One Thing Led to Another (20 page)

‘My waters broke at 6.10 p.m., ten minutes after the last boat to the mainland. Angus was delivered by the landlady of The Jura, on our living room floor at ten to two in the morning. He was the eighth baby she’d delivered and the seventh Angus in our family. The next day, it was wonderful, half the island came to wet the baby’s head.’

Gillian, 61, Isle of Jura

I realize now, as I lie in bed meeting the steely glare of Eminem, that I must have been suffering from a severe case of pregnancy battiness to even
think
it could have worked out with Laurence. After forty-eight hours of mulling it over I can see that my expectations were a joke
.
I mean, what on earth did I think he’d say when I told him I was up the duff?

‘Brilliant! I have a fetish for lactating nipples, and women who cry at not being able to work tin openers, especially when the baby in question is not my own, and sleep deprivation? Love it to bits! Who needs eight hours sleep when you can have three!’

Vicky called me at work yesterday, ‘just checking up’ on whether I had met up with Laurence and if so, if I had fulfilled my promise and told him I had a bun in the oven. (I didn’t
tell her about Sebastian Snail. There are some things in life that other people just do not need to know. Even your best friends.) I could have relayed the Pizza Express date in every gruesome detail but frankly, I couldn’t be arsed. The fact is, it was a non event, so non, I told it her it hadn’t happened at all, that he’d never even called.

‘So does this mean you’re not going to be seeing him anymore?’ she said, breathily. ‘And that you and Jim are…’

‘No,’ I snapped. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.
Nothing
means anything. Ever again.’

‘Right, I’ll shut up then,’ said Vicky, sharply. And that was it, she hasn’t asked about it since.

The pneumatic drill starts up outside. They’ve been digging up Lordship Lane for weeks now. I close my eyes, an image of Laurence slides onto my eyelids and I allow myself, just for a moment or two, to indulge in reverie, to imagine what it might have been like if things had been different: if I’d have held on longer, for example, told him about the baby when we were further down the line with our relationship. If we’d got married, moved to France. Maybe I’d have a job on
Paris Match
, we’d live on a tree-lined boulevard in an apartment with shutters, I’d spend weekends riding a basket-fronted bicycle dropping baguettes into said basket whilst wearing a flimsy skirt and permanent expression of gay abandon on my face…But then I figure it’s all irrelevant anyway because in the end, in the words of Queen, nothing
does
really matter because life will just do what it wants anyway and the more it strays from what you expect, the harder it is to envisage what exactly that might be.

I throw back the duvet and stand up, pulling back the curtain so hard it almost comes off its runners.

I peer down onto the street, there’s one there already. And it’s only eight o’clock. A yummy mummy-yummy daddy twosome with yummy baby in yummy pushchair. If I squint,
the bloke looks a bit like Laurence: tall, olive-skinned, same perfectly shaped head. I watch them saunter in the sun to the end of the street, the guy stopping to give the baby a drink, to stroke his hair, to tenderly get something out of the girl’s eye to…
Oh pack it in you ridiculous woman, he’s probably gambled their life savings away.

I go back to bed. When I wake up, forty minutes or so later, Saturday is hotting up outside and a full on row hotting up in the kitchen. I recognize Jim’s voice immediately, agitated but in control. But there’s another voice, one I don’t recognize at all. It’s a girl’s and it’s teetering on the brink of hysterics.

‘Jim
please
, why not? You’re supposed to be my brother.’

Ten years I’ve known Jim, and I’ve never met his coke addict sister once. I’m a mixture of grotesquely fascinated and a little bit scared.

I sit down at the top of the stairs and wrap my nightie around my knees so I can hear better, like I used to when I was little and mum and dad had friends round for a cheese fondue. (There was something in that emmenthal. They always ended up screeching at the top of their lungs to ‘Born in the USA’.)

Jim’s voice is weary but firm.

‘Look, if it was anything else you needed I’d help you, you know I would. I did, in fact, only last week and you totally took the piss.’

Dawn had been an hour late to her meeting with her Addiction Project Manager and high as a kite. Jim had taken a whole day off work to attend it with her. He was not amused.

‘But I can’t have you come and stay, I’m sorry, it’s just not fair. Tess is pregnant and to put it bluntly, I don’t feel comfortable having you in the house when you’re like this. How do
I know if I can trust you? It’s not as if you have the best track record with mum.’

