No Place For a Man Read online

  Matt watched his fellow drivers hurtling along the busy road, cutting in where they could, overtaking pointlessly just to be slowed at the next junction. Too many looked miserable, too many were gabbling anxiously into silly little phones, making sure they kept in contact, convincing themselves they were essential. That had been him yesterday, this morning even, before The Meeting, before, as had been euphemistically stated, ‘Options’ (which were no such thing) had been ‘Put’. Now he knew better. Those who were hired could always be fired. The truly tricky bit was going to be telling Jess.

  The boy was out by the railway again. It was the third time she’d seen him this week. Natasha wiped the tears away quickly and stared out of the window. She knew he couldn’t see as much of her as she could see of him, but she still didn’t want to look like some snivelly little kid. He might have super-vision, might be able to see the spot that was building itself up like a disgusting pus-filled volcano just under the skin above her left eyebrow. Even as she knew she was thinking the ridiculous, she flicked her hair about so fronds hung down over where she was sure the spot was pushing its way to the surface.

  From her window the boy looked more than interesting: for one thing he shouldn’t be where he was, down there on the rail side of the fence. It was dangerous, there were notices up everywhere about keeping off. He looked mysterious, unsettled. He wasn’t really doing anything, he never was, he was just being there, mooching about as if he was deciding something that really mattered but was going to take his time over it. He must have walked along from the level crossing up by the main road, past the allotments where her grandad dug his vegetables most days. There was nowhere else you could get through on to the embankment, unless he’d come through someone else’s garden and found a gap in the fence. She didn’t think it would be his own garden he’d walked through. She didn’t exactly know all the neighbours, nobody did – even the parents just said hello and not much else unless it was Christmas – but she hadn’t seen him around before this week and no-one had done any house-moving. He wasn’t wearing anything like a school uniform: even up at Briar’s Lane Comp you weren’t allowed to wear jeans with holey knees. Natasha ducked behind her curtain as he looked towards her window. She wondered if he’d actually seen her and hoped he hadn’t. If he ever did look right at her, she wanted to be ready. If she put her light on he could hardly miss seeing her now that it was getting dusk, but with the remains of the tears, and the spot …

  ‘Tasha! Supper’s ready!’ Zoe’s voice bellowed up the stairs. Natasha was hungry, she realized, though she minded Zoe breaking the spell. She liked it being just her and the railway boy. They shared, if it was possible, their solitude. They were both alone, both lonely, both, she was sure, with stuff on their minds. She could have stayed and watched him, made a point to her mother that principles were more important than mere food. The problem was that they weren’t. She was ravenous. She switched off the light and wondered if the boy had noticed. Perhaps he was looking at her window and hoping she’d be there again tomorrow.

  ‘So, Olly got off all right?’ Matt didn’t go in for hello-and-how-was-the-day, he just walked in through the door and launched straight in as if he’d nipped out of the kitchen five minutes ago to fetch something. It was a trick that tended to wrong-foot visitors who would wonder if they’d missed an earlier entrance, or if they were invisible or if Matt just hadn’t had the kind of mother who believed in teaching basic manners at a more formative age. Jess used to find it endearing, this eagerness to get on with conversation and bypass time-wasting pleasantries. Way back, in younger and more passionate times, he’d stride into the house and enquire loudly if she fancied a quickie without bothering to check if there was some stranger peering into the cellar to read a meter or Angie from across the road guzzling coffee in the kitchen. Just now, Jess was adding basil to a salad and wondering whether Natasha had stopped sulking yet. Matt reached over and picked a piece of lettuce out of the bowl.

  ‘Fine. He just … sort of fled; in fact it wasn’t very flattering, he could hardly wait.’

  ‘No big farewells then?’ Matt kissed the back of her neck. She caught a hint of Scotch, along with the warm smoky musk of pubs. ‘You should have sent him off to the airport by himself on the bus. If you don’t get the full-scale “Gonna miss you, Mom” scene, then what’s the point of going with them?’ He chuckled in a private-joke sort of way. Jess frowned. He was going to miss Oliver just as much as she was, he didn’t need to pretend to be beyond that … what? girly? stuff.

