The Great Escape Read online

  ‘Well, why not?’

  ‘Um … for one thing, there’d be the train fare, the hotel, meals, drinks and …’ Lou shrugs. ‘I can’t afford it. I’m absolutely stony broke.’

  ‘But … you just went out for brunch.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘and it was Jo’s treat. I can’t afford a whole weekend away.’

  ‘God, that’s a shame.’ Spike’s forehead crinkles in sympathy. ‘I mean, they are your best mates, and Hannah will only be getting married once, hopefully.’

  Lou inhales the mildewy bathroom air as an image forms in her mind: of Hannah and Sadie perched on bar stools, laughing their heads off like old times. Hannah will be glowing with pre-wedding excitement, and Sadie will be all red lips and curves and tumbling chestnut hair, and men will be falling over themselves to talk to them. Then she sees herself, not in her favourite vintage cocktail dress which she bought when she was a student, and which she loves and still fits her, but in an acrylic brown tabard with Let’s Bounce written across the chest. And she’s not on a bar stool between her two best friends, but on her hands and knees, using her little purple plastic scraper to remove a blob of congealed coronation chicken off the floor.

  Spike is at the bathroom cabinet now, taking out a pair of tiny scissors and tilting his head back in front of its mirrored door, all the better to study his nasal hairs. He didn’t have those when she met him. He just had a hairy chest – still does, of course – which Lou had found manly and sexy because, at nineteen, she’d never encountered one in an intimate setting before. Spike was different in other ways too, with his dangerous dark eyes and brief flurry of pop stardom in his youth, which she’d felt certain would burst back into life, if she stood back and waited patiently for long enough.

  ‘Oooch,’ Spike exclaims, snipping a hair. Lou drapes the magazine over the edge of the bath and observes the process with interest. To his right, three pairs of wrinkly boxer shorts are spread out to dry on the radiator. Nasal clipping complete, he turns and looks at her naked body in the bath. Not lustfully, Lou realises, or even approvingly, even though he still seems to fancy her, at least when they’re in bed. No, the way Spike is observing Lou now suggests that she’s a piece of sculpture he’s not sure if he likes or not. She imagines him turning away from her in the gallery and deciding to go to the café instead.

  ‘Well,’ he says thoughtfully, ‘maybe we could figure something out so you can go.’

  ‘I don’t see how,’ Lou replies. ‘The wedding’s coming up, isn’t it? I know we’re staying at Ryan and Hannah’s, but still … I might as well be realistic.’

  Spike frowns and scans the bathroom, as if seeking inspiration from the cracked blue tiles or his collection of mangled ointment tubes, which he stores in a plastic plant pot on the windowsill. ‘Couldn’t Hannah or Sadie help you out?’

  ‘I’m not asking them, Spike. God, I’d never ask my friends for money. It would sound so … pathetic.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you know – thirty-five years old and I can’t scrape together a train fare to Glasgow …’ She snorts.

  He looks crestfallen. Lou blinks at him, wondering how he manages to appear so much younger than forty-eight. Probably because he doesn’t have much to worry about, apart from which bodily part to idly scratch next, or whether it’s time to slope to the kitchen for another cup of tea or a beer.

  ‘Lou-Lou, honey …’ He pauses. ‘You know what I think? You’ve been working too hard at that awful place. And if you go to Glasgow it’ll be a change of scene and a laugh, and I could spend the whole weekend working on my CV.’

  ‘Your CV?’ she splutters. ‘What d’you mean, your CV?’

  He frowns, looking hurt. ‘You know. One of those things people send out when they’re applying for jobs.’

  ‘Yes, I know what a CV is, but …’ She stops herself from saying what would you put on it?

  ‘What kind of job would you apply for?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, I dunno, I suppose I’ll have to start thinking more … laterally.’

  The bath water is lukewarm now, but Lou is too dumbstruck by Spike’s announcement to reach for the hot tap.

  ‘What about your music?’ she adds. ‘I mean, are you thinking of getting a full-time job or what?’

  ‘Well,’ he shrugs, ‘I suppose I’ll just see what’s out there and keep music going on the side.’

  ‘On the side of what?’ she asks, laughing now.

  ‘I’ve no idea!’ he huffs, all symptoms of his sudden illness vanishing. ‘But you’re right – we need more money. We can’t keep going like this. Since I’ve been ill, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking …’ He reddens slightly.

