‘Great.’ Claire glanced at the clock as she closed the door. It was just after nine. She hadn’t realised it had got so late. They shouldn’t have wasted so much time chatting about rubbish – well,sheshouldn’t have. She knew she had only herself to blame – Luca had tried to keep them focused.
‘Sorry,’ she said, picking up the phone. ‘Time’s up. That was my mum.’
‘Don’t you have time just to finish off? It’ll probably only take another couple of minutes.’
‘I can’t. I have to go downstairs and eat paradise slices and watchCome Dine With Mewith her.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘Are you going to, um… finish off on your own?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be thinking of you.’
‘Good. Thanks,’ she said, then laughed – fancy thanking someone for using you as inspiration for a wank.
‘Um, Claire? About that. Before you go…’
‘Yes?’
‘Would you send me a photo?’
‘A photo of me? Naked?’
‘Yeah. With your new hairdo.’
‘Oh… I?—’
‘It’s okay,’ he interrupted. ‘If you don’t want to, that’s fine. I’ll be thinking of you anyway.’
‘No, it’s okay,’ she said, wanting to be brave. She needed to get over her inhibitions, and this would be a good start. ‘I’ll do it. Just give me a minute.’
She shrugged off her robe and stood in front of the mirror, since that was the only way she could get herself in the frame. She wasn’t very good at self-shots and it took a couple of goes before she got a photo she was happy with.
‘Okay,’ she said, picking up the phone again. ‘It’s not great, but I’ll send it to you now.’
‘Thanks, sweetheart.’
When they had said their goodbyes and hung up, Claire texted the picture to Luca. Then she got into her pyjamas to go down and watch TV with her mother. She was just about to go when her mobile chimed with a message alert. It was a text from Luca:
Beautiful picture, thank you. Can’t wait to see you in the flesh. X
Claire smiled and tossed the phone back on the bed. She spied the vibrator again. She’d have a play with it tonight in bed, try to get to grips with it. She hoped it was as quiet as the sales assistant had promised.
22
In 1990 Jacqueline Ffrench travelled to Romania, moved by the reports about the horrors of Romanian orphanages that emerged after the fall of Ceausescu’s regime in 1989.
She left with a truckload of clothes and toys, and a desire to help. She returned home with a family – her three-year-old daughter, Alina, and seven-year-old son, Luca.
But back home in Ireland, while she quickly bonded with the little girl, her adoptive son felt like a stranger to her. As she went through the motions of mothering the little boy, she struggled to give him what he needed most – the love and affection that had been missing his whole life. In this brutally honest account, the author writes movingly about her failure to connect with her son and confronts the heartbreaking truth that love doesn’t come to command, and sometimes good intentions aren’t enough.
Claire’s finger hovered over the ‘Buy Now’ button. She felt guilty, as if she was prying into Luca’s private life – which was ridiculous, since the book was available to anyone who cared to read it. But that did nothing to ease herconscience. The idea of strangers poring over the detritus of his miserable childhood sickened her, and she experienced a rush of hatred towards the woman she had never met. How could she have done that to him? Wasn’t it bad enough that she didn’t love him, without publicly humiliating and betraying him by using their relationship as material? Had she never thought what effect it might have on him? She stared hard at the author photo, as if she could find some answers there, but all she saw was an attractive blonde woman with a pleasant smile.
She took a deep breath and clicked to order the book, then went downstairs to help her mother get ready for tonight. Yvonne would have a conniption if she could see her now, preparing to spend Friday night playing cards with a bunch of pensioners – and, even worse, looking forward to it. But her mother’s friends were fun, and Claire enjoyed their regular Friday-evening gatherings more than she’d ever enjoyed noisy bars or nightclubs. Sometimes she was secretly glad that all her friends were coupled up and she had no one trying to drag her out on the pull at weekends. Of course, she did yearn for a boyfriend sometimes, but she wasn’t prepared to endure the bar scene to find one. Anyway, she had Luca now. Okay, he wasn’t her boyfriend, but they were good friends and they were having regular sex, so it was close enough. She was looking forward to seeing him tonight, though she was still half expecting him not to turn up. He might find he had something better to do when the time came.
In the kitchen her mother was sitting at the table spooning tomato sauce onto pizza bases. A couple of lemon drizzle cakes fresh from the oven were cooling on racks on the worktop.
‘You’ve been busy,’ Claire said, bending over the cakes and inhaling deeply. ‘They smell amazing.’ She went to thefridge and took out the pizza toppings she had prepared when she’d got in from work.
