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Now Jess looked at her mother’s diary, forgotten on the counter beside the fridge, and flipped to today. ‘Hairdresser 12 noon.’ Lucky Mum, Jess thought. Imagine being able to swan off on a school day and get your hair done.
There was no sign of Wilbur either. Wilbur was Jess’s cat, a ten-year-old tabby with unusual grey markings and a huge fluffy tail that shot up into the air if he was upset. His cosy bed on the kitchen radiator was empty and there was no point calling him. He was probably asleep somewhere he shouldn’t be: snuggled up amid the towels in the airing cupboard, his favourite and forbidden spot.
Jess positioned herself at the bleached pine table in the kitchen, spread her schoolbooks out in front of her and then switched on the portable telly. A repeat of Sabrina the Teenage Witch was on. Jess picked up a pen, opened the book where she’d made notes for the Milton essay and began to watch the TV.
Ten minutes later, weighed down with groceries, Abby arrived home. As soon as she’d shut the front door behind her, she unzipped her high boots gratefully. The problem with being short was that she always felt the need to wear heels, but they killed her.
‘Jess!’ she called, shrugging off her jacket. ‘Are you home?’ There was no answer and Abby’s heart skipped a beat. Dunmore was hardly crime central but you never knew. Anything could have happened to her…
Abby rushed into the kitchen in her socks to find Jess studiously working at the kitchen table, the television switched off.
‘Hi, love, you’re hard at it,’ she said, smiling in relief at her daughter’s bent head. Once, she’d have hugged Jess instantly, but recently Jess ducked away from hugs as though she couldn’t bear to be touched.
‘She’s a teenager, what do you expect?’ Tom had said sharply when Abby told him the first time it had happened. ‘I see it all the time in school.’
‘I know,’ Abby had replied shortly, angry at the implication that just because Tom was a teacher, he knew more about teenagers in general, and Jess in particular, than Jess’s own mother did. Abby knew the teenage years were going to be tough, she just hadn’t expected her darling Jess to change from best friend to worst enemy in a matter of months.
Now she restrained herself from reaching out to stroke Jess’s hair.
‘Yeah, we’ve lots of homework to do for the weekend,’ Jess said gloomily without looking up. ‘And I’ve got to revise.’ The more Jess thought about the exams, the more she felt like taking it out on someone else.
‘I dropped by the station just in case you were tired,’ Abby said hesitantly, not wanting a row. ‘I thought you might like a lift. But I missed you.’
Jess raised her head from her books and focused on her mother at last. ‘New hairstyle,’ she remarked flatly.
‘Is it OK?’ Abby ran an anxious hand through her hair.
‘Yes,’ relented Jess. ‘It’s great. Mum, I wish I could colour mine again.’ Jess’s first home-bleaching experiment with Steph had gone terribly wrong. It had cost ten times as much to have the straw-like tinge toned down.
‘They’d kill you in school,’ her mother pointed out happily, thrilled that Jess seemed to be in a good mood with her. After a rash of pink-toned hair, the principal had banned all hair dyeing except for the fifth and sixth years.
‘Subtle streaks,’ begged Jess. ‘I’d go to the hairdresser this time. Nobody would know. Mr Davies only notices punk black and bright pink. A few blonde highlights would get past him. Lots of people have blonde hair.’
‘We’ll talk about it,’ said Abby, who’d have promised anything to keep the peace.
‘That’s what you always say,’ Jess pointed out.
‘Yeah, I’m your horrible mother, I know.’ Abby began shoving the shopping into cupboards and Jess quickly reached back and put the remote control onto the worktop behind her. Her mother was pretty good about TV watching. Lots of her friends’ parents nagged like hell now they were in fourth year and studying for their Junior Cert. But Mum did disapprove of working while the TV was on, and the price for tomorrow night’s party at Michelle’s was to finish her homework by Saturday afternoon.
‘I got fresh pasta and I can make you garlic mushroom tagliatelle for dinner,’ Abby said, deep in the fridge.
