Where Have All the Boys Gone?(73)

“Out of hand, how?”

“Well, there seem to be a lot of people coming.”

“How many?”

Harry said something which sounded like it might have been “five hundred” but couldn’t have been.

“How many?”

“Five hundred.”

“Five HUNDRED?”

“It all went a bit nuts after the telly thing,” Harry mumbled.

“Looks like it! Who the hell is organising that?”

“Well, me, obviously, and Aunt Senga’s taken over the catering . . .”

“Christ.”

“Then it all started getting a bit crazy with all these women coming, so all the chaps in the Mermaid started adding things and now we’re doing, like, competitions, and slave auctions and things . . .”

“Slave auctions and things . . .” repeated Katie.

“Huh, yes.”

“Oh Christ,” said Katie. “If I could get the time off, I’d almost want to come. I imagine that would be worth seeing.”

Then she wondered how much Iain would make in a slave auction, and that made her sad and a little bit nostalgic, so she tried to think about something else.

“Well, that’s why we need you to come.”

“Oh no you don’t. You just want someone to put the blame on. Then you’ll probably contrive to call me a whore again and it will not end happily.”

“That’s not true,” protested Harry. “People are always asking after you. And there’s been some . . . ehm, some nice pieces in the paper.”

Katie’s heart, despite herself, leaped a little. “Well, that’s . . . but no, definitely not. What else are you up to, anyway?”

“I’m just about to walk Francis.”

“What’s the weather like?”

“Um, bit of a fresh wind blowing. Quite stiff. We’re going to head out for the cliffs, just as soon as I can wake him up.”

Katie thought how nice it would be to feel a fresh wind blowing right at that moment. Even just standing up to answer the phone had made her sweat.

“Well, good luck with it and let me know how it goes. You remember I told you about my sister?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she’s going to have the baby a lot sooner than we thought. And she’s come back from India to have it. And she’s staying here. And, um, there’s no one to look after her but me.” This came out in a bit of a rush.

“What about your mum?” asked Harry.

“We don’t want to upset her,” said Katie. “She’s . . . she’s a little nervous.”

“Nonsense!” said Harry. “That’s what mums are for. Honestly, you should really use her. Get her in to babysit and come and see us. Soon.”

“Thanks,” said Katie. “But it’s not really practical. Nice to hear from you, though.”

And she meant it. It felt like a little bit of fresh air in her world. And whenever she thought about it over the next few days, she felt a little fresher inside too.

ALCOHOLIC MILKSHAKES CAME to an abrupt end a week later, after the fifth schoolchild collapsed in the street and the papers started going for their guts, and the pressure really came off at the office. That meant early days and heavy, sleepless nights spent hanging around the flat.

Katie had called their mother, who sounded so nervous and put off by the whole thing that she’d almost washed her hands of her—her mum kept asking stupid questions, like whether Clara was getting married, and where was she going to have the baby, in a way that made it quite clear that, whilst mildly interested, she had absolutely no intention of getting involved more than she absolutely had to. Harry might complain about not having a mother, thought Katie uncharitably, but having one that was more interested in the price of carrots in Blackburn than her first grandchild was no picnic either.

Clara, meanwhile, had become fretful and clingy, constantly asking Katie where her maternity bag was and whether or not all this was going to hurt. Neither of them, though, touched on where the baby was going to live when it was born. At the moment, Katie’s money was on her sock drawer.

Katie couldn’t be bothered going out either. It was too hot, buses and Tubes had become instruments of torturous death by stinkification, and every bit of outside space was taken up with really young people drinking Smirnoff Ice, shrieking and having millions and millions of chums. Half of Katie’s chums had had babies and moved to Brighton, which was almost the same as if they’d all just died. The rest couldn’t be rounded up at the same time and required three weeks’ notice to plan a social event in the diary, something Katie simply couldn’t be arsed with at the moment. How people simply managed to drift together for a night out was completely beyond her. So, she and Clara stayed in, the two of them watching television and drinking iced water, and both, secretly, fretting.

“RIGHT,” SAID LOUISE, crashing through the door with her own key. She looked around the front room. It was covered in pizza boxes, empty ice-cube trays, and grass, a craving Clara was pretending to have to annoy Katie.

“You,” she pointed at Katie. “You’re coming with me. For a drink. Somewhere nice, that doesn’t smell of cardboard and pepperoni.”

“What about me?” asked Clara who, eight months gone, now looked like one of the M&M men.