Precocious (27 page)

I actually thought you would fold me in your arms, that you would smile, even, and be happy!

I thought you’d have a plan. I thought you’d tell me not to worry, say okay, it’s not ideal timing but that you’d support me. We’d work it out, build a life together, and when the baby,
our
baby, was a bit older, I could go to uni as I was supposed to, as planned, and you would look after her (she was a girl, I don’t know why, she was always a girl, in my mind). You’d look after us both in fact, and it would be fine, better than fine, it would be wonderful.

I thought you would kiss me and hug me and have a plan.

So the sight of your face, crumpled and confused, scared the life out of me.

I was suddenly aware I was in your office, in school, aware of the walls around us, the classrooms stretching out along the corridors, the bricks and the breezeblock and the roof crushing down on us. I saw us as though from outside myself, me in my school uniform, you in your shirt and tie, which you were loosening as though from the neck of a man who was choking.

Instead of holding me, you were shrinking from me, repeating ‘this is bad’ and I sank to the floor, bowed by the grim dawning realisation of what you wanted me to do.

I don’t know why I was so convinced she was a girl. I think I envisaged her as a little version of me, but better. She was mine, and they took her from me. You – you just paid for them to take her.

You sold me an alternative future: university. Education, illumination, the joy of learning. In your version everything looked like
Brideshead Revisited
.

In my (real) version I would live in a room with damp in the corner and let boys traipse one after the other through my door and under my bedclothes. It would never make me feel better.

You’d amazed me by saying I had to tell my mum. It became clear later, of course, why: she could be recruited as my chaperone for The Thing That Needed To Be Done, as you came to call it.

I asked her to come up to my room. She sat on the bed, fidgeting. We didn’t really do woman-to-woman chats. Her eyes scanned the room, and I followed them, over the bottles and pots that cluttered my dressing table, the records scattered on the floor, the book and mug on the windowsill. ‘You ought to keep things a bit tidier, you know,’ she muttered, frowning. I looked at her, wondering how to say these words to a woman I didn’t feel I even knew.

In the end she said it for me.

‘What’s this about, Fee?’ she demanded. She hardly ever called me Fee. I said nothing. I was staring at her so hard I felt my eyes might burst. ‘You’re not going to tell me you’re pregnant or something, are you?’

I made a sound like a gasp but no words came out.

She was businesslike. ‘Have you missed two periods?’

‘Just one.’

‘Oh, well, you’re probably not pregnant, then. Periods are irregular at your age,’ she frowned. ‘I did say you should’ve gone on the pill.’

She did, as well. Even offered to take me to the clinic. It was when she’d read my diary (she never admitted this, but it was obvious, there was no other reason she would have brought up such a personal subject, or even tried to speak to me on my own. She’d read some account of a party at Mari’s and jumped to conclusions; it had seemed ridiculous to me that she thought I was at any risk of getting pregnant. Yes, there were encounters in the dark, but we just kissed, touched, felt each other, sometimes we didn’t even undress. It was innocent, teenage stuff and I’d laughed when she’d falteringly asked me had I thought about contraception.)

‘Mum, it’s not like that these days. You can find out really early.’

But in my mind whirred the thought,
Maybe she’s right, maybe I’m not
, even though the blue lines, clear blue lines, clear as sky, screamed
Yes
.

‘What does he say?’

‘Who?’

‘Todd, of course.’

I suddenly realised I had thought I could somehow have this conversation without mention of the other essential piece of the jigsaw: The Father.

‘I haven’t told Todd,’ I said, truthfully.

It’s not as though I lied – in fact I did try to tell her it wasn’t him (‘you don’t have to protect him’ she kept saying, and I kept thinking,
You’re not listening, you’re not listening
), but I suppose when I didn’t offer any other names she carried on assuming.

One thing was for certain, she wasn’t going to let me tell Dad.