Jess’s face brightened. ‘Great,’ she said. She’d been a vegetarian for over two years now and was always trying to convince her mother to become one as well. Didn’t people realise that animals had rights too?
‘Your father and I have to go out, I’m afraid,’ continued Abby. She didn’t see her daughter’s face fall. ‘It’s a work thing. Beech’s tenth anniversary. Probably cheese and bad wine,’ Abby laughed. Beech, the production company who made her television show, were notorious for not spending money on luxuries. ‘We have to go, but if I cook the mushrooms now –’
‘I’m not hungry,’ Jess said in a monotone.
Her mother emerged from the fridge anxiously. ‘You must have something.’
‘I’ll phone for pizza if I’m hungry.’
‘If you’re lonely, I’m sure Jennifer wouldn’t mind staying until we get home,’ Abby ventured. Jennifer was the twenty-two-year-old college student who lived four houses down and who was keen to babysit to earn extra cash.
‘I don’t want Jennifer! I’m not a kid, Mum. I thought we agreed. If Sally Richardson thinks I’m old enough and reliable enough to babysit for her, why don’t you think I’m old enough to be on my own?’ Jess was furious.
It was Abby’s turn to look unhappy. She didn’t like Jess phoning for pizza delivery when she was alone in the house. You read such dreadful things in the papers. Just because they had an alarm and Jess had been warned not to open the door to strangers, didn’t mean bad things couldn’t happen. What if the pizza delivery person was a rapist or murderer? Abby’s mind raced over the frightening possibilities. Jess had refused to be babysat once she’d hit fourteen, and agreeing to that extra independence had seemed such a huge step to Abby. Now, she’d started babysitting for Sally’s little boys. No late nights or long hours, just the odd hour here or there, but it still struck Abby as scary that her baby was now the babysitter.
‘You know I don’t like you ordering stuff when we’re not here.’
Jess sat sullenly and Abby knew she was in a no-win situation. ‘Could Steph’s dad bring her round tonight?’ she asked, knowing even as she said it that Steph couldn’t come, otherwise Jess would have suggested it herself. It had been easier to organise Jess’s social life when the family lived a few houses away from her best friend.
‘She’s busy,’ Jess snapped. ‘Her grandmother’s birthday is tonight. I don’t know anyone else around this dump of a town.’
Abby shut the fridge wearily. She didn’t need reminding. The guilt was enough to give her sleepless nights.
She sighed. Although she adored their new home, the fact that it made Jess feel isolated was definitely threatening their relationship. Or maybe it was just the teenager thing.
Abby left money on the worktop for a pizza and went upstairs to get ready. It was half-past six, they were due out at seven and there was no sign of her husband. Not that Abby was surprised by this. After nearly seventeen years of marriage, she knew that Tom had all the sense of urgency of an inhabitant of a desert island. Which probably made them a good match, she knew. She was fiery and wound up like a spring, while Tom was possessed of endless, monastic calm.
‘You shouldn’t get so hyper about everything,’ was his standard phrase whenever Abby got in a flap about being late. Naturally, his saying this just made Abby even more hyper and irritated into the bargain. Could he not realise how annoying he was?
It was a relief to retreat to their room to get ready. It was a pretty nice bedroom, and one of the first she’d redecorated when they’d moved in. Floor-to-ceiling wardrobes (‘essential for hiding clutter’, as Abby herself said) and a bed with storage underneath. Everything was rich cream and cool apple green, and there wasn’t so much as an out-of-place magazine to ruin the aura of classic calmness. It was hell to keep it like that. As Abby professionally advocated the use of trios of decorative storage boxes to hide everyone else’s clutter, she felt she had to use them herself, but she could never remember which held what. She always ended up opening the wrong one for her jewellery and finding make-up instead. And she could never lay hands on a pen. It might be heresy to think so, but she almost missed the jam jar full of wonky biros that used to sit on her dressing table in the old house, before she’d learned how to declutter.
