After the Party (35 page)

After that Jem had a vague recollection of some men. She could not remember their names or their faces, but there had been one who she had thought was flirting with her but she'd been unimpressed with him, and then she remembered Ingrid and Diana leaving and then Sam had disappeared and Lulu had suggested that she might have gone to a hotel with one of the men and Jem had been very, very adamant that that could not possibly be the case because Sam was married with three children, and then Lulu had looked at her, fondly, sadly, as if to say, really, you really think that things like this don't happen, and Jem had felt that she was somehow on the periphery of real life, this place where people had sex with their daughters' friends' parents and went off to hotels with strange men while their husbands and children slumbered obliviously at home, and that inviting a single dad over for a curry was really not such a big deal after all, and then after that? Nothing. Did they get a cab home? Did they get a night bus? They might have been transported home upon a magic carpet and funneled unceremoniously into their homes through their chimney pots, for all she knew. The entire episode was a jet-black blank. Jem could vaguely remember the terrible hour of 3:45 a.m. flashing cruelly at her from the microwave in the kitchen when she stumbled toward the sink and a large glass of water. But beyond that, well, the only two people who could shed any light on the missing hours were her sister and her boyfriend, one of whom would undoubtedly still be asleep at this ungodly hour (oh, for the luxury of children who could pour their own cereal in the mornings) and the other was out. Running. While the morning dew was still gilding the streets of Herne Hill.

She noticed her mobile phone. It was sitting on the counter, plugged into the charger. She blinked. The phone blinked back
at her. Had she really had the foresight to charge her phone at three forty-five in the morning? She switched it on, wondering idly if her phone held any clues to the last two hours of her evening. And there it was: a message from Joel.

“Glad you got home OK. I'll sleep soundly now. X”

Joel?

Joel?

She looked at her sent folder and saw a message she'd sent to him at 3:48 a.m.: “I'm in. Unmurdered. Sleep tight!”

Oh, yes, Joel.

She remembered now. He'd been there. Where? Somewhere. Last night. With a tall beautiful man, a young man of mixed race, with a shorn head and green eyes. His son. An unsettling thought came to her at that moment. Something had happened.
Something had happened
. But she could not for the life of her remember what it was.

R
alph came to a halt opposite the clock tower in Brockwell Park and let his torso collapse against his thighs. His breathing came hard and tight, and sweat trickled from his temples and into his eyes. He had been pounding the streets of SE24 for nearly two hours and it was only now, as the deserted park slowly began to fill with people on their way to work and the sun sat high enough in the sky to light more than just the tops of the trees, that he felt he could stop. He crouched down and let his chin hang against his heaving chest. He winced with discomfort and felt a tight stitch begin to release its grip on his abdomen. Then he staggered toward an empty bench and sat down upon it heavily. He sighed and let his body relax. It had been a strange and stressful morning.

Jem had climbed into bed at nearly 4 a.m. the previous night. The sky was turning dusty blue and a small bird outside their bedroom window was warming up for the dawn chorus. But it didn't matter because Ralph had been awake since midnight, anyway, after receiving a text from Jem telling him that she was “just leaving” and would be home “within the hour.” As 1 a.m. had come and gone Ralph had become increasingly anxious. He'd called her phone but there'd been no reply and then a moment later his phone had rung and it was her and he'd answered it and realized very quickly that it was just a pocket call. Or, in this
case, he imagined, a handbag call. For ten minutes Ralph had sat with his phone to his ear, listening to Jem's night out.

He heard male voices and female laughter. He heard a tray of drinks being delivered to a table, someone insisting that it was his round and then another male voice saying, “I can't believe you've got two kids,” and then Jem saying, “Why, what should someone with two kids look like?” And the male voice saying, “Well, I don't know, just not like that. You're gorgeous.” And then Jem saying, “Thank you, you're very kind,” and then the conversation being interrupted again by raucous female laughter and some men jousting about and then finally the call cut off and Ralph was left sitting in his bed, silence ringing in his ears, feeling very slightly nauseous.

