by Fiona Gibson
“Well, if it’s not Jane Deakin!”
Jane looked up to meet the gaze of the woman beside her. “How are you, Barbara?” she asked, mustering a smile. Barbara had been her mother’s friend since childhood.
“Fine, Jane, apart from my cataracts. More to the point, how’s that mother of yours, abandoning us all to live in a shack up in Scotland? Has the woman completely lost it or is there some man involved, hmm?”
“No, not that I know of,” Jane told her. “You know Mum. There’s no changing her mind once she’s got an idea in her head….”
Barbara shook her head good-naturedly. “Complete nutcase, always had been. Not like you, eh, Jane?” Barbara’s pointy elbow dug into Jane’s side.
“Um, no.” Jane felt her cheeks reddening.
“The sensible one, that’s you. Most grown-up person in that crazy house, when you were a little girl. Always had your head screwed on.” She laughed from the pit of her belly, flashing a glimmer of gold tooth.
Jane felt as if her tongue and mouth and even her throat had withered and were incapable of functioning normally. She smiled inanely.
“Are you okay?” Barbara asked in a quieter voice. “I don’t want to pry, and do tell me it’s none of your business but—”
“I’m fine,” Jane barked, startling the auburn-haired girl opposite.
“Barbara Toner?” the doctor called around the door.
Barbara sprang up from her chair. “Yes, that’s me. Lovely seeing you, Jane. Do take care of yourself—you’re looking a little bit peaky if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Yes, I will.” Jane watched her leave. The auburn-haired girl caught her eye and smiled. She had a delicate face with a neat little chin and was wearing foundation that looked too orangey for her skin. She was pretty, Jane thought—around seventeen at a guess—with eyes of a pale, diluted green and the kind of sculpted lips you saw on Victorian dolls. In fact she looked like a doll, sitting there with pale hands clasped loosely on her lap.
A tall, good-looking boy ambled out of the loo. Finding nowhere to sit, he crouched down in front of the girl and rested a hand on her lap. “Feeling all right?” he asked gently.
“Yeah, okay,” the girl replied. “Bit hot in here though.”
He stood up, shook the stiffness from his legs and strolled across the waiting room to the water dispenser. “Get one for me, would you?” the girl called after him.
There was something about the young couple that transfixed Jane. The only un-doll-like thing about the girl, she realized now, was the faint swelling at her belly. The boy returned with a paper cone of water and bent to kiss her forehead. She looked up at and smiled her thanks.
It shocked Jane, the way her eyes misted instantly; she hadn’t been prepared for it at all. She wanted the magazine—pictures of tagines to hide behind—but had put it back on the table from where it had been snatched by an obese man in a tight white T-shirt.
“Hazel Driver?” proclaimed a nurse.
“Ollie, that’s us.” The girl stood up, dropped the cone into the bin and linked her boyfriend’s arm. They looked like a proper couple, Jane thought, trying to tear away her gaze. Like she and Max all those years ago. A couple who were happy and excited to be having a baby. They disappeared through the door to the surgeries, and Jane stared after them, even though there was nothing left to see. Here she was, probably two decades older than that girl—with her head screwed on, Barbara had said. She had a daughter who, in two or three years’ time, would be leaving home. She had more work pouring in than she could handle, and the memory of a night in a cottage with the storm wreaking havoc all around.
“Jane Deakin?” the woman doctor said.
She stood up. “Yes, that’s me.”
The doctor smiled distractedly, and Jane followed her through the door and along the corridor to the farthest room. “So how can I help?” the doctor asked as Jane took a seat.
“I—I think I’m pregnant. In fact I know I am.”
The doctor had a soft, kind face and wiry hair with grayness showing at the roots. “Have you done a test?” she asked.
“Yes.” Jane glanced around the cool white room. She’d come to a room like this for her pregnancy test sixteen years ago. She hadn’t known about home tests then, and wouldn’t have trusted them anyway. It had taken three days for the results to come through but Jane had known already, just as she knew now.
