An Unexpected Entry

Shit. She had me there. I'd been so taken in by the get-one-free offers, I'd forgotten to replenish our supply of milk. That wasn't good, given how much tea we drank. I smiled to myself; I was going to have to start writing a list before going shopping. I might not look like I was thirty-five, but some days I felt even older.

"Ummm... I'm guessing it's not in the fridge, then?" I called back. I knew full well that it wasn't, of course but... well, I didn't want to admit my mistake quite that quickly.

Kiera put her head round the living-room door and gave me a pitying look. I glanced up from the sofa, looking guilty.

"Dad, you're not supposed to be, like, senile at thirty-five."

"I'm not senile. I just got... distracted by biscuits."

She laughed at that. "Distracted by biscuits? That's about right. It would have been too much to ask for you to have been distracted by something I might actually want as well."

She wasn't a big eater, my daughter. Skinny little thing. Definitely not a biscuit girl.

"Yeah, well, I'm afraid I don't find salad all that much of a distraction," I said, truthfully.

"Oh, whatever." She rolled her eyes. "I'll just fetch a map, shall I, so you can find the plot you've obviously lost? You knew we needed milk. It was you who told me, last night. Or have you forgotten that as well?"

She paused, looking at me directly. I saw a flash of mischief in her eyes. "Jadie won't want to marry an Alzy, you know," she said. "We'll have to get you put in a home."

Jadie and I had been engaged for just over a month. Kiera's relaxed joking around the subject reminded me – not for the first time – of how well my daughter had seemingly adjusted to the idea that her best friend was, at some unspecified point in the future, going to become her stepmother.

Still, I'd always known the bond between the two girls had been strong. What Jadie had done for Kiera when she was a little girl; caring and coaxing and encouraging, relentlessly and with such compassion... that had been instrumental in helping Kiera to slowly but surely overcome the tragedy of her mother's untimely death. It had been an unusual circumstance for a friendship to be forged in. But it was surely a key reason why Kiera had felt able – eventually, at least – to forgive Jadie's transgression with me. A transgression that was still very much ongoing.

"Ah, the compassion of youth," I replied, sarcastically. "But who's going to pay to put you through uni if you get me... put in care?"

"Duh, I don't need anyone to pay. Why do you think I'm working my butt off this year and saving everything I earn?"

I smiled at her use of the word butt. I'd have said arse, of course. Bloody Americanisation again, I thought; her generation was even worse than mine for that. Still, language aside, she had a fair point. Whatever it was – butt or ass or arse or bum – she was working it off, rather ironically given the topic of our conversation, at Morrisons.

It wasn't a well-paid job but she was indeed saving pretty much everything and she would, in fact, be able to cover a chunk of her tuition fees herself. It was why she'd taken a year out instead of going straight off to uni like most of her friends. Very forward-thinking was my daughter. I admired her a lot for that.

"Alright, alright... I'll go back over and get the milk," I said, resignedly.

Her face softened, having won her little victory. She smiled again; genuinely this time.

"Actually... it's alright, Dad. You don't really need to. I just thought it was funny that you forgot. There might be enough left anyway for when Bethan and Emily arrive, and I'll bring some home later after my shift this evening."

"They're coming over again today?" I queried, referring to Bethan and Emily. "They were only here yesterday."

"Oh, well done. You remember that, then do you?" she said playfully, returning to her implication that I was on the path to senility. "And yes, they'll be here in a few minutes. They didn't get to see Jadie yesterday, because someone was taking her out on a last-minute Christmas shopping trip, weren't they?"

"Guilty as charged, m'lud."

"M'lud? Seriously? I think you'll find I'm a M'lady. At least I was, last time I looked."

"Sorry, son. I mean, daughter. Um. Who are you again? Are these my feet?"

She laughed, shaking her head. "Not funny, Dad. Way too convincing."

Walking over to the front window, she yawned and stretched, checking her phone before leaning back against the windowsill to face me.

I smiled at her. She could tell I was going to say something.

"What?" she challenged.

"Er... Bethan's changed a bit, hasn't she?"

Kiera laughed. "Oh right, that. My Dad, the master of epic understatement, as usual. Yeah, she is... a bit different."

