Next time her dad’s going to Lauren’s, Esther asks if she can come too. She sees him hesitate, as if he’s thinking, I was hoping we’d have some time alone this weekend. Esther really can read him that well. But then, Charlie’s usually around when he’s there, isn’t he? So why shouldn’t she be there too? ‘I could just do with getting out of town for the day,’ Esther adds. ‘I’ll get a late train home.’
Of course he says that’s fine because he’s concerned about her relationship with Miles. She only has to hint that things aren’t one hundred per cent okay and her dad will pretty much do what she wants.
In fact, Esther has stacked up a whole bunch of reasons why she wants to go to Lauren’s this weekend. Firstly, Miles has been caning it with his friends lately, crashing in at all hours, waking her up with his stinky breath and clammy hands all over her. She’s not keen on clubbing with him after the last time, and he accuses her of being boring for not wanting to go out. In fact, Esther does want to go out – to nice restaurants, the movies or even a proper grown-up party. She does not want his mate Kevin roaring at her over the music, spraying spit and never wiping that gunk from the corners of his mouth. It makes her want to vomit. Nor does she want Miles staggering in at 4.30 a.m. and peeing into her T-shirt drawer, thinking it’s the loo, as happened earlier this week.
It’s pretty grim, frankly. She hasn’t admitted this to anyone – not even to Chrissie. She can’t bear to admit that she loves someone who behaves like this. But, while Miles is in this phase, she needs to get away from him once in a while.
The other reason she wants to go is that it’s still worrying her, how her dad seems so besotted. It’s all Lauren-this, Lauren-that. Esther has literally never seen him like this in her life, and feels she should step in a bit. Not as a chaperone, that would be ridiculous – but to dilute things a little. And to remind him that he has other people in his life.
Is this selfish of her, Esther wonders? Probably – a bit. For a while she was scared she was ‘losing’ him to this woman he just happened to meet on holiday. Esther doesn’t feel like that now. She’s tested him several times, by suddenly ‘needing’ to spend time at his place. And he’s always cancelled his plans with his girlfriend and put her first. However, in tagging along this weekend she hopes to stop things from getting too intense. Esther would hate to see her dad getting hurt, or the relationship affecting his work and the rest of his life – i.e. his family life.
And now, as they arrive at Lauren’s on a crisp and sparkly December morning, Esther realises there’s another reason why she wanted to come today.
To hang out with Charlie again.
*
‘Hey!’ she says when he comes out of his room. They have a quick, slightly awkward hug, and she asks again how his exam prep’s going, and of course he plays down how hard he’s working. She still doesn’t know much about him, although she did ask her dad about Charlie’s dad, and he said he’s a fashion photographer, that he lives in New York, that he was a bit wild in his time but he’s probably straightened up now.
Of course Esther googled him. She doesn’t know why Charlie’s dad is so interesting to her; he just is. There was lots of his work online from years back, but nothing recent that she could find, and not much about the man himself. It doesn’t feel right to ask Charlie about him today. It might be a sensitive topic and she wouldn’t want to pry.
Lauren and her dad have been drinking coffee in the garden, wrapped up in winter sweaters and scarves, and now Lauren has appeared in the kitchen. ‘The light’s lovely out there, Esther,’ she says. ‘Fancy doing some more pictures?’
‘Are you sure?’ Esther asks, as if the possibility hadn’t occurred to her.
‘Yes, of course!’ As they head outside and start to shoot, Esther finds herself wishing again that there’d been boys like Charlie at Willow Vale, who’d wanted to pass their exams, go to university and study astrophysics.
‘How did it go?’ he asks when the shoot is over.
‘Really good,’ Esther replies. ‘Want to see the pictures?’ Maybe it’s silly to ask, as he’s into stars and planets and all that – not photos for Instagram. But he nods and seems keen, so they sit and scroll through them.
‘They’re great,’ he says. ‘Amazing.’
Esther smiles. ‘Your mum does a good job, y’know.’
He looks over as James and Lauren stroll into the kitchen. ‘You’re actually quite a good photographer, Mum!’ he teases.
‘Oh, thank you, Charlie,’ Lauren says, grinning. He’s right, though. The pictures are beautiful with the soft, wintry light and twiggy trees silhouetted against a pale sky. Lauren really is talented.
Esther doesn’t go home as planned that night. When Charlie’s friend Remy comes round with Freya, his girlfriend, Charlie invites her to have a few beers with them and they all sit up chatting in Charlie’s room.
It’s cosy up there, and kind of magical with the skylight in the sloping ceiling, and the telescope. She has a few drinks and finds herself telling them about Gracie and Jess, her best friends who she misses so much. How, last time she’d called Jess, she’d said, ‘Sorry, Est. Got to go, we’re having a party on the beach. Speak soon, yeah?’
