Just got real, p.15
Just Got Real, page 15
‘No prob,’ Saffy says, without hesitation. ‘Let’s speak tomorrow, once Mary’s called one of us.’ She reaches over and gives Joni a hug. ‘Feel better.’
Joni’s phone rings as she’s walking up Finchley Road. Saffy headed off in the opposite direction, to pick up a few things on St John’s Wood High Street. It’s Ant. On FaceTime. She’s been avoiding him for a couple of days, but she needs to keep up the pretence that everything is normal. She smooths down her hair, holds the phone up and answers.
‘Hey.’
‘Hi, gorgeous. Oh, where are you?’
‘Getting my steps in. Are you at work?’
‘Just on my way to a meeting at Ken Church Street.’ She can only see his face, not what he’s wearing. She thinks about all the times he’s turned up at her place, suit on, clean shirt in his bag. She can’t imagine he’s changing washers and cleaning hair out of the traps under the showers in his Tom Ford. He must change before he leaves the spa and then again when he gets there in the morning. Do his colleagues see him arrive dressed for an office job? Did he learn to cook just so he could transition from expensive nights out to cheap nights in while looking like the perfect boyfriend? She knows from personal experience how tiring deception is – remembering she’s Lucy, her daughter is Dani, that she works in data processing – but the idea of fighting that war on a triple front is mind-blowing.
‘I hate that I’m not seeing you till tomorrow,’ he says. ‘It’s just, having the kids …’ He’d told her that Amelia and Jack are staying with him for a few days while Camille has to pop over to France to visit her mum. Joni had been relieved. The less time she had to spend with him the better until they work out what to do about Mary’s money.
‘Are you doing anything special?’
‘I just want to enjoy staying in and hanging out with them,’ he says. Father of the Year. Boyfriend of the Century. ‘A bit of normal family life, you know. I miss having them live with me.’
It’s so tempting to say ‘I know you’re seeing Mary,’ but she manages to restrain herself. She has no idea at this point if Ant even has children. She doesn’t care. Actually, that’s not true. For their sake she hopes not. She doesn’t want to imagine them as pawns in whatever game Ant is playing. Either way, he definitely doesn’t have them staying with him tonight. She wonders whose photos he might have been showing her, the cute red-headed girl and the boisterous blond boy. A niece and nephew? Is there a website where you can buy candid snaps of strangers so you can pretend they’re your family?
‘Well, have fun,’ she says, crossing at the lights. She doesn’t say what she really wants to add, which is ‘While you still can.’
Because she’s pretty sure that, for Ant, the game’s up.
24
She can hardly concentrate waiting for Mary to call. She has to add up a column of figures four times to reach the same total twice. Yesterday she’d ended up sleeping on the sofa all afternoon – to Jasper’s delight. She’d only got up to eat – heating up frozen Itsu dumplings and ramen because she couldn’t be bothered to prepare anything from scratch – and to have a bath and change into her pyjamas. She had missed her gym session and she was angry with herself about that. She’d let life get in the way. She’d spent a while noting down all the extra sets she needed to add in to her sessions on Saturday and Sunday to make up for the lost time.
When she had arrived at work this morning she’d found a circle of Viking warriors – Ragnar and Lagertha among them – on the desk, surrounding her embracing squirrels, swords raised, and she’d actually laughed out loud. She took a photo and sent it to Imo and then, in an effort to appear as if everything were normal, to Ant. Really it was a way of testing the waters while she waited for Mary. To see if he’d got wind of what she was up to. Thankfully Mary had never told him about her phone call. ‘I think I was in denial,’ she’d said when Joni had asked her. ‘I was hoping it would all go away.’ Ant had returned her text immediately with a laughing face and Lucas 1 Lucy 0, so she was pretty confident Mary hadn’t told him about her and Saffy’s visit either.
In the end she gives in and plays Minesweeper on her computer to distract herself, angling the screen away from the glass wall. Anything to make the time pass. She’s on her fourth game when it’s interrupted by Imo’s voice shouting ‘Answer the phone, Mum!’, the ringtone that Imo had recorded before she left home, and Joni has no idea how to change. Mary.