“Is this your first pregnancy?” the doctor asked.
Such a typical London doctor’s office, Jane thought, where you never saw the same doctor twice, despite her regular trips here regarding Hannah’s asthma. “No, I have a fifteen-year-old daughter.”
The doctor laughed softly. “That’s quite a gap.” Quite a gap—not only in years but in what she’d intended to do. To make arrangements to end it and get on with her life.
“‘It’s not a planned pregnancy,” Jane murmured. “The father and I, we’re not together.”
The doctor smiled sympathetically. “How are you feeling about it?”
Jane opened her mouth to speak, and her head filled with that auburn-haired girl and the handsome boy who’d rested a hand on her lap. “Fine,” she said firmly. “Everything’s fine.”
“Well, that’s good,” the doctor said, sounding businesslike now. “So, Jane, if you can tell me the date when your last period started, we can work out a due date and book you in for your antenatal care.”
Jane felt something lifting—like a cloud, what were clouds made of again?—and said, “Thanks, that would be great.”
46
“I’m sorry,” Ollie said.
Hannah swung round from the table in the back room where Beth had been painting her face with lurid pink swirls to look like the center—the tongue—of the plant. “Are you?” she said flatly.
He perched on the edge of the table beside her. Hannah recoiled in her seat. Ollie was in costume, wearing the dentist’s white tunic, which made his face look brown and healthy. “There’s stuff I have to tell you,” he added.
“It’s okay,” she said tersely, “your mum told me everything. What I can’t understand—” the controlled fury in her voice took her by surprise “—is why you’ve said nothing since I came back from Scotland.”
Ollie flushed and dropped his gaze. “I didn’t know how.”
Hannah glared at him. How different he seemed from the confident Ollie in the Opal who knew about wine. “So why bother now?” she snapped.
“Because I might not see you again. I won’t be coming back to theater workshop after the show. I’ve got…other stuff going on.”
“Yes, I know.”
“It’s not like that,” he protested.
“So, what is it like?” Hannah turned away, trying to blot him out of her consciousness and thinking instead of her mum, dad and Zoë waiting in the hall. And Dylan, who thought she was different, and that was okay.
“I’d finished with her,” Ollie said. “It was all over when I started seeing you. Neither of us knew she was…you know.”
“Yeah, I know.” Across the room, Beth was tonging Emily’s hair into Audrey-style waves.
“It just happened, Han. We were unlucky….” She checked her watch, unbuckled the strap and slipped it into her bag. Man-eating plants didn’t wear watches. “So we’re making a go of it,” he added lamely.
“What about the other stuff?” she asked.
“What other—”
“The drugs stuff.”
Ollie frowned. “You might think it’s a big deal. It’s not. Just a bit of hash I was knocking out, nothing else. I was…”
“Unlucky.”
“Yeah. It’s not something I do for fun, you know? Mum has depression. Really bad, manic depression, and a lot of the time she can’t work and I have to support us, if you can imagine what that’s like.”
“And that’s why you’re a dealer—”
“What d’you suggest I do,” he snapped, “get a paper round?”
&n
bsp; “Ten minutes to curtains,” Beth announced. A hush fell like a blanket on the room. Ollie slipped from the edge of the table and, without a backward glance, marched off to deliver what Hannah realized would be his second sterling performance of the day. Uncurling her hand, she looked down at the five tiny dolls that Dylan had insisted she kept, saying he’d stopped believing in them a long time ago.
“Ready, Han?” Beth asked.
“Yes.” Hannah stood up, checked her reflection in the full-length wall mirror and tried to mentally prepare herself for being encased in knobbly papier-mâché. Even sharing the stage with Ollie, and having a best friend who told outrageous fibs—not to mention a mother who was acting like she was on drugs or something, and could barely look her in the eye—even with all that, everything was going to be just fine.
