‘Dave, buzz off!’ Ed said, getting out of bed and waving his arms in the direction of the animal, ‘I have work to do here. I’ll see you later.’
He pulled the door closed and played with the handle until there was a click.
‘Right,’ he said, heading back to the bed with an eager smile, ‘where were we?’
But as the kissing got going again a ghostly wail drifted towards the room.
‘Waaaaaaaaaaaah …’
It was the sound of Micky, tireless cot escapologist.
‘No prizes for guessing who that is,’ Ed began wearily. ‘You or me?’
‘I’ll go,’ Annie replied, ‘you take the dog downstairs. Then we’ll see if there’s any chance of reviving the situation in here.’
‘Muuuuuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmyyyy!’
The little voice sounded tragic now.
‘And up we get,’ Annie said, stepping from the bed and wrapping a dressing gown around her naked body. She got to the door ahead of Ed, turned the handle and it came clean off in her hand.
The spindle fell to the floor on the other side of the door and she was left staring at a firmly closed door with a hole where the handle used to be.
‘Ed!’
‘Oh fuddle.’
Years of teaching had left Ed with a remarkably muted swear vocabulary. He got out of bed to assess the situation. He examined the hole where the handle had been with such a bewildered expression it would almost have been comical if the wailing from the twins’ bedroom wasn’t growing louder.
‘They’re both awake now. You have to do something.’
‘Yes, I had noticed,’ Ed said dryly.
He pushed his finger into the hole the handle had left and felt around a little. He tried to pull the door open. But the catch was still holding firm.
‘We’re locked in!’ Annie exclaimed, beginning to feel slightly panicked now. The crying was reaching
fever
pitch and she was desperate to go and console her children. ‘What do we do now? Let’s get a coat hanger and poke it about, we’ve got to open the door.’
‘Good idea.’
Ed hurried over to the wardrobe and brought out a thin wire hanger.
With Annie urging him on, he tried various attacks: he poked the wire about in the hole, he poked it at the catch. Nothing worked.
‘MUMMMMY!’
That was definitely Micky’s voice and it was growing louder.
‘He’s out of his cot,’ Annie said, really worried now. What if he fell hard on to the floor? What if he came out of his room and tumbled down the stairs?
‘Oh for Pete’s sake,’ Ed exclaimed, poking at the catch again.
‘Mummy?’
The voice was definitely coming closer and sounded not so much upset now as questioning.
‘He’s coming to the door … Micky! It’s OK, but Mummy and Daddy are stuck in the bedroom.’
There was no reply.
‘Micky? Are you there?’ Annie asked, face pressed against the hole as she tried to scan the landing for any sign of her son.
There was a snuffling sound and then Annie saw
Micky’s
great big blue eye pressed against the other side of the hole.
‘Micky!’ she said, smiling with relief.
‘Mummy?’
He sounded smiley too.
‘Can you help?’ Annie asked in her most encouraging voice. ‘Do you see the funny knob with the stick on the floor?’
Micky’s eye moved away from the hole.
‘This will not work,’ Ed hissed.
‘It’s got to be worth a try.’
‘Stick,’ Micky declared. This was followed by a heavy clatter against the wooden floor.
‘What was that?’ Annie asked.
Ed smacked his hand against his forehead: ‘Probably the doorknob falling off the spindle.’
‘The spindle? You’re very technical for someone who’s made a complete balls-up of fixing our door,’ she snapped.
‘You can take this all out on me later, but right now it is not helping,’ Ed whispered fiercely.
‘Later? Later as in when the fire brigade are here trying to work out how to open this door? Do we even have a phone in our room so we can contact them? Where will Micky be by then? He’ll probably have gone down to the kitchen and turned on the gas.’
‘Not helping …’ Ed reminded her.
Annie put her eye to the hole to see what Micky was up to and immediately gave a yelp of pain.
‘Owwww!’
She pulled her head away, hand clutched over her eye.
The spindle plopped through the hole and on to the carpet.
‘Clever boy!’ Annie managed, despite the tears streaming from her poked eye.
‘I don’t believe it!’ Ed exclaimed. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I think I’ll be fine,’ she said, hand over her eye again.
Ed slotted the spindle halfway through the gap and turned it. The catch pulled back and the door popped open.