Reassured at least that he would not to have to call the police, as Jem was clearly not under the wheels of a car somewhere or being molested in a dark alley by a stranger, he had turned off the light and attempted to find himself some sleep, but none came. When Jem finally crawled into bed smelling of sour wine and old perfume, he feigned sleep and then he lay awake, watching the early morning sun staining his curtains, listening to the birds singing their songs and his partner snoring the snore of the comatose until 5:30 a.m., when he finally admitted defeat and got up for a run.

He was mildly annoyed. He was oddly anxious. He was cross, but not sure yet if he was cross enough to have a confrontation with Jem when she woke up. Until he decided on a whim to have a look at her mobile phone, sitting on the kitchen counter, plugged into the wall, flashing suggestively at him. He switched it on, immediately saw that she had mail, clicked the mail icon and there it was, a message, from Joel: “Glad you got home OK. I'll sleep soundly now. X.”

He'd marked the message as “unread” switched off the phone and fled, his feet murdering the pavement, slowly, with every ponderous step.

•  •  •

It was still, he could concede two angst-ridden hours later, inconclusive. Just because Joel had sent Jem a text message in the middle of the night telling her that he was glad she was home safely did not mean that they had had sex with each other. It just meant . . . well, it was unclear at this stage what other explanations there might be for the message, but Ralph was ready now to return home to find out.

Jem was lying on the sofa in her pajamas when he walked into the kitchen. Blake was on the floor surrounded by toys and Scarlett was sitting two inches away from the TV screen eating a KitKat.

“I know,” said Jem, before Ralph could say a word. “I know. It's disgusting. But it was all I could manage.”

Ralph pulled off his running shoes and began to clear away the breakfast table and the high chair. He scooped cornflakes into the palm of his hand and dropped them into the trash, then he rinsed out Scarlett's cereal bowl and Jem's oily croissant plate and put them in the dishwasher.

“I haven't changed Blake yet,” Jem croaked, “I just really couldn't face it.”

Ralph strode into the hallway and pulled a nappy and some wipes out of the cubbyhole where they kept them and came back into the kitchen.

“I'm really sorry,” said Jem, “I just assumed you'd be here to deal with everything. If I'd known you'd be out all morning, I might have tried to get a bit more sleep and drink a few less cocktails.”

Ralph gently lowered Blake onto his back and unpopped the buttons on his sleeper. He pulled away the bulging wet nappy and replaced it deftly with a thin dry one. He'd gone from not knowing what to say to not wanting to say anything. The sight of Jem prone on the sofa, the pathetic collapse of her body and the strained sighs emitting from her were driving him crazy.

His actions became more and more forced and aggressive with every moment that passed until: “Ralph, are you pissed off with me?”

“Later,” he whispered.

“What?”

“Let's. Talk. About this. Later,” he whispered again.

“Oh, God,” she said, suddenly upright on the sofa, “you are, aren't you? You're pissed off with me? God, what did I do? Did I wake you up?”

“No,” he began tersely. “You did not wake me up. Because I had not been to sleep. Because you sent me a text message at midnight saying that you'd be home at one a.m.”

Jem clasped her hands over her mouth. “Oh, God,” she said, “I didn't, did I?”

“Yes, you did. And then, when you weren't home by one thirty a.m. I called you, but you did not answer your phone. And then two minutes later you pocket-called me and I got to listen to you and your mates being chatted up by some braying tossers, and then you finally crawled in at four a.m. and started snoring within about two and a half seconds of closing your eyes and then, once I'd given up on the concept of sleep for the night, I decided to go for a run.”

Her hands were still clasped over her mouth and her eyes were wide with horror. “Oh, God,” she said, “I'm so sorry. So, so
sorry. Oh, God, I feel awful. I just, God, I really don't remember much. I mean, the guy you heard me talking to, honestly, just some little shrimp. And I honestly have no idea what happened to the bit between then and getting into bed . . .”

“Well, I'll tell you someone who might know.”

Jem threw him a questioning look.

