After Ever After (3 page)

I hold my breath, rise silently from the chair, tip myself and Ella precariously over the cot rails and lower her on to the mattress, feeling the ever increasing threat of a recurrence of my birth-related back injury shoot down my spine. Ella screws up her face and whimpers a little, but then her fist uncurls and her breathing becomes even again. I look at her for a moment, feeling that peculiarly new emotion, that overpowering helpless love that was born the day she was; but then I do tend to love her
even
more when she’s asleep. Crossing my fingers I leap over the nursery threshold with the grace and light footfall of a ballerina. No creaks greet my bare feet as I land. I stand for a second more and listen for movement from the cot. When I hear none I think ‘Oh good, she’s still asleep,’ and ‘Oh God, I hope she’s still breathing,’ at the same time. I resist the urge to make the dangerous return journey to double-check and breathe out a barely audible sigh of relief.

Ella’s wail crescendos like a siren call into the night and even though I can’t see him I just know that Fergus is turning his back on the bedroom door and stuffing his head under the pillow.

‘Okay, darling, I’m coming,’ I say wearily.

Ella and I settle back into the stupid chair and I put her on the breast in direct contravention of the rules given by The Book on page 142 (
NEVER use the breast to comfort or quiet your child
). As her sobs subside into snuffles, Gene Kelly and the other one, the one that might be Princess Leah’s mum, start to tell me they’ve danced the whole night through. Good for them.

Not so long ago the only reason I’d have been up all night would have been the pharmaceutical speed that Dora somehow acquired through some dodgy contact or other. We’d be dancing all night in some club, and then we’d get breakfast in a dingy café on the way home, and then we’d go for a walk down by the River Lee and the ducks would make us paranoid. Even more recently I’d be up all night with Fergus, talking and kissing and making love, yes, really doing it that way, the by-the-book romantic way. Now we’re lucky if we get five minutes before breakfast and even then I’m fairly sure it’s got more to do with his morning hard-on than me. It’s just, what’s the word … perfunctory.

When did all this happen? When did I start on the path that brought me here, hollow-eyed and missing in action? Or rather missing myself in the middle of the action.

Let me think … I’d known Fergus for two months before he asked me to marry him, another three months before the wedding and then, well, Camille forced me to take the pregnancy test the week after we got back from honeymoon and by then I was almost eight weeks gone. Another seven months and a bit for Ella to appear on the scene and she is now six and a bit months old. It has taken me something like eighteen months to come to this.

Under two years to go from city girl to nursing mother, dyed-in-the-wool single chick to married and frumpy. It took me ten seconds to fall in love with Fergus but has taken me eighteen months, a marriage certificate, a mortgage and a baby to reach the first clear-minded thought since the moment I met him.

I don’t really know who he is.

I know he’s not an international crime baron, or a spy, I know he doesn’t have a secret and glamorous life. I know he’s an IT consultant in the City. I know he’s got an Irish grandmother on his father’s side which he sees as justification to describe himself as a Celt and occasionally adopt a faux Irish accent that used to drive me mad when we first met and still does but in an entirely different way. What I mean is, what I think must have happened is that shortly before Ella was born the storm blew itself out of our whirlwind romance and left me dumped like my old friend Dorothy in a strange land where I don’t understand the language. The land of marriage, motherhood and my new home town of Berkhamsted. Smalltown Land. Smalltown Middle-Classville. Landrovertown. You get the picture.

Now Fergus.

I can remember very clearly, the way that women do, the night that I met Fergus. It had been raining like it is tonight, but different rain. Summer rain, light and cooling in the city. The sort of rain that might precede a thunderstorm. I remember every detail the way girls do remember everything about the day they meet their true love.

We’d finished work about an hour earlier, or at least I had – finishing on time in the human resources department of a major record label was difficult, especially with our borderline personality-disorder boss, but Camille made an art of working late, and not because she was dedicated to her work. Camille was still working on a spreadsheet she should have finished hours ago, a routine consequence of her endless office-hours phone calls to her mum, with whom she enjoyed the kind of mother–daughter intimacy that I had only daydreamed about. (
But Mum, do I need two eggs or three? Do I sift the flour? Mum, Mum, what do you think about invisible panty liners? The black ones?
That sort of thing.) Still, I consoled myself when jealousy crept up on me, if my mum were still alive there would be a good chance I wouldn’t make it to parties on time, so there’s always a bright side.

