by Ali Mercer
‘We don’t have to. You can come into our room for a bit, watch TV…’
If only I could spend a little time with her, I was sure I could make this right. I had to make it right. Mark would have to stay out of it, back down in the bar. He’d done enough damage for one night…
‘He said you didn’t tell him,’ Ava said.
‘Well, it wasn’t quite like that… No. All right. I didn’t.’
‘I guess that’s something,’ Ava said. She was looking at me in disgust. ‘Finally, you’re telling me the truth. But right now, that’s about as much as I can take.’
She reached forward and slid her keycard into the slot. The catch clicked and she opened the door. Inside it was dark and quiet; Ellie was sound asleep.
‘Ava,’ I said, and reached out and touched her arm.
She shook me off. ‘Were you ever going to tell me? If Mark hadn’t come back?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly.
‘Liar. You wouldn’t have done. It messes up the story, doesn’t it? All those years I felt sorry for you. Now it turns out that you were the last person I should have felt sorry for.’
‘Please, Ava, let me try to explain. Mark was married. He’d just gone back to his wife. He made it pretty clear he wasn’t interested.’
Ava was looking at me with the full force of disgust that only an adolescent is capable of.
‘I don’t want to hear it,’ she said, and retreated into the bedroom and shut the door.
I was left standing there in the corridor, at a complete loss.
Should I hammer on the door? Insist on talking to her? What good would that do? She’d just told me, in the clearest of terms, to get lost. It would have to wait until she was ready… if she ever was.
* * *
I retreated to the room I was sharing with Mark and sent her a message:
I’m next door if you change your mind.
Then I messaged Mark:
I’m in our room. Ava’s in hers. Very angry, doesn’t want to talk.
I was half hoping I’d hear a little tap on the door, or that she’d reply to my message, but my phone stayed blank and silent and when I heard footsteps approaching outside it turned out to be Mark.
He came over and sat next to me on the bed; I was lying back, propped up by pillows. He attempted a smile. ‘We really screwed up, didn’t we?’
Various horrible, hurtful things came to mind to say. We screwed up? You mean you screwed up. We had an agreement. Now look what’s happened. What were you thinking?
But what was the point of blaming him?
‘It’s really me she’s angry with,’ I said.
He couldn’t hide it; he was relieved.
‘Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that she knows,’ he said. ‘She’ll probably feel better about it once she’s slept on it, won’t she? I suppose we’ll just have to give her time.’ He reached out and patted me on the knee. ‘You should try and get some sleep. You look worn out. After all, Ava’s not the only one of our children we have to worry about.’
He stood up and began to head towards the bathroom.
‘Mark…’
He stopped in his tracks and turned back. He looked slightly apprehensive, like someone who has almost got away with something but not quite.
‘If I’d told you I was pregnant at the time, would it have made any difference?’
‘Jenny, please… is there any point in raking over all of this now?’
‘But do you think it would have done?’
‘How am I supposed to know? The fact is, you didn’t.’
‘That lets you off the hook nicely.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Oh, nothing. I’m sorry. I’m just worried about Ava.’
‘You never know, once she’s had a bit of time to digest it she might actually be pleased,’ Mark said. ‘After all, who’d want Sean as a father? It’s really Ellie who’s the one who’s got the rough deal here.’
With that he went off, leaving me to try and decide whether it was reasonable for me to feel angry with him, or whether I was the one who was responsible for all of this and there was absolutely nobody else to share the blame.
* * *
That night I went over and over what I’d done, while Mark slept peacefully beside me. If I’d had a clear conscience I might have been able to sleep too. But I still couldn’t see what I could have done any differently. How could what I’d done have been the wrong thing to do, when I hadn’t really had a choice? But somehow, it had been wrong, and my only hope was that Ava would forgive me.
It wasn’t particularly charitable of me. Or loving. But I couldn’t help but suspect that Mark had been so willing to overlook my not having told him about Ava because he knew he wouldn’t have been interested at the time. Even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to admit it.
When Mark had come back into my life I’d let myself believe that this really could be a fairy tale, and all the years of effort were about to be rewarded by a princessy ending: the new husband, the new baby, the new home.
But now Ava knew what I’d taken such care to hide from everybody all these years. I’d failed her, and she knew it. And the only thing that could save me now was whether she could bring herself to forgive me.
* * *
I’d never forgotten Mark. All the time Ava was growing up, I’d thought about him often. From time to time Sean must have done, too, though we never spoke about him. After all, we had Ava to remind us.
Mark was there in her face, her mannerisms, her bones. I’d never realised before what a powerful thing genetic heritage is: I’d never seen that much of either of my parents in myself, and I didn’t think I looked at all like my sister. But there was Ava: fair-haired, blue-eyed, neat-featured. Mark’s role in making her had been impossible to forget.
Still, he’d been frozen in time for me as the man he’d been when I first met him. And then he’d come roaring back into my life as a man in his early forties who was champing at the bit to take on family life and all the contradictions and difficulties involved.
