Chapter 19
So of course I accept when David phones me up and asks me round again that night, to meet the boys. “Did Aileen speak to you?” I ask him.
“She did.”
“Did she bollock you?”
“What for?”
“For telling me something she was embarrassed to have me know.”
I’m sitting in that same spot in the garden room. I still wish Peggy was sitting opposite me but it’s nice to chat to David too, now I’ve decided I trust him.
“Ah,” he says. “You mean, how she was being sticky about you?” I wait.
“Right, well, yes. I shouldn’t have said that.
It was me. Not trying to keep you at arm’s length!
Rather . . . crapping out of telling her any details about you and me.
Petty as that sounds. And I didn’t want you to know I was such a petty little crapper-outer.
” He blows out a big breath. “So there it is. Do you still want to come round tonight or do you despise me now?”
“It’s a very endearing characteristic,” I tell him, “to be a bit shit—”
“Really? Well, I’ve got a terrible singing voice too, if it helps.”
“Don’t interrupt me. To be a bit shit and have no trouble admitting it when you get caught. It’s almost better than not being shit at all.”
“Oh, come off it!”
“No, because that’s intimidating, isn’t it? Can you imagine going out with someone gorgeous and clever and honest and diligent and organised and energetic?”
“I don’t have to.”
“Puke,” I say. “What time’s dinner, when the kids are there?”
“Six,” he tells me. “No devices at the table. But there might be a burping competition. Since it’s Monday.”
He’s kidding about the burping competition, but not the no-phones rule. My heart bangs in my chest as he calls up the stairs and two huge boys with feet like loaves come thundering down to the kitchen. They stand awkwardly in the doorway, staring at me.
“This is Lindsay,” David says. “Edwin. Sean. Sit down and say hello.”
They are only a couple of years older than Zak and Nicky and instantly I imagine all four kicking a ball around the back garden at Saint Helen’s while David and I and John and Shelley sit on the patio.
Although I can’t imagine what we would be talking about, the four of us.
Maybe we’re all admiring the baby I’m feeding, painlessly.
But won’t these kids be too old for football by then?
I bring myself back to the real world and say hello.
They don’t look much like David, but they don’t look like the whale their mum was at school, allegedly. They’re normal, slightly spotty, slightly squeaky-voiced kids, squirming a bit to be sharing dinner with their dad’s new girlfriend.
“Lindsay’s an audiobook narrator,” David says.
The bigger one really tries to think of a follow-up question but fails completely and goes pink, bending over his pasta and shaking his hair over his eyes.
David grimaces at me and I give him a doesn’t-matter shake of the head.
Then the two of us adults talk about my new dead room insulation, getting more and more strained, until I want to giggle. I wish Chloe was here. She’d say something outrageous and have both of them wrapped round her little finger in no time.
“Screens off at nine,” David says as they scrape their chairs back, having wolfed down their food apparently without chewing it in their desperation to get away.
We sit in silence and listen to their footsteps thump back upstairs, then to the sound of muffled guffaws as a door slams.
“That was excruciating,” David says, lying back in his chair and putting his napkin over his face. “I’m knackered.”
“At least it’s over,” I say. “It won’t be so bad next time. Poor little loves. God, imagine what it must have been like when they met . . . What’s Aileen’s wife’s name?”
“Christ, I know, right?” says David, taking the napkin off again. “Her name’s Medusa.”
I snort. “No it is not!”
“In this house, her name is Medusa.” He’s not quite laughing, so I go round the table and drop a kiss on his head en route to the dishwasher.
“You don’t need to do that,” he tells me.
But I’ve seen the way he keeps glancing at his briefcase and I shout him down.
I ask him how to put the radio on—I’m still loving the schedule coming back to me after all those podcast years—and then I tell him to leave me in peace.
He gives me a bear hug that suggests a mountain of work he’s been trying not to think about and disappears into the room next door.
In the quiet between tracks, I overhear a whispered conversation, even though he has closed the door. Mostly whispered, apart from one “All right!” that’s spat with enough vehemence to seem louder than a shout.
I’m instantly convinced it’s Aileen on the other end. That one of the boys texted her to report my presence and she’s rethought her earlier attitude and demanded I get chucked out.
