You Can’t Fall in Love With Your Ex (Can You?) (25 page)

Zé
appeared from the kitchen with a tray laden with coffee, steaming-hot milk, a
packet of Marlboro Gold and a lighter.

“Breakfast,”
she said. “Black or white?”

“Black,
please,” I said, and she passed me a small cup, intoxicatingly fragrant, thick
with perfect crema.

“You
don’t take sugar?”

“Not
with this.” I smiled and sipped.

Zé
sat opposite me, her feet up on the bench, her knees under her chin. The
sunlight filtered through the leaves of the magnolia tree and cast soft shadows
on her face, still flushed from her run. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke
politely past my shoulder, but I still caught a dizzying whiff of it.

“Are
you sure you won’t have one?” she said.

“Oh,
go on then.”

“God,
I’m such an enabler,” she laughed, then her face became serious again. I
noticed lines of tension running across her smooth brown forehead. “Rick didn’t
come home last night. Again.”

“Oh,
Zé. Was it work? Jonathan sometimes gets stuck in the office all night – or
almost all night.” But he never doesn’t phone, I thought.

“He
wasn’t at work. I know, because I rang the office. His PA said he left at
seven.”

“Was
he out for drinks, maybe?” I said, casting desperately around in my head for
something I could say that would comfort her. “They seem to socialise loads.
Jonathan’s forever having dinners and stuff. He loathes it. Or he says he does,
anyway. Probably Rick does too.”

Zé
laughed again, but it was a different sort of laugh, harsh and mirthless. She
lit another fag and offered me the packet. I hesitated, then took one too. “I
don’t even know what he likes or doesn’t any more, Laura. We just don’t talk. I
don’t know what he thinks or feels about anything. Since I had Juniper, it’s
all just shut down. I do my thing, he does his. Not that I even fucking know
what his thing is. I presume it’s other women. Other men, maybe. He hasn’t
touched me for years.”

“But,
Zé, you’re so beautiful,” I said helplessly. “You’re funny and amazing, how can
he not…”

She
shrugged. “At first I thought it was me having had Juniper. You know – minge
like a wizard’s sleeve, like sticking his cock out of the window and fucking
the night… All that. But I’ve done more pelvic floor exercises than you can
shake a stick at – not that he knows, because we haven’t had sex since before
she was born.”

I
tried not to let my face show how shocked I was. Eight years in a marriage with
no intimacy at all. The idea filled me with horror. I remembered how lovely
Jonathan had been when I had a meltdown after Owen was born, wailing and lamenting
about how I’d lost my figure for good and I’d never be the same again, and he’d
assured me that I was more beautiful than I’d ever been, and he desired me even
more than he had before.

“Have
you talked to him about it?”

“I
tried to, at first. But we just ended up shouting at each other, so I gave up.
I’m lazy, Laura. I’ll put up with a lot for the sake of a quiet life. But this
– being out all night when I’ve got no idea where he is – I don’t think I can
cope with it for much longer. If he’s with someone else, I’ll deal with it.
I’ll ignore it and carry on as normal until it passes. Or until he decides to
leave me, and then I’ll take him to the fucking cleaners. But what if something
happened to him? What if he fell under a train or something and I didn’t know?
That’s what scares me. If Juniper were to lose her father like that… He loves
her, you know. Even though he doesn’t love me any more.”

“Do
you think you might be happier if you left?” I said. “I hate thinking of you
being so miserable, and worrying about him all the time. He doesn’t deserve you.”

She
laughed. “Damn straight he doesn’t. But I have it easy. I don’t mind that
much that I never see him. I get to do my own thing. I have a lovely life, and
more importantly, Juniper does.”

She
lit another fag and stared out across the garden. She looked, suddenly,
unbearably sad.

“But
I worry that I’ll never be in love again,” she said. “Never have sex again,
never have anyone look at me that way, and look back at them, and – you know.
I’m forty-three, Laura. If I wait until Juniper goes to university and then
leave him I’ll be fifty-three. I’ll be ancient. On the scrap heap.”

