Mhairi McFarlane 3-Book Collection: You Had Me at Hello, Here’s Looking at You and It’s Not Me, It’s You. Mhairi McFarlane

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       33

      Natalie Shale’s house is a bay-fronted pre-war redbrick semi, the sort that Manchester suburbs specialise in. I press the doorbell and hear a tinny tune bouncing off the walls inside. I stamp my feet and wonder if neighbours are watching from behind their nets. Natalie opens the door and I’m struck again by how exquisite she is, even in her daytime-mum attire of vest top and jogging bottoms.

      ‘Rachel?’ she asks, warily, as if there has been a procession of fraudulent Rachel Woodfords at her door this morning. I get a vision of Gretton in a dark wig, hairy legs sticking out under a too tight pencil skirt. Urgh …

      ‘That’s me, Simon arranged this …? Thank you so much for offering us the interview.’

      ‘Yes, course, come on in.’

      I follow her to the lounge, lower myself on to the sofa and get my notepad out, noticing Natalie already has a Dictaphone on the coffee table.

      She notices me eyeing it and asks: ‘You don’t want to record it too?’

      ‘No, I prefer shorthand. I don’t trust tape recorders.’

      ‘Oh.’ She glances at the device in confusion, as if it might bite her. ‘Simon said I should record it, sorry.’

      Why doesn’t that surprise me?

      ‘Sure,’ I say, and Natalie looks grateful there’s not going to be a confrontation.

      ‘The photographer’s coming at two,’ I remind her. ‘Is that OK?’

      ‘Yeah,’ she smiles. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll have changed by then. Tea?’

      ‘Thanks. White, no sugar.’

      While the kettle boils windily, I look around Natalie’s living room and make some mental notes for ‘colour’ in the article. I could make actual notes, but it feels impolite to be jotting things down about her house while she’s dunking the Tetley’s. There are photographs of her daughters on almost every available surface. I might be tempted to show off if I’d pushed out children as attractive as her twins. The most recent pictures show them in hers‘n’hers OshKosh dungarees, their hair pulled into cloud-like afro bunches. In most of the photos they’re giggling, open-mouthed, revealing little goofy milk teeth pegs. A huge football pitch-sized frame over the mantelpiece shows Natalie with the girls, in a formation as if they’re sitting in an invisible canoe, hands on each other’s shoulders.

      It’s the sort of barefoot everyone-in-Levi’s studio portrait that strives so hard to portray a happy family that it somehow only reminds me of dysfunctional American ones where the strange bumfluff-chinned twitchy son eventually herds everyone into the garage and picks them off with a shotgun.

      The television is on at a low murmur, showing some kind of heavily studio-lit, imported US soap. The atmosphere is one of contentment and calm. You’d never guess the trauma the people living here have been through.

      ‘Hope it’s not too weak,’ Natalie says, returning with a cup. ‘Lucas always says I like mine like Horlicks – baby tea, he calls it.’

      As she passes it to me I see it has ‘World’s Best Dad’ on it. I wonder if she noticed this, or if she was merely concentrating on making the tea.

      ‘It’s fine,’ I say, sipping it. I’ve had many dodgy cups of tea while out on jobs – cracked mug, the smell of stale milk, poorly washed-up vessel handed over by kindly host with failing eyesight, usually accompanied by spectacularly bendy biscuits – and I’ve made a point of finishing them all. I’m rarely imposing on them because they’ve had good news, after all.

      ‘Your little girls are so cute,’ I say, pointing at a picture.

      ‘Thank you,’ Natalie says. ‘They’re at nursery, it’d be bedlam otherwise. Do you have kids?’

      ‘No.’ In case statement of the blunt fact makes me sound like I’m passing judgement on her having kids, I add apologetically: ‘Sure I’ll get round to it.’