by Lisa Jewell
‘Hold on,’ she said to the closed door, while she hurriedly de-smudged her eyes and flattened her hair, ‘hold on.’ And then she pulled the door open and tried her hardest to smile a totally normal smile at her boyfriend’s mum. ‘Hi!’ she said, ‘Sam! What are you doing here?’
Sam gave her a strange look, almost patronising.
‘You know why I’m here,’ she said.
Robyn laughed, nervously. Here it is, she thought, here it is. ‘Do I?’ she asked, as lightly as she could.
‘Of course you do. Now, are you going to let me in or what?’
DEAN
Dean took the shot from Tommy’s outstretched hand and necked it in one. It tasted like petrol, like paraffin. It burned at the back of his throat. It issued vapours from his nostrils. It rang in his ears. It numbed all the excruciating corners of his mind. He sucked on the spliff that Tommy had just passed him and then he let his body collapse against the back of the sofa and the world recede away from him, just for a few moments.
Tommy was his cousin. He’d been in the army for the past four years and now he’d signed himself off and was back in London. It was good timing. Dean and Tommy had grown up together and the people you grew up with were the easiest people to be with, Dean always thought. And right now he needed someone easy to be with. Tommy was the looker of the family. Dean had always liked going out on the town with him because the combination of Dean’s dark, otherworldly features and Tommy’s Action Man facial geometry (in some ways he could never have been anything other than a soldier) made quite a formidable impression. And Tommy, unlike Dean, liked talking to girls, approaching them, flattering them, pursuing them. Dean liked girls, he just didn’t like all the palaver you had to go through to get to them. He and Tommy made a good pair in that way.
They’d been talking all afternoon about Tommy’s time in Afghanistan: the bullets, the dirt, the nights under the stars wondering if he would live to see the sunrise. He used a lot of jargon when he talked: medevac, SCUD, sortie. It didn’t mean much to Dean but he appreciated the distraction from his own concerns. For the past two hours he’d been in a world where babies were blown up by snipers, not waiting to be taken home from special care, where men were men and women were not really in the picture at all. It was a good place to be. But now, as Tommy took the half-smoked spliff back from Dean and drew on it, Dean knew that The Tommy Show was almost over. A brief silence fell and Tommy sighed.
‘My mum told me all the shit that’s been happening. Fucking crazy, man.’ He shook his head, sadly.
Dean nodded.
‘I mean, how old was she?’
‘Sky?’
Tommy nodded.
‘Nineteen,’ said Dean.
‘Shit.’ Tommy squeezed air through pursed lips and grimaced. ‘Christ. You know, that kind of thing happens all the time out there,’ he gestured with his arm, to a place that Dean assumed was Afghanistan and not south-east London, ‘you expect it. But here … You know, modern day and age. You’d just think, you’d think they’d be able to stop it. Young girl, all her life ahead of her. Fuck, man …’ He winced again and rubbed the spliff out into an ashtray. ‘And what about the baby?’ he asked. ‘Boy, girl?’
‘Girl,’ said Dean.
‘Right. What’s the deal with her? My mum said she’s still at the hospital.’
‘Yeah, that’s right. She’s been in special care, you know, in an incubator. Wires and shit.’
‘Fuck,’ said Tommy.
‘Yeah, she’s doing well, though. She’s coming out next month, they reckon.’
‘Oh. Right, that’s good. And she’s all right, is she? I mean, you know, brain-wise?’
Dean flinched. He hadn’t even thought about that. With Sky being a premature baby herself it had never occurred to him that a premature baby could be anything other than one hundred per cent normal. The suggestion rankled with him slightly. ‘Far as I know,’ he replied. ‘Yeah. She’s fine.’
‘Good stuff,’ said Tommy. ‘That’s good. And then she’ll be coming here, will she?’ He looked around the unsavoury flat questioningly. It had not been a pretty flat when Sky had lived here, but it had at least been tidy and relatively hygienic and home to things like clean bath towels and washing up liquid. Now, after living here alone, during the toughest four weeks of his life, Dean knew the flat was squalid. He had attempted to tidy up when Tommy had said he was coming to visit, but really all he’d done was to kick things from the middle of the floor out towards the edges of the floor; the flat still smelled of mildew, stale smoke and loneliness.
