Page 25 of We All Live Here
“Did you get me a cinnamon bun?” says Violet, thrusting her rucksack at her.
Lila can feel the school mums around Marja giving her surreptitious glances.Yes, that’s me, talking to the new hot guy, she tells them silently.Suck on that, bitches.“I thought we could get one on the way home.”
“Oh, my God, Mum, you’re so annoying!” Violet throws her head back and lets out a wail of despair. “It ismilesfrom our house. And I’mso tired!”
Lila flashes the mothers a smile. Marja has her back to her. She usually has her back to her, these days. “I tell you what,” she says. “We’ll stop at the mini-mart and get a jam doughnut.”
•••
It is perhapstestament to how little male attention Lila has received over the past eighteen months that for the entire walk to the mini-mart and home again, she is feeling little electric shocks of pleasure when she remembers the exchange with Gabriel. The direct nature of his gaze. The almost shy half-smile when she thrust at him the bag with the bun. She thinks about it in the moments when Violet’s incessant chatter is briefly quelled by the doughnut, which she eats with forensic pleasure, sucking the sugar from her fingers as she walks. There was definitely a charge between them, wasn’t there? Would he have approached Lila if he hadn’t been remotely attracted to her? He could have gone to the other mums. He didn’t need to smile so much, or confide anything in her. Then she catches herself, and feels ridiculous. She is a forty-two-year-old woman obsessing like a schoolgirl. After everything she’s been through. He’s just a man who wanted a sugary bun. She maintains this stance for twenty strides. And then she is remembering how his eyes crinkled behind his glasses, his lovely mop of hair, the unexpected anticipatory pleasure of the next school run.
The circuit of pleasure and abrupt self-tellings-off comes to a halt when she reaches the front door and remembers. Gene is here, Gene, with his endless need for attention and approval, crashing back into her life without even a hint of apology for every way in which he has failed at being a father.
She closes her eyes momentarily outside the front door, takes a deep breath, puts the key into the lock, and walks in.
“The emergency plumber is here,” Bill announces, as she walks through to the kitchen. Violet passes them both and collapses in front of the television, sweeping up the remote control without looking at it, so that all further conversation takes place over the sound of overexcited American teenagers shouting at each other in school halls.
“What? Why?”
Bill is peeling a motley collection of mucky, no doubt organic swedes. She wonders, with faint trepidation, which feels ungenerous yet entirely justified, what he is preparing for supper.
“That man blocked the toilet with paper. Why he needed to use half a roll just for his morning ablutions I don’t know. But I couldn’t unblock it.”
Bill’s expression tells of the double insult involved in having to clear up Gene’s actual mess as well as his metaphorical one.
“Jesus. How much is that going to cost?” Lila sits down heavily beside the oblivious Violet. “Where is he?”
“No idea. Halfway back to Los Angeles hopefully.”
Her head shoots up.
“He said he’d be back after rehearsals.” Bill says it with the same disgust as if Gene had gone to a public stoning. “I suppose I have to include him in tonight’s dinner plans.”
“It’s just one more night, Bill,” she says.
Bill’s silence and faintly bristling back conveys what he thinks of that plan. Then he says, “I’d be grateful if you could have a word with him about the…plumbing business. I wouldn’t want to have to organize another emergency plumber tomorrow.”
•••
Lila says she’sgoing to work for a couple of hours before supper. But when she walks into her office she sees the sofa-bed, the spare duvet rumpled on its thin mattress, and realizes resentfully that, with Bill and Gene here, she has no space in the house to herself. She heads for her bedroom, and, ridiculously weary, bypasses her bed and lies down instead on the carpet, staring up at the ceiling, listening to Bill’s murmured exchanges with the plumber on the top floor.I would like a life where I was flirting with someone over an outdoor table right now.Perhaps with a cold bottle of rosé. Not listening to a cross, elderly man negotiate with a plumber over a blocked toilet, and nothing to look forward to but some permutation of swede.She sighs heavily. Marja probably never lies on a floor feeling she doesn’t want to see a single human being ever again. Marja is probably right now lying on a sofa with Dan rubbing her feet. He was always good at pregnancy foot rubs. Or maybe she’s one of those women whose hormones go mad during the early months and right now they’re in bed having—
Lila closes her eyes and counts to ten. Then she picks up her phone. She checks the school email chain—which she rarely does—and sees the announcement of a new child in class five, Elena Mallory. She thinks for a minute, then types “Gabriel Mallory” speculatively into a search engine, and waits to see what comes up.
Architect Gabriel Mallory wins award for “revolutionary” halfway house. Judges praise his “humane and socially forward thinking design.”
She stares at the picture of him holding his award. Of course he’s an award-winning architect. Of course he is. She rolls onto her stomach and idly googlesGabriel Mallory Wife. Nothing comes up, not under his name anyway. There’s a bunch of other Gabriel Mallorys—men with wraparound Oakley sunglasses and surfboards, bearded IT developers, small boys in the arms of proud blonde mothers. She typesGabriel Mallory Divorceand then, when nothing comes up,Gabriel Mallory Wife Tragic Death.
“What are you doing?”
Lila jumps.
Violet is standing in front of her, staring down at Lila’s phone.
“Jesus, Violet. You can’t sneak in on me like that.”
“Your boobs look really squishy when you lie on your front.”
“Thank you.”
