The Secrets of Married Women (2 page)

Her eyes come back to mine with that cryptic business in them again. ‘An affair? Oh! Me? Never! Jill, I had so much screwing around in my single days. Maybe it’s different for you. You’ve only ever been with one man so you could be forgiven for being curious. But affairs are so sleazy. It’s awful. And besides, I’ve too much to lose. I have a child. You don’t understand what it’s like when you’re a mother, Jill.’

Leigh sometimes makes tactless comments that make me feel like I’m a member of a very limited club of childless pariahs, and it wounds me more than I can ever let on. Rob and I just found out a few months ago that we can’t have children. Leigh’s the only person I’ve told, because Rob, for some strange reason, doesn’t want anybody to know yet. It’s not as though having children was all Rob and I ever yearned for. But since when was life so logical that this would make everything uncomplicated and okay?

‘So how’s Molly then?’ I ask, while we’re on the topic. Molly’s her eight-year-old, a rising Charlotte Church who’ll grab the phone off her mam and bleat
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
in your ear when you’re trying to have a conversation, which can be annoying.

‘Brilliant,’ she says, because Molly’s clearly not what she wants to talk about right now. Her wiry green gaze buzzes around the room. ‘Oh, God, look at these two. We’ll never look like that again will we?’

I stifle a yawn and glance at the two dolled-up ten-year-olds in Madonna corsets that she’s referring to. The age rant; I’ve heard it a million times. Honestly, sometimes you can go out with Leigh feeling quite okay about yourself and then you go home and want to stick your head in the oven and slow-roast your own eyeballs. ‘Why? Would you want to be that age again?’

‘I’d kill my own mother to.’

‘Well that’s not saying much!’

She smiles at me. Leigh’s mother is a nut who met all Leigh’s ‘dads’ by doing prison visiting. Then Leigh found out she had a twin sister—her mother kept Leigh and gave the other baby away. Leigh recently tracked her down and went to a coffee shop in Leicester to meet her—with Wendy and me in distant supportive tow at a nearby table—and the woman stood her up; something she won’t have mentioned now.

‘Honestly, though, do you even see one guy in here looking at us Jill? I tell you, not one has. Not even baldy by the bar who looks like he got that suit free when he bought the tie. Mr Divorced In Polyester. It’s so depressing!’

‘Well somebody should just give us a lethal injection and serve us up for dog food.’

‘I know!’ she says, thinking I’m being serious, and I just about scream. It’s the one thing I’ll never understand about Leigh. She’s bright, she’s got a brilliant job, a doting family, yet the only thing she seems to measure herself on is how many men look twice at her.

We swell and collide with the pressing tide of bodies. I’m hot, and considerably underdressed, in my leather jacket, cargo pants and beige draw-string T—something I’d wear to run errands. But getting glammed up on a Friday night to come to a busy bar that’s full of singles, when I’m married, just makes me feel like a big fraud. A bead of sweat makes down my spine and my big toe and my calves are now in a serious gridlock cramp in these three-inch, knee-high black boots—my token nod to glamour. Donna Summer’s singing
Hot Stuff
now, and, as if on cue, two young lads latched onto beer glasses walk past us, and one of them—the cocky one with the muscles and sun bed tan—gives me the eye. Then his mate looks at Leigh and goes, ‘Neh. Not her!’

A flaming colour rushes up Leigh’s white neck. ‘Did you hear what he just said?’

‘Oh come on, Leigh, they’re drunk. Don’t waste a minute thinking about it!’

‘Well the good-looking one certainly likes you.’ Her eyes do a quick sweep of me.

‘Oh come on, lads his age would have anybody.’

‘But not me!’ She turns away, takes a shaky sip of her wine. I’m stunned to see tears.

