Love Is A Thief

‘And she’d need her own toolbox, which would be nice, and somewhere to work.’

‘Where would that be?’

Mary kept her eyes closed, frowning with concentration.

‘Well, there are the arches down near Tessa’s gym. Power Mary could have an arch down there.’

‘And is Power Mary by herself or are there other people with her?’

‘Well, it would be nice to work with other people, wouldn’t it—maybe some other ladies? And Power Mary would need to stop for lunch because Len and I do like to eat together. But in the afternoon she could carry on, as long as she finished by four because I like to have dinner ready for when Len gets in. So Power Mary could go home, have a quick shower, put her overalls in the wash then make Len a nice stew, although if this is an alternate universe it would be lovely if Len could work a washing machine.’

‘Mary, that sounds so achievable.’

Mary opened her eyes.

‘Me working in a garage!’ she scoffed before gathering up the mugs and hurrying into the kitchen. ‘Why on earth would I learn to do this at my age?’ she said over the sound of frenzied washing up. ‘I am who I am, Kate. I have what I have and I am happy. What would poor Len think if I suddenly decided to copy his hobby after all these years? I’d feel like I was taking something from him.’ She came back into the lounge with two fresh cups of tea. ‘And what if I was better than him, Kate, which, I am not going to lie to you, would probably happen. Lord knows how any of our cars have kept working over the years. No, we are fine as we are. I was brought up to be grateful for what I have and what I have is this.’

‘Mary, have you even spoken to Len about this, or asked him if he would mind?’

‘Oh no dear. No, not at all.’ She opened the box of Quality Street. I found yet another Strawberry Cream in my mouth. It’s physically impossible to have too many strawberry Quality Streets. They don’t take up any space in your stomach, like popcorn and cheese and most kinds of chocolate. ‘No, I would never talk to my Len about this. Well, it really is lovely to see you again, Little Kate. Such a treat. And young Peter is back too. You are all back home again.’

‘Have you seen him?’ I asked, as casually as a World War II interrogation expert.

‘Oh, yes, he came straight round to see us when he got back. Such a lovely boy. He’s got a PhD from America—did you know that?’

‘No, I haven’t seen actual proof. So did he say how he was, what he’s been doing, why he got married, why he got divorced, why he came back?’ Cool as a cucumber.

‘Well, he told me about an art exhibition he’d been to recently. Oh, and he told me about his running shoes—did you know they’re made from recycled bottles? Such a clever boy,’ she mused, chewing on a toffee. ‘I remember the tears after he left for Switzerland.’ Mine not hers. ‘It was worse than when your pet cat Rupert died.’

‘Peter’s hardly like Rupert the cat, Mary. Rupert was loyal and communicative and didn’t leave without writing a note.’

Rupert can’t actually write. I was making a point.

‘Well, I always liked that Peter Parker. Truth be told, I would have loved it if he’d fallen for one of my girls. Such a lovely young man,’ she cooed, placing her mug against her breastbone.

The thought of Peter Parker falling for either Laura or Yvette made my own breastbone warm, but in more of an acidic lung-crushing way than a soul-completing spiritual way, so I sipped on my hot tea to distract myself, but it was slightly too hot so I burnt my own tongue, which had the intended effect.

quest | mary to train as a mechanic

when a rain cloud meets a rainbow

Sport in London is not something I know a great deal about. My normal form of exercise over the last few years has been snowboarding at high speed down a mountain behind Gabriel while he yelled, ‘I am in love with Kate. I love Kate!’ to whomever he passed before we’d disappear off piste, through a forest, down a secret snow path to a secluded chalet where we’d make love by an open fire before naming all the children we wanted to have while I crossed my fingers, and sometimes my toes, and hoped I’d just been impregnated by my future husband … or something like that.

