Always Alchemy: The Ever After Book (Alchemy #6)

31. Fire Engines, Fairy Wings, and Found Family

31

FIRE ENGINES, FAIRY WINGS, AND FOUND FAMILY

MAX

I have everything in my life that a man could want or need. All the blessings I never knew to hope for.

Except for those big, manly, athletic dogs, that is.

There is not a Weimaraner or a Vizsla in sight in these endless grounds in our weekend pad in the South Downs, and it’s a fucking travesty. Instead, I’m constantly at risk of tripping over our two miniature long-haired dachshunds, Mac and Cheese, wherever I go. They’re always under my bloody feet. They’re more spoilt than any emperor and better groomed than a My Little Pony. Worse, it appears they’re virtually untrainable.

Obviously, Dex and I got totally screwed over by our wife. It’s not the first time it’s happened, and it won’t be the last. She claimed that having big dogs with big exercise needs while living in London during the week was downright cruel.

Personally, I think subjecting two grown men to these two is cruel, as are the knowing sniggers I get when I have to yell for the disobedient little shits by name in Holland Park when they refuse to remember their basic recall training.

Our four-year-old daughter, Amelia, alternates between disdain for their lack of self respect and adoration. Charlie, now five, is endlessly patient with them. Let’s just say our son got his biological father’s sweet nature and our daughter suffers fools even less than her old man.

At least Dex and I are not alone in our public humiliation. Adam Wright got equally pussy-whipped and found himself buying a pup from the same litter as Cheese. Welcoming (I use that term loosely in Adam’s case) the unimaginatively named Blondie into their family prompted Nat to design an entire line of overpriced doggy accessories for Gossamer.

Obviously, we own two of everything.

Canine regrets aside, today will be a happy day. We’ve got most of the gang coming down for the afternoon to celebrate Charlie’s fifth birthday. He has insisted on a fancy dress party, even though we’re still a couple of weeks away from Halloween, with dogs very much included in that dress code. In fact, for those guests with doggy companions, the code is Dress Like Your Dog.

In an ill-judged move, a previous version of me insisted that the dog’s costumes, at the very least, be homemade. As a result, the five of us are spending our precious Saturday morning putting the finishing touches to the dogs’ costumes, and I am far, far more invested than is decent.

I personally would have gone for matching, or at least complementary, costumes for Mac and Cheese, but both kids have gone in their own creative directions. Hence, Mac will be waddling around as a fire engine this afternoon—poor little fucker—and Cheese will be, predictably enough, a fairy princess .

Darcy has refused to have anything to do with the crafting of dog costumes, arguing that she’s organised “the entire fucking party” (her words) and that Dex and I should pull our fingers out and make ourselves useful. That’s not strictly accurate—we’ve more than pulled our weight—but you never argue with your pregnant wife, a lesson Dex and I have learned the hard way.

Hence, we find ourselves in costume-crafting teams. Dex and Milly are Team Cheese the Fairy Princess while Charlie and I are Team Mac the Fire Engine. As for the human costumes, Dex, Charlie and I will dress as firemen later while mother and daughter are, predictably enough, fairy princesses.

I can tell you now that our wife is counting down the hours till she’s wrapped around two massive firemen’s poles later. A fireman-slash-fairy spit roast is not one I’ve tried before.

As that blessed hour is an eternity away and we have a fantastic little boy to celebrate in the meantime, we sit at our vast wooden table in this light, airy kitchen. We bought this place a couple of years ago, when entertaining two kids under two in the city every weekend felt miserable as fuck. It’s just over an hour from London, in an AONB—an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, with four acres of gardens and paddocks and a sprawling white house with a traditionally thatched roof. The entire place is glorious, and I swear, every time we drive through those big gates, my blood pressure drops like a stone.

The problem with all your friends being Type A overachievers is that they’re competitive fucks, so I’m taking this dress code seriously. I will not have Charlie outclassed on his birthday by Wolff or Wright.

