A Friend of the Family Page 6

  He looked at his watch again. Eleven-thirty. A whole lonely, empty day stretched ahead of him with nothing to do except worry about Mon and feel out of sorts. He needed to speak to someone, take his mind off things. He needed something else to think about.

  Carly, he thought with relief, that’s what he needed. Some Carly.

  Ned’s thoughts had turned more and more often to Carly as his relationship with Monica had degenerated. To soft Carly, who never lost her temper or did weird things. To sweet Carly, who was absolutely normal in every way. He wondered what she was doing and how she was and who she was seeing. He wondered if she ever missed him and how she’d react if he was to turn up on her doorstep one day. He tried to imagine it, tried to imagine her wide face and her big eyes and her silky brown hair tied back in a pony-tail. He fantasized about her scrunching her face up into a frown and folding her arms across her big, soft chest and pretending to be angry with him for a moment, before giving in and grinning and giving him a big, warm, normal Carly hug.

  Maybe they’d be friends for a while or maybe they’d just leap straight into bed and have nice, normal sex, without any staring and instant orgasms and fancy stuff; just good old-fashioned Ned and Carly sex. But it didn’t really matter what they did, in Ned’s fantasy, because just being there with Carly would be enough, enough to make him feel normal again, and proper, and home.

  He pulled out his old address book and leafed to the ‘C’ page. There they were, all Carly’s numbers from over the years, written in different pens. At her parents’, her bar job, her job at Dorothy Day Fashions, her flat on Gipsy Hill. All the stages of her life. And the numbers all so familiar, sequences he’d pressed into dial pads a thousand, two thousand times. He tried her at work first.

  ‘Good morning, Dorothy Day Fashions.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah, hi. Can I speak to Carly, please?’

  ‘Carly who?’

  ‘Carly Hilaris.’

  He heard her rustling through some papers.

  Sorry – there’s no one of that name here.’

  What! But, are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, sorry.’

  ‘Can you look again – she works in the cutting room.’

  ‘Neeta,’ he heard her calling to someone else, ‘d’you remember a Carly, used to work in the cutting room?’ She came back to him. ‘She left about three years ago, apparently.’

  Left? Dorothy Day Fashions? ‘God. She left. Where did she go? Do you know?’

  Ned heard more muffled conversation in the background.

  ‘Mexico.’

  ‘Mexico?’

  ‘That’s right. Lucky thing. She went backpacking or something.’

  ‘Backpacking? Ned was incredulous. Carly, backpacking? In Mexico? But Carly didn’t even like going to Wales. Carly liked home. It was her favourite thing.

  ‘Er, thank you, thank you very much.’ He hung up and dragged his fingers through his hair. Carly was in Mexico. Or at least had been in Mexico. Maybe she was home now. He tried her home number with a growing sense of uncertainty. The answerphone clicked on and some girl called Nadia told him that she wasn’t home but that he could leave a message, while Destiny’s Child sang ‘Survivor’ very loudly in the background. Shit. He hadn’t considered this possibility. It hadn’t occurred to him that she wouldn’t still be exactly where he’d left her.

  He’d run out of options. He was stumped. Completely stumped. In his Bondi-based fantasies, he’d never really thought beyond meeting up with Carly. Crystal Palace mast, Mum, Dad, Goldie, dinner at Mickey’s, Sean, Tony, own bed, Carly. And that was where it ended. Everything else, he’d assumed, would just sort of flow from there. Now he didn’t know what to do.

  He kicked off his shoes, pulled off his jeans and climbed back under the eiderdown on the sofa, thinking that so far this being-back-at-home thing was not turning out anything like he’d expected.

  Skiving in the Park

  ‘Hi – hi, who’s that? Oh, Aliyah. Hi, it’s Tony. Look, I’m feeling a bit, er… under the weather today so I think I’ll work from home. Oh – it’s going round is it? Oh right. Oh, OK. So anyway – if anything urgent comes up, you can contact me here. I don’t think there was much on, was there? No. I didn’t think so. I’ll call in later, just to check everything’s ticking over. Yeah. OK, thanks, Aliyah. And have a good day. Yeah, I will. Thanks. Bye.’

