Men I've Loved Before

by Adele Parks

  ‘Is Jen about?’ Neil asked, hoping he sounded nonchalant. In fact he desperately hoped that Jen was nowhere to be seen; there was no way he could talk about the things he needed to talk about with Karl if Jen was hanging around.

  ‘She’s at her mother’s. We both spent Christmas Day, Boxing Day and Sunday at her folks’ but, Jesus, mate,’ Karl rolled his eyes with exasperation. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do that every year. I came back here this morning and left her to it. She was on about us staying right through to New Year. Fuck that.’

  ‘Difficult family?’

  ‘No, not especially. They were totally normal. Bickering, which I put down to the fact it was Christmas, and nosey, which I put down to the fact that I’m fascinating. The problem was, they were just dead boring and farty.’

  ‘You mean boring farts?’

  ‘No. I mean they were so old they didn’t have an embarrassment threshold and they didn’t care about expressing their appreciation of the Christmas lunch the old-fashioned way. Seriously, all her family members look like and behave like Henry the Eighth, including her mother. I’m worried about that. They say take a good look at the mother because that’s who you end up with.’

  ‘Nat doesn’t look like her mother,’ pointed out Neil.

  ‘No, she looks like her father, which still makes a better bet than Jen’s mum.’ Karl cracked open one of the cans and asked, ‘Do you want to watch the Boxing Day game? I recorded it.’

  ‘Not really, Karl.’

  ‘No? What then?’

  Neil took a deep breath and then dived in. ‘I need to talk to someone about something big.’

  ‘Mate, I’ve seen yours, it’s not that big,’ joked Karl. He sensed an emotional onslaught and he was trying to head it off. Neil had been tough-going since he’d split with Nat. Karl had really tried to be sympathetic, way more so than he would have been with any other bloke who’d split from any other woman. He’d made a concession on account of having had a crack at Nat. Even though Neil hadn’t found out about the incident and Karl had got away without a kicking (verbal, emotional or physical), hidden somewhere very deep inside, Karl felt inconvenient twinges of responsibility. If he’d stopped to think how floored Neil would be by losing Nat, he might have done things differently that night. He had, once or twice, asked himself if it would have been wiser to tell Nat that there was definitely nothing going on with Neil and the stripper, even though at the time he hadn’t been a hundred per cent certain. Should he have called Neil and got him to come and pick Nat up? Could he have stemmed this disaster? Should he have been like the little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dam and saved an entire town from flood, instead of concentrating on getting into a completely different sort of hole?

  Karl got his answer when Neil announced, ‘Nat’s pregnant.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘It’s not mine.’

  ‘Nor mine,’ blathered Karl.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry, daft joke.’ Jesus, Jesus, thought Karl. His legs turned to water. He staggered backwards and collapsed into his sofa. Neil took it as a cue and he sat down too.

  ‘That night she left me, she went to meet this bloke Lee Mahony and it’s his.’

  ‘She did what?’ asked Karl, confused.

  ‘She had sex with him and it’s his.’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘Not exactly, no. Not in so many words. But I know she did,’ insisted Neil. ‘So, she thinks the baby is Lee Mahony’s and of course it might be. Almost certainly is. It all depends on how many times they did it and did they do it before then, you know, dates and stuff. I don’t know for sure. Was she having an affair for some time or did she just get angry that night and do it only the once? It affects the odds. I keep going over it and over it, trying to think it through.’

  ‘Mate, I’m not following you.’

  ‘Because if it was just that once, if it was just that night that she had sex with someone else, then it might still be mine.’

  ‘How could it be yours?’ asked Karl, bemused. He knew enough about Nat and Neil’s private lives to know that they always used contraception.

  ‘Because I put pinholes in the condom that we used when we had sex that night,’ confessed Neil in a rush.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ replied Karl, which Neil thought was apt and covered it.

