‘This,’ says Lipsy, a look of total unconcern on her face, ‘is Robert. Rob to his friends, so you can call him Robert. He’s my boyfriend. And now, if you don’t mind, we’re busy.’
With that she gives me a hearty shove and shuts – and locks! – the door in my face.
For a moment or two I can’t breathe. I really think I might just suffocate here on the landing while my daughter fornicates in her room with a man twice her age. Then, recovering enough to raise a fist, I begin to bang ferociously on her door.
‘Get. Out. Here. Now.’
‘What’s all the noise?’ My mother has come to join in the fun and I round on her, remembering that she knew all about this and did nothing.
‘Do you know how old this boyfriend is?’ I demand.
She looks slightly perturbed, as if she’s being asked to remember the name of an actor from a show in the seventies.
‘He’s OLD,’ I tell her. ‘At least twice her age. And he’s in there with her now. In her bedroom, Mum.’
‘Well, now, I don’t think he is actually twice her age. I seem to remember Lipsy saying he was thirty.’
She actually says this as though it’s helpful.
‘Oh well, as long as he’s two years short of being a pervert that’s OK, isn’t it? I don’t even know why I was worried. I’ll go back to my own room shall I and forget all about it? ARE YOU INSANE?’
Just then Lipsy’s door swings open again and she steps out onto the landing, calmly closing the door behind her.
‘Get out here, you pervert!’ I shout over her shoulder.
‘Mum. MUM!’ My daughter is looking at me with an expression of such disgust it stops my hollering and demands my full attention. ‘Will you just listen to yourself? Do you really think standing here making a fool out of yourself is going to make any difference to what I do? Rob and I have been seeing each other for months and there is nothing you can do about it. Nothing!’ she shouts over me as I try to protest. ‘Anyway, Grandma is happy for me to have him here and it’s her house and not yours.’
There is a “so there” element to her voice that is so young and innocent I am tempted to start my protesting anew. But, as ever, I can see the futility of the task. I could shout and scream and create. I could maybe drag the man out of her room by his scrawny neck and throw him bodily down the stairs. I could (try to) lock her in her room in an attempt to teach her a lesson. But with Lipsy these things just never seem to work. Believe me, I’ve tried them. I guess it’s my failing as her mother that I never found quite the right way to discipline her, never mastered the art of making her do what I say simply because I say it.
Instead I decide to attack my own mother, who was far too good at being strict with me to be letting Lipsy get away with this now. ‘Is this right?’ I demand of her. ‘Are you OK with this happening in your house?’
My mother stands between us, her face creased with confusion. She looks from me to Lipsy and back again. I hear movements from behind the door to my daughter’s bedroom and wonder what the man, what Robert, is doing.
‘Well, the thing is, I can’t really say… that is, I’m not sure that it’s …’
‘Oh, don’t bother.’ I turn away from the pair of them so they can’t see the tears of frustration that are starting to puddle in my eyes. As I reach for the door to my own room – my own bloody teenage bedroom where, God knows, I got up to stuff I fervently pray Lipsy will never do – my daughter throws out her killer blow.
‘You’re such a hypocrite, Mum. After all, you weren’t that much older than me when you got pregnant.’
Chapter 5
Wednesday 6
th
June
I hate my mother.
As of today the above statement is official and nothing she can do will ever change my mind.
Yesterday the woman formerly known as my mother went totally ballistic when she found Rob in my room. She caused a scene like you would not believe. I was so ashamed. Thankfully Rob was cool about it but afterwards he said he didn’t feel right doing it with her in the house. Just great!
Then, as if she hadn’t done enough already, she goes and phones my dad, who we never see anyway, and tells him all about it. Like he gives a shit. But that made everything ten million times worse because for the past six months I’ve been telling my mum that I was staying at my dad’s at weekends when I kind of wasn’t. I was actually staying with Rob.
Now I’m grounded. Grandma is backing her up so that’s it. My life’s over. Rob will meet someone else – that Nina at McDonald’s likes him, I’m sure. And she’s got blonde hair and big tits and she’s such a tart …
No. Must not worry. Rob isn’t like that. And if he is then it will be all my mother’s fault and I’ll make her pay for ever.