Funny how big things shrank into piddling little things when you were about to morph into a ravenous man-eating plant.
47
Jane seemed different, Max thought as they left the church. Distracted, as if present only in body, with something weighing heavily on her mind—something of gargantuan proportions that had overshadowed Hannah’s performance in the show. His daughter had been brilliant, Max thought, considering her only lines had been, “Feed me!” and “Feed me, Seymour!” about thirty times over. She’d even managed to make a Venus flytrap funny—surely no mean feat—and had outshone by miles that dentist guy who’d wandered aimlessly around the stage and muttered into his chest.
“Okay if Han comes back to ours?” Dylan asked from the backseat of Jane’s car. Jane was driving them home. Although Max’s knee was healing well after surgery—he’d been told to “take it easy” for some unspecified period—he was still, irksomely, relying on her to ferry him around.
“Sure,” he said, “that okay with you, Jane?”
“Uh-huh,” she muttered.
He wanted to catch her eye, to signal: isn’t this good, that Hannah’s started hanging out with Dylan instead of acting like some Zoë appendage? Max had grown fond of this kid with his unkempt fringe and bizarre comic strips who, he suspected, had learnt to accept his lowly position in the family food chain.
“What’s it to you what Hannah does?” Zoë crunched hard on a boiled sweet.
“I just—” Dylan began.
“I mean, asking Han back to ours? Like she’s your…friend or something?” she snorted witheringly.
Hannah was sandwiched between Zoë and Dylan, sipping from a bottle of Lucozade. “I am his friend,” she said levelly. “Maybe we could watch a film or something, the three of us….”
“The three of us?” Zoë repeated faintly.
The car’s interior hummed with ill-tempered vibes. This wasn’t what Max had bargained for at all. He’d left the church in a buoyant mood, despite the fact that Jane seemed to have floated off to some distant planet—and was now trapped with a carload of bickering teenagers.
Jane pulled up outside his house. “I’ll cook you some supper if you like,” Max said, hoping she hadn’t detected the tinge of desperation in his voice.
“Sure,” she said brightly, “that’d be lovely.”
He needn’t have worried. She wasn’t even there.
Max brought mugs of tea into the back room, where low evening sunshine eked through Jane’s stained glass window. “So, are you happy with it?” she asked, curling up in one of the wicker chairs.
Max followed her gaze. “Of course I am….”
“But…?” she prompted him.
He glanced at her. She didn’t just look different; she was different. He sensed a distance between them and yearned to pull her back in, but didn’t know how. “I can’t help wondering,” he murmured, “what made you abandon the first panel and start again.”
She picked up her mug and blew across it. “I didn’t abandon it.”
“So…what happened to it?”
“I gave it away.” Her cheeks flushed, and tension flickered across her brow.
“Why?” he asked.
“I—I wanted to leave something. On the island…”
Max felt as if certain internal organs—his stomach, perhaps, certainly his heart—had sunk a little. “Jane,” he asked softly, “did you give it to…that person you met?”
“Yes, I did.”
“So…it wasn’t just a fling?” It’s none of your business, he scolded himself. What are you thinking, asking her about this stuff?
“It was a one-night stand actually.” Jane forced a brittle smile. “I’m thirty-seven, Max. How does that sound, that I spent the night with someone I barely know?”
“There’s no law against it,” he muttered, his head swilling with lurid images of rough, tough Highlander types with indecipherable accents and grappling hands. He felt quite nauseous.
“It…just happened, Max.”
“Right.” Or maybe one of those crackpot aristocratic landlords, his brain ranted on. Lairds, did they call them? The ones who’d inherited vast, crumbling estates and had nothing to do but slug whisky all day and—
“Don’t look at me that way,” Jane said desperately.
“I wasn’t,” he protested, realizing that he’d been staring—no, glaring—right into her startled eyes.
He looked away, not knowing what to do or say next. The evening sun had been dulled by a cloud. She said something then—something that sounded like repugnant.