  Tony took a deep breath and wiped the sweat from his brow. Yes, of course, it was utterly ridiculous to be so nervous about pulling a sickie on your own bloody company, but it was the first time he’d ever done it. In his life. It just wasn’t in his nature to slack off. He was a grafter, always had been since he was a little kid and used to earn himself 5 ρ for helping his dad polish antique silver. Tony liked to work. He liked going to work, being at work, working. He resented colds and coughs that kept him from doing his job. He hadn’t even taken a holiday since he and Jo had split up. Couldn’t see the point. But in a way he was sick today. Sick in the head. Sick of his life. Sick of himself.

  Lovesick.

  He considered his options now that he had a day to himself. He could go for a jog, maybe, or to the gym. He could take the car to be valeted. Maybe just go for a good long walk on Dulwich Common and have a quiet drink in a pub somewhere with the papers.

  And then it occurred to him – Ned, he could spend the day with Ned.

  Tony felt a bit bad about last night. He’d been so pissed off about Gervase turning up and so eaten up with jealousy every time he looked at Sean that he’d barely said a word to Ned. He’d had hardly any contact with Ned while he’d been away. He was too busy to send e-mails, and the time difference always seemed to work against him picking up the phone for a chat. And he really had missed him, particularly during the divorce. The whole family had enfolded him like a great big blanket but it hadn’t felt quite complete without Ned.

  A part of Tony had been angry when Ned left. The Londons were a family of five – that was their shape: pentagonal. It just didn’t work quite so well as a square. And, if he was to be completely honest with himself, it wouldn’t have been quite so bad if it had been Sean who’d gone away and misshapened their family, because Ned was the bridge between Tony and Sean. He was one of those sunshiny people who got on with everyone, and with Ned around the gulf between the two eldest brothers hadn’t really shown up. With three of them there was banter; with just the two of them there was the altogether tougher option of conversation.

  Ned was grimacing when Tony turned up to collect him from Beulah Hill later that day.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘My fucking back. Mum stuck me on the sofa last night – didn’t want to kick her precious Gervase out of my room.’

  Tony scowled. ‘Fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Nice car,’ said Ned.

  ‘D’you think so?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said running his hand over the paintwork, ‘it’s really cute.’

  Cute? thought Tony. Cute? Well, that just about summed it up. That was exactly, succinctly, what was wrong with his red sports car. It was cute.

  ‘Yeah, well – get in, then.’

  They drove past the shops and restaurants of Westow Street in a companionable silence. Ned was drinking in the scenery, the plethora of restaurants completely out of proportion to the size of the area, the library with its intricate carved stonework, the tiny branch of Wool-worth’s, the huge pub up on the roundabout.

  ‘It’s all the same,’ he said in wonder.

  ‘You’ve only been gone three years. What did you expect?’

  ‘God, I don’t know – just new shops and stuff I suppose. Just things to be… different’

  ‘Ned, nothing ever really changes – haven’t you learnt that yet?’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ said Ned, with a hint of sadness in his voice, ‘everything bloody changes. And I really wish it wouldn’t.’

  Walking through Crystal Palace Park was always good for exacerbating an already melancholy mood. Tony had had a wander
through most of London’s big parks over the years – Regent’s Park had its frou-frou rose gardens and its outdoor theatre, Hyde Park had its Serpentine and its horses, Battersea Park had its Buddha and its river views and Hampstead Heath had that whole countryside thing going on – but not one of them even began to compare to Crystal Place in terms of pure atmosphere.

  Where the glittering glass palace had stood before it burnt to the ground seventy years earlier, the grassy terraces led down towards a panoramic swathe of steps, carved from pock-marked stone, from where you could see the whole of south London. If you stood at the top of the steps and looked around from left to right, the park looked like some tragic dumping ground for the world’s greatest attractions. The mast rose Eiffel Tower-like from a hill to the left and at intervals between the steps stood headless statues and proud-looking sphinxes, staring stoically into the misty distance, unaware that the building they were guarding had disappeared from behind them for ever. Their beards and toes were sprayed with metallic tags and they always made Tony feel sad, like seeing a faithful dog lying at the feet of the corpse of an elderly owner.

