Page 47 of Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
It was gone two before Nina finally crawled into bed. Or rather she collapsed on the sofa in Paul and Chloe’s front room and pulled a chenille throw around her, which had chocolate smeared on it. Nina prayed that it was chocolate.
It was barely six when she was rudely, and abruptly, jolted awake by her nieces jumping on her. Nothing that Nina said (‘I’m telling Santa Claus to put both of you on the naughty list’) could convince them to go back to bed.
‘Santa Claus doesn’t even exist,’ eight-year-old Rosie said witheringly. ‘And even if he did, Christmas isagesaway. We’ve loads of time to get on the good list.’
Meanwhile little Ellie, never one for respecting people’s personal space boundaries, shoved her face into Nina’s. ‘You look weird without your make-up on. I don’t like it.’
There was nothing else Nina could do but get up, put on something calledPaw Patrol, aim cereal in the direction of two bowls then go back to the sofa, bookended by a niece each. Neither of them would stop talking, even though Nina begged them to shut up.
Paul and a grey-looking Chloe didn’t come downstairs until eight o’clock. It had been the longest two hours of Nina’s life.
‘Thanks for the lie-in, sis,’ Paul grinned. ‘You’ll have to wait a bit for a shower. There’s no hot water left.’
‘I hate you,’ Nina said with great feeling, as she slumped across the kitchen island. ‘Also, I feel like I’ve been in a car crash.’
‘Yeah, yeah. This is what being a parent feels like every day,’ Chloe said, as she poured coffee into a mug so large that it could have doubled up as a soup tureen.
Considering how rotten she felt, she might just as well have got good and drunk, Nina thought to herself a couple of hours later as she entered the living hell that was a soft-play centre.
Everything was neon and fluorescent as far as the eye could see while what seemed like hundreds of little girls, all of them dressed in Disney Princess outfits, ran around shrieking. Their ear-splitting screams competed with a constant soundtrack of tinny pop music, which sounded like it was sung by a group of chipmunks who’d been huffing helium.
And the smell! Fried food, TCP and a base note of vomit. ‘They puke all the time,’ explained the morose teenager on a vigil to make sure that no one wet themselves in the ball pit.
It can hardly get much worse than this, Nina reasoned, and promptly jinxed herself because in a waft of Chanel No 5 and bad energy, her mother appeared at her side.
There wasn’t really much that Alison O’Kelly could complain about this morning. Nina was here, present, mostly conscious, and was being a team player and a good aunt. But this was Nina’s mother; she couldalwaysfind something to complain about.
‘Oh, Nina, you might have made more of an effort,’ she said by way of a greeting. ‘It’s a birthday party.’
Because she was sleep deprived and also planned to spend a large part of the day having needles stabbed into her skin, Nina had dressed for comfort. She was wearing dungarees from her favourite purveyor of retro denim, Freddies of Pinewood, a vintage silk, dark green and white, polka-dot blouse with a pussy-cat bow and her hair was pinned up and mostly tucked out of sight in a headscarf. Nina liked to think that she was rocking a Rosie The Riveter vibe and besides, she had a full face of make-up, and all the other mums and dads were in jumpers and jeans.
Still, she wasn’t going to rise to the bait. ‘You look nice, Mum,’ she said, nodding at Alison’s floral-wrap dress and her immaculately coiffed hair.
Her mother was not to be swayed. ‘And you’re not even staying for lunch. Poor little Ellie was broken-hearted when she found out.’
Poor little Ellie, in fullLittle Mermaidregalia, was running round after her friends with a cupcake in one hand and a fistful of Wotsits in the other, while screaming at the very top of her vocal register.
‘Well, she seems to have made a full recovery,’ Nina pointed out but her mother hadn’t finished.
‘I suppose we’re just too boring and suburban for you,’ she continued and Nina had never been so pleased to hear the ping of an incoming text message.
‘Sorry,’ she said, though she wasn’t the least bit sorry. ‘I need to look at this. It could be about my tattoo appointment.’
It probably wasn’t as it was far too early for either Claude or Marianne to be up and compos mentis enough to operate a touchscreen. When Nina pulled her phone out of the bib pocket of her dungarees, it was Noah’s name she saw and her heart did a strange fluttering thing like she was going into dfib.
Sorry I didn’t reply to your text last night. I fell asleep on the job! Did you know the trains aren’t running due to engineering works? Have car, do you want a lift?
Bumping into Dan last night had proved to Nina that she’d been right not to settle for a boy from Worcester Park. That it had been necessary to change everything about her life so she wouldn’t end up with a boy from Worcester Park. Noah was a boy from Worcester Park too but …
God, yes please! Get me out of here! Am in soft-play centre in Ewell, I think it must be called Hell On Earth.
Because Noah might be a boy from Worcester Park but he’d left the first chance he’d got, too. He’d had adventures. He’d lived and not a half-life either. Also, he was offering to rescue Nina like the proverbial white knight on a dashing steed.
Noah texted her back immediately.Can you send me a location pin?
I totally would if I knew how to.
He texted her the instructions, which she followed as her mother carped on in the background, ‘So rude to spend all of Ellie’s party on the phone.’
