Chapter Text
Post-separation, Jo managed to stay in her childhood home for a grand total of four and a half weeks before concluding that it was time to go. She loved her mum and was grateful for the help, but they were going to be found dead with their hands locked round each other’s throats if they spent much longer under the same roof. They were too much alike in the wrong ways to be housemates.
That left her with the problem of where to live instead. She couldn’t move back to her former house, which Iain was living in with Clem and Ljubica, the erstwhile nanny, on the basis that it was better for the baby to be in familiar surroundings with the people he knew best. The jab at her shortcomings as a mother hadn’t escaped her, but she’d agreed, not because she wanted to, but because she thought a history of calm, reasonable behaviour would be to her benefit when they inevitably ended up in a mediator’s office together. It hadn’t stopped her secretly hoping that his new girlfriend had given him a flaming case of some disease that caused incurable testicle rot. Bastard.
So, she needed a place of her own, for the first time in more than twelve years. That part at least would be easy, she thought: she’d just hand it over to Danny, and he’d deal with all the messy details and present her with a set of keys. Done and dusted. It didn’t occur to her that Danny might resist the assignment, after all the personal tasks he’d handled for her in the past, but he turned out to have definite feelings about it.
“Jo, I’m not going to rent a flat for you without your input. I don’t know what you want.”
“Four walls and a roof, Danny. Indoor plumbing would be a bonus. It’s not that difficult.”
Danny scowled down at her from the other side of her desk, hands in his trouser pockets and long fringe flopping in his eyes. He still had the look of a big, slightly anxious puppy that hadn’t quite worked out what to do with its own outsize paws, but over the last little while he’d grown more sure of himself and less willing to let her walk all over him, which was both pleasing and frustrating.
“I’ll get listings and book the viewing appointments, and I’ll go with you if you like, but you’ve got to at least see the places. What if I choose something you hate and you’re stuck with it for months and months?”
Jo chewed on the end of her pencil and wondered if she could get him to rent a place for himself and then just move into his spare room. She practically lived in the office these days, so it wasn’t as if she needed much space, and it would be very convenient to have him close at hand if she thought of something they needed to discuss, or wanted an appointment added to her diary.
Or if I have nightmares, she thought, and bit down on the pencil’s metal ferrule so hard it made a crunching noise between her teeth. She’d been plagued by horrifying dreams ever since she stopped drinking, as if alcohol had been keeping them at bay and now she was having years’ worth all at once. She couldn’t seem to get through a night without waking up sweating and shaking—sometimes crying too, just to make the trifecta complete—and inevitably she’d have to switch the bedside lamp on to get back to sleep. Wouldn’t it help to know that Danny was in the next room, only a knock on the door away if she wanted company?
“All right, book the appointments,” she said, realising he was giving her a querying look. “Just try to do them late in the day or first thing in the morning. And I do want you to come along with me. You can take notes.”
Having passed the job off to him, she promptly forgot about it, buried under an avalanche of pleas from constituents and complaints from her opponents and endless proposals and requests and reports to review. If the issue of her own living arrangements occurred to her at all, it was only to vaguely wonder how Danny was getting on with it, until he announced a few days later that she had an appointment to view a property late that afternoon.
“What, today? I can’t. I’ve got something else at that time, I know I have.” She started to open a window on her computer to show him, but he shook his head.
“They’ve cancelled it. You’re wide open all evening.”
“Oh,” Jo said, and sat back in her chair, suddenly apprehensive about the prospect of actually looking at a flat where she would live on her own. Until now, everything had seemed flimsy and unsettled, like a dream from which she might still wake up, but knowing that there was a real place waiting for her to inhabit it felt a little too permanent for comfort. “Couldn’t you reschedule for another time? It’s already been a long day, and—”
“You’ll lose it if I do,” Danny said. “It’s the best listing the agent’s sent me so far, and someone else will have it by tomorrow morning if we wait. It’s two bedrooms, unfurnished, and there’s even a little patch of garden at the back that’ll be nice for Clem.” He took her coat from its hook on the back of the door and held it out to her. “Come on, Jo. Just look at the place. It’ll be all right. I’ll be with you.”