‘He’ll make you tell him who it is,’ she said gravely, ‘and if you told him, he’d …’

She’d looked into the distance with a strange expression that told me that her ellipsis would lead to something so fundamentally un-Dad-like that she couldn’t picture it. Maybe violence, even, against the boy (man!) who’d taken his daughter’s innocence. Something in her eyes made me think she would actually like that. Drama, action. A reaction. In a way, I felt the same. My dad as hero – imagine: however misguided, however much I would have hated to see you hurt, would have railed and screamed and sworn I’d never forgive him, the image of Dad-Hero was something so exotic it was impossible not to find it captivating.

You never actually said you would come, but I sort of assumed you would. I made sure you knew where and when it would be, like planning an event, a show, a rendezvous, not the ending of a life. Date and time. Venue. Be there or … don’t.

I knew it was risky, but I also knew Mum wouldn’t make a fuss, not there in the clinic. Mum cared what people thought of her, especially doctors and, funnily enough, teachers. She always put on a special posh voice when she spoke to them.

But you didn’t come.

It was weird because you were attentive, afterwards. You called me every day for a week. I didn’t go to school and Mum didn’t push it, but nor did she talk about what had happened. She made me tomato soup with little pieces of buttered white bread floating in it, the way I liked it.

On the phone, your tone was light and friendly. You regaled me with school stories: the cringe-inducing assembly with third-year pupils playing faltering guitar; the teacher–pupil football game featuring a controversial sending-off.

‘Mr Dawson was hilarious,’ you laughed, ‘he swore
very
loudly, then off he flounced, taking his headband with him.’

‘Great,’ I said.

You didn’t ask me how I was.

‘I’d like to see you,’ you said during the last of these calls.

‘Okay.’

You picked me up in the car and pulled in only a few streets away. This time you weren’t bothering to take me anywhere pretty.
A back street
, I thought,
this is what I’m worth, now.
You left the engine running and I listened to it hum and rumble. I sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, perfectly still. I felt like an ice sculpture, hard, cold and brittle. I felt like if you touched me, I would shatter. But I knew, somehow, that you weren’t going to touch me. You took a deep breath.

‘We should cool it for a bit. Let the dust settle.’

‘What?’

‘We can be friends.’

Friends?

‘I don’t even know what that means.’

‘Look, this …’ you gestured vaguely in the direction of my middle, ‘this was a wake-up call. A sign, maybe. Things have gone … too far.’

I looked around the car, scene of so many kisses, conversations, hurried un-fastening and fastening of buttons, jokes, hands on knees, cuddles, even tears. This enclosed space with its smell of leather and air-freshener, once a magical place to me, a place that meant nearness to you, a canopy, a shelter, a safe place, was now just a car. Determinedly impersonal, no trinkets, no tapes or empty wrappers, not even a speck of dust. Everything clean and empty. No traces of evidence.

‘What’s done can’t be undone,’ I said quietly, wondering how many times I’d thought that and not said it aloud.

‘I know, but we can make it right, from now on.’

‘By not being together.’

‘Well, by … I mean, we’ll still see each other.’

‘At school?’ I said through gritted teeth.

‘I haven’t done right by you,’ you said in a low voice. ‘Let me try, now. For once. Let me be a decent man, for once, please.’

‘Do what you want.’
I won’t beg
, I told myself,
I won’t
, but the threat of tears stung my eyes and burned my throat and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

‘It’s not what I want, Fee. It’s about doing what’s right for you.’

In the shadow of the car I could see tears, or maybe sweat, something on your face that you brushed away with the heel of your hand, and in that moment I wanted to reach for you, but I feared being brushed away just as easily.

I was also brimming with anger and couldn’t trust what I was going to say or do, so I sat in my stifling silence and just let the tide of rage wash over me, drown me, until finally the struggle subsided and I was floating and numb and blissfully indifferent to everything. For just a split second, a heady, wonderful second, I didn’t care, didn’t give a blind fuck about any of it.

This was the second in which I was able to choke out the words, ‘Take me home, please.’

When I got in I staggered to the attic and threw myself with a great heaving sob onto the bed.

You said it was ‘good timing’, just before the Christmas holidays. A couple of weeks’ ‘distance’, you said, was what we needed. All I could see ahead of me was just that – distance.