People always talked a lot about how much women wanted babies, how they got broody at a certain age and had ticking biological clocks and all of that, even though it was patently obvious that plenty of them didn’t, and most of the rest of the time, for most of us, suddenly discovering we were pregnant was pretty much the last thing we wanted.
Stitches, mastitis, caring for a young baby who kept you up all night and then going to work the next day… surely any woman who’d been through it would have at least some mixed feelings about the prospect of doing it all again?
Men had so much less skin in the game. It was so much easier for them to want kids. You wouldn’t think it from the way the newspapers talked about these things, but men could get baby hunger just the same way women could, and in some ways, there was less to put them off.
Though sometimes, they came up against a partner who really didn’t want to have children, who was prepared to stop using contraception and see what happened but who wasn’t willing to explore the possibility of fertility treatment. Like Paula. Mark hadn’t spoken about it in any detail – I could tell he felt he ought to make at least some effort to protect her privacy – but he’d told me enough for me to figure out what her attitude had been.
In a way, I could understand where she’d been coming from. They’d had a good life, from what I could make out: a flat in a decent part of London, dinner parties with other couples, lots of foreign holidays. She’d had a career doing something in publishing, Mark had said. Why would you want to swap all that calm and order for the chaos and unpredictability of having children? You couldn’t blame her for having doubts. And if Mark had felt the same way, it would have been fine. But over time, he’d changed his mind. The hunger had got to him. And when it came down to it, she hadn’t been willing to contemplate what might be needed to give him what he wanted.
You couldn’t really blame her for that, either. All
those hormone injections, the invasive procedures, handing your body over to the control of doctors… why would any woman begin to put herself through it unless she was longing for the baby she might have at the end of it? You couldn’t do something like that half-heartedly, just because your partner was keen on the idea. You’d have to be passionate about it. Dedicated. Like a hero on a quest.
I hadn’t been like that at all. I’d taken a risk and my body had presented me with a fait accompli… but even so, it hadn’t been a given that I would go through with it.
It was just as well that Paula hadn’t really wanted children. Imagine if she had… how much more reason she would have had to hate me. Not that it really mattered how she felt; she wasn’t part of Mark’s life, and she wouldn’t be part of ours. They weren’t in touch any more; they weren’t the kind of exes who stayed friends. I’d asked Mark once, ‘Did you break up because of the children thing? Because you really wanted them, and she didn’t?’ and he’d hesitated and said yes, that had been a big part of it, and it had been obvious he didn’t want to talk about it any more and I’d changed the subject.
I knew he’d been as generous as possible when sorting out the financial settlement; he’d let her have the house, which was unusual these days even if a woman had children and was going to be the main carer, and especially if she didn’t and had an income of her own. I hadn’t asked him if he’d done that to try and make the whole thing less acrimonious. It was pretty obvious that was the case. It was just another example of that capacity he had to give big – bigger than most people. It didn’t always work. It hadn’t with Ava, with the present of the red books, though Ellie loved them. And it seemed not to have made a blind bit of difference with Paula.
Anyway, I was never going to meet her, so it didn’t really matter what she thought. But I didn’t like the thought of anyone having cause to hate me.
That night, when I finally got off to sleep, I dreamed about her.
I couldn’t see her face. I don’t know how I knew it was her, but it definitely was. It was dark in the dream and she was walking towards me, and I wanted to run but I couldn’t. Then she said, ‘You’ve made a big mistake,’ and I realised she was coming for me and my baby and then I woke up.
It was still early and Mark was asleep; the room was beginning to get light but only just, and our room service breakfasts hadn’t arrived yet. Later on I’d have to try again to talk to Ava, but for now I didn’t make any move to get up. Instead I carried on lying in bed and remembered how I’d ended up deceiving her.
* * *
I’d called Mark three days after our time together. Just the one call – I’d been very restrained. I’d left a breezy, cheerful message, one I’d practised a hundred times.
‘Just wondering how you are, if you fancied meeting up for a drink or coffee or whatever.’
He called me back the next day. A good sign. A great sign. Or so I thought, at first. Before the conversation went the way it did.
‘Jenny, you have to understand that there is absolutely no way we can see each other again. I met up with my wife and we’re back together, and we both really want to make it work. But, Jenny, she can never find out, do you understand? You must never, ever call me again.’
I didn’t cry. I just felt numb. What else had I expected? Served me right for getting mixed up with a married man.
‘OK,’ I said, doing my best to sound blasé. ‘I guess it was fun while it lasted.’
‘It was.’ He didn’t even try to hide his relief. ‘So I don’t have to worry about my bunny rabbit?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Pet rabbit,’ he said, slowly and patiently, as if I was stupid. ‘Like in the film. Fatal Attraction. A married man has a one-night stand with someone and then he doesn’t want to see her again, and she gets obsessed with him and breaks into the family home and boils his kid’s pet rabbit in a pot.’
‘How horrible. I’d never do that. But anyway, you don’t have kids. Or a rabbit.’
