Every Good Girl (7 page)

‘OK, good idea. You could discuss your gap year
with him, see what he thinks,' she said. ‘Have you phoned him?'

‘No. I just thought I'd surprise him. He might not even be there, but I don't mind chancing it.'

Nina smiled. ‘It'll surprise Catherine too.' The thought quite cheered her up.

Up in her room Emily undressed completely and padded across the landing to the bathroom she shared with Lucy. Under the shower she soaped away the stale lingering smells of last night's cigarettes and the grubby pub that she, Chloe and Nick with friends from various local schools and colleges frequented at weekends. The night before there had been a bizarre tweak of pleasure in
not
going on to his house and having sex with Nick: nothing, not even a goodnight kiss. He was nice to snog, but if you got as far as kissing him it was as if all the right buttons were suddenly pressed and he was on autopilot till the after-sex cigarette. If you stopped him halfway, you did damage: his mother had told him this, told him it wasn't safe to stop once he'd got going because he'd end up with prostate cancer or something. According to Nick, that would mean it was all Emily's fault if she refused to finish what she'd started. That meant, Emily reasoned, that it followed it was all his mother's fault that she, in the interests of his health, had therefore refused to start anything at all. So tough luck.

Back in her room, she chose underwear far more carefully than she had before lunch. ‘Well you never know, Simon might be there, and then he
might
just want . . .' she murmured to the cat sleeping on her unmade bed as she picked out the scarlet satin bra and knickers that she'd bought with a Knickerbox gift token the previous Christmas. The bra was now rather
tight, she noticed, which meant she'd grown in the past three months. The mirror told her it gave her quite a cleavage, which, being used to a fairly flat teenage figure, slightly unnerved her. ‘God I look like a
woman
,' she told the cat. ‘Proper tits.' She felt quite shocked, as if she was looking at someone else, someone she didn't know very well.

‘Can I come too?' Lucy knocked and came into the room at the same time. ‘That looks nice. Like a bikini,' she said, admiring Emily's underwear. ‘
Is
it a bikini? Are you going to the pool?'

‘No, I'm going man-catching,' Emily told her, turning to the wardrobe and flicking hangers past, looking for something to wear that would hint at the treasures beneath without looking too obvious.

‘How do you do that exactly?' Lucy asked solemnly.

‘I can't really tell you,' Emily said, holding up a very short black velvet dress and checking for old, unattractive stains. ‘It just comes naturally when you get to the right age.'

‘I thought you were going to Dad's. That's what you told Mum,' Lucy continued. ‘She said we should always tell
someone
, even if it's not her, the truth about where we're going just in case of accidents. So you'd better tell me, hadn't you?' she smiled persuasively at Emily, who grinned back at her. No wonder she gets all this modelling work, Emily thought, she really has got the most peculiarly pointy little cat-face. Not so much pretty-pretty as unusual. And her mouth's too big, in every sense. No way would she ever tell Lucy a secret.

‘Actually I
am
going to Dad's. And this time no you can't come in case I go on to see Nick later. Sorry, maybe next time,' she said, patting Lucy on the head in a gesture she hoped the child would take as the nearest she'd get to open affection, and not simply
feel she was being put down.

‘I'll have to go for a walk on the Common with Gran, then,' Lucy complained glumly. ‘She
always
wants to walk on the Common. She says it's good for the digestion. And she always goes really fast so that she can get back home in time to cook something for Uncle Graham.'

‘Well it's good for the dog. Genghis will love it, and then it won't be your turn to walk him tomorrow will it?' Emily grinned at her, opened the door and ushered Lucy out ahead of her. She shut the door firmly, so Lucy would know she wasn't expected to make a return curiosity visit in her sister's absence. Together they went down the stairs, back to the kitchen.

‘Joe shouldn't have left the dog for you to look after. You'd think he could have taken it with him,' Monica was saying as she watched Nina attaching a stout lead to the collar of the ancient and supremely idle Afghan hound.

Emily laughed, ‘No
way
. These dogs are just so uncool now, Dad wouldn't be seen dead with him.'

