Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel

by Dorothy Koomson

  I hadn’t told Mal he couldn’t bring her, because it hadn’t occurred to me that she would want to come. Nor that she’d find enough courage to do that.

  She is startled, a deer caught in fast-approaching headlights, by the fact I have caught her staring at me. Color rises in her cheeks, but she does not look away. She knows I know what she was doing. She was trying to see if she could work out my frame of mind so she could come and talk to me. She was trying to work out if I would turn my back on her, shout at her, tell her to leave me alone, or politely listen to her hollow words.

  She doesn’t realize that whether she speaks to me or not, none of this means anything.

  Every day I wake up, lying on his bed. I sleep in his room, with his favorite sheet—one I used to have on my bed—scrunched comfortingly under my cheek. I don’t sleep under the covers, I’m too warm to do that. I need to be in his room for as long as it smells of him. I want to capture every molecule of his scent before it evaporates into the air of time.

  Keith and I hardly speak when we are in the house at the same time. We dance around each other, making each other cups of coffee without asking if the other wants one, because initiating conversation is too much. He went back to work two days after and stays away for as long as he can—until he knows that I will be in his room, with the door shut, curled up on the single bed, pretending to myself I can sleep. Even though I know I’ll see him again when I die and that I will one day find him in my dreams, I cannot sleep for long enough to find him. I drift in dreamland for half an hour at most, and then I’m awake again until dawn. As I close my eyes, I always hear him ask me why he doesn’t have a large bed like me. “I need lots of space, too,” he always says in my head. “Just because I’m smaller than you doesn’t mean I don’t need space.”

  When I wake up, I hear Keith in the living room. Playing PlayStation games. One after the other. I don’t know if he gets any enjoyment from them, but he plays until as late as possible, then he climbs the stairs to bed. Always he stops outside the white paneled door with the big picture of a lion on it (“All lions are called Leo”). I always hope Keith will come in, share this with me, breach the gap between us, but he never does. After a few seconds he moves on, goes to bed. In the morning I creep around our bedroom getting dressed and leave for Starstruck while he is still asleep.

  I make the cakes, cookies, pies, flapjacks as usual; baking is something I can do without thinking. I make the ordered coffees, teas and smoothies but Amy gives them to the customers. I don’t serve customers anymore. People talk to me otherwise. They ask me how I am, they ask after my son if they haven’t been in for a while, they try to comfort me when there’s nothing they can do.

  I usually sit at the back, in the seat where I used to sit with him when he was a newborn, before I bought the place, and I stare out of the window.

  I sit and order my thoughts.

  I sit and attempt to smooth out the raw edges of my pain.

  I sit.

  I return to an empty house, one that echoes with permanent loss, and I make dinner that neither Keith nor I will eat. I sit alone in the kitchen, I push food around my plate for what feels like hours and seconds at the same time, then I scrape the food into the bin, wash the plate. I sit in the living room to watch television by staring through it, my thumb pressing buttons on the remote control until I get to a channel that doesn’t hurt my ears and my brain and then I stare through it.

  Every day, every day, I’m surprised that the world has carried on. News is still happening, newspapers are still being made, people are still walking and talking and making mistakes and creating wonderful memories. Every day I’m surprised anew. Every day, I wonder if anyone realizes that time has actually stopped and they’re fooling themselves that it is moving forward.

  This is my life.

  It has nothing to do with Stephanie.

  Keith’s strong, solid arm slips around my shoulders and his full, soft lips press against my right temple. He hasn’t touched me in nearly two weeks. Not since the day after, when I finally went back to the house, and he tried to hold me, tried to let me collapse into his arms, and I couldn’t stand to be touched. Not when the feel of my son was still fresh on my skin, was still gently impressed into the curves of my aura. “Love you, babe,” Keith whispers.

  “Love you, too,” I reply.

  We both mean it.