‘Oh Leigh, I didn’t mean it like that!’ I can’t believe how fragile she’s being. I want to say, why do you care what two horny teenagers and a lonely-heart with a hair-weave think of you? There are bigger things to worry about. But instead I tell her I’m bursting for the toilet. I take off, cutting a mission around shoulders, backs, boobs, boob-jobs, biceps and beer-glasses, and barge into the ladies’ loos where I immediately get gassed by a million cans of hairspray. They’re all bombarding the mirror, lifting their boobs, adjusting their thongs, fluffing, puffing and perfuming, or lining up at the condom machine, ranking the merits of strawberry versus peach flavour. What am I doing in this awful place? I left this scene behind me when I was about sixteen. I should be out with my husband, or at home, snuggled on the settee between him and the dog. There was a time when Rob and I never went out separately on Friday or Saturday nights. We could still see friends, but the rule was we had to see them together. It was a lovely little claim we had on each other; our friends all said it was sweet. Tonight though, as I was leaving, hovering there, hoping for some comment that I looked nice, I got the distinct impression that Rob couldn’t have cared less about the weekend rule, he was probably just pleased I was off out so he could get on with his date with the television.

I queue for the toilet, then I queue at the mirror to wash my hands and get lethally elbowed by a back-combing twelve-year-old Britney Spears. Between all these pluming heads I manage to catch a glimpse of myself standing quite still. My short, blonde ‘do’ that I have to keep Frizz-Eased so as not to look like the Jackson Five. My new tiny, trendy tortoiseshell glasses that replaced my older, clunky ones, that replaced painful years of vanity in the form of contact lenses. And my touch of long-lasting cherry lip-gloss. I don’t look half bad. I don’t think I look thirty-five. But among this sea of fresh young faces, I can see that my own has been hardened by a few too many of life’s hard knocks.

‘So, I wonder if Wendy’s having a nice night out.’ I pass Leigh another glass of wine. Our friend Wendy is at her husband’s work function tonight. If she’d been here, Leigh would never have ranted on like that about Lawrence, because Wendy’s got such a great marriage that makes a grasping part of your self-esteem want to build your own up, not blacken it. ‘So what do you think?’ I elbow her. ‘Will Neil look like James Bond in his tuxedo?’

The old sense of humour I know and love returns. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘But he’ll look better with it off.’ Wendy’s hubby, Neil, is a hunk. Plus he’s a top policeman, and he only has eyes for his wife. ‘But I’d rather you didn’t get me started on that thought track if you don’t mind. It’s a bit like dreaming of a chateaubriand when you’ve got to go home to a pale, squidgy, thawed-out pork sausage.’ She rolls her eyes back. ‘Hard choice. Hard, hard choice. A select roast extravagantly carved from the heart of the finest beef tenderloin, versus… the pulverised toenails and entrails of… Miss Piggy.’

‘Stop it!’ I tell her, and we chuckle.

‘You know I was thinking about Wendy the other day,’ she holds her glass up to her face, scrutinizes it then rubs a lipstick mark off it. ‘You know the problem with Wendy? You never get any dirt off her, do you? Don’t you just sometimes wish she’d sit down, say life’s crap, Neil’s an arsehole, my kids should be set upon by Dingos….’

‘But her life’s not crap. Neil’s fantastic, and her lads are sweethearts. You’re just being a catty jealous cow.’

‘Oh I am. Haven’t the tips of my ears turned green?’ She lifts one of her funeral curtains.

‘Actually,’ I pretend to peer in there, ‘you’ve got a lot of wax in that one.’ Her face is transformed by her smile. ‘So have I cheered you up then, petals? You’re not going to go home and gash your jugular when Lawrence wants to have sex the moment you are in the door?’

‘Please,’ she says. ‘Don’t put that unpleasant thought in my head right now.’ She gawps at the offending lads who are now chatting up the two babies who look like they’ve forgotten to put their tops on. ‘Oh come on Jill, this place is making me gag. I don’t even know what we’re doing here. I feel like going home and scrubbing myself in a shower.’

I neglect to remind her that coming here was her idea.

