‘Well, he’s very pretty,’ was Chloe’s summing-up of Max when Neve showed her the photo he’d insisted she take on her new iPhone. ‘You want to watch out for the pretty ones, Neevy. They know they don’t have to try too hard.’
‘He’s actually been trying a lot harder than I thought he would,’ Neve said in surprise as she thought about how well-behaved Max had been the night before. He’d kept the salacious remarks to a minimum, and been a really good sport about bowling and cheap pizza. ‘It’s odd, really. I know he thinks I’m a bit of a rarity because I’m the only woman he’s ever met who’s fairly immune to his charms, but he hasn’t tried anything.’ She bit her lip. ‘It’s probably because he doesn’t fancy me.’
Chloe gave Neve a long-suffering look. ‘I’ve got a beast of a hangover so I haven’t got the energy to try and persuade you that you’re completely fanciable.’ She studied Max’s photo again, then started scrolling through Neve’s pictures of her new best ever friends. ‘Men that look like this don’t do anything they don’t want to do. Compared to his usual type of girl, you must seem like a breath of fresh air. I bet he can’t wait to try and corrupt you.’
‘Really, he’s not like that,’ Neve protested. ‘He’s hardly even kissed me and we did agree that kissing was allowed.’
‘Define hardly even kissing,’ Chloe demanded, and Neve was forced to describe the very lacklustre kisses she’d been getting and how last night she thought they were finally progressing when Max had stopped.
‘Is it weird that I want Max to kiss me when I’m in love with William?’ she asked worriedly.
‘Is William remaining a kiss-free zone too?’ Even with a debilitating hangover, Chloe hadn’t lost the ability to arch her right eyebrow. ‘No? Well, then, go for it. No point in having a pretty pretend boyfriend and remaining kiss-free. He’s probably waiting for you to give him a signal that he won’t offend your maidenly sensibilities if he really goes for it.’
‘Shut up,’ Neve said without any rancour because the memory of Max when he was really going for it made her feel a little light-headed.
‘When I was first going out with Andrew, way, way back, we’d spend hours snogging on his bed with the door open so his mum could hear if anything was being unzipped or unbuttoned and rush in with glasses of Ribena.’ Chloe sighed longingly. ‘I really miss that. I even miss the glasses of Ribena.’ She looked over Neve’s head. ‘I think that guy is trying to get your attention.’
Neve looked around, her eyes widening in horror as she saw Douglas coming towards their table with a thin-lipped Charlotte bringing up the rear. Charlotte was wearing a dove-grey Juicy Couture tracksuit tucked into grey Ugg boots (no faux Primark ones for her) and the general impression was that of a storm cloud coming Neve’s way, if storm clouds liked to accessorise with copious amounts of fake tan, gold jewellery and eyelash extensions.
‘Mind if we join you?’ Douglas asked, already sitting down. ‘It’s just there’s a half-hour wait for the next table.’
Charlotte was forced to sit down next to Neve, who tried to scooch her chair as far away as possible, while Douglas introduced himself to Chloe who said she could see the family resemblance, which was a lie because Douglas, like Celia, favoured the Celtic side of the family and was generally considered to be the looker of the Slater clan.
Neve gulped down the rest of her peppermint tea as Chloe and Douglas chattered quite happily about the medicinal benefits of a fry-up on a hangover, even Charlotte chiming in with a completely inane remark about how she couldn’t stand fried tomatoes. ‘We have to go now,’ Neve said, managing to extricate herself, her bag and her coat from the back of her chair without once touching Charlotte.
‘I thought she’d look like a Gorgon,’ Chloe remarked as they walked back along Muswell Hill Broadway. ‘Sulky as a crow, but nothing Medusa-like about her. It was a bit of an anti-climax.’
‘Next time she’s screaming at me, I’ll be sure to make a recording on my phone,’ Neve snapped, her good humour completely gone, especially when she realised that it was too late to go back home and change before presenting herself at Max’s front door.
