The Two of Us Read online

  ‘That was his first and last glass. Had about three sips.’

  Phil smiles, nods.

  ‘How’s Craig?’ I ask, and maybe there is a little edge, a little snide on the question.

  Phil hesitates a second before answering. ‘He’s fine,’ he says. ‘We’re . . . good, you know.’

  I nod and smile.

  ‘Nothing happens,’ Phil says. ‘Not really, not . . . not often.’ He puts a finger to the corner of his eye.

  ‘Don’t you start crying,’ I tell him. ‘Had plenty of that for one night.’

  Phil starts crying.

  ‘Does El know?’

  Phil nods, shakes his head, shrugs. ‘I don’t know, Fisher. We . . . Craig stays over sometimes.’ This sets Phil off on a full-on, shoulder-shaking, head-in-hands crying jag – he goes from nothing to sobbing in a single second, then after half a minute of histrionics, he somehow pulls himself together at about the same speed. It’s exhausting to witness. Phil takes a deep breath, swallows the last of El’s whisky and refills both of our glasses. ‘El sleeping in that . . . fucking cot,’ he says, ‘and me and Craig in the next room. It’s so . . . I’m a fucking mess. It’s a fucking mess.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I tell him. ‘You’re allowed to be happy.’

  ‘Easier said than done,’ Phil says.

  ‘How long have you been seeing him?’

  ‘On and off since November.’

  ‘Going well?’

  ‘Yes. I think so, I mean . . . yes,’ Phil allows himself a smile. ‘He’s good to me, makes me feel . . .’ Phil shrugs and dabs his tears with a handkerchief. He glances at El. ‘And then there’s my baby boy here.’

  I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything.

  Phil is crying again. ‘It’s like the worst thing and the best thing happening at the same time, and I . . . God, I sound so selfish.’

  ‘El would be happy for you, you know.’

  ‘I wish I could be.’

  ‘Give it a try,’ I tell him, and the triteness of it embarrasses me to the point where I feel myself blush. ‘I mean, he’ll act up, shout, call you names, throw things . . .’

  Phil laughs. ‘At least he can’t throw things very far, hey?’

  ‘There is that. But you should – you should tell him.’

  Phil nods. ‘I know.’

  ‘So,’ I say. ‘After your birthday?’

  ‘July, August, maybe. In about six months.’

  ‘Best make them a fucking good six months, then.’

  I empty my glass and immediately refill it.

  Phil swallows the last of his. ‘Pass the bottle.’

  Chapter 27

  Three times in two months.

  Twice in one day.

  I am a sex god, a bedroom legend, a mattress master. Oh, yes and make no mistake, I am a non-stop love machine.

  This year is a leap year, and today is the last day in February – the 29th, if you please. It’s Ivy’s turn to read the baby book, which is a good thing because I’m too fuzzed-out and soft around the edges on my post-coital comedown. On my post-day comedown, for that matter. At thirty-one weeks our babies are at least as long as a stick of celery. Which may not sound particularly impressive, but at thirty-one weeks Ivy looks like she is full term, and it’s the limit of my reach to wrap my arm around her waist and pull her against me as we lie on our sides making love. At thirty-one weeks, the twins can hear us singing, talking, laughing, they can feel my hands on their mother’s stomach. They can – although the book doesn’t mention this explicitly – hear Ivy saying, ‘That’s it . . . like that, yes, yes, oh my God yes,’ and so on. It doesn’t do to think about it too deeply.

  The babies’ lungs have secreted a surfactant that will enable them to breathe independently outside of the womb. Their cheeks are chubby, their bottoms are soft and plump. Ivy’s uterus undergoes involuntary Braxton Hicks contractions – practice contractions for the real thing just six weeks away. There is less space than ever inside Ivy’s womb, but even so the babies will make noticeable movements around ten times a day.

  As I lie beside Ivy, still tingling with the afterglow of our lovemaking, drifting in and out of that surreal pre-sleep state, my hand rests at the top of Ivy’s bump and (always the more active of the two) baby Danny, or Danni if it’s a girl, kicks against my hand. Turvy is still without a proper name, but Owen is on the shortlist for a boy and Juliet, my mother’s name, is the front-runner for a girl.

  ‘Did you have a nice honeymoon?’ Ivy asks.

  I nuzzle my face into the side of Ivy’s neck and nibble at the soft flesh. ‘Is it over already?’ I ask.

  Ivy strokes the top of my head and it sends a shiver across my skull, and down my nape and spine.