‘It’s a joke. A figure of speech. Haven’t you ever heard people talking about bunny-boilers? That’s what they mean.’
He was still speaking unnecessarily slowly, and I was reminded of how clever he was, and how clever I wasn’t.
‘Well, I promise I will never do anything horrible to your rabbit. Or to anything else of yours.’
My voice sounded weird. Dry mouth. Nerves. Not because I was trying not to cry. It was only a one-night stand, for heaven’s sake, and didn’t everybody have those, at one time or another? It wasn’t like an actual proper relationship that had bitten the dust. You couldn’t even call it being dumped. It was nothing. Something that had stopped before it even got started.
‘That’s good to hear,’ he said.
I expected him to ring off after that, but when it came to it, he hesitated. Even though he wanted nothing more than to get rid of me, he seemed to feel the weight of it: the saying of a final goodbye to someone who was once your lover, if only briefly.
‘Take care of yourself, OK, Jenny? Good luck with everything. You’re a great girl, and you deserve to be with someone who will love you properly.’
‘So do you,’ I said.
Was I imagining it, or had there been a slight catch in his voice when we exchanged our last goodbyes, just before he ended the call?
I replayed that conversation so many times in the days that followed. I knew it was silly of me to dwell on it. Bunny-boilerish, even. But I really didn’t have any thoughts of vengeance. I was just sad about it. It felt so much as if there could have been something more… but there wasn’t, and there never would be, and there was nothing for it but to accept that. Because the alternative was to turn into some kind of crazy, obsessed person, a stalker or worse, and what did that have to do with love?
It was just that I could suddenly understand how you might become that person. And I never would have done, before.
Then, a couple of weeks after the awful phone conversation, I finally told someone about it.
Not my mum – my calls home were always strictly cheerful and upbeat. Not my friend Karen – she had real problems to deal with; she’d just had a lump in her breast scanned, and was waiting for the results. No: I told the unlikeliest person in the world, other than a complete stranger. The person I chose to confide in was my layabout housemate Sean, who worked in the pub across the road from the salon where I was a junior stylist, and who played the guitar loudly but not well.
Sean had dropped out of a degree at Kingston University to focus on his band, or so he said, though the band had since broken up. He loved music, but what he also loved was the excuse it gave him to sit up late, listening and talking and drinking and smoking, and generally carrying on like someone who had no particular need to get up in the morning.
He was also fond of board games, and he was generous with his whisky. One night I stayed up with him to finish a game of Monopoly. The rest of the house was quiet – everyone else had gone to bed – and it felt so cosy there, in our little rented sitting room with the strange wood cladding on the walls, that I’d just come out with it.
‘Love is strange,’ Sean said. ‘Cupid’s arrow is as good a way to describe it as anything. Once it hits you, it’s likely to stick.’
‘And it hurts,’ I said.
He poured me some more whisky, and a bit later on he tried to kiss me and then stopped.
He said, ‘Is it because you’re still hung up on that other bloke?’
And I let him think it was. It was easier than telling him I wasn’t interested.
‘Well, if you change your mind, you know where I am,’ Sean said, and I went up to bed feeling better than I had ever since Mark had said goodbye.
* * *
A week or so after that I found myself in the bathroom of our shared house, staring at a pregnancy test.
Tests, I should say, because there were two in the packet and I used them both, and they both said exactly the same thing. Which was the opposite of what
I’d hoped they’d say. But there it was. In blue and white. Twice.
Pregnant.
No way I could have it.
There was a knocking at the bathroom door.
‘Hey! Anybody alive in there?’
It was Sean.
‘Just a minute,’ I said, and stuffed the pregnancy tests back into the box along with the wrapping. I put the box under my jumper and squashed my arm against it to keep it in place, then let myself out.
He was standing outside in an old band T-shirt and boxer shorts, holding a threadbare towel, unshaven and probably hungover as usual. He said, ‘You all right?’
‘Yeah… not too bad.’
I edged away from him to make it plain I wasn’t in the mood to talk, but he didn’t take the hint. He said, ‘Are you around later?’
‘What, tonight? I don’t know. Probably going to turn in early. I’m pretty tired.’
He pulled a face. ‘Shame. I was kind of hoping there might be someone decent to talk to when I finish work tonight.’ Then he frowned. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Of course, why wouldn’t I be?’
And then the packet shot out from under my arm and landed on the dirty carpet at our feet.
I scooped it up almost instantly, but not before he’d had a good chance to figure out what it was. His eyes widened. He said, ‘Jenny…’
I could have scuttled away. Instead I carried on standing there, and he said, ‘So that’s what’s going on, is it?’
‘Yeah. I… I just found out.’
We stood there looking at each other for a little longer. Sean said, ‘That sucks.’
I half managed a smile. After all, many things sucked: being fired, the bank refusing to extend your overdraft, being rejected by someone you’d fallen for… Things sucking was part of life, part of the natural order of things. But it wasn’t disastrous. Usually it meant you could figure out a way to pick yourself up, dust yourself down and carry on.
‘Yeah. It does,’ I agreed.