‘No,’ said Dean, ‘not here.’
‘Then where?’
Dean shrugged. He had not seen his daughter since the day she was born and had no idea what would happen next month when she was finally discharged from the hospital. His mother had offered to take Isadora. But then so, of course, had Sky’s mother, Rose, who felt she had a bigger claim to the child, being her maternal grandmother, and Dean could see her point. In a way he wanted the baby to go to Rose. She was younger than his mother, had other grandchildren, lived in a nicer house and would take the responsibility in her stride. Dean’s mum was different. She liked her life the way it was. She was independent and hadn’t really had to think about anyone apart from Dean for her whole adult life. She was not geared up for life with a baby. But still, the thought of his baby being brought up by that overly controlling woman in her chichi house with all those shit magazines everywhere and her vain daughters and their spoiled children and TV blaring out MTV all day long, and the plastic fucking fairies in the garden … Rose would treat the baby like a doll, put it in a big frilly pram with a rosette on its head and wheel it about Peckham as if it was the holy reincarnation of her princess bloody daughter.
He shuddered at the thought of his daughter becoming another Sky. That woman had already brought four self-obsessed princesses into the world, he didn’t want her to do that to another one. But he didn’t want to land a baby on his own sixty-two-year-old mother either. Whatever she might say about being glad to do it for him, he knew it wasn’t what she wanted. And he knew that Rose would fight her tooth and nail to keep the baby for herself anyway and probably did have more right to it. So there was only one other solution. But all Dean needed to do was take one look around this flat, and one look in the mirror at his gaunt, grey, almost scary face, and he would roll himself another spliff and know that it could never happen. He couldn’t even face seeing his child in the safety and security of a modern hospital ward. How could he hope to nurture her here, in this fetid place, to find within himself the nugget of whatever it took to love and care for a new baby? He would never be a father to his own child, he knew that much. He was too small, inside and out. There was not enough within him for this baby. He was not equipped, in any way.
‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually, defeatedly, ‘Sky’s mum, I suppose. She’s got all the kit, you know, she’s all set up for it. Makes sense really.’
‘And what about you?’ asked Tommy. ‘You’ll visit, will you?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, reaching for the bottle of Aftershock and pouring them both another measure. ‘Yeah, I’ll visit.’
He grimaced at the lie. He wouldn’t visit. He would stay here and he would fester and putrefy and then one day, hopefully sooner rather than later, he would die.
‘Cheers,’ he said, raising his shot glass to his cousin’s, ‘good to have you back.’
They knocked their glasses together grimly, both of them aware of but not acknowledging the sheer weight of deep, heavy, unknowable shit that had been left untouched behind the light façade of their conversation.
Dean awoke the following morning in bed with a girl called Kate. She had red hair. He had never slept with a ginger girl before. He blinked at her through tacky eyelids, his vision blurred with sleep. Her hair was proper, bright orange. Carrot. It was simultaneously alarming and amazing. He almost put out a hand to touch it but realised that his arm was trapped beneath
her sleeping body, that his arm was in fact totally dead. He pulled it from under her, inch by inch, wincing with discomfort. Finally the arm was free and he shook it violently from side to side, trying to regain some feeling in it. It crawled with pins and needles and distracted him for a moment from the throbbing inside his head. His thoughts contained no real clues to the journey that had brought him to the bed of this woman with orange hair.
He knew he’d been dragged to the pub last night by Tommy at some time after ten o’clock. He knew that it was club night at the pub, that a female DJ with pigtails and a school uniform on had been installed in the corner, and that he had danced to ‘Right on Time’ by Black Box with a bottle of Budweiser in his hand. He knew that Tommy had been scanning the place for girls from the moment they’d walked in and declared it ‘full of rough as fuck minge’ but still managed to ferret something half-decent out of the scattering of women lining the bar. But he did not know where this one had come from. Just knew that her name was Kate. He only remembered that because it was his grandmother’s name. He remembered saying that to her, last night: ‘You’ve got the same name as my grandmother.’ But not adding: And the same as my baby daughter’s middle name.