  ‘But I can’t tell her. She’ll kill me. She didn’t want a baby and now she doesn’t want me either, so it’s a double whammy if I tell her that the baby might be mine. It’s only a slim chance anyway.’ A chance Neil clutched at.

  ‘But what the hell made you do a bloody irresponsible, utterly stupid thing like that?’ demanded Karl, who was too dazed by the information overload to fully process everything yet.

  ‘It was Cindy’s idea.’

  ‘The stripper?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Genius mate, bloody genius. What were you thinking of, taking advice from a stripper who is no more than a kid herself?’ snapped Karl angrily.

  ‘She didn’t advise me exactly, she inspired me. She said she stopped taking the pill to—’ Neil stopped talking, he knew it sounded bad.

  Karl finished the sentence for him. ‘To trap some poor bastard into marrying her?’

  ‘They were already married. Her husband just didn’t want kids.’

  ‘People have the right not to want kids,’ bawled Karl, exasperated at this large-scale irresponsibility.

  ‘And people have the right to want them!’ yelled Neil, even more loudly. Neil knew what he’d done was wrong but he wanted his friend to understand his relentless, miserable desperation. ‘I just got so pissed off that women hold all the fertility cards. It’s not fair that it’s them who decide when they want babies, or more importantly in our case, it’s not fair that Nat decided she didn’t want a baby. I deserved a say too.’

  ‘They haven’t always had the say. There were hundreds of thousands of years when they just got knocked up and had to get on with it. Contraception is a relatively new privilege. You can’t blame them for being excited about it,’ pointed out Karl. ‘And Neil, mate, what you did is truly fucked up. This isn’t like some April fool’s day prank, this is massive.’

  Neil shrugged moodily. He knew Karl was right. What he had done was massive. Making a baby was as big as it got, that had been his point all along. He knew it was desperately reckless to try to trick someone into a pregnancy.

  ‘None of it matters anyway. She’s aborting the baby. Today.’ Saying the words made Neil feel shaky and sick. He was an idiot, a fucking idiot, he understood that now. The thought of Nat going under anaesthetic, having to deal with the trauma of an abortion, was too much for him to handle. Why hadn’t he thought of that? He’d been so sure that if she fell pregnant she’d come round to his way of thinking. That’s what he’d told himself when he’d drunkenly, impetuously put the pinpricks in the condom.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It might be my baby,’ cried Neil in anguish.

  ‘Or not,’ pointed out Karl.

  ‘I know. It’s unlikely that she’s fallen pregnant after a one off semi-protected occasion with me. Much more likely to be this bastard Lee Mahony’s,’ said Neil with a desolate groan.

  ‘What were you saying about this Lee bloke?’ Karl couldn’t get his head around that bit of the story. Did this mean that Nat had had sex with Neil, then visited his place and then left his place in a hurry because she was nipping off to yet another bloke’s place? That couldn’t be right, could it? It was the behaviour of a nymphomaniac. She wasn’t that sort of woman, was she? Karl couldn’t slip the jigsaw pieces into place because Neil had another bombshell to drop.

  ‘The thing is, mate, I don’t care. My baby or not, I want it and I want her.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Deadly serious.’

  ‘You are so screwed up,’ said Karl definitively.

  ‘No, I’m really not. I have been. I now realise that sitting around for weeks, not ev
en cleaning my teeth for days on end, that was screwed up and the holes in the condom, that was, well, wrong too, very desperate, underhand and impulsive, I see that. Plus, the whole stripper thing, well, that was one bloody silly, big mess. But this, Karl, wanting her and wanting the baby, irrespective of whose baby it is, this is my finest hour.’

  ‘Getting sacked was stupid too,’ added Karl.

  ‘I’m sacked?’

  ‘Didn’t you get the letter?’

  ‘No. Or maybe I did. I haven’t been opening my post.’

