Man of the Month Club Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  First Trimester

  . 1 .

  . 2 .

  . 3 .

  . 4 .

  . 5 .

  . 6 .

  . 7 .

  . 8 .

  . 9 .

  . 10 .

  . 11 .

  . 12 .

  . 13 .

  .14.

  Second Trimester

  .1.

  . 2 .

  . 3 .

  . 4 .

  . 5 .

  . 6 .

  . 7.

  . 8 .

  . 9 .

  .10.

  . 11 .

  . 12 .

  . 13 .

  . 14 .

  . 15 .

  . 16 .

  . 17 .

  . 18 .

  . 19 .

  . 20 .

  . 21 .

  Third Trimester

  . 1 .

  . 2 .

  . 3 .

  . 4 .

  .5.

  . 6 .

  . 7 .

  . 8 .

  . 9 .

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd. 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2006 by Jackie Clune.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY and the B design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / August 2007

  eISBN : 978-1-101-04296-0

  Clune, Jackie, date.

  Man of the month club / Jackie Clune. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-04296-0

  1. Single mothers—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—

  Fiction. 3. Chelsea (London, England)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6103.L86M

  823’.92—dc22

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks must go to Robert Caskie, Sean Lock, and Alan Davies, who made me do it, and to Capel and Land for all their support.

  For Richard, Saoirse, Thady, Frank, and Orla, with all my love

  First Trimester

  . 1 .

  There it was again. “Ak ak ak ak ak ak ak!” Every morning this week the same grating, high-pitched staccato cackle from somewhere on the roof terrace just above Amy’s head. And here it was again this morning, the dawning of her thirty-ninth year to be exact, when she was nursing a prebirthday hangover.

  “Ak ak ak ak ak ak ak!”

  Slowly pushing up her sequined “The Bitch Is Sleeping” eye mask (gratifying to remember she had at least one witty ex), Amy squinted at the alarm clock.

  “Fuck. Fucking six fourteen. Jesus.

  “Just stick your head under the pillow and block it out,” she reasoned to no one in particular. “Mind over matter.”

  A blissful twenty seconds passed.

  “Ak ak ak ak ak ak ak! Ak ak ak ak ak ak ak!”

  Now it was in stereo.

  Forget the noise, forget your birthday. Birthday. God, what a nightmare, thought Amy. Surely it wasn’t necessary to celebrate your birthday after the age of twenty-one, was it? What was the point? Amy only ever got crap joke presents because she already had everything she needed and none of her close circle of friends could afford the sorts of things she liked to buy as treats. Who out of her requisite Five Good Friends (she’d read Marie Claire) could afford the vintage wine she’d just ordered, the limited-edition Fendi handbag, the hardtop accessory cover for her convertible BMW? Brendan? With his crap copywriting job for QVC’s jewelry website? Gay Brendan, who did his bit for homosexual equality by spending his days thinking up different ways of describing cheap baubles made of “rolled gold.” Bleeding-heart Soph, teaching her adult literacy evening classes for next to nothing while her husband, Greg, lounged about at home, claiming to be a stand-up comedian? Angela, her oldest mate from convent days, who’d banged out five kids and hadn’t so much let herself go as emigrated? Or Jules, her work colleague and all-drinking, all-pulling mate who spent every last penny (and then some) on the latest plastic-surgery fad? There wasn’t an inch of Jules’s perfectly average body that hadn’t been tucked, lifted, Botoxed, or liposuctioned into submission already.

  “Ak ak ak ak ak ak ak!”

  What the bloody hell was the noise? It seemed to cut through her skull and pierce her nerve center at exactly the right pitch to cause maximum irritation. The clattering, aggressive, insistent “aks” followed by the few seconds of sinister silence—just long enough for you to think it was over.

  “Ak ak ak ak ak ak ak!”

  Amy rolled over and imagined it was a haggard old witch who’d crash-landed on her Japanese roof garden, mistaking the bubbling ornamental water feature for a cauldron. No. It was only April 12— far too early for Halloween. Maybe it was her mum, miraculously morphed into an airborne banshee, come to prick her single child-free conscience once again? No. Mum would wait until Amy was there over the weekend (to receive the mandatory, tragic, trying-too-hard-but-getting-it-oh-so-very-wrong gift: American tan knee-highs, “Great under trousers for work!”; an egg poacher that could cook six eggs at a time, “Well, I thought in case you had one of your dinners . . .”). It wasn’t that Amy’s mum was trying to rub it in regarding her grandchildless state—it was more of a constant drip, drip, drop of sad expressions and a subtle moistening of the eye when walking past prams. A gently leaking tap.

  “Ak ak ak ak ak ak ak!”

  “Right, that’s it, you bastard—I’m coming to get you, whatever you are!” yelled Amy, abandoning any hope of sleep.

