What You Did

by Claire McGowan

  ‘Well, she might not be. It’s a high-risk pregnancy – she’s forty-two. I can’t believe you left her. What were you thinking?’

  It was a larger question that I was asking, really, and Callum must have known this because he didn’t answer. He seemed weary, beaten somehow. ‘She’ll be OK,’ he said again. ‘She hardly needs me.’

  ‘Of course she needs you! She needs someone to advocate for her, make sure they keep to the birth plan, and . . .’

  ‘I’d be no good at that. Don’t know anything about kids. It’s not even mine.’ He slid the last in matter of factly, as if he thought I already knew this. And had I, before Jodi said? On some level, had I suspected? I seemed to remember Karen saying: I guess they’re doing something. Something covered a lot. Interventions. Petri dishes. Donor sperm.

  ‘Of course it’s yours.’ I sat across from him in the other leather seat, determined to be brisk and clear and not give in to the small pulse of panic at the base of my spine.

  ‘I mean it. Got no lead in my pipe. It works but there’s nothing. Tanks are dry.’

  I winced. ‘You mean you used a sperm donor.’

  He drank some whisky and made a face. ‘Some German fella. Imagine we’ll have a tall blonde baby who’s very good at cycling. At least we’ll get sun loungers on holiday.’

  ‘Cal . . . lots of people do it this way. It doesn’t mean you’re not . . . that it’s not . . . anyway, Jodi needs you. She’s in pain, and she’s scared, and you need to go to her now.’

  He raised his head. His eyes were bloodshot, piggy, as if he’d been smoking weed for hours or hadn’t slept in weeks or both. ‘She doesn’t need me. No one needs me.’

  ‘That’s not . . .’

  He sighed. Regretful, or maybe irritated with my slowness. ‘Al. Ali. You know by now, don’t you? You know and that’s why you’ve come?’

  It was almost a pleading. ‘What do I know?’

  Another sigh. His voice was small, like a child’s. ‘What I did. I kept waiting for them to come for me, but they never did.’

  My heart was pumping very hard in my chest, like someone was pounding me with their fist. ‘Cal . . .’

  And I thought back to that moment in the kitchen, Karen stumbling in with blood on her thigh and my sense that this was it, the last moment before everything changed. I had that same feeling now, looking over the polished parquet floor at Callum, my friend of twenty-five years. I thought about the jumper I’d found in Benji’s toy-box, scarlet red, now dirty with burrs and leaves, unearthed from the rubbish pile. They’d say Mike took it off that night, afraid of DNA or blood, then he hid it somewhere he knew it would be burned. But Mike had not been sober enough to think of something like that. I’d seen him myself. So someone else must have done it. The jumper had been left on the decking, carelessly dropped. It was the jumper both Bill and Karen had mentioned seeing in the dark of the garden. But Mike was in bare arms when I confronted him right after, on the swing seat. Someone else could have put the jumper on.

  Someone else could have done this to Karen.

  Callum

  It was a strange thing, consciousness. He’d used the excuse before at uni – I was so drunk, sorry mate, I can’t remember. To get out of bad behaviour, spilling someone’s pint or staggering off home without them from Park End or groping a girl on the dance floor. Sorry, sorry, I can’t remember, all a blur, must have blacked out. Back then, it hadn’t been true. He’d never truly blacked out, the kind where you’re walking around and talking and doing things but there’s just a big black hole in your memory. These days, now he kept a vodka bottle in his glove box and one in his desk drawer and went to a bar for a whisky chaser every day before heading home, he’d learned the true meaning of that word. Blackout. And who could blame him if he needed something, when he was going home to Jodi, standing at the top of the stairs with her dressing gown done up all the way to the neck? Wrinkling her nose at him. You stink of booze. She could smell everything now she was finally, at ruinous expense, pregnant. Other things had changed too. When he reached for her, made sad and squishy by the booze, sad enough to wish they could bridge the space between them somehow, she turned away in bed. I don’t want to hurt the baby. I can’t bear the stink. I’m too tired. Reminding him, in a million subtle ways every day, that she was pregnant with another man’s child.

