The Foster Husband (22 page)

‘Mrs Curtis, what would you think if I told you that Ben is my foster husband?’

The doorbell rings early on Saturday morning. I’m still in my pyjamas since Ben woke early and decided to rip out the blue bathroom tiles before I could have a shower.
Sometimes my good intentions are my own undoing, but it’s the last room to be done up. The plumber arrives on Monday and in a week the whole house will be finished. I try not to think what
will happen if the redecorated house sells as quickly as I assured Ben it would. It might force me into making some sort of decision about where to go next.

Through the frosted glass I can see two small figures, and a taller one. Minnie barks at the door, and I see the letterbox flip open and five little fingers poke through the bristle strips, a
pair of eyes searching behind them.

‘Well, good morning,’ I say, opening the door to see Eddy and his girls standing there expectantly. Grace hops from foot to foot, one hand hidden behind her back.

‘We’ve got a present for the puppy,’ she shrieks, unable to contain herself any longer. She thrusts out her hand towards Minnie, who sniffs at the haphazardly wrapped
package.

‘Oh wow, aren’t you sweet?’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

Charlotte plays it cool. ‘Grace, Daddy says we’re not to give it to Minnie unless Kate says so. You shouldn’t feed other people’s dogs without asking.’

‘You know, you’re absolutely right, Charlotte,’ I say. ‘You’re very good to ask. Why don’t you come on in and then you can give Minnie her present in the
garden in case she makes a mess opening it?’

Eddy smiles at me over the heads of his daughters as they race past me towards the back door.

‘Seem to always catch you in your pyjamas,’ he says, embarrassed. He suddenly starts as he hears a sound from the bathroom.

‘Er, Kate, have you got someone here? Should we—’

I snort with laughter. ‘God, Eddy, no! It’s my sister’s fiancé.’

Eddy’s eyes widen still further, and his eyebrows shoot up towards his hairline.

‘Not like that! He’s just moved in for a while, before the wedding – he’s helping with decorating the place so we can sell it faster,’ I explain. Eddy looks
reassured, but still suspicious.

‘Bit weird though, isn’t it?’ he says, tilting his head towards the bathroom.

I shrug. It’s come to seem totally normal to me now, or as normal as things get in my family. From the garden we can hear the girls shrieking with excitement, and Minnie’s sharp
yaps. Eddy follows me into the kitchen, and I’m putting the kettle on when Ben appears, wiping his hands all over his sweatshirt, his hair and eyebrows white with plaster dust.

‘Hi,’ he says, confidently striding towards Eddy with his wiped-clean hand outstretched. ‘How do you do? Ben Truscott. Prue’s, er, betrothed.’

Eddy looks bewildered at the formality of the introduction. ‘Eddy Curtis,’ he says, looking at me for his cue. ‘Kate’s, er, schoolfriend?’

Ben beams at both of us. ‘Kettle on?’ he says, unnecessarily since he must be able to hear it clunking away behind me. ‘Mine’s white, two sugars.’

I give him a look that he chooses to ignore, staring instead at Eddy. It doesn’t escape my notice that the arrival of another man in the house has ramped up Ben’s testosterone levels
considerably. He wouldn’t dream of expecting me to make him tea without asking nicely if he wasn’t showing off. I find myself wondering, as I open the cupboard for teabags, how
effective Ben’s training truly is if it all falls apart in front of other people.

As if reading my mind, Eddy asks, out of nowhere, ‘My grandma says to ask you how the training’s going?’

‘What?’ I exclaim, spinning around from the cupboard. But he looks perfectly innocent.

‘Training,’ says Eddy. ‘The dog, I supposed she meant.’

‘Oh yes,’ I say. ‘Minnie. Of course. Well, you can tell her it’s going fine. A few wobbles, but a firm hand is all that’s needed. The results are worth
it.’

‘So, Eddy,’ says Ben, standing with his legs improbably far apart in what I can only assume is an effort to look more macho. ‘At school with Kate, eh? I bet you’ve got a
tale or two to tell, ha ha!’

Eddy mutters something about the girls, and strides over to the back door to look out at where they’re playing.

Ben, as oblivious as ever, ploughs on. ‘Prue says she had a total mare at school being known as Kate’s sister. Everyone always expected her to blow up the chemistry lab, or deal
drugs behind the languages block.’

Eddy coughs and glances at me quickly.