We finish our drinks and leave. It’s refreshingly chilly, and spitting on to rain, a fine spray visible only under the blue of the streetlamps. I breathe in the oily Newcastle dampness, aware that my hearing has almost gone dim from all the loud music. I love this revamped part of the city, especially at night. The Blinking Eye bridge lit up with blue lights
. The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, a converted flourmill, floodlit against the night sky. And the new Sage Centre for Music that reminds you of a stainless steel seashell, or a giant cream horn as my dad calls it. The new Newcastle that has lost its scent of coalmines and unemployment lines. A
group of girls jig past us, linking arms, singing Kylie songs, and doing their drunken version of the Can-Can. Leigh and I walk without saying much, as lights from the Sage Centre bob a reflection on the river and cars drum noisily over the Tyne Bridge. She seems bleak again. I realise that sometimes the people I know the most are the ones I least understand. I listen to our heels clack on the wet cobblestones.

The lovely silver Mercedes SL 500, whose alarm I set off when I accidentally nudged it as I tried to squeeze my Jetta between it and a BMW X5, is still parked behind me. I’m about to get in my car when I notice something under my wiper. ‘What’s that?’ Leigh asks.

It doesn’t look like a parking ticket. I pull out the somewhat soggy piece of paper and read:
I saw you scratch my car. So instead of compensation, how about a drink
? And under that is the name Andrey and a phone number.

I am rather amazed and taken aback. My eyes dart from his very fancy car to the steamed-up window of Still Life, where, without looking obvious, I try to see if I can see a man who looks like an Andrey, not that I know what an Andrey would look like. But there’s just a lot of silhouettes planted against the glass. I stand there lost in a big smirk, staring at that car and biting the paper. I have to admit, this sort of thing doesn’t happen to me every day. I wonder if he’s gorgeous. Like he would be if my life were a movie.

‘What is it then?’ Leigh’s white face peers across the car roof, through a blue-lit rain.

It’s on the tip of my tongue to show her. And on better nights we’d have a chuckle and speculate whether he’d be good in bed, and she’d share some sordid story about a past hi-jinx with a man named Andrey. Then she’d wave me off at her door, and I’d sparkle all the way home—that fabulous after-effect of having a good night out with a great friend. But something tells me not to bother. So I slip the paper into my bag. ‘Oh nothing. Just a flyer.’

~ * * * ~

‘Leigh had a bit of a freak-out,’ I tell Rob when I slip under the duvet beside him, relieved to be home beside him. Rob always loves the stories of the girls’ nights out. Rob never has stories of his nights out. Rob thinks if he talks about anything other than sport with his pals, they’re all being gay or something.

He turns and lifts an arm for me to snuggle under, sniffs my hair. ‘You smell like an ashtray.’

‘Eau du Fags. It’s the new fragrance by Givenchy.’ I poke him in the ribs. ‘Anyway, what you doing in bed this early? Did your girlfriend just leave?’

‘Didn’t you pass her on the way in?’ I feel him smile against my cheek. ‘Why did Leigh throw a wobbler then?’

The cold steel rain, heavy now, scatters on the windows that flank our bed, and nestling under Rob’s arm is truly the closest thing to my heaven. ‘Oh, because some wasted three-year-old made eyes at me instead of her.’ I inch my legs over to the side of the bed that he’s warmed and tell him the story, lapping up the feeling of his thumb stroking my damp hair.

‘She’s bonkers,’ is his verdict. Rob’s deep like that.

Leigh does have issues. But could you blame her, given her upbringing? As she’ll often say, ‘You know my mam never once gave me a cuddle or told me I was beautiful.’ And I think that’s so sad. Because my mother was the opposite. My mother did that every day.

‘So were the flies out again?’ he asks. This is Rob’s little joke about men finding his wife attractive. ‘You’re like dung,’ he’ll say. ‘You attract all the flies.’

‘Oh, the odd bluebottle was buzzing around, you know…’ I think of that note for a moment, and realise it’s still in my bag. ‘So, did our very untrained puppy do another pile in the house?’ Rob bought me Kiefer, a Hound/Collie cross, for my birthday. Don’t ask me why. I’ve never expressed any desire for a dog, probably because I’ve never had any desire for a dog. So Kiefer’s spent the last three months teaching me how to love him—by crapping all over the house, shredding my nerve-ends with his bark, chewing his way through my every last shoe and piece of furniture, and stubbornly foisting himself in the middle of Rob and me whenever I try to steal a bit of affection.

‘Nah. Just that mound under your pillow.’