I took full measurements for Mac a couple of weeks ago and cut a large piece of cardboard to size. It’s been folded over so it will essentially sit on his back, folding around his front, hanging over the sides and leaving his little legs free (though pissing could pose a problem). I’ve attempted to explain to our son that it’s as important to get the structural integrity right as it is to honour the specifications of an authentic emergency vehicle.

Last weekend, Charlie painted the cardboard engine red as I looked on and praised his handiwork, sitting on my hands to stop myself from interfering. When he was in bed later that night, I touched up the blotchy parts and gave it a good coat of lacquer.

Darcy says I can’t help myself.

All this is to say: Team Mac the Fire Engine is in pretty good shape.

Dex, despite working far fewer hours than me this week, has done fuck all to prep for poor little Cheese’s costume and hence is sitting on the floor next to the table with Milly, trying not to swear out loud as he attempts to staple together a tutu from a mound of pink tulle.

‘This is deeply concerning,’ Darcy notes with a disparaging look at Team Cheese, wafting past with a huge floating bouquet of red and white balloons to tether somewhere (Mills is horrified that they aren’t rose gold, but this ain’t her party).

‘It’ll be fine,’ Dex says through clenched teeth, narrowly missing his finger with the stapler. ‘Ffff-fudge.’

I look on smugly. ‘Sounds like Daddy’s struggling a little, doesn’t it, Charlie-boy?’

He grins at me, delighted, showing tiny, pearly teeth. ‘Yep!’ The kid is far too sweet natured for his own good, so I’ve been treating this project as an excellent opportunity to instil in him some of my killer instinct .

We work away while, in the background, Spotify plays a series of shrill, kid-oriented covers of pop classics.

‘There!’ Dex says finally, the triumph in his voice audible. I look down. Cheese is wearing a poorly made tutu that definitely does not have structural integrity, and a pair of suspiciously well crafted wings that look to have originally been metal coat hangers.

‘Look, Daddy!’ Milly says to me, attempting to get the flimsy elastic chin strap of a tiny gold crown around Cheese’s endless snout. ‘She’s so pretty!’

‘She really is, darling,’ I coo before frowning at my husband. ‘Where did you get those wings? There’s no way you made those.’

He has the good grace to look sheepish. ‘Mummy made them last night, right, Mills? She said something about fairy wings being above my pay grade.’

‘For God’s sake,’ I mutter, unimpressed, watching as Cheese tries to shake her crown off. Darcy goes way too easy on Dex. He dazzles her with those big doe eyes he passed onto our son and she’s fucking putty. I mean, I’m not exactly immune myself, but sometimes you have to know when to hold your ground.

I grumble something about weaponised incompetence.

He grins at me.

I fucking melt.

‘Anyway,’ I say, recovering, ‘it’s still not as good as ours. Watch this. Fireman Sam has nothing on this guy.’

I manoeuvre Mac’s head carefully through the cardboard casing so the box is sitting jauntily over his elongated body. He looks fantastic. We’ve attached cardboard wheels to the engine itself with split pins, the ladder I painstakingly made from straws affixed to his back. He looks up at me, blinks, and then tries to curve his body to the left so he can chase his tail. He can’t bend, obviously. Not in that thing.

He does a funny little dance, rotating on the spot without getting anywhere closer to his tail. I feel a brief stab of guilt. I’ll remove his cardboard prison until the guests arrive and extend his freedom.

The most important thing is that our dog costume is better than Dex’s.

Right on cue, Cheese gives up on trying to shake the crown from her head and scuttles off.

‘No!’ Dex shouts ineffectually at her. ‘Don’t?—’

But she’s got a timely case of the zoomies. She races, crown askew and tutu flying, towards the kitchen sofa—the one that stands on short oak legs. The one she can just about squeeze under at the best of times. And as she disappears under it, my husband groans and I let out a shout of triumph.

Those wings are toast.

DEX

This guest list will win any Best Dressed award.

