Everything and Nothing. Araminta Hall
she’d felt like she had to put her straight or hit her. But nobody would listen, so she’d said that Billie’s mum was her mum’s best friend and she’d known Billie since they were babies and she didn’t have anorexia. And, you know what, even now she would be hard pushed to admit that it wasn’t true.
Ruth began the day out with her children so positively. It had been a good idea of Betty’s and Ruth was ashamed she hadn’t thought of it herself. Unusually the monotony of grey which seemed to always sit over their heads had been replaced by a perfect sun resplendent in a baby blue sky. If you ignored the fact that they had to begin the day with a visit to a £120-an-hour nutritionist because her son wouldn’t eat, you could imagine it was going to be perfect. And Ruth was going to make it perfect. She might have missed the vegetable garden, but surely special times could be found in lots of places.
On the way to the tube she thought it wise to remind Betty where they were going. ‘You know you have to be really, really good in the doctor’s office, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do, Mummy.’
‘You have to sit completely still and let me talk to him. Do you understand? Absolutely no funny business. Because it’s very important that Mummy gets to hear everything he says. And then we can go to the park and if you’ve been an extra good girl I’ll get you the biggest ice cream you’ve ever seen.’
Ruth always got a stab of anxiety going into the tube with her children. She ran through countless scenarios where a terrorist would let off a bomb or both her children would try to jump in front of a tube at the same time or someone would snatch Betty but to get her back she would have to leave Hal alone. Plus of course all the usual problems, like the fact that hardly any of the stations had lifts and no one ever helped with the buggy. She tried to visualise Christian in his day to calm these anxieties and then laughed at herself. It was odd how he still remained her constant, like a talisman that could be worried in her pocket.
The tube roared into the station with a rush of warm air which made Ruth want to shut her eyes and pretend she was standing on an African plain. The platform felt old and worn beneath her feet and there was an awful lot of day to get through before they could make their way back to this station. She worried that time with her children always going to be like this, a series of events that needed to be got through before you could legitimately put them to bed.
‘Come on,’ she was shouting now, pulling Betty onto the tube and in the process squeezing her hand too hard against the metal buggy handle and making her cry.
‘My Brat,’ screamed Betty as the doors whipped shut.
Ruth spun round in time to see the grotesque plastic doll fall under the train.
‘We’re going to kill my Brat,’ wailed Betty as the train crunched off.
‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll get you another one,’ said Ruth, secretly pleased because those dolls could give women a complex all on their own and yet Ruth was sure she’d read they were the bestselling toys out there. They made Barbie and Sindy look like nuns, with their ridiculously provocative bodies that could only have been dreamt up by a fetishist. And their facial features were no more than an advert for plastic surgery, not to mention their clothes, which would make a street-walker blush. One day she would muster the energy to explain to Betty why it was neither clever nor cool to own such toys, why being a woman was about so much more than how you looked, why . . . God, she couldn’t think straight against the unrelenting screech of Betty’s hysterics.
Christian knew Toby was right about Sarah, but he’d also known that he would find it impossible not to meet her for lunch. He arrived first at the Italian restaurant a few roads away from his office and chose a table at the back. The table was too small and intimate, with its depressing red-and-white checked plastic tablecloth and obligatory vase of breadsticks. Ruth would laugh at the framed photo of the Pope above the entrance to the toilets; he could imagine her saying that it didn’t bode well for the food.
Sarah was an acceptable ten minutes late but she arrived looking embarrassed and flustered. She turned to the side as she squeezed into her seat opposite him and he could see how much weight she had lost, she almost looked like one of those models in Ruth’s magazine. Today she was wearing black trousers with a black T-shirt and a leopard-print scarf tied round her neck. Her once blonde hair hung loose around her shoulders and there was only the faintest trace of make-up on her eyes. He knew it was wrong to find her as attractive as he did.
‘I’m sorry to have called,’ she said immediately. ‘But it was all too weird.’
‘No, it’s nice. It was the right thing to do.’ Christian pointed to the bottle of wine he wanted, it seemed unlikely that he could get through this without alcohol.
Sarah was nervous, he realised; she kept on re-adjusting her scarf and he noticed the red rash creeping up under her chin like some sort of rampant ivy.
‘Anyway,’ she said, breaking a breadstick but not eating it, ‘new job?’
‘Yeah, I’ve been there nearly two years now.’
‘And it’s okay?’
‘Well, you know, as okay as jobs ever are.’
‘But you’ve done well.’
Christian tried to hear a note of sarcasm in her voice, but couldn’t find it there. He nodded and knew that he had to return like some semi-pro tennis player. ‘And what about you, what have you been up to?’
‘Well, I’ve mainly been living in Australia.’ She looked down and crumbled more of the breadstick. Their wine arrived and Christian poured them both a glass.
‘Australia. Wow.’ He wanted to leave. He had always hated anyone who went to Australia for anything other than a holiday.
‘Yeah, it was great.’ He could tell she wanted to say something and so he let the silence build. Sarah tucked her hair behind her ears incessantly. ‘After the, you know, miscarriage, I went back to my mum and dad’s for a while and then I thought, fuck it, I’m going to get on a plane, and I ended up in Sydney and I met someone and stayed for two years.’
Christian liked the sound of someone, it had been foolish to imagine she’d been pining after him. ‘Great. Did you work?’
‘Only bar work and stuff. It’s much easier to get by over there.’
Sarah chatted on about the weather and the standard of living and the beaches, stuff Christian had heard countless times before. It seemed implausible that he had nearly left Ruth for this woman. With the flip of a dice life took you on the oddest ride, up some ladders, down too many snakes. He could have had a whole life with Sarah, they’d have a two-year-old by now, probably living in some tiny flat somewhere because he had to give most of his money to Ruth, who would legitimately hate him. She could have even met someone else and he would feel lonely and jaded because of course most of their friends and relatives would have sided with her. He’d have two children he hardly knew, one who he’d never lived with, and he would have to take them on terrible days out to the zoo where they would all feel like crying. And then when Betty got older she would say to her future boyfriends that she didn’t trust men much because her father had got some girl pregnant when she was three and left her mother to bring her and Hal up alone.
And nothing would have been different with Sarah. He could see that as clear as the sun shining through the window from the street. They would have spent the past two years arguing about whose turn it was to take out the rubbish, or why he watched so much football, or who was more tired. It was sad to realise that no one was unique and who you ended up with was more down to circumstances than design. He longed to be at home, sitting on one of the uncomfortable sofas he always teased Ruth for buying only because they’d looked good, with Betty and Hal fighting and him and Ruth looking at each other and feeling for one tiny second like they were in complete agreement.
‘So what did you have?’
Christian hadn’t been paying enough attention to what Sarah had been saying. His pasta was offputting; there was too