All That Mullarkey Read online

Jaz smiled serenely from her position on a blanket, her head pillowed on Gez’s big tummy. ‘You could’ve borrowed mine, though it would swamp you. But I haven’t brought it today, sorry.’

  Vicky, like flotsam washed up on the corner of the blanket, gazed across the water. ‘I don’t think I want to lend mine. It’s a bit … personal, isn’t it? Like lending your knickers to a stranger.’ Then, insincerely, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Cleo rose and slipped off her shoes and socks. ‘I don’t need Neoprene.’

  Justin stared. ‘You’re bonkers. You’ll get saturated!’

  Cleo opened her eyes very wide and waded into the lake up to her knees, wet jeans rasping her ankles. ‘I’ll dry, won’t I?’

  Justin shook his head, eyes laughing, and mounted the ski. Cleo clambered on behind him, locking her arms around his waist. His wetsuit felt warm and both smooth and rough. She was aware of his body beneath it.

  The jet-ski bobbed, vibrating as the engine coughed. Justin shouted back above the raw sound, ‘Hold tight! Lean when I do, don’t try and sit me up. Away we go!’

  The ski leapt and Cleo shrieked as she left her stomach behind, then whooped as they accelerated hard in a spout of freezing spray. Her jeans were soaked instantly, clinging and clammy as Justin slewed the jet-ski into a figure of eight, bouncing across the surface, the engine pounding woah-wow-woah.

  ‘Yeah!’ she yelled as Justin arced the ski into a wide turn, faster and faster, leaning further and further. She screamed as flying spray chilled her arms and plastered her hair across her eyes. ‘More!’ she yelped, against the wind. And, ‘Wow! Whooo! This is great!’ Faster and faster until it was all she could do to cling on, lacing her fingers together on the other side of Justin, her chest against his warm back, tensing her thighs against the sensation of falling, every inch of skin stung by cold water.

  Justin raced around one final circuit of the lake, then let the ski idle back to shore. Cleo was laughing, gasping, as she splashed off the ski and through the shallows. ‘That was fantastic, brilliant!’

  The engine died and Justin jumped down and dragged the ski in. ‘You’re mad! Look at the state of you.’

  Cleo laughed helplessly as she squelched onto the shore, pulling her T-shirt away from her breasts, her bra showing through the wet fabric. ‘But it was fabulous!’

  ‘Come here, you crazy, crazy woman.’ Justin hauled her into a big hug and a breathless kiss. ‘You’re an absolute headcase! You make less noise having sex.’ He didn’t bother to lower his voice. ‘We’d better get you into something dry.’

  The men laughed and Jaz grinned; but Vicky glared as Cleo squeezed lake water from her hair.

  As Cleo sat in the car, grinning through an adrenaline high, wrapped in the musty Regatta jacket, Justin gripped the steering wheel against the bumpy track and shook his head. ‘Everyone thinks you’re mad.’ He flicked the indicator and joined the road. ‘You’d better marry me, madwoman. Anyway, you might be pregnant.’

  Cleo’s heart stopped. Laughter evaporated. Throat shut. Marry?

  The doors at the back of her mind burst open on an abrupt heave and common sense careered out to shake an image of Gav at her, screaming, ‘You’re already married!’

  Oh …

  Chapter Three

  … shit.

  As she plummeted back into real life, hideous reality zoomed up to smash her in the face.

  Her marriage was in bits.

  Her husband had walked out.

  She’d had unprotected sex with a stranger.

  The righteous anger that had seethed in her – sustaining the sensation that she could do anything, get away with anything, it didn’t matter and never would – gave one last growl and drained away.

  Her breath caught in her throat so hard she almost gagged. She croaked, ‘I’d better go home.’

  Justin glanced at her, a frown beginning. ‘We’re going home … oh, your home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not right now?’

  ‘Yes.’ She felt cold, exhausted and stupid. Why was she here, soaked with algae-fouled water? Why on earth had she embarked on this reckless fling? Which was over now.

  Justin changed down for a turning, voice suddenly stiff. ‘Have you left any gear at my place?’

  ‘No, but you can drop me off and I’ll get a taxi back to my car.’

  ‘I’ll drive you.’ He lapsed into a silence that lasted for the whole of the twenty-minute drive.