We have Anton Wolff in the house, dressed as James Bond. Shocker. Gen looks stunning on his arm as a platinum blonde Bond Girl who’s definitely dressed to kill, but their dog, Hades, is drawing all the attention. A Doberman who’s always lacked his owner’s, um, edge, he’s currently trussed up in sunglasses and an orange bikini, from the waistband of which sticks a rubber knife: Halle Berry in Die Another Day .

Not to be outdone, Zach has turned up looking basically like himself, except that Maddy assures me he’s supposed to be a librarian. I suppose his hair does look messier than usual, and he’s wearing a mustard-coloured sleeveless sweater over his shirt. He’s made poor old Norm bear the brunt of the responsibility. The dog is wearing a lightweight sandwich-board-type affair, covered to make it look like a library book.

Of Mice and Men , to be exact.

Given his tank-like physique, I’m guessing he’s Lennie. He’s an old guy these days, with plenty of white in his black fur and that tired, rheumy look in his eyes. Even so, he’s bearing his cross with characteristically quiet stoicism. I’ll give it five minutes before I make a plan to rescue him and feed him a sneaky sausage roll.

More aesthetically pleasing are Grace Wright and Blondie, who are both dressed as Anna Wintour. Grace is clutching an edition of British Vogue that bears one of Nat’s designs on the cover, while Blondie actually has a little brown wig on her head, shaped like a bob, and a string of pearls around her neck. Some doll’s sunglasses are propped on the wig. I have to say, she’s far more on board with her headgear than Cheese was. And I could swear she’s strutting—as much as anyone with two-inch legs can strut, anyway.

We end up taking photos of the dogs with their owners almost immediately so we can put the poor creatures (the dogs, that is) out of their misery and rid them of the more cumbersome costumes. Darce gets a fab shot of Max, Charlie and me in our firemen’s gear with our very own pint-sized fire engine. Mac really does look bloody cute. Our wife’s take on fairy princess is borderline porno, but no one’s complaining. She could take to the Alchemy pole in that getup.

Most importantly (well, after beating Max on the costume front, which I’ve failed spectacularly at doing), Charlie seems ecstatic. Given it’s October, we planned a tentative indoor-outdoor arrangement, with a chef manning the barbecue outdoors and serving up hot dogs, burgers and corn on the cob while we base ourselves indoors. But the afternoon is dry and crisp, and the kids are running around every inch of the house and gardens.

We spend so much time surveilling him and Milly, watching for any signs that this unorthodox family unit is in any way affecting them for the worse. It’s ridiculous, obviously. They have three adoring parents and a solid family unit. They’re far more fortunate than so many of their peers. But every piece of data we gather tells us the same thing.

They’re great kids.

They’re well adjusted and happy and kind. There will come a time when their schoolmates regurgitate bitchy, ignorant, judgmental things they’ve heard their parents say about us, and when that happens, we’ll deal with it. But with Charlie only one month into “proper” school, that’s not exactly a concern yet.

I take in the chaos around us as I sip my beer and chat to Mum and Charles. While we’ve opted to dress up as the kids’ favourite alter egos, most of our friends and their kids (and dogs) have gone down the spooky route. The little French boys, who’ve wisely given the librarian theme a wide berth, are both dressed as Count Dracula and my sister’s kids, Rosalie and Bobby, are, respectively, a witch and a skeleton. Rafe’s a wizard and Belle is also a witch—the most gleeful hex ever.

Celebrating Halloween still feels a little odd for me and her, given it was banned in our household growing up. My dad felt strongly that it was the Devil’s work and that we were best off steering well clear before spending the first of November praying fervently for our unholy souls.

I suspect that’s why my sister is enjoying this witch gig so much.

Next week, when we’re back in London, we’ll get down to the serious business of preparing for Halloween, with paper bats and carved pumpkins. There are a lot of wealthy Americans in Holland Park who tend to go way overboard with their spooky decorations, so trick-or-treating will be epic, and the Wrights are putting on a giant spooky installation on the facade of their insane pad.

I can’t wait.