A beach party with her super-brainy university friends. That had sounded fun. Esther had googled St Andrews beach, and as she’d gazed at the wide stretch of golden sand, tears had dropped down her cheeks. Miles had thought she was mad, getting upset over something like that. But her tears had kept falling as if a tap had been turned on. Why hadn’t she gone to college? Why had she gone straight from living with her mum and Luc to her boyfriend’s place with its creepy bat, without sharing flats like her best friends were doing?
She doesn’t tell Charlie, Remy and Freya that part.
Lauren says of course it’s fine for Esther to stay over in the spare room, and when she wakes she’s surprised to hear birds tweeting instead of Miles snoring, then saying in his gruff morning voice, ‘Make some coffee, would you, babe?’
For a moment she actually wishes this was her bed she was lying in, out here in the countryside. Being here feels so good. But of course she has to go home, and she’s aware of a heaviness pressing down on her chest as her dad drives them back to London on Sunday evening. She’s had a lovely time hanging out with Charlie, just chatting about everyday stuff. It’s felt totally unpressurised. She enjoyed meeting Remy and Freya but she actually prefers just being with Charlie really.
Esther could never have imagined being friends with a seventeen-year-old boy. But she already feels that Charlie is her friend. He listens to her. He’s smart and interesting and never talks over her the way Miles does. She’s never met anyone quite like him. For some reason, Esther decides not to mention any of this to Miles. It isn’t that he’d be jealous or even bothered; it’s just, she wants to keep something for herself. Not that it matters, because he’s not really interested. Even when she shows him the new pictures Lauren took of her, he seems distracted.
‘Yeah, nice,’ he says quickly, as if he has other, more urgent matters on his mind. Like attacking the grubby tile grout? Very occasionally Esther finds herself wondering what it’d be like to have a boyfriend closer to her own age. There’s been a couple but no one that serious, and no one ever mentioned grout.
She curls up on their bed and goes through the pictures on her own, choosing the best ones. Shoots are so fun and easy now, compared to when Miles took charge of them, getting her to lie on the rug like a corpse and curl up in a little ball in the walk-in cupboard where he keeps a busted old keyboard and some African drums. ‘Let’s make it edgy,’ he used to say. ‘If those jewellery people want boring, happy-smiley stuff, tell them to fuck off.’
He was only trying to help; she realises that. But Esther likes working with Bethani. They’re such nice girls in the London office, and they take her for lovely lunches at a place right on the river, and they’re basically Esther’s main income these days.
She didn’t want to tell them to fuck off. Also, she doesn’t want Miles telling her what to do, getting involved in her work when he knows nothing about it. And it occurred to her recently that that’s Miles’s default reaction to pretty much any irritating situation she might happen to mention, like back in the summer, when she’d been packing for Corsica and told him, ‘Dad’ll go mad when he sees how much stuff I’m bringing.’
Miles: ‘Tell him to fuck off.’
Me: ‘Miles, that’s my dad!’
Miles: ‘So?’
He hardly speaks to his own dad, who owns half of the West Country and reckons he’s an artisanal cider producer when he’s actually an army guy, a colonel or something, if they still exist. Or a brigadier? Is that a thing, the Brigadier of Somerset?
So no, Esther wasn’t going to tell her dad to fuck off – or the Bethani girls, for that matter. They’ve loved her pictures since Lauren started doing them. And she suspects that might bother Miles a little bit because later, he grudgingly has a quick look through yesterday’s shoot.
‘Anyone can be a photographer with a phone,’ he remarks, stifling a yawn.
‘Lauren has proper cameras too,’ she tells him. ‘She’s professional, Miles. She does shoots for newspapers, magazines, websites – all this incredible food photography. It’s just, with a phone there’s that spontaneity—’
‘Ooh, spontaneity!’ he teases.
She glares at him, telling herself not to rise to it. In fact, he too has a proper, very expensive camera, which he’s used once – to take a picture of his own reflection in a tarnished mirror. He has a problem with instruction manuals, he says. He can’t learn things that way. ‘Do a photography course then,’ Esther suggested, but he said he didn’t have the time.
‘You don’t need to feel threatened because Lauren’s been helping me,’ Esther tries to reassure him. Her therapist said that, when someone is behaving in a way you don’t like, it’s best to try to understand ‘the why’.
‘Why should I feel threatened, babe?’ he asks, looking baffled.
‘I’m saying, you shouldn’t—’
‘I don’t feel threatened by anyone,’ Miles retorts.