A Friend of the Family (21 page)

Some of it sounded great, some of it sounded interesting and some of it sounded downright dodgy. But Tony didn’t care – he was mesmerized watching Millie’s heavily ringed hands as they deftly sketched shapes and lines, as they swooped down on to her enormous mug of tea and gripped it, as she ran them through her thick hair. Tony found it vaguely thrilling to be discussing the size of his bed with her, the colour of his bedclothes. In fact, he found the whole experience of sitting in Millie’s living room on a Thursday afternoon so thrilling that he completely forgot that he was the managing director of his own company and was supposed to have been in a meeting at three o’clock, and got a genuine shock when his mobile phone rang at quarter to and Anne-Marie was on the other end wondering which meeting room he wanted her to set up in.

‘Shit,’ he said, as he put his phone away, ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Well,’ Millie said, retracting her ballpoint pen, ‘what do you think? Do I get the job?’

‘What,’ said Tony in surprise, ‘you’ll do it?’

‘Yes. Why not. But I won’t be able to start for a while – probably not until the summer holidays.’

‘Summer holidays – when do they start?’

‘June.’

He nodded. ‘June’s fine. June’s great. Definitely.’

‘Excellent! Put it here!’ she offered him her hand to shake and he took it eagerly. It was warm and dry and firm and he didn’t want to let go of it. Ever.

‘It’s a deal.’

Millie smiled and opened the front door for him.

She reached up to kiss him on the cheek. Her lips connected with his skin, like they always did, but this time she hooked an arm around his neck and drew him to her. Tony found himself with his nose in her hair and suddenly lost control of his arms. He tentatively found a place for his left hand in the centre of her back and gave her a quick squeeze.

‘And thank you so much for all the ginger and lemon. I already feel a bit better, actually. That really was incredibly sweet and lovely of you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘You really are such a wonderful man, Tony. Are you sure you and your brother are related?’

‘No – I think there’s every chance that the babies got switched in the hospital.’

Millie smiled, and then frowned. ‘God, Tony. I could really do without all this. You know?’

‘I know,’ said Tony, pausing slightly, unsure whether to say what he was about to say or not. ‘Millie,’ he began tentatively, ‘whatever happens, right, you know you can walk away. There are people who will hold you up, support you – you wouldn’t be left alone. Do you see what I’m saying?’

Millie crinkled her nose up and squinted at him.
Taking the piss. Tony didn’t mind. ‘I don’t think it’s going to get to that stage, Tony, but I do hear what you’re saying. Thank you.’ She squeezed his arm again. ‘I’ll call you,’ she said, ‘arrange to come over and see your place. Maybe next week?’

‘Next week would be great.’

A cab was approaching so Tony leapt down the front steps and on to the street to hail it. He turned round to see if Millie was still at the door, but it was just closing behind her.

He fell into the back of the taxi and watched through the back window as Millie’s enchanted kingdom receded into the background.

A wonderful man.

Millie thought that he was A Wonderful Man.

And currently thought that his little brother was a complete waste of space. How the hell had his lazy, self-centred, slacker of a brother ever managed to get his hands on such a classy woman? What was it about him that had appealed to a woman like Millie in the first place? OK, so he’d written a book, but that didn’t change him fundamentally as a person and Millie was patently not some shallow little celeb-chasing girl who got a kick out of going out with a published author. There was obviously something else to her attraction to Sean. His looks? Possibly – he was a nice-looking bloke, but there were better-looking guys out there if that’s all she was interested in.

Maybe it was a maternal thing – maybe his boyish incompetence brought out her mothering instincts. Or
maybe it was just one of those completely inexplicable attractions that you encountered every now and then in life – a bizarre chemical collision between two people who had nothing in common except some pheromone that happened to correspond with the other person’s pheromone at some fleeting moment in time. That seemed more likely, and would explain Sean’s sudden cooling off at the prospect of making such a lasting commitment to Millie. Marriage was one thing; a marriage could be arranged at the height of the chemical collision and unarranged when said pheromones had departed the scene. Divorce was a friend of the whirlwind wedding. The prospect of something as irreversible as a baby, on the other hand, could cause pheromones to flee immediately, screaming and waving their hands around in horror. There obviously wasn’t enough substance to Sean’s feelings for Millie to sustain a real life together. So he was doing what Sean always did: he was backing off. Backing off and waiting for the girl to get so upset and so angry and so hurt that they told him to fuck off. But he couldn’t get away with that approach this time. This time there were babies and engagement rings involved. This time he was going to have to grow up and deal with it.

