‘You see, ba ma way of thinkin', it's aw to dae with basic psychology … '
Stevie cut him off with a mirthless little laugh. Like he would know! The only thing he knew about heads was that they were meant to propel forwards at great speed into someone else's nose. Most likely someone he was married to, too.
‘Please don't take this wrongly, Mr MacLean but I'll handle this in my own fashion,' she said bravely. Her lip throbbed and she was fighting back some annoying tears, and she didn't know if they were down to bodily pain or his frustrating, hateful presence and all he stood for.
Adam pulled out a card from his tracksuit pocket and slammed it on the table, which made both her and the plates jump.
‘Sorry, I'm a wee bit heavy-handed.'
You can say that again, she thought.
‘Here's ma card. If you change yer mind and want to hear whit I have to say, then gi' me a ring. We could smash this thing up before it gets too big and get back tae being happy.'
She didn't like the way he said ‘smash' with such relish, or maybe it was just his accent. Either way, she wouldn't have fancied his chances in a lullaby-singing competition.
‘That is, if you seriously want tae get yerrr man back.' He looked accusingly at the feast on the table. Not exactly food for a seriously devoted body sculptor, he thought. Then he was off, just as Catherine made her perfectly timed return.
‘So?' she said, and then jumped back. ‘Shit – your lip! He didn't hit you after all, did he?'
‘Like he'd dare,' said Stevie, but knowing he'd dare quite easily. ‘No, I burnt my lip on the coffee.'
‘And?'
‘Then I bit it and it hurt.'
‘No, you clumsy tart, I meant "and" as in "and what did he want"?'
‘Oh, he says he has a plan to break up Matthew and Jo,' Stevie said unenthusiastically.
‘What was it then?' Catherine leant eagerly forward.
‘Haven't a clue,' shrugged Stevie. ‘I said I wasn't interested in hearing it.'
‘Why not? You could at least have listened to what he had to say! You do have something in common here, after all.'
Stevie shuddered at the thought of having anything in common with him.
‘I think I could guess at a push what he'd suggest,' she said. ‘Something to do with sawn-offs and hitmen.'
‘Ooh look,' said Catherine, picking up his card. ‘He's the General Manager here.'
‘I hope you're flaming joking. I've just signed up for a whole year!' said Stevie, snatching back the card to see it there in black and white, and red and a touch of navy blue – Adam MacLean, General Manager of Well Life Super-gym, Dodmoor, Barnsley, and the scribble of his mobile number. The information knocked Stevie for six because he looked more like the head of ‘Thugs International' than something sensible, respectable and managerial.
A picture came into her head of him pushing past her and coming into the house. If she hadn't opened the door, she would still have been in blissful ignorance. Jo and Matthew might have just had a quick fling and that could have been the end of it. Maybe that's all it was: a last-minute explosion of freedom before he finally settled down and got married. It happened. Stevie was thirty-six; she wasn't the naïve baby she'd been nearly five years ago when she had found out about Mick, even if Mick and Matthew were very different animals. Mick wouldn't have felt the slightest bit of guilt, but she knew Matthew would be crippled with it and most likely pacing the Spanish hotel foyer vowing never to do anything like that again. But then he had to go and tell her just because he found out about it and got upset and wanted to upset everyone else too. No, she'd heard what McBigmouth had to say once; she wouldn't make that mistake again.
‘He can go and stuff a live haggis up his backside,' said Stevie decisively. Then she bit down and burnt the other side of her mouth on the panini.
Chapter 8
Paris smiled that special smile of hers as Brandon took her into his arms.
‘I love you so much,' she said, her red lips parting slowly to alert him to the fact that she was ready for his kiss. Brandon let her fall heavily to the ground.
‘I'm sorry, love, but I'm mad crazy bonkers over another woman. She's got everything you haven't, so no one can blame me really. So this is the big El Dumpo, I'm afraid. Well, have a nice life, pet.' And with that he expertly mounted his Spanish black stallion and, bearing a rose between his teeth, stuck his boot spurs into the side of his horse, who whinnied and galloped him away to his new love La Joanna, which in Spanish means ‘crafty two-faced cow'.
Stevie sighed, pushed back her chair and looked at the words that plopped out of her printer on the page. Yet another sheet to join the ream of bad writing destined for the recycling bin in the garage.
‘Yeah, this is really going to pay the bills, pratting around like this,' she said to herself. She had a block as big as Everest in her writer's flow. In fact, she might as well log off for ever, then get a job in a factory sprinkling cheese on pizzas.
It was not often that writing felt like hard work, but today it did. Not that she usually wrote at the weekend, but seeing as she hadn't touched her keyboard since last Monday, she thought she might take advantage of the hour whilst Danny played Harry Potter on his GameCube. He was busy zapping toadstools to get Bertie Botts beans to buy some spells at Hogwarts, and he seemed quite content, although Stevie felt guilty that she wasn't doing anything more exciting herself to entertain him.
She always tried to do something special at the weekends – take him for a walk to the park, or do some gardening together, or play board games. It was a kickback, she supposed, from her own childhood. She would get piles of games for Christmas and birthdays, but find there was no one to play them with. Her mum was always too busy to sit down and shake a dice, and even though their tiny home was like a new pin, Edna Honeywell was continuously scrubbing or Brasso-ing the ornaments. Later, Stevie suspected that was probably just an excuse to avoid getting roped into playing Frustration or Ker Plunk and, much as she herself liked a nicely kept home, she vowed never to make such a god of the housework that she was too busy to play with her own children. Her dad worked long hours and so when he did get home, he could barely manage a ‘hello', never mind a game of Cluedo. He needed to save his energies for the rabid arguments that Stevie listened to as she lay trembling in her bed.
So one day, Stevie simply stopped asking her parents to play and turned to herself for entertainment, drawing and scribbling, reading and writing, constructing little books and stories of love and happy families that became longer and more structured and crafted. She never showed them to anyone, they were her own private treasures. Her diaries were highly detailed too. In them, she found an overflow pipe for her frustrations and ambitions and crazily mixed-up emotions. Especially when her father ran off with the woman with a really thick neck a few doors away, and her mother, in vengeance, took a slimy lover whose eyes were too close together and who stared too long at Stevie's budding breasts for her comfort. It had been a difficult time and stained her teenage years with some memories she would rather forget. She had burnt the diaries in the end; they had been useful to write but far too painful to read.
It had been a relief to get away to university to study English, made possible because it was in the old days when students of moderate-earning parents got grants and they only had to stump up the minimum payment, which her dad did out of guilt because it was easier to give presents and money than time. That was why she always wanted to give a child what she had never had – a parent's interest and attention. Preferably two parents, although that chance seemed forever to be slipping past her.
Today, though, she did not want to play with Danny and that made her feel mean, although she had accepted a long time ago that she wasn't Supermum. She just wanted to go to the gym and hurt herself with big weights, then come home and soothe the aches in a hot bath, wrap herself in her fluffy towelling robe and fold onto the sofa to sleep until Tuesday, the day that Matthew came home.
It was an incredibly soggy day. The air was damp and the Yorkshire earth was dealing with the aftermath of heavy showers through the night.
‘I'm bored,' said Danny, quitting Harry.