  ‘Oh.’ Karl shrugged uncomfortably, that hadn’t been the best way to break the news. ‘Sorry, mate. They sent you warnings. You didn’t turn up to work for six weeks and you didn’t even get a doc’s note. What were you thinking?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking, I told you. I’ve messed lots of stuff up but none of that matters. All that matters is I want Nat and I want this baby.’

  Karl considered. Was his mate certifiable or a hero? Was this his finest hour or just another form of delirium?

  ‘But she’s getting an abortion. She still doesn’t want a sprog.’

  ‘Yes, and because it’s not mine I haven’t got a leg to stand on. I reckon if it was my baby I’d at least get a say, wouldn’t I? What are the rules on this stuff? Do dads have any rights?’

  ‘Don’t know. We’d have to Google it.’ Karl was beginning to think that perhaps he could do something to salvage this situation. Maybe. But it would require him to be brave and utterly self-sacrificing, which was not his style. He needed to think carefully about what to do for the best. If he got involved now, confessed his part in this tragedy, might it not just further confuse things? He had to speak to Nat before he said too much to Neil. ‘Do you think you could really do it, be a dad to someone else’s kid and never resent the kid for it?’

  ‘Of course. How can the child be in any way to blame for its parentage? I felt sure about it from the moment she told me she was pregnant but I didn’t start shouting my mouth off. I took my time. I’ve given this a lot of thought. I’ve thought of nothing else since she told me.’

  ‘And you’d not resent Nat either?’

  ‘Do you know what? I had seven years with Nat and this will be my seventh week without her. Isn’t it madness that it took the weeks without her to remind me how much I love her?’

  He’d been paralysed without her. People didn’t get that. They thought he was being a lazy git, or a self-indulgent git or just a plain awkward git but he was paralysed. Heartbroken. What an overused term that was. The word no longer touched the meaning but Neil was sure his heart had literally broken. He felt a relentless throbbing in his chest where it had once beaten. He thought his heart had shattered like glass and tiny shards were embedded in every aspect of his life because wherever he looked he found anguish, sorrow and grief. Shards of his heart lay within the folds of her few remaining clothes that were scattered on the bedroom floor or neatly hung in the wardrobe. He’d scooped up the clothes and sniffed at them, trying to find traces of her essence: her perfume, her deodorant, her toil, he didn’t care which aspect of her he might inhale, he just wanted to hold something of her. He’d slept with her dressing gown for weeks and been bitterly disappointed when all traces of her had finally faded and been replaced by his own tangy smell. There were shards of his shattered heart inside the cupboards when he pulled out a mug that she’d decorated at a pottery class, and more hidden among the bottles on the window sill in the bathroom. Shards glinted amongst the pages of her books and magazines that were tightly squeezed on their bookshelves and newspaper racks. Shards in tunes, in movies, in the silver winter air; they were everywhere because she was nowhere. He missed her. He missed her more than he’d imagined it was possible for one human being to miss another. If he poked his head out of the window, he was tortured by imaginary sightings of her; if he poked about inside his head, he was tortured by vivid memories of her.

  He thought back to their first date, the cinema trip to see Kill Bill, Vol. 1. That had been an amazing night, one of those nights that had its own momentum, its own time frame and rule book. Yes, he’d discovered that Nat’s taste in movies was refreshingly wide (and perhaps in sexual experimentation, he’d never forget that comment she’d made about Uma Thurman, it was just so breathtakingly cool), but the thing that had won Neil hook, line and sinker that night happened even before the film had begun. They had been settled in the itchy blue seats, stuffing popcorn (that tasted suspiciously close to polystyrene) into their mouths when suddenly the music to announce the start of the programme had blared into the auditorium. Neil had never paid much attention to that jingle before; it was catchy although not what anyone would describe as seminal. But then Natalie had started to dance. She remained in her seat (thank God) but she’d done this little jive, a stationary boogie, so to speak. She was so uninhibited and joyful that Neil was completely unable to resist laughing, and the more he laughed, the more she danced, until he could no longer hold out and he had felt compelled to join in. They’d danced in their seats, candid and spontaneous. It was little things like that which really made a boy fall for a girl. A girl fall for a boy. Ever since then, Neil and Natalie had always boogied in their seats whenever they went to the movies. It was one of their things.

