The Birds and the Bees(19)

       
           



       

He had been quite surprised at how controlled she had tried to be too,  although she was really a bag of nerves, any fool could have seen that.  What was it she had said when he asked her which side of the church she  was to sit on? Broom? He had nearly laughed aloud at that. Broom!

He also noticed how much her eyes were taken up with the three other  main players in this ridiculous production. Admittedly, he himself had  been fascinated to watch Matthew and Jo stage-manage their ‘coming  together', just before ‘The Birds and the Bees'. He had suppressed a wry  smile at their guile, although seeing Jo flirt with another man in that  way poked at something ancient and violent within him. She and Matty  Boy had stayed together all evening after that, careful not to give away  any clues to their already established intimacy by making every move  look casual, though this had been sabotaged somewhat as Jo kept having  to sneak out her purse to pay for the drinks that Matthew went up to the  bar to get. She wouldn't have liked that one bit, and might have just  won him Round 2 by default, which offset some of the feelings that were  twisting in his gut like a blunt, rusty knife.

He saw that Matty Boy had run after his estranged partner when the time  had come for her to leave, although he was gone less than a minute. Adam  wondered what all that was about. Couldn't have been much, because he  went straight back to the table and there was a moment of discreet but  heavy-duty talk between him and Jo. Not that he was watching them much.  He was trying really hard to look as if he was unbothered and jolly. It  was all part of his master-plan.

Dragging his thoughts back to the here and now, he watched her, hovering  around the salad vegetables here in the local supermarket. She was  wearing jeans and a green sweatshirt which complemented her ruffled  blonde hair. She looked quite neat now and she had certainly scrubbed up  nae bad in that little red suit and hat at the wedding, he had thought,  although she must have wanted to die when Jo turned up in a reversal of  the same colours. Jo looked so gorgeous that he would not have been  able to stop himself kissing her and carrying her home, if she had given  him the slightest encouragement. Something inside him had creaked when  he saw her looking so long and lovely in that beautifully expensive  suit, although commonsense told him that it was his stomach making that  sound through hunger. His heart knew different.

No little boy with her again – so who had she palmed him off onto today,  Adam wondered. He just bet the Mother of the Year awards were stacked  high on her mantelpiece. Mind you, the kid was better off away from a  mother with a temper like that. It must have been sheer luck that he  hadn't been hurt in the crossfire when she threw pans in temper at  Matthew.

She must have just come into the supermarket for she had only collected  the one item so far – and what an item! She hadn't seen him because she  was concentrating on trying to guide a trolley with a demonically  possessed front wheel, so the advantage was his. It was wicked, but he  couldn't resist charging deliberately into her trolley with his own,  full of many bottles of spirits, mainly whisky, which rattled in rude  protest. Then he gave her a look of mock surprise that wouldn't have  fooled the king of village idiots.

‘Well fancy meetin' yooou here. Adjusting to single life verrry quickly,  I see,' he bellowed, pointing down to the very long cucumber standing  erect in her trolley. She blushed immediately and threw the nearest  thing to hand in beside it to dilute the embarrassment. A tray of  stir-fry.

‘Oooh yum yum,' he said puckishly. ‘Cucumber stir-fry, my favourite.'

‘Was there something you wanted, Mr MacLean?' said Stevie haughtily, trying not to blush any harder.

‘No' really,' he said, trying not to be so amused that she was redder  than the vine-ripened tomatoes nearby. She would be fun to torture, he  thought. It might take his mind off what her man was doing with his  woman.

‘Only I've far more important things to do than stand here being insulted by you.'

‘I wonder what they could be?' he smiled like a barracuda, raised his eyebrows and cast a look at the impressive cucumber.

She sooo wanted to batter him round the head with it.

‘My fiancé is calling around later,' Stevie said, ignoring his pathetic  childish innuendos. He looked interested now and less piss-takey.

‘Oh really?' he said, folding his arms. ‘Whit forrr?'

‘I don't know, but he's coming when my son is in bed so he obviously  wants to talk. I'm quietly optimistic,' which she was, surprisingly  enough. After she got home from the wedding, she had looked up ‘winning  your partner back' on the internet and picked up a thread about ‘the  power of positive thought'. Apparently, the trick was to visualize what  she wanted to happen and focus on that. It was worth a try; anything was  worth a try. So by that token, she had been telling herself since then  that Matthew was coming home tonight for good. He had finished with Jo  at the reception because she was so boring and uninteresting and had bad  breath, and now they were back on track to get married and live happily  ever after. And Adam MacLean would be kidnapped by aliens and whisked  off to Saturn for painful medical experiments.                       
       
           



       

‘Well, good luck,' said Adam MacLean, ‘but will ye take a piece of advice?'

‘No,' said Stevie and started to wheel away, but he grabbed her handlebar forcefully and made sure she wasn't going anywhere.

‘Well, I'm givin' it tae ya anyway, so take it or leave it. Basic  psychology. Play it exactly the opposite tae how he'd expect you tae  behave. It's yoor only weapon.'

Whether or not he meant to imply that her looks or her personality  wouldn't do much in a head-to-head with Jo, that's the way she took it.

‘Yes, well thank you, Professor Platitude,' she huffed belligerently. ‘I  look forward to your next lecture with great eagerness. What will it  be, I wonder? Jung's theory of the Absolutely Bloody Obvious?'

Not that he'd know who Jung was. Probably thought she meant the old DJ  whose first name was Jimmy. And with that, Stevie and her enormous  cucumber weaved off in the direction of the celery, whilst her trolley  headed for Fresh Meats.



She turned up at Catherine's just after half past eleven to find the  kitchen in chaos and Danny tucking into a full English breakfast.

‘How the hell did you get him to eat that?' said Stevie, after she had  given him a big ‘hello' kiss. ‘I can hardly get him to eat anything  except for Coco Pops and chicken – and his flaming collars of course!'

‘Ah, the wonderful mystery of children,' said Catherine. ‘Violet doesn't  eat eggs usually, she's only eating them because Danny is, and he's  only eating them because Kate is. James obviously eats nothing because  he never gets up.'

‘Does Violet eat them when Kate eats them then?'

‘Naw, doesn't work like that – they're related,' said Catherine with a  sniff, leading her pal off for a coffee in a quieter corner after  swiping bits of uneaten bacon from the twins, Sarah and Robbie. ‘Mmm,  why is it that food stolen from kids always tastes so good?' she said,  smacking her lips in neo-orgasmic delight. ‘Oh, by the way, Danny's got a  snaggy toenail, Kate said, but he wouldn't let her cut it off. He said  the Toenail Pixie will get it later, is that right?'

‘He's scared of getting his toenails cut, so I do them in the middle of  the night when he's asleep. He thinks a pixie comes and does it,'  explained Stevie.

‘I don't know how you think of these things,' said Catherine. ‘I haven't a creative bone in my body.'

‘Oh, I don't know, I think you've created quite a lot,' said Stevie,  looking at the kitchen scene, which looked like a Waltons family reunion      , with Danny playing the special guest-star part. ‘He looks so happy  here,' she said, as he giggled at Eddie who was trying to pretend that  one of them had stolen the sausage that he had just fed to Boot under  the table.

‘You worry too much,' said Catherine.

‘He was in front of the headmaster last week for smacking Curtis Ryder.'

‘ … Who was trying to pull his trousers down,' said Catherine sternly,  because she knew where this was going. ‘That's why Curtis Ryder got a  thump, not because Danny's doolally because Matthew's gone. The lad's  standing up for himself, like you always tell him to. Take a chill pill,  gal'. And she shoved a packet of medicinal chocolate digestives at her  to break open with her nails.