The Foster Husband Page 22

  I bend down for the pen and twist it between my fingers, thinking for a moment. I feel giddy and mischievous after my night out, and not a little tipsy. I tiptoe over to Ben’s prone form and pop the lid off the marker, catching that pungent chemical scent as I inhale. My first stroke of the ink on his forehead makes him shake his head very slightly. I hold my breath until he stops moving.

  But he sleeps peacefully through the rest of it, until the job is done.

  33

  London

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ exclaimed Matt, leaping back onto the bed as if the floor was electrified.

  ‘What?’ I muttered, from under the covers. ‘Get off, you’re squashing me.’

  ‘Your dog’s puked on the floor again,’ he said.

  ‘My dog?’

  ‘Our dog,’ he conceded.

  ‘You’d better not be getting sick on the duvet,’ I warned.

  ‘Cold sick,’ said Matt, holding his ankle in both hands as if his foot belonged to someone else. ‘It’s all between my toes – it’s fucking disgusting.’

  ‘It’s even more disgusting when she eats it, believe me. Anyway, it’s your turn to take her out.’

  ‘What do you think I was trying to do?’ snaps Matt. ‘I was about to do it before I stepped in a pile of cold sick.’

  ‘Don’t get cross with me about it,’ I said, rolling over. ‘It’s not me who puked on the carpet. It wasn’t me who—’

  ‘Yeah, I know, it wasn’t you who bought a puppy in the first place. You’ve told me that a million times. I thought she’d be company for you. I thought it would make you happy.’

  She had made me happy, for about two seconds when I first saw the tiny chocolate brown face peeping out from under Matt’s coat. And, okay, for another half an hour playing with her on the kitchen floor while Matt watched over the pair of us; and then she peed on the floor and he made himself scarce, and that is really how it’s gone since then. He was all about the fun and the exuberance, while I was the one who had to sort out training, and walks and cleaning up. Minnie was a gift that came with a hefty side order of responsibility.

  ‘You didn’t think at all,’ I mumbled into the pillow.

  ‘What did you say?’ Matt demanded, pulling on my shoulder.

  ‘Matt – get off! You’re going to get dog puke on the sheets and I only changed them yesterday.’ I batted his hand away without turning over. He carried on talking but I pulled a pillow over my head and pressed it down over my ear so that all I could hear was a muffled commentary I’d heard a hundred times before.

  The next thing I heard was the sound of the ensuite shower kicking in. I knew it. No matter how many times I told Matt we had to let Minnie out as soon as we got up, he always thought he knew better. If he’d got up on time – it was his turn, after all – she probably wouldn’t have puked on the carpet in the first place. It wasn’t fair on the dog to make her wait any longer. If I knew Minnie – Matt didn’t, that much was obvious – she’d be cowering with guilt in the kitchen, aware of her vomiting faux pas. Or peeing on the doormat in desperation.

  I swung my legs out of bed, on the sick-free side, and grudgingly pulled on my jeans and a T-shirt. I slid my flip-flops onto my feet and pulled my hair up into an elastic band without even looking in the mirror. Once upon a time I’d have been ashamed for the neighbours to see me like this, but now I hardly even noticed, and I’m sure they didn’t either.

  ‘Fine, Matt,’ I shouted at the bathroom door. ‘You win. I’ll do it.’ Like I always do.

  Downstairs in the kitchen Minnie had curled herself up into a tight ball in a corner of her bed, as if I might not see her there. I crouched down and cupped her little face with both hands, tickling under her chin. As soon as she realized I wasn’t going to tell her off, she wriggled up to stand on her hind legs, her front legs scrabbling at my knees as she tried to lick my face.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Minnie,’ I said. ‘As long as you puke on Daddy’s side of the bed, Mummy doesn’t mind.’

  I clipped the lead onto her collar and straightened up, ready to take her outside. I noticed an empty bottle of wine by the sink, and the glass beside it, with the sticky dregs clinging to the side. I’d heard Matt come in last night at half past ten, but I was already in bed. After half an hour of waiting to see if he’d come upstairs, I’d turned out the light. He never tried to wake me up when he came to bed these days. A good thing too, I didn’t want him to if he was going to be drunk again. But it felt like the distance between my side of the bed and his was growing, as if there was someone or something else lying there between us, holding us apart. Something neither of us was prepared to look at too closely.

