Chapter 2
MARCUS
Who is this woman?
I’ve never in my life met anyone so obsessed with a cake. (Other than myself, obviously, about the same cake, but I had excellent reason for that.) If Simon hadn’t intervened, I think she’d genuinely have eaten it off the floor. Unhinged.
And now she’s sitting at my neighbour’s kitchen table with a fork in the remnants of her half of the squashed cake.
Given that she and Simon greeted each other like old friends, I’m guessing that she is not a cake-crazed intruder looking for a comfortable chair and some cutlery, but a friend of Ellie’s.
A close friend, going by how much she’s made herself at home.
Hard to imagine, because Ellie is extremely sane, but maybe the cake woman isn’t always as bad as this.
‘Sorry?’ she says, staring. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve come to give Maurice his antibiotics.’ I resent explaining myself in any way to the person who ruined my daughter’s birthday cake, but I’m not going to descend into a no-you-tell-me-first back-and-forth.
Frankie. That’s what Simon called her.
She nods, slowly. ‘Maurice is on antibiotics,’ she muses, as though I might be lying. How ridiculous: why would I lie about Ellie’s cat? And how would I know Maurice’s name if I were lying? ‘Oh, yes,’ she continues. ‘They have to be given at the same time every day.’
‘Yep.’ They do. 6 p.m. I’m here because Ellie and Jack both knew they’d be out at this time today. And, wow, she must know Ellie very well to know so much about her cat’s medication.
‘Well, thank you very much,’ Frankie says briskly. Dismissing me. ‘I can do the antibiotics.’
I would like nothing more than to walk straight back out, but I feel a responsibility to Maurice.
‘Do you know how to do them?’ I ask.
‘Yep.’
‘Could I confirm how exactly you plan to do them?’ I can’t just abandon Maurice to badly administered antibiotics. He got bitten by a fox and has a very nasty wound that risks turning septic.
Frankie raises one of her perfectly shaped eyebrows, like no-one other than me has ever not allowed her to have entirely her own way before.
Often the way with very beautiful women, I think.
Like my ex-wife. People will do anything for them just to receive one of their perfect smiles. (I am no longer one of those people.)
‘I know how to give a cat antibiotics,’ she says haughtily.
‘And I have a duty to Maurice,’ I reply, equally haughtily.
She glares at me and I smile blandly at her.
I am not ten years old, and therefore I should not immediately think Ha, you lose, when, after several seconds, she ends our unspoken contest.
‘Hold him by the neck and use a syringe,’ she says.
I have to fight to hold back a victorious smile, as I reply, ‘Great. So the antibiotics are in the fridge and it’s one five-millilitre syringeful.’
‘Thank you.’ No smile.
I wonder how she knows Ellie. I am not going to ask. I do not need to know, and I won’t, I hope, ever see this woman again, so it’s irrelevant to my life.
‘No problem,’ I say.
As I turn to leave, she picks up her fork and very deliberately takes a big mouthful of destroyed cake.
‘Don’t forget the antibiotics,’ I say.
She chews and swallows – somehow managing to look beautiful throughout – and then says, ‘Yummmm. Delicious.’
‘Antibiotics?’
She rolls her eyes at me. ‘I’m not going to forget.’
‘Okay. Good news.’ I hesitate for a moment, worrying about Maurice. ‘Why don’t we do the antibiotics together?’ I suggest eventually. Why can’t she just bloody do them so I can go? Or let me do them.
‘Because I am not a child and I can manage by myself?’
‘Yeah.’ I can’t leave until he’s had them, I decide. ‘I’ll just stay and check everything’s fine. Gave my word to Ellie.’ I check my watch; I really need to get home very soon.
Frankie takes another very deliberate mouthful and I decide that I don’t have time for this.
I take the three strides necessary to cross the room, open the fridge door and take out the antibiotics bottle, and, grabbing a handful of fishy biscuits from the box that Ellie keeps in the corner of the worktop, call, ‘Maurice, fishy.’
Maurice is an intelligent cat and immediately strolls into the kitchen and heads straight for my hand. I feed him the biscuits and then catch him by his collar. Shortly afterwards, I’ve given him the antibiotics and am rinsing the syringe.
‘Did you genuinely think I couldn’t give a cat some medicine?’ enquires Frankie icily.
‘I’m sure you can but I wasn’t certain, and I need to go and did not have time to wait for you to finish eating.’
‘Right.’
I should say nothing else and just leave, but can’t help adding, ‘Maurice and Ellie should count themselves lucky that you didn’t grab the antibiotics and spill them all over the floor.’
‘If you are referring to the cake, it was in fact you who grabbed it and caused it to fall onto the floor. It was my cake, because I was at the front of the queue. You reached round behind me for it and if you hadn’t been holding it out, my bag would not have hit it and it would not have landed on the floor and I would have had my cake with its icing intact. ’
‘I explained that I wanted the cake.’ I can’t entirely argue with her; I did reach round her. But I had very good reason.
‘And I explained that I wanted it. And I was at the front of the queue.’
The if-looks-could-kill expression in her eyes is so extreme that I laugh.
She does not join me in laughing. She just raises an eyebrow and takes another mouthful. I should go.
‘Agree to differ,’ I say, and walk out of the door while she continues to glare.
* * *
I rush home – it’s my daughter Ruby’s fourteenth birthday today and I have to be there to greet her when she gets back from school – only to see, when I open the front door, her school backpack, sports bag and Doc Marten boots strewn across the hall. Fuck.
I dive straight for the kitchen and find her sitting at the table drumming her fingers and looking at me with her eyes full of even more disdain than Frankie’s were earlier.
At least she isn’t holed up in her bedroom.
