by Maria Goodin
“But I thought…” I muttered, confused, “…you said…”
“Nothing’s a hundred per cent safe, is it? I was taking it every day, just like you’re meant to. But these things happen.”
These things happen?!
My heart started to pound, the information infiltrating its way into my brain. My legs suddenly felt numb.
This is a disaster! God, this can’t be happening! What does this mean? What am I meant to do? Jesus Christ, I only did it once!
“Take some time to freak out. I freaked out at first as well. But now I’ve got my head around it and, well, it’ll be okay. It’s not ace, but, hey, it’s manageable.”
“Not ace”? Talk about the understatement of the century!
But then it dawned on me what she was saying. It was manageable. Of course. For a moment the shock had overwhelmed me, but of course it was manageable. There was a way out of this. It would be all right. This could be fixed.
“O–okay,” I stammered, “erm… so what happens now? Do you… shall I come with you to sort it out? I mean, I’ll come with you, we… we can go together—”
“I’ve already been to the doctors, just to get it totally confirmed.”
“Oh right. Okay. And… so, what happens now?”
“Well, you know, you’ve got school, so you should probably just focus on that. And I’m going back to uni tomorrow evening. My parents want me to stay at home, but screw that.”
“You’ve told your parents?!” I asked, unable to contain the horror in my voice. Why had she gone and done that? There was no frigging way I was telling mine!
“Well, yeah, I figured I might as well do it now. They’re not thrilled, as you can imagine.”
I tried to visualise telling my parents about this, but all I could see was the excruciating moment when my dad cornered me in his workshop last year and initiated “the talk”. I’d been so desperate to escape that I’d mumbled I know, I know in response to every sentence he uttered, before practically shoving him out of my way and rushing back to the safety of the house.
No, there was no need to tell my parents about this. What would be the point? This was a mistake that was going to the grave with me.
But Libby.
What about Libby?
I couldn’t keep this from her any more than I could have kept the fact I slept with Hellie from her. I simply couldn’t live with the deceit.
But maybe it wouldn’t make a difference. She knew what had happened between me and Hellie anyway. Surely that was the worst of it. This… this was just a crappy, unfortunate by-product of something she had already forgiven me for. But it would be dealt with. It would soon be a thing of the past. God, surely after everything me and Libby had worked through this wouldn’t derail us now.
“Okay, so look,” I said, sudden determination in my voice, “this is my responsibility too, so just tell me when you have an appointment and I’ll come with you. You don’t have to do any of it on your own.”
For a moment I felt almost like a grown-up. I was owning up to this, taking responsibility, being supportive.
“Okay,” said Hellie, her voice softer, appreciative, “that’s good. I mean, like I said, I wasn’t expecting anything from you, but actually that’s kind of nice to hear. God, most boys your age would probably run a mile. Most boys my age would probably run a mile. But then I’ve always thought you’re really mature. And in the long term you can be as involved as you want. There’s no pressure. You know my parents are loaded, so financially it’s no problem.”
I nodded silently, my brain struggling to catch up.
In the long term?
“And, look, don’t feel like you need to tell your parents right now. We can keep it quiet awhile. My dad’s pissed, but he’s not going to go hammering on your door or anything. And as for your girlfriend… I don’t know. Hopefully you can still make it work. It’s not like we’re going to ever be a couple, right? Just ’cause we’re having a baby, it doesn’t mean anything really needs to change. Especially for you.”
Having a what?!
“What…? But I thought…”
On the end of the line, voices suddenly erupted loudly and then gradually faded. It sounded like Hellie had switched the TV on.
“You thought what?”
“I thought… So you’re not getting rid of it?”
“The baby? No, that’s what… Is that what you thought I was saying? God no, I’m morally opposed to abortion. Oh God, is that what you thought I was saying? No, sorry if I confused you. I’m keeping it. Definitely.”
It felt like the room was sliding, the walls coming in towards me, all the hope of a couple of minutes ago suddenly wrenched away. I closed my eyes and bit down on my lower lip until it hurt.
There was absolutely no frigging way this could be happening.
I remember that I couldn’t look her in the eye. Couldn’t allow myself to feel anything at all. We were at the end and it was going to hurt.
We stood in silence in exactly the same spot on the bridge where just a few weeks ago we’d made up, put our arms around each other and clung onto the glimmer of hope that was our future. This time, it was a bright, frosty Saturday afternoon. There were dog walkers again, meandering along the towpath, wrapped up against the cold air, stepping aside for the cyclists who weaved around them. Families were out enjoying the sunshine. But apart from all the activity, the landscape was unchanged. The same narrowboats were still moored in the same order, smoke puffing from their chimneys. I even noticed a piece of rubbish – a stream of transparent plastic wrapping – that had been stuck in the bare branches of a nearby tree the last time we had stood here. Not much had altered really, and yet in my world everything was totally different.
I knew it was wrong and utterly selfish, but part of me was still hoping – desperately, irrationally – that Libby would want to stay together despite the baby. She was liberal, used to unusual family set-ups. I figured she wouldn’t have to be involved with the baby, and it’s not like Hellie and I would ever be together.
