He’s gurgling happily through his milky vomit as he watches Noah and Emmy dancing to Sesame Street, and as Lauren picks him up, she wonders what the hell she’s doing. What is a married mother of three children under five doing going to meet a man she was in love with over twenty years ago? She looks at the children she adores, knowing that what she’s about to do can only end badly. But she feels powerless to stop it.
‘Hello, my gorgeous boy,’ exclaims Rose, as she opens her front door to see Noah bounding up the garden path towards her.
‘Hi Nana,’ he says, as he wraps his chubby arms around her neck.
‘Goodness,’ says Rose, as Lauren follows him with the car seat in one hand and Emmy clinging onto the other. ‘You look gorgeous too. Are you sure it’s not some fancy man you’re going to see instead of your sister?’
Lauren instantly feels her cheeks redden, knowing she’s going to have to get better at this if she’s going to get away with it.
‘I’ll get going, if you don’t mind,’ says Lauren on the front doorstep. ‘I won’t be too long.’
‘Listen, if it means you having a good chat with Kate and sorting everything out, you can take as long as you like.’
Lauren smiles tightly, gives each of the children a kiss and waves as she pulls away.
By the time she gets to the Fox and Hounds pub, her stomach is in knots and she can’t even remember the route she took to get there. She flips down the sun visor and inspects herself in the mirror one last time, smoothing her eyebrows with a finger adorned with gold jewellery.
‘Oh my God,’ she says, unable to believe that she was about to walk in with the proof that she’s married to someone else sparkling on her ring finger. She eases off her wedding band and wonders if Justin had seen it when they’d met at the petrol station. Surely it would have been the first thing he’d looked for, just as she had. It clangs unceremoniously as she drops it in the ashtray on the centre console – the irony not lost on her.
Lauren steps furtively into the unfamiliar pub, unable to remember the last time she walked into somewhere like this on her own. She crosses her fingers that Justin is going to present himself immediately, as the little confidence she’s enforced upon herself is fading fast.
Her eyes scan the low-ceilinged room, frantically peering into the darkest nooks in the corners, hoping to see him. Fear clasps itself around her diaphragm, as the possibility of recognizing someone else infiltrates her brain, or worse, someone recognizing her. What if a former colleague of Simon’s, one of the hundreds that she’s been introduced to over the years, is here and sees her? Would she pretend that she’s waiting for a girlfriend and ignore Justin when he arrives? Or should she introduce him as her brother? What would he think of her if she did? How would she explain it away?
Stop! she silently screams as the never-ending questions circle in her head.
‘Hi, what can I get you?’ asks the smiling girl behind the bar.
Lauren hadn’t even realized she was standing at it. ‘Oh, erm, can I get a gin and tonic please?’ she says, still looking nervously around.
‘Is that a large?’
She wants to say yes because she feels she needs it, but she’s driving, and she’d never go over the limit.
‘No thanks,’ she says. ‘Just a small one.’
‘You’re early,’ says a voice beside her. ‘I was hoping to get here before you.’
She spins around and locks eyes with the man she loved and lost over two decades ago.
‘Am I?’ is all she can say. She was quite sure she timed it so that she would arrive ten minutes after the agreed time. The nerves must have got to her more than she thought.
Justin leans in to kiss her cheek, his skin soft and stubble-free. ‘You look amazing,’ he says, drinking her in with his eyes.
‘What, in this old thing?’ she says, out of habit whenever anyone pays her a compliment. She pulls at the bottom of her blouse and remembers Kate’s words. ‘Why do you always do yourself down whenever anyone says something nice?’ She remembers being at one of Kate’s swanky do’s and a handsome man telling her that she had beautiful hair. She’d immediately put a hand to it and said, ‘I imagine it looks like I’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.’
‘Just say thank you,’ Kate had said, as they watched the man make a hasty retreat. It saddens Lauren that she was so insecure about how she looked, even before having children, when she felt like a different woman entirely. She wishes she knew then what she knows now.
‘It brings out the colour in your eyes,’ says Justin.
Thank you,’ says Lauren, looking at the floor.
He orders a lager top, and a surge of melancholy engulfs her as she’s transported back to when she’d managed to blag her way into Zen’s nightclub wearing a crop top and pleated mini skirt, thinking her attempt at looking like Britney Spears as a schoolgirl was a good idea to try and pass as someone older. It had worked though, and with Justin being over eighteen, they’d happily drunk lager tops and vodka until the early hours before crashing at someone’s house whose parents were away.
As they move away from the bar with their drinks, Lauren feels Justin’s hand in the small of her back, guiding her, reassuring her. If she were with Simon, he’d either be stomping off in front of her