‘Oh God, oh God, wait for me,’ she’d cried as I blotted my lipstick and checked my evening outfit inch by square inch in my make-up mirror. I looked at the back of her head. She was never ready on time. Never in the five years I’d known her.

‘Come on, Camille, if we don’t leave soon all the celebs will be gone!’ Maybe it wasn’t fair to pick on Camille too much. If it hadn’t been for her we’d never have got invites to this latest industry party. Camille knew everyone who counted and everyone who counted was in love with her. From executive producers to post-room boys, Camille had inside tabs on everyone and everything at Starbrite Records.

Which was great, because we only worked as assistants in the human resources department and our brushes with glamour would have been few and far between without her contacts. There was no mystery to how she did it: her hundred-watt smile and ‘it could be you’ eyes swung it every time. Maybe if her fan club knew just how much she loved her boyfriend they wouldn’t have put out quite so much with the freebies and VIP passes, but Camille had an ingenious way of never letting it come up.

‘I know, I know, I’ve just got this one last set of figures to put in and then I’m …’ She caught sight of one of her cornrow plaits over her shoulder. ‘Hey, listen,’ she said, changing her own subject with her usual continuity carefree aplomb, ‘what do you reckon to me going blonde the next time I get a weave done?’

I shook my head at her and shoved her out of her chair. ‘Budge over. I’ll finish this and you get ready.’

She smiled at me gratefully, probably certain that my infamous impatience with tardiness of any kind would force my co-operation eventually and result in me finishing her work for her.

‘Cheers, you’re a doll, but really – blonde, maybe? Like her from Destiny’s Child?’

I gave her a quick appraisal and tried to imagine her with blonde hair instead of the shiny black plaits that framed her oval face now. Camille was a beautiful girl, slim and sexy in a way that belied her couch potato loved-up weekends. She somehow emanated a bronze glow that made her dark skin faintly luminescent, powering the sparkle in her almond-shaped, amber-coloured eyes. I couldn’t see how blonde extensions could improve on that.

‘Maybe something different from plaits, but not blonde. Stick to the natural look, babe,’ I’d said. ‘It suits you.’

‘Natural-ish look. One day my own hair will grow long enough to do something with …’ she said wistfully, and applied the lipgloss that was the only cosmetic she wore, or needed to wear.

Dora had been with us that night; she’d been waiting in the foyer with her dark glasses on and her mac pulled conspicuously around her body like protective armour. Other departing Starbrite Records people raised eyebrows in her direction as they left, probably wondering if she was one of the over-the-hill (over twenty-one) hopefuls that occasionally hung out in the lobby desperate to give an impromptu concert to a passing executive, receptionist, cleaner – whatever. I just put it down to her eccentricity, the same attitude to life that had made her dye her eyebrows blue when we were fifteen and that had made her dye her naturally honey-blonde hair black two weeks before that night.

Things had happened to Dora when she was a child, things that meant she ended up in care, things which made her and me the weirdest two kids at school and instant soulmates, protecting each other from the jibes of the lacy-topped socks girls and their permed perfection. We told only each other about the things that had happened to us, and because of that I understood her perfectly. I never questioned her latest tangent in lifestyle, because that was the kind of person Dora was: a ship sailing close to the wind but always coming back safe to the port of our friendship after every near miss.

All my life I have half pretended that I’m a very intuitive soul, but I don’t remember knowing that by that time Dora was already caught deep in addiction. I think it was partly because it was never like I’d seen it in films, dramatic, horrifying and didactic. She looked well, she held everything together okay, and she earned good money, so I suppose she didn’t need to go robbing old ladies to support her habit, not when heroin was only twenty quid a pop. Can you imagine? I always thought it was so much more expensive than that. Anyway, I tell myself that the change in her was so gradual as to make it almost imperceptible. Honestly, though, there is also the fact that I was too busy waiting to be in love to notice at first. We all drank a lot and we all dabbled sometimes, looking for something else to temporarily occupy that empty space we imagined was allocated for the contentment a relationship would bring.

