Page 33 of A Very Happy Halloween

“Maybe.”

“Don’t be so negative. If I can pass, then anyone can pass.” That didn’t make me feel better. “Did you see Mum’s latest photos?”

Oh, thank goodness, a subject change. “The ones where she dressed up as a cat and Dad looked all bewildered?”

“You don’t think he’s going senile, do you? Liam said confusion is a natural reaction to Hello Kitty, but Dad’s looked puzzled in most of the pictures so far.”

“He’s fine, honestly. Dad just doesn’t handle change very well. Remember when Mum swapped his Yorkshire teabags for green tea because it was healthier, and he drank nearly the whole cup before he asked her to check the ‘best before’ date?”

“I guess.”

We chatted for a few more minutes and then said our goodbyes. Marissa and I hadn’t always seen eye to eye, especially as kids, but since the breakup, she’d been an absolute rock. I had a good family, Steven excepted, and more than anything, I wanted Eis to be a part of it.

Fourteen

When Harry heard that Alfie was going to take a martial arts class, Harry decided that he also wanted to take a martial arts class, as did three of his friends. Thank goodness Eis’s BMW had seven seats. He’d also stuck an Uber decal on the door, the idiot.

Harry proclaimed the BMW “nicer than Dad’s car,” and I checked Alfie’s pockets before he climbed inside. For once, they were empty. Guess he was so excited by the prospect of a gym class that he forgot to bring any of his little friends along for the trip.

For Eis, it was a day off from plumbing. Apparently, the pipes in Marigold Lodge were cheap ones made from thin copper, and impurities in the water had caused pinhole leaks to appear here, there, and everywhere. On Thursday, a guy had shown up and installed a water softener while Eis made him coffee and chatted as if he owned the place, and now Eis was pulling up floorboards and ripping out walls to replace every pipe in the house.

I’d given up arguing.

What was the point?

If I cared to dig into my psyche, which I didn’t, I’d have to admit that I liked his constant, mercurial presence. It was only my wounded pride that wasn’t happy about the situation.

Eis was quiet on the trip to Bristol. Pensive. The team at Four Rings knew he was coming, but he seemed almost nervous about seeing everyone after so long. I thought I understood. People talked. Rumours started. On my return to Engleby, I’d squirmed as people whispered behind their hands in the convenience store, and that was before Mum and her Rotary club cronies had started their matchmaking attempts.

“We’re here!” Alfie bounced excitedly in his seat, and four not-quite-teenage boys rolled their eyes at him.

The gym was in what looked like a converted warehouse on a small industrial estate, and Eis drove around to a staff car park at the rear. The boys had come ready in tracksuits, but Eis was wearing jeans rather than his usual sweatpants. Business casual?

“All right, bro?” A member of staff greeted Eis with a man-hug when we got inside. His name badge said Darren, Manager, and his genuine smile said Eis was a friend as well as his boss.

Groups trained on padded mats, at punchbags, and in the half-dozen fighting rings that were scattered throughout the cavernous interior. A handful of men were lifting weights in the far corner, and up on a mezzanine, I spotted the kind of equipment I’d attempted to use in the days before I admitted defeat and accepted that a gym membership wasn’t compatible with motherhood and working thirty hours a week. Treadmills, stationary bikes, stair-climbers.

I was busy working out the ratio of women to men, surprised when it was closer to fifty-fifty than I’d imagined, when one of Harry’s friends piped up.

“Hey, our Uber driver’s picture is on the wall.”

“He’s not really an Uber driver,” Harry told him. “He’s a plumber.”

I hadn’t paid much attention to the giant panels surrounding us, which were mostly action shots with a few motivational quotes mixed in, but now I realised that Eis was in a fair few of them. If I’d thought about it, I’d have realised it was only natural that he’d feature heavily in his gym’s marketing material, but my brain was still futzed, and I was totally unprepared for a twelve-foot-tall sweaty Eisen brooding at me from on high. Did you know that in MMA, the competitors wear obscenely tight shorts? They showed everything. Ev-ery-thing.

His slight smirk told me that he knew exactly what I was looking at.

“Six and a half days,” he whispered in my ear.

“Wait, so your plumber fights MMA?” another of the kids asked.

Now Darren looked more puzzled than my dad. “A plumber?”

“He’s an uber-plumber,” Alfie announced. “He’s cleaning my mum’s pipes.”

My cheeks burned, and Eis just started laughing, the bastard. Please, somebody kill me now.

“Janie’s a neighbour,” Eis clarified. “I’m helping out with some DIY.”

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