  Matt was reading the paper when I got back, hiding behind it like a shield. Probably to hide the sight of the mess he’d made having breakfast. A toddler would have been tidier – there was jam on the table, and a crust under it, which Minnie snaffled before I could pick it up. No wonder she kept being sick.

  ‘I was going to take her out,’ he said, turning down a corner of the sports page to look at me accusingly.

  ‘Yeah?’ I asked, picking up his dirty plate and knife and heading towards the dishwasher.

  ‘Just because I’m not doing it exactly to your timetable doesn’t mean I’m not going to do it.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Matt, it’s not my timetable, it’s the dog’s. She doesn’t care if you’ve had a shower or not, she just needs to go out.’

  Matt put down the paper and glared at me, his eyes hard and challenging. ‘I had to wash the sick off my foot – or do you think I should have just pulled my socks on over it? You’d only have had a go at me about the extra laundry.’

  ‘When have I ever had a go at you about the laundry?’ I demanded.

  He started mimicking me in a high-pitched sing-song. ‘Matt, you never take the laundry basket upstairs. Matt, would it have killed you to bring the washing in. Matt, don’t you know not to put wool on a hot wash.’

  ‘Fuck off, Matt,’ I said. ‘Just fuck off. You have no appreciation of what I do for you.’

  ‘You don’t do it for me,’ he sneered, standing up. ‘You do it for you. I just get in your way, and you couldn’t make it more obvious.’

  He pushed past me, ignoring Minnie, who tried to jump up for attention.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Matt! We’ve got Sarah and Jay coming round for lunch. You can’t go out!’

  Matt turned back. ‘Can’t I?’

  ‘You invited them,’ I hissed. ‘You insisted they come – it wasn’t my idea! – and now you’re fucking off to leave me to do everything, just like you always do.’

  He braced himself against the kitchen door frame, his hands on either side of it, as if he was about to burst it apart Incredible-Hulk style. His voice was a fierce whisper, somehow more frightening than if he had shouted.

  ‘I said let’s just have a picnic on the Heath. I said let’s just buy some stuff from the supermarket. I said don’t make a massive production out of it, let’s just catch up with our friends. Your friends. You were the one who said you wanted to do everything from scratch, spend hours in the kitchen. You can’t blame me for that.’

  ‘But you’re not even helping,’ I protested.

  ‘Because I can’t do anything right for you, Kate. Everything I do is wrong. You’re impossible to please right now, and do you know why? Because you’re miserable. You’re miserable and you’re lonely and you’re bored, and I am sick of trying to make it all better for you.’

  ‘Oh really?’ I snapped. ‘So it’s all my fault, is it? I work and I work for us, for this marriage, and you turn it all around and use it against me.’

  ‘Seriously, Kate?’ Matt sighed, rubbing at his forehead, pinching up a frown between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Take a look at yourself. You’ve turned into some kind of fucking domestic martyr and you expect me to suffer for it. You’re always spoiling for a fight over totally trivial shit—
’

  ‘It is not trivial – our marriage is not trivial!’

  ‘Kate, I know that. But marriage is about more than just who picks up the towels off the bathroom floor you know. Or cleans up the dog sick.’

  ‘Me!’ I screamed, a sob rising in my throat. ‘It’s me, it’s always me. It’s always always me.’

  ‘And you won’t ever let me forget it, will you?’

  When the front door slammed behind him I sank down onto the floor and put my head on my knees. Minnie nudged at my hand with her nose, and leaned her small warm body against me. I wondered if I was going to have to take her to puppy counselling; if she was already traumatized by living in this household.

  Household? What a strange choice of word. Already, you see, I was beginning not to think of it as home.

  34

  I remember reading a book once where a woman cooked all of her emotions into the food she created. When she was sad, everyone who ate her food would cry. When she was happy, they’d laugh. If I had been that woman then everyone who ate the lunch I served that day would have become bitterly resentful. But because life doesn’t really work like that, it seemed that all the bitterness ended up on my plate instead.

