‘D’you have a flat-head screwdriver?’ Colin asks.
If there’s such an item in the house Vince has no idea where it might be because DIY is Kate’s domain. He might as well have asked, ‘Where’s your stopcock?’ – another thing men like Colin are obsessed with, along with creosoting fences and poking about inside fuse boxes: stuff Vince has zero interest in. ‘I don’t need a screwdriver,’ he retorts.
‘No, we do,’ Colin insists. ‘Anda pry bar, if you have one. It’s a kind of little crowbar,’ he adds, in a silly patronising voice, as if Vince were a child. Does he speak like this to the kids at school? If so, it’s a wonder he hasn’t been assaulted. He wouldn’t blame them for that. ‘This way we won’t damage the door or the frame,’ he explains.
What’s with all the ‘we’-speak?Vince thinks irritably. Oh, he knows what Colin’s up to, trying to show off to Deborah while the poor woman tries not to wet herself. He’s seen the way his neighbour goes all giggly and flushed around her, like a fourteen-year-old when the person they fancy has sat next to them on the bus. As both he and Deborah are divorced and single, Colin seems to think he’s in with a chance.
However, Vince has no time for approaching things carefully. After the frankly substandard buffet, the dog throwing up and now this bathroom emergency, all Vince really cares about is allowing Deborah access to the loo.
‘Stand back,’ he commands. With his chin up and back rod-straight, he turns sideways to the door.
‘Don’t! You’ll break it!’ Colin shrieks, as if Vince were about perform a cataract operation with a Black+Decker drill. ‘I can nip home for my tools,’ he insists.
‘I don’t need your tools.’
‘But, Vince—’
‘Can you shut up for a minute?’ he shouts, with a fury that would suggest it’s not Colin Carse who’s standing in his hallway, wittering on about hinge pins, but that malevolent PE teacher from Vince’s school, who’d guffawed when he’d flopped like a pancake on top of the horse, and made him do it again and again until everyone was laughing and he’d loped off to the showers with tears coursing down his face.
‘Vince-the-Vault,’ his classmates had called him after that.
‘Cry-baby Vincent, can’t mount a wooden horse!’
‘Take it from behind, Vince. It’s easier that way!’
School was a nightmare then. Although there were only two PE sessions per week they seemed to inhabit around ninety per cent of his brain space – pulsing on his crumpled timetable like appointments with death.
His neighbour triggers him, that’s the thing. Vince feels guilty even thinking this, when some of his classmates joined the army and saw active service in the Gulf War – but Colin Carse gives him PTSD. Vince glares at him, thinking it’s no wonder his wife left him for her driving instructor, which might have explained why she’d racked up 275 lessons before sitting her test. Local folklore has it that she was ready after ten.
‘I’m only trying to help,’ Colin crows, and Vince sees him trying to exchange an eye-roll with Deborah.
Fuck you,Vince thinks furiously, picturing himself careering not towards a cheap 1960s bathroom door but that terrible contraption in the gym hall, his nemesis all through secondary school and the cause of all those humiliating horse sex jokes – as his upper body meets it with an almighty crash.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Kate
It’s when the bus stops at the big roundabout that a terrible thought hits me: that Stilton and broccoli quiche. It was taking longer to cook than the other stuff and I never took it out of the oven.
Will Vince have done it? Probably not. What if it’s in there all night, burning and filling the house with fumes and smoke? Instinctively, my hand folds around my phone. I must call Vince and alert him!
It’s a quiche in the oven, I tell myself sternly,not impending nuclear attack.
Outside the window, the shops have made way for neat red-brick terraces with Farrow & Ball front doors; then it’s the wide, flat expanse of the park where the book festival took place. The marquee is still up, bunting flapping damply. We pass the bowling green and then the less picturesque retail park where there’s a Lidl. Deborah boasts about shopping there, but only in a middle-class way.Their Parmesan’s excellent and they actually have avocados!
Now we’re leaving the town and joining the dual carriageway. Someone’s bound to be waiting outside our locked bathroom by now, growing more and more desperate. I picture Dr Kemp giving the door a polite tap: ‘Hello? Hello?’ Then he’ll call Vince and say, ‘I think there’s someone in there. They’ve been an awfully long time.’ And eventually Vince will gather, simply by elimination, that it must be me.
Maybe he’ll think I’ve fainted after all that frantic buffet activity? Or died right there on the toilet, like Elvis? Then he’ll realise he should have appreciated me more – but too late now! Because I’m not dead on the toilet. I’m sitting here with a single ticket to Victoria coach station and that quiche is probably a charred disc by now and I don’t care.
It hardly seems real, what I’ve just done. My heart is thumping hard, adrenaline still coursing through me as we reach the motorway. Then gradually, the fuggy warmth of the bus starts to calm me. I snooze a little, realising when I come to with a jolt that we’re already in London, and that my phone is ringing again. Still dozy, and without thinking properly, I answer it this time.
‘Christ, Kate, I’ve been calling you,’ Vince announces. ‘Where are you?’
‘Just, uh, up the road,’ I start, blinking out at the city lights.
‘Up the road? What d’you mean? We have a party going on—’
‘I know, I just—’