  Callum thought about the man a lot. He was German, that was all they knew. German and thirty-eight. Callum imagined someone tall and blond with amazing abs. He pictured him like he’d always pictured Bill, stripped to the waist hewing wood in a pine forest. Jodi had always liked Bill a bit too much. All the girls did. He’s so sweet. He really listens. Easy to listen when you had nothing to say, no jokes, no banter. A man like this would be the father of his child. Callum would dandle a huge German baby, who’d grow up taller than him. He could picture the graduation photos, the strapping blond boy and his dark, five foot seven father. People would laugh. People would know he was not the dad. That he wasn’t man enough to get his own wife up the duff. When the kid was eighteen he’d maybe be allowed to track the man down, his real father. While Callum would have spent years paying for him and changing his shitty nappies and picking him up from discos pissed. It wasn’t right.

  When he’d told his parents what they were planning to do, IVF with donor sperm – Jodi had told them, Callum hadn’t wanted to, but she was excited, and he thought maybe she’d wanted to make the point that it wasn’t her with the little problem, the issue – his mother had faltered, then gushed. ‘Oh, how lovely. Isn’t it wonderful, the things they can do these days.’

  His father had said nothing. Later, in the garden, while Callum pretended he knew how to cut grass, he had said, ‘I don’t know how you can do it. Another man’s bairn.’

  ‘It’ll be mine,’ he’d said, wishing he felt it.

  ‘You’ll always know it isn’t,’ his father had said, and Callum felt it all well up in him, the years of rage, feeling so small and so stupid, even now when he could buy his parents’ house twice over, knowing he’d never measure up to his father, because he couldn’t fix things and build things and ejaculate working sperm. He’d said nothing, but it was in there, moving under a thin layer like an iced-over river. Getting restless.

  Then, that night. Karen so hot and flirty, her legs bare. Sexy still at her age, when Jodi was a whale and Ali was so prim and proper. Ali had always been the good girl. Even Jodi, quiet as she was, had once had her wild side too. Before the lack of babies had soured and killed it between them. Before she realised his cock was no use to her for what she needed. When she’d lumbered up to bed that night, she’d hissed at him. Actually hissed with disgust. ‘You better not come stumbling in to bed pissed like that. It’s not good for the baby if I get woken up.’

  ‘But where am I meant to sleep?’ He’d heard his own little-boy voice, pathetic and whiny. His father would have hit him for that.

  ‘I don’t care. Sleep on the sofa. Sleep in the garden.’ She’d thrown him a contemptuous look over her shoulder. ‘Sleep with Karen. Seems like that’s what you want. Not that she’d have you.’

  It was the not that she’d have you that rankled. Even his pregnant wife, leaking and enormous, wasn’t worried other women would want him. No one wanted him. Even the women in the office and the hotels, they’d been paid, hadn’t they? One way or the other.

  He’d suspected about Karen and Mike in college, of course. They didn’t even try to hide it, and Ali was the only one who didn’t see or want to see, locked up with her books and student activities while Karen and Mike dry-humped in the corner of clubs, disappeared off at bops for an hour only to come back five minutes apart, glowing and dishevelled. Callum burned with jealousy. There was Mikey with both the sexiest girl in their year and the nicest too. It wasn’t fair.

  He’d thought it was over, of course. Just a college thing, all in the past. Then that lunch, the one where he’d sweated right through his shirt thinking he had to explain to Mikey
he didn’t have the money. The cash Mike had lent him to shore up the mortgage, after one year and then another he hadn’t got his yearly bonus. Booze on his breath at work. One girl and then another paid off, disappearing from the office. No surprise. He kept hoping it would right itself, the money would start flowing again, and he’d be able to pay Mike off. But it never did.

  Then, a miracle. Mike had a new phone, hadn’t set it up right yet. He went to the loo during lunch and it went off, flashing up Karen’s name and a query about meeting later. Terse, but Callum knew the rhythms of an affair text. There’d been a few girls. Interns mostly, a leg-over for a leg-up. Everyone knew the score. When Mike came back he’d said lightly, ‘You want to change your privacy settings, mate. Don’t want Al seeing that, I guess.’ And watching Mike turn pale and stammering, how lovely it was. ‘Don’t worry mate, I won’t tell. We’re pals.’ And not bringing up the money he owed, and instead letting Mike pick up the tab for lunch, it was glorious. It really was. He’d even asked for more, nice and neat every month, slipped into an overseas savings account he’d set up through work. It wasn’t blackmail, of course it wasn’t! They were old mates. He just needed it, and Mikey had it, so what was the harm?