I’m even more convinced when David sidles round the door a minute later looking . . . flustered is the only word for it. His face is red and his hair looks as if he’s been running his hands through it.
“I’m really sorry about this,” he says. I feel my heart sink. Or rather I feel the pasta in my stomach threaten to rise.
“What’s up?” I ask, trying for breezy.
“That was work,” he says. It takes me a couple of blinks to catch up with him, not least because it certainly didn’t sound like work. Not his kind of work. “I’m going to have to go in. Just for a bit.”
“In? To your office?”
“No! God no, not Chambers Street. Just to the Stirling jail. Bloody snafu over an important client who’s . . . Well, it’s confidential, you know.”
“Is Aileen coming?”
“What? No, no. It’ll be fine. An hour tops. And I’ll keep my phone on while I’m driving.”
“David, I can’t be left with your children the first night I meet them. Aileen’ll do her nut. Rightly.”
“Aileen will never know,” he says. “I’ll tell the boys they can stay online till ten and not to phone Mum. They know the drill. They won’t drop me in it.”
What drill, I think, wondering how many girlfriends have been left in charge of these kids when David suddenly has to go to some random jail.
It also occurs to me that I really don’t understand his job.
Trotting along to a jail at night sounds pretty junior for all those letters after his name.
I still haven’t checked what LLM and CC actually stand for.
By the time I decide to agree, he’s left the room anyway, telling me to help myself to the whisky and thus proving how he really doesn’t know me well enough to have left his kids in my care, because I loathe whisky.
I hear him upstairs talking in a low voice.
I hear the cheer go up about the extra screen time.
Then I hear the car start in the drive and I’m left in the kitchen, still holding a tea towel, with two boys I don’t know.
And—on the bright side—a whole house to snoop around as long as I cock an ear for David returning.
Not that I would actually hear him. Because as soon as he’s gone, the boys stop playing whatever games they usually play and start running riot.
I can hear them charging about, banging in and out of the rooms up there and laughing their heads off.
I stand inside the kitchen door wondering what to do.
If I tell them to pipe down, they’ll hate me for keeps.
And maybe David would be glad they’re getting some exercise.
Maybe they always do circuits after dinner.
I decide to ignore them and go into the room with the leather sofas and the ludicrous telly.
I tune out a particularly loud thump as I’m working out how to switch it on.
They quieten down after this and I hope they haven’t smashed something valuable.
I’ve just settled on a makeover show and taken one sip of my tea when the bigger one edges round the door.
“Hiya,” I say, then I look at him properly. His face is stark although still red from all the high jinks. “What’s wrong?”
“Sean fell off the— Sean fell and I think he’s hurt himself.”
I get up, my stomach turning somersaults, and follow him out into the hall. He hangs back and I brush past him, taking the stairs two at a time. Sean, the little one, is lying on the landing at the foot of a pull-down loft ladder, which he has presumably leapt off.
“You okay?” I ask. I know he isn’t. He’s flat on his back and he’s breathing in whimpering little gasps. “Where does it— Jesus!”
His left wrist, which he’s cradling against himself, is puffed up to three times the size it should be and there’s a step in it as if his hand has shunted out of line with the rest of his arm.
I feel my vision grey out and dig my nails into my palms to get hold of myself.
I understand now why Edwin didn’t want to rush back and look at his brother again.
“Okay, sweetheart,” I say. “You’ve broken your arm. We need to get you to hospital. Does anything else hurt?”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Sean says with a waver in his voice. “It just feels really weird.”
I’ve got my phone out but I dither between dialling David and 999.
“Can you sit up, maybe?” I ask. “And could you lift your arm and rest it on top of your head? You need to have it higher than your heart to help with the swelling. Good boy. That’s brilliant.” I raise my voice. “Edwin? Are you okay? How are you feeling?”
“A bit sick,” Edwin calls up the stairs.
“Wee soul,” I call back down. I’ve tried David but he’s not answering.
First, I flash to angry. How the hell can he not be answering me when he knows I’m alone with his kids?
Then my brain catches up. He said he would keep it on while he was driving, but you can’t take mobiles into jails, which is where he is.
Briefly, I consider Aileen, but I immediately chicken out of that and dial for an ambulance instead.