"What do her mum and dad make of her new... lifestyle? Has it had the desired effect of shock and awe?"

"Don't be so cruel. You make it sound like she's doing it just to annoy them."

I raised my eyebrows at that. Kiera laughed.

"Yeah, okay, maybe she is," my daughter conceded. "But you can hardly blame her. They were so weird and strict all the time... it wasn't normal. I'm not surprised she's kind of gone a bit wild."

Kiera was right. Bethan's parents were indeed a bit mental. I recalled Kiera and the other girls having to make up some very convoluted 'school project' stories just so they could get Bethan 'released' to come out with them, as she hadn't been allowed out purely for the purposes of socialising.

Which meant, somewhat inevitably, that as soon as she'd escaped her parents' clutches and moved into halls of residence, Bethan had gone all-in when it came to throwing off the shackles of her restrictive upbringing. She'd been away at uni for a term and now, if her appearance the day before had been anything to go by, she had come back with a serious case of middle-class-rebel-girl.

Just the way she looked told a story. Previously I remembered her as a fairly plain-looking girl. She'd had a pleasant enough oval face, well-kept straight brown hair and, I recalled, particularly nice porcelain-white skin. Average height and build; a nice feminine figure hinted at beneath her conservative clothes. But not the sort of girl who stood out. Now, though, well, that couldn't be said any more. She was anything but plain. She still couldn't really be described as pretty, but there was a lot more... life there; a vibrance to her that made her a lot more appealing.

I thought back to what she'd looked like the day before. Emo, would be the modern term. I smiled to myself; we called them goths back in the nineties. She'd had punky streaks of blue and blonde combed into hair that was now dyed black; thick black eyeliner highlighted those deep blue eyes and really stood out against her clear, pale skin; as did the obligatory piercings which had appeared in nose and face and, I suspected, one or two other places as well...

And, of course, there was the piece de resistance; the large, fresh, black star-pattern tattoo behind her right ear which would probably, on its own, have been sufficient to achieve her likely intended purpose of enraging her father. I wasn't sure what it would do for her future employment prospects, mind, but I guessed she could worry about that later. YOLO and all that, right?

"I would love to have seen their faces when she walked back through their door last week, looking like that," I said.

"Dad, that's not a very... responsible thing to say."

I smiled. She was right. "Hmm. Responsibility isn't my strong suit these days, as you well know."

"Yeah, well," she said. "Apparently they didn't actually say anything. I think they were too stunned. Or maybe it was because Emily was with her."

Yeah, I thought. That might just have had something to do with it. Bethan's new look didn't really tell the whole story of her little rebellious streak. In fact, it wasn't even the half of it. Emily was the other half.

Emily wasn't a school friend at all; she was another first-year from Bethan's uni who'd come back with her to stay for a few days. As soon as I'd met her the day before, I could see straight away why the two of them had got together; they were both escaping the confines of their upbringing. Emily was more of an upper-class rebel-girl, though. Trustafarian was perhaps a rather uncharitable description, but it was probably what most people would think when they saw her fresh-faced combination of well-kept dreadlocks, expensive piercings and very-nicely-spoken confidence.

That said, she was rather pleasant to look at, despite her clichéd surfer-hippie-punk-girl aesthetic. Very pleasant indeed, actually. Like Bethan, she was average in height and had a nice young-looking feminine figure. She possessed a round-ish, attractive, open face with sensual brown eyes, dark eyebrows and that unique pink, healthy-looking complexion which only seemed to exist in the upper echelons of British society. The right genes, I guessed.

Whatever, it made her look young and... vital. She had a flat, neat nose and a broad mouth with full lips; all nicely-proportioned and youthful, and framed by what was probably her most striking feature; her very long, brown, dreadlocked hair. It ran almost all the way down her back and it was streaked with blonde highlights. She reminded me of those suspiciously-attractive 'alternative' girls that the cameramen always accidentally managed to focus on to when they were covering a music festival.

