The Mum Who Got Her Life Back. Fiona Gibson

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СКАЧАТЬ next, that I wouldn’t see her for six weeks as she was off to some Pagan drumming thing on a remote island. When we broke up, she egged my car. ‘What a waste of eggs,’ Lori chuckled as we sluiced the windscreen down.

      For a brief period, I succumbed to my mate Fergus’s nagging that Tinder was the way forward. It wasn’t just for young people looking for casual hook-ups, he insisted. ‘Old fuckers like us use it too now,’ he enthused. Although I met a couple of perfectly lovely women, it felt terribly random, and I couldn’t be doing with all that swiping business. I know everyone meets online these days – Elaine’s had a couple of relationships that started this way – but it wasn’t for me. I started to think that perhaps nothing was for me.

      But now, as the evening rolls on, I wonder if this was what I was holding out for: just a lovely, normal night in a pub with a gorgeous, sparky woman.

      ‘What about your kids’ dad?’ I ask, having given her a brief summary of the Elaine business.

      ‘We get along fine,’ she replies. ‘Even the break-up wasn’t that traumatic, not really. It was my decision, finally, but he didn’t fight it. Danny said he almost felt cheated that no clothes had been torn up, no prawns stuffed in curtain poles, not a single incident of screaming.’

      I smile. ‘So, you’ve divorced now?’

      ‘Oh, we weren’t married. But we were as good as, of course. The kids were eleven when we split …’

      ‘And their dad really was okay about it?’ I ask.

      ‘It seemed like it at the time,’ she replies. ‘I mean, he started dating fairly soon, and he met his current partner a year or so after we broke up. They’re still together – very happy, by all accounts. But maybe …’ She shrugs. ‘Later on, Danny told me he’d been devastated. I said, “Really? I didn’t think you minded that much.” And he said, “You make it sound like you just put an old armchair out for the council collection men.”’

      I can’t help laughing at that.

      ‘Have you heard of Danny Raven?’ she asks.

      ‘Yes, of course …’

      ‘Well, that’s him.’

      ‘Really?’ For some reason, this feels like a punch to the gut. Her ex is Danny Raven, fêted film-maker, for Christ’s sake. So why’s she spending her Christmas Eve in the pub with the manager of a—

      ‘Jack?’ Her voice cuts into my thoughts.

      ‘Yes?’

      The smile seemed to illuminate her face as she leans more closely towards me. ‘It’s very, very over between him and me. We get along fine, and we raise our kids together. But I am most definitively on my own now. I mean, there’s no one …’ She pauses. It feels as if my heart has stopped. Even closer she comes, her beautiful face before me now. As she kisses me lightly on the lips, I feel as if I might topple off my chair.

      We pull apart and look at each other. Somehow, our hands have entwined under the table. There’s so much I want to say to her, I hardly know where to begin. ‘I’d really like to see you again,’ is all I can manage, ‘if that’s all right with you.’

      Nadia nods. ‘I’d really like to see you too. But, um, there is something …’

      Oh, shit – here it comes: the ‘but’.

      ‘Uh-huh?’ I say, feigning nonchalance.

      ‘There’s, er … a thing I need to tell you.’

      I inhale deeply, various possibilities already forming in my mind: she’s in love with someone. Or something’s wrong – maybe she has an illness? Or an issue with her kids? – and she doesn’t want to get involved with anyone right now. Fine, it’s been a lovely evening; but maybe I really should get home, seeing as I still have a pile of presents to wrap for my parents, my brother and sister-in-law …

      ‘What is it?’ I ask lightly, draining my glass.

      She looks down. ‘I have to tell you … I don’t actually work in Lush.’

      ‘What?’

      She reddens and nods with a closed-lipped smile. I’m baffled now; so why did she spend twenty minutes chatting to me about bath bombs? ‘I’m so sorry,’ I murmur, shaking my head. ‘I just assumed …’

      ‘Yes, of course you did.’ She is laughing now.

      ‘But I accosted you and asked you all those questions about skin stuff! Why didn’t you just tell me to leave you alone?’

      ‘Because I didn’t want you to leave me alone.’

      ‘But what must you have thought?’ I laugh, mortified by my mistake.

      ‘You didn’t accost me,’ she insists. ‘Look – it’s me who should be apologising …’

      ‘Why?’ I am genuinely bewildered.

      ‘Well, I, er …’ She looks down at her hands, and then, as her gaze meets mine, something seems to somersault in the pit of my stomach. ‘I let you think I worked there,’ she says, smiling. ‘Actually, I sort of pretended …’

      ‘You pretended? Why?’

      She pauses and pushes back that wayward strand of hair. ‘Because,’ she says simply, ‘I just wanted to talk to you.’

       Chapter Eight

       Four months later

       Nadia

      Molly once explained to me how a microwave works, how its radio waves ‘excite’ the atoms in food, causing them to jiggle about in a frenzy, making everything hot. I feel this way whenever I’m with Jack, even several months in – not hot in a menopausal sweat kind of way, but sort of shimmery and super-charged.

      At certain times my setting switches to FULL POWER: e.g. during sex. To think, I’d almost forgotten what the point of it was, apart from making babies. Like knowing who’s number one in the charts, I’d begun to assume it belonged to a previous era of my life; something I could get along without quite contentedly.

      The full-power thing kicks in even whenever Jack just happens to stroll nakedly across my bedroom. I should be used to him now, as we have been seeing each other regularly since Molly and Alfie headed back to uni after the Christmas break. But I wonder if the novelty aspect will ever wear off, as I still want to shout, ‘There’s a beautiful naked man wandering casually across my bedroom!’ And I want to take a quick snap of his luscious rear view with my phone and beam it onto a huge building. Yep, I want to objectify him, plus lots of other things, because the truth is – although he’d deny this to the hilt – he has a lovely body. It’s not intimidatingly buff, and that’s a plus, in my book, as I’ve always found the idea of a six-pack disconcerting (especially as, size-wise, СКАЧАТЬ