His voice was kind, but also more knowing than it ought to have been, as if he could see straight through her reluctance to the fear underneath. Jo longed to snap back that she didn’t need anyone to hold her hand, especially not her twenty-six-year-old researcher, but the hard truth was that she knew she did. She felt like burying her face in the front of his shirt and wailing that she didn’t want to, but instead she let out a sharp breath and said, “All right, let’s go.”
The flat was on the ground floor of an old house that had been converted—two up, one down—and was small enough to view the whole thing in five minutes. Jo could see the estate agent eyeing her and Danny, trying to work out the relationship between them; it made her squirm, but Danny was oblivious as he wandered around the empty, echoing space, snapping photos of the bathroom and airing cupboard for her to look at later. He’d been right, it was a nice place, with stripped wooden floors and plenty of light from south-facing windows, but all the features that might have pleased her in the past left her feeling empty and depressed. What was the good of having French doors and a fitted kitchen when her entire life had been pulled out from underneath her like a secondhand rug?
“What d’you think?” Danny appeared at her side, tucking his phone away.
“It’s all right.”
“Yeah, but do you like it? You’re the one who’s got to live in it.”
“For the eight hours a day when I’m not in the office,” Jo said. “It’ll do well enough for that, I suppose.”
Danny frowned at her. He’d been doing a lot of that lately, she reflected, but then so had everyone.
“Don’t think of it that way. It’s going to be your home. Clem’s too, when he’s with you.”
“We haven’t even reached an agreement yet. For all I know I won’t get visits at all, or they’ll be supervised at some neutral location.”
“For Christ’s sake, Jo. Those sorts of agreements are for people who smack their kids and let them play with crack pipes. You’ve got the drink thing under control, and Iain can’t keep you from ever seeing Clem just because he thinks you spend too much time at the office.”
“He’ll try,” Jo said.
“And he’ll lose, so plan for that. Did you see the second bedroom? It seems okay for a kid to me, but I’m not a parent.”
“I did, but I’ve already forgotten what it looked like.”
“Go and look again.” He turned her around by the shoulders and gave her a gentle push in the right direction. “I took a photo, but it’s not the same.”
“All right, all right. Stop shoving. I’m going.”
As she went, she surprised herself by wishing bitterly and passionately that Danny were Clem’s father instead of Iain. Danny might be young and idealistic and a bit of an annoying moraliser at times, but he would never in a thousand years have sold her out to the tabloids or betrayed her with the nanny or tried to take her son away from her. She let herself indulge in a brief, bright fantasy in which Iain and Ljubica decided to move abroad forever, and she and Danny and Clem all lived in these rooms together and were happy. She knew perfectly well that all the problems of trying to do her job and be a mother to a toddler would still be there—the only difference was that they’d be playing out in a smaller space—but her imagination spun up scenes of quiet, cosy evenings and peaceful Sunday mornings with no quarreling. Danny was good with Clem and could take him to the park; teach him to play football when he was a bit older. Even in this fantasy, her brain wouldn’t let her picture actually having sex with Danny, but he could sleep on the sofa, and Clem here, in this room—
For a moment she missed Clem so much that it was like a physical pain in her chest: his tiny, perfect hands and his soft baby cheeks and the way his fine hair curled into damp ringlets at the back of his neck when he slept. She blinked tears away and leaned into the bedroom, trying to imagine how she’d decorate it to please him. He liked cars; perhaps she could buy him one of those little beds shaped like a race car. He was almost big enough for it now. God, how had that happened so fast?
“Jo, you finished in there?” Danny called from the other room, and she took a last glance around and went to join him and the estate agent, the heels of her shoes clacking sharply on the bare boards.
“I’ll take it,” she said to the agent, who congratulated her on a good decision and then excused herself to collect some paperwork.
“You’re sure?” Danny asked when the woman had gone.
“Of course I’m sure. You’re right, it’s a good place. Well done finding it.” She touched his elbow lightly. “You’ll help me move in, won’t you? I’ve got some clothes and things with me at my mum’s, but there are others at the old house that I need to fetch.”
“Iain won’t be there, will he? Or what’s her name?”
“Iain doesn’t want to see me any more than I want to see him,” Jo said. “And her name’s Ljubica. Ljubica with the amazing tits.”