  When they were boys they’d come to the park in the summer and explore the secret labyrinth of underground tunnels beneath the ruins of the palace, inventing ghosts to scare each other and tearing out afterwards into the sunshine, euphoric with relief. The park was mayhem in the summer but on a damp April day like today you could almost believe you had the place to yourself and let the idiosyncratic, ghostly atmosphere overwhelm you. Crystal Palace was awash with ley lines, if you believed that sort of thing, which Tony wasn’t convinced he did. But there was something special, something spiritual in the air, that was for sure, something unlike anywhere else in London.

  They took the steps slowly and in silence.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Tony,’ said Ned.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tony, ‘likewise.’

  ‘How’ve you been, you know, with the divorce and everything?’

  Tony shrugged. ‘Oh – fine – not bad at all really.’

  They turned left, heading towards the cafeteria in the sports complex, dodging a flock of men in brightly coloured, skin-tight sportswear along the way.

  ‘What happened exactly? With you and Jo?’

  Tony laughed and stuffed his cold hands into his coat pockets. ‘Shit. That’s a big one.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but it was so weird hearing about it all from the other side of the world. It didn’t feel quite real.

  It didn’t make any sense. I mean, you and Jo, you were a real team – you were soul-mates.’

  ‘Like you and Carly, you mean?’ He raised an eyebrow at Ned.

  ‘Yeah, but, that was different. We were kids when we met, we grew out of each other. But you and Jo – you were already adults when you met.’

  Tony shook his head. ‘No, we weren’t adults. We were twenty-two.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘You’re not an adult when you’re twenty-two, not in this world, not these days. You look like one and sound like one, but you’re still just a kid.’

  ‘So is that what happened, then – did you grow out of each other?’

  ‘Fundamentally, I suppose. But ultimately it all came down to one conversation – a conversation we should have had a lot earlier.’

  Tony held the door of the cafeteria open for Ned and felt himself thawing under the warm air of a heater above it.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The baby conversation.’

  ‘Ah – putting the pressure on, was she?’

  ‘No, it was the other way round, actually. I was ready. She wasn’t.’

  ‘But what was the panic? Couldn’t you just have waited a bit for her. She would have changed her mind eventually.’

  ‘No point. It was a stupid fucking idea anyway. When I think about it now I realize I only wanted a kid because I was thirty-one, because we’d been married for years, because I thought I should be cracking on with it. You know: typical Tony. And when she said “no” it was like this great moment of realization. If I wasn’t going to be doing the whole family thing, tying myself down with kids and working my bollocks off to pay for it all, then what the fuck was the point of being married, you know? Of going to bed with the same woman every night? And I guess Jo must have felt the same way too.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because she left me for some bloke in her office two months later.’

  ‘No way!’ cried Ned. ‘Not Jo. Jo wouldn’t…’

  ‘Yeah, she would. Of course she would. She always got what she wanted, Jo.’

  ‘Shit – Mum didn’t say anything about that. She just said you’d come to the end of the road.’

  ‘Yeah, well – I didn’t tell Mum.’

  ‘You’re kidding – why not?’

  ‘Don’t know really. I didn’t want Mum to think badly of her, I s’pose.’

  ‘Yeah, but… why shouldn’t she think badly of her? She fucked you over – she…’

  ‘She did the right thing. Jo did the right thing. I was ready to cut loose and she was the only one of us who was brave enough to do anything about it. You know…’

  Tony picked up a vinyl-topped tray and pushed it across the steel tracks in the café towards a display of sandwiches and baguettes. He selected a cheese-and-ham baguette, approximately a foot long. Then he picked up a scone with butter and cream and a can of Heineken. As he waited to pay at the cash desk, he slapped a twin pack of Ginger Nuts on to his tray, an impulse purchase.

  He felt self-conscious as he watched Ned slipping a tuna sandwich and a bottle of mineral water on to the tray.