She was very obviously the product of private education; she had that weird sense of... certainty about her which state-school girls – even well-brought-up ones like Kiera and her friends – never really developed. Yet for all that, she wasn't some horrible braying, vacuous posh girl. She was pretty funny, as it happened; a straight-talker, direct and to-the-point. I'd rather liked her. Of course, the fact that she'd been blatantly flirting with me the previous day might have had something to do with that. But still...

I'd known she wasn't serious, of course. Well, at least I didn't think she had been. She was being a bit too obvious to be taken seriously. And, in any case, there was the small matter of her and Bethan being quite open about the fact that they were, well, rather more than just friends. Now that wasn't really surprising. After all, what better way for each of them to really upset the comfortable apple-carts of their respective upbringings; what more powerful way to outrage conservative parents – and impress old school friends – than to bring home a girlfriend to show off, rather than a boyfriend?

I felt guilty for being so cynical. But, I was pretty certain that my assumptions weren't that far from the truth.

Shaking my head briefly from those recollections of the previous day, I said to Kiera, "I hope you're not going to do the same when you go off to Cambridge next year?"

"What, bring back a girlfriend? You'd have a problem with that?" She knew full well that wasn't what I'd meant, but she did like to play me, did my daughter.

It was my turn to roll my eyes at her. "No, of course not... Although... I think Sam might have something to say, if you did."

Sam was Kiera's boyfriend. They'd got together in the summer and were still going strong, despite him having gone away to uni up in Norwich. I liked him. He was a thoroughly decent lad. At least... I hadn't had to have him killed yet, anyway.

"Oh, I don't know, Dad," she said, looking at me with a challenge. "My generation are very open-minded about that sort of thing... he might not mind sharing..."

I suppressed a guffaw, and pretended to be serious. "Oh well, that's good to know, I suppose. I'll tell him you said that, shall I? Maybe over Christmas dinner with his parents?"

A look of horror crossed her face. She was so easy to wind up. "Dad! I was only joking!"

"Of course, dear daughter. And so was I."

She looked relieved. I carried on. "Anyway, I wasn't on about... that. I meant the whole tattoos and piercings thing. I'm not sure your future career as an eminent professor of Archaeology is entirely compatible with a big spider web on your face, or whatever..."

"Spider web, lol, as if!" she said. Talking in internet acronyms – pronounced as words – was another thing which had crept into her speech patterns. "No, I was just going to go old-school with some barbed wire round my neck and maybe a little borstal tear... you know, keepin' it classy."

We both laughed. "I'm now even more worried, given that you appear to know what a borstal tear is..." I said.

"Actually, Jadie told me. I think she's planning on one for herself... you know, a little Christmas surprise for you..."

We laughed again.

"So. Did you get her anything nice, yesterday?" Kiera asked.

"Might have."

Kiera smiled. "Aww. Like what?"

I coughed. "Maybe things that a father wouldn't wish to discuss with his daughter. You know... small, pink, lacy things."

"Eww, Dad. Sorry I asked," she said, making a sick face. "Although..." she continued, a cheeky smile cracking her face. "You do know she prefers black to pink... don't you?"

I laughed, shaking my head. Such were the complications of conversation when your fiancée was your daughter's best friend.

"And, moving swiftly on..." I said, smiling. "Does Jadie know that Bethan and Emily are coming over again? I know she was gutted to have missed them yesterday. "

"Duh. Of course she knows." Kiera pulled out her phone from her leggings and waved it at me. "You know... she has one of these..." she said, rolling her eyes.

I smiled. I wasn't some kind of technophobe luddite. But I hadn't grown up with the technology like Kiera and Jadie's generation had. For me it was an occasionally-useful add-on... but for them, it was completely integral to their lives. Which meant that it didn't seem to matter how hard I tried to get to grips with their always-connected way of living, something always managed to catch me out and make me look... old.

"Oh right, yeah. Of course."

Right on cue, Kiera's phone buzzed in her hand.

"They'll be here in a minute," she announced.

"See, that's the problem with all your technology."

"What?"

"There's no such thing as a surprise any more. Those things..." I nodded to her phone, "...they give you, I don't know, like, advance warning of everything. You all know exactly where you are; what you're doing; when you're going to arrive... you've lost all that... excitement of not knowing stuff, you know, like when the doorbell is going to ring."