  The night of the reunion had slid by in a smear of old jokes, recycled until the juice was wrung out of them. He’d felt old, and tired, and a strong sense that this would be the last time for all of them. The six of them who had remained friends when so many others weren’t, shored up by the two marriages in the group, and Karen who never went away. He understood that now, and in a way he felt sorry for her. Having to watch as Ali swanned about, gabbing about her kids’ achievements and the price of her new house. Giggling behind her hands. ‘I shouldn’t say, and I hate to brag, but isn’t it just mad? Almost a million? Can you believe it?’ Karen smiling thinly, probably thinking of that hole she rented in Birmingham. Everyone – well, Jodi – had tried to push Karen and Bill together at uni. As if it was some stupid American sitcom where everyone had to pair off in the end. Almost Shakespearean, almost incestuous, as if there was no one else in the world but the Group. The blonde Swedish bird of Bill’s, she’d been sexy, if a bit older, but Callum hadn’t liked the cool appraising way her eyes passed over his face, the few times they’d met. And she’d been four inches taller than him. It wasn’t right, in a woman. And Karen had some fellas over the years, some builder or something, slumming it with manual labour. It had amused him and Mike to ask the guy his opinion about the tax system, see him stumble. The lecturer was smarter but wasn’t ageing well, already grey and cracked round the eyes, and you could tell Karen wanted something else. She wanted Mike, and she’d never get him. Callum had known before her that Mike was ending it. Poor bitch. Poor stupid bloody bitch.

  It was maybe this that had made him follow Karen into the garden. He’d gone to the loo – Bill was in bed already – and when he stumbled back out Mike was passed out in the swing seat. Pathetic bastard. It was dark, a pitch-like dark you never got in London, and turning cold. Mike’s jumper was on the decking and without thinking he’d pulled it on, rubbing at his arms. It was soft and expensive, Mikey flaunting his cash again. And Karen, poor cow, had gone wandering across the lawn wringing her hands, pissed and sobbing. His heart broke for her and without really thinking he was lumbering after her, to hug her or share something, share their pain – Hey, Kar, I know how you feel, Mike’s a bastard, a bastard who always comes up smelling of roses no matter what he does, and my wife is up the duff with some German sperm and I’m obsolete. I have to pay women to fuck me.

  And maybe the thought was there, that Karen was sad and desperate, and she’d had some shockers in the past, as they always liked to remind her in their bantz. Maybe that thought was there as he put his hand out to steady her, on the back of her neck, like a frightened horse. He didn’t remember what happened after that, not until he was lying on the sofa and everyone was shouting and Karen was screaming in the kitchen. But he had a feeling that the memories were there inside somewhere, like the bugs that scurry and run when you disturb a woodpile. And he didn’t want to see those bugs.

  In the car the next day, going home. Jodi driving, by tacit agreement, as he was still surely over the limit. She was mad at him, he thought, for getting drunk again, but that happened so often it was hardly worth mentioning. No discussion about what had happened all the way home to Pimlico, a silent drive without even the radio on. Afraid to hear news bulletins. Man arrested on suspicion of rape after Bishopsdean party. Karen was sure it was Mike, positive. She’d been so drunk.

  Mike was his friend. But Mike had shagged Karen, over and over, and got away with it, hurt her, hurt Ali, and all Callum had done was a silly misunderstanding. That was all. Reached out to hold Karen, and then she’d seemed to want him, but then she’d changed her mind and he’d just tried to make her be quiet and listen, understand what they both had to lose if she kept screaming. But she’d been so pissed she couldn’t tell one man from the other. And wasn’t that her fault too?

  It was easy in the end. He kept waiting for Jodi to bring it up, tell him she knew something, but she never did, and neither did he, and they slid back into their lives, work and the baby and the house, so easily it was like dropping into a moving stream of cold clear water.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  He talked. He talked so much, in a stream of words that sometimes made sense and sometimes didn’t, as if half the conversation was happening in his own head. ‘She was so, you know how she was. Flirting her ass off. That dress. Throwing herself all over Bill and, and I was so drunk, Al, and I just felt . . . I’m not a man. I know that. I’m not a man because I can’t make anything and Jodi knows I’m not a man and you know and. And. You see. She. How she was. You know? That dress . . . Al, I never meant to. I thought she wanted to. That dress. Flirting. Christ, she’s such a tease when she wants to be. We called her that. Karen the Pricktease, back then, only, only, Mikey, she wasn’t teasing him. Never told me. His best friend. Never told me. But I saw. I saw it on his phone.’

