The Family Way - Tony Parsons

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own private secret, where they could watch the world go by and pretend it was Chelsea in the swinging sixties. In these luxurious hours of doing nothing very much, their dreams coincided. Cat found the freedom she had craved since childhood, and Rory found the quiet life he had searched for since the end of his marriage.

      But not tonight. Rory let them into the flat, and there were lights and music that shouldn’t have been there. Bright lights, loud music.

      ‘Jake must have let himself in,’ Rory said.

      Jake was Rory’s fifteen-year-old son. He usually stayed with Rory’s ex-wife, Ali, at the weekend, and lived with Rory during the holidays. The exceptions to this rule were the nights when hysterical screaming rows ended with Jake storming off to his father. Rory frowned. What was it this time? He turned to Cat with an apologetic smile.

      ‘Hope you don’t mind,’ Rory said.

      ‘It’s fine,’ Cat said.

      She had been looking forward to being alone with Rory and shutting out the world. But what could she say? Her man had a child, and if they were going to be together, she had to live with the fact. Besides, she liked Jake. When she had first met him, three years ago now, he had been a shy, sweet-natured twelve-year-old boy who had reacted to his parents’ divorce as though the sky had fallen in. Cat loved him instantly, and saw echoes of her own childhood wounds in the boy. Jake was clingy with Rory, and easily moved to tears, and you would have needed a heart of stone not to warm to him. But Cat had to admit it was hard to equate that sunny-faced twelve-year-old with the hulking teenager that Jake had become.

      ‘What’s this music?’ Rory smiled brightly, as he came into the room with Cat. ‘Nirvana?’

      Jake – spotty, lanky and hooded, hormones in turmoil – was draped all over the sofa with a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips.

      ‘Nirvana?’ he sneered. ‘Nirvana?’

      There was another youth by his side, wearing a woolly hat. Cat thought, why do they wear outdoor clothes inside? What’s cool about that?

      ‘Nirvana,’ the youth chortled. ‘Nirvana!’

      ‘It’s White Stripes,’ Cat said. ‘Something from Elephant, isn’t it? “Ball and Biscuit”, is it? Shame on you, Rory. Hello, Jake.’

      ‘Sounds a bit like Nirvana,’ Rory said sheepishly.

      Jake rolled his eyes to the ceiling. ‘It does not sound anything like fucking Nirvana!’

      ‘Tone down the language a notch,’ Rory said. ‘And please open the window if you have to smoke that stuff.’

      ‘Mum doesn’t mind.’

      ‘Mum doesn’t live here. Don’t you say hello to Cat?’

      Jake grunted.

      ‘Hi, Jake, how’s it going?’ Cat said, in that affable voice she seemed to reserve just for him.

      The friend was called Jude. Jude had been planning to stay the night with Jake until there was some dispute with Jake’s mother. The details were unclear. As far as Cat could make out, it was something to do with three-day-old pizza, unwashed socks and treating the place like a hotel. So Jake and his friend had escaped to Dad.

      Cat felt sorry for Jake. She knew what it was like to have your mother and your father living different lives in different homes. She knew how trapped a teenager could feel. She struggled to remind herself that Jake was still the same vulnerable child she had known not so long ago.

      But her Saturday night was shot, and it was hard to fight the feeling that your parents ruin the first half of your life, and then somebody else’s children ruin the second half.

      How her mother would have laughed.

      There was no lazy lovemaking for Rory and Cat that night, and the glass of wine they shared in the kitchen felt perfunctory, like a ritual that was getting old.

      They bolted down the wine, as in the living room White Stripes gave way to hip-hop blaring from the TV, and she tried her best to hide her disappointment from Rory, because he was by far the kindest, most gentle man she had ever met, and she supposed she loved him.

      She was bone tired. When they crawled under Rory’s duvet, they made spoons, and she soon fell into a fitful sleep, despite the boom-boom guns-and-bitches racket coming from the TV set.

      When she woke in the early hours she was desperate for water, and wearing just her pants and a white karate jacket snatched from the dirty laundry, she padded her way through the now silent flat to the kitchen.

      When she turned on the light she gasped. Jake and Jude were in their boxer shorts, munching toast.

      ‘Oh, excuse me,’ Cat said, grabbing a bottle of Evian from the fridge, and deciding not to get a glass because going to the cabinet where they were stored would have meant getting closer to all those gawky white limbs of the two teenage boys.

      As she closed the bedroom door behind her, she heard the voice of Jake’s friend Jude, and their graveyard laughter.

      ‘Not bad for an old girl,’ he said.

      

      Michael pushed his smile into his daughter’s filthy face.

      ‘She’s a mucky pup,’ he observed. ‘And she’s a chubby bubba. She is, she is! Ooza lovely chubby bubba? Ooza lovely chubby bubba? Chloe is, Chloe’s a lovely chubby bubba!’

      Chloe stared blankly at her father.

      Then she burped, and the burp evolved into minor projectile vomiting, a milky stream of mashed organic vegetables erupting from her mouth and then dribbling down that dimpled chin.

      And Jessica thought, forced to listen to this mindless gibberish, who wouldn’t throw up?

      ‘Oooh, has Daddy’s chubby bubba got an upset yummy-yummy tum-tum? Has she? Has she?’

      It can’t be good for her, thought Jessica. Talking to a baby as though you have just had a full frontal lobotomy, it just can’t be good for her development.

      But then again, thought Jessica, what do I know about it?

      Nothing, that’s what.

      While Naoko cleaned the bile from her baby daughter’s face and clothes, Michael rushed off to get the £1,000 digital camera that he had bought to record Chloe’s vomiting for future generations.

      Naoko lifted Chloe from her high chair and gently placed her on her feet. Chloe was walking. Well, not exactly walking. More like staggering really, Jessica thought, as she watched her niece shuffle around with the grim purpose of a drunk trying to establish sobriety, her parents on either side of her like kindly, concerned policemen.

      ‘She’ll be adorable when she gets some hair and teeth,’ Jessica said.

      Michael, Naoko and Paulo shot her a look, as if she had uttered some unforgivable blasphemy.

      ‘Even more adorable,’ she added quickly.

      ‘She has hair and teeth.’ Naoko smiled, stroking the light brown bum fluff on the top of her daughter’s head. ‘Don’t you, Chloe-chan?’

      Chloe smiled, revealing four tiny white teeth, two up two down, in the centre of her wet pink mouth. And then she collapsed onto her nappy-covered bottom, her brown eyes wide with shock. Four adults rushed to attend to her.

      ‘Come to your Uncle Paulo.’

      But Chloe didn’t want to come to her Uncle Paulo. She clung to her mother and howled with outrage, staring at Paulo as though he had just climbed in through the window with a chainsaw.

      Chloe was changing. A few months ago, when she was still indisputably a baby, Chloe didn’t care who picked her up and gave her a cuddle. But now, one month short of her first birthday, with babyhood already being left behind, she was clinging to her parents and regarding

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