“You
won’t!” I said. “You never will. You’ll always be amazing. When you’re ready,
there’ll be someone who falls head over heels for you, and you with them.”

“Yeah,
some old codger who can’t get it up without Viagra,” she laughed and did a
little faux shudder. “Not like that lush actor who fancies you.”

I
felt my face turning hot and scarlet under her steady dark gaze.

“Zé…”
I began.

“What?”

“Nothing,”
I said.

“It’s
not nothing, Laura. Come on, what’s the matter?”

I
nicked another of her fags and lit it and, almost against my will, the whole
story came spilling out. How I’d met Felix when I was twenty-one, what had
happened then, how he’d disappeared from my life for all those years and now
come back, bringing with him a torrent of emotions I didn’t want to feel but
had no idea how to stop. How I hadn’t told Jonathan about any of it. How I’d
seen him on my birthday and how I’d felt. That I had no idea at all what I was
going to do next.

“So
there you have it,” I finished miserably. “One massive fuck-up waiting to
happen, and it’s all my fault.”

“Life’s
pants, isn’t it?” Zé said. “The way it chucks curve-balls at us and we’re meant
to find a way of hitting them straight. I can’t tell you what to do. I know
what I’d do. I’d have a wonderful affair with him, make myself happy, then find
a way to walk away before anyone got hurt too badly. But that’s me. I don’t
love my husband. You do.”

“But
you can’t love two people at the same time!” I said. “You can’t. Can you?”

“As
far as I know, there’s no rule against it,” Zé said. “We all love lots of
people; we just love them in different ways. It’s when you love two people the
same way that the problems start.”

I
thought about that for a bit. I didn’t love Felix and Jonathan in the same way
at all – I was certain of it. Even when I’d met Jonathan, in those first heady
days when we were going out and then engaged, I’d felt differently about him from
the way I’d felt about Felix. But that was because I was a different person.
Now, it was as if my twenty-one-year-old self was back in my head and my heart,
bringing with her all the feelings I’d had then.

“I
don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said again.

“Just
be careful, Laura,” Zé said. “Please be careful. I want you to be happy, but
try and be it without causing too much carnage.”

In
spite of myself, I laughed. “Don’t worry. I definitely don’t want to cause
carnage. I just want – I don’t know! I want to make it all unhappen – either
what went wrong with Felix and me in the first place, or meeting him again, or
– something.”

“Well,
we both know you can’t do that,” Zé said. “Take some time to think about stuff,
that’s all. Don’t rush into anything you’ll regret.”

“I
won’t,” I promised. But there was something I hadn’t told her – that when
Jonathan and I went to New York in just a few days’ time, Felix was going to be
there too. And I didn’t know if I’d be able to resist seeing him, or what would
happen if I did.

I
stood up to go, and as I was gathering my things together, Zé’s phone rang.
“Rick,” she said, glancing at the screen.

“Want
me to wait?”

“Don’t
worry. I’ll have it out with him, and speak to you later.” She hugged me
hastily, snatched up her phone and said coldly, “Yes?”

It
would have been horribly intrusive to stay. Zé needed to deal with this on her
own. So I walked back through the house, let myself out and went home, and when
I got there I sent her a text saying how grateful I was for her friendship and
advice, and that I was there any time she wanted to talk about things.

The
contrast between Zé’s serene, immaculate home and our house couldn’t have been
more stark. The kitchen was carnage. Milk all over the floor, Owen’s Marmitey
fingerprints on the cabinets rapidly taking on the adhesive qualities of
superglue, Darcey’s scooter lying where she’d left it in a prime tripping spot
by the door, the lamb chops I’d taken out of the freezer for Jonathan’s and my
dinner looking unpromising in a puddle of pinkish liquid on the worktop.

