imported Italian cars from a showroom off the Holloway Road in north London. They brought in small quantities of pre-ordered merchandise from Turin, Milan and Rome, driving the cheaper left-hand-drive cars back to the UK themselves, doing the conversion to right-hand drive in their body shop, or else they bought second-hand in the boroughs of Islington, Camden and Barnet. Above their modest showroom a row of green, white and red Italian flags streamed in the weak sunlight of north London, above the name of the firm – Baresi Brothers.
They made a good living, enough to support both their families, although like many small businessmen they found there was either not enough work or more than they could handle.
Now when trade was slow, Michael produced the latest pictures of his daughter, Chloe, and spread them across the gleaming red bonnet of an old Ferrari Modena. If marriage to Naoko had calmed Michael down, Paulo thought, then the birth of Chloe seemed to have tamed him.
As they admired the latest portraits of Chloe, the brothers were joined by Ginger, the showroom’s receptionist. Ginger was married and somewhere in her late thirties, and Paulo couldn’t help noticing that Ginger’s breasts seemed to rise and fall in slow motion as she sighed with longing at the sight of baby Chloe in all her gummy-mouthed glory.
‘Oh, she’s gorgeous, Mike,’ Ginger said.
And Michael smiled proudly, completely smitten by his daughter. Ginger looked all dreamy-eyed, as she went to put on the kettle.
‘They love it if you’ve got kids,’ Michael told his brother when they were alone.
Paulo smiled. ‘I guess it’s a sign that your wedding tackle’s in full working order, and you’re a good provider, and all of that. You know – a good mate.’
‘Yes, all that old bollocks,’ Michael said, as he considered his daughter’s pouting beauty. ‘It drives them wild, doesn’t it?’
Megan didn’t remember too much about the party. A crumbling Victorian house big enough to provide a home to half a dozen trainee doctors. The sweet and sickly smell of dope. All these people she knew acting ten years younger than they really were. And all this really bad music – or at least music she didn’t know.
Then suddenly there was this guy – Kirk, definitely Kirk – and he was different from the other people there.
For a start he wasn’t as unhealthy-looking as all the young doctors. He didn’t drink as much, or smoke as much. He didn’t have the cynical line in chat that Megan’s contemporaries had developed as a way of dealing with the parade of disease and deprivation that was suddenly passing through their lives, expecting to be saved.
He just stood there, a fit, good-looking Australian boy – more reserved than you would expect a guy like that to be – smiling politely as the finest minds of their generation got stoned and drunk while talking shop.
‘Everybody’s so smart,’ he said, and it made her laugh.
‘Is that what you think? I thought this lot were just good at passing exams.’
‘No, they’re really smart. Got to be smart to be a doctor, haven’t you? I don’t understand what they’re talking about half the time. All these medical terms. Someone was talking about a patient who was PFO.’
Megan smiled. ‘That just means, Pissed – Fell Over,’ she said.
He frowned. ‘It does?’
She nodded, and let him into the secret language of medical students. Raising her voice above the bad music, while he tilted his handsome head towards her, Megan told him about ash cash (money paid to a doctor for signing cremation forms), house red (blood), FLKs (funny-looking kids), GLMs (good-looking mums) and the great fallback diagnosis, GOK (God only knows) – all the mocking slang that protected them from the sheer naked horror of their jobs.
‘But you still got to be smart, though,’ he insisted.
What an open and honest thing to say, she thought. And so unlike all the people she knew, who couldn’t open their mouths without trying to make some cynical little joke. She looked at him – really looked at him – for the first time. ‘What do you do?’
‘I teach,’ he said. It was the last thing she would have expected. ‘I teach people how to dive. You know – scuba dive.’
She gestured with her glass, taking in the party, the flat, the city.
‘Not around here.’
His wide white smile. Megan loved his smile. ‘In sunnier places. You ever dive?’
‘No, but I’ve got a certificate for swimming a length in my pyjamas. Not really the same thing, is it?’
He laughed. ‘It’s a start.’
He liked her. She could tell. It happened quite a lot. She knew she wasn’t as pretty as Jessica, who had a kind of baby-faced beauty about her, or as tall as Cat, who was as long-limbed and rangy as a dancer, but men liked Megan. They liked all those curves and a face that, because of some genetic accident, somehow looked slightly younger than her age. They liked that contrast. A girl’s face and a woman’s body, Will always said excitedly, heading straight for Megan’s breasts.
She smiled at Kirk, and he did her the honour of blushing. It felt good to have this kind of contact after being with Will for so long, and having to make sure she didn’t send out the wrong signals. Tonight she could send out any signal she liked.
Then suddenly there was finally a song she knew and loved – the one where Edwyn Collins sings, ‘Well, I never met a girl like you before.’
‘That can be our song,’ Kirk said, grinning sheepishly, and usually such ham-fisted flirting would have turned her right off. But she let him get away with it because she liked him too. Right at that moment, she liked him a lot. He wasn’t part of her world and that was fine. She was ready for a break from her world.
And then there was that moment she had almost forgotten about after all the years as someone’s girlfriend – the look of recognition in the eyes of someone you don’t know yet – and suddenly his face was an irresistible object, and their heads were slightly tilting to one side, and finally they were kissing.
He was a good kisser and that was nice too. Enthusiastic, but not trying to clean your tonsils with his tongue. A really good kisser, Megan thought – just the right amount of give and take. She liked that too. But what she liked best was that he could have probably fucked any girl at that party, but he clearly wanted to fuck her.
And Megan thought, you’re in luck, mate.
So they found themselves in one of the bedrooms, and Megan started to relax a little when she saw there was a lock on the door, and soon she was fulfilling her biological destiny on a stack of coats, while downstairs Edwyn Collins sang, ‘I never met a girl like you before,’ and, yes, somehow it felt like it was just for them.
Megan smiled to herself as her sister came through the turnstile.
Jessica looked gorgeous passing through the crowd, Megan thought, like a woman without a care in the world among a mob of tube-weary commuters. Men of all ages turned for a second look – checking out the slim legs and that effortlessly size 10 frame and the round baby face that often made strangers believe she was the youngest of the sisters.
Looking at Jessica made Megan feel shabby and fat. That was the trouble with curves. You had to watch them or they got out of control. Megan was suddenly aware that she had only fingercombed her hair that morning, and that she had to stop keeping Mars bars in her desk.
They hugged each other at the ticket barrier.
‘Look at us,’ Megan said, linking arms with her sister. ‘Grace Kelly and a crack whore.’
Jessica sized up her sister.
‘You look exhausted, Dr Jewell. Doesn’t that sound great? Dr Jewell, Dr Jewell.’
‘I’ve