‘Hi. Are you OK?’ She closes the door. ‘What happened?’
‘I’m fine,’ Mary says. It sounds as if she’s in the garden again and Joni can picture her there among the flowers, the birds singing their hearts out to be heard over the distant traffic. ‘Sorry I didn’t try you earlier, I had to go—’
‘Did you ask him for it back?’ Joni interrupts and then feels rude. ‘Sorry. Go on. What were you going to say?’
‘Nothing. Yes. I told him one of my sons needed the money urgently. That something had happened – I was vague, but I made out it was basically a matter of life and death. I said I couldn’t access any more cash because that’s more or less what he said to me, so I thought two can play at that game …’
Joni paces. She always walks round her office when she’s on the phone. It helps her think. ‘And?’
‘He said there was nothing he could do at the moment. That as soon as the house was sold he’d pay me back as promised. He kept apologizing and saying he couldn’t believe he’d got me in this mess, but, of course, I didn’t believe a word of it. I even asked if he had any shares he could cash in but he said his accounts are all frozen till the divorce is finalized. Could that be true?’
‘Maybe. If they’re locked into some kind of court battle. I don’t know. It seems unlikely. Me and Ian just divided everything in two. And anyway, he told me his divorce has gone through. All they had left to do was sell the house and split the profits. But obviously we don’t know if that’s true either.’
Mary sighs. ‘Well, it doesn’t look as if he’s intending to repay me any time soon. I feel like such a fool.’
‘We’ll think of something. Are you sure you don’t want to tell the police? I mean, I know he’d just say it was a present, but it might make him think …’
‘No. I couldn’t cope if it got out. I can’t believe I’ve been this stupid, but if my family knew … well, I just couldn’t …’
‘I understand,’ Joni says, imagining herself trying to explain something similar to Imo. She actually can’t. It would be too humiliating. Even worse if she was nearly fifteen years older like Mary, and Ant’s senior. She thinks about those stories you read in the paper where a seventy-year-old woman has married a twenty-five-year-old man she met on holiday and is protesting that she believes it’s real love even when it’s obvious to everyone reading – and presumably her own grown-up kids and even the grandchildren – that he’s taking her for a ride. Not that it’s inconceivable that Ant and Mary would make a believable couple. Not at all. But she knows how the world sees things. Mary would be perceived as the silly, gullible menopausal victim. The butt of jokes. Joni can see it would be unbearable. ‘I’m going to fill Saffy in, are you OK with that?’
‘Yes, do,’ Mary says so quietly Joni almost doesn’t hear.
‘Don’t beat yourself up.’ She says goodbye and then carries on pacing round her office. She doesn’t feel as if she can settle to anything. She’s so preoccupied with Ant. She sits back at her desk, stands up again and dials Saffy’s number.
‘I’m in John Lewis,’ Saffy says when she answers. ‘Shall I come and meet you for lunch?’
Joni hesitates. She likes to eat lunch at her desk, her door shut, her chair facing the window overlooking the square. Her back a metaphorical ‘Do not disturb’ sign for anyone approaching her office. She brings it in with her – a carefully balanced meal of avocado and salad sandwich on seed-laden granary bread. A bag of protein crisps. A bottle of blended juice. It never varies much beyond the ingredients of the salad or the type of fruit and veg that make up the juice. She knows it’s healthy, it’s what her body needs, so who cares if it’s not that exciting?
‘I’m literally two minutes away from you. We could go to the Langham.’
Her lunchbox is waiting, stacked up in the fridge in the kitchen with the other four that are always there, the milk that’s usually a day or so past its best, a couple of old yoghurts and half a bottle of wine that’s been open since last Christmas.
‘OK. But make it By Chloe. I only get an hour. I don’t have time to faff around with posh service.’ She doesn’t know why she suggests it. It’s the only place she can think of off the top of her head, but she hasn’t set foot in there for months. Eighteen to be precise. More, actually. Meg, newly vegan, had been obsessed with it, trekking over at least once a week and salivating over the burgers and fries.
‘And it’s healthy!’ she would exclaim, stuffing in mac and cheese with fake bacon.
