After the Party (12 page)

The house was empty, Theo and Jared and the older children all at school. Lulu had clearly been in the middle of doing the household accounts. The big oak table in the kitchen was spread thick with bills, letters, Post-its and a calculator. “You've come just in the nick of time actually, just as I was about to hang myself. Look at this.” She pointed at the table. “How can one smallish family produce so much paper? I mean, it's like we're a small nation or something, a flipping principality. Plus I've just worked out that we can't actually afford to eat anymore. I'm afraid,” she blinked at Jem with pursed lips, “I'm going to have to charge you for your tea.”

Jem laughed and began to unpop the straps on the Baby Bjorn. “Christ,” she said, “is it that bad?”

“Yes,” she said. “It's that bad. I might have to get a job.”

“But I don't understand.” Jem handed Blake to Lulu while she took off the baby carrier. “Walter's still earning the same, yes?”

“Yes, but we're spending more. Simple as that. It's my fault.
I just don't know when to stop. I keep saying the same things to myself over and over to justify it, you know: Well, at least I'm not paying for child care. Well, at least we're not paying for school fees. Well, at least we're not gadding off on expensive holidays. Well, at least we're not driving an expensive car. But you know me, it's all the, you know,
extras
. The posh shampoo. The eBay habit. The not-even-looking-at-the-prices in Waitrose. You know, I picked up a packet of organic blueberries from there the other day and didn't notice until I got home that they were three pounds ninety-nine. For nineteen blueberries; twenty-one pee each.”

“You worked it out?”

“Yes, I worked it out. And I also worked out that I will not be buying organic blueberries from Waitrose again. Party Ring?” She offered her a plastic tub of pastel-colored biscuits. Jem took two. “Anyway, apart from not missing Ralph, how are you?”

“Yeah, I'm fine.” Jem sat Blake on her lap and let him suck the edge of one of her Party Rings.

Lulu had the kettle under the tap and turned to glance at Jem curiously. “Are you going to tell me?” she said.

“What?” said Jem.

“What's going on.”

“With what?”

“With you and Ralph.”

“Nothing.”

She put the lid back on the kettle and put it on its base. “Right,” she said. “Have you two had sex yet?”

Jem shook her head.

“How long has it been now?”

“Six months,” said Jem, “maybe longer.”

“Right, so it's been EIGHT MONTHS.”

Jem started to protest, but Lulu talked over her. “It's been eight months and you need to do something about it.”

“Oh, God.” Jem let her head drop into her chest. “Just the thought of it. Just the idea of having to be all . . . sexy.”

“You don't have to be sexy, you just have to open your legs.”

Jem sighed. Talking about this stuff with Lulu was always unedifying because Lulu loved sex. She'd loved it even more when she was pregnant and then been up for it again within mere days of giving birth to both her sons. For Lulu sex was on a par with drinking champagne or eating cake or buying things in nice shops. For Lulu sex was a salve at the end of a stressful day. For Lulu sex was fun. “I know,” sighed Jem. “And when I think about it I can just about imagine it. I can just about imagine myself saying yes and going for it. But then the minute he asks, it's like, it's like he's just suggested going Rollerblading. Or
skiing
. Or even, you know, going for a jog. All things that I quite enjoy but don't particularly want to do at nine at night when I've been looking after children all day.”

“Well, then, don't do it at night. Do it during the day.”

“Right, just ask the kids to entertain themselves for an hour—”

“No,” Lulu interrupted, “when Scarlett's at nursery, when Blake's sleeping.”

Jem thought back to Ralph's request a few weeks earlier, just after she'd gotten back from her meeting in town. What had been her excuse that day? Sore feet. Leaking breasts. Lack of sleep. But beneath all of that just really, really not wanting to have sex. Because Lulu must also have had sore feet, leaking breasts and a lack of sleep when her babies were small but she had also still enjoyed the notion of taking all of her clothes off and bouncing up and down naked on top of her husband.
These things were reasons but they were not an explanation.