‘You clever boy,’ Annie cooed, ‘you clever, clever boy!’
There stood Micky in his blue babygro with an unusual, concentrated look on his face. Before Ed or Annie could quite register what it meant, he opened his mouth and hit them with a gush of projectile puke.
It was almost an hour later when Ed and Annie finally fell back into bed, soggy, still smelling slightly of toddler puke and far too tired for any romantic rekindling.
‘You know some time ago you promised me a mini-break, far away from the domestic mayhem,’ Ed complained. ‘A mini-break, Annie, where is my mini-break?’
‘I did. I totally did, babes. We will go on a mini-break. Just you and me to a lovely place far, far away from the madness.’
‘When is this happening? And where?’
‘I will book us a mini-break. I promise.’
‘Please do …’ Ed turned and landed a kiss on her forehead, ‘because it may be our only chance to have sex this decade.’
He turned out the bedside light but just as they settled down to sleep, he remembered: ‘What was the favour you wanted to ask?’
Annie hesitated. It was one thing to ask your husband for a huge massive favour when he was all blissed out and contented post-sex. It was quite another when dogs, puking babies and general exhaustion had got in the way of the big romantic reunion.
‘Well … I dunno …’ she began, ‘it’s a crazy plan. Don’t know if I’m even close to pulling it off. In fact, let’s not talk about it now.’
‘What? Tell me,’ Ed insisted.
‘Well, it’s just Svetlana … she knows I’m on a forced holiday, and she’s offered to take me on a spa break with her but you know … it’s really not fair
…
there would be too much to organize if I went away.’
‘When? Right now? While you’re off?’
‘Oh honestly, I don’t think it’s going to work. This weekend-ish. Well, in fact, leaving on Friday morning.’
‘Friday?!’ Ed sounded incredulous.
‘It was a very last minute offer. But she has said she’ll pay and it’s a very famous place. Legendary, in fact.’
‘Go,’ came the simple reply.
‘Go? But how? But who?’
‘Dinah and I will share it out between us,’ Ed replied, ‘but there are two conditions.’
‘OK …’ Annie wondered what was coming now.
‘One, you have to come back with a spring in your step, the girl we know and love …’
‘Well, I can try, babes.’
‘Two, you have to promise me that we will go away on our mini-break. We have to go away. I have to get one night, maybe even two of uninterrupted time with you or I am going to … burst!’
‘It’s a deal.’
Chapter Eight
New York
Fabian posing hard:
White linen suit (from Dad via Brooks Brothers)
Pink shirt (same)
Suede lace-ups (Gap)
Cream trilby hat (thrift store)
Green hair dye (drugstore)
Total est. cost: $470
ALTHOUGH THE PERFECT
Dress office had closed for the day, Lana was striding through all the most interesting streets of Manhattan, camera phone in hand, still hard at work.
Ever since she’d flounced back from London, ahead of Elena, with her fate and the fate of the
dress
label unresolved, Lana had spent the hours between work and bedtime roaming the streets, supposedly in search of inspiration.
She wouldn’t admit to anyone, not even herself, that she was lonely. Since she’d ditched her last guy, Matt, she’d found that she didn’t particularly want to see anyone from the little circle of friends she’d made through him because it was still awkward.
Gracie was usually busy in the evenings with her friends, her family and her long-standing boyfriend, ‘Beefy’ Bingham. A nice guy, Lana had thought when she met him, but somehow not exactly the cool, fashiony, finger-on-the-pulse kind of man Lana had imagined Gracie would be with.
So in the evenings, Lana stayed out, away from the apartment phone that never rang now that she and her mother weren’t calling each other. Instead, Lana walked the streets and took pictures all over Manhattan, dreaming up inspiration and ideas for a project that now might never get off the ground.
She snapped cool girls with funkily styled outfits, edgy shop window displays, unexpected patterns, clashing colours, anything that might inspire a dazzling new collection of clothes.
‘East 28th Street,’ Lana whispered, but with determination. She was heading there because that’s where Parker had advised them to look for the very
hottest
store windows and the very coolest New Yorkers.