‘Thanks a fucking lot!’ As Dawn lifts up her face I notice that although she was probably once really pretty, she looks haggard; closer to forty than thirty-three. ‘Do you really think I’d sink so low as to steal from my own little brother?’

‘Yes. You’ve done it to your own mother, why am I any different?’

‘Because you are! Because you’re my brother, because we’ve always been in this together, you’ve always looked out for me.’

‘Not anymore, sorry Dawn. I’ll have my own baby in a few months, I can’t be babysitting you anymore.’

Curiosity is getting the better of me now, I creep downstairs, as quietly as I can and peer through the banister where I can get a closer look at her.

She’s tall and skinny like Jim, with high-lighted hair pulled back in a messy bun and the same prominent nose. But she’s glamorous, too, in a bling kind of way. She’s wearing tight cut-off jeans, a cropped leather bomber jacket and sky-high, wooden-heeled shoes with gold studs on. Every time she shakes her arms about, which is all the time, the twenty or so bangles that take up her left fore-arm, jangle noisily.

She leans against the worktop and bites her nails. The skin on her midriff is mottled, like salami.

‘You think I’m such a loser, such a waster don’t you Jim?’

‘No,
you
think you’re a loser. I just think you need help.’

‘Yes Jim!’ Her voice reverberates around the kitchen. ‘That’s what I’m asking for, that’s why I’m here. God, you’re so fucking righteous. You’re not so perfect yourself, you know. At least I stayed with mum when dad left. At least I didn’t fuck off to my mate’s house when she needed me most and had the pigs ringing her up in the middle of the night for the next six months.’

Pigs? Police? Has the father of my child got some dodgy criminal past he’s just omitted to tell me about?!

‘Oh fuck off Dawn, that only happened about three times. It wasn’t just you who was dealing with dad leaving, and anyway you’ve more than made up for it since. At least I didn’t start stuffing cocaine up my nose when things got a bit heavy. At least I sorted my life out.’

‘I am sorting my life out, that’s why I want to come here, to get away from the dealers and mum and fucking Stokey which is doing my head in.’

‘Oh, and you think you won’t be able to get hold of drugs here? In London? Jesus, Dawn, you’re so naïve. You’re already high anyway, I can see it in your eyes.’

There’s a long silence. From the corner of my eye I see Jim hang his head then go over to his sister and try to hug her.

‘Look I’m sorry, OK?’ he says. ‘Perhaps if it was another time and Tess wasn’t pregnant.’ But she brushes him off…

‘Dawn,’ Jim shouts after her, following her to the front door. ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, don’t be like that, look…’

But it’s too late, she’s gone, her wooden high-heeled clogs clip-clopping down the front path.

Jim slams the door shut. ‘Oh sod yer then, you stupid coke head bitch,’ I hear him mutter as he trundles off in his dressing gown. I can’t help but smirk. I’ve never known Jim speak like that before. But he hears me.

‘Tess.’ His expression is one of surprise and embarrassment. ‘Have you been sitting there all the time?’

I cower, guiltily. He gives an amused tut. ‘Oh marvellous,’ he says as he shuffles off back into the kitchen. ‘So now you really know the truth about my mental family.’

‘So, is she alright? Why can’t she come and stay?’ I ask, getting up from the stairs and following him in the kitchen.

‘No,’ says Jim, pointing at me. He takes two crumpets out of the bread bin. ‘Just no, alright? You’ve got no idea
what she’s like. And anyway, you shouldn’t have been listening.’

‘Sorry,’ I mumble. ‘Although I have to confess, I did hear everything. So, what’s this about you and being in trouble with the police, eh?’

‘Oh nothing, it was just a bit of joyriding.’

‘
Joyriding
!!? Just a bit of joyriding?!’

‘
Yes,
so?’ The crumpets pop up and Jim takes them out of the toaster and drops them on the side. ‘My dad had just left, I went a bit off the rails, give me a break.’

‘Did you get a criminal record?’ I’m shocked, Jim’s always seemed so in possession of himself, I can’t imagine him caving in to teenage angst. I follow him into the lounge.

‘No, just a caution.’

‘Did you cause any damage?’

‘What, in our two week reign of terror around Stoke-on-Trent?’ he scoffs and for a moment I see that beanpole of an attitude-ridden teenager. ‘A tree and my mate’s collarbone. And the bloke’s car, obviously. Unluckily for us, he was a local policeman.’