“Do you still fancy him?” Lulu asked bluntly.

“Fancy him?”

“Yes. Think he's handsome. Think he's
gorgeous
. Want to touch him. Want to squeeze him.”

She conjured up an image of his face. It was a beautiful face. She thought about his long strong arms, the hardness of them, his elegant legs, his perfectly shaped skull, his angular hands and feet. Ralph was gorgeous by any measure, slightly older, slightly grayer, slightly balder and slightly less defined around his middle, but still undeniably a very attractive man. For years she had found him irresistible, had slept with her body entwined around his, had breathed in the scent of his scalp as if it were the meaning of life. Her physical love for him had been desperate, overwhelming, exhilarating. And then it had just stopped. Not gradually but almost overnight.

“I still think he's gorgeous,” she replied, “totally. But I just don't want to have sex with him. A bit like, you know, I think
you're
gorgeous but . . .”

“Right, so you fancy him platonically, like he's your really hot brother or something.”

“Er, yeah, I guess so.”

“And while you're not having sex with him, what do you expect him to be doing about it?”

“I know,” Jem hissed. “I'm not stupid. I know what I should be doing.”

“Then do it,” said Lulu. “When he gets back on Saturday, have a bottle of wine . . .”

“I can't! I'm breastfeeding!”

“Okay then, have a small glass of wine, take him to bed, it's
been so long he'll be over and done with in thirty seconds, you'll lie there thinking, actually, that was more fun than Rollerblading, he'll lie there thinking, hurrah, my wife let me have sex with her, onward and upward, your future secure for your children.”

Jem nodded decisively. “Yes,” she said, “you're right. I know you're right. I think it's just—I do everything, and having sex with Ralph just feels like yet one more thing I have to do, just to keep everyone happy, just to stop everyone moaning, and that's all I do all day, stop people moaning.”

“So, if Ralph did more about the house you'd be more minded to boff him?”

Jem considered this. Was it that simple? If he emptied the dishwasher more often and got the kids ready to leave the house without asking, would Jem feel a sudden return to carnal longing? It was a very pertinent question and the answer, Jem felt, lay at the root of everything. Was she fed up with Ralph because he was unsupportive and didn't help around the house or was she fed up with Ralph because, well, because they were nearing their conclusion?

“I don't know,” she said, “maybe.”

“And you're clearly not dead from the waist down,” said Lulu, “given that you've been having meaningful brushes with strange men on the tube.”

“What strange men?” asked Jem, feeling slightly unnerved that her sister had remembered their conversation.

“You know, the one that was like something out of a novel. The single dad.”

“Oh,
that
.” Jem tried to look insouciant. “That wasn't about sex. That's just me and my old destiny thing, you know, imagining too much into scenarios, thinking that stuff has to, you know,
mean something
. And besides, I've kind of got talking to him lately and honestly, there's nothing there.”

“Nothing there?”

“No. Nothing. He's nice. That's all.” Jem smiled tightly, unsure as to whether or not her words held the truth.

“So you don't want to boff him?”

“I don't want to boff him. I don't want to boff anyone. I just want to be left alone.”

Lulu smiled and passed Jem her tea. “Be left alone to have a deep and meaningful love affair with your baby,” she said.

Jem looked at her baby. She inhaled the smell of his scalp. She ran her finger around the inside of his trouser hem, tracing the silk of his delicious new skin. She brought his fist to her lips and kissed it.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“There's nothing like it,” said Lulu, watching her. “But don't leave Ralph out in the cold for too long. For all your sakes. Christ, at least give him a BJ, that'll buy you a few weeks' grace!”

Jem looked at her sister and her sister looked at her and then they both began to laugh uproariously.