I’d made all these points to my parents in a foolish, gushing tirade of emotion at eleven o’clock last night, following an exhausting day of thrashing out the finer details of what any of this would mean for our family.
My dad had sighed and looked at his feet a lot. My mum had wrung her hands through her hair and paced furiously up and down the lounge.
“Have you got any idea what’s happening here?!” she’d shouted. “Are you in any way able to comprehend the magnitude of this? It’s a baby, Jamie! A human life! Have you any idea how much responsibility that is? Libby isn’t the issue! She’s not even on the radar! Fretting over the state of your teenage romance is not the bloody priority here!”
“I know that! I know it’s not the priority, but it’s still something. Something I have to sort out!”
“What on earth makes you think that a sensible girl like Liberty would want to be involved in this mess?! Or even that she deserves to be involved in this mess?”
“Libby,” I mumbled, “she hates being called Liberty.”
“After everything you’ve already put that girl through, I can’t believe you’d even consider trying to drag her into this! She is focusing on her education! She is focusing on getting into a good university one day! All the things that you should have been focusing on while you were out drinking and getting into trouble and getting girls pregnant! And, yes, I do understand this has been a tough year for you, but, no, I don’t think you can keep using that as an excuse! And how the hell am I going to explain this to Harmonie? I’ve already had to plead your case on several occasions, not least because you managed to scar her daughter’s face for life! And there was I telling her you were a good lad really, you’d just been through a rough time but you were sorting yourself out now… Ha! And now you’ve gone and proved her completely right and made me look a bloody fool!”
“I can’t believe you’re worrying about what Harmonie is going to think of you! So it’s not
okay for me be thinking about how Libby fits into all this, but it is okay for you to be worrying about her flake of a mother?! Well, I’m sorry if you get kicked out of your stupid yoga class again!”
“Libby doesn’t fit into all this, Jamie! You’ve made your bed and now you have to lie in it – alone, if you can manage that! The fact that you are even thinking about getting Libby involved in this just shows that, a, you really do have no comprehension of what is coming your way, b, you are just as selfish as most boys your age, and c, you are completely deluded! Because as much as that girl might think she’s in love with you, I imagine that even she must have her limits! Just like we all do!”
“Jamie,” my dad had interrupted, calmly but forcefully, “I know right now you’re struggling to take all this in, and it’s going to take some time to get your head around it. It’s going to take us all time to get our heads around it,” he added, glancing at my mum, “but I think what your mum’s saying is that you’re going to have a lot to deal with over the coming months, and it’s going to mean change. Big change. In every part of your life.”
Deep down, I knew they were right. I could burn myself out trying to cling on to the way things were, but it was all in vain.
My life was turning upside down and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
But still, in spite of myself, in that moment on the bridge, after I told Libby about the pregnancy, I allowed myself to entertain the tiniest glimmer of hope that she might still want to be with me, in whatever form that might take.
“So are you and Hellie going to be… together?” Libby asked, quietly, her hands pushed deep in her coat pockets, staring down at the sparkling surface of the water.
I shook my head, sadly. “No. I mean, I don’t know how it’s all going to work at the moment, but it’s not like that between us. It never will be.”
She nodded, thoughtfully.
We watched silently as a red narrowboat chugged out from underneath the bridge and made its way slowly, peacefully along the canal, causing a couple of ducks to bob gently in its wake.
Libby suddenly turned and looked up at me, squinting against the light. Her skin looked unusually pale, but the tip of her nose was pink. She was wearing the same knitted scarf that she’d worn all winter, the one I’d buried my face in the last time we’d stood here, overcome by relief that she was willing to take me back. Now I ran my eyes over her cheeks, her chin, her hair… all so familiar. And I knew that I’d never touch her again.
“We could stay together,” she said, her eyes imploring, full of hope. “I know it sounds messy, but people’s lives are messy, and it’s not like you meant to get yourself into this situation, and it’s not like normal relationships have ever really been a feature in my life. I mean, you and Hellie won’t be a couple, and who’s to say she won’t get a new boyfriend, so there’s no reason you and I… I mean, look at my parents…”
As she talked fast, anxiously, coming up with all the logical reasons that I’d already been through in my mind about how and why we could still make this work, all the reasons I’d prayed she would come up with on her own, I felt hope swell in my chest once again, just like it had the last time we’d stood on this bridge.
But as I watched her – pretty, clever, full of ambition, her whole life ahead of her – I knew with sudden conviction that my parents were right. I couldn’t do this to her. I was sixteen. She was fifteen. We were just kids. And although my own selfish longing wanted to wrap her in my arms and believe in what she was saying, all of a sudden I didn’t. I didn’t believe any of it anymore. This baby was going to change everything. And it was going to be the biggest challenge of my life. I didn’t know if I had the resources to get myself through this, let alone contend with the complications of Libby being involved. And she deserved so much more than this mess I was in. As hard as it felt now, she’d move on, find another boyfriend, build a life for herself, and one day, maybe, look back and remember me as her first love, but nothing more. I had to face the truth. We’d finally come up against something bigger than both of us.
As she talked, I shook my head, slowly, watching her eyes fill with tears. Her voice trailed off and she reached out to touch me, but I pushed her hand away.