There was nothing for it but to turn up in what she was wearing: jeans, a long-sleeved thermal, a crumpled summer dress over them and one of her ubiquitous cardigans, her hair scraped back in a ponytail to keep it off her face when she was cycling, and her tattiest pair of Converses. It didn’t help matters that her mother phoned while Neve was in the off-licence trying to find a decent bottle of red wine for under a fiver.
Ten minutes later, Neve was standing outside a large terraced Victorian house on a wide tree-lined avenue behind Crouch End Broadway and trying to get her mother off the phone. Margaret Slater had supposedly called because she’d read an article in the Sunday Mirror about binge-drinking and wanted to know exactly how many units Celia got through in a week, but now she was gently haranguing Neve because she’d just spoken to Douglas ‘and he said that you didn’t even say hello to her’.
‘She didn’t say hello to me first,’ Neve said indignantly. ‘I can’t believe you’re telling me off about this.’ Especially as her mother didn’t know the half of it, or even a quarter of just how badly Charlotte had bullied her at school. And she certainly wasn’t going to admit that nine years later, she was still letting Charlotte get away with it. ‘It’s not like you’re a fully paid-up member of her fan club.’
‘Well, I still think that Douglas rushed into things, but what’s done is done and when they have children …’
‘She’s pregnant?’ Neve stilled in horror. ‘Oh God, no!’
‘Well, not yet but they’ve been married nearly three years and she’s not getting any younger.’
Charlotte was five months older than Neve, but this didn’t seem like the right moment to bring that up, not when she was contemplating the awful idea that there might be a genetic replica of Charlotte roaming the earth before too long. ‘Can we not talk about this now, Mum? I’m actually at a friend’s house,’ Neve said, as the front door suddenly swung open to reveal Max standing there in jeans, a Clash T-shirt and a quizzical expression.
‘I saw you come up the path five minutes ago,’ he said.
Neve pointed at her phone and mouthed the words ‘my mother’ at him.
‘I’m just saying, Neevy, I know she can be very difficult and I know there was all that business when you were at school, but you have to live together and it would be much easier if you just let things lie.’
‘But why should I be the one who has to—’
‘It’s up to you to take the high road because her mother – well, you know I don’t like to speak ill of people, but that family, they’re as common as muck. She always says that her father lives abroad, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was in prison.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Neve gritted, as Max hefted her bike up his steps and wheeled it inside. ‘Will you just stop going on about it, please?’
It was another three, very long minutes before her mother hung up and Neve felt crumpled and frazzled and excruciatingly embarrassed because Max had been standing there listening to her bleat, ‘Mum? Mum, I really have to go now,’ in a never-ending loop.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said, and more because she was in need of comfort than because of anything Chloe had said earlier, Neve waited until Max had shut the front door behind her, then reached up to brush her lips against his cheek and give him a quick clumsy hug. ‘I brought wine,’ she added, thrusting the bottle at him.
‘Poor Neevy,’ Max cooed. ‘Were you just being told off?’
‘No. Well, kind of, in between being lectured about the dangers of binge-drinking.’ Neve scowled as she tried to run her fingers through her hair and remembered that she hadn’t even had time to free it from its constricting ponytail. ‘Is my bike OK there?’
Max had propped her bike against the hall wall, and as there had been five buzzers on the intercom, it stood to reason that there was going to be at least one other
resident who objected to its presence. Probably not as loudly as Charlotte, but even so.
‘Oh, it’s fine,’ Max assured her. He gestured to the stairs. ‘Second floor. Come on, Keith’s been beside himself all afternoon.’
She followed Max up the stairs, riveted by the sight of his long, lean legs and the tiny strip of skin exposed between T-shirt and jeans when they got to the top floor and he reached up to unlock his front door. Then he was brusquely pushed to one side as Keith scurried out into the hall to greet them, circled Neve a couple of times, then bounded up a flight of stairs painted bright blue and looked back at them expectantly.
‘I think Keith wants to give you the guided tour,’ Max said, helping Neve out of her coat. ‘I’ll be up in a minute.’