  Pulling on her dressing gown and stumbling down the mezzanine stairs from her platform bed, Amy scooted across the floor, hotly pursued by Germaine Greer. It had been such an inspired choice of name for her scruffy, wiry gray-haired terrier with the bright, alert eyes and the faint air of jaded wisdom. Germaine had been a thirtieth birthday gift from another long-gone ex who erroneously thought buying a dog would cement their relationship. In reality, Germ
aine had been the final fluffy nail in the coffin. Amy wrenched open the access door. Bugger. It was raining. She scooted back to the shoe rack and pulled out first a trainer, then a flip-flop. Sod it, no one’s looking. As she struggled into her Nike, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror—eye mask askew, mascara circling her bloodshot eyes, the vestiges of last night’s red wine staining her lips a deeply un-this-season goth purple.

  “Well, hey, Miss Thing—happy birthday! You got it going on!” she Marlboro-croaked at her reflection. She’d smoked so many fags last night that her lips had virtually set in that cat’s-anus wrinkly pout. She made a mental note to ask Jules about that Botox party. At one time it was Tupperware, then nylon lingerie, then “adult accessories,” but now women of Amy’s age gathered together in one another’s lounges.

  Back to the matter at hand, Amy scooted back to the door, clambered up the fire escape stairs—thud, flip-flop, thud, flip-flop—and arrived soaked and breathless in her ornamental rooftop paradise. Not that she’d had much to do with it—an old flame had constructed it in happier times, and had stolen the onyx Buddha as he left. Now, was that good karma? Silence. No piercing cackles, no unidentifiable hawking, no strange, clattery disturbance. Just the cold, raw, seeping damp of an early-spring morning in London, Canary Wharf winking away conspiratorially at the Docklands developments it overlooked. It was still pretty dark, and by the look of the sky, today was going to be one of those London days with a gray ceiling, when you swore you could feel invisible hands from the heavens pushing you downward into the cracked pavement and potholed roads. Flicking on the security floodlight, Amy flip-flop thudded her way round to the skylight directly above her bed. Nothing.

  “Ak ak ak ak ak ak!”

  Amy wheeled round just in time to spot two—no, three—enormous hopping magpies descending into a monster nest that they had obviously spent the past week thieving for.

  “Go on—shoo! Scram!”

  Clearly out of shock more than indignation, the three magpies scattered into the thick sky as Amy odd-shoe shuffled her bird-scaring dance.

  Did I really just say “scram”? Nobody says “scram,” apart from the villain at the end of Scooby Doo, she thought.

  It was at this point that the glint of metal caught her eye. Just a flash at first, but something pulled her over to the nest. Niftily woven in among the twigs, leaves, and bits of moss was a thirty-nine-year-old silver locket, blackening in the dew, the catch slightly ajar, revealing Amy, aged two weeks, sausage-wrapped in swaddling clothes. Amy had turned the flat upside down for three days, cursing and crying, thinking she’d lost for good the one thing she had left that her dad had actually bought for her. It wasn’t worth a lot, but it was her one link with her useless, dead old bastard of a dad. At forty, he’d drunk himself to an early grave, pawning anything worth the price of a pint along the way. Amy had been just fourteen when the saggy armchair by the radiator had become permanently and eerily vacant one Saturday afternoon. He’d gone out to the pub at a quarter to twelve—the landlord of the depressing prefab sixties bar he propped up could set his watch by her dad—and simply never come home. It wasn’t until the Monday after that Amy found out he’d died. That obstacle course of diplomacy and sensitivity had been given to Sister Kathleen to navigate—“Amy Stokes, you’ll not be joining us for the Fun Day because you’ll be burying your drunken father, God rest his soul.” For years she had worn the locket despite the dictates of fashion (albeit often hidden beneath her Gucci and Nicole Farhi casuals).

  “You thieving little shits!” she shouted as hot tears of relief sprang to her eyes. She’d heard that magpies liked to steal shiny things but had always assumed it was an old wives’ tale. But apparently the much-maligned old wives were bang on the money. The magpies—or one of them at least—had flown in four days ago, nicked her necklace, and used it for a nest makeover. She wouldn’t have minded so much if it had been any other piece of jewelry she owned—the black pearl earrings, the Tiffany solitaire engagement ring she’d guiltily wangled out of a no-hoper would-be fiancé, the platinum charm bracelet she’d been adding to for seven years. But the locket—the locket was a no-go area. Nobody touched the locket. It was hard to say why it held such potency for her—it wasn’t as if her dad had ever even really noticed she was around. Only when she had any money—the odd fiver from relatives on a birthday or Christmas—would he turn his watery, sad eyes on her and pay her any attention. She’d always relented and handed over whatever she had, if only to see that alcoholic mask of self-pity disappear momentarily from his face. But the one thing she would not budge on, the one thing she had taken great pains to hide under floorboards, down the back of sofas, in the cistern of the toilet at one point, was the locket. Not that he would have forced it out of her hand and into the pawnshop—she’d hidden it more from herself as much as anything. She got so good at it that she herself would almost forget where she had hidden it. Almost. In some ways, Amy supposed, as she teased the locket from the thickly thatched nest, it had become a symbol of her triumph over poverty. If you’ve got something, if you hang on to something of value, however small, you’ve always got something to build on. And look at her now, on the roof of her Docklands penthouse, mistress of her own business, able to buy whatever (and whomever) she wanted.