I place my bag from the café, which contains my half of the ruined carrot cake, plus three other cakes I hope she might like (she won’t but worth a shot), on the table, and say, ‘Happy birthday!’ with ludicrously fake-sounding jolliness.
It’s hard to be truly jolly when you’re terrified that you have yet again completely messed up with your daughter. ‘I have cake!’
‘Thanks. Nice of you to be home when I got back.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, ignoring the rudeness and its accompanying eyeroll.
‘I went to Simon’s to get your favourite cake.
’ I see her smile and think bugger, I’m so stupid, now I’m about to disappoint her again.
‘And unfortunately a very annoying woman got to the counter in front of me and asked for the cake and wouldn’t let me buy it even when I offered to buy every other cake in the shop for her instead. ’
Ruby’s lips twitch very slightly, which raises my hopes.
And then she says, ‘Dad, that’s so embarrassing. Throwing cash round like that.’
‘For your birthday, though,’ I say.
‘Yeah, no,’ she tells me, with another eyeroll.
‘Right. Sorry. Anyway, I bought you some other cakes that I thought you might like and…’
‘What are you going to do with them if I don’t like them?’
‘Freeze them and then make sure someone else eats them,’ I say promptly. Very rightly, Ruby is extremely against food waste. ‘Also, back to the carrot cake, I do have one half of a squashed one. Very squashed. And without most of the icing.’
Ruby slightly raises an eyebrow and in a rare display of (vague) interest asks, ‘Squashed? Half?’
‘I, um, took the cake, and the woman who wanted it spun round very fast and her bag knocked it and it ended up upside down on the floor.’
‘Both of you wanted only one cake?’ Ruby frowns. ‘Didn’t you just say the woman got there first?’
‘Um, yes.’ Bugger. I should not have explained this. I should have just said I dropped it. ‘Basically, I obviously want to give you the best birthday I can. And that’s your favourite cake. The woman did get to the front of the queue a little before me…’
‘So you took it from her?’
‘Kind of. I mean, not really. A bit. I obviously explained that I very much needed it. I told her it was an emergency and she said that she needed it and I couldn’t have it, so, yes, I did then reach round her and take the cake.
Because in that moment I turned into one of those parents who have to have the perfect birthday cake for their child. ’
Now I think about it, I might have behaved a little unreasonably. At the time, though, it seemed fully rational.
Ruby is just staring at me. If there was one way I was going to fuck up today, I would not have predicted this.
She shakes her head. ‘Stupid,’ she says.
‘Yup. Sorry.’
I wait, breath bated, and then… she smiles. And I smile too. And then I dare to hug her, and she actually returns the hug. And in this moment, I couldn’t be happier.
Ruby is fourteen and I love her more than life itself.
I do my best but I have absolutely no idea how to deal with her other than to try to spend as much time with her as possible, listen on the occasions she actually wants to talk properly to me, even though those occasions are only ever at midnight or when I really need to get some work done, and try to do my best to prove to her by my actions that I really do love her and that I can be both a father and mother to her.
Her mother has demonstrated very comprehensively by her actions that she is not going to be there for her.
A friend of mine with older daughters once told me a story about how he’d knocked on his fifteen-year-old daughter’s bedroom door and asked her what takeaway she’d like and she’d replied Fuck off.
That – my friend told me – summed up his teenage daughters in a nutshell.
At the time – Ruby was eleven – I thought that my beautiful, easy-going, adorable little girl would never become like that.
Wrong. Obviously not all teenage girls are difficult.
But Ruby, while a wonderful young woman, and, I’m proud to say, lovely at school and with her friends’ parents, is also, at times, very difficult at home.
Almost certainly not helped by her mother’s desertion.
So I do spend a fair amount of time walking on eggshells.
Today, she genuinely thinks her mother’s going to phone to wish her a happy birthday.
I don’t think she will, like she hasn’t on any of the ten other birthdays Ruby’s had since she left.
And then Ruby will be devastated yet again.
And that might involve her confiding her feelings in me, or going and sitting in her bedroom by herself, or lashing out at me.
‘When’s Sam back?’ she asks.
Sam, my son, is eleven and was only a few months old when their mum left, so he has no memory of her whatsoever. I’m never sure which of them – him or Ruby – is better off in that regard. Ruby was nearly four and does have a few memories of her.
‘He’s been doing after-school football,’ I tell Ruby. ‘He’s getting dropped back by Miranda.’
Miranda and her husband Rob also live in the village, and – very handily – amongst their four children have a girl the same age as Ruby and a boy the same age as Sam, who Ruby and Sam are very good friends with, so we share lifts a lot.
‘Cool.’ Ruby starts rooting around in the café bag and pulls out all the cakes. ‘These other ones look okay.’ She opens the carrot cake box and her eyes widen. ‘Dad. This is grim.’
I take another look. Yeah, I don’t think many people would eat that. I’m not really sure why I took my half.
‘The woman who has the other half was definitely going to eat hers,’ I say. ‘She was genuinely going to eat it off the floor, but Simon stopped her and scooped the bit that hadn’t touched the floor into boxes.’
‘She must have really wanted it.’
‘Yeah.’ I’m beginning to feel a little guilty.
Not really guilty, because snaffling a cake from under someone’s nose – having first asked very politely for it – is a nothing in the face of disappointing your daughter on her birthday.
But somewhat guilty. Because maybe the woman did have good cause to want it.
Although… since the person who she was buying it for was clearly just herself, her cause can’t have been as good as mine. Still…
‘Maybe you should apologise,’ Ruby says, upending our usual parent-child dynamic. ‘You stole her cake, didn’t you?’
‘Kind of. Yep.’ I don’t think now’s the time to tell Ruby that I saw the woman at Ellie’s and we had a small argument about cat-antibiotic administration. ‘If I ever see her again, I’ll apologise.’ Fortunately, I won’t.