The Birds and the Bees(28)

Jo was running her finger around the surfaces when he got back inside.

‘Well,' she said, ‘I'm surprised. Had it been my man moving another woman in, I'd have made sure it was an absolute tip.'

‘Stevie's not like that.'

‘I don't mean to sound cruel, Matt, really I don't when I say this. Nice  happy Stevie might not be like that but, as you know, unhappy scorned  Stevie can be very nasty.'

‘Hmmm,' said Matthew, although he knew that was slightly out of order.  ‘Nasty' was not a word he could truly associate with his ex. Even when  she told him how mad she had gone during the Mick business, she had not  done anything that could truly be classed as ‘nasty'. Not making up a  bed for him and his new lover hardly constituted cutting all the  crotches out of his suits, although he realized he hadn't checked them.  Sprinting quickly up the stairs, he threw open the wardrobe doors and  flicked through them. Nope, all intact. Phew! Like he'd doubted her  really! He knew Stevie like the back of his hand, although he had  thought she would be more upset about them splitting up than she was.  Admittedly, her total acceptance of the situation had surprised him. And  even though he knew it was unreasonable, it had slightly annoyed him  too.

Jo followed him up at a more leisurely pace and sussed out the wardrobe space situation.

‘So that's one suitcase worth, where do I put the others?' she said with a teasing smile.

‘We'll figure it out,' he said. ‘Personally I think you should throw all your clothes away and be naked for ever.'

She laughed, and he thought, Bloody hell, she's in my bedroom at last.  He felt as thrilled as he did when he was in the same situation with  Tina Tinker when they were seventeen and his mam and dad were away for  the night.

‘I see the bed's not made.' She poked the naked quilt.

‘Do you care?'

‘What do you think?'

‘I think I want to see you undressed on it now.'

She slowly unbuttoned her shirt, and the sensations that started to  missile his brain knocked all thoughts of Visas and Mastercards and bank  loans and overdrafts into Kingdom Come.





Chapter 23




Nothing could have prepared Stevie for the sight that met her eyes as  she went to close the kitchen blinds. She could not possibly have ever  found a big enough piece of padding to protect her heart against it, not  even on the World Wide Web. She jumped back from the window as if it  had just given her a belt of electricity and hid in the shadows, wanting  to move away but unable to. With a gruesome compulsion, she watched the  smart red Golf drive cosily into Matthew's carport then his black Punto  pull up behind it. Both drivers got out smiling, and then her ex-fiancé  scooped up her treacherous ex-friend in his arms and carried her  Prince-Charming style into her ex-home. They were giggling, probably  singing a song from Oklahoma as well, because that's what it looked  like – Hollywood happiness – the sort you dream of but only one person in a  million ever gets, and it is never you. The door seemed to close slowly  and magically behind them, and at that very moment it felt as if someone  had whipped away the top layer of Stevie's skin and everything that  possibly could, hurt and throbbed. What the hell had possessed her to  follow Adam MacLean's hare-brained scheme and move into this cottage,  when she had known she would feel like this as soon as she saw them  together? It was going to kill her, day after day after day. She could  appreciate how Prometheus felt now, having his insides eternally picked  at by a big bird for stealing fire from the gods. Except it was her that  was being both stolen from and punished, and no prizes for guessing who  the big bird was.

Mesmerized, she stayed there watching for sights of more animation, and  was rewarded, if you could call it that, for her patience with the sight  of Matthew speeding out again to get their suitcases, rushed and clumsy  like some Ealing Comedy newlywed. Then she watched as the bedroom light  went on upstairs, and then watched as it went off.                       
       
