Читать книгу Ordinary Joe - Jon Teckman - Страница 14

I left the office before five that evening, citing jet lag as the reason I couldn’t put in the usual twelve-hour day. I’d like to say I left early because I was keen to get home to spend some quality time with my family after being away for a whole week. That may even have been partly true. But the main reason was that I wanted to be well out of sight before Olivia woke up in LA and went online to see if her lover had replied to her latest e-mail. I was trying to outrun the Internet.

I also had an important mission to attend to. After kissing Natasha and the kids ‘hello’, I sprinted up the stairs to our bedroom, pulled open the top drawer of my chest (we had matching ‘his’ and ‘hers’ furniture throughout our bedroom – identical cherry-wood chests of drawers, wardrobes, bookshelves and bedside cabinets all arranged in perfect symmetry) and started searching frantically for the smoking gun – the comedy socks that could pin the crime of my adultery on my weak, sloping shoulders. After a few minutes of fruitless excavation, an untidy pile of balled socks, odd socks, boxer shorts and briefs had spread across the floor by my feet.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ I heard Natasha say and looked round to see her standing in the doorway, leaning against one side like a drunken sailor against a lamp post. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘What?’ I replied as if my wife had been addressing me in Serbo-Croat. ‘Looking for? I’m not looking for anything. I just thought it was high time I gave my underwear drawer a bit of a clear-out. There’s stuff in here I haven’t worn for years. Look!’ With some reluctance, I picked up a couple of pairs of perfectly good socks and a few of their unmatched cousins and threw them without ceremony into the waste-paper bin. Then I bent down and picked up the rest of my collection of undergarments and stuffed them back into the drawer. ‘That’s better,’ I said, straining to push it shut, and still wondering where the hell the incriminating items might be.

‘Are you feeling OK, love?’ Natasha said, a look of genuine concern spreading across her face. ‘Touch of jet lag? You do remember that I’m supposed to be going out this evening, don’t you? I’ve got my book group. Would you rather I cancelled? I haven’t actually managed to finish the book so I’m not too bothered about going.’

‘No, you go,’ I said, ‘I’ll be fine. It’s about time you had a good night out.’

‘I’m not sure I’d call sitting with a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals discussing the latest Booker Prize-winner a good night out, but thank you. I could do with getting away from this place for a bit. Are you OK to get the kids’ tea sorted while I get ready?’

‘Of course,’ I said, kissing her on the cheek as I brushed past her in the doorway. ‘No problem.’

Following Natasha’s instructions, I went down to the kitchen and started to prepare the children’s tea, mixing up an off-white, glutinous, cheesy sauce which I then threw over some quick-cook pasta and doled out into their favourite bowls. As I sat down to watch them spooning the goo in the approximate direction of their hungry mouths, the realisation suddenly struck me: the evidence I was looking for would still be in amongst the dirty washing I’d brought back from New York. Leaving the children to eat, I sidled into the utility room to continue my search. It didn’t take me long to sift through the pile of laundry stacked up by the machine and find the guilty parties – my pair of black socks with the brightly coloured cartoon and the slogan picked out in red letters: ‘Have a Silly Saturday’. I rammed them into my trouser pockets – one to the left; one to the right – then raced back into the kitchen just as the first spoonful of cheesy pasta hit the wedding picture of my parents-in-law that hung above the breakfast bar, the product of Matthew’s poor aim or, to be fair, Helen’s quick reactions in dodging the projectile he had aimed at her. His second salvo caught his sister square in the middle of the forehead.