She was also going there because: ‘I like to hang out there myself …’ he’d told them, ‘there’s this one place, Blonde Tobacco, it’s immense: low key, laid back. If I have any free time, that’s where I like to be. Plus it’s real close to the hallway-with-a-camp-bed which I call home.’
Although it was almost two weeks since she’d first met and last seen Parker, Lana couldn’t get him out of her mind. He was the most attractive and most fascinating person she’d met in a long time. She’d tried to shake the memory of him off, but little details – his scruffy trainers, the clunky watch which slid around his smooth, olive wrist – kept flashing about in her mind.
So now, like a possessed person, she was walking towards the bar he was sometimes in when he had the time. Even though she knew he was not going to be there and she would be wandering around like some minor, wannabe stalker.
But still the street and the bar – Blonde Tobacco – were calling to her, luring her on.
As she turned and began to walk down East 28th Street, she tried to look nonchalant and relaxed but really felt as self-conscious as if she was wearing a T-shirt with the words:
Hello Parker, I am sooooo crushing on you
.
He won’t be here, she reminded herself. So she would just walk down the street, take photos of the shop windows and maybe of some of the people sitting around outside in the evening sunshine and then she would go.
No harm done.
Parker would never know.
She raised her camera phone and focused on a small group of Manhattan’s coolest sitting in a knot at a tiny metal table.
There was a guy in a small cream-coloured porkpie hat with bright green hair sticking out from underneath it. This was good; this had to be the kind of inspirational image Elena and Gracie would want.
Lana held up her phone then hit zoom because she didn’t really want the cool dude in the hat to know she was taking his picture. She looked at the screen and saw a pattern which made her eyes widen: black with a pink and orange stripe?
She looked up and saw Parker – right at the table with the man in the hat – looking straight at her. It was such a heady surprise she fumbled her phone in fright, letting it fall with a clatter. She dropped down to pick it up. When she glimpsed up through her hair, hoping Parker hadn’t noticed, he was waving in her direction.
Lana put the phone into her bag and took a
calming
breath. He was a cool guy so she would have to play it cool too. She would just go over and say hello. No big deal.
As she approached his table, she set a smile on her face and tried to give off the natural born confidence of a New York girl.
‘Hey,’ Parker called out.
‘Hey,’ she replied.
‘You meeting someone here?’
She shrugged and said: ‘Maybe later’ … proud that her voice sounded incredibly close to casual even if her heart was beginning to race. ‘Right now I’m just walking about, getting inspired. Can I take a picture of your friend? I’m crazy about his hat.’
She gave the guy with the green hair her charm offensive smile.
‘Fabian, you have to meet—’ Parker began.
‘Lana,’ she said, holding out her hand.
‘I know, you don’t have to tell me,’ Parker said with a lazy grin, ‘So do you have a blog where we can see your photos?’ he asked.
‘Not yet … but I might set one up.’
‘You should. I’d love to see them. “Lana from London’s blog.” Think about it. Fabian, Lana really is from London, how cool is that?’ Parker asked.
‘Honoured to meet you,’ Fabian said in a deep, drawling voice as he extended his hand.
‘Fabian is from the South and he’s working a
whole
Truman Capote but with green hair kind of thing,’ Parker added. ‘Would you like to sit down and have a drink with us? We’re only drinking lemon tea, because we both have to work later.’
‘Lemon tea would be lovely,’ Lana said, pulling up the chair between them and trying to keep the grin across her face under some semblance of control.
‘
Lovely?
Now, isn’t that so English and so pretty?’ Fabian asked. ‘You’re probably related to Kate Middleton, right?’
Lana laughed: ‘I don’t think so!’
‘OK, so let’s call the waitress over and order you a tall lemon tea, then you can tell us all about London,’ Parker said, ‘which we love by the way and want to move to like tomorrow …’
‘Really? But New York is better, so way better,’ Lana promised.
‘But this is how it is,’ Parker said, turning his lively eyes on her: ‘you’ve lived in London, you know London, so you love New York. We know New York, so we want something new and we can’t wait to move to London.’
‘In London, right now, it may be May but it is cold and rainy,’ Lana warned. ‘No one is sitting outside sipping at lemon teas, believe me.’
‘Right, but in New York we have the coldest winter you can imagine for six months of the year,’ Fabian countered.