So charming. Rose often wondered who these alien creatures were and where had they come from. They were so big. They were so loud. They had so much stuff – so many clothes, so much make-up, most of which they were wearing, all at once, layer upon layer of it. And they were so contemptuous. It was a good job she loved them so much, otherwise she might resent being a rather despised and worn part of the furniture – squishy and unkempt and thoroughly sat upon.
‘And how’s Jason?’ asked Sal.
As her daughters had lain on her bed and teased her on her sartorial choices, a great snort had come from the spare room and the girls had hung off each other’s shoulders in peals of sisterly laughter.
Jason was having a catch-up nap and a bloody good snore. He had a varied repertoire; never steady, rhythmic snoring that could be tolerated by a co-sleeping human, but the spluttering, intermittent kind – a frustrating orchestra of misleading lulls and great, trumpeting trumpets. It was snoring that had seen he and Rose resorting to separate rooms, which was not a great situation as, of course, they were already in separate rooms for most of the year anyway, but Rose got such a terrible night’s sleep if she and Jason slept in the same bed, and she needed to be alert, what with the girls and the house . . . and the girls . . . to deal with that it was the only solution. And he slept better without her prodding him or kneeing him in the back or making random clacking noises with her tongue, like she was giddying up a horse, which she’d heard could stop a bear of a man snoring in his tracks.
Disappointingly, she’d heard wrong. They never slept in the same bed because of the Philharmonic Snorechestra . . . Rose had coined that phrase and her daughters, for once, actually thought it quite funny.
‘He’s OK,’ replied Rose. ‘The same. He got back this morning. “Good cop” has returned.’
Jason had arrived home this morning after yet another work trip to Hong Kong – it had been five years of this now; that land reclamation project was taking a really long time. His plane had actually arrived late last night, but sensible Jason never did a Roy Orbison and ‘Drove All Night’ to get home to her, all dishevelled and five o’clock shadow . . . rather he would check into the Novotel at the airport, have a good night’s sleep and a hearty continental buffet breakfast and then cruise on home for a civilised 8 a.m. When he’d stepped into the hall with a weary ‘hello’, she didn’t bother leaving the washing up to come and greet him; he went straight upstairs to sort out his case. It was predictable, non-romantic fare for two pedestrian, rather careworn ships that passed in the night, or rather, the morning. Same old same old.
‘Meaning you’re always bad cop?’ enquired JoJo.
‘Yep!’ said Rose. ‘I’m there at the coal face, in the trenches, doing all the nagging and the telling off. He breezes in now and again, like Prince Charming, to save the day, and to do nice things. They adore him because of it and just tolerate me. I’m so boring compared to him!’
To their girls, Jason’s homecomings were always Prodigal. All three of them had ambushed him on the landing this morning, showering him with kisses and hugs and risking creasing their lovingly ironed (by Mum) cropped tops and leggings. OK, they stopped short of ‘Daddy, my Daddy’ but it was like the bloody Railway Children.
‘Thank God you’re home!’ Darcie had exclaimed. ‘Mum’s been driving us nuts!’
‘And she took my phone away for being cheeky!’
‘And she wouldn’t buy me that new top, for Alex’s party!’
It was the same thing every time. He was someone fresh and exciting, hardly ever seen; she was always there, good old Mum, bad old cop, just part of the furniture to be sat on and abused, day after day, because it didn’t really matter if she was there or not.
‘Does he feel that way too?’ asked Sal. A train sped past them in the other direction, with an elongated toot and a flash of people sleeping or raising plastic coffee cups to their mouths.
‘That I’m boring?’ asked Rose. ‘Probably.’ Jason, she was sure, saw her as part of the furniture too. Not a lover, just that terrible and damning ‘mate’. When had he started calling her that? Five years ago, ten years ago? After Katie was born? When he’d been down the ‘business end’ three times in total, for the birth of his daughters, and had seen quite enough? When he’d witnessed her mooching round in her dressing gown of a morning cooking sausages one too many times? Or because he was away for more than half the year, leaving her and the girls to it, and ‘mate’ was the best she could get, in the current circumstances? She daren’t admit it could be way more than that, not yet.
‘Where’s he been?’ asked Wendy. ‘Hong Kong again?’
‘Always Hong Kong.’
‘He’s a man in demand.’
‘He is. Shame me and the girls are at the back of the queue for supply.’ Rose sighed a big, huffy sigh, and not for the first time. She was sure a lot of people thought she was a single mum, and she wouldn’t blame them. That’s what she was, in effect. ‘Ugh. Enough about me and Jason,’ Rose said, wriggling in her seat and slipping a foot in and out of one shoe, under the table. ‘It’s dull. What’s going on with you, Sal? Are you still dating and dumping?’
‘I like to call it being discerning.’ Sal smiled, as the train clattered heavily down a portion of track and their near-empty rosé miniatures jiggled on the table, threatening to topple over.
Rose smiled. Sal was always meeting people then discarding them. Several men in the last three years had been kicked to the kerb. There was Mr Lovely, who Sal was over the moon to discover had a tragically misspelled tattoo, a tiny etching of ‘They think its all over’, with a devastating missing apostrophe; there was Mr Right with the Wrong Attitude, who made the catastrophic error of opening a door for her and steering her through it as ‘one of the fairer sex’; and other men and other non-negotiable traits – an overly dirty laugh, an inability to pluck nostril hairs, a penchant for Travel Scrabble or owning one horrid jumper too many. Sal looked for faults like a bloodhound and was thrilled to uncover them so she could dispatch the man off into the horizon.
‘The Guy Effect,’ said JoJo sagely. ‘Still rumbling on.’
They all nodded. Sal had been in a ten-year relationship with Guy. On a good day he had been charismatic and charming, on a bad, downright awful. He had a lot wrong with him but Sal loved the man and could never see it. She defended him, she made excuses for him. She said he was a ‘poet and a tortured soul’ (he really wasn’t; he was a merely a frustrated copy editor on a lawnmower magazine); Rose and the others just thought he was a grumpy, argumentative loser.
During one of their epic fights four years ago, Guy had died. There had been a petty argument in the car involving Sal’s map reading and Guy’s refusal to stop and ask a passer-by for directions. The argument had escalated; the car had accelerated, driven by an increasingly angry Guy. He’d failed to see a Give Way sign and had ploughed them into the base of an electricity pylon. Guy had died instantly; Sal miraculously emerged unscathed, physically, at least, and, although grief-stricken over his death, Sal suddenly saw the relationship and its terrible end for what it was. She had been blind to Guy’s faults and that blindness had caused years of pain and, ultimately, tragedy, which was why she looked for them relentlessly in men now. It was a protection: simply, she only dated people she could never fall in love with.
‘Actually,’ said Sal, hesitantly, ‘I’ve slept with someone.’ Her face broke into a broad grin. ‘Someone I really shouldn’t have slept with.’
‘Who?’ asked Rose.
‘When?’ asked JoJo.
‘Why shouldn’t you have slept with him?’ asked Wendy. ‘Did he have the Wrong Shoes or call you a “lady” to your face?’
‘Er, no,’ said Sal, looking quite sheepish, for her. ‘He’s my