“Laura,
you are a slattern,” I told myself. Back when I’d been working, we’d had a
cleaner once a fortnight to come in and sort out the worst of it, but now, with
me at home all day, there was no way I could justify it. What did I do all day,
anyway, when the children were at school and nursery, except drink coffee with
Zé, go for walks in the park and daydream? I was meant to be a housewife, but I
was neglecting the poor house.

Reluctantly,
I pulled on a pair of Marigolds and set to work. Cleaning is meant to be
therapeutic, I know, but I’ve never found it to be so. For every job you do,
another seems to appear, like a hydra growing extra heads with each one you
chop off. You clean the kitchen cabinets, then notice the fridge needs doing
too, then once you’ve cleaned the outside you may as well do the inside, then
you realise that the freezer is clogged with ice so decide to defrost it, then
end up with water all over the floor you cleaned earlier. You take the sheets off
the beds and then realise all the spare sets are dirty, and you can’t wash them
until you hang up the wet stuff that’s been festering the machine for days. You
get out the hoover and discover that its bag needs changing, and the old one
bursts when you take it out, scattering six months’ worth of dust and crud
everywhere. You clean the bath and realise the shower head is clogged with
limescale and you’ll have to go out to the shop and buy a load of
industrial-strength chemicals to dissolve it.

I
know, I know – according to Kim and Aggie and their ilk, all you need to turn
the most disgusting hovel into a show home is a tub of bicarb and half a lemon.
Good luck to them – as far as I’m concerned, the more powerful the chemicals,
the less elbow grease is needed on my part.

And
it doesn’t help that inanimate objects seem to have it in for me. The stairgate
that I’ve walked through five seconds before will mysteriously close and trip
me up. The children’s car seats are forever breaking my nails out of sheer spite.
Even the letterbox attacks me with its lethal brass jaws when I try and remove
a stuck pizza menu.

So
my blitz on the house took far longer than I intended. When it was time to
fetch the children, I still hadn’t finished, so I parked them in front of the
telly with microwaved frozen pizza (less frozen than it had been when I’d
started defrosting the fridge, admittedly) and carried on. I gave them their
bath, wondering what the hell the point had been of cleaning the bathroom from
top to bottom when they were only going to flood the floor and scatter toys
everywhere. I read them a shorter story than usual, put them to bed and
returned to my tedious, endless task.

By
the time Jonathan got home, the house was immaculate and sparkling. He found me
folding the last of the bed linen, which had emerged warm and fragrant from the
dryer. I should have been full of Stepford Wifely smugness, but I wasn’t – I’d
found a video on YouTube showing how to fold fitted sheets into perfect
squares, rather than just squashing them into whatever random shape they chose
to take on. But the sheets were refusing to co-operate. However many times I
watched the tutorial, I managed to pick up the corners in the wrong order and
ended up with a misshapen triangle instead.

“Fucking
wanker sheets,” I muttered. “Sort yourselves out, for God’s sake.”

“What
on earth are you doing, Laura?” Jonathan asked. “Glass of wine?”

“Look,”
I said, thrusting my tablet at him. “Just look at this. Martha Stewart says you
should fold your sheets so they’re square, but ours are having none of it. Why
have we got rogue sheets?”

I
took a large gulp from my glass of wine, and watched as Jonathan played the
video, then picked up a sheet and folded it perfectly.

“Have
you been fighting with inanimate objects again?” he said.

In
spite of myself, I laughed. “All bloody day. But how come it worked for you and
it won’t work for me?”

“It’s
not rocket science.” Quickly and deftly, Jonathan folded the rest of the
laundry. “There. But honestly, how much does it contribute to the sum of human
happiness if our sheets are folded into squares? And why are you taking
housekeeping advice from a woman who got chucked in prison for insider trading,
anyway?”

“It’s
not just her,” I said. “You should see what Anthea Turner says about towels.
Apparently you’re not allowed to see the edges.”

“Have
you been drinking, Laura?”

“No!
Well, only now.” I drank some more wine.

“Who
the hell cares if you can see the edges of towels?”

“Anthea
Turner, obviously.”