Beneath the Skin(85)
‘It’s OK, Dad.’ Rupert shrugs and picks up his pen. ‘I’m just glad I was here. You know, when you needed me.’
Rupert tries for a smile and reverts to his school work. Charlie stares through the window at the garden, his finger on his lips, thinking.
‘Isn’t it time you went home to your wife?’ Jemima says, kissing the back of Sami’s neck to wake him.
‘She isn’t there,’ Sami replies, sluggish with sleep.
‘Where’s she gone to?’ Jemima asks, her high voice loaded with interest.
Sami doesn’t reply, but drags himself from the single bed and picks up his neatly piled clothes from where he left them a couple of hours previously.
‘So, where’s she gone, your wife?’ Jemima asks again, sitting cross-legged on the bed as she watches him dress.
Sami groans inwardly. Fool. The more he tries not to be one, the more he seems to suit it. ‘Her mum isn’t well,’ he fibs, but he catches a glimmer in Jemima’s eye as he fumbles with the buttons of his shirt.
She lies back and stretches with a satisfied smile on her face. ‘I’ll have to pop by. Didsbury, isn’t it? The townhouses just behind the shops. Might be exciting, making love in your bed.’
‘Oh, she’ll probably be back tomorrow,’ he replies, searching for his socks.
He shakes himself fully awake, he needs to be alert. Like a fool he fell asleep. Like a bloody fool he weakened, weakened because he’s lonely and sad and needs a boost.
Jemima places her long arms around his neck and kisses his lips with her eyes open. They’re smug and proprietorial, he notices. ‘Stay tonight if you like. Or we could go to yours now, make love and travel to work together in the morning.’
Sami’s face feels hot. It’s burning with irritation and with anger. At her, at himself. ‘I have sex with you. I only make love to my wife,’ he wants to yell.
He pulls away and tries for a relaxed smile. Then he looks around to see if he’s left anything. That’s it, he decides. Finito. He doesn’t even like her that much.
He kept his distance at the office, cordial but cool. Until today, until tonight. There were leaving drinks at the office after work for one of the associates. Jemima ignored him completely. She flirted with all the men and with Andy Maher, the handsome office silver fox, in particular, her laugh a high-pitched tinkle.
Of course Sami couldn’t stand the competition. He slowly made his way to her side of the room, asserted his presence and invited himself round to her flat.
Played like a fool, a bloody great fool.
Her finger now strokes the back of his hand as he opens the door to leave. Her nails, he notices, are long and sharp. ‘Night night, Sami. Tomorrow then,’ she says, her slight lisp struggling with the S.
Sami isn’t sure what she means, but he doesn’t like the sound of it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Mike contemplates whether the smell of incense is real or imagined as he gazes at the paintings of the Stations of the Cross hung on the small church walls. He’s taken to popping into the Hidden Gem behind the buzz of King Street at lunchtimes. He can’t quite pin down the reason. It isn’t for prayer, the silence or even the thinking time. The reason, he supposes, is that time seems suspended here.
‘Don’t go,’ Antonia whispered on the night of the funeral. ‘Don’t go.’ Two small words that changed everything.
They talked. Or rather Antonia talked and he gazed and watched and listened. He drank in her eyes and her mouth, the exquisite sculpture of her features, until the early hours.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she murmured, her eyes dark and huge in her soulful face. ‘About the parent thing. Childhood never goes away, does it?’
Antonia’s account of her upbringing was shocking. It wasn’t so much the episodes of her father’s heavy drinking, not even the violence towards her mother that followed, but the hatred and the spite that went with it.
‘He didn’t hit me,’ she said. ‘But I had to watch, to learn my lesson. My mother is black and so she was beaten. He’d ask if I was black too, and I would say, “No, I’m not, of course I’m not, Dad.”’
She cried then. Large tears tumbling from her chestnutcoloured eyes which she didn’t bother to brush away. ‘I did nothing, Mike. Nothing to help her. It’s like I connived. Is that the right word?’
He held her in his arms, her face buried in his shoulder, her hair soft against his face.
‘You were only a child,’ he soothed, his body on fire. With anger. With lust. ‘Not your fault. Just a child.’
Mike shakes his head and looks up at the statue of Our Lady of Manchester with her child. Weeks have passed since the funeral and Olivia is carrying his child. In a few months there will be a new life, a life that has to be protected, nurtured and loved. It’s precisely what he wanted for so long. Yet more than anything now, he needs time to stand still, to work it all out.
‘It has healed. Beautifully,’ he said later, as he stroked Antonia’s arm, feeling other bumps of scar tissue just under the surface. ‘Why did you do this?’
She looked at him for a long time before answering. ‘Perhaps because I’m not as flawless as everyone thinks.’
‘But none of us are perfect,’ he replied, wretched with desire.