I
n Santa Monica the sun was surrendering itself over the Pacific Ocean in roily ribbons of peach and copper. Ralph sat in the passenger seat of Smith's car and watched it in awe. On his left, Rosey held the steering wheel loosely with one hand while tuning the radio with the other. Unlike Smith, she drove with the windows down and the air-conditioning off, and the early evening breeze swept thick licks of her hair across her cheeks, which she would occasionally push back behind her ear with two fingers. She wasn't making any attempt to converse with Ralph. “I can't talk before a gig,” she'd explained, “I'm too sick with nerves.” But Ralph was glad. All he'd done since he arrived in California was talk. He wanted some silence, just a moment or two, to absorb his surroundings, to taste his aloneness, to wonder how he was feeling.

His family seemed a long way away. He'd spoken to them three times since he'd been here, including a Skype chat with a webcam last night that had left him feeling a little unsettled, watching the luminous, ghostly image of his daughter, resplendent in a pink hoodie and bunny ears, bobbing up and down restlessly in his swivel chair, showing him things she'd made that day at nursery, happy to talk to him but clearly not missing him in the slightest. Blake had been presented to the camera as a furled-up ball of sleep, his new hair glowing in the light of the
monitor like a halo of fur. Then Ralph had spoken to Jem, who'd looked tired and pale, and underwhelmed by the experience of speaking to her three-day-absent partner. It was as though they'd communicated across a galaxy. It was as though the air between them had been sucked away into a black hole the moment the computer was turned off, like waking from a dream and swiftly losing the sense of substance, the detail. They were there. He was here. Between them was just endless space.

“You hungry?” Rosey broke into his reverie.

He contemplated his stomach. “Yeah,” he said, “a bit.”

“Taco?”

He smiled. Taco. The last notion a peckish person in Britain would conjure up out of hunger. “Yeah,” he said, “why not?”

She drove them into a drive-thru Taco Bell and ordered for the two of them. A moment later she handed him a large cup of Coke and something in a box. On inspection it was a crispy shell the shape of a flattened hedgehog, sprouting spikes of red pepper and frills of lettuce and weighted down with a brown sludge of mince and creamy sauce.

“It's better than it looks,” said Rosey, “honest.” She herself had a much more discreet-looking pancake roll stuffed with something yellow. “I don't normally eat this sort of shit,” she said, watching his expression with amusement, “just a treat to calm my nerves before a show, you know. Go on, get stuck in.”

He worked his way through the taco silently and in as businesslike a fashion as he could manage as they continued on their way out of town. He wanted to appreciate the experience of eating a taco in a car in California with a beautiful woman he barely knew. This would never happen to him again.

“So,” said Rosey, a few moments later, “what's it been like, catching up with Smith after all these years?”

Ralph rubbed his face with a cheap paper napkin and considered the question. “Yeah,” he said, “it's good. It's great to see him so happy, you know.”

“Wasn't happy in London then, eh?”

“No. Not really. It wasn't really coming together for him then. He was, well, kind of pretending to be something he wasn't.”

“While all the while secretly yearning to be a laid-back California Reiki dude?”

Ralph laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “something like that.”

“You must have made the odd couple, back then, you the artist and Smith all stiff in his City suits?”

“I guess we did.”

“So how did you get together in the first place?”

Ralph pressed the napkin into a ball inside the palm of his hand and related a story from a lifetime ago, a story of two grammar school boys with nothing in common except a foreign exchange student from the States called Sherelle. She'd been lodging with the Smith family but had taken a shine to the sooty-eyed, soap-stiff-haired Ralph and pursued him into a frenzied sexual relationship, mainly within the confines of the guest bedroom in Smith's liberal house. Smith, who'd always assumed that the gangling, slightly fey Ralph was gay, looked upon him with newfound respect and Ralph, stultified by his life as an only child with two aging parents, began to look forward to the time he spent in the loud, messy and easygoing Smith abode. They'd found themselves starting jobs in London at the same time, and within a year Smith had put down a deposit on a flat and asked Ralph to move in with him. They'd spent ten carefree years barely conversing, getting stoned and watching too much TV. And then, just as it had taken a girl to bring them together, it had taken another girl to pull them apart. Their flatmate. Jem.

“You mean Smith was dating your wife?”

“Girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Yeah. I came home from a party one night, she was in his bed.”