‘It’s definitely not,’ Joni remembers saying. ‘The calories must be insane.’ She wishes she’d kept quiet now. Just let Meg work it out for herself. Or not. Whatever made her happy.
‘Fine. Ten minutes?’ Joni looks at her watch. It’s twenty to one. Usually she waits till one, but only because that’s a rule she sets for herself – if she takes her break any earlier the afternoons feel interminably long – and they stand more chance of getting a table if they go earlier. ‘See you there.’
As it happens the café is already heaving, so she waits for Saffy outside and then they order a takeaway – quinoa salad for Joni, pasta with avocado and pesto for Saffy – and walk up Portland Place trying to find a bench. Saffy, dressed in her combat trousers, her big purple trainers and a slightly cropped vest top, looks like an escapee from the Spice Girls, Joni thinks. Sweary Spice. In contrast she’s in her safe work clothes – a pale pink Orla Kiely skirt patterned with daisies, and a fine knit off-white short-sleeve top. Flat sandals. Nice, but hardly a masterclass in self-expression. She has a variation of the same for all seasons. A-line skirts, fitted tops, sensible but attractive footwear. Thick tights in winter. Thin cardigans in spring and autumn. A uniform.
Saffy has talked nineteen to the dozen since she spotted Joni waiting for her outside the café. Joni’s not quite sure what about – what she’s been looking for in John Lewis, she thinks. It’s like an assault. After a quiet morning processing figures in her office it’s too much all at once and it takes her a few minutes to adjust, tune in, pick the words out of the noise. She lets it wash over her like a foreign language, the odd phrase standing out here and there – ‘four-seater’ and ‘modular’ – which leads her to believe Saffy might have been shopping for a sofa. She spots a bench on a quiet side street and points to it.
‘Right,’ Saffy says when they get there, as if adhering to some tacit agreement that business talk wouldn’t begin until they sat down. ‘What did she say? I’ve been on edge all morning.’
Joni hears a growl coming from Saffy’s bag. ‘Is Tyson in there?’
Saffy fishes him out. Places him on her lap. ‘The cleaner was off sick this morning and I didn’t want to leave him on his own.’
‘What were you going to do if there’d been a table free?’
‘Oh, he’d have been quiet. He’s a good boy, aren’t you? No one would even have known.’ Tyson looks up at her, his tongue lolling from his mouth. She plants a kiss on his head and he rumbles with another growl. ‘So, tell me.’
Joni fills her in as succinctly as she can, trying to fend off interruptions.
‘So, he has no fucking intention of ever paying her back, let’s face it.’ Saffy shoves a plastic forkful of pasta into her mouth and then picks up a few pieces in her fingers and offers them to Tyson, who snaps them from her like the world’s smallest toothless crocodile. ‘Good boy.’
‘No, I don’t think so. I mean, you’d offer to sell it straightaway if you didn’t have the money, wouldn’t you?’
‘If you were an even vaguely decent human being, then yes. How did she sound?’
‘Sad. Resigned.’
‘Not angry?’
Joni thinks for a second. ‘No. Not yet.’
‘She should be. I’d be fucking fuming.’
‘You and me both.’ Joni has been trying all morning to imagine what she would have done. In her head she can see herself shouting at Ant, telling him she knows what he’s doing, that he needs to get the money back to her or else. In reality she wonders if that’s really how she would react. It’s easy to be brave in your own imagination. Saffy, she’s pretty sure, would have marched him to the bank right then and there whether it was open or not, dragged the manager out of bed if she had to. ‘I wonder when he’ll try and cash in with me. I imagine that’s the point.’
‘I would think so. I can’t wait to hear what it is he needs next. A yacht? A plane?’ Saffy puts the last remains of her lunch on her lap and Tyson dives in face first. ‘We can’t let Mary let him off just because she feels embarrassed or she doesn’t want her kids to find out. He can’t just walk away with fifty grand.’
‘I know.’
‘He knows she lost her husband, for God’s sake. I mean, how low can you stoop?’
Joni turns to look at her. ‘You’re a big softy under there somewhere, aren’t you?’