  ‘But you’ve only been ill for like, a couple of hours, and anyway, I’m not stopping you from doing your CV. It’s not as if I breathe down your neck putting you off. In fact there’s no reason why you can’t do it right now, without me being 200 miles away.’ She clamps her mouth shut. Here he is, talking about taking a positive step, and she’s giving him a lecture.

  ‘Yeah, I know, babe,’ he murmurs, ‘but it’d just be me, all on my own, and I know I’ve been a bit, um … relaxed lately. I feel shit about it, to be honest. And if you went away I’d have nothing to do than focus on applying for jobs.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says slowly, ‘but I’ve told you, I don’t even have the money to …’

  ‘Let’s sell something then,’ Spike says firmly.

  Lou stares at him. He looks so energised now, with his newly-clipped nostrils and glowing cheeks.

  ‘What would we sell?’ she asks warily.

  ‘Couldn’t you knock up a few necklaces?’

  ‘I don’t knock up jewellery,’ she retorts. ‘I know it might not seem much to you, Spike, but it takes me days to make a piece, and I don’t even have any silver or stones at the moment …’ She tails off, prickling with guilt at the sight of his sad, puppy-dog face as he turns and leaves the bathroom. ‘Sorry, I know you’re only trying to help,’ she calls after him.

  When he doesn’t reply, Lou climbs out of the bath, looks around for her dressing gown, then remembers that Spike’s stolen it for a pillow and wraps herself in a towel instead. As she joins him on the rug in front of the gas fire, he turns to her and smiles. ‘I’ve had an idea,’ he says, pointing at the guitar propped up against their coffee table. ‘See that? Reckon I know someone who’d buy it.’

  ‘What?’ She frowns. ‘You’re not selling that! Don’t be crazy.’

  ‘But you said you wanted …’

  ‘Of course I want to go, but you’re not selling the first guitar you ever owned, and even if you did, I wouldn’t take the money for it.’

  ‘I just thought Rick at Sound Shack might want …’

  ‘No, Spike! Can you imagine how bad I’d feel? It’s really sweet of you and I can’t believe you even thought of it, but it’s not happening. So let’s just forget all about it.’ With a smile, she snuggles close to his chest, overwhelmed by his generous suggestion. Yet, as they lie together, sharing Spike’s nest, she becomes aware of something else mingling with the gas fire’s oppressive heat – not sickness or germs but a lighter, fruitier, almost floral scent.

  No, she’s probably imagining it. It must be her age – she’s such a lightweight these days. Two Bloody Marys and she loses a grip on her senses.

  FIFTEEN

  Sadie knows she can’t possibly join Hannah and Lou in Glasgow. She’s a mother, and proper mothers don’t jump on a train, abandoning their eight-month-old babies for a whole weekend. Yet the thought of escaping, and having forty-eight hours in one of her favourite cities with her best friends makes her feel dizzy with yearning. Sadie is picturing herself dressed up, in a dimly-lit bar, perhaps having had her eyebrows threaded. Would a proper mother hanker for such things, in between reading picture books and freezing bananas? No, she would not.

  Sadie has yet to respond to Hannah’s mail, or mention it to Barney, even though it popped into her inbox in t
he early hours of this morning, and it’s now 1.30 pm. She should reply now, get it over with – like ripping off a plaster. Sorry, Han, you know I’d love to come, but it’s just too difficult. Yet she can’t make herself do it. Becoming a mother has made Sadie, who once taught art and design at a challenging north London secondary school, virtually incapable of making even the smallest decision.

  Of course, Barney will say she should go, Sadie reflects as she tries to scrub an orange blot out of a towelling bib. You could hardly find a more decent, caring man than her husband, who’s currently tapping away on his laptop at the kitchen table, tweaking his little beard occasionally and rubbing his green eyes. Even the subject of his document reveals his innate goodness: a proposal to raise funds to build a girls’ school in Ghana for the charity he works for.

  ‘Still going to your mum and dad’s later?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ he murmurs, taking a swig from his mug. ‘I just need to finish this.’

  ‘Sure you don’t mind me not coming?’

  There’s a quick burst of typing. ‘No, it’s fine.’ Tap-tap-tap. ‘You need a break.’ Tap-tap.