‘Reports of my wildness may have been exaggerated,’ I say, smiling and letting Eddy see that I’m not bothered by it. ‘And sharing the occasional spliff hardly counts as
dealing drugs. Prue makes it sound like I was selling crack on the playing fields.’

Ben sucks in his breath audibly, shaking his head. ‘You say that, Kate, but it’s pretty well-documented that marijuana is a gateway drug. I’m no authority, but I believe
I’m right in saying that the occasional spliff, as you so casually put it, can lead to much more dangerous drugs.’

I smirk down at the kitchen counter, plopping two teaspoons of sugar into Ben’s milky tea as he continues his lecture. From over by the back door, Eddy catches my eye and flashes me a
conspiratorial grin. Us against Ben. It feels strange – I’d almost forgotten how it felt to be anything other than me on my own against everything – but welcome to be silently
sharing a joke across a room like this, not having to say a word to be understood.

Our eyes stay locked for a fraction too long to be comfortable, and Eddy breaks away first, stepping out into the garden, claiming to hear the girls arguing. Ben continues regardless.

‘I’m sure you’re right, Ben,’ I say, eventually, to shut him up. I have a feeling he could go on for hours about the dangers of ‘hard drugs’, which is an
expression I have only heard on the lips of people who’ve never taken any. ‘It’s only a matter of luck that I didn’t end up as a crack whore, or worse.’

‘Well,’ says Eddy, coming back into the kitchen with a glint in his eye. ‘I don’t know about luck. Everyone knows that Manda Clarke had the crack-whore thing sewn up back
then – she’d never have let you on her patch. And Davy Mason was running Lyme’s heroin supply from the bike sheds. Not sure there was room for another dealer in town.’

‘Heroin?’ exclaims Ben, his eyes nearly popping out of his head. ‘Crikey!’

‘Well,’ I say to Eddy. ‘Until Davy got turned out of the bike sheds by Manda’s underage prostitution ring, of course. No one wanted to cross the Big Mama of the Fourth
Year.’

‘Of course,’ says Eddy gravely, shaking his head. ‘Tough times. They’d cleaned the school up a lot by the time Prue got there, Ben. Don’t look so
shocked.’

Ben looks from me to Eddy and then back again, his forehead contracting with the effort of thinking. Then he reaches over and slaps Eddy on the back so heartily that Eddy has to take a
correcting step to steady himself.

‘Ha! Nearly had me then! Prostitution ring!’ Ben’s booming laugh fills the kitchen.

‘Here’s your tea,’ I say, holding out a steaming mug. ‘Watch out for the heroin. I’m not sure I stirred it in properly.’

Ben scoffs and takes the mug out of my hands, still chuckling.

‘So you’ve made this place look amazing,’ says Eddy. ‘Grandma said you’d been working like mad.’

‘Thanks,’ Ben and I say in unison. He looks embarrassed to have been caught taking all the credit.

‘All Kate’s idea,’ says Ben graciously.

‘But I couldn’t have done it without Ben,’ I say, equally gracious. I feel like we are an advert for cordial relations between in-laws, at least, now that he’s forgiven
me for turfing him out of the house when the football was on.

‘Yeah,’ he agrees. ‘Kate’s more of the foreman type. You know what women are like, mate. Just give the directions, ha! Leave all the grafting to us, right?’

Eddy laughs uncomfortably, and Ben adopts an even more wide-legged stance, as if to assert his manliness despite admitting he obeyed my orders. At this rate he’ll soon be on the kitchen
floor in full box splits.

‘Well, it looks great,’ says Eddy, politely tactful.

Ben claims that it’s because he and I are a dream team, which is news to me. I suppose it’s true that I think of myself more as the foreman than part of a team. But someone has to be
in charge, surely? Otherwise you just drift, never achieving anything, never going anywhere. There has to be a direction in life, or where do you end up?

I excuse myself to use the bathroom while Ben is on a break from ripping up the tiles. I’ve hardly left the kitchen before I hear his next question to Eddy, announced in his foghorn voice
as if he’s projecting out into the street.

‘Seriously, though, mate, I heard Kate was a right goer back at school. Did you and she ever—’

I slam the bathroom door before I have to hear any more.