Lipsy snapped her diary shut and returned it to its secret place under her mattress. Lately she’d been filling it with the kind of things she had a feeling should not be viewed by anyone else but her. And her mum had turned into such a pain in the arse she wouldn’t put it past her to sneak around looking for evidence against her.
No, it was safer to keep it well and truly hidden. Maybe she should think of some kind of code for certain things; she knew that was what her friend Rosie did in her diary. Rosie had explained the code to Lipsy, which Lipsy thought was a bit stupid – what was the point of a secret code if your best friend knew how to break it?
Still, she was grateful for the advice. She needed all the weapons she could find against her mother now. It was all-out war.
***
Paul stirred two sugars into his latte, rolling his eyes in disgust as the hot liquid slopped over into the plate-sized saucer. Never mind that these trendy coffee shops had to give you your drink in a cup the size of a soup bowl, did they really have to fill them right to the brim? And look at the handle on the mug – too small for even a child’s finger to fit through. He hated these places, full of frazzled shoppers and self-conscious types. He could have told Stella no, he’d meet her somewhere else, like the pub for example, but he knew Café Crème was her favourite hangout.
Lifting the mug carefully to his lips, he sipped the scalding liquid and watched the door closely. A tall woman with dark hair appeared behind a group of rowdy teenagers and Paul stretched his head to see. It wasn’t Stella. When she did arrive, thought Paul, she would be full of life, immediately telling him about some scrape she’d had on the way into town, or a near-miss in the car park. He couldn’t believe how well she’d coped this week. She was amazing. Paul didn’t even want to think how he’d feel if he lost everything he owned – without insurance, as well. But Stella had breezed into the office on Wednesday morning, the energy fairly bursting out of her, and happily announced that she was going to do up her house herself and make it even better than it was before.
She’d need a lot of help, though. Paul had sat her down during her lunch break and made her start on a list of jobs that needed doing. He thought he was being constructive, and was taken aback when she rolled her eyes and said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, not a
list
!’
But, like any good friend, he’d offered his services, and – possibly more usefully – the services of the handyman Smart Homes used for all its maintenance jobs. Stella’s eyes had filled with tears at this point, but Paul had shrugged off her thanks. It was the least he could do, he told her. And he meant it.
His phone beeped with the sound of an incoming text and Paul retrieved it from his pocket, expecting it to be Stella saying she was going to be late. But it was only Andrew, his squash buddy, arranging a game for tomorrow. He typed in a quick response then shoved the phone back into his jeans.
Two women – well, girls really – were looking at him across the café, their heads together conspiratorially and their faces arranged into surreptitious smiles. It took Paul a good few minutes to realise that the girls were smiling at him in a nice way and not laughing at him for some reason. He felt his face grow hot and he looked away, embarrassed. He was just no good at this kind of thing. He knew if Steve or Nick were here now they’d be egging him on to go and ask for phone numbers, and he knew that no matter how much they pressured him he simply wouldn’t be able to do it.
What was wrong with a man being in his late thirties and still single? He was perfectly happy, thank you very much, and resented the implication by everyone from his friends to his parents to magazines and TV that it should be any different. His life was full – fuller than most of the couples he knew who did nothing more exciting than watch telly every night, their routine punctuated only by the odd drink-fuelled argument. Who wanted routine and commitment and – perish the thought – kids, anyway?
As if in punishment, a woman with a buggy wide enough for triplets barged roughly past his seat. In a considerate reflex, Paul tried to jerk it out of the way. And spilt half his coffee into his lap. Thankfully, he’d been gazing into space for so long the temperature was only on the hot side of warm. Otherwise – he didn’t want to think about otherwise. The woman squeezed by him and glared, looking pointedly at his lap.
‘It’s only coffee,’ Paul tried to explain but she’d already gone, threading around the tables like a rally driver.
‘Had a bit of an accident?’
Stella stood over him, smirking as he dabbed at the stain with a soggy napkin.
‘Very funny.’ Paul tried to smile but the humour of the situation was, for once, lost on him. His ruminations had left him feeling defensive, and he wondered whether he should have talked to those two girls after all. Too late now, of course. ‘Sit down, I’ll get you a coffee. Oh. You’ve already got one.’
