‘Because. Drama. I kinda started it, I want to make sure she gets out all right. I’ll leave if the police show up. He had a lot of pubes.’
‘The Spaniard? More than me?’
‘Enough to have donated pubes to at least two other men.’
‘Why would you donate pubes?’
‘For merkins, maybe.’
Beth is silent. Possibly wondering if I’ve hit my head again.
‘Anyway, when you’re done, go to Mum’s. It’s the reason I’m calling. I’m coming round.’
‘OK, for dinner? You bringing the boys?’
‘Nah… I just found something out and you need to know… Meg will be there too.’
The tone of Beth’s voice changes and, for a moment, I stop looking across the road, at the builders heckling the scene from the scaffolding next door, at the old woman with a shopping trolley who seems to be stealing some of Pedro’s stuff, at the people filming the drama on their phones.
‘Everything OK, B?’ I ask.
‘Yeah. I don’t want to say it on the phone.’
‘Is it the boys? Will? Are you OK?’
‘No. It’s just… Oscar. You had that name Oscar on your phone. Oscar from the 9th of February. We’ve worked out who it is…’
18
Having sat in my fair share of doctor’s surgeries of late, I really am not thrilled about sitting in another. This one is unnaturally sterile, from the plastic plants to the shiny leaflets, and staff in matching tops. All whiter than white. It feels like the sort of place where one would come to either get some fillers or an intimate wax. Instead, I’m here with two sisters who look abnormally anxious on my behalf.
‘Stop shaking your leg,’ Meg says, sitting next to me, clutching a hand around my knee.
‘All right, Mum,’ I grunt back.
I do like that look she gives me when I compare her to our mother. It’s a look that gets me through the day. Beth cranes her head every time a door opens and closes. She was the one who put two and two together and got Oscar but she looks like she just wants answers, to find that missing jigsaw piece. Frankly, I’m disappointed that somewhere this posh doesn’t have a hot beverages machine.
‘Are you sure this is the place?’ I ask, looking around. Since we’ve been here the lady in reception keeps smiling at me and then looking sad that I don’t remember her. Because this place doesn’t feel like a place I’d frequent. Although mildly ridiculous, the sex club I understand, the university also feels logical, but this is completely not where I thought I’d end up.
‘The number of this place is on your phone. He’s the only Oscar we can link you with,’ Beth says.
‘I really hope you’re not having an affair with this man,’ Meg says.
‘Lucy wouldn’t do that… not with everything Emma went through…’ Beth says, defending me. She’s my favourite sister now.
‘Would I though?’ I ask. ‘Maybe he’s got a giant schlong. You’d expect a doctor to know his way around.’ Meg closes her eyes, hoping the receptionist didn’t hear that. ‘You two are too much. It could be a very simple explanation that we’re in a book club together, or share an allotment… or run a multi-million-pound drugs ring.’
‘What if he’s your actual father and it turns out Mum had an affair with him thirty years ago?’ Beth says.
Meg isn’t playing into this and I’m disappointed that she lacks the imagination.
‘No, the most likely reason is that you were probably having sex with an old man.’
‘You sound jealous. B, do you have any sweets? You always have sweets,’ I ask, sighing out loudly.
‘That’s because I’m the best sister.’ She rifles around in her handbag and pulls out a family bag of Haribo. This is why we keep Beth. Meg’s hand reaches over my body to steal some and I elbow her out of the way. She always seems to think she’s entitled to the gummy cola bottles. A woman from across the way looks over at us curiously trying to figure out the dynamic of this sister sandwich, wishing we’d conduct ourselves with more decorum but working out why we don’t quite match. I wish I knew. Like I wish I knew why I have a connection to a doctor at a high-end fertility clinic in London.
It started after I slept with the Spaniard and then unearthed his cheating to scenes of drama where the actual police did indeed show up, though not before Gabriella called herself an Uber and got the hell out of there. Beth rang and I walked through the streets of London and listened to how the sisters had done their best investigative journalism to find out that one of the numbers on my phone belonged to this fertility clinic, Vitro (which, knowing me, they thought was a nightclub). Further digging led them to discover one of the doctors here was called Dr Oscar Jacobs. Oscar. So he wasn’t an old lover, an adversary, the name of a child whose party I once commandeered. No, it was the name of a fifty-something-old doctor who liked a lemon-yellow tie and whose beard looked like he’d borrowed it off a man of the mountains. The mystery had been unearthed and, frankly, it was slightly disappointing, to me at least.