  ‘Have you been to the pub?’ she asked. Matt was leaning against the sink, very much in her way, and looking strangely pleased with himself. He was a tall, broad man who enjoyed the fact that people assumed he was younger than his forty-eight years. He’d taken off his tie. Jess could see it trailing from his jacket pocket, crammed in roughly the way a schoolboy embarrassed about his uniform would. As she watched, he took off the jacket and hurled it at the back door.

  ‘What was that for?’ she asked, mystified. ‘It’s fallen on the cat’s bowl!’

  He shrugged and laughed and went to sit at the table, ignoring the crumpled jacket ‘Who cares? I don’t intend ever to wear a suit again.’ He reached across the table, pulled the opened bottle of wine towards him and poured himself a glass. Pausing suddenly, he looked anxious for a moment. ‘You won’t bury me in one, will you, Jess? People tend to, I’ve heard. Promise you won’t?’

  She laughed. ‘Of course I won’t! You can wear the full Manchester United strip if you want. What’s all this about? You’re being very peculiar.’

  ‘It would have to be the away strip, I suppose. Going to meet God is hardly a home fixture,’ he mused, then admitted, ‘yes I have had a drink. I dropped in at the Leo for a quick sharpener just now.’

  ‘So you left work early then.’ He could have had a drink at home, with me, Jess thought. He could have used a bit of imagination, worked out that she’d like a bit of sympathetic company on the day their eldest child took off for Australia for several months. It was surely an important end to something, a start to a new stage.

  ‘You could have …’ she began, then stopped. No point nagging. It only made her sound like a control freak. ‘So why no suits? Has the firm gone in for a dress-down policy? You’ll have to spend a fortune at Paul Smith to get the look right.’

  ‘No. I’m just not going back.’

  ‘Not going back where, Dad?’ Natasha breezed into the kitchen and joined her father at the table. ‘What’s for supper?’ she asked, leaning back on her chair and looking as if she was expecting full-scale waitress service, an attitude guaranteed to get Jess steaming mad.

  ‘Nothing if you don’t get the plates out of the oven,’ Jess snapped. Matt topped up his wine glass and poured one for her, though rather, she noticed, as an afterthought.

  ‘Not going back to work?’ she asked him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why aren’t you?’ Zoe, catching up quickly, joined them in the kitchen.

  Matt surveyed his audience, whose attention he certainly had, and smiled. ‘Because I’ve been made redundant, that’s why. I have cleared my desk, brought home the metaphorical spider plant and I’m out of there. For good.’

  Jess stared at him as if gazing on a stranger. Matt had worked at Cranbourne Communications for twenty-two years. Public relations, editorial advising and journalists’ jollies were part of his identity. His was the face that had launched a thousand press parties for everyone from political apologists to minor royalty and TV moguls with excuses to sell.

  ‘Why? What have you done?’ Natasha’s face was full of excitement, as if her dad was a schoolboy caught smoking dope behind the gym and heading for expulsion.

  ‘Nothing. I’ve been downsized. Down-and-out-sized. It’s that simple. The computer revolution has finally kicked in so less of us are needed. That and the fact that younger people are cheaper, of course.’

  Jess bent down to take the jacket potatoes out of the oven. Her hands w
ere shaking. She wished he’d told her earlier, come home and taken her out (to the Leo maybe …) so there would be just the two of them discussing this, talking through it, getting themselves past the shock stage. Instead she felt he’d cheated more than a bit, picked his moment when she was occupied, diddling about with domestic stuff and her concentration was divided. The girls were there too, as he’d known they would be. Did they really need to be for this?

  ‘Will we have to leave our school and go to Briar’s Lane?’ Natasha’s eyes sparkled at the prospect. Jess waited with interest for the answer. Tucked away inside it was what they all wanted to know: the ‘what the hell do we live on?’ question.

  To Jess’s fury, Matt laughed. ‘No. I get paid full whack for six months, then it’s final goodbye with a lump sum, a good one, and on with the rest of life. We could come out of it quids in.’ He reached out and patted Jess on the behind. She twitched away out of reach as he went on, talking to Natasha and Zoe, ‘And your famous mother’s working, so everything’s fine.’