‘I’ve been here ages. I was in the queue trying to catch your eye. You look like a man with a lot on his mind, you were miles away. Anything I should know about?’
‘Nothing important. Muffin?’ he said, pushing the bag of mini-muffins across the table.
‘No thanks, I’m watching my figure.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll watch it for you,’ he countered, to which Stella responded with a hearty laugh. Paul began to relax again. He knew she loved this kind of banter, and he loved the way that she could take it without getting snitty or precious like some women. Or take it too seriously, like some other women.
Despite the joke – or maybe because of it – he found himself looking at her figure as she sat back, coffee in hand, and thinking how perfect it actually was. Long legs – not skinny, just right. Trim waist. Great-shaped body dipping in and out in all the right places – ALL the right places. He wasn’t sure when exactly she’d turned from the gangly, sweet kid at school into the voluptuous woman who sat before him now, and he wondered why he had never noticed it before.
Because she’s a friend, Smart, he told himself sternly, annoyed at the way he’d caught himself acting like the kind of man he couldn’t stand. What sort of a bloke leers at their friends? Particularly vulnerable friends like Stella. It must be his age, he thought, and the constant pressure from some invisible source to abandon his bachelor lifestyle.
He resolved to make it up to her by giving her a pay rise. God knows, she deserved it.
‘What’s up with you, Smart-boy? You’re doing that staring into space thing again?’ Stella prodded him with her spoon.
Paul shook himself mentally. Snap out of it, man. ‘I’m good,’ he said. ‘How about you?’
‘Not good.’ Stella smiled ruefully. ‘I’ve had a really bad morning, to be honest.’
‘Lipsy?’
‘You guessed it.’ She leant forward with her elbows on the table. ‘You know, I can’t believe I was such a mug, believing she was actually staying at her dad’s all those weekends. I should have known, shouldn’t I? I mean, I know what he’s like. I know how little interest he’s shown in his daughter, so why was I willing to believe that he’d suddenly started wanting her to stay overnight? He’s only got a bedsit! How stupid am I?’ Stella shook her head, not noticing that a few strands of hair had settled in her cappuccino. ‘Don’t answer that. Any normal mother would have seen through it immediately. And then I might have been able to protect her from this Robert character. From getting into something she’s just too young to understand.’
Paul stretched out his arm and rescued her hair from the coffee. ‘You’re being too hard on yourself, Stella. You’re a great mother, you know you are. Look at what you’ve been through to provide a good home for the two of you –’
‘Oh, yes. I made a great job of that, didn’t I? Except – then I went and burnt it down.’
‘You didn’t burn it down …’
‘But I tell you what,’ Stella carried on over him, ‘I may be a shit mother but I’m a damn sight better mother than he ever will be a father. He’s not going to worm his way back into her life now. Not if I have anything to do with it.’
‘What do you mean?’
Stella sat back and stirred her coffee with her finger, then transferred the finger to her mouth and licked off the froth. Paul knew he would find this gesture irresistibly sexy on another woman, someone who wasn’t only a friend. He shook the thought away again. Perhaps it was just too damn long since he’d had a date. Maybe that was why he was having these weird thoughts. He glanced over to where the two girls had been sitting, but they were gone. Typical.
‘He says he wants to get to know her properly,’ Stella said grimly. ‘After sixteen years of nothing more than the odd Christmas card, now it seems he does actually want to know his daughter. Which is what I thought he was doing anyway, for the last six months. It’s as if now he’s heard what she’s getting up to with this Robert, he wants to do the father thing. Like I’m not a good mother. Like I’ve failed. Well, I told him he could whistle.’ Stella fixed Paul with a steely glare and he was suddenly very glad that he was not the reviled John Dean. In a voice that could freeze a volcano she said, ‘He’s got absolutely no chance.’
Paul would have liked to tell his friend that, really, she had no choice in the matter. She had to let her daughter see her father; if anything she should encourage it. It was the right thing to do. But he didn’t. He knew her too well to point out the obvious. The time would come when she’d ask him for advice. Until then he’d be a proper friend and just listen.