Who Do You Think You Are?. Claire Moss
to go. As I stepped onto the street, I allowed myself a little swagger in my step.
It was time to leave. It had actually been time to leave for a while, but I wanted to stay. Geri didn’t seem to mind. I think she hardly noticed me any more; she just cooked and tidied and got the children ready for bed around me. ‘You’re one of the family,’ she had said to me when I first came back and I’d cried with gratitude at her pretending I still had a family. I had forgotten the other side of it though, that a family is just a group of people who have carte blanche to ignore you and take you for granted.
‘Pass me that nappy, Tash,’ she said, as I was getting up the nerve to tell her.
‘Here,’ I said, picking up the one lying nearest to me on the floor.
‘No,’ she shook her head, irritated. ‘That’s one of Katie’s. I need one for Sophie.’
I hunted round for a smaller nappy, glad to have my back to her. ‘So, anyway,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’ll be round tomorrow night after all.’
Her hand shot out to grab Katie as she made a naked dash for the stairs but, still wet from her bath, the little girl slipped past her. ‘What?’ Geri said, distracted. ‘Why not?’
‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ I said truthfully. ‘You must be sick to death of having me round here every night, eating your food, drinking your wine, winding up your kids.’
‘Tash, we love having you, I mean it. We wish you’d stay here, honestly. We hate to think of you in that big house on your own every night.’ She grabbed a handful of baby wipes in readiness. ‘And anyway, you never eat the food, and you always bring the wine.’
I laughed. ‘Well, it’s good of you to say so, but I know you and Matt will be glad of some time together.’
She rolled her eyes as she lifted the baby’s bottom and shoved the nappy under her. ‘Tash, we’re constantly together. That’s why we’re so glad you’re here to give us someone else to talk to and about.’ She didn’t seem to be joking. ‘So anyway,’ she picked Sophie up and handed her to me. I cuddled the tiny warm bundle into me, stroking her chubby neck. ‘Why aren’t you coming tomorrow?’
‘I’m – well, I’m meeting someone. A bloke.’
‘A bloke?’ It was Matt, carrying Katie over his shoulder like a sack of coal. She wasn’t laughing or wriggling, just hanging floppily as though this was how her dad put her to bed every night. From what I’d observed over the preceding weeks, this was in fact the case. ‘What bloke?’
I shot Geri an urgent look. Matt was a good guy, and after these last few months of hanging around his house every evening, talking to his wife for hour after hour while he dozed, mouth open, on the couch, I had begun to regard him as my friend. But I still didn’t want to tell him these things. I knew he must know about me and Stephen and Tim and the whole hideous mess because I’m certain Geri tells him everything, no matter how much she promises me that she won’t. But I wanted to at least be able to pretend to him – to anyone – that I was a good person.
‘Matt, mind your own business,’ Geri said, leaning forward to kiss Katie on the cheek.
‘Night, Mummy!’ she yelled.
‘Night, Katie!’ Geri yelled back.
‘Don’t worry, Tash,’ Matt said over his shoulder as he carried Katie out of the room. ‘She’ll tell me it all later anyway.’
Geri stood up and took Sophie back over to the armchair. She lifted up her top and moved the baby to her breast, saying, ‘Well? What bloke?’
‘Just someone I met at work.’
‘One of the other librarians?’
‘No,’ I shook my head. ‘A customer. He came in the library the other day and asked me to help him with some research he’s doing.’
‘What?’ Sophie’s head jerked away at the sound of her mother’s shriek, leaving Geri’s white, veiny boob staring me in the face.
‘What do you mean, “what”?’
‘You’re going out with some bloke who came in the Local Studies Library? On his own? During the day?’
I pulled a ‘fuck off’ face. ‘He’s a journalist actually, not one of the family history weirdos. He’s working on a story about a local cold case or something. Sounds pretty interesting.’
Sophie was sucking away at the boob again. ‘A journalist? Tash, are you sure?’
I knew what she was asking. Not if I was sure this bloke was really a journalist but if I was sure I should talk to a journalist ever again.
‘He’s not a Stephen kind of journalist, don’t worry.’
‘So is he the other kind of journalist?’
I felt that tight grip in my stomach that came every time anyone mentioned him. Even though Geri hadn’t used Tim’s name, I knew that was what she meant. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not that kind either.’ Nobody was a Tim kind of anything.
‘So, did he just ask you out?’ She sounded incredulous.
‘No, not like that. It’s not a date or anything. He just wanted to talk about this research in a bit more depth, and we’d been having a bit of a laugh, and, you know…’
‘Tash, shut up. I’m thirty-three years old, I’ve had two children, I’ve slept with fourteen men. I understand how these things work as well as you do. People don’t – men don’t ask women they meet in the course of their boring research on dead people to go out for a drink with them unless they want to get into their knickers. You might not think it’s a date, but I reckon he will do. God, I’m so jealous.’ She stood to put Sophie in her cot.
‘Geri!’
She held a finger to her lips as we crept out of the room.
‘No,’ she whispered, ‘not like that. I mean, I’ve just never been on a date. When I met Matt we’d slept together about fifteen times before we even went to the cinema together. It would never have occurred to me to go out romantically with someone I hadn’t already had sex with – it’s what people do in films or stupid books about New York.’
‘Well, there’s nothing to be jealous about,’ I said coolly, ‘because it isn’t a date!’
Geri said nothing in response, but the look on her face told me what was going on in her head. In her head she was holding up her thumbs and forefingers in front of her forehead to form a massive W and she was saying ‘whatever’ in an annoying, squeaky voice.
We went into the lounge and Geri poured me a glass of red wine without asking. ‘So anyway,’ she said as I sat down, ‘what’s he like?’
‘Erm – our age or thereabouts, I would have said. Maybe a bit older, but he’s still got all his hair. Quite tall.’
‘Taller than you?’ she put in anxiously.
‘Of course,’ I said quickly, then felt annoyed with myself for playing into Geri’s hands. She was asking about height because tallness and the lack of it had always been a central part of my decision-making process when it comes to men. I’m 5’9” and ever since I reached my full height at age fifteen had had a strict rule that anyone shorter than me was not an option. Until Stephen. I had somehow allowed Stephen to slip through, which just goes to show that rules are there for a reason.
‘And, what? Dark? Fair?’
‘Kind of – kind of sandy, I suppose?’
Geri smirked. ‘Come off it, Tash. We all know what “sandy”