulk-bought and did some freezing …’
‘Mmm. Freshness is rather the point …’ Micky murmured, studying the figures.
‘Yes of course it is.’ Matt felt weary suddenly. What the hell did he think he was doing, diddling about with recipes for a suburban bistro? Did any of them really, truly, deep down believe even in their wackiest flights of fantasy that they could come up with anything that would eventually rival Burger King? And suppose they did, what would his role be? Inevitably he pictured himself back at a desk, trawling through the lists in his Psion, organizing mailshots for magazines, setting up launch events, toadying to the press again, ever the obliging PR. The very thought made him feel depressed.
Micky and Ben weren’t stupid. They might let him loose trying a few prototype recipes on his own guests and giving him their patiently non-critical opinions, but when it came to major catering know-how, they were the ones who’d done the courses and knew what was what. It was their bar, for heaven’s sake. They were only letting him in on this because of his connections, his address book and his usefulness. It reminded him of when he was small and the big boys on the rec had let him play cricket with them because, he one day realized, he was the one who owned a halfway decent bat. His joblessness seemed, at that moment, a miserable burden. The freedom feeling had gone missing. He hoped it intended to come back soon.
‘Cooee! Anyone in here?’ Paula appeared in the kitchen clutching a huge bunch of tulips lavishly wrapped in tissue paper in several shades of orange. Yellow ribbons trailed from the package, curling down over her hand like a Victorian child’s blond ringlets.
‘Matt darling! Wonderful to see you!’ She pressed her entire body against him (rather unnecessarily hard, in his opinion, though he wished he was feeling more up to enjoying the moment) and slapped a sticky lipstick kiss on the corner of his mouth. Over her shoulder he caught Ben and Micky smirking and blowing camp mock kisses at him.
‘The front door was wide open so I just came right in! You should keep it shut you know, Jess told me all about the burglary along the road.’ Paula ripped the tulips from their pretty packaging and started opening cupboards looking for a vase.
‘Here, I’ll get it,’ Matt said, taking a plain oblong glass vase from the dresser cupboard. Paula picked it up and inspected it for suitability.
‘Haven’t you got anything more, round?’ she asked. ‘With square ones they tend to go all droopy.’
‘Ooh I know the feeling,’ Ben cut in. Paula smiled at him, looking uncertain.
‘I’m sure we have, somewhere.’ Matt glared past her at Ben. ‘But let’s just leave them in this for now. I’ll sort it later. Come on outside, Jess is there with the girls.’ Jess hadn’t seen the flowers arrive, it occurred to him. Surely they were meant for her?
Jess, listening with Clarissa to Eddy’s tale of how a makeshift barbecue in a dustbin lid on the hard shoulder of the Ml had set fire to his band’s first van back in ’68, saw his face change like someone who’d just caught sight of Madonna shopping in Sainsbury’s. She turned and saw Paula approaching in cream leather trousers so tight that anyone with iffy eyesight could have been given the impression of naked skin.
‘And who is this?’ Eddy muttered to Jess, keeping his eye on the vision picking her high-heeled way across the terrace towards them.
‘Paula, lovely to see you!’ The two women kissed briefly and Jess could almost feel Eddy’s hot breath on the back of her neck.
‘Paula, this is Eddy Valera. He lives just along the road. And Clarissa who lives next door to him.’ Clarissa, knowing her time was up, grinned briefly at Paula and strode off towards the bench for some ‘aren’t men bastards’ solidarity with Angie. Paula’s delicately extended, perfectly manicured hand was grabbed in both of Eddy’s and he hauled her back in the direction of the conservatory. ‘Let me get you a drink. I don’t suppose you ever went to any Spidercrunch gigs a few years ago …?’
* * *
‘Dad did all the food,’ Natasha said to Tom. ‘So I suppose we should go and eat some of it.’ She disentangled herself from him and leaned back against the shed door.
‘Sure. I’m starving,’ he agreed, shoving his arms back into his jacket. Natasha fastened the buttons on her shirt and pulled her sweatshirt over her head, then cuddled up close to him again and breathed in the scent of the battered and oily old leather. ‘Whenever I smell leather, whatever happens when I’m old or at university or married or something, I’ll always think of you,’ she said.
He held her tight against him and kissed her hair. ‘And whenever I smell burning sausages on a barbie, I’ll think of you too!’ he teased, opening the shed door and making a run for the food before she could hit him.
‘You’ve got to try one of these,’ Zoe told Emily, handing her a plate from which a steaming fat burger hung out over the side of its bun. ‘Dad’s got a master plan to set up a smart burger chain and make us all mega-rich. They’re at the experimental stage but it smells all right.’
Emily screwed her nose up and looked at it with suspicion, then turned to Matt who was waiting for an opinion. ‘You need to make them a bit smaller, for a start,’ she commented. ‘Or you’ll go broke.’
‘I’ll keep it in mind. We haven’t got round to portion control yet. Just try it. Zoe’s got one of the other sorts, a tomato and herb one.’
‘What’s mine?’
‘See what you think, guess the flavourings.’
Emily nibbled cautiously round the edge of the food. Then Zoe watched as she reached across the table for ketchup. She took the top off the bun and carefully squirted a letter E over the burger’s surface. Then she very slowly arranged two slivers of raw onion in a cross, added four small circles of dill pickle, placing them meticulously in the four arms made by the crossed onion, and replaced the bun lid.
Zoe wished Angie was watching, but Angie was now swapping horror stories about Things Bin-Men Leave on Your Drive with Clarissa and wasn’t interested in her skinny daughter’s meal rituals.
‘It’ll get cold,’ Matt prompted, exchanging a glance with Zoe.
‘OK, OK.’ Emily eventually lifted the burger and bit a neat piece out of it. She chewed it slowly, reminding Zoe of a programme about wine tasters.
‘What do you think?’ Ben joined them, eager to see what the youth market made of his idea.
‘You’re all looking at me! Don’t watch me!’ Emily wailed, showing an unattractive chewed mass of food. She bolted from the garden, running through the conservatory and kitchen towards the downstairs loo.
‘Back to the drawing board Matt, do you think?’ Ben poured himself and Matt generous glasses of wine.
‘Probably, very bloody probably,’ Matt agreed, gloomily.