Chapter 21
21
‘You’re home late?’ Sarah said as she heard the front door shut. It wasn’t a bad thing. The kids had gone down easily enough – George still with the shower cap on his head. Sarah had allowed him a half-hour respite while he was in the bath. When he was all dried off, and she placed the cap back on, she had coated the edge in Vaseline, partially to stop any nits escaping, partially to try and lessen the red mark around his head that would surely be a red flag for social services. After that, she had got on to the editing. Drew sauntered in, dropping his coat on the back of the sofa.
‘Everything okay?’ she asked.
He nodded, closing his eyes.
‘Yeah. Strange day.’
‘Strange how?’
‘Just strange,’ he said. She waited to see if any more details were going to be given to expand his answer, but when none came, she got back to the computer.
‘Oh crap,’ she said, lifting her head back up only seconds after it had gone down. ‘Did you get the nit lotion?’
‘Nit lotion?’ His wide-eyed confusion, followed by the fumbling for his phone, told her all she needed to know. ‘Sorry, I didn’t see the message.’
Sarah groaned and looked at the clock. There was no point going now. The pharmacy part of the supermarket closed at seven-thirty. Trust Drew to pick today of all days to be late.
‘Fine then,’ she said, eyes going back to the computer. ‘But you’re going to have to get Eva ready before you go tomorrow. I’ll need to leave by seven if I’m going to get George de-loused before school.’
‘George has got lice?’
Dropping her hands down to her sides, Sarah studied her husband with an increasing tilt to her head.
‘Have you been drinking?’ she said.
‘What? Oh, yes, just a couple after work, that’s all. Nothing special.’
Sarah’s normal reaction to Drew informing her that he had been at the pub spending copious amounts of money on overpriced draught ales would be to remind him exactly how much their weekly shop was, how close to the limit of their overdraft they were, and exactly how much nappies cost. But things had been so good between them lately. Besides, he looked happy, sitting there on the sofa. Like a huge weight had been lifted. So instead of berating him, she said, ‘You haven’t done that in ages. Who did you go with?’
He felt like crap. Worse than crap. Like crap that had got stuck on the bottom of his shoe, clinging to the sole, so he hadn’t noticed until he had trodden it all the way through the house. What a prick.
He hadn’t meant to say that he had gone for a drink with Barry. He hadn’t meant to say anything at all. But then Barry’s name came out, and the lies just came tumbling with it.
‘He’s going through a bit of a rough time,’ Drew said, his mouth elaborating on the first lie before he could stop it. ‘Divorce,’ he added.
Sarah frowned. ‘Didn’t he only get married last year?’ she said. ‘Alice, wasn’t it?’
A lump wedged itself into Drew’s throat. ‘Yes, well, erm. I think maybe it was a bit of a quick decision.’
‘Hadn’t they been together since school?’
‘I’m not too sure…’
The lump was now causing a violent case of sweating and a rapid increase in heart rate. Any second, and his eyes would start twitching, he realised. His eyes always twitched when he lied. And Sarah would spot it in an instant.
‘I think I’m going to have a bath,’ he said, standing up and angling himself away from his wife. ‘You don’t mind, do you? Just that the train was really packed tonight.’ Another lie – what was wrong with him?
‘No, you go. Then maybe afterwards, you can have a look at the corrections I’ve made in this last chapter. Check if you’re okay with them?’
‘It’s fine,’ Drew insisted, now racing up the stairs. ‘I trust you. Change what you want. Change everything. It’s fine.’
In the bath, he dunked his head under the water, letting the soap suds settle before thrusting his face back out. He tried to convince himself that it was better this way as he fished around for the soap that was now sliding around beneath his calves. If he’d said he was out with Polly, Sarah would have been bound to ask him why, and if he said why, then he’d have to tell her. At that point, she’d have found out that his entire company had seen the chapter she wrote for their book. She’d have been mortified. Beyond mortified. And the last thing she needed this late on in her pregnancy was stress. No, he had done the right thing in protecting Sarah and the baby from stress, he told himself. He had definitely done the right thing.