  Liza lived in some jaundice-yellow flats slung in lines of two storeys over carports, a bus ride from the city centre. Cleo’s car was still parked under the flats in the space that car-less Liza never used.

  Justin killed the engine. ‘What changed?’ All the laughter had gone from his voice. He was almost a stranger (again) without his semi-permanent grin.

  She shook her head, choked by the enormity of everything she’d done.

  He stared, mind obviously ticking. ‘It’s to do with “married”. You’re married.’

  Her face felt as stiff as plastic. ‘You knew that.’

  ‘But you’re separated!’

  She looked away, clenching her hands in the folds of his jacket. ‘Well …’

  ‘Aren’t you? Did your husband leave?’

  She sniffed and nodded. Her voice strained to work. ‘He walked out on Friday.’

  His voice was suddenly a bellow. ‘Friday! Yesterday? What happened?’

  She avoided his eyes. ‘We had a big row.’

  ‘And he stormed out?’

  Miserably, she nodded.

  His voice dropped to a furious hiss. ‘For fuck’s sake! That’s not what I call “separated”. That’s just a barney, an argument, a tiff! You scream at each other then you make up!’ He hesitated. ‘You spent the night with me … to punish him?’

  It was so close to the truth that her voice refused to let her deny it.

  ‘So it wasn’t an attraction, a wild thing, an affair – I was just convenient! You somehow fouled up meeting your sister and needed a place to stay!’

  She winced.

  Her eyes burned with tears as she scrabbled for the door handle and bolted, abandoning the warmth of both him and his smelly old jacket in the car.

  Trembling with cold and nerves she drove home badly, forgetting to use her mirrors, driving straight over at a crossroads, hearing a scream of brakes.

  What had she done?

  What about Gav? She felt sick. Clouds like battleships rolled up to obscure the sun; she turned her heaters up high, yet still shivered.

  When she reached home and saw Gav’s car drawn up outside, she seriously thought she’d faint.

  Gav was back.

  For what? For ever? For something he’d left? For another row?

  Her brain began feverishly to concoct a plausible excuse for why she was soaked with lake water. Her guilty heart beat so hard that it seemed to rattle behind her eyes.

  Relief though, he wasn’t actually in the house. She called his name into the empty air, voice stretched to cracking in the answering silence. Gratefully, she hurled her sodden clothes into the washing machine and raced for the shower to scrub urgently at the lake water on her skin and hair with shower gel and shampoo, to obliterate the vegetable smell. As well as any traces of extra-marital sex.

  In the bedroom the writing on the wall remained. THIS MARRIAGE IS OVER. Love Gav.

  When Gav burst through the front door, pounding up the stairs – ‘Cleo?’ – she was standing looking at it, in her yellow towelling robe.

  He skidded to a halt. Somehow he looked gaunt, as if he hadn’t eaten for a week. They stared at each other. His voice was disbelieving and exultant. ‘You’re back!’

  She nodded. Watched his eyes flick to the marker pen message and back to her, his face flush and then pale.

  ‘Cleo …’ His eyes were red at the lower rim. His Adam’s apple bobbed. ‘I am so sorry.’ He walked slowly towards her, hands out, palms up, rushing his sentences, falling over his apologie
s. ‘Can you forgive me? I don’t deserve it, but when I came home and you’d gone …!’ He bit his lip and shut his eyes for an instant. ‘You must’ve thought I’d gone mad.’

  Mad. She flinched. Crazy madwoman. Justin, laughing, hugging her tightly with delight. The smell of lake water, his hot mouth taking her cold lips. She pushed the image away.

  Gav lowered his beseeching hands. ‘I don’t know what came over me, Cleo, I just went off on one.’

  She studied his desperate face as if she’d never seen it: sandy eyebrows, fair skin lightly freckled, softly lined. Not a sunburst of laughter lines radiating white in a tanned skin, not a sharp nose above curving, laughing lips. As if in a visualisation exercise, she brought a picture of Justin deliberately into her mind’s eye – and set a flame to it. Watched it catch, balloon, shrivel and collapse like a photograph in an ashtray. He must be gone.

  Gav was her husband. Her guilt reared up like a serpent and speared her heart with its forked tongue. He was obviously waiting for a flurry of questions from poor wronged little wifey. She supposed that, if she wanted to save her marriage – she did, didn’t she? – she must discover what had happened to make Gav ‘go off on one’. And make certain that he never found out that she’d been off on one of her own.