           



       

Her high-performance imagination made a best friend and a powerful  enemy. When dealing with the Parises and Brandons at work, it had a good  place, but here it tortured her with a horrible and vivid slideshow  projection. They would have fallen onto the bed now, not even noticing  that it hadn't been made. An orchestra was welling up behind them, the  couple that were meant to be, the heaven-made match who would ride every  tidal wave life threw at them, like champion golden Australian surfers.  They would buy each other anniversary cards, years from now, with poems  on page 3 that précised to ‘we showed 'em, didn't we?' and their ‘our  song' would be something by Shania Twain. They would spend their lives  bonking like beautiful body-perfect minks: Jo savouring Matt's toned,  lightly muscular body and his big shoulders whilst Matthew marvelled in  her velvet skin and her cellulite-free arse. These were Stevie's  thoughts as she stood in her Joseph and his Technicolor Dreamcoat  dressing-gown and Totes Toasties, and continued to sip from a mint  Options, which had long since gone cold.

She honestly did not know if she could go on. Her life was a shambles,  her fiancé was a love rat, her friend was a love rattess, she couldn't  face writing any more and she was in a house she couldn't afford. Not  only that, but she had not yet formally sorted out terms and conditions  with a bloke she owed money to who had no qualms about bashing women he  supposedly liked. So what would he do to women he couldn't stand the  sight of? And what if McPsychopath demanded his oats instead of  money – and she didn't mean the Scott's Porage variety? Then again, she  had to go on, because she had a wee – a little boy sleeping upstairs,  wrapped round a cuddly Superhero, who needed his mam to be strong and to  feed him and provide for him and give him a home other than a cardboard  box on a street somewhere. Even if she was an old boot of a mam that  had surprised no one by being dumped. Thank God she was only drinking  cold hot chocolate and wasn't up to her forehead in gin because by now  she would have had her Roy Orbison CD on and be upping the Kleenex  shares by fifty quid each, and be in a very dangerous state of mind.

She did eventually doze off in bed that night, but only in between many  wakings up that meant she bobbed in the shallow waters of sleep rather  than surrendered to the deeper warm currents that rested the mind. Her  dreams had a Hammer House of Horror certificate.



Stevie had read, and indeed written, about people who compartmentalized  their pain, who put a jolly face on and confronted the world, even  though their heart was cracking inside them, only to sob into their  pillows when they were safely alone, but she didn't really believe  anyone could manage it successfully. She found, however, the next  morning, that she was living proof of the phenomenon. She scurried  around the kitchen like Doris Day, for Danny's sake, tra-la-la-ing as  she poured out Coco Pops and orange juice and made ‘fresh cwoffee'. She  kept the kitchen blinds open to a minimum, just enough to let some  sunlight squeeze through them, but at an angle that didn't allow her to  see anything of the house opposite, or the goings-on of the people  within it.

As soon as Danny was safely in school, her whole body seemed to sag, not  helped by the fact that a day of trying to sort out Paris and Brandon's  fates awaited her. She knew another wasted morning of rubbish-quality  writing would be the outcome, and that the only possible solution of  working off some of the half-grief, half-murder feelings that were  munching away inside her, lay up the road in Well Life.

It was the first time she had been since doing her Norman Wisdom routine  on the treadmill, but contrary to her belief, no one nudged each other  as she got on it or pointed her out. There were no, ‘That's her's  whispered a bit too loudly or sniggering behind hands; she was once  again consigned to the anonymous. Grabbing a towel, she put her bag in  the locker and climbed aboard the treadmill carefully. She had forgotten  her headphones so couldn't divert her thoughts by listening to Jeremy  Kyle trying to sort out complicated dysfunctional lives on the overhead  TVs. Maybe she should give him a ring.

She tried to blank her mind and keep her pacing rhythm true to the  background music blasting out through the speakers, until she realized  the track was ‘Loneliness' and a connection sparked between her and the  song. From then on, every time she heard it in the future, an  accompanying image of herself lonely and rejected would loom up in her  head, sadly trying to achieve the impossible by running on the spot. Her  eyes started to leak again to her absolute horror, and she tried to  build a quick surreptitious eye-wipe into her routine, which nearly  upset her balance. She had decided to rest the machine for a couple of  minutes when she saw Adam MacLean heading directly towards her.