Nothing good was going to come of today, Sarah could tell. It started with running out of milk. There was a bit in the bottom of the bottle, enough for one child but not two. Struck by an inspirational idea, Sarah decided to add a bit of water to it, just to make it go a little further. She turned on the kitchen tap the exact second George had bolted into the kitchen and ran headlong into her leg.
‘Shit,’ she said as the bottle dropped from her hand, spilling what little there was down the sink.
‘We’re not supposed to say shit.’ George scowled. ‘You tell Daddy off when he says that word.’
‘And we’re not supposed to be running in the kitchen either. And why haven’t you got your clothes on? I told you to put your clothes on.’
‘But I couldn’t get them on over this.’ He pointed to the shower cap that had slipped down the side of his face, while the Vaseline had glued his hair to his skin at peculiar angles like a hedgehog that had got itself caught in a hedge.
‘Okay, well, I’ll deal with that. How does bread and ketchup sound for breakfast?’ she asked. George crinkled up his nose.
‘Well, it’s all we’ve got, so you’re having it.’ She’d run out of patience. The plan was to leave in five minutes, and she hadn’t even brushed her teeth yet. ‘Where is your dad?’ Sarah handed George an uncut slice of bread on a plate and squeezed a dollop of tomato sauce on the side. Drew was meant to have Eva down by now. ‘Drew? What are you doing?’ she hollered up the stairs. ‘Do you not remember me saying I needed you to help this morning? Help ,’ she reinforced. Five minutes later, and he appeared downstairs, Eva dressed in a tutu with a Paw Patrol T-shirt and a pair of George’s old wellington boots that were at least three sizes too big.
‘It’s what she wanted to wear,’ Drew said.
‘It’s so pretty.’ Eva responded, tugging at her skirt.
Resisting the urge to roll her eyes at her husband, Sarah took their daughter from his arms and slipped off the boots. ‘If this is what happens when you go drinking with Barry, then I’m putting an end to it now,’ she said. ‘And you’ll have to drive me to the pharmacy and park the car at the station today.’
‘That means we’ll have to pay for parking for the day.’
‘Would you rather we get a letter about George’s unauthorised absences?’
She took his silence as acceptance.
While they had managed to get to the pharmacy only ten minutes later than planned, the delousing experience was every bit as horrific as Sarah had anticipated.
‘It’s in my eyes. It’s in my eyes!’ George thrashed around in the bath.
‘You’re wearing your swimming goggles. It is not in your eyes.’
‘It’s in my nose. It’s in my nose! Argh! That hurts!’
Sarah inhaled deeply, only to fill her lungs with the acrid fumes of the lotion.
‘When you get to school today, you are to play with no one, do you hear me? No one. Because if you get these things again, I will throttle someone.’
George’s bottom lip began to wobble. ‘But I like playing with people,’ he said. His eyes, magnified by the goggles, started to fill with tears.
‘Fine,’ Sarah said. ‘But you have to sit at least two feet away from them.’
‘How far is two feet?’
Eva, meanwhile, had a mini-meltdown about the fact that Sarah wouldn’t let her eat the tiny, round pieces of George’s LEGO set and was sent to her bedroom, screaming away. She was still screaming when Sarah bundled them into the car.
In the classroom, she was met by Miss Jenkins.
‘Sorry we’re late,’ she said, taking George’s coat from him as he went.
‘No, it’s quite all right. Mrs Fairwright explained.’
Mrs Fairwright? It took Sarah a second. Justine. Of course, she would have had to get in there and say something.
‘It’s better now though, the psoriasis?’ The teacher asked, causing a pink hue to rise to Sarah’s cheeks.
‘Yes, thank you. It’s much, much?—’
‘The only thing is, it isn’t on his record. We have to have any conditions on his record.’