  Her anger, so sustaining till now, wouldn’t creak into action. She pointed to THIS MARRIAGE IS OVER. Love Gav and her hand shook.

  His eyes were huge. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

  Her emotions seemed to have iced over. ‘Something certainly wound you up. Something at work?’

  His eyes flickered to hers. For a long moment it seemed as if he would deny it. Then his head dropped. ‘I suppose that’s it. There’s been talk of redundancy and Bob Chester …’ Now that he’d decided to admit it, it was as if he couldn’t wait to let it all out; he became almost eager. ‘He told me, in front of everybody, that underperformers would be first to go.’

  She stared. ‘But you’re not an underperformer.’

  ‘He still said it! I suppose I’ve been stewing, not wanting to admit perhaps I’m not as good at my job as I thought. I got strung up and twitchy and I took it out on you. I’m …’ – he swayed forward on the balls of his feet, brushed the top of her head with his lips – ‘… ashamed.’

  So Cleo got her first experience of her and Gav making up after a row; as the hot summer’s day ended in a storm that crashed about outside the bedroom window, they made love to seal the rift. He was thoughtful, the act protracted. It must’ve been guilt that made her feel so numb and unresponsive. Or maybe shock. Or plain fatigue. When Gav arched his back and cried out she felt relief. And then guiltier than before.

  And so weary. Utterly, deadly tired. Leaden, aching, exhausted. Probably nobody in the living history of mankind had ever been so tired. Ever.

  But then, and for long into the night, she couldn’t sleep. She closed her eyes and experienced flashbacks of being with Justin – sex with Justin. She’d been … overt. No ‘getting to know you’. No inhibitions.

  In the morning she was suddenly yanked awake by a horrible realisation. ‘I didn’t put my cap in last night!’

  Gav stretched and sighed. ‘Don’t you think things were much easier when you were on the pill?’

  Cleo lay very still on her pillow. Oh crap, not again.

  Chapter Four

  Cleo tipped her handbag upside down and shook everything out. Where the hell was it? It was Monday and she needed her wretched mobile phone! When had she last had it? She flicked back through her memory.

  And went cold. Deeply, horrifyingly cold.

  Squeezing her eyes tight shut, she willed herself into positive thought. ‘I have not left my mobile phone at Justin’s flat!’ But she had, of course she had. In her mind she could see it nestling alongside Justin’s phone on the chest of drawers when –

  As if things weren’t bad enough.

  She heard Gav’s leaping footsteps and looked up to see him appear at the top of the stairs. ‘All right?’ He smiled, fresh and attractive in his grey shirt and blue tie, hair still damp from the shower.

  ‘Fine, fine!’ She scooped up her card wallet, purse, pen, comb. The weather had broken with Saturday night’s storm. Rain still slanted across dull fields and over stoical sheep to whisper against the windows.

  The bed gave as he sat behind her. ‘Sure?’

  ‘’Course! Won’t you be late?’

  His sigh was hot on her neck as his arm slid around her. ‘We could ring in sick.’

  Fastening her bag, she eased away and reached for her jacket. ‘Best to get back to normal. Just normal.’

  His eyes were huge with guilt. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ Above his head, a stripped patch in the wallpaper signposted where his message had been.

  Normal used to be good and comfy. If only finding it again was easy. If only Cleo didn’t feel so betrayed by Gav’s behaviour at the same time as being so guilty over her own.

  She felt as if she’d been through some life-altering experience. Perhaps she had.

  At coffee break she should have been mixing with a trainee sales team, as the whole focus of the day was on teamwork. She should be making herself the hub. Instead, she slipped along the corridors of the client’s building to find a phone.

  In an empty office, she dialled her own number. Five rings. Six. Then the line opened. She could hear the tinny buzz of background noise.

  ‘It’s Cleo,’ she said.

  A moment, then Justin responded. ‘Hang on.’ The squeak of a chair, footsteps, the tinny buzz fading, a door clicking. ‘Yes?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Obviously, I left my mobile with you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She waited while he made no useful suggestions. Then she tried, ‘Can I come and fetch it?’