The stairs took a sharp turn into a narrow hallway, which opened out into a huge living room. Neve stood there for a moment and looked around as she got her bearings. The bright blue floorboards took some getting used to so she averted her gaze to the pictures on the bright white walls; Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe hung above the fireplace and on the opposite wall staring back at her was Her Majesty the Queen, with Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols emblazoned across her face. There was a black leather sofa and armchairs, a glass coffee table, an interesting art installation-cum-floorlight that looked like the DNA strand for the double helix, six speakers mounted at different points along the walls, a huge telly and a stack of electronic things underneath it. She was in the domain of a modern bachelor.
Where she had books, books and yet more books, Max’s shelves had proper vinyl records and CDs. There were piles of magazines neatly catalogued and just one set of bookshelves, which was where Neve headed. She hadn’t expected Max to share her taste in literature – there weren’t many men who bid aggressively on eBay for out-of-print Virago Modern Classics – but she was astounded to discover that he had no books. Well, he had coffee-table books bearing the names of fashion designers and photographers, but there were absolutely no novels apart from three lurid, glittery paperbacks. With some trepidation, Neve pulled one of them from the shelf: Goals and Gucci by Mandy McIntyre. Wasn’t that the name of Max’s pet WAG? Neve gave an excited little squeal and opened the book …
It was a good day to go shopping, Brandy Ballantyne thought to herself as she scooped up the keys to her Golf GTI and—
Max’s hand smacked down on the page. ‘Nuh-huh, you want to read it, then you do it on your own time. I’m not having you stand there and snigger over my prose style.’
Neve tried to hold on to the book as Max gently but firmly prised her fingers away. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’
‘You’ll hate it,’ Max said, placing all three books on the tallest shelf so Neve couldn’t get to them without a ladder. ‘But if you like, after dinner, I’ll turn the lights down low and read the dirty bits to you.’
Neve vowed to herself that first thing tomorrow she’d buy all three books on Amazon so she could see just how Max’s dirty bits differed from the dirty bits in her grandmother’s romance novels which were stashed in a plastic crate under her bed. At the tender age of thirteen she’d been shocked at just how filthy they were but since then, she’d read every single one at least twice, but not even Celia knew about that. ‘Let’s leave your dirty bits out of it,’ she said as she wandered across the room to the mantelpiece, Max hot on her heels as she looked at the black-and-white framed photos.
Ooh! There was Max with Sarah Jessica Parker. And there was Max being kissed on the cheek by Lady Gaga and there was Max again, this time cuddling up to Kate Moss.
‘Who’s this?’ Neve asked, picking up the one colour photo, which featured Max with a middle-aged couple and two blonde girls in their twenties, all five of them proudly wearing Snuggies and paper hats and sitting in a row on a long sofa, wrapping-paper strewn everywhere. ‘Is this your mum and dad? I didn’t know you had sisters.’
‘God, I should have Neve-proofed the flat before you came round,’ Max said, snatching the photo away and putting it back on the mantelpiece. ‘Nope, not my family. I just borrow them for major public holidays.’
Neve tried to peer past Max’s shoulder. ‘Seriously, who are they?’
‘It’s the McIntyres, which you’d know if you ever read a tabloid newspaper.’
‘You didn’t spend Christmas with your family?’ she ventured timidly, because although Max had had a ringside seat to hear her mother berating her (and had probably heard every word because her mother was incapable of talking quietly), he was flaring his nostrils and beetling his brow and generally giving the impression that Neve was going somewhere he didn’t want her to go.
‘You know how secretly you think I’m a bastard?’ He didn’t even wait for Neve to deny that she’d ever thought such a heinous thing, but just flashed her a knowing smile. ‘Well, technically I am. Never met my father, my mum’s dead so I usually crash someone else’s Christmas dinner.’
‘Oh Max, I’m so sorry about your mum.’ Neve took a hesitant step forward with the vague idea that Max might need another clumsy hug, but he folded his arms.
‘No big deal, Neevy. Happened years ago and anyway, friends are the new family, blah blah blah.’ He tilted his head. ‘Are you hungry?’
She was always hungry. ‘What are you making?’