“You know it wouldn’t work,” I told her.
And she did. I could see it in her face. I watched as the hope she was trying to cling on to vanished as quickly as it had materialised. She composed herself, taking a breath, holding her head a little higher, blinking back tears and nodding resolutely. She wasn’t raised to have some boy break her heart.
“I should go,” I whispered, unable to stand this any longer.
Libby clenched her jaw, nodded, forced the tiniest of smiles.
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I strode past her, over the bridge, down the steps and along the towpath without looking back, telling myself not to think, not to feel. It was the only way I was going to get through this.
I remember bursting through the door of my dad’s workshop, a timber building at the end of our garden where he did everything from fixing car parts to carving pieces of furniture.
“Dad, can you come help?” I shouted desperately over the drumming of the rain. Even the short walk from the house had soaked me and I could feel water running off my hair, dribbling down the back of my neck.
My dad was sitting at his worktable, hunched over something that looked like the inside of a radio, his glasses perched on the end of his nose.
“Hmm?”
He didn’t look up.
“The baby won’t stop crying. I’ve tried everything. Nappy, bottle, burping, hushing, singing… Can you just come and make him shut up? It’s doing my head in.”
My dad repositioned the head of the lamp, examined the array of tools on the tabletop, picked up a small screwdriver and went back to work.
“Well, I’m a little busy right now, son,” he muttered.
I pushed my hands through my hair, smelling rancid milk on my forearm from where I’d already tested the temperature of a bottle four times today, starting at two o’clock this morning.
“Dad, I’m serious,” I told him, already halfway out the door, expecting him to get up and follow as usual.
“So am I.”
I frowned at him.
“You have to be joking. You’re not busy. What are you even doing?”
“I’m tinkering.”
“Tinkering isn’t being busy,” I said, impatiently, shooting a glance back towards the house. I’d left the baby on the lounge floor where he couldn’t fall off anything, and it wasn’t like he could do much other than lie in one place, but my anxiety was mounting with every second I was away. And I could still hear his bloody screaming. “Come on, Dad, you’re the only one who can calm him when he gets like this, you know that.”
“And where’s Hellie?” he asked, laying his screwdriver down and picking up a small piece of wire.
“How the heck should I know?” I shrugged, bitterly.
Despite the communal living arrangement being Hellie’s idea, I hadn’t seen her since yesterday morning. She’d suggested living like this would be easier for now, and given that my mum had moved out and Laura’s bedroom was empty, it seemed to make sense. But it was starting to become clear that moving out of her own home and into ours had more to do with irritating her parents than any ideology about sharing the early months of parenting. Two weeks after the baby came home, she’d started going out for long stretches of time, and six weeks in, she was staying out overnight without bothering to inform anyone of her whereabouts. I felt angry, trapped, exhausted, overwhelmed and desperate, and I couldn’t handle it anymore. The baby didn’t seem to like me or Hellie or my mum or Laura or anyone who touched him apart from my dad, who was the only one of us with the peace of mind to settle him.
“You know, son,” said my dad, removing his glasses and leaning back in his tatty office chair, “you need to do this yourself.”
“I can’t do it myself!” I snappe
d. “I’ve spent the last frigging hour trying to do it myself! He hates me! I’ve tried everything and all he does is scream louder!”
“He’s trying to tell you something.”
“He’s not trying to tell me anything, he just likes screaming for the hell of it!”
“Try and listen to what he’s telling you.”
“Oh, come on, Dad! I can’t do this.”
My dad nodded. “Yes, you can.” Then he put his glasses back on and returned to his tinkering.
“You have to be kidding me!” I shouted, slamming the door behind me so hard that the whole workshop shook. I stormed back towards the house, the dark clouds and pouring rain making it easy to forget that this was summer.
I scooped the baby off the floor, holding him away from the wet fabric of my T-shirt, jiggling him a little too frantically. The noise of his screaming drowned out any ability to think.
“Shh, shh, shh, SHH, SHH!” I told him with increasing frustration.
“WAHH! WAHH! WAHH!” he screamed, his little red face scrunched up and angry.
“Oh my God, will you just shut up,” I whispered. “Please, please, please, just shut the hell up.”
I walked him around the house, into my room which looked more than ever like a bomb had hit it, into Hellie’s room which was now a strange mixture of the punk-rock posters that Laura had left behind and Hellie’s expensive perfumes, floaty scarves and pieces of silver jewellery, into my parents’ room, where my mum’s bedside table now sat bare. I had a sudden image of opening my parents’ window and throwing the baby down onto the drive, knowing that the blessed relief of silence would follow. I could feel my body yearning to make the necessary movements, my left arm itching to take the baby’s weight, while my right arm reached out for the window latch…
I fearfully shook the images from my mind and turned away, only to be faced with the sight of myself in my parents’ full-length mirror. My hair was dishevelled, I had a stain down my T-shirt, my face was strangely grey, my eyes were puffy and bloodshot… I’d looked like this last year, when I “lost my way” and started drinking until I was sick. But this time there was no fixing it. I was helpless and there was no way out.