  Perhaps Matt had staked out the front door for their arrival, or perhaps, as he claimed, it was a total coincidence, but when the doorbell rang he was standing there with Sarah and Jay, laughing and joking, his black mood entirely gone. He had a carrier bag full of bottles, his ready excuse for why he’d been out, though Sarah and Jay would not know that rather than just popping out to the off-licence he’d been gone for three long hours. It seemed there was some big joke about the event they were all working on, a model-turned-presenter who was in way over her head, but the nuances were lost on me while I was occupied with getting the chicken in the oven on time.

  ‘But the best thing is,’ said Sarah, ‘the runner went over to her house, right, to drop off the schedules, and she invited him upstairs—’

  ‘Oh yes?’ leers Matt inappropriately.

  ‘He’s totally gay, Matt, get your mind out of the gutter. She just had to get something, and apparently she has this sort of mini-fridge thing by the side of her bed.’

  ‘A mini-fridge?’ said Matt, wrinkling his nose.

  ‘Yeah, Paul said it’s sort of a cross between a fridge and a bedside table – it’s got a lamp built into it and stuff. Kind of cool, actually,’ said Jay.

  Sarah grimaced at him. ‘Only it’s not very cool at all, it’s completely tragic. Because what do you think she keeps in there? Kate, what do you think she keeps in the mini-fridge?’

  I looked over from the sink, where I was peeling potatoes. ‘Um, I’m not sure who you’re talking about?’

  ‘Yes, you are, you know, Minty Alexander. The supermodel – she presented part of the roadshow we did last year?’

  ‘The dark-haired one? Wasn’t she one of The Times Young Media Faces? That one?’

  Jay scoffed. ‘Young Media Face, my arse. That woman is pushing thirty if she’s a day. The number of fucking filters we have to use to stop her looking like Zelda from Terrahawks, you wouldn’t believe.’

  Sarah was getting annoyed now; we were all drifting too far off topic. ‘No, but listen, what would you imagine a glamorous supermodel and television presenter might keep in the fridge next to her bed?’

  I looked blank.

  ‘Come on,’ urged Sarah.

  ‘Eye masks?’ I suggested. ‘Moisturiser? Coconut water?’

  ‘Eye masks and moisturiser – cold. Coconut water – warm.’

  ‘What?’ asked Jay. ‘I thought it was a fridge – isn’t everything cold?’

  ‘Get with the programme, Jay,’ said Sarah. ‘I mean, she’s getting warmer when she says coconut water.’

  ‘So you mean it’s a drink thing?’ asked Matt as he opened a bottle of wine.

  ‘Hot,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Champagne,’ I suggested.

  ‘Warmer.’

  ‘Vodka,’ offered Jay.

  ‘Same temperature,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Oh come on then, what?’ Matt asked.

  Sarah left a dramatic pause, looking at each of us in turn.

  ‘You’ll never guess,’ she said. ‘Cans of Stella. Cans and cans of wife beater, lined up in the mini-fridge by the side of her bed, ready for her to crack one open first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Eurgh, that is fucking grim,’ said Jay. ‘First thing in the morning?’

  ‘Now you know why you need all those filters.’ Matt laughed.

  ‘I know!’ said Sarah. ‘If only all those fashion magazines could see her downing her morning lager, I don’t reckon they’d be so keen to call her a style icon.’

  ‘Yeah, well that runner also said—’ Jay began, and he launched into another story of scurrilous celebrity gossip.

  This used to be my meat and drink. When I talked about work on my fleeting visits to Lyme Regis, Prue accused me of being a name-dropper, which had astonished me. Everyone talks about the people they work with, and in our case it was famous people. Gossiping about our encounters with celebrities wasn’t showing off, it was just what we did. But now I felt I had nothing to contribute. Who wanted to hear about what Minnie had done on her walk that day when Sarah had stories of supermodels and Jay and Matt were falling over themselves to compete with tales of their own.