Max looked more edgy than when they’d been discussing his lack of immediate family. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you can and can’t eat?’
‘Actually it’s Treat Sunday. No gym and I can eat carbs after six.’ There was more to Treat Sunday than just those edited highlights but they’d do for now.
‘So if I made you a jacket potato with steak and salad that would be OK?’ Max asked doubtfully.
‘If the potato has really crispy skin that wouldn’t just be OK, it would be sheer, utter ecstasy.’ Neve closed her eyes at the thought of it, and when she opened them again, Max was giving her a look that she imagined was a perfect mirror of her own heated features. ‘Sorry, I get very excited at the thought of my weekly potato.’
‘You really are an odd girl,’ Max said, as if that was a good thing. ‘Now that you’ve rooted through all my personal belongings, it’s time for you to watch me slave over a hot stove.’
Chapter Fourteen
Neve perched on a stool in Max’s red and green kitchen and watched him prepare her meal. Though watching became supervising as she had to keep pointing out that even though it was Treat Sunday, the steaks had to be grilled rather than put in a frying pan with butter. And that balsamic vinegar made a much better salad dressing than olive oil, and would the jacket potatoes still get crispy if he cooked them in the microwave?
Once Max was following her precise instructions, Neve allowed herself to sit back and just watch as he chopped tomatoes and washed rocket leaves and turned steaks with a little smile on his face. He’d put his iPod into a speaker dock and he moved around the kitchen in time to the music, looking up every now and again at Neve, who was sitting with her legs off the ground to avoid Keith who had silvery trails of drool hanging from his mouth and was intent on trying to wipe them off on her jeans.
She’d been so het up about being alone with Max in his flat, but actually he seemed less threatening on his home turf than when he was prowling across a crowded VIP room. Neve always thought of Max as someone who was supremely comfortable in his own skin, but now watching him tap out a drumbeat with a knife handle against his chopping board, she felt like she was getting a glimpse of the real Max that was buried so deep beneath the glitter and the free champagne and the air kisses, that she hadn’t even realised he existed.
They ate at the little table in the kitchen. Max put tealights in shot glasses because he said that he didn’t want Neve to see the mess he’d made of the salad, but as they started to eat, bumping knees under the little table, the candlelight turned salad and steak at five thirty on a Sunday afternoon into a romantic meal for two. Apart from when Max banished Keith to his basket in the hall because he kept nudging
Neve with a paw and dribbling over her leg.
It was all Neve could do not to let out little whimpers of delight as she ate the last piece of her very crunchy potato skin, then sat back with a contented little sigh and patted her tummy. ‘The memory of that potato will keep me going until next Sunday.’
‘It was nothing,’ Max insisted, but he looked very pleased as he mopped up the last of the steak juice with a piece of bread. ‘This is one of my b-list meals. Thai green curry – that’s my signature dish. What’s yours?’
‘Probably steamed fish.’ Neve grimaced at the thought of the spartan meal she had on Monday evenings to make up for the excesses of Treat Sunday. ‘I can do roasts and casseroles but nothing fancy. It wasn’t until I left home that I realised that bolognese sauce didn’t start life in a jar.’
‘The only cooking lesson I ever got from my mum was “there’s the Pot Noodle, there’s the kettle, get on with it”,’ Max said lightly, and Neve smiled but resisted the urge to prod further – not when they were having such a nice time.
‘My mum’s such a terrible cook that I think a Pot Noodle would have been preferable to her idiosyncratic take on a sausage casserole.’
‘Please, you have never eaten a Pot Noodle.’ Max pushed back his chair so he could start clearing the table. ‘No, you just sit there and look pretty. You’re my guest,’ he said, when Neve picked up the salad bowl.
She did feel pretty sitting there with the top two buttons of her dress undone and her face flushed from the wine and because Max had turned up the central heating when she’d handed him a wooden spoon and he’d felt her cold fingers.
Max was rooting around in the fridge. When he straightened up, he was holding something behind his back. ‘Now I know you probably won’t eat pudding, but it’s more about the actual spectacle, than the eating.’