One of the best-dressed awards of the day has to go to Charles and Mum. He’s dressed in his old military uniform (the Hunter men aren’t the type to cultivate a middle-aged spread, that’s for sure), dapper as hell and posture ramrod straight, while Mum is sporting red lipstick and victory rolls. Charles’ ancient lurcher, Dickens, is wearing a jaunty green beret and a camo coat. Charlie is fascinated, as he is by any sort of public service uniform.

It wasn’t deliberate at first that we named Charlie after Max’s dad (just as it wasn’t deliberate that Mum and the kids and I all ended up with the same surname: Hunter Scott). In fact, Darcy came up with the name after meeting Charlie, the Sorrel Farm owners’ adorable black spaniel. But it’s certainly fitting. Charles fell in love with my mother and has spent the past five years overhauling everything she thought she knew about relationships.

He’s a king among men, just like his son, and he loves his little namesake with the same exuberant energy that he loves Amelia, who’s his flesh and blood. The way he has replaced our dad in our lives is just one of the many weird and wonderful ways Mum, Belle and I have rewritten the futures we thought we’d have.

It’s been a month or two shy of seven years since I’ve had any contact with Dad.

Seven years.

I hear headlines from Mum, who is still in occasional touch with him and with a few of their parish friends. None of them are surprising. He’s in good health and very active with the church. He spends a great deal of time since taking full retirement ferrying frail old ladies to and from Mass each day. They adore him, obviously. Ben is an absolute saint, apparently.

A saint who cast aside his own son and grandchildren for falling foul of his moral codes.

Seven years of therapy and just as many years of being enveloped in a loving, supportive relationship have taught me how to sit with it. How to sit with the loss and betrayal and injustice. I will never be a hundred percent fine with it, mainly because my outrage on my children’s behalf still runs deep. But I am a hundred percent grateful for my lot in life: two incredible spouses, two beautiful, loving children and another on the way, one happy and loved-up mother, and a step-father-cum-father-in-law who could not be a stronger role model for our children.

When we’ve kicked out the last stragglers and retired to the drawing room to let the caterers clear up in the kitchen area, Lauren calls Charlie over, tugging him up onto her lap. ‘We’ve got some pressies for the birthday boy,’ she sing-songs, kissing him on his cheek.

‘Presents for me?’ Amelia asks from my lap.

Darcy laughs. ‘Nope, sweetheart. It’s not your birthday. Only the birthday boy or girl gets presents. ’

Amelia folds her arms huffily over her chest, and I stifle a smirk. My little go-getter doesn’t like that one bit.

Charlie slides off Mum’s lap to the rug so he can rip the paper off two boxes. They’re both Playmobil emergency service vehicles to complement the epic fire station we gave him earlier in the week, on his actual birthday. (I won’t tell you how long it took three intelligent adults to construct it.) Charles Senior holds out a large envelope to him. ‘This is from us too, champ.’

Charlie gets a large card out of the envelope and brandishes it. ‘Fireman Sam!’

‘You might want to ask your Mummy or Daddies to read it to you,’ Charles suggests, and Charlie scrambles to his feet. ‘You read it, Grandpa?’

I grin at Darcy and Max over Amelia’s head. We all know what this is.

‘Dear Charlie,’ Charles reads aloud. ‘Very many happy returns on your fifth birthday, with love from Granny and Grandpa. You are invited to join us next Saturday at Camberley Fire Station to meet the fire crew there, inspect our fire engines, and even slide down the pole if you are brave enough! Dress code: full fire-fighting kit. What do you think, old man? Are you game?’

Charlie’s frowning as he tries to compute this. ‘An actual real-life fire station?’

Mum nods enthusiastically. ‘Yes. We told our local fire crew about you and they said they’d love to meet you and show you around. What do you think?’

‘And will I get to sit in the truck? And slide down the pole?’

‘Yes and yes!’ Charles says. ‘And you have to wear your uniform, that’s very important. Can we tell them you’ll be there? ’

Charlie gapes at him for a moment. Then he launches himself at Charles, little arms going around his grandpa’s neck, and holds on for dear life.

Mum lays an affectionate palm on his little back. ‘I take it that’s a yes, then,’ she says softly.