‘Come on Emily, that's not true. He could hardly live in the flat with Joe. It wouldn't be fair.' Nina patted Genghis's soft shaggy head. ‘Not fair on
whom
?' Emily asked as she gave Monica a goodbye hug.

Graham sat in his Fiesta in the Waddington Aviation Viewing Enclosure, notepad and book of
USA Military Aircraft Serials
in hand. A satisfying day. A rare day off from the demands of both home and hospital and no fewer than
three
F–117 Nighthawks had arrived, slinking over the horizon and down on to the runway just in front of him. Their weird black shapes reminded him of sinister origami. No wonder the media liked to call them Stealths. They even looked
fragile, but deceptive like the small plain spiders that have the deadliest venom. The Brits had nothing like the F–117, not military, though he was sentimentally both fond and proud of Concorde. And if they
had
got something that special, it definitely wouldn't be out and flying on a Sunday. Weekends and three weeks in August: any amateur aircraft enthusiast could tell a hostile nation that that was the time to invade.

Right now his stomach told him it was more than lunchtime so he waved briefly to the small band of equally committed hobbyists comparing their electronic scanners by the airfield fence and drove towards the village. As well as hungry he felt quite old. The others waiting in the WAVE with him were, at the most, only just out of their teens. Partly this was cheering: that youngsters hadn't all gone over to mugging and computer games in place of plane-spotting and bird-watching. But it reminded him uncomfortably that people generally, most people, expected to grow out of it. He hadn't. He didn't want to. His military aircraft log must be about the most comprehensive in the country, way back to 1971. If it had flown in, from whichever world air force, he'd been to see it, photographed it, written it down.

He looked at the car's clock. Only 2.15. After the burger (which Mother mustn't know about because of BSE), if he drove fast, he could get home and get in a couple of hours of number-logging on the computer before his mother got home and started her ‘Oh you're not shutting yourself away again with
that
stuff are you?' nagging again. If he went out she'd moan about being neglected. He couldn't win.

‘So tell me about Barbados. When are you going?'

Monica strode along across the breezy Common
beside Lucy, trying not to gasp at the pace. The dog, too hopelessly unreliable to be let off its lead in an open space, hauled Lucy along in an attempt to get her to run with him.

‘I might
not
be going. They liked me, but they liked about ten others as well and we've all got to go back next Thursday for a re-call. I think we'll have to try some of the clothes on. That's what usually happens. And if they don't look good on us we don't get it.'

‘Barbados though, that'll be lovely won't it, darling? I'm sure you were easily the prettiest, you're bound to get it.'

‘Don't build her hopes up, she might
not
, you know.' Nina murmured a warning to her mother. Monica frowned at her.

‘Oh don't be so defeatist, let the girl fly while she can.
You
did, in your day. Of course she'll get it. She usually does, doesn't she? And of course you'll get to go as well, chaperoning, but if you don't want to, I'll go.'

‘Last time I got a hot country job, we only went to Ealing to a big shed. They'd made scenery and got loads of palm trees.' Lucy laughed. ‘It was really cold and we had to dance about and pretend it was a party on a beach. That was an advert for Tropi-choc sweets. They were disgusting.'

‘Joe isn't very keen. He says it interrupts her school work,' Nina admitted.

‘But it was him who got her involved in all this in the first place, wasn't it, taking her to a casting for some awful ad for, what was it, yoghurt?'

‘Yes, but he thought it would just be that one-off, just for fun. We used to argue about it quite a lot.'

Monica sniffed. ‘Well, you know what I think. You could have found a way of sorting it out without
resorting to
words
. You let that man slip through your fingers, simply because you've never managed the art of quiet subtlety. There's many a way to skin cats, you know. Perhaps if you'd given him a son . . .' She made it sound like a gift, or a bribe, Nina thought, as if for the sake of a son he'd have stopped showing off his manhood with a succession of dozy young girls and stayed home being dutiful. Sally, though, had ‘given' each of her two husbands a son and they'd still gone off and left her, but then
she
was of the opinion that if you had a boy-child, they were so utterly treasured by their doting mothers that the husbands got jealous anyway . . . Either way, the female of the species, daughter, wife or mother, clearly couldn't win.