Danny grimaced. “I don’t care about Ljubica’s tits. I just don’t want to move a sofa with her watching me.”
“You won’t have to,” Jo said, thinking about the grey-and-white striped sofa in her former house, covered with a blue knitted blanket and scattered with the baby’s toys, and how she’d sat on it in shock the morning of the tabloid article, listening to Danny ringing the doorbell over and over, but unable to get up and face him. “I’m leaving all the furniture there for them. I don’t want it. I’m only taking my personal things—books and photos and papers. We’ll be finished in an hour, if not less.”
“Okay,” Danny said. “We’ll do it together.”
Saturday morning brought flat, featureless grey skies and misty rain, and Jo woke up early and reluctantly to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling of her old bedroom. It had been converted into a rather bland spare room years ago, and all the furniture had been replaced and arranged differently to when she’d lived in it, but the window still had its wide wooden ledge, and the trees in next door’s garden cast the same dappled, shifting shadows on the wall at night. She’d lain here like this many times over the last month, watching them shift and change, and imagining that she was fifteen again, with her whole unblemished life still ahead, and no worries greater than whether she knew all her French verb conjugations for the next day. It was a stupid, useless thing to do, but who could blame her?
Well, she thought wearily, she wasn’t fifteen, she was forty, and she had a task ahead of her that wasn’t going to go away no matter how long she stayed in bed. Iain had offered to pack on her behalf, which she supposed was generous of him, but she’d found she couldn’t bear the thought of his hands touching anything she owned, any more than she could bear the memory of them touching her body. So she’d said she would do it herself, with Danny to help her, and after some minor resistance, he’d said he would clear everyone out so they could have free run of the place.
That news had disappointed her, as she’d been hoping for the chance to spend a few minutes with Clem, whom she hadn’t seen in nearly two weeks, but perhaps it was better not to do it under these circumstances. He wouldn’t understand her coming home only to put things into boxes and leave again. Deep down, there was also a creeping fear that he wouldn’t know her after the time apart; that he’d turn away and cling to Iain or the nanny instead, as he’d sometimes done in the past when she’d come in late from work and tried to pick him up for a cuddle. She knew she’d have to face that possibility sooner or later, or he really would forget her, but not today. Not on top of everything else.
Danny was already waiting outside the house, in a boxy little white van he’d hired for the job, and when she arrived he got out, keys in hand and face screwed up against the fine droplets of rain, and came to meet her. He had on weekend clothes—old, faded jeans with a hole at one knee, a hoodie under a jacket—and she felt conspicuous standing there with him in her own darker blue denim and black cotton jumper, as if they were both in costume for a play about her divorce.
“You’re sure this is going to be big enough?” Danny gestured at the van.
“I told you, I’m hardly taking anything. Did you get the boxes?”
“They’re in the back. Is it safe to go in? Iain’s not there?”
“It’s safe,” Jo said. “They’ve all gone out. Iain said they’re taking Clem to one of those indoor soft play spaces for the morning. He loves them. He—“ She broke off. “Never mind. Let’s just get this over with.”
She let them in at the front door with her key—Iain had suggested she could leave it behind when she went, but she had no intention of doing that and cutting off her access to a house she still jointly owned with him—and led the way through to the combined kitchen and lounge, which were cluttered with the evidence of people having woken up and left in a hurry. A few of Clem’s toys were abandoned on the floor: bright, chunky plastic cars sized for tiny hands, a cuddly monkey she’d bought before he was born, a jack-in-the-box. The sight of them made her heart clench up at the reminder that her son’s daily life was going on without her in it. She wanted him to be safe and happy, but she also wanted to be the one who provided that safety and happiness for him. She knew she didn’t spend anything like enough time with him, and had often been guilty of wishing him elsewhere on days when he was fussy and she was feeling pulled in too many directions, but she loved him and looked forward to the rare quiet moments when she could just sit and rock him and give him his bottle. That had to count for something, didn’t it?
“You okay, Jo?” Danny appeared beside her, a stack of boxes in his arms and concern all over his face, and she waited a beat to be sure her voice would be steady before she spoke.
“Fine,” she said shortly, and reached for the top box on the stack. “We’ll do the books first.”