  This morning Ivy brought me breakfast (toast and coffee) in bed.

  ‘Do you know what day it is?’ she asked.

  ‘Friday?’

  ‘The . . .’

  ‘I don’t know . . . is it pinch punch first of the month?’ I say, pinching then punching Ivy on the bicep.

  ‘Ouch! No,’ she slaps my hand. ‘It’s the 29th of February, doofus.’

  ‘Leap year,’ I say, sitting up suddenly and very nearly spilling a full mug of coffee all over myself.

  ‘Yes,’ Ivy puts her hand on top of mine, ‘and before you get excited, I’m not proposing.’

  I lower myself back into my pillows. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Want to know what the best thing is about getting married?’

  ‘The presents?’

  Ivy shakes her head. ‘The honeymoon.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Botswana, Tongabezi, Uganda, Mozambique, Madagascar.’

  ‘What?’

  Ivy shrugs apologetically. ‘He was a banker.’

  ‘You said it.’

  ‘Anyway,’ says Ivy, and she leans in and kisses me very delicately, her tongue brushing against my lips, ‘we’re going to the zoo.’

  ‘The zoo? Today?’

  Ivy nods. ‘Remember when we met in the café, the day I told you about . . .’ and she places a hand on her belly. ‘You said we should go to the zoo?’

  I smile at the memory; me clumsily trying to stave off what I thought was an imminent dumping.

  Ivy kisses me again. ‘Happy honeymoon, baby.’

  I pick up the tray of coffee and toast, place it gently on the floor and then help Ivy remove her T-shirt.

  After the gorillas and tigers, the giraffes, penguins, lions, zebras, long-snouted seahorses and ice creams in the freezing cold, Ivy took me to a Michelin-starred restaurant. And after the vichyssoise of asparagus and the pressed-duck-liver pâté; the caramelized halibut, heirloom tomatoes and slow-cooked rump of lamb; the Valrhona chocolate hotpot with confit orange and poppy-seed sorbet; the Muscadet, cappuccino and hand-rolled truffles, after all of that Ivy put me in a taxi, brought me home and made love to me for the second time in one day.

  And there is not one single thing, animal, ingredient, nuance or whispered word that could have made this day any more perfect. My face is still pressed into that place where her neck joins her body and my face seems to fit so well. I lick a trail up to the tip of her chin, kiss her mouth, take her bottom lip between my teeth.

  ‘Are you serious?’ asks Ivy, me still biting her lip.

  ‘You only get one honeymoon,’ I tell her.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ she says, removing my hand from her thigh. ‘But this was definitely in my top two.’

  The First Monday Reading Circle is seven people around, and the youngest person after Ivy is probably Agnes, who I have pegged in the low-to-mid sixties. At the other end of the loop is Cora, surely well into her eighties and who seems permanently bewildered to the extent that I’m surprised she can even hold a novel the right way up. Today they are assembled in our living room, eating biscuits and discussing a chap I’ve never heard of called Paul Auster. Listening to the racket coming through the walls, it sounds like a bunch of angry men arguin
g about football, rather than a group of pensioners discussing fiction; and it’s making it remarkably difficult to concentrate on the task in hand.

  I’m kneeling in the centre of a fairy-tale forest, staring at an inaccurate map and feeling more than a little lost. The recently cleared spare bedroom (my chair and TV have been granted admission to the living room, Cocktopussy has been disposed of and everything else is wrapped in polythene and wedged into the tiny loft space) is now a nursery. The walls are painted blue and green and adorned with vinyl transfers of trees, birds, squirrels, a castle, a knight, a princess and a dragon that, if you ask me, is a touch too scary for a baby’s bedroom. In the middle of this make-believe wilderness, I am surrounded by screws and bolts of various sizes, nubs of dowelling and assorted pieces of wood that, according to the instructions, are a mere ten steps away from becoming a cot. And when I’ve assembled this one there is another, still in its box, propped up against the radiator. The race is on to see if I can make sense of four pages of Ikea instructions before the pensioners (and Ivy) dissect four hundred pages of contemporary American literature. At thirty-two years old I have of course ‘done flat-pack’ before, with modest, if imperfect, success; but the stakes are so much higher now. Panel A is virtually indistinguishable from Panel B, and neither looks very much like its diagram, so I check again, because this construction will be holding babies, not books, and there is zero margin for error.

  There is a knock on the other side of the forest door.

  ‘Hello?’ says a gentle, plummy voice.