Abby’s cupboards were where it had all started, really. Not her wardrobe – recently featured in Style magazine – or her bathroom – a shrine to Zen-like bathing that had cost a fortune to install – but her kitchen cupboards, where a simple rotation system of putting new tins and jars to the back meant that nothing ever had to be thrown out because it was months past the sell-by date. The list on the cork board also helped. Any item taken from the fridge, larder or cupboard was listed in the handy notebook with the pen attached, so that when Abby did her once-a-month stocking-up shop, she knew exactly what was needed.
A naturally tidy person, she’d hit upon the idea of offering her tidy mind to others in an attempt to help people organise their lives. Jess had just turned ten and Abby found she had time on her hands.
Originally, she’d started sorting out wardrobes: helping women with scores of identical black clothes prioritise and bin anything they hadn’t worn for years. It had been a cottage industry, really – a few mornings a week in which she’d given her clients the courage to throw out much loved but threadbare garments and sell on those barely worn. She wasn’t a stylist, she told customers, just a de-junking merchant.
‘You can buy new clothes yourself afterwards – I’m just helping you let go of the old stuff.’
The breakthrough had come after two years of this when a customer had sighed at the pristine state of Abby’s kitchen cupboards and said she wished she was as organised.
Abby offered to write down her system.
‘No, do it for me,’ begged the woman.
Soon Abby was organising clutter-free systems for home offices and sorting out houses stuffed with possessions where nobody could find anything any more. She was ruthless with old cards, newspaper clippings and letters from old flames, but gentle with the person reluctantly throwing out all their treasures.
‘You’re not using it, it’s using you,’ was her mantra. ‘If it’s not useful or beautiful, dump it! You’ll feel so much better when your life is decluttered.’
When she decluttered the office of a magazine journalist, who wrote about the empowering experience of throwing out bin bags full of detritus, fame came calling.
At nearly seven o’clock, Tom’s ten-year-old Volvo creaked to a halt outside.
‘Sorry,’ he called as he slammed the front door. ‘I got stuck with drama club.’
Upstairs, fully dressed and clock-watching, Abby sighed. Typical Tom. Overseeing the drama club wasn’t even his job. What was the point of being the deputy headmaster if you had to do all the extra jobs instead of foisting them on other people? At home he never hesitated to ask Abby to do things for him, but at work, he metamorphosed into Mr No, Let-Me-Do-It.
After another five minutes of waiting for Tom to come up and change, Abby marched downstairs. She wasn’t going to say anything but she was ready and it was time they were out of the door.
Tom and Jess were in the kitchen together, laughing at some shared joke.
‘Dad, you old hippie,’ Jess was saying fondly. She had her chair pushed back and her feet up on another, black-stockinged legs stretched out comfortably. ‘Go off and listen to your old Jethro Tull records, right? You are never going to be cool.’
‘I can watch MTV with the best of them,’ Tom retorted mildly. He gave his daughter a pretend slap on the wrist. ‘I was just saying I like that Chad Kruger song. Don’t send me into the old people’s home just yet.’
‘Next week, then,’ grinned Jess. ‘Shooo. I’ve got chemistry homework and you’ve got some posh do to go to.’
Tom ruffled Jess’s hair. Jess didn’t move her head away. She smiled at her father.
Abby watched them silently, half pleased that they got on so well, half jealous that she no longer shared that same easy relationship with either of them. It was as if Jess and Tom were a tight little family unit and she was out in the cold.
Selina Carson slid through the throng with all the practised ease of someone who could throw a party for three hundred people in her sleep. As publicity director of Beech Productions, Selina knew better than anyone how to stretch budgets and coax favours out of people. Without her help, the tenth anniversary party would be above a grubby pub with sausages and chips to eat and one free glass of limp champagne each. Thanks to her, it was being held in a divinely proportioned new gallery with lots of outrageous modern art on the walls, including a modern version of Ingres’s voluptuous ladies of the harem, which was being ogled by many of the male guests when they thought nobody was looking.