  We both fear it. When you love someone, you risk losing them. Like we have with our son, like we have with each other. He moves on to another part of the room; he can’t stay near me too long because it reminds us that we don’t talk anymore.

  That is why Stephanie’s concern about whether to speak to me is so laughable. She doesn’t exist for me right now. No one exists for me right now.

  Time is standing still.

  Only for now, though. It will start ticking again. Something will happen to make my life start ticking again. I know I will fall asleep and find him again and I will want to go out into the world again. But for now, nothing can rouse me from where I am.

  Especially not you, Stephanie.

  I shut her out by closing my eyes. I want to go back to that memory on the beach. I want to go back to where I was with him before she came creeping in.

  PART SEVEN

  CHAPTER 61

  A s always, she’s wearing her red duffel coat.

  I watch her kneel down beside him, not seeming to notice or care the ground is damp and cold, as she runs her fingertips over the gold engraving on the cool, cream marble, like I did a few minutes ago. Then her long, slender fingers move over the yellow, velvety petals of the roses I laid there.

  She never suspects it’s me.

  She always looks up and around, wondering who it is that has left yellow flowers every few days for the past three months, but she never suspects—but why would she? In all the world, I’m the last person she would think would do this. No one knows I do this. That I work part-time hours so that I can come down here.

  I’m always careful. While I talk to him, clear away any weeds or leaves, I always keep an eye out for her, watching to see that familiar flash of red that means I have to move away and keep my head down or, like today, I have to hide behind a tree and stay pressed up against the trunk until she’s gone.

  She looks different. She is still incredibly beautiful, but she is different. Maybe it’s that her hair is back in braids, like when I first met her and when she was carrying Leo. Or maybe it’s because she looks so grown up. Grief has aged her; she seems so removed, aloof, untouchable, like grown-ups always seemed to be when I was a child. It’s haunting.

  What I want to do each time I see her is this: throw my arms around her, tell her I’m sorry. For her loss, for her pain, for the end of the world. But most of all, for not being her friend when she tried so hard with me. Since my friendship with Carole has become so real and open and supportive, I know now, properly, what my fears did all those years ago. I wouldn’t let her close, but I took away her closest friend. I robbed her. I finally have a friend who isn’t Mal but who I can rely upon, so I understand how harmful that was. How she didn’t deserve it.

  And I know that it should be me sitting where she is.

  It should have been me who spent day after day at the hospital, sitting by his bed, holding his hand and willing him better. It should be me coming here every day, talking to him, sharing with him, missing him like no one else could. It should be me walking around with my heart removed and a bottomless hole where the center of my soul once lived.

  I’m sorry. That’s what I wanted to say at the funeral. That’s what I want to say now. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  CHAPTER 62

  I won’t keep you long,” I say to Mal.

  We’re in a small café overlooking Brighton marina, far enough from Hove, from Starstruck, from the hospital, to make this an anonymous, neutral meeting place. We sit in a window booth, opposite each other; the sea is on one side of us and we can see it but not hear
it.

  Everything about him says he doesn’t want to be here, but when I called him earlier asking if we could meet up sometime soon, he said, “I’m on my way,” and two hours later he arrived. Now he sits stiff-backed and tense across from me in the café.

  He’s tried constantly to talk to me in the past three months, like everyone else has, but I haven’t been able to speak to him or anyone else properly. Talking reopens the wound, it makes me want to comfort other people, it makes me feel guilty that I sometimes want to scream in their faces to show them how I’m really doing. Show them that inside, that’s what it feels like most of the time: a constant, unrelenting, one-note scream.

  I can speak to Mal now, and it seems I might be too late, because he doesn’t want to be here.

  I smile inside at the way half a lock of his butter-blond hair sticks up just over his right ear, at the crystal of sleep that sits in one of his eyelashes, and at the hairs that lie the wrong way in his left eyebrow. Instinctively, I lick my thumb and reach across the rectangle of the table and start to smooth his eyebrow hairs into place. Mal jerks away from me, backwards in his seat, startled and reproachful at the same time.