I start laughing. ‘You idiot, Jim, that is so you. Is there anything else you want to tell me? A secret past as a rent boy? Dawn said there were a
few
calls to your mum from the police?’

‘Drunk and disorderly.’ Jim bites into his crumpet. I get the feeling he’s actually showing off now. ‘I got arrested for being drunk and disorderly the week after that.’

‘No way! Really? Did you have to spend a night in a cell?’

‘In hospital. Me and my mates were legging it away from the police and I got impaled on a fence.’

‘That’s hilarious!’ I double up laughing.

‘It’s not funny, Tess’, he says. ‘I nearly lost my right bollock. Two millimetres to the right and there wouldn’t have been any baby Ashcroft.’

Jim slurps on his tea, I get the feeling that’s the end of the conversation. He’s got two days’ growth of stubble and hasn’t bothered to put his contact lenses in today, or yesterday come to think of it. Not that I saw him much yesterday, he was out at Awful’s all evening then went straight to bed when he got in. Although that could have been the fact I was hogging the sofa with an Alice band in my hair and toothpaste on my spots.

‘You’re so good with them, Jim,’ I say, looking at him as he rubs the side of his face, all stressed out. ‘With your sister, your mum.’

‘Yeah well.’ He smiles, matter-of-factly. ‘I don’t have much choice, do I? They’re my family.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘No, don’t worry. I don’t want my dysfunctional family to put a dampener on your Saturday morning. Or mine for that matter. Oh, but I know what I forgot to tell you. A bloke called this morning, Fraser is it?’

‘Oh! She had it?’

‘Yeah, little girl, seven pounds something. Everything’s fine, all fingers and toes, mum and baby well…’ He stops, he thinks. ‘What else are you meant to ask when someone’s had a baby?’

‘Her name, Jim. What’s her name?’

‘Oh.’ Jim wipes away a bit of butter that’s running down his chin. ‘Something fancy and foreign, to be honest I only asked out of politeness.’

‘Jim! The name’s the most important bit. Was it Esme?’

‘No, it definitely wasn’t that.’

‘Giselle?’

‘
Gisom?
What? No. I’d have remembered something so ridiculous.’

‘Manon?’

‘
Manon.
Now, you might be onto something there. Yes,’ he says, suddenly, decisively. ‘It was definitely that.’

‘I knew it,’ I say, smugly, sipping on my tea. ‘I knew they’d call her that.’

‘Only a girl,’ mumbles Jim, shaking his head, ‘would get excited about guessing a baby’s name.’

An hour later and I’m laid out on the sofa, Jim is curled up on the bobbly armchair, one foot tucked under the other, the Travel section of the
Guardian
folded back so he can hold it with one hand. With his other hand, he’s twirling strands of hair round till they become stiff like meringue, at which point he moves onto another one which means his head is now covered in dark little spikes.

I look at him out of the corner of my eye, the sun streaming through the window makes the skin on his legs look even more translucent and his hair more glossy. Deep chocolate brown.

He has a nice profile Jim – something about the full, expressive lips, part gormless, part looking as if they are always just about to say something.

‘What?’ Jim clocks me looking at him.

‘What?’

‘What are you looking at?’

‘Nothing,’ I say, ‘I’m not looking at anything.’

‘Good,’ says Jim, going back to his newspaper. ‘I thought I had something hanging out of my nose.’

‘What’s that your reading?’ I ask.

‘The 50 best Family Breaks.’

‘Any good ones?’

‘Yeah, fifty.’

‘Can I read it after you?’

He nods and yawns.

We decide to go for a driving lesson.

Jim drives down Lordship Lane, one hand on the steering wheel, leaning into the window with the other.

‘Are you OK, Jim?’ I ask.

‘Yeah, why?’

‘You seem distant that’s all.’

‘No I’m fine, just a bit knackered.’

Silence, we drive on, around the bustle of Goose Green roundabout and up Dog Kennel Hill.

‘Are you up upset about your sister?’

‘No, I’m alright,’ he says, tersely. ‘Stop going on.’

He indicates, then turns left into Sainsbury’s, I look at him, confused.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Where does it look like?’

‘You didn’t say you needed some shopping.’

‘I don’t,’ he says, ‘we’re having a driving lesson, aren’t we?’