  A pause. A noise which might’ve been his fingers drumming. A quick intake of breath. ‘The problem is, I’m in Ipswich. Until Friday.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her breath whisked out in a sigh of disappointment. She was in Northampton herself, there was evidently going to be no instant solution. ‘You’ll appreciate I need my phone back.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Another pause. ‘Could I meet you in Ipswich and –’

  He cut her off. ‘I’m working.’

  Sod him. ‘Right. So can I call round for it on Friday?’

  Another pause before, ‘I’ll meet you. Muggie’s at nine.’

  She groaned mentally. ‘Does it have to be there?’

  ‘That’s where I’ll be.’

  Voices and footsteps passed in the corridor outside. She froze until they’d gone. Hissed, ‘Do you have to be so unco-operative?’

  He half laughed. ‘Muggie’s at nine.’

  Next, she rang Gav.

  His voice was happy, soppy, delighted to hear from her after three hours apart. ‘Mmmm, my sexy, darling wife.’

  She had to concentrate to achieve the breezy conversation she’d mentally rehearsed. ‘Can’t be long, I’m borrowing someone’s phone. I just rang to tell you not to try me on my mobile, it’s turned temperamental. Tom’s got a mate who can sort it, so I’ve given it to him.’

  Annoyingly, Gav immediately objected. ‘You shouldn’t give it to some amateur, it’s an expensive phone, I’ll take it back to the shop.’

  Damn it to soddery, of course Gav had bought it for her. She tried to be dismissive. ‘It’s already out of guarantee, the shop would be mega-expensive. Yes … I love you, too.’ She hoped. When the guilt and the anger were over, she was sure she’d find she still loved him.

  Glancing at her watch, rapidly she dialled Liza at the treatment centre, who, bless her bless her bless her, wasn’t engaged with a client’s bare feet and was able to answer her phone. Cleo heaved a sigh of relief to hear her calm, ‘Hiya!’

  ‘Oh Liza!’ Suddenly she wanted a huge, cleansing cry, had to dig her nails into her palms to stop herself from bursting into loud, sisterly boo-hoos. ‘If anyone asks, particularly Gav, I spent Friday night wi
th you, OK? I was upset and you spent the whole time getting me drunk and wiping my tears. Can you do that?’

  ‘Of course,’ Liza agreed promptly. ‘But what’s going on?’

  Cleo checked her watch again. ‘I’ll ring you later to explain. And definitely don’t try me on my mobile! And will you come with me this Friday evening to Muggie’s?’

  ‘What, Muggie’s in Bridge Street? I go there all the time.’

  Cleo fought down sobs again. ‘Pity you weren’t there last Friday. None of the horrible mess would’ve happened!’

  ‘Ah.’ Liza sounded satisfied. ‘I met this farmer’s son …’

  Cleo broke in hastily. The client would be complaining to Nathan if she left her team much longer. ‘Just come with me this Friday, OK? Promise?’

  Liza promised. ‘As long as you tell me then what’s going on.’

  The heavy hand on Justin’s shoulder made him jog his drink. He flicked at the splashes on his jacket.

  Martin grinned. ‘Sorry, mate. New phone?’

  Justin looked at the petite folding mobile phone in his hand. ‘I’m just minding it for a bit.’ While Martin caught the barman’s eye and Drew pressed up beside them in the crush, hands jammed deep into the pockets of his drainpipe jeans, Justin slipped the phone into his pocket.

  ‘Thanks.’ He accepted the drink that Martin passed him.

  Drew drank half his lager in one long slurp, then burped. ‘On your own? No lady of the lake?’

  Justin shook his head.

  ‘Still seeing her?’

  The cold beer was good, tightening his throat on the way down with its iciness. He shook his head again. ‘There was the little matter of a husband.’ He had to raise his voice; the pub was filling up.

  Martin and Drew showed him matching surprised expressions. Drew’s brows descended – ‘Didn’t she tell you?’

  ‘Kind of. She said he’d cleared off. I didn’t realise she meant the day before, until she went home to see if he’d turned up.’ Justin wiped the bottom of his glass on the bar and remembered, belatedly, how, a couple of years ago, a girlfriend of Drew’s had lied about her marital status. Drew had only discovered the truth when the husband had come after him with fists swinging. Drew had been hurt in more ways than one.