  How would he ever be able to go to the movies again?

  Neil took a deep breath and finally said what he really thought. ‘You were wrong, Karl, sex isn’t everything. Love is everything. I want her back even without the baby. Or any baby. I want a family, I do, but I want her more. She is the root to any family I might ever have. I see now, Nat alone is enough of a family for me. Karl, I seriously don’t think I can, you know, not have her. I don’t think I’d be able to, you know, be.’

  ‘Right.’ It was an uncomfortable moment. Karl thought about what he had done and not done. Neil thought about what he should have done and what he should not have done. The silence stretched.

  After a Jurassic age, Karl said carefully, ‘You can’t give up, Neil.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You should tell her. You should tell her what you’ve just told me.’

  ‘It won’t make any difference,’ replied Neil despondently.

  ‘It might. Tell her about the condom with the holes in it. Tell her you don’t care who the father is. Tell her you don’t even care if there are no babies. Tell her, Neil. Now. Tell her before it’s too late.’

  43

  Nat wondered what to wear. She was worried about looking too affluent. Would the people at the clinic condemn her for not progressing with the pregnancy if it was clear she had the money to support a child? She worried that anything too bright, yellow, pink or red, looked too jubilant. She didn’t feel at all jubilant, she felt wretched, gutted, punctured, so was it more appropriate to wear a dark colour? She didn’t want to wear anything she particularly liked because she knew whatever she wore today she’d never want to see again. Why was it so hard? She was just getting dressed. She did it every day of her life. Why did she feel like stone? Nat closed her eyes and thrust her hands into her wardrobe; she’d wear the first thing she laid her hands on. There, a blue roll-neck, that would do.

  Nat wandered down into her parents’ kitchen at quarter to nine. Brian had already left the house, he had gone for one of his walks on the Downs and, even though it wasn’t a Saturday, he’d taken his hessian bag and pointed stick. He’d noted, with some disgust, that there would likely be an increase in littering. A direct result of Boxing Day hikers, he reasoned; not regulars on the Downs and rather inconsiderate because of it. Natalie knew he would then have a well-deserved lunch in one of the pubs in the high street. He wouldn’t be home until mid-afternoon. By which time it would all be over. Finished with. Behind her. That was the way to do it. The only way. And then she could get on with everything.

  With what?

  The thought was not a new one but every time it thrust its way into her head, Nat had shoved it away with equal force. Today she didn’t have the require
d energy to fight against its bleakness; the truth was she had no idea what ‘everything’ was any more. It was no longer Neil or her home; she had her job still and that was vital to her but she was struggling with her relationships with pretty much all her friends and family. She’d distanced herself from Jen because of Karl and she’d distanced herself from Ali because of Ali’s pregnancy. It was very hard being around Ali and listening to her constant updates about her fetus’s development, morning sickness, birthing plans, cravings and fears about stretch marks. Nat wanted to shout out, ‘I understand!’ but did she? Ali was euphoric; Nat didn’t understand that, she was terrified. It had been bitter-sweet seeing Neil’s family on Christmas Day. Nat had not yet found the switch that she needed to turn off her emotions towards them. Would she ever? And as for her own mum and dad, well, she felt dreadful just catching sight of them. They crept around her, oozing concern but unable to find the way into a meaningful conversation. It wasn’t their fault, it was hers; she’d blocked every attempt they’d made to talk about Neil. Her life had more holes in it than Swiss cheese.

  For the first month after she split from Neil, Nat had thought it was enough (sometimes too much) just to put one foot in front of another, to simply exist. She had not allowed herself to think beyond the next tube journey, the next meeting, the next meal. Any longer-term vision required a Herculean effort that she was not capable of. And then she’d discovered she was pregnant.