Erik the Pink

by Matthew J. Metzger

  “You what?” Mike said.

  “Eh?” Lauren echoed.

  “If something happened to me and Andreas, there’s nobody left for B—”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Lauren interrupted at once. “Of course there is. There’s us.”

  “That’s what we wanted to ask—”

  “Who’s asking?” Jo snorted. “She’s right.”

  Erik rolled his eyes, rapping his knuckles on the table.

  “What he means,” Andreas said calmly, eyes still trained on Beatriz as she devoured the contents of the bottle, “is we want to make it formal. So nobody can argue.”

  There was a pause.

  Then Mike said, “Who’s nobody?”

  Andreas sighed. He frowned a little, then smoothed it out when Beatriz whined.

  “Erik might not have any known family, but I do,” he said. “They weren’t the kind of people I want raising my little girl should the worst happen. And at the moment, if something were to happen to us, they could make a very good case for getting custody of her.”

  There was a short, sharp silence.

  “Right,” Lauren said. “So—what? Wills? Christenings? How does it work?”

  “Wills,” Erik agreed. “We want to make wills, and name you guys her family should the worst happen.”

  “Deal,” Jo said instantly. “You know me and Mike would have her in a heartbeat.”

  Mike rolled his eyes, but made a noise of agreement.

  “And if they couldn’t, I would,” Lauren chipped in. “We’re her aunties and uncles! Of course we’d have her. Make your wills.”

  Erik offered her a relieved smile. Truth be told, he wasn’t remotely surprised. All three had been his bedrock between them in those last two desperate years before finding Andreas and getting the family he’d always worked for. He’d already known without a doubt they would step in should his daughter need them.

  “Just make sure fuck all happens,” Mike grunted. “I didn’t sign up to be a dad.”

  Andreas chuckled as he pulled the bottle free, and held up their round, well-fed offspring.

  “Just for that,” he said, “you can hold her first.”

  Mike groaned, Lauren complained, and Jo called him unfair.

  Erik simply watched, grinning, as Mike begrudgingly did as he was told.

  Chapter 6

  Andreas tapped his pen against the table, and stared absently out of the window.

  It was a bright morning. Absolutely freezing, but the sun was blazing away in a clear blue sky, and if not for the liberal layer of frost in the shadows of the house, he could have mistaken it for warm outside.

  It was mornings like this that Andreas missed home the most.

  Much as he’d turned his back on his family, he missed Spain. He missed the noise and the chaos during the day, hot and dusty and crowding around all the time—and then he missed the warm afternoons as the sun sank, where quiet rolled in for a few precious hours before the bars opened up and the world exploded out of its own seams all over again. He missed the haphazard way everyone was crammed in, modernity and antiquity all squashed up together, exposed telephone wires and ancient trains but the outrage at daring to suggest a car without the latest in fancy gadgets. He missed clothes lines and flats, and still found the view of an English garden strange.

  It was still home.

  He supposed it would always be home.

  He’d sat down after breakfast to make some notes about a will. He and Erik had a joint account for bills and the mortgage, but that was it. They each paid fifty percent of their wages—or in Andreas’ case since getting pregnant, benefits—into it, and the rest of their financial lives were conducted separately. So he’d written down the obvious destination for his money—and then stopped.

  It felt like—

  It shouldn’t feel like closing a door, and yet it did.

  When Andreas had left home, it had been forever. He’d known that. Mother’s tearful tirade, Father’s fury—it was for good. He couldn’t forgive them for it, and he knew they’d never come around. He’d not left Spain for a while after that, but he’d known from that day his connection to his family had been broken.

  And yet only now did he feel like he was really closing the door on it.

  They didn’t know Beatriz existed. Andreas had never sent the letter. And even if he had, Andreas knew there’d be no reply, no Facebook appeal, no nothing. His mother would be horrified at them having a baby in that kind of lifestyle. His father would probably deny by this point that Andreas was their child at all, so the baby was nothing to do with them. And yet staring at the notepaper, his financial footprint firmly listed and then Beatriz’s name under all of it—

  Andreas swallowed, and tightened his grip around the pen.