I should come back in January and concentrate on my exams, you said. Something baleful and pathetic in your eyes, your voice: ‘forget about little ol’ me’.

The previous Christmas, the world had seemed shiny and interesting. Now everything was dark and ruined. How much can change in twelve months and how mercilessly the turning seasons remind you of what happened last time they showed their colours. I now knew that every Christmas, every winter, I would be doomed to remember and to mark this sorry anniversary, the best and the worst times wrapped up together in foil paper and twinkling lights, forever.

My thoughts, for a while, are full of revenge.

When someone hurts you, the instinct is to hurt them back, right?

That’s what my mum would say when we were kids. ‘If anyone ever hits you, hit them back.’

My dad would mumble something like ‘you can’t counter violence with violence’, and Mum would shoot him her most withering look, he’d go back to silence and Alex and I would be none the wiser as to what was the correct response when the fists and insults that populated adolescence on our streets came flying.

That’s why I’d needed Mari to rescue me that day; I’d just stood, mute and unmoving, when a group of girls launched themselves at me for no reason beyond not liking the look of me.

That’s all I kept thinking:
Why? What did I do wrong? This makes no sense
.

And this makes no sense, now.

I remember reading somewhere that one of the suggestions given to unhappy couples by Relate (formerly Marriage Guidance, name changed so as not to exclude non-married couples who can of course be equally miserable) is to spend a whole month apart. No contact. No phone calls. No visiting hours. No letters, but you are allowed to write things down: divide a piece of paper into two. Make a list of all the things you love about your relationship on one side, and on the other all the things you hate or are unhappy with.

Now when you get together at the end of the break, voila! Everything will somehow be okay.

I always knew lists were a good thing.

If the lists match? Or if your positives match his negatives, or vice versa? Will that help? Be each other’s bright side, so to speak.

The truth is, no one really knows what happens at the end of the month. What they don’t tell you is that most couples don’t last the whole month. Don’t make it, one way or another.

What is it they say? If you love somebody, set them free. If they come back, they are yours forever. If they don’t, they were never yours to begin with.

What is it you say? Cliché? But Dave would argue clichés become so for a reason.

It’s been longer than a month, for me and Dave, when we meet for a drink. And as far as I know, neither of us has made a list.

‘How’ve you been?’ he asks.

He looks good; he looks better. Better than me, and better than I remember him ever looking before. He’s had a haircut; his shirt is untucked, but neatly pressed, and he has the remains of a tan. He’s been away, I think. Where? Who with? He looks brilliant. He looks relaxed, and his smile is simple, with no agenda behind it. Nothing hidden.

‘I’m sorry,’ is all I can say. I wish I’d made more of an effort; thought more about the details, what perfume to wear, what jewellery.

‘No wedding ring,’ he observes sadly, and in spite of his expression I smile, because I can’t remember the last time I felt as though Dave had read my mind.

‘I want to wear it again’ is what I want to say, but instead I change the subject, toy with the menu, ask about Bella.

‘She misses you,’ he says.

‘And you?’ I want to ask ‘do you miss me?’ But I don’t, because neither answer would make me feel better.

He’s going on, with a guilty, lopsided grin, ‘… she’s getting fat, though. I think I’ve been spoiling her.’

‘I doubt it,’ I laugh, ‘you exercise the legs off that poor dog.’ Eventually I say, ‘I miss her, too.’

He looks in my eyes and I find myself panicking, thinking,
Don’t say it, don’t, don’t be nice to me, please
.

‘You could come home,’ he says, and then, hurriedly, ‘I don’t have to be there. I mean, just try being at home for a while. See how it feels.’

‘I have a few things to sort out,’ I say. ‘I don’t know if I should … come home, until I’m done.’

‘It’s up to you. I’d just like to know that you were there. And if you leave again, well …’

‘I can’t promise anything.’

‘It’s up to you,’ he says again.

When we get up to leave, wrapping scarves around ourselves, draining our glasses, Dave reaches into his inside pocket. For a strange moment I think he’s going to produce a ring again, propose again, and we can go back to the beginning, and it will all be alright.