So ‘conventional’ sports, involving gyms, training sessions, boot camps and clothes, were as unfamiliar to me as German men; in that they were both a bit foreign and both seemed unnecessarily formal. Someone who did know an awful lot about gyms, training sessions and being painfully over-formal was Peter smile-free Parker, the boy who never dialled. Grandma had called to inform me that Peter was an expert on everything to do with fitness; was a triathlete; an occasional marathon runner and, rather bizarrely, a dab hand on a trampoline. Grandma knew I needed help formulating fitness plans for True Love’s proposed Fat Camp and said Peter Parker was the only man who’d know how. With less than a week before Fat Camp was due to start and with no budget to hire a professional adviser, I had reluctantly called Peter Parker, at Grandma’s request, to ask for his sport-related assistance.

I had tried not to bother myself with thoughts about Peter after bumping into him that day at Pepperpots. Actually, we hadn’t so much bumped into each other as I had bumped into a chair, tripping backwards at the sound of his voice, landing on my arse and righting myself by completing a slow and wobbly backwards roll. It was an odd and impromptu display of adult amateur gymnastics, finished up with some stuttering nonsense that my mouth wanted to contribute. Something along the lines of,

‘Hi, Peter, it’s been a long … you just … where did you … why … you didn’t ever …’ Then I fiddled with my hair before muttering, ‘You could have called.’

‘What did you say, darling?’ my grandma had bellowed as she absolutely can’t bear mumbling. Personally I think she’s going a bit deaf but she won’t hear of it, excuse the pun. She even accused Michael Parkinson of being a mumbler the other day, at his book launch, and they don’t come more eloquent and enunciated than Parky.

‘I said he could have called, Grandma!’ I yelled back. Then, because I’d raised my voice for her benefit, I continued at that level for Peter. ‘It’s been fifteen years, Peter! Fifteen years! You didn’t call! You didn’t write—you didn’t even tell me where I could find you.’

Peter had looked at me blankly as if what I’d actually been doing was pointing at his foot and saying, ‘That’s a shoe, Peter! That’s a shoe, that’s a shoe, that’s a shoe!’ rather than having formed a coherent question about the premature and rather dramatic end to our intense childhood friendship. Although in his defence I had just done a backwards roll.

‘Well, I’ve always considered Switzerland to be very insular,’ Grandma had continued, nodding her head reassuringly at Peter. ‘I can’t imagine that I’d keep in touch with anyone if I moved there.’ She smiled affectionately, gently squeezing his arm.

‘It is very secluded,’ Peter confirmed, eyes fixed to the floor.

‘Oh, of course!’ I’d said, slapping my own forehead. ‘Silly me! That’s why it’s a tax haven! Because there are no phones, or computers, or pens to write letters, or even post offices to buy stamps. Rich people literally disappear there like dropping into a landlocked Bermuda Triangle, and they never resurface. I admit I tried the same thing with the Inland Revenue but the bastards just turned up at my office anyway. “I’m Swiss,” I told them. “I don’t do contact. I’m a landlocked island of secrets,” but they made me pay my taxes and they made me do it by handwritten bloody post!’ What on earth was I talking about?

‘Goodness, Kate, you are getting very shouty. Not all of us can be Anne bloody Frank.’

‘I’m not asking him to get under the floorboards and write me a diary, Grandma! Peter, you totally disappeared!

‘He was in Switzerland, darling. You knew he was in Switzerland. Isn’t the boy allowed to educate himself? And I don’t know why everyone is obsessed with communication these days,’ Grandma had said wearily, sitting herself down. ‘Social media, they call it. I don’t think it’s social at all. I think it’s nice to be quiet and peaceful and left alone to do one’s studies. I imagine that’s what Switzerland must be like.’

‘I’m not on Facebook,’ Peter offered, quite randomly, before reaching over and gently taking his jacket from my hands.

‘Well, of course you’re not on Facebook, Peter, or I would have found yo …’ My voice petered out as I revealed myself to be a bit of a creepy Internet stalker. Peter had stared at me blankly. I’d stared back. He’d practically trebled in attractiveness since the last time I’d seen him. I was fifty shades of grey in comparison to him and I’m not referring to the literary equivalent of soft porn. I’m referring to the drab colourless mist that doesn’t even feature on a rainbow. Peter Parker was a bloody great rainbow and I was the grimacing, unwelcome rain cloud in the distance. Switzerland must be the aesthetic equivalent of Lourdes.