‘Oh, is it not?’ Sarah feigned surprise while simultaneously wanting to slap Justine silly and cursing herself for such a ridiculous lie. Bloody Justine. Next time George got nits, Sarah was going to insist he only played with Philomena for a week before she did that lotion. That’d wipe the smile off her face. ‘I’ll send an email through with the details when I get home.’ She was about to move to leave when she noticed that the teacher’s smile was still fixed on her, just a fraction too broad to be casual.
‘About those Winter Fair prizes…’
‘Oh, shi-oot.’ Sarah tried and failed to hide her expletive. ‘Yes. I know. I’m so sorry. They’re on their way. They really are. I thought I’d got them at home. The thing is…’ She could feel herself starting to babble under pressure and clammed her mouth shut.
‘Hopefully by the end of the week?’
‘Hopefully,’ Sarah said. Then, before she could dig herself into an even bigger hole, she grabbed hold of Eva’s pushchair and swivelled out of the door.
A small, red slip was poking out of the letterbox when Sarah arrived back home. She pulled it free.
We tried to deliver your package, but you were out.
‘Great,’ she said, rifling around in her bag for her keys. She had only just found them when her eyes fell on the other sentence at the bottom of the card.
Your item will be kept at Wokingham post office for twelve hours. After that, it will be returned to the sender.
‘Twelve hours?’ Sarah said out loud. What happened to keeping things for a week? Or three days at the least. Bloody companies, she could see their plan. They’d probably timed it exactly so she wouldn’t be in when they delivered it, then she’d have to pay another fifteen quid to get it re-delivered. It was a scam, the whole lot of it.
With a despairing moan, she turned Eva’s pushchair back around. Off to the post office it was, then.
The niggling sensation that had been present in Drew’s stomach the night before was still unsettling him as he made his way off the train and into the office. It wasn’t like he had done anything wrong. If anyone was to blame, it was Sarah. She was the one who’d sent the damn thing to his work email in the first place. And yes, there was the teeny weenie lie he had told her about going to the pub with Barry. But was that the cause of this new anxiety? He didn’t think it was. The fact remained that Polly was only doing what she thought was best to keep him out of trouble. Yet, for some reason, that made him feel uncomfortable.
Several eyes turned to him as he entered the office building. Smirking eyes accompanied by smirking lips. Of course, they would have all read the email by now. All it would have taken was for one busybody to open the attachment, and the whole place would have known in a matter of minutes. Still, he thought to himself as he made his way past the cubicles and to his office, that was yesterday, and Casper had even sent him a personal email, apologising once again for Polly’s behaviour, and reminding him that their work emails should be used for work only. Trying to ignore the myriad whispers he knew were occurring outside his door, Drew buried himself away behind his computer and got started on his never-ending mountain of tasks.
At ten to ten, a knock on the door pulled his eyes away from the computer screen for the first time all morning.
‘Have you got a minute?’ Today, she was dressed all in cream, like one of those mini-milk ice lollies Eva liked so much. Drew shook that particular thought from his head. Where had it come from? When on earth did he become the type of person who thought about his work colleagues in terms of ice lollies? Feeling an increasingly common sweat budding on the back of his neck, he cleared his throat.
‘Polly? Is everything okay?’ His voice came out as a coarse croaking.
‘Do you have a minute?’ She gestured to the chair in front of his desk. ‘It won’t take long.’
‘Eh. Well, yes, I suppose.’ Not only was his shirt collar growing more stifling by the second; it was now causing a strange constricting sensation around his throat. ‘Sorry, I mean, of course, take a seat.’
With a quick glance behind, Polly slipped into the room, closing the door behind her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, taking a seat and shuffling it towards the front of the desk. ‘I realised after you left, I probably made you feel uncomfortable.’
‘Uncomfortable?’
‘What I said about my little workplace crush.’