In the end, they fit everything in four large boxes and three small ones, plus a big wheelie suitcase full of clothes and shoes. It didn’t seem like much to show for a nearly thirteen-year-relationship, she thought bleakly, watching Danny hoist up the last two boxes and carry them to the door. Once he was through, she followed him, dragging the suitcase—it had a bockety wheel that kept wobbling and catching on the wet pavement—and stowed it in the rear of the van before climbing into the passenger seat. She started to do up her seatbelt, and then an idea occurred to her.
“Hang on a minute,” she said to Danny, who was just settling himself in his own seat behind the wheel. “I’ve forgotten something.”
She opened the van’s passenger door, slid down, and darted through the rain, back to the house and into the kitchen, where she pushed aside leftover breakfast clutter and yanked the plug of the toaster out of the power point. The toaster itself was bulky but not too heavy, and she carried it, cord trailing like a long black snake, back to the van and took up her place again, cradling it securely in her lap.
“What?” she said to Danny, who was giving her an odd look.
“I’m not sure I should ask this, but why are you taking the toaster of all things?”
“It’s a Dualit.”
“Okay,” Danny said, bemused. “What does that mean?”
“No idea,” Jo said, “but it was expensive and Iain bloody loves it, and now it’s mine. Start the motor.”
They spent most of the drive from house to flat in silence, underscored by the patter of rain and the rhythmic clack and squeak of wipers on the windscreen. One of the wiper blades was damaged, with a long, thin tongue of rubber flapping loose at its edge, and it added a third note to the medley: clack across the glass, flap as the wiper reached the bottom of its arc, squeak as it started the journey back.
Jo found it nearly hypnotic as she sat there holding the toaster, trying not to think about the mountain of emails currently accumulating in her in-box or to wonder if Iain had remembered to wrap Clem up against the chill. She might have missed birthday parties and forgot what the theme of the week was at nursery, but she’d never once neglected to put a jacket on him when it was cold or wet. There was another data point for the mediator, she thought. She clutched the toaster closer and hoped the rain would ease up, just a bit, so they could carry boxes in without getting drenched.
The sky didn’t oblige, but Danny spotted someone who was just leaving and lurked at a distance until he could wedge the van into their parking space, which was really too small for it. He shut off the motor and turned to her, and his forehead crinkled up in a familiar expression of worry.
“You sure you’re all right?”
“Of course I’m all right, why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, you’re hugging the toaster as if it’s a teddy, for one thing.”
“I’m not,” Jo said defensively. “I don’t want to drop it, that’s all. I told you, it was expensive.”
“If you’re sure…”
“I’m sure. Let’s get on with it.”
Even at midmorning, the lowering clouds had left the flat nearly dark inside despite its tall, multi-paned windows, and after Danny had kicked the door shut behind him and put the last of the damp boxes down with a grunt and a thump, he looked round for a light switch.
“Aren’t there any overhead lights? I didn’t look for them before.”
“I don’t think so,” Jo said through chattering teeth. In addition to being gloomy, the interior of the flat was as cold as dead bones; she didn’t think anyone had stepped foot through the door since she and Danny had viewed the place almost a week before, an idea reinforced by the whiff of stale, shut-up air underlying the scent of fresh paint. “You can switch the heating on over there, though.”
Danny went to do it, then came back blowing on his hands and rubbing them together. He surveyed the mostly empty space, with the boxes in two short stacks and the toaster sitting still unplugged in the kitchen, and shook his head.
“You can’t live here like this, Jo. You haven’t got any lamps. You haven’t even got a bed. What are you going to do, sleep on a pile of toast?”
Jo felt tension start to gather in her temples and pressed her fingertips to them. “My mum’s got a camp bed. I’ll borrow that when I go back to collect my other clothes.”
“Yeah, but what about everything else? All the pans and towels and knives and things. If we don’t buy them now, it’ll be months before you get to it.”
“You can go,” Jo said. “I’ll give you my credit card and you can buy whatever you think I need. Or order it online if you’d rather. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter,” Danny said firmly. “Look, Jo, I know you don’t want to start over, but you’ve got to, so you may as well do it with things you really like, instead of crap ones that someone else chose for you.” He jingled the keys to the van in his pocket. “We’ve already planned to be away from the office for the whole day, so let’s just go and finish the job. You’ll feel better if you’re properly settled in a real home.”
