She stared at him from the other side of the bed, not trusting him and wondering what line she was being spun.
‘I mean, I’ll wear a condom if you want me to. Of course I will. But you don’t have to worry about getting pregnant.’
He wasn’t going to promise to pull out before he came, was he? Yeah, right. And the cheque’s in the post.
‘I’ve had the cut,’ Rory said.
‘What?’
‘The snip, the cut, the operation. You know. A vasectomy.’
For some reason she knew he was telling the truth. There was just something about the way he hung his head, smiling ruefully, saying the words that she knew he must have rehearsed.
‘I had it just before my marriage broke up. My wife and I – well, things were bad. We were both getting older. We knew we didn’t want any more children. So I had it done. And then she got pregnant by her tennis coach.’ The rueful smile. ‘So it was perfect timing, really.’
‘Did it hurt?’
‘A bit like getting your balls caught in a nutcracker.’
‘Okay. We don’t need to talk about it any more. Come here.’
It was strange at first – the feeling of a man coming inside her, and knowing she didn’t have to worry. Cat had spent so many years trying to avoid getting pregnant, enduring the various indignities of coil, cap, condom, pill and pulling out, that it was a load off her mind, and a load off her menstrual cycle, to be able to stop worrying about all of that. Rory was a considerate, experienced lover, and yet not one of those men who absolutely insist on the woman coming first, as though anything else would be awfully bad manners. They even had their own running gag about their contraception arrangements, or lack of them.
‘How do you like your eggs, madam?’ Rory would ask, and Cat would cry, ‘Unfertilised!’
She began to see his inability to have children as another one of the good things in her perfect life. Like the flat with the view of Tower Bridge, and the beat-up little sports car, and her job as manager of Mamma-san, one of the most fashionable restaurants in London, where tables were in such short supply that, when you called the reservation line, they just laughed at you and then hung up.
Unencumbered – that was a word Cat liked.
She was free to lie around all Sunday in her dressing gown, reading the papers, or jump on a plane and go to Prague for the weekend, or stay over at Rory’s place when the mood took her. Unencumbered – and that was just how she wanted it. Because after their mother had walked out, her childhood had been as encumbered as can be. She never wanted to be that tied down, that domesticated, again.
She didn’t want children, and could go for, oh, months, without even thinking about the subject – until someone implied that it was somehow abnormal to want to hold on to a life you loved – and she was too successful, and too fulfilled, to feel as though she was missing anything. Cat didn’t consider herself childless, she considered herself childfree. Big difference.
She wasn’t like those other women. She wasn’t like her sister Jessica. Cat didn’t need a baby to make her life worthwhile, and her world whole.
Where did it come from, that addiction to the idea of motherhood, that need to be needed? Cat knew where it came from – it came from men who didn’t love you enough. Men who left a hole in your life that a woman could only fill with some adorable, eight-pound crying and crapping machine.
So she lay in the dark with Rory sleeping by her side, and she thought to herself, this is perfect, isn’t it? This is a good, unencumbered life. Unencumbered – the most beautiful word in the English language.
Why would anyone ever want anything more?
Paulo and Michael grew up in one of the rougher parts of Essex, their father an engineer at Ford in Dagenham, and their childish dreams were full of cars.
More than half the men in their neighbourhood worked at the plant. Cars were everything here. Cars meant jobs, a wage packet, a glimpse of freedom. Cars were how the boy became a man. A teenager’s first Ford Escort was a rite of passage as momentous as any tribal scar. Yet although the brothers both loved cars, they loved them in very different ways.
Paulo was fetishistically obsessed with V8 engines, camshafts and the life of Enzo Ferrari. Michael’s interest veered more towards what he called ‘pussy magnets’.
Paulo loved cars for themselves. Michael loved them for what they could get you, the sweet illusions they projected, and the dreams they made come true.
Michael liked girls as much as he liked cars. His specialist subject, even when he was a spotty little virgin, sharing a bedroom with his slightly bigger brother, was ‘what drives them wild’.
While Paulo learned about Modena and Le Mans, Michael read top-shelf magazines and absorbed the lessons of ‘shallow fucking’ (‘You don’t put it all the way in – drives them wild, it says so here’) and locating the G-spot (‘Put a moistened finger inside and then move it as if you want someone to come towards you – drives them wild, Paulo, apparently’).
They both covered the walls with pictures of Ferraris, but Michael had Sam Fox sandwiched between the Maranellos and the Spiders. Until one day their devout mother saw her.
‘I’m not having the Whore of-a Babylon in my house,’ she said, pulling down the poster with one hand and deftly cuffing Michael around the ear with the other. She knew it wouldn’t be Paulo putting up Whore of Babylon pictures. ‘Put up our Holy Mother.’
‘No jugglies on the wall, lads,’ their father quietly told them later. ‘They upset your mother.’
And the brothers thought – jugglies? What would their old man know about jugglies?
Their parents had come across from Napoli as small children, landing within a year of each other, although you would never know it. Their father, another Paulo, sounded every inch a working-class Londoner, all glottal stops and talk of West Ham and Romford dogs, while their mother, Maria, had never lost the accent and the attitudes of the old country.
Maria – who was called ‘Ma’ by both her husband and her sons – didn’t drive, never saw a bill and never had a job. ‘My home is my job,’ she said. Yet she was the volatile, undisputed emperor of their little terraced home, giving her sons what she called ‘a clip round the earhole’ as often as she kissed their cheeks with a fierce, moist-eyed passion. The boys couldn’t recall their father ever raising his voice.
As a child, Paulo felt most Italian when he visited the homes of his friends. That’s when he knew his own family was special, not because they attended Mass or because they ate baked ziti or because his parents spoke to each other in a foreign language, but because they resembled the type of family that was dying out in this country.
Some of his friends lived with just their mother, one of them lived with just his father, many were in strange patchwork families, made up of new fathers, half-brothers and stepmothers. His own family was much more simple, and old-fashioned, and he was grateful for that fact. It was the kind of family that Paulo wanted for himself one day.
There were only ten months between the brothers, and many people mistook them for twins. They grew up unusually close, dreaming of going into business together one day – something with cars. Racing them, mending them, selling them. Anything. This was what they had learned from their father and all those long years at Ford. ‘You can’t get rich working for somebody else,’ said the old man, again and again, just before he fell asleep in front of the ten o’clock news.
After leaving school at sixteen, the brothers drove taxis for ten years, Paulo in a black