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“It’s designer!”
“Oh, well, that’s all right then.”
“Oh, shut up, you.” She snatches it out of my hands hastily, “You’re beginning to sound like Gerry. And anyway, boys can wear bright colours. Gerry’s got a pink shirt that he wears all the time.”
I raise my eyebrows as she gently folds the sweater and places it back into the bag.
“So, come on.” She’s on her knees, stuffing the Mamababa bag behind some saucepans in the bottom cupboard, “Tell me about your weekend with Daniel.” I stare in silence as she fumbles around wildly, pots and pans clank against each other, spilling out onto the grey slate kitchen tiles. “Well?” she demands, with a quick glance over her shoulder. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. Gerry doesn’t like me buying baby things, says we should wait until he/ she arrives, but I just can’t resist sometimes.”
“Well, he does have a point, Lou.”
She stands up, red-faced and looking like she’s been tied to the back of a truck and dragged through the Sahara desert. “Er… excuse me, who’s side are you on?”
“Yours,” I groan, folding my arms.
“Good.” She blows her blonde fringe off her face, some of which has stuck to her forehead during her hiding rampage, rolls up her sleeves and starts unpacking the groceries. “Now, tell me about Daniel before I explode. And no filtering. I want the full fat version.”
“Well, I came here straight from his flat this morning,” I brag, grinning at her stupidly. She stops unpacking.
“You didn’t do it?”
“We did!”
“You old tart. What was he like?”
“I’m not telling you, you perv.” We both dissolve into a fit of giggles. I haven’t seen Louise this happy in years.
“So when are we going to meet him, then?” She slides an overloaded blue plastic laundry basket across the kitchen floor with the side of her red Converse shoe.
I tell her that he works hard, that his hours are unpredictable and, to my complete dismay, he spends a lot of his free time tending to Connie and Lily’s needs.
“Honestly, Lou, I’m getting a bit peeved by it all, to be honest.” I get to my feet, “Let me do that,” I crouch down next to her at the washing machine, elbowing her out of the way. She protests at first but then allows me to help. “Take last night, for instance,” I say, stuffing clothes into the machine, “we had to plan our evening around picking Connie and Lily up from Aliki’s house, around the corner from here, actually, Wolseley Road?” Louise nods, says she drives past that road several times a day, nice houses, big. “And chauffeur them home to flipping Bayswater. So, that was most of our evening gone.”
“Doesn’t his daughter drive?”
“Yes, but she likes a drink!”
“Why don’t you download the Uber app onto her phone when she’s not looking?” We both laugh. If only it were that simple. “And I still can’t believe how old she is. Shit! So, what’s she like, then, apart from a drunken attention seeking diva?”
“Okay. Ish. Quite spoilt and loud, but that’s to be expected, I suppose, with Daniel as a father. Does this go in with the coloureds?” I hold a white lacy bra over my head, clearly Jess’s judging by the cup size; Louise is tiny, even now she’s expecting. She grabs it out of my hand and tosses it into the whites by the table.
“And the ex-wife?”
“I haven’t met her yet, although she did wave from the doorway when we picked them up yesterday. She seems quite friendly.”
“Well, don’t rush into anything, Audrey, he does seem to have quite a bit of baggage. Just be careful.” Louise stretches her back and grimaces. “You don’t want to get hurt again.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I really do like him, though. He makes me feel…I dunno…safe. I didn’t…” I glance up. “You okay?”
“Yes, just a bit of back pain, GP said it’s quite normal, although I can’t remember feeling like this with Jess during the first trimester. But that was over nineteen years ago.”
“The what?”
“Oh, never mind.” She smiles as she wipes down her gleaming, spotless worktop, one hand supporting the small of her back. “You were saying…”
“I was about to say that at least I didn’t have this trouble with Nick.” A heavy silence hangs in the air. A dog barks crazily in the distance followed by a hiss from the table as one of the supermarket bags unfurls. I look up at her “Because he didn’t have a family, I mean. I’m just not used to it.”
“Well, he’s history, isn’t he?” she says crisply, unloading the contents of a large bag for life.