  Matt poured out more drinks for our guests and raised the bottle in my direction. I shook my head and stuck to my glass of mineral water. He started telling a story about someone new in the Marketing team – Olivia, a girl who’d joined from MTV and who Sarah and Danny seemed to know already. I hadn’t heard him mention her before. But then, he didn’t talk to me about work very often these days. I wasn’t sure when I’d stopped asking him about it.

  When they all roared with laughter at yet another reference that sailed over my head, I just joined in politely, then excused myself to go and attend to the food.

  I didn’t think they’d even noticed I’d gone until, a few minutes later, Sarah appeared at my elbow.

  ‘Kate, you look so well,’ she said, picking up a wilted piece of watercress from the bowl of salad leaves I was arranging. She put it in her mouth and chewed, looking at me expectantly as if I was about to admit something.

  ‘Do you mean fat?’ I asked warily. I think we all know that ‘you look well’ is code for ‘haven’t you porked out lately’.

  ‘No!’ She laughed, leaning on the kitchen counter. She seemed taller than I remembered, and I realized she was wearing expensive new pointy-toed snakeskin heels – the kind I rarely bothered with now that I had nowhere to wear them.

  ‘Just well. It’s the not-working-in-an-office glow – it suits you. You look so fresh-faced and lovely. I guess it must be really relaxing being at home instead of at work. A slower pace of life. Just having time to chill out and stuff.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I lied. ‘It really is.’

  Sarah looked out of the kitchen window into the garden. ‘I really miss you, you know. Not just at work, though God knows, Jennifer is no Kate Martell when it comes to keeping everyone in line.’

  I kept looking down at the salad leaves, turning them over and over with my hands in exactly the way I’d been shown on the cookery course I’d attended last month. People didn’t know that even a salad should be made a certain way. I had to concentrate.

  ‘I miss you, too,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch much. It’s just . . .’

  Sarah looked back at me. ‘It’s just what?’

  ‘Stuff, you know. Work feels really far away for me right now. Even going into town – I don’t know. It’s just not where my head’s at.’

  Sarah regarded me searchingly.

  ‘I never thought you’d be able to just drop work like that,’ she said, real concern in her eyes, as if I’d been diagnosed with a terrible illness instead of just released from the drudgery of office life.

  I had been like that once: unable to imagine a l
ife that wasn’t defined by schedules and budgets and deadlines. Thinking that if you weren’t working you were hardly worth a place in the world. I shrugged. ‘I’ve moved on. I didn’t expect it either, but maybe I’ve just realized that no one can sustain the kind of job we do for ever. All that travel – the pressure. It was horrible to be made redundant, but maybe it’s worked out for the best in the end.’

  ‘I know you’ve moved on from work, Kate,’ she said, ‘I just hope that doesn’t mean you’ve moved on from me. I thought we were proper friends, not just people who used to work together.’

  I made myself laugh brightly. ‘Sarah! As if I’d think that!’ I screwed the top onto the jar of dressing I’d made and shook it hard. Sarah stepped back cautiously, flinching away from the flying jar.

  ‘I’ve just been busy,’ I continued. ‘You have too. Don’t go reading too much into it. It’s not some massive diss, honest.’

  She smiled. ‘God, sorry, I didn’t mean to lay a guilt trip on you. I only realized when Jay and I were coming here that I hadn’t seen you for months. I counted. Four months, Kate! I used to see you every day. It’s just weird.’

  ‘It’s weird for me, too,’ I admitted.

  Sarah looked over at the table where Matt and Jay sat. ‘That’s why I was so glad Matt said you wanted us to come over for lunch. It really means a lot that you asked us over. And Matt has been going on and on about your amazing cooking these days.’

  So Matt had presented this as my idea, had he? I wondered what he was playing at.

  ‘I’m really glad you’re here,’ I said. ‘Don’t expect too much on the food front, I think Matt’s probably been embellishing a bit.’

  ‘No I haven’t,’ he called over from the table. I could see by the slight glassiness in his eyes that he’d already had too much to drink. Again. Lunch wasn’t even going to be ready for an hour. ‘My wife is an extraordinary cook, I’ll have you know. She’s extraordinary at everything.’