  ‘Come in.’

  Jim, the only male member of the First Monday Reading Circle, is somewhere in his mid-sixties and married to Agnes. His bald head appears around the door jamb. ‘Golly,’ he says, taking in the scattered components. ‘Looks complicated.’

  ‘Just a little,’ I say, holding up the useless instructions.

  Jim’s arm snakes around the doorway. ‘Thought you might need refreshing,’ he says, presenting a large glass of wine.

  ‘Jim, you’re a legend. A knight in shining armour, in fact. Come in, please.’

  Jim steps into the room and tiptoes with surprising nimbleness around the strewn pieces of my flat-pack cot.

  ‘Cheers,’ he says, passing me the wine then clinking his glass against mine.

  ‘I’d invite you to sit down,’ I say, gesturing apologetically at the absence of any furniture. ‘But . . .’

  Jim waves this away and sits cross-legged on the carpet beside me. ‘Dim problem, as they say in Wales. Aggy makes me do yoga three times a week; I can manage a few minutes on my bottom.’

  ‘You Welsh?’ I ask.

  Jim shakes his head. ‘The in-laws were, so you pick up the odd phrase.’ He laughs. ‘Well, I had to; they didn’t speak a word of English the first three times I met them. Or rather, they chose not to.’

  ‘Odd.’

  ‘I think they were rather suspicious of my intentions towards their daughter,’ he says, waggling his bushy eyebrows in what is probably meant to be a lascivious fashion. ‘Being a parent does funny things to you,’ he says. ‘You’ll discover that for yourself soon enough.’

  ‘You have kids?’ I ask.

  Jim holds up three fingers. ‘All girls,’ he says, beaming.

  ‘Delores, Florence and Myfanwy – all grown up now, all mummies in their own right.’

  ‘Wow.’

  Jim nods. ‘Most wonderful thing in the world, being a daddy, but . . .’ and he clicks his fingers in the air ‘. . . it goes fast,’ he says. ‘Very, very fast.’

  Jim picks up a piece of dowelling and rolls it between his fingers.

  ‘Any words of wisdom?’

  Jim laughs again. ‘You’re asking the wrong chap,’ he says. ‘I don’t know, just . . . just enjoy it. Do the best you can and don’t be too hard on yourself when you get it wrong.’

  ‘I’m sure I will. Get it wrong, I mean.’

  Jim puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘You’ll be fine. I mean, yes, you’ll get it wrong, but you’ll be fine. Ivy is a wonderful girl, wonderful, wonderful girl.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, she is.’

  ‘You know,’ Jim says, setting his glass down carefully, ‘I always rather enjoyed a bit of flat-pack. Need a hand?’

  I nod at the wall, in the direction of the chatter coming from the book club. ‘Aren’t you meant to be . . .?’

  Jim shrugs. ‘I didn’t care much for the book, to be honest. Skimmed most of it.’ He winks, holding a finger to his lips in an arch gesture of conspiracy.

  I pass the assembly instructions to him. ‘Please, be my guest.’

  Jim ignores the instructions and instead dives straight in, sliding the piece of dowel into what I hope is the correct hole.

  ‘Have you been in the book club long?’ I ask.

  ‘Must be more than ten years,’ he says, selecting a screw and attaching a leg to what might be Panel B. ‘Funny thing is, I’m not really much of a reader.’

  ‘So why join a book club?’

  ‘It’s what you do, isn’t it. For each other, I mean. Aggy liked the idea but was too shy to go on her own. So I went along for moral support more than anything else.’ Jim hunts through the various pieces of pine until he finds the one he wants. ‘I was only going to attend the first one or two, to get her started, but the girls had left home, and . . .’ Jim balances a piece of cot between his feet, holding it in place with his knees ‘. . . pass me that leg, would you. It’s just a nice thing to do together. The book’s the least part of it, if I’m honest. For me, anyway . . . that screw, there, if you will . . . thank you. Going somewhere on the bus, meeting friends, having a glass of wine.’

  ‘Is that a hint?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  I hold up my wine glass, which is now empty.

  Jim grins mischievously. ‘Don’t mind if I do, young man. Do not mind if I do.’

  By the time Jim leaves, my new friend has assembled two cots, two mobiles, two baby bouncers and drunk (an indulgent, admonishing look from Agnes for her husband, and a smack on the bottom for me) the best part of a bottle of wine.