Tony ran a hand over his belly and looked down at his high-street shoes. He really was going to have to sort himself out if he wanted to stand a chance in hell of attracting Millie. Not seeing so much of Ness lately had helped – he wasn’t drinking so much and his clothes all felt a little bit looser. But if he wanted Millie to look at
him as anything other than Sean’s much nicer older brother he had a hell of a lot more work to do.

He rummaged through the pockets of his coat and found what he was looking for – the Natural Weightloss programme leaflet he’d picked up weeks ago.

He pulled out his mobile, phoned the number on the leaflet and made an appointment for a consultation the following week.

Big Quiffs and Little Cars

It had been a long week for Ned. As well as his disastrous night out with Carly, he’d had the pleasure of receiving eighteen delightful text messages from Monica, an envelope full of her toenail clippings, a package containing wax strips with her pubes attached and then the
pièce de résistance
this morning. A small vial of her blood. It was only tiny – she’d siphoned it off into one of those miniature plastic bottles of soy sauce you get in sushi boxes. But the fact was that the more parcels and text messages she sent him the less concerned he felt. He found them quite comforting now – they meant she wasn’t dead, that she wasn’t in a plane on her way to London and that she wasn’t getting any worse. The scale of the gruesomeness of the ‘body parts’ had diminished rather than gathered momentum; there’d been no severed digits or bits of flesh. And when the toenail clippings had arrived on Tuesday, Ned had actually breathed a sigh of relief. Toenails weren’t disturbing – they were just grim. Now she was just being annoying instead of scary.

The blood was a bit more of a hark back to the days of hair and eyelashes, but it wasn’t hard to extract
that much blood from yourself – it might not even be blood; she might have got it from a joke shop or something.

No – unless Mon suddenly upped the ante and started sending him thumbs and eyeballs, he wasn’t going to let it get to him. He had enough to worry about without worrying about Monica and her stupid little games.

Like tonight, for example.

He was sitting in the living room at the moment, watching
The Simpsons
on Sky One, eating Jaffa Cakes out of some kind of new-fangled metal-tin affair and waiting for Gervase to get back from work. He was waiting for Gervase because tonight he, Ned London, was going out with him. Bizarre. He’d scoured his mind, searching for the perfect excuse to get out of it, but had been unable to come up with anything. The fact that they lived in the same house meant that in order to concoct a believable excuse he’d actually have to have somewhere else to go; and, sad to say, he didn’t. The ritual Friday night out with friends seemed to have fallen off almost as quickly as Mac’s hair after Ned left the country.

‘No one really goes out any more,’ Simon had said, sadly. ‘Everyone’s just sort of coupled off. It’s all
Friends
and
Frasier
and home-delivery Thai on a Friday night now. Unless it’s someone’s birthday – we still go out on people’s birthdays.’

But he’d made a few phone calls last night, anyway, hoping for a last-minute reprieve in the form of an alternative social engagement, and found that everyone
else was doing things like staying in because they were knackered (pathetic), working late at the office (tragic) and having dinner with their parents (verging on the sick). Even Simon, the only other single guy left in their circle, had other plans for the night: competing in a ten-pin bowling tournament in Streatham. He’d said that Ned was welcome to come along and give him some moral support, but when Ned had sat down and weighed up the options, going to see some greasy old rock and roller in Wood Green with Gervase just about had the edge over spending the night watching his mate chucking big shiny balls down a runway.

When Gervase got home he went straight upstairs to get ready. When he came back down half an hour later he was wearing far too much aftershave and a battered leather jacket with fringing and studs all over it. He was also wearing a violently purple shirt, open pretty much to the navel, and very pointy-toed boots with a slight heel. Ned had never seen Gervase ‘dressed up’ before and was caught momentarily somewhere between laughing out loud and a quiet sense of awe. He looked utterly ridiculous and kind of cool, all at the same time.

At the same moment that Gervase entered the room, a horn went in the street and Gervase clapped his hands together. ‘OK. That’s Bud. Let’s rock.’