  “Sorry,” I say, digging my fingers into my palm and resting my hand beside my cup. “I keep forgetting, as Leo used to say, ‘don’t want your spit on my face.’ ” I can say his name. I can talk about him in little increments before the urge to scream takes over.

  Mal covers my hand with his, a warm and gentle cocoon. I raise my gaze to meet his as he lifts my thumb, cradling my hand in his palm, and, our eyes locked the whole time, he runs my thumb over his eyebrow before returning it to the table. As soon as he sets my hand down, we break eye contact: I return my gaze to the table, he stares at a point over my shoulder.

  “I … I won’t keep you long,” I repeat. “I know this is probably the last place you want to be.”

  He refocuses on me, stares with his warm, rust-brown eyes. “What I want is to be on that side of the booth,” he says in a low, even voice. “With you. I want to rest my head on your lap and have you talk to me for hours about everything and nothing because that’s your way of telling me it’s all going to be all right. I want to put my arms around you, hold you close, stroke your face and tell you that it’s all going to be all right.”

  I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to be held. How the feel of another person’s body can so completely surround you, you lose the point where you begin and they end. When being with someone suddenly means you have the strength of two.

  On the nights Keith and I sleep in our bed, we don’t touch. We want to, but it seems we have forgotten how; we cannot remember the way to reach out for another and become a part of them. If our bodies accidentally brush, we leave them there, barely touching, hoping that the memory of how to be together will come rushing back to us, until it becomes too painful a reminder of what we have lost and then we slide away to the very edges of the bed. Mal was the last person to hold me. In that bed, in that hotel room, the night before Leo left.

  “This is the biggest crisis we’ve ever had and we’re not facing it together,” Mal says. “Which is what I want to do. That’s all I’ve wanted for three months. So, you’re wrong, this isn’t the last place I want to be; it’s the closest to the place I want to be as I can get.”

  I inhale through my nose, exhale through my mouth, calm my panic at what he has said. I haven’t let anyone close enough to tell me that. I know that Mum, Dad, Cordy, Aunt Mer, Amy, Keith and Mal all think they lost me too when we lost our little boy. But I cannot help that. I cannot cope with their grief as well as mine. I have needed to do this alone.

  “It’s good to see you,” I say to Mal.

  “Yeah?” he breathes, as his face relaxes into a beautiful smile, crinkling his eyes, widening his jaw, illuminating him from every possible angle. I have to look away, fighting down the lump in my throat. I haven’t been able to find Leo in my dreams, yet, but there he is, sitting opposite me, smiling.

  “Yeah,” I say to Mal, my eyes still averted. “It’s good to see you.”

  After a silence that could go on forever if we let it, I have to speak. “I wanted to see you for a reason,” I say, looking at him again. “Two reasons, actually.”

  He waits patiently for me to explain.

  “I’m pregnant,” I say.

  His eyes widen in shock but he does not speak.

  “Turns out what we did was sex after all and I’m pregnant.”

  He still does not speak.

  “Anyway, you must excuse me, because right now, I’m going to go throw up.”

  He has ordered me lemon and ginger herbal tea and a piece of dry, white toast by the time I slide back into my part of the booth. He’s remembered that was what had kept the any-time-of-the-day sickness at bay last time. He’s also had his coffee taken away. It isn’t as strong a coffee-smell-induced nausea as last time, but once I’ve thrown up, the smell of it at close quarters makes me more sick.

  I sip my tea, nibble a crust of the toast. “Thanks, for this,” I say, indicating the food and drink.

  “I was thinking,” he replies, “that I must have super-sperm.”

  This makes me laugh, the first time in months, a proper full-bodied laugh.

  “Don’t laugh,” he protests, his eyes dancing. “Hear me out. I, Malvolio Wacken, have super-sperm. Twice now I have knocked you up with one lot of the stuff. I mean, the first time I was trying, the second time not so much, but still it happened. I reckon I have super-sperm and maybe I should bottle it and sell it.”