‘No,’ Saffy says, stuffing her now empty carton into the paper carrier bag along with her cutlery. ‘I just don’t like people taking advantage, that’s all.’
‘Even if we could get him to sign the car over to her that’d be something,’ Joni says, still working on her salad. Tyson eyes it greedily. Joni gives him a stare that she hopes says ‘Don’t even think about it.’
‘We need to find out more about him,’ Saffy says. ‘The truth about who he really is. He must have an Achilles heel.’
Joni nods. ‘Everyone has something. We just have to find out what it is.’
25
Joni feels as if she’s back where she started, hanging around outside Evoke in Notting Hill, only this time with Saffy in tow. The only things they know for certain about Ant are his name, his gym and where he works. They need to start somewhere. They’re sitting inside the café across the road, watching from the window in the hope of seeing him leave for the day. Joni is pretty sure that he finishes at around six because it seems to be no problem for him to get to hers before seven, but they still got here at ten to five, just in case. Hopefully today he’ll be prompt, because the waitress has already warned them she’s shutting up shop any moment, and Joni doesn’t want to risk him spotting her out on the street. She claimed an emergency dentist’s appointment at four forty-five and left work at a quarter past four, something she has never done before. Not even for a genuine reason. She always arranges anything extra-curricular for her days off. And then she’d felt she had to act the part, so she put on a sad face and winced as she told Shona where she was going. ‘Oh God, poor you,’ Shona had said with genuine sympathy that made Joni’s guilt even worse. ‘You do look as if your face is a bit swollen.’
This morning the collectibles were back. This time the elephant was being held hostage by Jabba, Jar Jar and Baby Yoda. Some kind of uniformed space warrior held his plastic gun to its head. Joni put them all away and then went on to Amazon and ordered a pink and white unicorn and a kitten with a ball of wool. Two could play at that game. She looked around for a note detailing whatever Lucas didn’t get round to yesterday and found nothing.
She and Saffy have tried looking Ant up on 192, the electoral roll site, but Anthony Simons, London, throws up hundreds of searches including countless A. Simons who could just as well be Angela as Anthony. They need to narrow down the area he lives in if nothing else. They have to assume that everything he’s told them about himself, beyond those three facts, is a lie.
Saffy grabs her arm, points with the other hand. There he is in his gym gear, striding down the street. ‘Go on,’ Joni says. They’d weighed up following him, but it seemed too fraught with pitfalls unless he simply strolled round the corner to his home. What if he got into a car or taxi? Or wasn’t going home at all? They know he’s not heading to Mary’s – he’s told her the story about having the kids staying for a week, but with completely different days that stretch across the weekend – but that doesn’t mean he’s not on his way somewhere else.
‘He must need a night off though,’ Saffy had argued. ‘I mean, you’d be knackered, wouldn’t you? Juggling two women and with another waiting in the wings. All that shagging. Do him and Mary shag, do you think?’ Her own rescheduled first meeting with him has yet to be confirmed, but they’ve speculated as to whether he’ll start to back away from Mary, now she’s had the temerity to ask for her money back, and invest more energy into seeing what he can get from Joni and subsequently, presumably, Saffy herself. ‘A fucking broken nose,’ all five foot not much of Saffy had said. ‘A knee in the balls.’ Joni didn’t doubt it for a second.
Now Saffy crams her ponytail-attached baseball cap on to her head and strolls across to the entrance to Evoke while Joni pays for their drinks. Joni watches as she pushes the door open and goes in. She’s not entirely sure about leaving the task to Saffy, who she can imagine veering wildly off script, but they couldn’t risk Ant doubling back and finding her, Joni aka Lucy, there checking up on him. She paces as she waits, watching the corner just in case.
After a couple of minutes the door opens and Saffy stomps out clutching a handful of sample-size bottles of something or other. ‘Here,’ she says, thrusting three of them at Joni.
‘Did they give you those?’ Joni asks, wondering if Saffy even managed to ask what she was supposed to.
‘It said help yourself. They probably didn’t mean to six but …’
Joni stuffs the samples into her bag. ‘So …?’