Ned ran to the kitchen, pulled a four pack of Kronen-burg from the fridge, grabbed his jacket and followed Gervase outside. Parked on the street was a bright-yellow, souped-up Robin Reliant, with red flames painted down the side. At the wheel was a man wearing
a red leather jacket who had a gigantic peroxide quiff that nearly filled the whole car.

Ned gulped.

‘All right,’ said Gervase, as the quiff guy got out of the Reliant and shook his hand. Standing, the quiff guy turned out to be about five foot two and so thin that Calista Flockhart would probably have refused to stand next to him in case he made her look fat. He had intensely blue eyes and a sharp, rodenty face with two pointy little yellow rat-teeth.

‘Bud, this is Ned – he’s my landlady’s son.’

‘All right, Ned,’ said Bud, giving his hand a squeeze.

‘All right.’

‘Nice motor you’ve got there.’ He indicated his parents’ driveway with a jerk of his head. Ned looked round at his father’s ancient Transit van and his mother’s even more ancient Vauxhall Cavalier, and looked back at Bud. ‘Which one?’

‘The little Isetta.’

‘The what?’

‘The bubble car. Lovely. What is it –’68? ’69?’

Ned turned and looked at the sad little car that was now so much a part of the furniture outside their house that he barely noticed it any more. ‘I’ve got no idea,’ he said, ‘Tony got it for his seventeenth birthday.’

‘Lovely. Really lovely little car.’Bud stared at the mouldy old car longingly and nodded his head appreciatively.

‘Bud likes little cars,’ said Gervase.

‘Oh,’ said Ned, ‘right.’And then he turned to get into
Bud’s little Reliant. There was a small bench in the back that looked better suited to a lunch box than a six-foot man, and he realized that simply stepping into the car and sitting down was not going to be feasible. Some kind of strategy was called for. He tried getting in with his right foot first and then employed a kind of 180-degree twist to the rest of his body, but that didn’t work. He tried lowering himself in arse-first, which at least meant that eighty per cent of him was now in the car, but he couldn’t find anywhere to put his left leg or his head. He slid his bum along the little bench and managed to accommodate his left leg, but his head was still folded flat against his chest. Gervase and Bud chatted on the pavement while Ned performed his tribute to Houdini and Ned was tempted to say, ‘Tell you what, Gervase, you’re at least four inches shorter than me – why don’t
you
get in the back’, but realized that this contravened lift-giving etiquette, which of course stated that the driver’s best mate/girlfriend/wife got the passenger seat and strangers got the back – regardless of shape or size.

With a few more adjustments, Ned managed to lift his head an inch or two off his chest, but then Gervase flattened the passenger seat, which effectively cut off a whole side of the back of the car, so Ned was left with no choice but to curl himself up into a sub-foetal ball, with his arms wrapped around his knees and his bottom bones digging into the poorly upholstered bench.

‘You all right in the back there?’ asked the more suitably proportioned Bud.

‘Yeah,’ said Ned, ‘fine.’

The car made a milk-float-type noise as Bud turned the key and then they were off.

It was the longest drive of Ned’s life. The car never really felt like it got going – it was like spending the entire journey in first gear – and every pit and pebble on the road sent painful jolts up his spine through his bum bones. Halfway through the journey he started feeling like he was going to faint, so he twisted around and hooked his legs over the back of the seat so that they hung in the cargo area of the boot.

Bud and Gervase talked about music in the front, chain-smoking, drinking Ned’s lagers and breaking into tune every now and then. Gervase did most of the talking, accompanied by Bud saying ‘Damn right’, ‘That rocks’ and ‘Fuck, man’ every now and then, and laughing as if someone was tickling his feet with a feather. Ned had very little idea what most of their conversation was about and didn’t really care. All he was concerned with was the impending end of the journey and getting out of this sardine can on three wheels.

By the time they finally pitched up in Wood Green, it was dark and Ned thought he might actually be dead. Bud and Gervase swung casually from the car looking fresh as daisies and Ned slowly unfurled himself from the torture device, every bone and muscle in his body complaining loudly as he did so. The first thing he did when he got out of the car was to check his wallet to see how much cash he had. He didn’t care how much it cost, he was getting a cab home.