  “Good idea,” I laugh. “But the flaw in your plan is that it seems you can only knock me up. And believe me, I won’t be buying it. Not when I can clearly get it for free. You big sperm tart.”

  It’s his turn to laugh, to throw his head to one side and guffaw so loudly a couple of people turn around to look at us. I remember suddenly why I loved him for all those years. Why I still love him. All the reasons that come from moments like this.

  “What are we going to do?” he asks, suddenly serious. His eyes are now fixed on the area of my body that is hidden by the table. “Are you going to have the baby?”

  I nod. Since I did the test last week, I’ve known without a doubt that I’m going to go through with this.

  He nods also, relieved, openly happy. “OK, all right. So I need to tell Steph. It won’t be easy, especially at the moment, but I’ll do it.”

  “Stephanie is already so hurt and damaged, so scared of losing you, do you think telling her what we did and then about this,” I place my hand over my stomach, “is fair to her? She was always paranoid about our relationship; what will confirming her fears so soon after all this has happened do to her?”

  “You think I should lie to her?”

  “No, Mal, I think you should wait until you’ve heard everything I’ve got to say before you decide who you’re going to tell and when.”

  “You’re not going to tell Keith?”

  I shake my head. “No. It will hurt him more than I could bear. Before he’ll be able to tell, I’ll be gone.”

  “Gone?” he asks.

  “I told you I had two reasons to see you. The first is that I’m pregnant. The second is that I’ve decided to see the world. To do some traveling. I’m going in a few weeks. Keith doesn’t know yet. If I told him, he’d think we were going together and he’d make himself come. But he wouldn’t want to. Our marriage is over and I don’t want him making himself cling to it.”

  “Your marriage is over?”

  “I love him, I always will. But he, like the house, like Hove, like England, I suppose, reminds me of what I’ve lost. They’re all a part of it. I walk into the house or a room, and I expect to see some new sign that he was there. But the toys he left lying on the floor are still there. His blue controller on the PlayStation is still sitting on top of the box. The book he was reading before he showed me the ultimate wheelie is still open on his bedroom floor. It’s all the same. And I can’t chan
ge it because if I do, I get scared that I’ll be losing another little bit of him. It’s agony going into the house. And it’s agony being with Keith. I can’t go to the beach without breaking down. I can’t do it anymore. I need to get away from here. Make new memories in a place that isn’t full of the old ones.”

  “You’re pregnant.”

  I shrug. “Yeah, I get to be pregnant somewhere else. Which is why you should think carefully about when you tell Stephanie. Because I don’t want you to tell her thinking you’re going to be a regular dad to this one.”

  “I could come with you.”

  “Even if I thought you could leave Stephanie, why would I want you to do that to her? What sort of a person would that make me? If you and she split up, that’s got to be because that’s where your relationship is at, not because of me or the baby.”

  Mal stares at me, and I can feel his grief. I do not want to take another child away from him, but I cannot stay here. I have to put myself first.

  “I don’t want you to go,” he states. “Please don’t leave the country. Please don’t leave me.”

  “I wish … I have to go. For my sanity. So I can start to get over this. So that Keith can find someone else. For a million and one reasons, I have to go. I’m not saying I won’t be back, but I have to go. You do understand, don’t you?”

  He nods. “I don’t want it to be like this, but I understand.”

  “I want you to be her dad. This one’s a she. I want you to write to her, send her pictures, call her, I want her to know you from the start. We’ll work it out. Somehow, we’ll work it out.”

  “Yeah, we will,” he agrees. “We will.”

  I stand, shrug on my coat, pick up my bag. “I’ll see you, Mal.”

  “Isn’t that the point, you won’t?”

  “I don’t like goodbyes, so I say ‘I’ll see you,’ then it makes it that little bit easier.”