A Spot Of Bother

45

Katie didn’t know quite what she felt.

Ray hadn’t come back. He was walking the streets, or sleeping on someone’s sofa. He was going to pitch up in the morning with a bunch of flowers or a box of shitty chocolates from a petrol station and she was going to have to give in because he looked all tortured. And she couldn’t find the words to say how much this was going to piss her off.

On the other hand she and Jacob did have the house to themselves.

They watched Ivor the Engine and read Winnie the Witch and found the flip cartoon Jamie had made on the corner of Jacob’s drawing pad, of a dog wagging its tail and doing a poo and the poo getting up and turning into a little man and running away. Jacob insisted they make one of their own and she managed to draw a little flip cartoon of a poorly structured dog in a high wind, three frames of which Jacob then colored in.

At bath time he kept his eyes closed for six whole seconds while she rinsed the shampoo from his hair, and they had a discussion about how big a skyscraper was, and the fact that it could still fit into the world even if the skyscraper was ten times as big because the world was truly massive and it wasn’t just the earth, it was the moon and the sun and the planets and the whole of space.

They had filled pasta and pesto for tea and Jacob said, “Are we still going to Barcelona?”

And Katie said, “Of course,” and it was only later, after Jacob had gone to bed, that she began to wonder. Was it true, what she’d said to Ray? Would she refuse to marry someone who treated her like that?

She’d lose the house. Jacob would lose another father. They’d have to move into some shabby little flat. Beans on white bread. Cutting work every time Jacob was ill. Arguing with Aidan to hang on to a job she hated. No car. No holidays.

But if she went ahead? Would they bicker like her parents and drift apart? Would she end up having some halfhearted little affair with the first bloke who made an offer?

And it wasn’t so much the thought of living like that which depressed her. A few years of single-parenting in London and you could put up with pretty much anything. It was the compromise which hurt, the prospect of chucking away all the principles she once had. Still had. The thought of listening to Mum’s smug lecturettes about young women wanting it all, and no longer being able to answer back.

It was going to have to be a bloody big box of chocolates.