  Sadie bends to kiss the back of his light brown neck. ‘I don’t want your mum and dad to think I’m being rude,’ she adds. It’s true, but while her in-laws are lovely – welcoming and non-judgmental – the prospect of an entire afternoon to herself is even lovelier. And it doesn’t feel right to tell Barney about Sadie’s hen weekend now. To be awarded a few hours off duty, then to demand an entire weekend away would be greedy beyond belief.

  Barney sets off with the babies, taking jar food and two bottles of formula, which makes Sadie feel even guiltier (she’s trying to keep formula consumption down to a minimum, as a Proper Mother would). Now, all by herself in their small, dark house, she wonders how to fill the baby-free hours ahead. She could leaf through the newspapers, stimulating her mind – these days her reading is pretty much limited to Peepo! and My Little Farm, which doesn’t even have proper sentences. However, there are at least three weeks’ worth of papers in an ungainly pile by the sofa, and she doesn’t fancy sifting through them to find the most recent. She could sneak off to bed – no, too lazy – or flop out on the sofa in an exhausted stupor (ditto). For one wild moment she considers mashing up an overripe avocado to smear all over her face. There are several avocados in the kitchen – she’d bought them to feed the babies, who’d decided they tasted worse than ear wax. Wasn’t that what busy mums were supposed to do? Indulge in a little ‘pampering’? But Sadie has already wasted fifteen minutes of her precious afternoon and doesn’t want to be pampered. No, she needs to get out.

  But where to? Barney has driven to his parents’ place, so she’s temporarily carless, and although Little Hissingham is charmingly pretty with its village green and whitewashed pub, there isn’t a hell of a lot going on. Everyone raves about the pub, the Black Swan, but Sadie isn’t sure she’d feel entirely comfortable wandering in on her own. She’d be bound to spot someone she knows, however vaguely: that woman from the park, who’d want to know if she’d found her babies’ shoes yet, or Monica whose baby’s party she hurried out of far too eagerly. Plus, drinking in the daytime, all alone, she’d probably be marked as an alcoholic.

  If she were Hannah, she’d be out on her bike, every inch of her body taut and fit, with a flush of rude health springing up on her cheeks. However, Sadie’s bike now resides in the tiny shed in their back garden, having suffered seemingly irreversible gear damage when one of Barney’s mates crushed it under a flat-pack wardrobe when they moved. She could go for a run, if she was lithe and tiny like Lou – but it would probably kill her, and she doesn’t relish the idea of Milo and Dylan being motherless. Plus, Sadie doesn’t own any trainers. Swim, she thinks. That’s more like it: rhythmic, soothing, with no bodily parts thrashing about. And she’ll be able to report back to Barney, ‘I went swimming’ and feel proud and purposeful. Sadie quickly throws her kit together and heads out.

  The pool is just over a mile away in the small town of Corlingwood, an unremarkable cluster of new-built homes in virtually identical cul-de-sacs. In the sports centre – a faceless slab of pale grey brick – Sadie changes into her Proper Mother swimsuit (black, sporty, serious bosom support), ties back her chestnut hair and plunges into the deep end.

  This is good, she thinks, launching into a breaststroke. She’ll do twenty – no, thirty, maybe fifty lengths and soon slip easily back into her dark-wash jeans. The pool is pleasingly quiet; there’s only an elderly man ploughing steady lengths, and a woman in a flowery swimsuit, her hair trapped beneath a pale blue bathing cap, who dives into the deep end in an elegant curve.

  A man strides out of the changing room. Tall, slim, closely-cropped dark hair – something about him reminds Sadie of Johnny, her old friend from Garnet Street who just disappeared when that icy girlfriend of his (Sadie can’t remember her name) got pregnant. She’d had a slight crush on him in her second year, then worried that she fancied him just because he was so easy to talk to, someone you could wake up at 2 am for a chat, knowing he’d be pleased to see you. She began to suspect he fancied Lou, or maybe Hannah – surely he found one of them attractive – then the years rolled on and what she’d regarded as matey-flirtatiousness with all three of them turned out, disappointingly, to be just plain mateyness.

  The man has swum to the shallow end. He stops, propping his elbows on the pool’s edge, and smiles at her. Sadie smiles back, alarmed by how unfamiliar it feels these days to be noticed by a man. She realises then that he’s not looking at her, but at the woman who’s just come out of the changing room, and quickly rearranges her face. ‘Hi, Sadie,’ the woman says with a big grin, clambering into the pool.

