The Second Life of Nathan Jones. David Atkinson

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Chapter 8

      Nathan should have been ready for the tears and the bad behaviour from his girls on the day their mother left but how did you prepare for something like that? He didn’t know. His own emotions were raw, which made dealing with his daughters’ feelings even harder.

      Millie withdrew to her room and cut all the hair off two of her Bratz dolls. Chloe demanded to watch a documentary about elephants. Nathan searched all the channels and the various on-demand options, finding programmes about lions, rhinos and even hippos but nothing on elephants. Chloe cried and flung herself to the ground like a two-year-old. Daisy sat and played with her Sylvanian Families, occasionally coming into the kitchen to check that her daddy hadn’t left and to bash him on the head with a large plastic hammer that she’d recently taken a shine to. Then she promptly peed her pants for the first time in nearly a year.

      Thankfully the first day represented the peak of their discontentment; next morning everyone had to attend school or nursery and were too busy to worry about much. Finally, left alone, Nathan sulked for a while, partly about Laura leaving and partly about the ridiculous amount of work he had to do in getting everyone ready and out of the door in time for everything.

      Laura had been right about that – he really hadn’t known what it involved. By the end of the week he’d managed to get into a sort of routine, only interrupted by the evening call that Laura made to speak to the girls. This went reasonably smoothly for the first few weeks, then one Friday Laura announced to Nathan, ‘Next weekend I want to bring the girls down here for a few days.’

      ‘That’s a hassle, Laura. They’ll hardly get there, and they’ll have to turn around and come back.’

      ‘Not really; it’s only an hour on the plane and they’ve got an in-service day at the school on the Monday, so they don’t need to be back until Monday night so that gives me an extra day with them.’

      ‘How—?’

      Laura interrupted him. ‘My mum’s going to bring them down; all you need to do is drop them all at the airport for 3 p.m.’

      ‘You’ve worked it all out, huh?’

      ‘I’m organised, Nathan.’

      ‘You said your flat’s tiny.’

      ‘It is, but we’ll manage as it’s only for three nights.’

      Nathan had detected a hint of regret in Laura’s voice on the phone each evening. Perhaps having the girls over a weekend would be a good thing and she might realise how much she missed both them and him. Well, them, at any rate.

      Nathan hadn’t imagined Laura would completely abandon her kids, but he’d expected her to fly up and down at the weekends, not drag them all down there. So far, she’d only made it home once since leaving, but she said this had been down to having to work extra hard, including weekends, to ‘make her mark’ in the office.

      On the following Friday he dutifully drove everyone, including his mother-in-law, to the airport and waited until the flight took off before heading home to an empty house. He hadn’t made any plans to do anything so when his friend Graham phoned and suggested a beer he readily agreed.

      Nathan arrived at the pub first, but, it only being five minutes from his house, this wasn’t a surprise. He ordered two pints and went to sit at a table near the back where he could see the TV. Some lower-league football match played out for single lonely males who had nothing better to do on a Friday night. Nathan’s local wouldn’t be described as lively; it lacked the thumping dance music and flashing lights of uptown bars. The muted dark atmosphere attracted a certain clientele, older with less testosterone. During the week some of the patrons were local MSPs from the parliament building nearby.

      As it was a Friday most of the MSPs had returned to their constituencies, but Nathan recognised Steven Cowley, a large sweaty man sitting alone at the bar nursing a glass. He’d been all over the news in recent weeks, having been caught having an affair with a young intern. His wife had taken their children and left.

      The affair had been revealed on the Channel 5 breakfast show hosted by ex-celebrity chef Lance Donaldson. The show tended to focus on the more salacious news items and frequently wheeled in those in the public eye who’d become embroiled in some scandal or other, though Lance’s team wasn’t averse to using ordinary members of the public if celebrity scandals were thin on the ground.

      Nathan didn’t usually take much notice of such things, but this stuck in his mind because the intern had been exceptionally pretty, and he couldn’t understand what a young girl saw in such a fat oaf as Cowley. Power must be a powerful aphrodisiac to attract someone like that to him. Well, he’d paid a high price, as the intern had dumped him in the end, unable to cope with the publicity.

      He got pulled from his thoughts by the arrival of Graham, who waved across the bar and made a drinking motion with his hand. Nathan shook his head and pointed at the two drinks already on the table. Graham sat down opposite him.

      ‘How’s things?’

      ‘Oh, fair to crap, I suppose.’

      ‘Laura’s taken them all weekend?’

      ‘Yeah, the flat’s so quiet.’

      ‘I wish Alison would take our two and disappear for the odd weekend.’

      Graham had two children, Jack and Emma, with his partner Alison. They weren’t married, which didn’t appear to be an issue for either of them.

      ‘Yeah, but it’d be different if Alison had left you. You wouldn’t be so keen then.’

      ‘Does that mean you’re going to sit and mope about for three days?’

      ‘I like moping about.’

      ‘It’s not good for you.’

      ‘How would you know? Have you been studying up on the dangers of moping?’

      ‘It’s not healthy; you need to get out and about, do something new.’

      ‘Like what?’

      ‘I don’t know – maybe you should try and find a girlfriend.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘A girlfriend. Laura’s not coming back, you know.’

      ‘How do you know that? You know nothing about it.’

      Graham smiled. ‘I know enough about you two to know you’ve been unhappy for years. One of you had СКАЧАТЬ