Then, after Fergus, I was too busy
being
in love to notice, putting my heart and soul into living the dream I had dreamt about so often. After almost thirty years of waiting for my lightning bolt to strike, the delight of romantic electrocution made me miss all the signs of her addiction, largely because I simply didn’t see her quite so much and when I did I was being part of a couple, a kind of benevolent sister letting her indulge in her latest range of oddness. I simply didn’t know about it until she was admitted to hospital. And I feel bad for that. I let Dora down.

Dora was always odd, had been from the first time I’d hung out with her at lunch break at Hackney Downs Primary School and she’d pierced her own ears with a safety pin, a cork and a bottle of TCP, the scent of which was still discernible about her person for the rest of the week. Not
so
weird – teenagers do go a bit mad, you might think – but we were only seven. So Dora in shades and a mac on a summer’s evening wasn’t an unusual thing. To let myself off the hook, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed even if I had been on the ball, all present and correct.

‘Worried you’ll be spotted by the Feds?’ I asked as we exited the lift into the lobby. ‘Or maybe the Mafia is after you again?’ She peered at me over the rim of her cat’s-eyes glasses and pushed her dyed black fringe out of her eyes.

‘You may laugh, but some of us were born to be arrested.’ We did laugh, and Dora strode out into the damp evening air with us, where the last remnants of the summer’s day we’d missed, pinned behind hermetically sealed double glazing, sizzled on the pavements.

This launch wasn’t your usual kind of affair held in whichever was the latest hippest club or music venue. It was to celebrate the sudden, surprise commercial success of one of our singer-songwriters, a guy called Simon Shaw who had been languishing unheard and unplayed almost since he’d been signed and until he was almost due to be dropped. And then some anglophile indie fan in LA had chosen one of his tracks to feature in the latest teen flick and he had become an overnight Stateside success, prompting the instant renewal of his contract and the swift re-release of his back catalogue. Camille had told us that Nick Cavell, the boss of us all and God to many a teenage hopeful, had told her that he expected the fuss to be over as soon as Shaw won an Ivor Novello award, so they wanted to make as much cash as possible right now. It seemed that Simon was unaware of the Machiavellian machinations that turned behind his back, though, as he believed fate had finally delivered him the break he deserved after years and years of paying his dues. Despite this he wanted to ‘keep it real’. So the champagne, the discreetly provided coke, the party-compulsive celebrities, the godlike executives and the likes of us, the hangers-on, were all transferred to a warehouse conversion in the Docklands where an old school friend of Simon’s, an aspiring artist, had managed to put together a show. Simon wanted to spread his good luck around.

It was an impressive space and the art was fairly impressive too: huge canvasses of compelling colour. The artist guy hung around them with his girlfriend, looking on nervously as a scantily clad soap actress eyed one painting, biting her thickly glossed lip and absent-mindedly adjusting her thong. Following our usual routine, the three of us made a beeline for the bar and collected as many free bottles of beer as we could carry before finding a niche that would afford the best view of the proceedings at the top of a wrought-iron spiral staircase with a balcony that overlooked the sequined throng.

‘What does this Simon Shaw geezer look like then?’ Dora asked me as she shed her mac to reveal a very revealing red lace-trimmed dress, the sort of affair you’d see going for £9.99 at Walthamstow market. ‘I might want to sleep with him. I’ve recently realised I’ve never shagged a famous person.’ Dora had never yet been turned down by anyone she had taken a fancy to; it was her instant display of her double-jointed contortions that usually swung it.

‘He’s sort of, well, blondey, mousey, blue-eyesy kind of average, really,’ Camille said. ‘He’s terribly nice, though. We had a lovely chat in the lift the other day.’

Dora and I exchanged an ‘it figures’ look, or at least I think we did; she still had her shades on.

‘Well, I’m off to shag someone fitting that description. I’ll see you chicks later.’ And she headed off into the crowd, leaving me to reflect that the time we spent together at parties and clubs before she went off on her own private missions had dwindled down to almost nothing.