Chapter 11 Jules “Somebody That I Used to Know” #2
“No way!” Isa says. She’s a superfan of the young influencer. She grabs Isaac’s arm, raring to set off. “You coming, Nelly?”
“It’s okay. I’m staying here,” Nelly responds with a determined shake of her head.
“Darling. Just go—” I implore, but she crosses her arms, scowling.
“Mum.”
Wow. Even back then, she knew her own mind. And exactly how to put me in my place.
Jules shrugs hopelessly at Ngozi as the twins head off into the fair.
“Good for you, darling,” Ngozi says to Nelly, popping a tenner in her collection pot. Then Ngozi hooks her arm through Jules’s and they walk into the festival, past the bouncy castle and the ice cream van, and the red double-decker bus kitted out in Union Jack bunting for afternoon tea.
“I wish she’d enjoy herself more,” Jules grumbles.
“It’s good to be engaged,” Ngozi says.
“And she’s made her point, but let’s be honest, it’s a waste of time. What difference is one eleven-year-old going to make?” Jules protests.
How could I be so wrong? Because eleven-year-old Greta Thunberg did change things. Why did I have so little faith in my own daughter?
Ngozi stops by a young woman offering us paper cups of an orange liquid that looks suspiciously like cough syrup.
“Go on,” Ngozi encourages, taking one herself.
“What is it?” Jules asks, wincing at the unusual taste.
“Aperol Spritz,” the woman holding the tray says. “It’s new.”
Thanking her, we replace the empty cups and turn away.
“I don’t think that’s ever going to catch on,” Jules tells Ngozi.
“Not in a million years.”
Jules and Ngozi wander down the rows of stalls, tempted by tidbits of weird cheeses, chili sauces, and chocolate brownies.
So many hipster brands, most of which I now know will fizzle and die.
Dishy James from Fishy Fishy, one of the restaurants Jules knows well, calls out, and Jules and Ngozi accept a free cone of chips.
“Mum!”
Liam bounds up in his blue-and-white Brighton and Hove Albion football kit and my stomach does a flip. Look at his knobbly, mud-stained knees, his floppy brown hair!
But 2012 Jules is thinking how unbearably grown-up he is. Even though he’s only nine.
“Can I have some money for the ride?” he says, holding out his left hand and pointing at the kids’ fairground waltzer in the distance.
His beautiful hand, before he got hurt. My heart breaks at the sight of it and I can’t help thinking about how tempting it would be to use the machine to go back and change things.
I can’t, though. I may be going against my and Adam’s rule to change my own life, but I draw the line at messing with our kids, especially who they are. The one golden rule we can’t break.
“No. That guy’s always a rip-off merchant.”
He looks up with big, forlorn eyes. “Max is going.”
Jules lets out a growl of frustration at being fleeced. Even more so because—I get a flash of one of her recent memories—Adam’s doing a half Ironman today. On his birthday. Which means that he won’t be back to celebrate with them until this evening, by which time the kids will be frazzled.
At least if she gives Liam money, it will give her time to chat about Ngozi’s big decision about whether she joins a boutique fashion brand as their part-time in-house lawyer, or plumps for the much better-paid option of joining an international law firm as a full-time partner.
I already know she’ll choose the latter, just like Jules is about to advise her, but I’m itching to tell her to take the other path, the fashion brand, because that one won’t wreck her marriage. But I’m not here to change her fate.
Only mine.
Jules starts rooting through her knockoff Burberry handbag, and I can’t help noticing the contents, remembering that Touche éclat concealer she’s convinced she needs (but really doesn’t), the small tube of BB cream that’s just come out and is all the rage, and a Rimmel burgundy lipstick à la Kate Moss.
Stuff I know, for a fact, she’s only been able to buy on credit, a sneaky little habit she’s already developing behind Adam’s back.
“What the hell?” she says, pulling out a CD in a cardboard case with a twenty-pound note attached to it.
See You Later xx May 2012 is written on it in Adam’s handwriting.
His peace offering, she realizes, for being off doing his silly race today.
She laughs, feeling immediately less cross with him. He’s not so bad, after all.
Yet at the same time—for me—this discovery means thirty-seven minutes have gone already of the seventy-four-minute CD. Why does it always have to fly by so fast?
Jules digs out a handful of change and pours it into Liam’s cupped palms. It’s eight years since Adam’s parents died, but even now most of his paycheck goes to their debt and mortgage repayments.
He and Jules are just about getting by, but they’re still no closer to living abroad or truly getting her business off the ground—because it takes too many hours and one of them needs to be there for the kids.