He peered around Kate’s room. It looked like a student’s room. She had a dressing table covered in junk jewellery and photos of friends, a guitar against the wall, a laptop, a sari pinned across the window. And there, on her bedside table, a mug half full of thick cold tea with the words ‘Deptford University’ printed on it.
The girl began to stir and Dean held his breath. He had no idea what to expect. But as the girl rolled towards him he was pleasantly surprised to see that she was pretty. Not as pretty as Sky, but then not like that ginger one from Girls Aloud either. She had delicate features and the right kind of freckles and her lips were a kind of strawberry colour. ‘Urgh, God,’ she said as her eyes alighted upon him. Then she rolled away from him again and grunted.
‘Yeah, nice to meet you, too,’ said Dean with as much humour as he could muster.
‘Urgh, God. Not you,’ she groaned. ‘Not you. This.’ She pointed at her head. ‘Hurts. Hurts bad.’
Dean sat up and flopped his legs over the side of Kate’s bed. ‘I’ll get some painkillers. Where do you keep them?’
She pointed him silently towards a plastic Tupperware box on her dressing table. He unpeeled the lid and brought her over a packet of Ibuprofens and a glass of water from her desk.
‘Thanks,’ she said, heaving herself into an upright position and pulling her hair away from her face. It occurred to Dean as he watched her and also considered his own appearance that they were both wearing underwear. He had on his boxers and Kate was wearing a grey vest over a bra.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you and I? We didn’t …’
‘No. We didn’t.’
‘Oh, right.’ He tried to dredge something up from the bottom of his brain that might remind him what exactly they had done, but found nothing.
She tipped the pills on to the back of her tongue and swallowed them frantically with the water. ‘Remember?’ she said. ‘We talked?’
‘We talked?’
‘Yeah. We sat up until stupid o’clock in my kitchen talking.’
‘Right.’
‘Yeah, and smoking. We smoked a lot. My throat feels like I’ve been swallowing glass.’ She put her hand to her throat and stroked it tenderly.
‘So, what were we talking about? You and me?’
‘Oh, anything and everything. Your dead girlfriend, mainly. And your sick baby. Oh, and your sperm-donor dad.’
‘No!’ Dean spun round and looked at her in shock.
‘Yeah. For real. I mean, all I wanted was to meet a nice boy and maybe have a bit of a cuddle. Bloody typical for me, I end up with Mr Dead Girlfriend doing a Jeremy Kyle in my kitchen.’ Her words sounded cruel but Dean could tell she was only being flippant. He could remember now. He could remember seeing her pretty face by the light of a candle, watching her filling the kettle and stirring a teabag around a mug. He could remember ham sandwiches on plastic plates, and filling and rolling and filling and rolling a dozen fat spliffs, sending hazy veils of smoke into the air around them. And he could remember talking. Not just chatting but really talking. And he remembered saying this: ‘It’s so easy talking to you, I feel like I’ve known you, like, forever.’
He didn’t feel like he’d known her forever this morning. He felt like he’d never met her before in his life. He felt awkward now, knowing that he’d opened up to this strange girl with orange hair and freckly shoulders.
‘Sorry,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Didn’t mean to dump on you.’
She smiled then and he liked the way her face looked when she smiled. He could see for a moment why he might have felt able to open his soul to this girl. ‘Not a problem,’ she said, pulling her thick hair back into a wild bun. ‘Glad to have been of service. I dread to think how many typos there were in that form we sent off, though. Holy shit. It must have looked like it had been filled in by psychotic six year olds.’
He smiled at her curiously. ‘What form?’ he said, a creeping sense of unease growing within him as a memory began to unfurl in his head.
She turned and glanced at him. ‘You don’t remember?’