That little outburst evidently didn't warrant a response in my daughter's eyes. In fact, it earned me nothing more than a shake of the head and her trademark pitying look as, having heard a car pull up outside, she went through to the hall to open the front door.

To be fair, if I'd have known what a massive, heart-stopping, fuck-off-great surprise was lying in wait for me later that afternoon... well, I'd probably have pitied my naively-dismissive view regarding the benefits of advance warning as well.

Part 2: Good Girl's Back

Kiera let the girls in; they came straight through into the living room. After the usual greetings – and a bit of token flirting from Emily with respect to my t-shirt and its tightness – they all launched straight into talking about a Christmas Eve party that they were trying to organise.

I soon picked up that this meant they wouldn't be going to see Jadie immediately. They knew she would be working late in her admin job at the hospital on Christmas Eve – like Kiera she was saving hard for uni, and picking up the shifts nobody else wanted – so they'd all agreed that it would be a bit mean to go and see her and then start planning a party which she couldn't attend.

I knew I wasn't going to see a lot of Jadie over Christmas, what with her parents being around and her working all sorts of odd shifts. So, seeing as Kiera and company were happily engaged in party planning, I decided I'd pop round to see Jadie there and then.

Not the first time, a spur-of-the-moment decision would lead to trouble. But, well, I didn't know that then, of course.

I couldn't exactly tell the others where I was going, given that Bethan and Emily were blithely ignorant of my relationship with Jadie. So, by means of an excuse, I announced that I would be walking over to the supermarket to get some milk. If the girls wanted to wait until I returned, I said, I could make them all a cup of tea again before they went next-door to Jadie's.

Kiera looked at me strangely, given that she'd been planning on getting the milk later, but she didn't say anything. The other two seemed happy with my suggestion, and that was that.

I had a quick piss in the downstairs cloakroom; slipped my coat and shoes on and went out through the front door. I glanced back to the living room window, just to check the girls were still engaged in conversation and not looking at where I was headed, then I nipped over the border which separated my driveway from next door and walked swiftly to the front porch.

Jadie's parents – Keith and Sarah – were safely away staying with Keith's mother on a pre-Christmas visit; they wouldn't be back for another couple of days yet. Her brother Josh, as usual, was staying in his university digs rather than coming home straight away. Which meant Jadie had the house to herself.

I rang the doorbell and waited, looking around their front garden. I saw the estate agents had finally updated the sign which was stuck in the lawn; it now read 'Sold.' I shivered, not just because it was chilly outside. That sign was a permanent reminder of a tricky conversation that was drawing ever-closer; the one where Jadie was going to tell her parents about... well, about me.

She was adamant that she'd do it on her own. I wanted to be there to support her but, to be fair, the risk of Keith punching me to the ground and then beating me to death was not insignificant. Jadie wouldn't countenance putting me in harm's way. I was still trying to persuade her to compromise and do it over the phone once they had moved away, rather than in person before they left.

Finally, the door opened. Jadie took one look at me and rolled her eyes. That wasn't quite the greeting I'd been hoping for.

"The training isn't going very well, is it?" she said, making no move to open the door any further so I could get in from the cold.

"Training?" I queried.

I had no idea what she was talking about, although that wasn't particularly unusual. The age gap did make it feel like we were from different planets, sometimes.

"Yes, training, Mr Baines," she said, with a slight note of exasperation.

I smiled; she still called me 'Mr Baines' despite everything. She'd called me that for so long – ten years whilst I'd been merely her best friend's dad – that it just didn't seem right for her to suddenly start calling me Jim. Being a wanton pervert, I got a kick out of hearing her say it. But, I had to admit, it would sound... pretty abnormal to anyone else. Still, our entire relationship was well beyond the realms of normality.

Whatever. I was clueless as to what she was on about with this training business. Evidently noting my confusion, she explained herself.

"You know, me training you to act like you actually live in the twenty-first century, so that you message me instead of just rocking up on my doorstep and ringing the doorbell like it's the 1970s or something."

Oh right. Yeah, that training. I smiled internally and was about to defend myself but her face changed, suddenly. She looked coy, and lowered her eyes.