Liam shouts a thanks and bounds off as Jules and Ngozi make a beeline for the fancy Albarino stand—the new wine flavor of the month. They join the queue, getting not one but two free compostable glasses each.
Oh, the ease with which I used to down my plonk in those heady premenopausal days, when I could get tanked up on the old-lady petrol and the effects didn’t fell me for a week. The sheer joy of being, if not actually young, then at least being able to act like I still was.
From the stage come the rough chords of the local Maroon 5 wannabes warming up and I spot Liam staring up at them, entranced.
Jules hardly registers it. It’s no surprise to her that Liam has become distracted by the music.
He’s obsessed. She and Adam are convinced that he’ll be in his own band one day.
They talk about it in bed, late at night, fantasizing about the future they see for him, although Jules is keen to keep Liam grounded in a normal childhood, even if Adam is sure fame and fortune are round the corner.
Or at least in another ten years. After all, his guitar teacher says he’s already running out of new stuff to show him.
Jules feels the wine hit her system like an old friend. This is so marvelous; I can’t wait to tell Adam. Oh, fuck no. Christ, no, I can’t. He’d go nuts if he knew I—me, his Jules—had snuck into the shed and was here.
Eek. I get a sharp dart of terror. What if Adam walks in and catches me tranced out in the shed? What then?
“Boo!”
Jules turns to see Darius.
“Hey,” she says, looking him up and down and noting that he’s grown an on-trend hipster beard.
They bump noses as he goes in for a kiss on both cheeks. He’s not been around for a few months.
“Darius,” Ngozi says in a bored tone, poking Jules in the ribs, her message clear: she really doesn’t want to get stuck talking to him. “So how are things since the old takeaway-food-to-home app fell apart?”
“Now, that was just a financing issue,” he chides her. “The basic idea’s sound. And someone will do it, you mark my words.”
“Sure.” Ngozi doesn’t look convinced.
“Other than that…” he says. “I’d go as far as to say I’m winning.”
“And still as modest as ever,” Jules teases, while I surreptitiously keep one eye on the queue for the main events tent. I already know that she’s going to make it inside on time, but I can’t help feeling nervous, knowing the seconds are ticking away.
Meanwhile, Ngozi is slumped on one hip, listening as Darius bangs on about his latest idea, which revolves around some virtual way to view properties for sale…online. Right, like people are ever going to do that.
“Meaning, basically, you’re still going to end up a gazillionaire,” Ngozi says, deadpan, when he’s finished his pitch.
“You’ve got to be in it to win it,” he says, all big Billy business balls.
Ngozi rolls her eyes.
“I think that cookery demo I wanted to see is starting,” Jules cuts in. Good. Come on, we’ve got to get going.
“Right, yeah.” Ngozi grabs her opportunity too. “Sorry, Darius. We gotta run.”
Leaving him there with a wave and a promise to catch up soon, they walk off arm in arm toward the main marquee.
“That beard looks like it’s just been attacked by a ferret,” Ngozi says.
“Thank God Adam hasn’t got one,” Jules adds.
Only hang on, my Adam, my original Adam, did. And suddenly it’s like I’m not just married to one Adam anymore, but like I’m somehow fragmented and multiplying and so is Adam…as though we’re walking through the hall of mirrors at the end of the pier.
Then—quite literally—not a moment too soon, we’re in the queue over at the main marquee. The reason I’ve come back here.
As Chef Marcel’s picture grins down at us from the poster advertising his cooking demonstration, Jules and Ngozi each buy a ticket and hurry inside.
There’s a raised dais at the front where the cooking demo has already started and Jules and Ngozi quickly take their seats. Onstage beside Chef Marcel is a compère with a microphone asking questions.
“You look like you could do that in your sleep,” he says, as Chef Marcel finishes expertly piping freshly made truffle cream into baby mushrooms.
“La clef dont on se sert est toujours claire,” Chef Marcel says in his deep, gravelly voice. “It means,” he adds, in heavily accented English, “ ‘One does not get rusty in what one does every day.’ ”
Of course, I’m fascinated, just as much as Jules is, and the next twenty minutes of the demonstration fly by.
“You can sign up for my course with my colleague on the stand,” Chef Marcel says, pointing toward a desk manned by a chic-looking woman in a sleeveless black dress who waves a hand in greeting at the crowd.
“That’s Marcel’s wife, Anna,” the compère adds. “She’s offering lessons in French too if anyone’s interested.”
This is it. The moment I’ve been waiting for. Quickly, I impose myself. Jules would never do it in a million years, because things are still so tight at home financially. She feels guilty enough about the makeup in her bag.