“What?” he snapped.
“Max, I said I’m pregnant.”
He felt faint, as if he’d been whacked on the head with a stick. Years ago he’d hit black ice and come off his bike, cracking his head against a traffic bollard or so he’d been told later; he couldn’t remember the bollard bit. Only the thwack, then the clouded dizziness as some young mum with a toddler in a backpack had struggled to help him up. “Are you sure?” he managed to say.
She nodded. “I’ve done a test.”
So Jane was having a baby. She’d conceived a child with some drunken maniac in a derelict castle.
“Congratulations,” he said flatly.
“Please, Max, don’t be like that.”
He stared at her, transfixed by the tear that wobbled like mercury in her left eye, then spilled over and formed a wiggly line down her cheek. Just like Veronica’s tears after the holiday. Jesus, he really knew how to make women cry.
He reached for her hand and squeezed it. “I’ve really fucked up,” she murmured.
“No, you haven’t.”
“You hate me….”
“Christ, Jane, how can I ever hate you? I love—” Suddenly he didn’t care what she’d done on that island. She was a free woman—a gorgeous, sexy, single woman—and hadn’t he spent recent months having mind-blowing sex with a woman with whom he had less than zero in common? Where did that place him, on the scale of fucking up?
He came out of his chair, perched on the arm of hers and pulled her toward him. She felt skinny and fragile, not like someone carrying a baby at all. He wanted to kiss and tell her that everything would be okay, and not caring that Hannah or Zoë or Dylan might stumble in and find them. “So what are you going to do?” he asked gently.
She wiped her face with her hands. “It’s stupid, and it’s not a good time—not that there’s ever a good time to have a baby with someone you’ve no intention of seeing—”
“What’s his name?”
“Conor.”
“Does he know?” Max asked, turning the name over in his head. Conor didn’t sound like an alcoholic maniac.
She shook her head fiercely. “He has a son, a boy of seven years old. I can’t mess up their lives.” A small voice in Max’s head said, It’s okay, she wants the baby but she doesn’t want him. This Conor person. That makes it almost—no, really—all right. “What about Han?” he asked.
“I haven’t told her yet.”
He saw dread on her face then, mixed with defiance; she was going ahead with this, no matter what. “Jane, d’you know why I bought this house?” His voice faltered. Jan
e shook her head. “You didn’t really believe I took it on as a challenge, did you?”
“No, but—”
“I bought it for you, Jane—you and Han.” He stared at her. She looked aghast but Max didn’t care; he didn’t give a shit about anything.
“Why?” Jane whispered.
“I had an idea—you probably think I’m mad—that if there was some place that could be ours, for the three of us…not the old house where the bad stuff happened—”
“You thought I’d come back?”
He nodded, looking helplessly around the room. The house still felt hollow and empty no matter how hard he tried to fill it with chairs and standard lamps and oatmeal throws. “See that?” he asked, pointing to the stained glass window. “I thought, if I asked you to make it, then you might feel as if you belong here.”
He looked down at his hand, which was holding Jane’s. He did it then—kneeled in front of her and held her face in his hands, then kissed her lips, as if they were students again in a corridor, vaguely aware of someone whistling and laughing and neither of them caring. “Max.” Jane disentangled herself and stood up.
“What—” he began.
“I can’t….”
“You don’t understand,” he protested, scrambling up and following her through to the hall. “I want you to know it’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”
She blinked at him. “We?”
“Why shouldn’t we have another baby?” The words had flown out of his mouth.
“But it’s not your…”
“I don’t care,” he charged on. “It doesn’t make any difference. It’s yours and I love you and we can be a family—”
“Max,” she said softly, her face pale in the shadowy hall, “I can’t go back. I’m so sorry.”
Max stopped. There was no point in saying anything else, because he knew he’d blown it now. He took in Jane’s look of despair and—the worst part—pity. He’d poured them all out, the feelings he’d bottled for years, and she pitied him.
