Anyway, that evening there was a whole jumble of thoughts. I lay in bed half-asleep, thinking about David, and the Scottish detective, and coming down off the roof to find Chas and eventually I got these thoughts unknotted, and when I woke up in the morning I decided it would be a good idea to find out where Martin’s wife and children lived, and then go and talk to them all and see if there was any chance of getting the family back together. Because if that worked, then Martin wouldn’t get so eaten up about some things, and he’d have somebody rather than nobody, and I’d have something to do for forty or fifty minutes an hour, and it would help everybody.
But I was a hopeless detective. I knew Martin’s wife’s name was Cindy, so I looked Cindy Sharp up in the phone book, and she wasn’t there, and I ran out of ideas after that. So I asked Jess, because I didn’t think JJ would approve of my plan, and she found all the information we needed in about five minutes, on a computer. But then she wanted to come with me to see Cindy, and I said she could. I know, I know. But you try telling her she can’t have something she wants.
Jess
I got on Dad’s computer, and put “Cindy Sharp” into Google, and I found an interview she’d given to some woman’s magazine when Martin had gone to prison. “Cindy Sharp talks for the first time about her heartbreak” and all that. You could even click on a picture of her and her two girls. Cindy looked like Penny, except older and a bit fatter, because of having had kids and that. And what’s the betting that Penny looked like the fifteen-year-old, except that the fifteen-year-old was even slimmer than Penny, and had bigger tits or whatever? They’re tossers, aren’t they, men like Martin? They think women are like fucking laptops or whatever, like, My old one’s knackered and anyway, you can get ones that are slimmer and do more stuff now.
So I read the interview, and it said she lived in this village called Torley Heath, about forty miles outside London. And if she was trying to stop people like us from knocking on the door to tell her to get back with her husband, then she made a big mistake, because the interviewer described exactly where her house is in the village—opposite an old-fashioned corner shop, next door but one to the village school. She told us all this because she wanted us to know how idealistic or whatever Cindy’s life is. Apart from her ex-husband being in prison for sleeping with a fifteen-year-old.
We decided not to tell JJ. We were pretty sure he’d stop us for some bullshit reason or another. He’d say, “It’s none of your business,” or, “You’ll fuck up the last chance he’s got.” But we thought we had a strong argument, Maureen and I. Our argument was this. Maybe Cindy did hate Martin because he was a real playa who went anywhere with anyone. But now he was suicidal, and he probably wouldn’t go anywhere with anyone, or at least not for a while. So basically, if she wouldn’t take him back, she had to hate him enough to want him to die. And that’s a lot of hate. True, he hadn’t ever said he wanted to get back with her, but he needed to be in a secure domestic environment, in a place like Torley Heath. It was better to do nothing in a place where there was nothing to do than in London, where there was trouble—teenage girls and nightclubs and tower-blocks. That’s what we felt.
So we had a day out. Maureen made horrible like old-fashioned sandwiches with egg and stuff in them, which I couldn’t eat. And we got the tube to Paddington, then the train to Newbury, and then a bus to Torley Heath. I’d been worried that Maureen and I wouldn’t have much to say to each other, and we’d get really bored, and I’d end up doing something stupid, because of the boredom. But it really wasn’t like that, mostly because of me, and the effort I put in. I decided that I was going to be like an interviewer type-person, and I’d spend the journey finding out about Maureen’s life, no matter how boring or depressing it was. The only trouble was that it was actually too boring and depressing to listen to, so I sort of switched off when she was talking, and thought up the next question. A couple of times she looked at me funny, so I’m guessing that quite often she had just told me something and then I asked her about it again. Like once, I tuned back in to hear her go, something something something met Frank. So I went, When did you meet Frank, but I think what she’d just said was, That was when I met Frank. So I’d have to work on that, if I was ever to be an interviewer. But let’s face it, I wouldn’t be interviewing people who did nothing and had a disabled son, would I? So it would be easier to concentrate, because they’d be talking about their new films and other stuff you’d actually want to know about.
Anyway, the point was that we went through a whole journey to the middle of fucking nowhere without me asking her whether she had sex doggy style or anything like that. And what I realized then was that I’d come a long way since New Year’s Eve. I’d grown as a person. And that made me think that our story was sort of coming to an end, and it was going to be a happy ending. Because I’d grown as a person, and also we were in this period where we were sorting out each other’s problems. We weren’t just sitting around moping. That’s when stories end, isn’t it? When people show they’ve learned things, and problems get solved. I’ve seen loads of films like that. We’d sort out Martin today, and then turn our minds to JJ, and then me, and then Maureen. And we’d meet on the roof after ninety days, and smile, and hug, and know that we had moved on.
The bus stop was right outside the village shop that the article in the magazine had gone on about. So we got off the bus and stood outside the shop and looked across the road to see what we could see. What we saw was this little cottagey sort of place with a low wall, and you could look into the garden, and in the garden there were two little girls all wrapped up in hats and scarves and they were playing with a dog. So I went to Maureen, Do you know the names of Martin’s kids? And she was like, Yes, they’re called Polly and Maisie—which seemed about right, I thought. I could imagine Martin and Cindy having kids called Polly and Maisie, which are sort of old-fashioned posh names, so everyone could pretend that Mr Darcy or whatever lived next door. So I shouted, Oo-o, Polly! Maisie! And they looked at us and came towards us, and that was my detective work over.
We knocked on the door and Cindy answered, and she looked at me as if she half-recognized me, and I was like, I’m Jess. I’m one of the Toppers’ House Four, and I was, you know, linked to your husband or whatever in the newspapers. Which was a lie, by the way. (That was me telling her it was a lie, not me telling you. I really wish I knew where speech marks or whatever went. I can see the point of them now.)
And she said, Ex-husband, which was sort of an unfriendly and unhelpful start.
And I went, Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it?
And she went, Is it?
And I went, Yes, it is. Because he doesn’t have to be your ex-husband.
And she went, Oh, yes he does.
And we hadn’t even gone through the front door.
At that point Maureen goes, Do you think we could come in and talk to you? I’m Maureen. I’m also a friend of Martin’s. We’ve come down from London on the train.
And the bus, I said. I just wanted her to know we’d made an effort.
And Cindy said, I’m sorry, come in. Not I’m sorry, fuck off home, which is what I thought she was going to say. She was apologizing for her bad manners in making us stand out on the doorstep. So I was like, Oh, this is going to be easy. In ten minutes I’ll have bullied her into taking him back.
So we walk into the cottage, and it’s cosy in there, but not all like out of a magazine, which I thought it would be. The furniture didn’t really match, and it was old, and it smelled of the dog a bit. She showed us through to the sitting room and there was this geezer in there sitting by the fire. He was nice-looking, younger than her, and I thought, Oh-oh, he’s got his feet under the table. Because he was listening to a Walkman with his shoes off, and you don’t listen to a Walkman with your shoes off in someone’s house if you’re just visiting, do you?