‘Would anyone like a herbal tea?’ Grandma had asked. ‘I’ve got some lovely fresh mint we could use.’

‘Grandma!’ I yelled, for the second time that evening, before storming off towards the front door with such force I looked as if I were wading through imaginary syrup or performing dramatic high-elbowed mime.

‘I’d love a mint tea,’ Peter had said as I yanked open the front door. ‘I can’t remember the last time I had fresh mint,’ he said with flat-toned enthusiasm as the door had slammed shut behind me, narrowly missing Federico, who’d pelted after me like an abandoned child.

I’d stood on the doorstep for several minutes, shaking from a mixture of shock and anger, while Peter, my oldest, bestest, long-time, disappeared-off-the-face-of-the-earth friend, and Grandma, my primary carer in the world, sipped on fresh mint tea inside, both of them acting as if it were perfectly normal for him to have reappeared after all these years, which would be fine and excusable if they were script writing for Dallas. And why would Grandma allow me to bump into Peter Parker for the first time in 15 years wearing Primark? Why? Why!

Anyway I am completely unbothered by the whole thing. If they don’t think I deserve a proper explanation for the disappearance-reappearance I will never again ask for one. I will surreptitiously gather clues, draw wild conclusions, make generalisations then spring them on them at a later stage, probably while pissed. But I will never ask for the facts. Facts are dull. And on the plus side, as I have decided to look for the silver lining of every cloud (or at least my own grimacing, unwelcome rain cloud) I did get to test out my backwards roll, which I’ve been meaning to do for ages. Traditionally it has always been my weakest basic gym move and Mrs Franklin, my seventh-grade teacher, once said to me,

‘Kate Winters! You get back down on that gym mat and you practise that backwards roll. You never know when you are going to have to backwards roll yourself out of a dangerous situation!’

And I think that day in Pepperpots proved to us all that Mrs Franklin was bloody well right.

the sport-related meeting with peter parker

I walked into the boardroom to find Federico standing on top of the heart-shaped table in a ninja position doing wrist-flicking impersonations of Spiderman.

‘So there’s no connection at all?’ Federico asked before making a whoosh noise and shooting another invisible web across the room towards Peter Parker. Peter didn’t respond. He just stood behind Chad’s special heart-shaped chair, cross-armed, stern-faced, handsome. ‘Because you really do have the same highly burdened energy, yes you do, a man with a past, a man with a hidden secret, a man who can scale walls and—’

‘Please don’t do this,’ Peter said, without moving a single muscle on his face.

‘Well, who needs to be a superhero when you already look like a ruddy great Gucci model is what I say!’ Federico said, jumping off the table doing one last mid-air wrist flick that made Peter flinch. ‘So, Kat-kins, do you have your notes ready, because our Fat Camp auditionees are due any second. Not that they are auditioning to be fat,’ he said to Peter. ‘Not at all—they are fat, Peter. We are working with genuinely miserable members of the public who are overweight. Although aren’t we all these days? What with all those hidden calories. You need a PhD in label-reading to get through life a size zero. It’s like playing hide-and-seek every time so much as a morsel passes my lips. “Is there a calorie?” I say to myself. And then normally I eat it anyway.’ His phone started ringing. ‘I have to take this. Hello? Hello? Yes, this is Federico.’ He shoved me out of the way only to stand three feet away and shout loudly into his teeny-tiny phone. I looked from Federico to Peter, who seemed to be standing at the furthest point away from me on the other side of the room.

‘So this is where you work?’ he said, looking around the room. ‘A writer at True Love magazine; saving us from the destructive influences of love …’ His jaw flexed. ‘How ironic.’

I didn’t think it was particularly ironic, but perhaps the lack of irony was in fact the ironic part?