“Ruby?” Gus called softly. There was silence except for our breaths. “She’s dropped right off again,” he said and settled his head into the crook of my neck.
“That’s the first time that’s ever happened,” I told him.
“Ever ever?”
“Ever… like that.” I hoped he wouldn’t need details. I was shy now and I had a bit of a feeling I’d farted.
“Me too,” he said. “First time I’ve ever done it… ” He was shy too. “Without any… ”
“Fiddling,” I said, making him laugh again.
“We’re meant to be, Jessie C.” And then he said it. That word. “Love at first sight,” he said.
And so even though I knew it was love at fourth sight, really-he hadn’t thought much of me at all the day of the Disney cakes, and he had barely noticed me in the Project and the library-I didn’t tell him. And I told myself that word only counted when it was a verb and it came between I and you. What he’d just said was just something people say.
“Night-night, Gus,” I said.
“Night-night, Jessie-cakes. Sweet dreams.”
Fourteen
Friday, 7 October
Needless to say, they were anything but sweet dreams. But I kept on top of it all. I’m good at staying in control of my dreams, even though the one time I told someone about it, which was Steve at work, he looked at me like I was green with purple spots.
“Your dreams are your subconscious, Jessie,” he’d said, like he’d just invented the word. “Out of your conscious control.”
“Fair enough,” I’d answered. “Maybe it’s my sub-subconscious that controls them. I’m just saying that I don’t dream about stuff I don’t want to.”
“The problem with positive thinking as a therapeutic device,” said Steve, “is that it’s so depoliticized that it, in effect, privatises misfortune and translates it into blame.” Which was a very typical Steve kind of thing to say and ended the conversation like only Steve can.
And it’s only that one thing anyway. I can’t stop myself dreaming about being late and naked and legs like putty. I certainly would have put the stoppers on that one sex dream I had about Steve after I’d broken up with Mike Finlayson and Steve had been really kind about me crying in the laundry room and hadn’t brought politics or ethics or anything into for once (just went and got me a bacon and egg roll and a hot chocolate with hazelnut).
But if I find my dreams veering towards a metal framed bed, I can turn right round and walk out the door. And if my dream self walks up to a pile of something on the ground and it’s waving a bit and the light’s shining through it, it always ends up being bubbles or an anemone or something, and no matter how hard the wee sneaky poltergeist that lives in my head tries to turn it into a big pile of them, it never quite gets there.
Thursday night in Gus’s bed was a close thing, though. In the dream, we were in his workshop and I was looking around at all the light bulbs, except they weren’t light bulbs anymore (you know the way it goes); they were pencils with big bulbs on the ends. And my mother was there (as usual), and she was saying what a shocking state things had got to and where were the… then her voice would get fuzzy and I couldn’t hear. Imagine having all these pencils all over the place, she said, and their big glowing ends and no… on them. So the symbolism wasn’t exactly a puzzle. Because my dear mother would drop dead if she knew what Gus and I had just done, and she’d no more say the word condom than she would blow one up and draw a face on it at a party.
But as well as the sex thing (thank you Dr. Freud), it was novelty pen ends too, and Gus was saying they were all next door and he’d finished them. But if he opened the door of this workshop bit and then opened the door of the storage place too, they would probably catch a draught and blow right in.
So he opened the door and I was punching the buttons on the baby monitor to tell him to stop, except the monitor was a phone and I didn’t know how to work it. A Fisher Price phone that played tapes too, and Ruby said the battery’s dead, and I woke up.
Another night survived. Good old sub-subconscious. Well done. Have a drink on me. Have two.
And even if it had failed and I’d dreamed about them, breakfast with Ruby and Dillon was enough to drive any other thoughts out of my head. Most of the problem was Gus being so determined to get Ruby back to nursery for the day.
“Break her in gently,” he said. “Otherwise she’ll start on Monday with five days straight.”
“But why?” I whispered. We were standing in the bathroom with the door pulled. The kids were in the hall putting their boots and coats on. “She could have another week off. Do mornings only, day about. Gus, think about it. Her mum’s just died.”
“Miss Colquhoun seems to think she should be at school.”
“She never said that!”
“She threatened to come out here checking up on us if Ruby wasn’t at school.”
“No, she didn’t!” I could have shaken him. How could anyone misunderstand a simple conversation so badly? Well, maybe if their wife had just driven off a cliff, Jessie. So I took a big breath, counted to ten, and let it go. “I’ll take her in,” I said. “But if she doesn’t make it, you’ll have to get her on the bus.”
“If she wants to leave early, I’ll get her in the van,” he said, kissed my head and left me standing there.
“The same van I couldn’t put the kids in yesterday?” I said, following him. Jesus, Jessie, give it a rest, I told myself, but I kept following all the way through to the kitchen, stepping over the children on the hall floor.
“You can’t put both kids in the van,” said Gus. He was on his knees at the cupboard beside the door, rummaging in amongst the Tupperware and ice-cream tubs. “It’s fine with just Ruby.”
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
He was stirring the tubs round, collapsing the neat towers and sending lids wheeling over the floor. “Flask,” he said, finding it. “It’ll be brass monkeys in the workshop today.”
“What’ll you do with Dillon?” I said. I bent to pick up a couple of the lids and got close enough for him to grab my legs and pull me towards him, holding my bum in his hands.
“He’ll be fine in his snowsuit.” He put his mouth against the front of my jeans and breathed out hard, like when you’re trying to melt ice on a window. I could feel the heat right through my clothes. “And he runs about a lot anyway,” he added, looking up. “It’s me that gets freezing, sitting hunched over at the table all day like… ”
“Like who?” I said, smiling down, melted away to nothing again. “What are you making just now anyway, hunched over your table? I thought it was something huge.”
“Gepetto,” he said. “Bob Cratchett. One of them. Man, I need to see something that’s not Disney one of these days.”
“Dickens, though,” I said, running my hands through his hair. “I’m impressed.”
“Muppets’ Christmas Carol,” he admitted and got to his feet with the flask in his hand, went to the kettle.
It wasn’t until Ruby and me were in the car bumping over the track through the caravan site that I realised he’d misled me. Or misunderstood me, anyway. I hadn’t meant how would Dillon keep warm, I’d meant who was going to look after Dillon if Gus went to town in the van? But I shook the worry away. What did I know about their arrangements, really? Neighbours and babysitters and friends to turn to in a pinch? Except on Tuesday it hadn’t seemed like there was anyone. And nobody had come round with a pan of soup or a bunch of flowers since the news broke about Becky. Funny that. How could a family be so all alone?