Jo sat down on the nearest box, feeling suddenly drained and weary to her core. She was glad Danny had come to help, but at the moment she wished he would just go away and leave her alone. Hadn’t she done enough? Couldn’t she be finished with this part of it now?
“You’re a fine one to lecture me about being settled,” she said. “Didn’t you sleep on Scott’s sofa for two months before you moved into his spare bedroom?”
“Yeah, I did,” Danny said. “It was rubbish. I felt like a homeless person. And it proves you don’t want me shopping for you. I’ve never had a place all to myself. Who knows what I might buy?”
“I think you’ve forgotten which one of us is in charge again,” Jo said irritably, and then gave in. “Oh, all right. Today is already bad enough. Why not make it even worse for myself with a trip to Ikea?”
In another life, it might have been awkward for her to shop for home goods with Danny, but sometime in the last several weeks she’d lost the capacity for any embarrassment where he was concerned. She was fairly certain it had happened during the apocalyptic, drunken weekend she’d spent with him in Scott’s flat, hiding from everyone she knew: she had vague memories of wailing and crying; wanting to stop but being unable to; and being violently sick as Danny held her hair out of the way. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so so sorry, she’d said in the midst of it all, and he’d rubbed her back and said It’s all right, Jo.
At some point he’d made her lie down and covered her up with something soft, and she’d either fallen asleep or blacked out. Either way, there’d been nothing else until she woke up late the following afternoon, her head aching so badly it reminded her of that Greek myth where someone had birthed a full-grown deity from their skull. After you’d thrown up your bootlaces in front of someone, looking at cheap garlic presses together was nothing. She wondered briefly whether their shopping excursion would turn up in a nasty message-board posting—Spotted: Labour’s Jo Porter out and about with her researcher—but decided she didn’t give a fuck if it did. People were gossiping about her anyway. Let them add this to the list.
They wandered the maze of aisles, ate salmon and cake in the noisy café, and eventually loaded the van with an armchair in sections, a trio of lamps, and five big blue bags overstuffed with dishes and linens and all the other bits and bobs that went into daily living—including the garlic press, which Danny, who liked to cook, had insisted she buy. It was more than she thought she would use, and a few larger pieces of furniture were still being delivered and would have to be assembled by someone who wasn’t her, but she supposed it was better to have things and not need them than need them and not have them.
Danny set the GPS for the trip to their next destination, and she reclined her seat a little, feeling sleepy and still rather too full of cake. She thought of Clem again; was he missing her? Probably not. He would have had a happy, exciting day, and anyway he was used to her not being there. Well, she’d change that soon. She just needed a bit of time.
The purchases they’d had to cram into the rear of the van looked much smaller and lonelier as they sat like an oasis in the middle of the bare living-room floor, or so Jo thought later as she viewed their handiwork. Last came the mattress, which needed both of them to manhandle it up the front steps, through the door and into the larger bedroom, where she immediately let go the end she was holding and bent over, hands on knees, to catch her breath. She was going to have to start going to the gym again, she thought. She’d just ask Danny to pencil that in to her nonexistent free time, somewhere between the counselling sessions she kept cancelling and the evening receptions where she pretended to love drinking tonic water and lime.
“We should have got the Ikea one,” she said, muffled.
“You said they were crap.”
“They are crap.” Jo straightened up and rubbed at a stitch in her side. “They come rolled up, though.”
“Well, we’ve got this monstrous thing instead.” Danny said. He was mostly invisible behind the far end of the mattress, but tall enough to rest his chin on its upper edge, which made him look a bit like a mattress-human hybrid with a floppy-haired head. “Where do you want it?”
“Over there, near the window.” She pointed, and he dragged the mattress the rest of the way and lowered it to the floor with a whump that sent a fine cloud of dust flying and made Jo mentally add a broom to the list of things she still needed to acquire.
“Let’s see the view you’ll have from here.” Danny lay down, seeming not to notice the beads of rain on the mattress’ plastic wrapping, and folded his arms behind his head as if he were stargazing. “Come on, you too.”