‘Ahh.’ That was the cause of the gastric bubbling. Polly admitting to having a crush on him. Deep down, he had already known that but had been doing a damn good job of denying it to himself. However, now that it was out in the open, denying it, even to himself, became a lot harder. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try. ‘To be honest, I didn’t really think anything of it.’ He tried to sound as casual as possible when he spoke. ‘I assumed it was a joke.’
‘Phew.’ Polly used the back of her hand to exaggeratedly wipe her forehead, accompanied by a distinctly coquettish grin. ‘It was. It really was. If I’m going to be honest, I do have a small crush, but not on you. On Phil.’ She nodded out the window to where Phil, the resident body-builder, was leaning over a cubicle. ‘Did you know he works with rescue dogs on the weekend?’
‘I didn’t,’ Drew said, his pulse rate slowing back to an almost normal pace for the first time since Polly had entered the room. Of course she would go for a man like Phil. Even without the rescue dogs. ‘Muscles and a soft side. Sounds like he’s a keeper.’
Polly pulled a face. ‘Well, I’m not sure about that.’ Her coquettish grin deepened before being replaced by a far more business-like expression. ‘Okay, now that I’ve got that off my chest, I have to ask you something.’
‘Fire away.’ A wave of relief washed over him. Questions about databases. Warehouse facts. He didn’t care. He would even answer questions about standard deviation analysis on global tax rates to avoid going back to the conversation about men and crushes.
‘Your wife,’ Polly said, leaning in and resting her elbows on his desk and causing the contortions in his stomach to immediately recommence. ‘Did she actually write that? I mean, it came from her account.’
‘Well—’
‘Because if she did, that woman has a talent. I’m not joking. I read a lot of things like that. You know, single girl and everything, and that one…’ Her eyes shone as she let out a slow breath from between her lips. ‘Well, just imagine. It was hot. That’s what I’m trying to say. Seriously. If I could write like that, well, I wouldn’t be here. I would be writing those types of books as a living.’
Trying desperately not to use his imagination the way she had asked him to, Drew focused instead on the end of her sentence.
‘You think so? You think it’s that good?’
‘So, she did write it?’ Polly’s eyes glinted. The gut-churning Drew had been feeling was replaced by something a little more fluttery. Maybe… pride.
‘We’re actually writing a book together.’ He lowered his voice as he spoke. ‘Sarah’s mainly been doing the editing part, but I asked her to have a go at a chapter by herself. I knew it was good. I told her it was good.’
‘You’re doing it together?’ Polly’s eyebrows arched in a way that indicated she was impressed. ‘Wow, that is hot stuff. And you’re doing it as a proper book? You’re going to get it published and everything?’
‘That’s the plan. We’re hoping to get it online before the baby arrives in January.’
The eyebrows remained arched, the look of awe only increasing. ‘That’s amazing. And all while working here? And she has the kids at home too, right?’
‘She does.’
‘She sounds like a wonder woman.’
A comforting warmth fanned out through Drew’s previously contorted insides.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘She is pretty amazing.’ Sitting back in his chair, he took a moment to consider the fact. Sarah was amazing. He had married an amazing woman.
‘Well, I’ve taken enough of your time anyway,’ Polly said, rising to her feet. ‘I’d better be on my best behaviour. The last thing I want is for Casper to come down and see me bothering you. He’d probably order a restraining order on your behalf.’
Drew chuckled.
‘Oh, and are you okay to drop your figures down to Stu? I can run them down later if you want. I’ve only got to run some numbers for the marketing group.’
‘Of course, that’s no problem.’ Then realising that Stu was the only person in the office who wasn’t going to have to suppress a smirk when they spoke, Drew added, ‘Maybe I might choose to be like Stu now too. Stay off all forms of the internet for the rest of my life.’
Polly chuckled in her normal, light-hearted way.
‘Great. And like I said, you need to hold onto that wife of yours. She’s a keeper. And don’t forget to tell me when the book comes out. I am definitely ordering a copy.’
Then, without another word, she disappeared back onto the office floor, leaving Drew feeling, for no reason that he could explain, like something good might come from his little mishap after all.