Fiona Gibson - The Mum Who Got Her Life Back

‘We get along fine,’ she replies. ‘Even the break-up wasn’t that traumatic, not really. It was my decision, finally, but he didn’t fight it. Danny said he almost felt cheated that no clothes had been torn up, no prawns stuffed in curtain poles, not a single incident of screaming.’

I smile. ‘So, you’ve divorced now?’

‘Oh, we weren’t married. But we were as good as, of course. The kids were eleven when we split …’

‘And their dad really was okay about it?’ I ask.

‘It seemed like it at the time,’ she replies. ‘I mean, he started dating fairly soon, and he met his current partner a year or so after we broke up. They’re still together – very happy, by all accounts. But maybe …’ She shrugs. ‘Later on, Danny told me he’d been devastated. I said, “Really? I didn’t think you minded that much.” And he said, “You make it sound like you just put an old armchair out for the council collection men.”’

I can’t help laughing at that.

‘Have you heard of Danny Raven?’ she asks.

‘Yes, of course …’

‘Well, that’s him.’

‘Really?’ For some reason, this feels like a punch to the gut. Her ex is Danny Raven, fêted film-maker, for Christ’s sake. So why’s she spending her Christmas Eve in the pub with the manager of a—

‘Jack?’ Her voice cuts into my thoughts.

‘Yes?’

The smile seemed to illuminate her face as she leans more closely towards me. ‘It’s very, very over between him and me. We get along fine, and we raise our kids together. But I am most definitively on my own now. I mean, there’s no one …’ She pauses. It feels as if my heart has stopped. Even closer she comes, her beautiful face before me now. As she kisses me lightly on the lips, I feel as if I might topple off my chair.

We pull apart and look at each other. Somehow, our hands have entwined under the table. There’s so much I want to say to her, I hardly know where to begin. ‘I’d really like to see you again,’ is all I can manage, ‘if that’s all right with you.’

Nadia nods. ‘I’d really like to see you too. But, um, there is something …’

Oh, shit – here it comes: the ‘but’.

‘Uh-huh?’ I say, feigning nonchalance.

‘There’s, er … a thing I need to tell you.’

I inhale deeply, various possibilities already forming in my mind: she’s in love with someone. Or something’s wrong – maybe she has an illness? Or an issue with her kids? – and she doesn’t want to get involved with anyone right now. Fine, it’s been a lovely evening; but maybe I really should get home, seeing as I still have a pile of presents to wrap for my parents, my brother and sister-in-law …

‘What is it?’ I ask lightly, draining my glass.

She looks down. ‘I have to tell you … I don’t actually work in Lush.’

‘ What? ’

She reddens and nods with a closed-lipped smile. I’m baffled now; so why did she spend twenty minutes chatting to me about bath bombs? ‘I’m so sorry,’ I murmur, shaking my head. ‘I just assumed …’

‘Yes, of course you did.’ She is laughing now.

‘But I accosted you and asked you all those questions about skin stuff! Why didn’t you just tell me to leave you alone?’

‘Because I didn’t want you to leave me alone.’

‘But what must you have thought?’ I laugh, mortified by my mistake.

‘You didn’t accost me,’ she insists. ‘Look – it’s me who should be apologising …’

‘Why?’ I am genuinely bewildered.

‘Well, I, er …’ She looks down at her hands, and then, as her gaze meets mine, something seems to somersault in the pit of my stomach. ‘I let you think I worked there,’ she says, smiling. ‘Actually, I sort of pretended …’

‘You pretended? Why?’

She pauses and pushes back that wayward strand of hair. ‘Because,’ she says simply, ‘I just wanted to talk to you.’

Molly once explained to me how a microwave works, how its radio waves ‘excite’ the atoms in food, causing them to jiggle about in a frenzy, making everything hot. I feel this way whenever I’m with Jack, even several months in – not hot in a menopausal sweat kind of way, but sort of shimmery and super-charged.

At certain times my setting switches to FULL POWER: e.g. during sex. To think, I’d almost forgotten what the point of it was, apart from making babies. Like knowing who’s number one in the charts, I’d begun to assume it belonged to a previous era of my life; something I could get along without quite contentedly.

The full-power thing kicks in even whenever Jack just happens to stroll nakedly across my bedroom. I should be used to him now, as we have been seeing each other regularly since Molly and Alfie headed back to uni after the Christmas break. But I wonder if the novelty aspect will ever wear off, as I still want to shout, ‘There’s a beautiful naked man wandering casually across my bedroom!’ And I want to take a quick snap of his luscious rear view with my phone and beam it onto a huge building. Yep, I want to objectify him, plus lots of other things, because the truth is – although he’d deny this to the hilt – he has a lovely body. It’s not intimidatingly buff, and that’s a plus, in my book, as I’ve always found the idea of a six-pack disconcerting (especially as, size-wise, I am a generous fourteen). Jack has more your casual runner’s-type physique: fairly slim, although he insists that’s just the way he’s built – ‘A bag of bones when I was kid’ – rather than due to his endeavours on the fitness front.

I have to say, his bottom is especially lovely. Corinne has a word she uses, to describe an attractive male rear: biteable , adjective, meaning ‘evokes lust’. It suits Jack’s perfectly. I do have a few pictures of him on my phone – not of his bottom, but his lovely face, and of the two of us together; selfies taken when we’ve been out and about, doing the kind of things newish couples do: strolling through parks, visiting galleries, having picnics and walks along the river. When no one’s looking I’m prone to browsing through them. My boyfriend. It feels weird, using that term at fifty-one years old, but nothing else seems quite right. Jack is the kind of man I’d imagined, occasionally, might be out there somewhere: the one I’d kept missing as we went about our business in the same city all these years.

The long, cold winter has blossomed into a glorious spring, and by now I have met his friends and the volunteers at his shop. Iain claimed to have remembered me from when I popped in, and I was treated to one of his hot-tap coffees before Jack could dive for the kettle himself.

This coming weekend, significantly, I am meeting Lori. He’s been suggesting it for a while now, but I’ve been nervous. He’d also told me about his ex Elaine’s litany of boyfriends, and how they’ve tended to just appear at her house, to be presented to Lori, and then in a few weeks they’d be gone.

‘It’s not like that with us,’ Jack has insisted, ‘and she knows all about you. She really wants to meet you and thinks I’m hiding you away – or making you up.’

‘What, even though you’ve shown her pictures of me?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. She’s starting to think her dad’s a sad bastard who’s taken pictures of some random woman off the internet and is pretending she’s his girlfriend.’ He laughed, then turned serious. ‘She also knows your kids are academic types, at uni, and she said, “You’re not ashamed of me, are you, Dad?”’

Well, that did it. We agreed that I could go round to his place one Saturday, when Lori was there, and he’d make lunch.