  ‘Hi.’ Sadie smiles hazily. The man has lunged off in a splashy crawl, and the woman glides through the water towards her. Hell, Sadie has met her before, and has precisely five seconds to remember not just where and when, but her name, the name of her husband and however many children and pets she might have. Her brain whirs ineffectually.

  ‘Did you try it then?’ The woman is beside her now, briskly rubbing her upper arms to try and warm herself.

  ‘Er, I, um don’t think …’

  ‘You should! You really should. It’s one of those things that’s so simple but really works.’

  Sadie gazes at her. ‘Mmm. I will.’

  The woman laughs as the man swims past them. ‘Frozen bananas! As lollies, remember? My tip when we were chatting at Monica’s?’

  ‘Oh, God yes,’ Sadie booms, relief surging through her.

  ‘Polly, are you swimming or what?’ the man calls out jovially from the other end of the pool. Polly! At least Sadie now knows her name. She feels her shoulders relax and her brain start to function normally once again.

  ‘So, not with your twins today?’ Polly remarks as they start to swim steadily together.

  ‘No. Barney’s taken them to see his parents. I’ve got time off for good behaviour.’

  ‘Us too. Left the kids with my sister. It’s our regular thing.’

  ‘What, this? Swimming?’ Sadie asks, surprised. With no discernible logic, she’d assumed that having the dedication to make bogus lollies also meant you’d have at least one of your children tethered to your bosom at all times.

  ‘Oh yes, every week. It’s our regular date.’

  Sadie takes this in. She’s always assumed dates should involve alcohol and possibly food, maybe a movie, but each to their own. ‘Not next weekend though,’ Polly adds, ‘because I’ll be in New York for work.’

  ‘New York?’ Sadie blasts out.

  Polly chuckles. ‘Well, it’s not that often. Just every couple of months. I work for a magazine publishing company and I’m kind of straddling two continents at the moment.’

  ‘Oh,’ Sadie murmurs. ‘I mean … that’s great. Wow. Do you, erm …’ She doesn’t know how to put this without sounding disapproving, which she isn’t; she’s just awestruck. ‘I … I guess your partner’s fine keepin
g things going at home,’ she adds.

  ‘Yes, of course he is. We manage it together, me and Phil’ – she casts the man who reminds Sadie of Johnny a fond glance – ‘and we have a brilliant nanny. It’s good, I think, for children to form bonds with other adults. Makes them independent and sociable and—’

  ‘Oh, I agree,’ Sadie says quickly. ‘I mean, I’m at home with the babies just now, but only because I couldn’t figure out how I’d manage to keep on top of my job with the two of them. I was an art teacher in north London. I’m going back at some point. Just not sure when …’ They reach the end of the pool, turn and set off again.

  ‘I couldn’t be at home full-time,’ Polly says. ‘I take my hat off to you.’

  Sadie laughs. ‘Well, to be honest I’d love to go away, just for a couple of days. One of my best friends has invited me on a hen weekend in Glasgow. It’s where we studied at art school …’

  ‘That sounds fun. You’re going, I assume?’

  ‘Er … well, I’m not sure. I know this sounds weedy but I’ve never left Milo and Dylan before.’

  ‘But they’d be with Barney, wouldn’t they? I’ve seen him around the village. Looks calm, capable …’ Polly chuckles indulgently.

  ‘Oh, yes, I know they’d be fine, it’s not that …’

  ‘So why not go?’

  ‘I …’ Sadie hesitates. ‘It just feels … alien.’

  ‘Well, you’re going to go away at some point, aren’t you? So why not start now? I mean, it’s your friend’s hen weekend!’

  ‘I know,’ Sadie says. ‘It’s just so soon …’

  ‘And you can’t not go to that. It’s a special occasion. It’s not as if you’re waltzing off just for the hell of it.’

  ‘Well, I’ll see,’ Sadie says cautiously. She doesn’t count lengths for the next hour because she’s imagining herself with Hannah and Lou, away from bibs and being woken up at all hours and marching around Hissingham Park.

  And by the time she climbs out, she’s decided to go. She isn’t planning to straddle two continents, for God’s sake. It’s only Glasgow. Saying goodbye to Polly, Sadie strides towards the changing room, focusing on placing one foot after another on the wet tiled floor to stop herself from leaping excitedly into the air.