  ‘Fine? What’s so bloody fine?’ Jess slammed the dish of potatoes down on the table. ‘You’ll only be “quids in” as you put it if you get another job pretty damn fast. What the hell are you going to do, where are you going to find another job like that one at your age?’

  There, it was out. The A-word. Jess knew the score even if Matt didn’t; the world was full of redundant men of his age – Jesus, there were even three here in the Grove – refugees from comfortable careers in midlife like stodgy complacent wives discarded for racy younger models. Matt could end up like Wandering Wilf who paced the south-west London streets all day, pretending he had a deep sense of purpose and telling anyone who asked that he was writing a whole novel in his head.

  ‘I don’t want another job “like that one” as you put it,’ Matt said quietly as he reached across towards the steaming chicken casserole. ‘Don’t spoil it, Jess. This is the best day of my life.’

  Two

  … Tidying a teenager’s room is like archaeology: over the years the chaos forms time-capsule layers beneath a crust of abandoned school work. At the top lie lager cans, surf magazines, long-lost videos and ticket stubs from recent gigs. Dig a little further (preferably in stout gloves) and you unearth an early Gameboy, a wheel-less skateboard and …

  Jess stopped typing and stared out of the window. The lupins by the front garden wall had the first signs of the blight that afflicted them every year. Someone had suggested it might be to do with living under the Heathrow flight path, it being a kind of unquestioned local assumption that excess fuel was jettisoned freely as the planes came in to land, though no-one had yet come up with a good explanation as to why this should affect only lupins. Surely they couldn’t be the only kerosene-sensitive plants? If you took notice of the frantic headlines in the local paper, things fell off, or out of, planes fairly constantly. Frozen sewage had crashed through the windows of a primary school, a poor dead stowaway had once plummeted onto a building site and a bit of a wing (luckily, for the passengers, not a crucial bit) had demolished a greenhouse on the allotments. Eddy-up-the-road walked with his face permanently pointed at the sky so as not to miss the inevitable mid-air collision (and potentially profitable I-saw-it-happen statements to the press) that he was sure was imminent. Whatever was falling now, the lupins’ leaves were starting to go that sad greyish colour. Soon they’d wilt and struggle, the flowers would be stunted and contorted and huge fat bugs would seize the vulnerable moment and move in for the kill. Jess wondered why she persevered with them. She should give up on the bloody things, she knew as she stared out at them; plant delphiniums instead and ring-fence them with slug pellets. Her father couldn’t understand why she didn’t turn over every bit of earth for organic vegetables but she was sticking with the lupins: she couldn’t decide if it was simply because she was a hopeless optimist that she trailed home with a box full of them every spring from the garden centre, or because she was too stubborn to give in and admit defeat.

  Across the road Angie, in her sleek baby-blue Ellesse tracksuit, hauled her DKNY gym bag out of her Discovery and unlocked her front door. Jess felt guilty; it should have been one of her own days for tone-and-groan (as Matt so sweetly put it) but she’d felt too vulnerable to face one of those jacuzzi tell-all sessions that she and Angie would inevitably have. Angie, divorced and with children boarding somewhere near Oxford, liked to think she was sensitive to her friends’ inner tensions. She had time for them, she said, and enough of life’s harsh experiences under her belt (and below her belt, rumour had it) to be both worldly-wise and impartial. She would persuade, with a light touch to the hand and an almost whispered, ‘Come on, you know you can tell me’ and it would all be out. The least Jess felt she should do was discuss Matt’s redundancy with him before she confided in anyone else. From the collective household attitude so far, she was the only one who considered it something of a disaster. The girls seemed to think it was almost as thrilling as a large-scale lottery win. As he’d become more and more euphoric and expansive over dinner they’d ceremoniously recruited him as an honorary Idle Teenager in temporary replacement for Oliver and suggested he pop down to Tesco for a shelf-stacking job on the late shift. Matt had actually looked as if he might give it some serious thought. She could anticipate Oliver’s e-mailed response when she got round to telling him: it would be ‘Choice, cool’.