  . 2 .

  Unlocking the door to Precious Little Darlings and punching in the alarm code, Amy reflected glumly on just how she’d come to be one of the leading designers in baby kitsch this side of the pond. At school, the smell of the art room had always been the most heady aroma to her nostrils: that mixture of paint, new paper, stale water, and dusty frustration. So different from the resigned and defeatist atmosphere of her home life. She spent most of her time there, encouraged by an incredulous Scottish art teacher named Alan who drew saucy nudes and erotic scenarios alongside her before dragging her off to the pub for lunchtime discussions about Cubism. She didn’t really bother with any other subject, instead devoting her time to maudlin self-portraits and developing a unique new screenprinting process, which she sold to a local design firm. Alan had pushed her to apply for the Chelsea Art School and had sprayed her with cheap sparkling wine when, miraculously, she got in—the only pupil he’d ever had who’d gone on to college.

  Chucking her keys on the counter, she wedged the door open with a Peter Rabbit draft excluder and lit up a cigarette. It still seemed like only yesterday that she had left home for college.

  At Chelsea, despite fitting in as well as a one-legged woman at an ass-kicking party, her star continued to rise. She’d felt at once intimidated by and superior to the trust-fund babies who populated the corridors, their piecrust collars and velvet headbands a daily assault on her good taste. She’d felt similarly irritated by the tortured souls in black; their hollow eyes and artistic temperaments merely seemed affected and unproductive compared to Amy’s pragmatic approach. She felt lucky to be there and couldn’t understand the casual laziness, the studied disinterest shown by many of her classmates.

  She worked hard and quickly became the unlikely star of her class. After her finals show, she had been offered various prestigious positions in several small but well-established design partnerships but, ever the maverick, had opted instead to set up her own company, hand-printing T-shirts with political slogans and selling them at her own stall on the Portobello market. One of her most successful lines had been a set of Babygros with hand-painted Enid Blyton fairies and Magic Roundabout characters on the front. She had meant the designs to be witty, postmodern nostalgia. She had meant them to wink a knowing, too-cool-for-school retro irony, a sort of “God, weren’t our childhoods sad?” kind of vibe. Instead, they were snapped up each Saturday by well-heeled trendies who thought them “sweet” and “adorable.” Within weeks, she was selling whole bundles to foreign buyers and taking orders on all sorts of soft-furnishing requests, from nursery curtains to crib frills. It became impossible to spend any time on her other lines—the anti-Thatcher oversized T-shirts, the
cutting feminist slogan aprons, or the nuclear-disarmament bed linens. Her business had snowballed so fast that she’d had to employ seven staff members by the end of the first year just to meet demand. Just how she wound up owning three shops and a successful mail-order business specializing in clothes, fabrics, wallpapers, painted murals, and furniture for overprivileged infants was beyond her comprehension. Despite her initial resistance, her insistence that she was better than the soft market of children’s design, it had seemed increasingly churlish to turn down the lucrative commissions and large overseas orders. Against her better judgment, Amy had become the darling of the chattering breeding classes, opening her first shop at the height of the consumerist eighties on a fashionable Chelsea backstreet. Not that she was complaining. The money was great—more than she knew what to do with most years—and she still kept some hands-on links with her team of designers. She was even known to personally paint the fairy grotto frescoes she had become famous for on the nursery walls of her rich and famous clients. She’d done a Spice Girl brat’s room, for God’s sake. But sometimes she regretted the lure of the success and the easy money. Sometimes she yearned to be in the adult world of chic minimalist urban-cool design. She could have done it—she could have gone into any field. She had the business head and the technical skill. To think that by now she could be entering the glittering premises of Conran’s emporium or swanning about in senior creative management at the Designer’s Guild—it was galling beyond measure. But somehow she’d got the biggest buzz from her first roll of children’s fabric, had wanted to stroke it and wrap herself up in the long, luxurious roll of brushed cotton, with its clean promise and unsullied possibilities, and her hands had unilaterally decided they wanted to paint beautiful, fluffy chicks on stripped pine chests of drawers, or flower-capped pixies dancing around the bottom of old oak trees in trompe l’oeil extravaganzas.