across the carpet. ‘Look, Nic, you don’t mind if I grab the bathroom first, do you? I brought a bag with me, in case I didn’t make it home, and it has to be somewhere around here, with work clothes and my toothbrush and stuff. I can be in and out in five minutes, I promise.’
‘That’s fine. Just let me pop in there for a wee, then you go ahead. There’s nowhere I have to be. It is Saturday after all. In fact, I think I might go straight back to bed.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s all right for you, I’m sure, but Saturday happens to be a working day for some of us. Me, at least. Oh, God, I knew we shouldn’t have had the party on a Friday.’
Nicci walked back up the stairs to the bathroom, with Jilly hot on her heels, and sat down on the loo, leaving the door open a crack so they could carry on talking. ‘If it had been up to me, we wouldn’t have had a party at all.’
‘Spoilsport!’ Jilly plonked her bottom down on the top step. ‘Don’t you want to put it all behind you, have a bit of fun? That was what last night was meant to be about, you know. You, and your future.’
‘I know, I know. Just don’t rush me, okay?’ Nicci flushed the loo and peered at herself in the mirror as she splashed a handful of water over her face. What a sight! Her brown hair hung in straggly knots and her roots needed doing, her eyes were distinctly bloodshot, and there were big streaky blobs of black around each one, where she hadn’t bothered taking off her mascara before falling into bed.
At least Mark wasn’t here to see her looking such a fright. Not that she was sure he would have noticed. He seemed to have stopped noticing a lot lately. She’d even come home with a streak of green paint across one ear once and he hadn’t said a word. The inevitable familiarity setting in after living with someone for so long, she supposed. Maybe not just so long but too long, she’d thought, as she’d stormed off to the reunion that fateful evening and drunkenly fallen into the waiting arms of Jason Brown.
Oh my God! Jason Brown, a man she hadn’t seen for years and would probably never see again. What on earth had she been thinking? The truth was that she hadn’t been thinking at all. Well, not clearly. Somehow she’d left her sensible head at home that night. It was where sensible seemed to belong. With Mark, who probably had the word Sensible stamped all the way through him like a stick of Blackpool rock. And, talking of rock, yes, she’d rocked the boat. No denying that, but maybe it had needed rocking. Just not quite so hard.
And if she hadn’t, they might still be together now, mightn’t they? She and Mark. The so-called perfect couple. That’s what everyone else seemed to think. But the cracks had already been there, spreading slowly through their lives, and their marriage, long before Jason Brown came along to open them up as wide as the Grand Canyon. Mark must have known that as well as she did, deep down. It was just that neither of them had talked about it. They’d both just let life drift along, and themselves drift slowly apart, seemingly going nowhere, or not together anyway.
As she kept telling herself, she may have been the one to push their marriage over the cliff but, if things had been right, they wouldn’t have been so dangerously close to the edge in the first place, would they? So, who knows? Maybe it would all have been over sooner or later anyway. Not that there was any comfort in that, and if she was trying to get rid of her own feelings of guilt it really wasn’t working.
‘Come on, Nic. Get a move on. I haven’t got all day!’ Jilly’s voice cut into her thoughts as she elbowed her out of the way and started running the taps in the bath. ‘Got any nice smellies? I need something to get rid of the whiff of stale wine. I swear someone must have tipped a whole bottle over me, ’cos I’m sure I didn’t drink that much. According to the doctors at the fertility clinic, I’m not really supposed to be drinking at all. You know, getting my body ready for whenever we go for our next try, but we were celebrating, weren’t we?’ Jilly lifted an arm and buried her nose into the crease. ‘Even so, I didn’t drink enough to smell this bad. Even my armpits reek!’
Nicci pulled a face. She probably didn’t smell too good herself. ‘Look on the windowsill. I think there’s some bubble bath left. The blue one, supposed to be for stress relief or some such nonsense. Don’t touch the lime and coconut bath bomb though. It’s my last one, from Christmas, and I’m saving it.’
‘What for?’ Jilly laughed, picking it up anyway and crinkling its cellophane wrapping. ‘Next Christmas? That’ll be here soon enough, and then you’ll probably get given another lot.’
‘I doubt it. So just keep your mucky paws off it, all right? And don’t use all the hot water.’
‘Yes, ma’am!’ Jilly saluted, peeling off her crumpled dress as she shoved Nicci outside and closed the door behind her.
Nicci made her way around the house, opening curtains and picking up the worst of the rubbish from the living room floor. She was pleased to find there were no more unexpected guests lurking in armchairs or sleeping it off under the table, although under the table turned out to be not a very pretty sight, having caught the worst of the fallout from the mangled cake. It looked like she’d be spending the best part of the day with a hoover, a wet cloth and a pile of bin bags.
But all that could wait, at least until Jilly had gone. Breakfast and coffee first. She filled the coffee machine and plugged it in, and pulled out two mugs from a cupboard. But when she opened the fridge door, there was no milk. And no eggs. All the bread had been used up making last night’s sandwiches, so no toast either. And some kind soul had finished off the orange juice with bits in, and put the empty carton back in the fridge as if hoping she might not notice.
She made the coffees, automatically adding two heaped spoons of sugar into one before remembering that it was meant to be for Jilly and not for Mark, and having to pour the whole mugful away again. She made Jilly another and left it on the worktop. If she was much longer in the bath, it would probably go cold before she got to drink it. Tough. Serve her right for not getting up and out sooner.
Nicci’s stomach growled ominously, in a Feed me right this minute kind of a way. She realised now just how little she had eaten at the party. There were always the leftovers, she supposed, as she carried her mug through and surveyed what was still out on the table. Needs must, and all that. She picked up a sandwich. The filling, whatever it had once been, seemed to have been picked out of it, and the bread that was left was so hard it could break teeth! Maybe not.
One thing there was still plenty of, of course, was the cake. By the time it had been cut last night nobody had been particularly interested in eating it. It would seem it had been viewed more as a symbol of the occasion than a genuine foodstuff. But it would be a shame to let it go to waste, after all Jilly’s hard work.
She popped a clump of it in her mouth and chewed. Not bad, actually. The jam was a bit sweet for this time of the morning, when a bacon and egg butty would have been her meal of choice, but it was pretty good just the same. The little icing bride and groom sat together now on the edge of the cake board, where someone must have helpfully repositioned them, the girl staring out towards the kitchen, the boy tipped over sideways and resting on his head.
She picked him up and wiped the crumbs off him before turning him the right way up again and setting the two of them face-to-face. They may only be edible figures, but she didn’t like to see them the way they had been last night, backs turned towards each other. She thought maybe, when the cake itself was all gone, she might hang on to them. Silly, obviously, wanting souvenirs, but there was something about them, and about who they were supposed to be, that meant she couldn’t just throw them away.
She could hear the bath water gurgling noisily down the drain as Jilly flung open the bathroom door with a loud bang and dripped her way hurriedly down the stairs. She had wrapped one of Nicci’s fluffy pink towels around her, or tried to, as there was barely enough fabric to reach around and meet in the middle, let alone conceal what was left of her modesty. Had she had any, that was.
‘Got a bigger towel, Nic? And a hairdryer? God only knows what Sheila is going to say when I roll up late. I can’t risk looking a mess as well. I hope that wine smell’s worn off. She won’t want me