The wine was good (‘Think of the publicity, darling!’ she’d said to the beleaguered wine importer she normally rang when organising parties) and clearly the dim sum were going down a treat. She just hoped that nobody got food poisoning, because the caterers were new and scarily cheap. Still, you had to economise somewhere.
‘Abby, darling, how lovely to see you. And Tom.’
Selina was relieved to see Abby, as she was running out of celebrities to introduce to the big advertisers and the company’s backers there tonight. Abby would be the perfect person to feed into the slightly bored groups and make them feel like movers and shakers. Even better, Selina could quietly explain this to Abby and Abby would know just what to do. She was a professional down to her fingertips, a direct result, Selina thought, of being that touch older when fame hit.
‘Your hair’s fabulous.’
‘Thanks, Selina.’ Abby grinned. She never entirely believed it when people complimented her, a trait she’d unknowingly passed on to her daughter. They were just being nice, she felt. Didn’t they know she was just a forty-something housewife who’d struck it lucky?
‘And, Tom, you look marvellous. Now, Abby…’ Selina grasped her star’s shoulder, whispered in her ear briefly, and then steered her round to a small group of men in suits. ‘Gentlemen, you must meet Abby Barton.’
A cigar-chomping advertising mogul, who was fed up with having to make small talk to lesser beings, grabbed Abby’s hand and shook it firmly.
‘Lovely to meet you. My wife adores your show,’ he said.
‘How nice of you to say so,’ cried Abby. Selina treated this like work but it wasn’t at all. People were really so sweet.
Duty done, Selina grabbed Tom’s arm and led him to the back of the gallery where small pockets of people stood on the edge of the crowd. To the left stood two very young women who were talking quietly together but eyeing the group as though they longed to be part of it but were too shy to approach.
‘Do me a huge favour and talk to those two, will you?’ Selina begged. ‘The red-haired one is the MD’s niece. She’s coming in to work as an assistant next week but she doesn’t know anyone yet and he wants me to keep an eye on her.’
‘They’ll want real TV people.’ Tom grinned lazily down at Selina. ‘They’ll be bored with a dull old teacher.’
‘Stop fishing for compliments,’ Selina scolded, thinking how lucky Abby Barton was. With his ruffled greying hair, angular face and eyes like deep-set pools of midnight black ink, Tom Barton definitely did not fit the mould of a dull old teacher. Just because he was utterly without vanity and clearly never bothered about what he wore, it didn’t mean that he wasn’t an attractive man. There was, she thought, something sexy about all that intense brain power, and his other-worldliness reminded Selina of a patrician Knight of the Round Table, always choosing the hard path because suffering was nobler. Tom made such a change from the thrusting young things who worked in television and who wore much better suits than Tom’s shabby grey one, but who could only talk about their new cars or their high-tech mobile phones. Tom could blind you with brilliance over the fall of the Byzantine Empire – Selina knew; she had hung on every word of that particular conversation, and, strangely, she’d never been interested in history before. He’d definitely grown better looking with age too. Lucky Tom. No, Selina corrected herself, lucky Abby.
She’d bet he was a darling at home. Those gentlemanly types were always rushing to open doors and carry in the shopping for you. Selina was unattached and had to drag her own shopping in from the car, more’s the pity.
For three-quarters of an hour, Tom and Abby didn’t catch sight of each other. Abby charmed her way through several groups of people, aware that her husband would be perfectly happy on his own. Tom said that years of suffering through parent-teacher nights meant there was no social occasion on which he was stuck for words.
It was nearly nine when Abby escaped from the final group, all of whom were nicely merry and already planning where they’d go next. She herself had stopped after one small glass of wine – it was her turn to drive home. She peered round the room and finally spotted Tom in a corner with two attractive young women. Twenty-somethings, dolled up in the high-street version of the designer suede skirt and cashmere knit that Abby was wearing.