  ‘Not hungry?’ he said.

  ‘Not really,’ said Ned, grimacing. ‘I’m feeling a bit dicky, actually, I think I might have picked up a bug on the plane, or something.’

  ‘Not having a beer?’

  ‘Nah. Thanks.’

  It fell silent, save for the sound of Ned ripping the plastic seal off the front of his sandwich and the ring-pull going on Tony’s beer.

  ‘So,’ said Ned, eventually, ‘how are you now? I mean, how’s your life?’

  Tony shrugged. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘work’s busy.’

  ‘The divorce, I mean, you say you’re cool with it and everything, but how did it hit you? Really?’

  ‘It didn’t,’ said Tony. ‘Obviously it was a bit weird at first, moving out of the house, living alone, not seeing Jo every day. But now, it’s fine.’

  Ned threw him a look. ‘Are you sure, Tone?’

  ‘Positive. Single life agrees with me.’

  ‘It’s just that you don’t seem very… You’re not the same as… Are you sure you’re happy? Because, you can talk to me if you’re not. You know that, don’t you?’

  Tony smiled. ‘I’m happy, Ned. Honest. Life’s just different now, that’s all. Not better, not worse, just different.’

  Ned nodded and they fell silent again.

  ‘I like Ness,’ said Ned eventually, through a mouthful of food, ‘she’s really funny.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tony grimly, ‘she’s all right, isn’t she?’

  ‘Where did you meet her?’

  ‘You know Trish? Rob’s missus?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Friend of hers, from school.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Are you going to marry her?’

  Tony spluttered slightly and laughed. ‘What?!’

  ‘Well, why not? She’s really pretty and really nice, and she obviously really loves you.’

  Tony wiped his mouth on a napkin and grimaced at Ned. ‘No, Ned. I am not going to marry Ness. We’ve only been going out for a year.’

  ‘Well, are you going to live with her, then?’

  ‘God, Ned, I don’t know. I’m really not thinking like that at the moment. We’re just, you know, hanging out. It’s nothing serious.’

  Ned nodded at him, knowingly. ‘I prefer her to Jo,’ he said in a small voice.

  Tony looked at him in surprise. ‘Really?’

/>   ‘Yeah. She’s more… human. More real. And she’s got better legs.’ He grinned at Tony and they laughed. ‘But seriously, Tone, I think you’ve done really well for yourself there. She’s brilliant.’

  ‘What about you and whatsername?’ Tony still felt vestiges of loyalty towards Carly when it came to Monica. ‘What went wrong there, then?’

  Ned shrugged and picked some cucumber out of his sandwich. ‘Don’t know really,’ he said.

  ‘What, she dump you? You dump her? What happened?’

  Ned fell silent for a moment and contemplated a coffee ring on the table-top.

  ‘Come on. You can tell me.’

  Ned cleared his throat and leant in so close towards him that Tony could smell cucumber on his breath. ‘Promise you won’t say anything to Mum?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Well, she went fucking loop-the-loop. Completely, like, really, really scary.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Just lost the plot entirely. Started following me, hitting people, pulling out her own hair, you know, like actual big clumps of her own hair.’

  ‘Christ. Shit. That’s bad. So – what happened? Is she better now?’

  Ned shrugged and picked at the plastic casing of his sandwich. ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Well, what did she say when you told her you were coming home?’

  He shrugged again. ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘You did tell her, didn’t you? You did tell her you were coming home?’

  Ned shook his head and looked embarrassed. ‘Well, I left her a note.’

  Tony laughed. ‘Oh shit, Ned – that’s really low.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, I know. But you don’t know Monica. I mean, Monica’s really – big.’

  ‘What, you mean fat?’

  ‘No – big. Like a bloke. Like a big bloke. And – I don’t know – anything could have happened if I’d told her I was leaving. She could have beaten me up or cut off my dick or something.’

  ‘You mean, you were scared of her?’ Tony started to laugh.

  ‘Terrified. I mean, really terrified. I saw her kill a kitten once.’