  Jess read over what she’d written – a few hundred words of lightweight rambling on the delights of sorting the absent Oliver’s bedroom, along with a hint of the poignancy of nest-flying. Five hundred or so words to go. There would be letters from readers after this one: some would tell her sad tales of teenagers who’d left at fifteen and never come back, others would tell her off for clearing up after someone who was legally a grown-up. One or two would rail about the pampering of boys and how mothers like her did not do their sons’ future partners any favours by collecting up mould-encrusted coffee cups and giving them a wash. Only she would know that she hadn’t actually had time to make a start on the room at all yet but, with the deadline only hours away, was making up her column as she went along; this was, after all, the entertainment end of journalism: you had to be part actor, part novelist, part sit-down comic.

  Upstairs, as if to make up for the lack of Oliver’s idle oversleeping presence, Matthew was huddled under the duvet snoring away the effects of too much of last night’s red wine.

  ‘No reason not to,’ he’d said as he’d opened a second bottle. Natasha had smirked. ‘What about your liver?’ she’d said, saving Jess the trouble of mentioning it herself.

  ‘Hey Tash, it’s not every day you get your life back,’ he’d replied, waving his glass around with cheery expansiveness and looking generally as if he’d discovered Santa was real.

  Had the job really been that bad? Jess wondered now. Matt had never seemed unhappy, certainly never said he was, but then again it was something she couldn’t recall that she’d actually asked him. You didn’t watch someone come home from the same job every day for twenty-two years and expect to find new, fascinating things to say about it. Matthew only talked about work when there was something amusing to report. Occasionally he had mentioned tricky clients: the Oscar nominee who’d demanded a large-scale press briefing and then refused to discuss her film role but had plenty to say on veganism, or the clothes designer who’d assumed that public relations was something to do with Matthew procuring under-age boys for him. Out at parties or dinners, Matt didn’t go into detail about his work. When asked he’d say he was in PR, in the kind of voice that made it sound too boring for further questions. He’d neatly deflect any remaining curiosity by asking what the questioner did and then feign staggering fascination with whatever reply he got, whether it was accountancy, greengrocery or painting the scarlet noses on garden gnomes. Whatever his previous reticence, it would certainly have to be talked about now, along with the big question – What Next?

  According to the clock in the top corner of Jess’
s i-Book it was coming up to eleven and there was still no sign that he intended to get up. Monica, coming in to clean, had been lied to and been asked to tiptoe around as Matt ‘had a migraine’. Monica had given her a raised-eyebrow ‘oh really?’ look and Jess had felt a vague shame about not telling her the truth – after all, everyone would know soon enough that it would be for a hell of a lot more than just one day that Matt would be off work. But then there was the thought that Monica, the next morning, would be cleaning (and chatting) down the road at Clarissa Hamilton’s. Jess needed a few more days to get used to the idea, work out some way of deciding Matt’s jobless state wasn’t so world-shattering, before she could fend off neighbourly nosiness disguised as sympathy.

  Jess read yet again the first couple of paragraphs of her piece and tried to put herself back into the necessary light-hearted mood that identified her style. This was where the acting aspect came in, thinking herself into character before she could get on with the performance. … And under the bed, half a plate of spaghetti bolognese, crusted over like lava on a long-dormant volcano …

  There wasn’t really a plate of food under Oliver’s bed, anything left over and edible would have gone straight into Donald the cat, but it was the kind of detail the readers liked. Domestically, she had to come across as just that tiny bit more of a slattern than was strictly acceptable, give an impression of colourful barely-coping muddle. As in a TV sitcom, her children had to be just that bit more of a trial, though likeable if you dug deep enough, and her husband …

  ‘God my head!’ Matt’s body slumped down onto the sofa. He was wearing his ancient navy blue towelling robe that had been pulled into long thready loops by Donald in his fond-kitten days.

  ‘That wine must have been full of dodgy chemicals. I won’t be buying any of that again.’ He ran his hands through his fair hair. It stayed sticking up, making him look like a scruffy schoolboy from a bygone age. Jess smiled at him, just managing to stop herself from pointing out that without his income there wouldn’t be much more in the way of wine-buying.