‘I don’t know. I hardly know anything about her. But we’ll find out, won’t we?’
He grins. ‘Is she hot?’
‘Miles!’
He’s laughing now, and she senses her shoulders relaxingas she thinks,At least he’s agreed to come. He might be an idiot sometimes but I do love him.‘How long will we have to be there?’ he asks.
She splutters. ‘How old are you?’
‘I’m only asking …’
‘Not long, I don’t think. It’s just lunch, Miles. No big deal at all.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
JAMES
‘We can’t be doing with other vets,’ Mariana Gomez announced on Friday, to explain why, despite having moved to deepest Croydon, she still treks across London to our practice with her anxious greyhound. ‘He goes for anyone else,’ she added. ‘He’s snarling and snapping before we’ve set foot in the door – but not here, James. Not with your amazingly calm vibes.’
I’m not sure I’m emitting calm vibes now as we drive out to Lauren’s in Hertfordshire. For one thing, I hadn’t banked on Miles joining us today. ‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he announced with a tooth-baring grin, ‘me gate-crashing the big event?’
‘Not at all,’ I lied as he clambered, uninvited, into the passenger seat.It’s not a big event. It’s just lunch!
‘Wonder how everyone’s going to get along?’ he muses now with a trace of glee. Having ambushed me successfully, he’s obviously feeling terribly pleased with himself.
‘Fine, I’m sure,’ I reply, focusing hard on the road ahead.
‘So, where are we going again?’
I tell him the name of the village.
‘Never heard of it!’
As if I might have made it up. ‘It’s a nice place,’ I say blandly, glimpsing Esther in the rear-view mirror, hunched like a little kid in the back seat.
‘So, how’re things in vet world?’ Miles enquires, as if he’s remotely interested.
‘Oh, fine. Pretty good, very busy …’
‘Lots of sick animals?’ Is he taking the piss or is it just my default reaction? The mere sight of him in his skinny jeans and flimsy shirts clinging to his narrow, sunken torso gets my hackles up.My daughter is in love with this man and I am powerless to do anything about it.
‘Just the usual,’ I reply.
‘D’you ever get attacked? Like, scratched or bitten?’
Is he planning to carry on like this for the whole journey? Should I start firing banal questions at him about his ‘job’?So, Miles, how exactly do you place a record on the turntable–or is ‘decks’ the correct term? How, precisely, do you ‘work the crowd’?
‘Not often,’ I say, ‘but it can be an occupational hazard …’
‘I admire you, man,’ he announces. ‘I could never do an ordinary job like you, tied into the nine-to-five, same thing week in, week out. Fuck, man. It’d do my head in.’
Maybe you should try it sometime. But then you don’t have to, do you?Apparently his elderly parents still reside at the family seat in Somerset, where there are fifteen bedrooms, a lake and a village of workers’ houses in the grounds. I know this not because of anything Esther has told me (Miles seems to want to keep his aristocratic ancestry under wraps) but through extensive googling. ‘They’re just ordinary people,’ I’ve heard him insist – but ordinary people don’t have stable blocks. I’d guess thata private income allows him to DJ once a fortnight and call it ‘work’.
But I don’t say any of that. I just tell him that I enjoy my job, wishing he’d plug in his earphones as Esther has, rather than pretending he wants to talk to me. Of course, ideally he wouldn’t be here at all. I’m not an unfriendly person, and occasionally Esther has introduced me to a boy who I didn’t think was exactlyidealfor her – a bit attitudey, verging on rude. But it was fine, I could accept that, because that was the difference – the word ‘boy’.
I know for a fact that Miles lies about his age. That was easy to find out. I realise it’s sounding as if I spendallmy spare time googling him, but I knew he’d been in a band as a youngster and they’d enjoyed a single hit (way back in the mists of time, almost pre-CDs! I mean, almostpre-electricity, when record players were wound up with a handle). Within minutes I’d found lead vocalist Miles Lattimer-Jones in a YouTube clip from 1989. He was wearing a red leather bomber jacket, a lightning bolt earring and his hair was bleached yellow, long at the back and spiked into meringue-like peaks on top – the most mulletty of Eighties mullets. Crucially he was an adult at this point.
You say you’re forty-five, Miles? More like fifty-two!