In the half-destroyed bathroom, plaster dust settles in my hair as I pick my toothbrush off the side of the sink. Considering my reflection, I seem to have a touch of the Miss Havishams –
if she had lived in a Sixties bungalow. It’s less romantic than a crumbling old mansion, and the bright blue bathroom suite doesn’t really lend itself to an atmosphere of tragedy, but
we definitely have something in common. Our pasts weigh too heavily on the present. If I don’t escape from mine soon, I may as well stay hiding in this bathroom forever, shrinking away from
conversations, avoiding contact with the outside world.

Is that what I want? To hide out in Lyme for ever, slowly mouldering, my hair greying with age and dust? If the best revenge is living well, I’m not doing a terribly good job of it.

London

Although Matt frequently accused me of living there, I’d never been in the Crown and Two Chairmen in the middle of the day before. I suppose it had never crossed my
mind that people might sit in a pub on a workday – don’t they have places to go? Money to earn? But the pub was busy. Not like on a Thursday or a Friday night when the after-work crowd
was four deep at the bar, and punters took over the pavements outside, but tables were occupied, the quiz machine was in use, the barman rushed from customer to customer. I had thought it was only
tragic, unemployed alcoholics who found themselves downing their third drink of the day by 3 p.m., but this afternoon I was well on the way to becoming one of their number.

Richard had called us in the moment we returned from Singapore. We thought, naturally, that it was for the usual wash-up session: going over what had worked and what hadn’t, discussing
what we could improve for the next time, making sure all the figures added up. He should have been out in Singapore to oversee everything, but at the last minute he’d had to stay in London.
Even without him, the event had been a triumph – everyone said so – and through the jetlag and exhaustion we were proud of the job we’d done. Striding through the office after two
weeks away, trailing our wheeled suitcases behind us, Sarah and I had greeted our colleagues, ready for the praise we were sure must be coming our way – and the compliments on the tans
we’d managed to get by the hotel pool on the last day. But people seemed to be avoiding conversation beyond a brief hello.

When we got to the meeting, Sarah and I sniggered over Richard’s new dye job – raven black – which, instead of making him look younger, gave him the look of an aged Elvis
impersonator. It must have been the dark hair that made him look so grey; the colour had drained out of his skin completely. No longer was he the red and angry shouty boss at the head of the
meeting table; this morning he looked like he was auditioning for the role of an undertaker, his face immobile and drawn.

‘Sit down,’ he said, and we all exchanged amused looks. What had got into him all of a sudden? Still in our post-show bubble, none of us could imagine what was going to happen
next.

‘You did a great job, everyone,’ said Richard. I couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t have his usual list of figures in front of him, which made me instantly
suspicious. He never went anywhere without those highlighted spreadsheets, I swear he slept with them clutched to his chest like a security blanket. ‘Great job. No one could have asked for
more of you. Not even me.’

Sarah’s expression was quizzical, and mine must have matched it. The wash-up meeting wasn’t about praise – we’d congratulated ourselves enough in the hotel bar after the
show – it was about picking holes in the event so they didn’t happen next time. Working out what went wrong, apportioning blame. I fidgeted on my chair. Something was up.

Richard cleared his throat and continued. ‘I’m just going to come out and say it. They’re shutting us down. That was our last event for Hitz. I’m sorry.’

We were all too surprised to speak. Sarah’s jaw hung open as she stared at him. Richard looked anxiously from face to face, as if concerned we hadn’t heard him properly. I felt like
an utter fool. How had I not seen this coming? Being alert to the grapevine at Hitz was the only way to survive – I’d seen other people lose their jobs and wondered how they could have
failed to see it coming. And now here I was, blindsided. Being away in Singapore was no excuse.

‘The whole department?’ I asked at last. ‘But they cut us in half last year. I thought that was it.’

‘I thought that was it, too, I’m sorry. They’re taking event production out of house. Jennifer Heston is setting up a new production company and they’re going to take
over all ongoing events. What happens after that is anyone’s guess.’

‘How long have we got?’ I asked.

‘Three months,’ he said. ‘You all get three months – you can carry on working here until your notice period is up, or you can go home today and not come back.
You’ll get paid either way. And you each have a meeting with HR to discuss the terms of your redundancy.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Kirsty.

‘It’s not as bad as it seems,’ said Richard, in a tone that suggested he was trying to persuade himself of this as much as the rest of us. ‘The package they’re
offering is very generous. And Jennifer’s going to need experienced staff – and freelancers – to keep these projects running. There will be plenty of opportunities for you all.
You’re talented and smart. I’ve loved working with all of you. I know you’ll be fine.’