  That was the issue, wasn’t it? They’d pushed him out before. This was the first time—

  It was the first time that he’d moved. It was the first time that he’d been the one to make the call. It was him closing the door, rather than them.

  Slowly, he wrote Beatriz’s name. Her full name. Beatriz María Mão de Ferro. Then an arrow. And Michael and Joanne Cartwright, Lauren Miller.

  In the kitchen, he heard Erik pull the plug out of the sink, and their daughter’s happy squeal.

  “Towel!” Erik cheered, and Andreas frowned down at the paper.

  Then he crossed out her surname—his surname—and put a single question mark above it.

  * * * *

  “Are you sure?” Erik asked, for probably the fifteenth time.

  Andreas levelled him with the world’s most unimpressed stare. Honestly, he could give the cat a run for its money.

  “I’m sure,” he said. “I need some peace and quiet, you need to be the only line of defence for once instead of expecting me to take over when the going gets tough.”

  Erik eyed the pram dubiously. Beatriz had turned six weeks old, and he was due back at work in a fortnight. So when Andreas had decided he needed a day at Lauren’s spa, Erik had decided to take Beatriz round in the pram and show her off to all the staff.

  Only they’d made the decision last night, while Andreas had been cuddling her to sleep on their bed. When taking care of a baby had seemed as easy as making sure there were a couple of bottles made up and ready in the fridge, and a clean nappy never more than an arms’ reach away.

  But of course, Erik didn’t work at home. And he’d never had her completely on his own for the entire day before.

  “Go!” Andreas snapped, then softened enough to reach up and offer a quick kiss. “You’ll be fine.”

  “Promise?” Erik whined.

  “Promise, you big pansy.”

  Erik growled and bit his jaw. Andreas laughed and jerked away.

  “Enough of that.”

  “Never.”

  Beatriz gave an outraged yowl.

  “See?” Andreas said imperiously, then stooped to press a kiss to her waving hands. “You go and have fun with Daddy.”

  She gurgled.

  “Okay. Let me just check I’ve got her b—”

  “Erik!”

  He sighed and took the brake off the pram. “Okay. Okay. You still going to join us for lunch later?”

  “Probably. I’ll text you.”

  Erik earned another kiss once he’d wrestled the pram out of the front door, and then it was firmly closed in his face. He looked down at Beatriz, who stared balefully back.

  “Guess it’s just you and me now, huh?”

  Before they’d decided to have a baby, Erik had ridden a moped to work. It was just far enough to be a nasty walk in the winter, but a great one in the summer. In early spring, it was reasonable enough. Flowers were starting to poke through the frosty grass, and the sky was starting to deepen from the thin, brittle blue of winter to the dark, intense colour of summer. It was bitterly cold, but brilliantly beautiful.

  “I wonder if you’re going to be like me,” he said conversationally, “or if your papa’s sunshine genes ar
e going to protect you from hay fever?”

  She burbled back at him. They’d discovered early on that she was just like Andreas in one respect: she hated silence. Nothing got her crying faster than silence. Erik liked a bit of quiet now and then, but Andreas was always playing music, humming to himself, singing in the kitchen or the shower, talking to the oven or the kettle. Beatriz had either got used to the constant noise even before she was born, or it was carved onto his DNA and she’d inherited it.

  Erik kind of liked it, though. Andreas had laughed at him, the way he’d give the baby bump a blow-by-blow account of his day, but Beatriz beamed up at him and gurgled in all the right places. And he got indulgent smiles from passers-by, instead of the usual disapproving glances at his beard, bun and bars.

  “I thought I’d like you to have my hair but you’re doubly beautiful with all Daddy’s curls, you know,” he told her as they reached the main road. “He used to have lovely long hair. I keep trying to persuade him to grow it out again—you’re going to help me, aren’t you?”

  She clapped, then blinked at her hands in surprise.

  “Good girl,” he said, reaching into the pram to tickle one fat little cheek as he waited for the traffic lights. “I’m going to relish this bit, you know. Before you can talk. Because I’ve heard him, I know your daddy’s talking to you in Spanish. I can’t speak that. Well, I can order the bill and say I love you. Not at the same time, obviously. Well, I could, but I think I might start getting funny looks if I did…”

  He blathered on and on all the way down the main road, off into the estate, and out the other side to the edge of the former village. The pub sat on the crux between the two, where the villagers said the town began, and the townsfolk simply said was the road towards the garden centre.