‘Come on Genghis, let's go, shall we?' Nina took the lead from Lucy and started running. The Common was Sunday-afternoon busy. Lunches were being walked off, lone fathers were having parental access, quality time with sweets and promises. Children ran and squabbled and kicked footballs. Men and women, arms linked in domestic solidarity, strolled together and sorted their weekend differences. Dogs more biddable than Genghis were running loose, sniffing for rabbits and for each other.

‘“Slipped through my fingers” did he? I'd say he prised them apart and forced his way through,' she whispered to herself as she ran. The dog loped gently just ahead of her, his big golden ears flopping. If she let the lead go he'd run till he dropped, unseeing and purposeless, for miles and miles and miles.

‘The doorbell's ringing,' Catherine murmured into the pillow. Joe didn't move. He lay sprawled and exhausted beneath the duvet, trying not to fall asleep because, wise grown-up as he was, he knew he'd be in
for a restless night later if he gave in now in the late afternoon.

‘Joe. It's ringing.'

‘Just ignore it,' he said, staring at the ceiling, conscious that he hardly had the energy left to blink.

‘I can't. It might be Simon. I'll just have a quick peek.' Catherine sighed and hauled her naked self out of the bed, pulling on a pink satin robe and tying the belt tightly. Joe was conscious of a small display of impatience in the act of the tying. The sharp tug of the fabric, the brisk knot. The leisurely tenderness of the past half-hour had evaporated. Catherine carefully positioned herself at the window where she thought she could look down at the street and not be seen.

A girl stood there, a girl with long hair the colour of butternut squash, blowing on her cold hands and looking up and around for signs of life in the building. His daughter. Catherine stepped back quickly from the window, telling herself she hadn't been seen, not from that angle. It was her turn to have Joe this weekend, not theirs.

‘Nobody there, they've gone away,' she told Joe as she slipped off the robe and climbed back into bed, smiling.

‘Jeez, Mum what are you doing, you scared me! It's not even seven o'clock yet!'

Emily stood in the kitchen doorway, hair sleep-tousled and feet bare. She was wearing an old Metropolis Studios T-shirt that Nina assumed she'd purloined from Joe on her last visit to him. It stopped at mid-thigh; her long pale legs looked chilled and vulnerable.

Nina was sitting in her old blue towelling dressing gown on the floor in front of the bookshelves, sorting paperbacks and allocating them to various supermarket boxes.

‘I'm clearing stuff out so we can paint this room. I woke up early and couldn't get back to sleep. Then when I was fidgeting about the cat came in and assumed it was morning so I thought I might as well get up and make a start. I won't have time later. Anyway,' she said, looking up at Emily, ‘I could ask you the same. I bet you can't remember when you last saw this hour of the day. You're usually not out of bed till about thirty seconds before you need to leave for school.'

Emily rubbed the back of her left leg with her right toes. ‘The birds woke me up,' she said. ‘Um . . . shall I make some tea?'

She wandered across to the sink and filled the kettle. She's looking shifty, Nina thought. If she didn't look so
obviously sleep-sodden, I'd wonder if she'd only just come home. She watched Emily reach up to get cups out of the cupboard and wondered what she got up to with Nick. She assumed it was
something
. The boy, struttingly confident of his own desirability, could clearly have his pick of the entire sixth form and probably most of the two years below that as well. With his lean, tall body and sun-streaked hair, he reminded Nina of an advert for surfwear. It was naive to imagine he'd put in time with a girl who wouldn't venture beyond a chaste good-night kiss, however astounding her personality.

‘Are you still seeing a lot of Nick?' she asked, cursing herself for such an obviously mother-like question. Emily turned and smirked at her pityingly. As well she might, Nina conceded. ‘
Seeing?
What kind of a question is that?' Emily mocked. ‘Do you mean am I having sex with him? Because if you do the answer is “Not right at this moment because I'm busy making tea for my mummy”, OK?' She flicked her hair and did a pert turn back to the kettle and filled the mugs with water.