‘What?’
‘Going on the internet last night?’
He glanced at the laptop on her desk and then at the plastic swivel chair pulled up in front of it and the small wooden stool to the left and, yes, he remembered sitting on that small wooden stool watching Kate tapping away at her keyboard, he even remembered thinking: She’s good at typing. And as that memory revealed itself so too did another.
Kate and he in the kitchen, Kate putting mugs into the sink, pouring tap water into glasses, saying: ‘Come upstairs. It’s in my room.’
He could remember the pale minty green of the walls on the staircase and a photo of a cat wearing a raincoat and rain-hat taped to the outside of the bathroom door. And, before that, the conversation that had preceded their ascent to Kate’s room.
‘Don’t you ever wonder? Don’t you want to know?’
‘What? Like brothers and sisters and stuff?’
‘Yeah. You know, people who are related to you. God, if I thought there were people out there who were my actual family, I just wouldn’t be able to resist it. I’d have to find out. I’d have to know.’
‘Yeah, it’s never really bothered me. I mean, there’s even a place now, apparently, they set it up last year, where you can trace your genetic siblings. My mum told me about it. But I still never really thought about it. I suppose, you know, with the baby coming and then everything that’s happened since, I just wasn’t too fussed about it.’
‘What’s it called?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Sibling Register or something.’
‘Is it on-line?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, it is. My mum said that’s what you have to do, if you want to join. You have to do it on-line.’
He could remember a sense of excitement and adventure coming upon him then. A sense that he was in the right place at the right time with the right person. That this was meant to be happening. Suddenly he’d felt the possibility of another life galloping towards him across the open meadow of his imagination. He’d felt light and fresh, like a house that had been locked and shuttered for too many years being opened up to the elements again. He’d thought it was the most brilliant idea that anybody had ever had. He’d almost run up Kate’s stairs in his haste to move his life along to this new place. Yes, he’d thought, yes. Let’s do this. Let’s rock and roll.
And then he’d sat on that stool and watched her do it, tap-tap-tap, page after page of personal details. He’d been expecting something at the end of it. A fanfare, maybe, or a bugle call, flashing lights and a ream of photographs of men and women with the words YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS! typed underneath.
He’d been deflated when he realised that he would have to wait, that actual human beings would
have to read through his application, verify his details, check that everyone involved was happy to have him informed of their existence, and that there certainly wouldn’t be any photos.
‘What a con!’ he’d said. ‘What a fucking con!’
‘Yes, but it’s there now. It’s in the system. You’ve done it. At some point over the next few days you’re going to find out whether or not you’ve got any brothers and sisters out there.’
‘Fuck.’
‘I know,’ she’d said.
And then they’d had another smoke and gone to bed.
This morning, in the harsh light of a bright spring morning, conscious of the smell of old smoke and unbrushed teeth, Dean felt appalled by this development. Kate was pulling on a hooded sweatshirt.
‘I can’t believe we did that,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ she said, smiling, ‘it’s cool, isn’t it? Beats Ouija boards any day!’
‘But can I, you know, can I change my mind? Did it say?’
‘Yeah, I reckon so. I think they’ll let whoever’s already registered know that someone new has registered and then they’ll ask you both if you want your details shared. I suppose you could always say no at that point.’ She turned and looked at him, her fists still furled inside the sleeves of her oversized hoodie. ‘You won’t, will you?’ she asked, thoughtfully. ‘You won’t say no?’
He shrugged. He couldn’t get his mind around it just now. ‘I don’t know. Depends, I suppose. Depends on what they say.’
Kate sat herself down on the edge of the bed next to Dean and held her chin in her hands. She looked at him from the corners of her eyes. ‘You have to tell me what happens, you know that? I’m not asking for your phone number or to be your girlfriend or anything like that. I mean, fuck, you’re the last person I’d want to go out with. You’re just, like, a complete car crash. But you have to at least just text me. When something happens.’
Dean nodded, absent-mindedly. ‘How did I meet you?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Last night?’