Jo thought of refusing, but the opportunity to steal a moment’s rest was too tempting to decline. She crossed the room, stretched out gingerly on the other half of the mattress, and looked where he was looking.
“It’s a white ceiling, Danny. Riveting.”
Danny rolled his eyes. “Not the ceiling. The window.”
“What about it?”
“Well, you can see the sky through it, for starters.” He turned his head to the side to look at her. “Imagine lying right here at night, all tucked up in your cosy new bed. It’s raining outside, just like it is now, and you can hear the drops hitting the window and dripping from leaves in the garden, but you’re nice and snug under that feather duvet we bought, and you’ve got on, I don’t know, some flannel pyjamas, and you’ve just had a mug of something hot and you’re all ready to fall asleep.”
“Am I four years old in this fantasy?”
“No, you’re just treating yourself kindly for a change,” Danny said. “How does it sound?”
“It sounds all right.”
“Only all right?”
“So what if it does? I’ve just spent a month in a borrowed bed in a room that’s not mine anymore, and before that I spent at least six months lying at the farthest edge of my own bed so I wouldn’t accidentally brush against my husband and feel him pull away from me. After that, all right is enough, Danny. All right is just fine.”
Surprised at her own outburst, Jo sat up abruptly and turned her back so he couldn’t see anything too revealing on her face. It was very quiet for a minute, and then she heard the squeak and rustle of plastic as Danny sat up too. He scooted over to the edge of the mattress and sat beside her, not quite touching, with his shoes leaving damp prints on the floorboards.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have–”
“It’s okay.” She bit down on her lip a little too hard and flinched at the sudden salt-and-copper tang of blood. “You can go now if you like. I’m sure you’ve got to return the van.”
“Not until Monday morning.” Danny shifted uncomfortably on the mattress. “I’ll go if you really want me to, but I’d rather stay a bit longer and help you finish settling in. At least as much as you can settle, until the rest of your new things come.”
Jo licked her bitten lip, which was already starting to puff up, and glanced at him sidelong, finding only sincerity in his expression. She’d never known someone could be so frustrating and so endearing at the same time, but Danny was a past master at it.
“All right, you can stay,” she said. “If you help me wash up the dishes before I put them away.”
Danny laughed. “You really weren’t paying attention when we viewed this flat, were you? It’s got a dishwasher. All the modern conveniences under one roof. And it wasn’t easy to find a place with a dishwasher and a washing machine, either, so how about some credit for my researching skills?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
Together they unpacked and put away what they could–her books and clothes would have to wait for the shelves and wardrobe to arrive–and then Danny sat cross-legged on the floor to screw together the armchair and set it up on its stumpy little feet for her. When they’d finished, the space wasn’t much different to when they’d started, but she had a place to sit and a place to sleep, and the new lamps cast a friendly, reassuring light, even though they were sat on upended cardboard boxes instead of proper tables. It didn’t feel like home yet, but it was as close as she thought she could come for now, and she felt a warm upwelling of gratitude toward Danny for caring about her comfort when she couldn’t do it herself.
“Anything else?” He shoved the last bits of packing paper and plastic and cushioning foam down into one of the empty boxes and hoisted it up, tucking it under one arm.
“I don’t think so,” Jo said. She’d wanted to push him away earlier, but now that he really was about to go, she was a little panicky at the thought of being left here on her own. She’d forgot about her recurring nightmares in the distraction of the day, but they were still going to be there when she tried to sleep, weren’t they? She couldn’t pack those into a box to be carried outside and disposed of, much as she would have liked to.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it, then.” Danny hesitated, as if he were waiting for her to say something more. He’d had to put on his glasses to read the instructions for assembling the chair, and they made him look older and younger at the same time, like an overly serious schoolboy. Then he grinned, suddenly all mischief. “Don’t forget that mug of Horlicks before bed.”
“Stop it.” Jo tried for a stern face, but she could feel a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth, despite her worry about the long night that lay ahead. “Go home, Danny. Thanks for helping.”
“Glad to do it.” Danny readjusted the box under his arm and fished the van keys out of his pocket. “Night, Jo. Mind the bugs don’t bite.”