giggles. How amusingly petty it must seem, wishing to protect our home from thieves and avoid a £2000 electricity bill …
‘And can you start putting milk back in the fridge after you’ve used it? When I came back last week it had actually turned into cottage cheese …’
Muffled snorts.
‘Morgan! Are you listening? It blobbed out into my cup!’
‘Ruh,’ comes the barely audible reply. With my teeth jammed together, I trot downstairs, pull on a black linen jacket over my red and black spotty dress, and pick up my overnight bag.
‘Bye, Mum,’ I call out, facetiously, adding, ‘Have a lovely time, won’t you?’ This is the stage I have reached: the point at which you start talking to yourself in the voice of your own child. Where you say things like, ‘Thanks for the takeaway, Mum, I really enjoyed it.’
The spectre of Jenna’s lemon thong shimmers in my mind as I climb into my scrappy old Kia and drive away.
*
My shabby, scrappy life. It’s not very ‘Audrey’, I reflect as I chug through our small, nondescript town en route to the motorway. Although I don’t obsess about her – the real Audrey, I mean – I can’t help having these thoughts occasionally.
You see, my name is Audrey too. It was Audrey Hepburn; let’s get that out of the way. It’ll come as no surprise that I am named after Mum’s favourite actress, which might sound sweet and romantic until I also explain that she and Dad had had an almighty row on the day she was going to register my birth. She’d threatened to go ahead with the Audrey thing. ‘Don’t you dare,’ he’d yelled (Mum filled me in on all of this as soon as I was old enough to understand). And she’d stormed off to the registrar’s and done it, just to get back at him over some silly slight. ‘What did Dad want to call me?’ I asked once.
‘Gail,’ she replied with a shudder, although it sounded perfectly acceptable to me. To be fair, though, I don’t imagine Doreen Hepburn anticipated the sniggery comments I’d endure throughout childhood and adolescence. You can imagine: ‘Ooh, you’re so alike! I thought I was in Breakfast at Tiffany’s for a minute!’ In fact our name is the only thing we have in common. I’d bet my life that the real Audrey never picked up a single pair of pants, not even her own exquisite little scanties, and certainly not someone else’s unsavoury boxers. Nor did she drive a crappy old car that whiffs of gravy (why is this? To my knowledge there has never been any gravy in it). The real Audrey was arguably the most gorgeous creature to ever walk on this earth. Me, I’m five-foot-two (if I stretch myself up a bit) with a well-padded bottom, boobs that require serious under-wired support and overzealously highlighted hair. I am a shoveller of peas, a disher-outer of sausages and mash. I am a 43-year-old dinner lady and my wedding ring didn’t come from Tiffany’s; it was on sale at Argos, £69.
While some women feel disgruntled about changing their name when they marry – or, quite reasonably, flatly refuse to do so – I was so eager to become Audrey Pepper that Vince, my ex, teased, ‘It’s the only reason you said yes.’ I kept it, too, even when I reverted to a ‘Miss’ after our divorce, when our son turned seven. I never tell boyfriends my maiden name – not that there’s been many. There was just the very occasional, casual date until I met Stevie nine months ago in a bustling pub in York.
I couldn’t believe this charming, rakishly handsome younger man was interested. So intent was he on bestowing me with drinks and flattery, I suspected I’d been unwittingly lured into some kind of social experiment and that a reality TV crew was secretly filming the whole thing. I imagined people sitting at home watching and nudging each other: ‘My God, she actually thinks he fancies her!’ I even glanced around the pub for a bloke with one of those huge zoom lenses. In fact, Stevie turned out not to be an actor tasked with seeing how many middle-aged women he could chat up in one night. He runs a training company, specialising in ‘mindful time management’. I don’t fully understand it, and it still strikes me as odd, considering he seems to have virtually no time to spare for normal things like going out for drinks or dinner with me. Hence the venue for tonight’s date being a two-hour drive from home.
Here’s another un-Audrey thing: meeting your boyfriend at a motorway service station on the M6 on a drizzly Wednesday night. Charnock Richard services, to be precise. We are not merely meeting there before heading off to somewhere more glamorous. I mean, that’s it. We are spending the night at a motorway hotel. We do this a lot, snatching the odd night together when he’s ‘on the road’, as he puts it, which happens to be most of the time. However, I suspect it’s not just for convenience, and that service station hotels are just his thing. His mission seems to be to make passionate love to me at every Welcome Break and Moto in the north of England.
It’s just gone 7.30 when I pull into the car park. I turn off the engine and take a moment to assess the situation I’ve found myself in. I’m parked next to a mud-splattered grey estate with a middle-aged couple inside it; they’re chomping on fried chicken and tossing the bones out of the side windows. I watch, amazed that anyone could possibly think it’s okay to do this.
A lanky young man with low-slung jeans and a small, wiry-haired dog ambles towards my car. Spotting the scattering of bones, the dog starts straining on its lead and yapping like crazy. Dragging him away, his owner fixes me with a furious glare. ‘You’re disgusting,’ he snaps.
Before I know what I’m doing I’m out of my car, shouting, ‘They’re not my bones, okay? Maybe you should check before accusing people!’
‘You’re mental,’ the man retorts, hurrying away. The chicken-munching couple laugh as they pull away, and it strikes me, as I stand in the fine rain in my skimpy dress – my jacket’s still on the back seat of my car – that I probably do look unhinged, and this is all a bit weird. This service station thing, I mean. This thing of Stevie expecting me to jump in my car to meet him with barely any notice.
Yet I do, nearly every time. I picture his teasing greeny-blue eyes – eyes that suggest he’s always up for fun – and sense myself weakening. I imagine his hot, urgent kisses and am already mentally packing a bag. Never mind that I have another job, as a carer for elderly Mrs B, on top of pea-shovelling duties. At the prospect of a night with my boyfriend I quickly arrange for someone to cover my shift. Julie usually obliges. She’s always keen for more hours.
So here I am, stepping through the flurry of pigeons pecking at the greasy chicken remains. Taking a deep breath, and inhaling a gust of exhaust from a carpet fitter’s van, I make my way towards the hotel to meet the most beautiful man I’ve ever had the pleasure of sleeping with.
Stevie springs up from the sofa in the soulless hotel bar and greets me with a lingering kiss. ‘Hi, gorgeous! You look lovely, Aud. I love that dress. You smell great too, and – wow – those shoes …’
‘Thanks.’ My irritation over the chicken bones melts away instantly. Despite the drive, I opted for vertiginous black patent heels – stockings too, middle-aged cliché that I am (Stevie is a whippersnapper of 34. He was born in the 80s, for God’s sake – okay, only just. But still).
‘G&T, is it?’
‘Love