“Your buddy, you know, the single dad. He sent you a text message.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said, “I saw it. I think we shared a cab home. Me and Lulu, and him and his son. I can't remember why, though, because they weren't with us before that. I'm guessing we must have bumped into them, somewhere along the way. I'm hoping Lulu might remember . . .” She rubbed her head and then stopped as her phone began to vibrate on the counter. Ralph looked at the display, unplugged it and threw it toward Jem on the sofa. “Talk of the devil,” he said, before picking up his cigarettes and a cold coffee from earlier and heading into the garden.

He was shaking slightly, both from lack of sleep and from pure fury. He used three matches to light the end of his cigarette and then finally he drew the smoke into his lungs deeply and with relief. He had never felt this way about Jem before. She had been out before, she had gotten drunk before, she had gotten home late before, but he had always taken it in stride. He'd always known what Jem was like: she was independent, a free spirit, and before he'd even gotten to know her he'd seen from the words in her diaries that if there was one thing that was likely to make Jem run a mile in the wrong direction it was a man who would try to clip her wings.

But something had happened to the way he saw Jem these days. He no longer saw her as “his girl.” For a long time now she had belonged to their children and then she'd shown Ralph
another side of herself, a side that was hard and uncompromising, that could take an unborn baby into a clinic and ask someone to kill it for her. Purely, it now seemed, so that she could buy herself some pretty clothes, squeeze herself into tight jeans and go out and drink herself sick. The explanation for the text from Joel seemed reasonable enough. All her explanations regarding Joel seemed reasonable enough. And as he'd previously theorized, if “local single dad Joel” was “local single mum Julie” he wouldn't be giving any of this a second thought. Literally. The whole concept of “Julie” would not occupy his thought process for a single moment. But then, Joel was a man and Jem was an attractive woman and Joel had sent Jem flowers.
Flowers that Ralph could never question Jem about because he should not know about them
.

He hurled the flowers from his thoughts.

He took a deep breath.

He needed to control this. He needed to control himself. He was going backward, backward into resentment and negativity. He closed his eyes. He should not be focusing on the past, on flowers, on strange men in the night. He had other priorities. To make Jem happy. To get married. To make this family strong.

He flattened the last inch of his cigarette under a flowerpot and hurled it into the flower beds. And then he went back inside. Right now he needed to find some peace.

•  •  •

Jem was just hanging up the phone when Ralph walked in. Blake was on her lap, pulling at the links of her silver bracelet, and Scarlett sat, as she had been for the entire morning, no doubt, with her nose pressed against the TV screen watching the CBeebies channel.

“Right,” he said striding through the room and reaching for the remote control, “telly off.”

Scarlett spun round and looked at him in horror. “Noooo!” she wailed.

“Yes, we're going out. Mummy's not feeling well.”

Scarlett's face collapsed into tears. “No, Daddy!” she wailed again, as though he had just threatened to leave her at the workhouse.

“Sorry, baby, but look, it's a lovely day and there's no reason why you should suffer just because Mummy decided to stay out all night and drink too much beer.”

Scarlett screamed then and collapsed onto the floor, where she began to roll round and round with the sheer utter agony of not being able to watch any more telly.

“You didn't give her her two-minute warning,” said Jem.

Ralph resisted the temptation to spit something knowing and smug at her and instead concentrated on getting the writhing and livid Scarlett out of the kitchen and upstairs to her bedroom to dress her. “You should have brought the clothes downstairs first,” called Jem, and Ralph thought, one more word, one more word, Jem, and I swear . . .

Finally he had both children in clothes that were suitable for outdoors, and Blake in the stroller and himself out of sweaty running clothes and straight, unshowered, into yesterday's jeans and T-shirt and checked his wallet for cash and his pockets for door keys and there was a, “Where are you going, when will you be back?” from Jem, which he replied to with a grunt and a “No idea,” and then, bang, the front door slammed behind him and he was walking away from the house, far too fast, Scarlett clutching his hand for dear life as she was half pulled along the pavement and toward a place, the only place where he knew he'd find some peace. He took his children to church.