  ‘Just remember,’ he says, the words coming a little more thickly now, ‘it goes like that . . .’ and once again, he clicks his fingers in the air. ‘Enjoy every moment.’

  ‘And change your share of nappies,’ says Agnes. ‘Honestly, James, you’ll be up half the night now.’

  ‘Blame this one,’ says Ivy, putting her arm around my shoulders. ‘He’s a bad influence.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Agnes, and she kisses me on the cheek before steering Jim out of the door.

  ‘How about Agnes?’ I ask.

  ‘How about her?’

  ‘As a name, I mean.’

  ‘You’re drunker than I thought,’ Ivy says. ‘Ouch! Easy . . .’

  I have three fingers inserted deep into her vagina. ‘Sorry. Want me to take a finger out?’

  ‘No, just . . . slow it down a little.’

  ‘How’s that? Better?’

  Ivy winces. ‘A little.’

  Depending on which website you get your information from, approximately one in three women will suffer a vaginal tear during childbirth. Which isn’t surprising when you consider the dimensions of the various elements – try pulling a sock over your head, for example; just make sure it’s a sock you don’t mind destroying. These rips and tears tend to happen in the no-man’s land between anus and vagina – the perineum. One way to protect against this kind of trauma is to pre-stretch the perineum beforehand. Long live romance.

  ‘Poppy?’

  ‘My neighbours had a dog called— Jesus!’

  ‘Maybe I should stop?’

  Ivy shakes her head. ‘Did you cut your nails?’

  I nod. ‘So, your neighbours . . . they had a dog called Jesus?’

  ‘Little yappy thing,’ says Ivy, grimacing. ‘And a cat called Satan.’

  ‘You sure you’re okay?’

  ‘Just keep going.’

  With my fingers hoo
ked into Ivy’s vagina, I stretch the flesh outward, rotating my hand at the wrist the way a potter might open the neck of a vase. Ivy screws her eyes tight and takes a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘Rose?’ I try.

  ‘Whatever,’ says Ivy.

  ‘You don’t like Rose?’

  ‘Seriously, you can call it Cinderfuckingrella if they can get it out without ripping me in half.’

  ‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I quite like Cinderfuckingrella; it’s . . . I dunno, classic.’

  ‘Romantic?’

  ‘Romantic!’ I say clicking the fingers on my free hand. ‘Cinderfuckingrella. And if it’s a boy, we can call it Rumplebastardstiltskin.’

  ‘Perfect,’ says Ivy. ‘We cracked it!’

  I rotate my hand anticlockwise and back again. There is nothing remotely pleasant, pretty or sexy about it. Nevertheless, it does cross my mind that whilst I’m here, whilst we have this intimate contact, we might as well . . .

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ says Ivy.

  ‘What! Think about what?’

  ‘It’s written all over your bloody face,’ she says. ‘And just to be clear, you’ve got more chance of seeing Cinderfuckingrella on a birth certificate than having a wriggle tonight.’

  ‘So tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ll think ab— Bastard!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Sod this,’ says Ivy, scooching her bum backwards so that my fingers snap out of her with a wet pop. ‘Whatever happens, happens. It’s going to be bad enough on the night without going through this now. Sod it.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘Cup of tea?’

  Ivy nods. ‘And don’t forget to wash your hands.’

  Chapter 28

  Coconut.

  Pineapple.

  Butternut squash . . .

  Chapter 29

  If there’s a day I dislike more than Christmas, it’s Mother’s Day. And the entire four weeks leading up to it, with every other shop window and TV advert reminding me that my own mother is no longer with me. Maybe that’s why I went so overboard on Ivy.

  When we woke on Saturday morning, I informed Ivy that it was exactly nineteen days to our due date. To celebrate, we ate our toast and drank our coffee in the fairy-tale forest. The nursery is now complete: two cots, two mobiles, two Moses baskets, two baby bouncers plus a small sofa bed for bottle-feeds and bedtime stories. There is barely space on the ground for a teddy bear, and my feet rested against one of the cots while we sat on the sofa and ate our breakfast in the quiet of the small anticipant room. In the afternoon we bought flowers and a card for Ivy’s mother. And while Ivy took an afternoon nap, I bought flowers, a card, chocolates, wine and two balloons for Ivy from baby DannyorDanni and baby Julietorsomethingelseifitsaboy. I stowed the goods in the Volvo’s vast boot and went for a long run through the Common. I went to sleep imagining the look of joy, gratitude and unvarnished love on Ivy’s face when I surprised her with my Mother’s Day bonanza.