  For a moment I thought he was going to cry with self-pity, poor old Cal, that no one had told him and he wasn’t a man. ‘. . . I thought she wanted. She was so. So, so. You know. And I saw her on the lawn and her legs were all bare so I went up to her – I thought she wanted. And she didn’t stop . . . she didn’t say no. You know Kar. She likes rough. You can tell. Dirty, like. Tell from looking. So we . . . and I went over and I was so drunk and then I . . .’

  I felt frozen. I could see the glass of whisky in front of me, diluted by melted ice cubes, but I didn’t know if I could lift my hand to touch it. All I could see was Karen that night. Blood on her thigh. Callum. Crashed out on the sofa in the living room, as if he’d been there for hours. But for Mike’s sake, I needed to be clear. I needed to be very very clear, even if having this conversation felt like putting my hand into a flame. ‘Cal. You’re saying that you and Karen . . . that you had sex with Karen . . . that night?’

  He nodded up and down, like the dog in that ad. ‘Thought she wanted it.’ Sorrowful. ‘Feeling bad. Jodi up the duff . . . not a real man. Not mine.’

  ‘So you . . . Cal, she was hurt. She was bleeding.’

  He shrank, like a boy being told off. ‘Thought she liked it. She didn’t say stop. Was awkward though. She kept kicking, like kicking me, and I had scratches. Hurt. Wildcat.’

  I had to be very very clear. ‘Did you . . . when you were with her, did you . . . finish?’

  He shook his head sadly. ‘Can’t. Couldn’t do it.’ Could there still be DNA though, from skin or hair or something? My stomach turned.

  I wondered if the police and lawyers felt like this sometimes. If it was simply too exhausting to even imagine building a case again, and going through all the evidence, the pages of text and sad little bags of bodily fluids, if they ever wanted to just throw up their hands and say, guys, you’ll have to sort it out between you. Because how did you solve this kind of crime, which when you open one eye is
sex, two old friends having drunk sex on a lawn, a laugh and a shameful giggle, then you open the other and it’s a terrible assault, it’s years in prison. It’s lives ruined. It’s a woman who can’t sleep in a room with a window any more. I tried to let it all sink in. This happened. Karen felt this. It was done to her. ‘Cal . . . you have to tell the police,’ I said, and I tried to sound reasonable, like I was talking to a sane person. ‘Mike might go to prison.’

  ‘But he shagged her! He shagged her for years! That day he shagged her! Saw it when we got there, look on their faces.’

  ‘I know. But she . . . she wanted him to. It’s not the same.’

  He pouted. ‘How was I meant to know she didn’t? Never said so.’

  And there it was – the attitude I’d been fighting so hard against for years. That it was on us to say no, even if we were too drunk to move or speak or too afraid or couldn’t breathe. And for Karen, I’d been the one to say: she was drunk. And, look at her dress. And, well they’d had sex before.

  ‘So – Mike didn’t do it.’ My voice was low, calm.

  He shook his head.

  ‘And – Cal, what about Martha? Did you – do you know what happened to her?’

  He stared at the ground, and I thought he was going to say of course not, it was some stranger like we always thought. Then he made a noise, some kind of bellow of guilt and relief and exasperation. ‘I never MEANT to! She was so pissed! They always get so pissed and then they scream and you have to stop them! Jesus, she made so much noise. Everyone would – people would hear. Had to stop her. Never meant to.’

  I swallowed. My mouth was so dry. ‘Mike wasn’t with her.’

  ‘Went to get drinks. Fancied his chances. Snogged her already. Not fair, is it? He had you and Karen already, then he wants to score with Rasby too? What’s so special about him, for fuck’s sake? What’s wrong with me?’ I could picture it. Martha, drunk and alone in the garden, waiting for Mike to come back. Callum creeping in, maybe after I’d spoken to him. Drunk, sloppy. Angry at Mike. His bear-like hands trying to quiet her. Around her slender white neck. Oh God.