Page 62 of The Woman in the Middle
‘What a walking bollock, he’s wedged the door open then?’ Morton said with a disgusted snort. ‘D’you know, I’d have crawled over hot coals for Les. I was that grateful she gave me a son and it wasn’t all bad for her, I reckon. I never cheated on her, she could have had anything she wanted from me. It was always me on the begging end, I knew I loved her more than she loved me and I learned to live with it. But this…’ His voice crumbled and Shay saw the tears stored in his eyes spill over, down his cheek. He wiped at them hurriedly, embarrassed by the show of emotion. ‘I was never going to be the Prince Charming she wanted with the designer stubble. If I put on a Tom Ford suit, I still looka tramp, but I thought after all these years, we could have stuck it to the end.’
‘Oh, Morton.’ Shay felt so sorry for him.
‘I’m okay, I’m okay,’ Morton insisted, batting away the sympathy. ‘I’ll just have to get used to being by myself, won’t I? And so will you.’ He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, then wiped his hand on his trousers.
‘Where is she… they living?’ Shay asked.
‘Monkcliffe. It’s a hamlet near Hathersage. She’s renting a big house on a hill. You can’t miss it, it’s got a blue roof and electric gates. His and her Audis parked in the drive, little red one for her, big black one for him.’
Courtney had said she’d seen her father in a brand new black Audi. Shay pictured how seamlessly Bruce had lied when she’d asked him about it, said Courtney was blind and mad.
‘I went to the solicitor this morning with a file of evidence. She’s got a right shock coming, I tell you. You’ll laugh, but I had an idea about you and me getting together. That’d teach ’em, wouldn’t it?’
He grinned, but he was looking at her intently as if it wasn’t entirely a joke.
‘We could pretend,’ he went on. ‘We could go out and have some nosebag and let ’em hear about us through the grapevine. We could even—’
‘That’s not a good idea.’ Shay shut that nonsense down immediately. ‘No games. My head’s cabbaged, Morton. I’ve just lost Mum and—’
‘Of course, sorry,’ he came straight back at her. ‘But if you want to go anywhere for a bit of company, I’ll take you. I’ll pay.’
‘Can I get you a coffee?’ she asked, hoping he didn’tthink it was a euphemism, so she added quickly, ‘before you go.’
‘I’d like that,’ he said, taking his phone out of his pocket. It was a huge thing with a cracked screen held in place by Sellotape. ‘I’ll ring a taxi while you put the kettle on.’
As it boiled and Morton finished off his pie, so many thoughts started swimming upstream into her brain like evil salmon. So Les had been sleeping with Bruce when they met for lunch. When she’d told Les about Bruce’s impotence, boy she must have been laughing up her sleeve about that. Les had played her like a cat plays a mouse that afternoon. Of course Bruce wouldn’t be having an affair, she’d said. Of course Shay should believe him and not pressurise him. Is that why she’d suggested meeting up? To check that ‘her man’ hadn’t been unfaithful to her by bedding his wife on their anniversary? But this was Les, her best mate. The old Les and the new Les were two opposing magnets that would not sit together for processing however hard she pushed.
When Morton left, Shay had the urge to slide down the door she had just shut and dissolve into a pool on the floor, become a liquid that would sink through the carpet, the floorboards, seeking oblivion. Instead she topped up the half-drunk brandy until one more drop would have spilled it over the rim. She lifted it to her lips.‘Let’s see if this bad boy can numb the maelstrom in my head,’she said to herself. It would be worth the hangover from hell in the morning if it did. Then her mobile rang. Courtney’s name filled the top of the screen.
‘Hellooo, Mummy,’ said Courtney, sounding excitable.
‘You okay, Court?’
‘Yep. But I’ve got to tell you this. I found something out today. A friend of my manager came into the shop to talkto her. Guess where she works?’ She left the smallest gap for her mother to jump in before answering the question herself. ‘Or should I say guesswhoshe works for? Only Karoline, Bride of Frankenstein.’
‘Sunny’s Karoline?’
‘Yep, the one and only. And Karoline’s off work because she’s been… suspended.’
‘No, she’s off work with stress, Sunny told me,’ Shay answered.
‘Wrong, because she’s the one causing all the stress. My manager’s friend has had to take time off because of her and she’s not the only one. Karoline’s actually off pending an investigation about bullying in the workplace. Apparently she’s vile to work for. Couldn’t see that coming, could you?’ She sniggered. ‘What has our Sunny got himself into here? You need to be having words with him, Mum, because he wouldn’t listen to me and Dad’s not bothered. He’d roll out some “he’s made his bed so he has to lie on it” trope.’
Yes, that’s exactly what he would have done. She’d failed her children, enabling Bruce to sneak all his responsibilities onto her shoulders. And could that be true about Karoline? Is that why her mum’s intuition had shouted so loudly about the woman and why she’d started having her own prickles of anxiety about this forthcoming wedding? Shay barely had room in her head for more, which was unlucky because Courtney had by no means finished.
‘Mort’s been in hospital,’ Courtney carried on. ‘I feel really bad about it as well because it was my fault.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah, well Fiona was away so I let Dingo stay in the flat, only Fi rings up and says she’s coming back early and Dingowouldn’t leave so I rang Mort to help eject him as Fi would have gone ape.’
Shay felt her blood rising.
‘So Mort comes up and there’s a fight and Dingo picks up a knife and if I hadn’t hit him over the head with a toaster, Mort would have been stabbed more than he was and—’
Shay gulped. ‘Stabbed?’
‘Well, the knife went in – only a bit though – and he had to get stitches and stay overnight. He told his dad he fell off the ladder at work so he wouldn’t worry. Anyway, that really is it. I’m done with Dingo now. It scared me so much and I had to do a proper repair job on the flat before Fiona got back after I’d taken Mort to hospital. Luckily there wasn’t much blood and it came out with some Vanish.’