The three of them certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves and were laughing as though they’d found more to talk about than television ratings and tax breaks for production companies. The blonde was nearly as tall as Tom and, from Abby’s viewpoint, she was definitely giving him the come-on, angling her skinny pelvis towards him, smiling, even flicking her hair coquettishly.
Abby felt the mildest tinge of irritation. Not that she was worried about Tom – heavens no. Tom was quite genuinely immune to flirting. If offered a choice between a discussion on the intellectual concept of school league tables or a torrid session in bed with a supermodel, he’d plump for the discussion. But that girl should know better. If she got any closer to Tom, she’d be on top of him.
‘Hello,’ Abby said breezily, and slipped an arm through her husband’s. ‘Ready to go yet?’
‘Oh, you can’t go now,’ wailed the blonde, her pretty face assuming a child-like petulance. ‘We’re having such a nice time. Nobody ever explained things to me in school like Tom can. He’s telling us all about girls in harems like in that picture over there.’
Abby wondered who she was. Somebody’s model girlfriend? A would-be TV star?
‘My wife says we have to go and we have to go,’ Tom replied, giving the blonde a warm smile.
Abby’s irritation level ratcheted up another notch. Tom made it sound as if she was a martinet dragging him away from fun. All she needed was a rolling pin to hit him over the head and she’d be perfectly in character.
‘Don’t let me tear you away, darling,’ she said, with heavy emphasis on the ‘darling’.
‘Yes, stay a bit longer,’ begged the blonde leggy section of his audience. ‘Just for another drink?’
‘Yes, do,’ said the other girl.
Tom shot a glance at his wife. His weakness was a captive audience.
‘Of course, stay,’ Abby said easily, her professional mask firmly in place. ‘I have lots of people to talk to, anyhow. I just thought we should get home to Jess before too long. Our daughter,’ she explained politely to the blonde.
Bright-faced, she surged back into the party and found Selina.
‘Anyone else you want me to talk to?’ she asked.
‘You look very flushed, Abby,’ said Selina in surprise. ‘Are you all right?’
The journey home was silent. Abby, glad to have the diversion of driving, stared grimly at the road and told herself that she was overreacting. Tom had simply been polite. Selina had asked him to talk to the girls, he’d explained.
All he’d been doing was enjoying a relaxing glass of wine after a long day, Abby thought. Nothing more. And it was probably nice to have people listen to him when he talked: he was always saying that the pupils in the boys’ school where he worked were so focused on exams that they only wanted to hear things they could use for the Junior or Leaving Certs.
‘I’m tired,’ he said, through a Grand Canyon of a yawn, without bothering to put his hand over his mouth. ‘Those duty parties are always exhausting.’
Abby’s anger resurfaced and she had to bite her lip so she wouldn’t point out that he hadn’t seemed in the least bit exhausted earlier. ‘Mmm,’ was all she said.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
‘I’ve got a headache.’ And that was more or less true, she thought. Irritation always gave her a headache because she clenched her jaw so tightly.
‘Oh.’ With that, Tom leaned back against his headrest and closed his eyes. He could sleep anywhere.
Abby gripped the steering wheel tightly and drove on into the night, thinking of all the smart remarks she should have made to put the blonde twenty-something bimbo in her box. If only Tom still gave her that kind of attention.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_4a7416ba-8040-5481-b7b7-20dce70b2cbd)
The weekend whizzed past with the whole family resolutely doing their own things. Jess spent most of Saturday in her room revising, then Abby dropped her off at Steph’s to get ready for their friend’s party. Abby had given permission for Jess to stay the night at Steph’s, and she couldn’t very well argue when Steph’s mother phoned on Sunday to say the family were going out to lunch and they’d love to have Jess along.
Tom was caught up in rehearsals for the school drama group’s play all day Saturday and didn’t get home until late. On Sunday, he told Abby he’d have to spend the entire day marking homework, and he positioned himself at the kitchen table, his papers spread in front of him and a solemn look on his face. Feeling strangely abandoned, Abby retired to the living room with the papers and ended up dozing off in front of the television, only waking up later that evening when Jess slammed the front door.