  It was a nice pub, sitting on a similar crossroads between a village watering hole and a restaurant. They served the most incredible pies, had a big play area in the back for children and tables already set for food in the conservatory, but a quiz night on Tuesdays and a team in the local pool league. Erik could fit in, as the big bear of a manager who kept the locals in line, but also be the affable, friendly face of a country bumpkin to the yuppies coming in from the shopping centre nearby to have lunch with their mothers-in-law and new babies.

  Funny how he was an expert in getting the pram through the door, having never owned the pram in question.

  “Oh my God, Erik!”

  It was Lizzy at the bar, and she squealed at the sight of the pram, immediately flitting out to come and have a look.

  “Is this your little one then?” she cooed, bending over the pram. Beatriz gave her a wide-eyed stare. “How pretty! Is it a boy or a girl?”

  “A girl for the minute,” Erik said easily. He grinned as a head popped around the kitchen door and some of the regulars heaved themselves off their stools to come and have a gander.

  “For the minute?” one of the regulars asked. “What, you going to return her and swap her?”

  “Nope, but you never know what they grow up to be,” Erik said easily.

  Beatriz started to make a warning sort of whimper, the tell-tale gearing up to a full wail, and Erik crooned as he carefully lifted her out and rested her against his shoulder. She brightened a little there, less unsure of all these strangers from her father’s arms.

  “We called her Beatriz,” he said, carefully trying to say it right.

  “Bayatrith?” Lizzy echoed. “That’s a weird name.”

  “It’s the Spanish version of Beatrice.”

  “Aww. Can I hold her?”

  Erik glanced down. Beatriz’s face was screwed up in her most stubborn expression.

  “I think she might bring the roof down,” he admitted. “Give her ten minutes? She seems to like weighing people up before getting a cuddle out of them.”

  They were taking her out in the pram fairly often now—albeit Erik was doing it more to persuade Andreas out of the house than Beatriz—but she was still grumpy about strangers. She adored her aunties, and tolerated Mike fairly well, but the trips to the doctor for her check-ups had been nightmares. She’d hated the doctor with a violent passion. Erik had no intention, on his very first foray away from Andreas with her, on letting that little piece of history repeat itself.

  He walked around the pub with her for half an hour or so, showing her off from his arms to all the regulars and staff, then settled down in one of the back rooms to feed her. He was still clumsy about it, juggling a wriggly, demanding baby and a full bottle, but eventually got her settled down in the crook of his elbow, contentedly devouring her lunch. She stared up at him as she did, those huge brown eyes placid and trusting, and he found himself smiling dumbly down at her.

  “You’re a monster,” he said, very seriously, “but you’re absolutely perfect.”

  She blinked slowly, like a happy cat, and her fingers curled sleepily into his sleeve.

  “Going to have a nap before Daddy joins us?”

  The excitement had worn her out—she pushed at the bottle when it was only two thirds empty, whining until Erik pulled it away, then promptly fell asleep before he’d even managed to set it aside and burp her. He sat there in silence, cuddling her as she slept against him, and staring at her tiny fingernails and the way her hair curled softly around her ears.

  “We might not have another one quite the way we had you,” he told her quietly, “but you’re definitely not going to be the only one.”

  When they’d first started talking about it, way back when, Lauren had offered to be a surrogate if they wanted. And there was always adoption. But freezing eggs reduced the odds they’d actually—well, egg. Do their job. Make babies. And they’d wanted their babies to be both of theirs, rather than just Erik’s. So Andreas had said they’d just try chucking out the condoms for six months and doing it heterosexual style for a bit.

  And bang. Pun intended. Along came Beatriz.

  The pregnancy had been awful, the toll on Andreas and his mental health ridiculous, but they’d clung to that idea of their very own baby all the way through. Erik had wanted to start a whole new lineage, pass on all the things about himself that came out of nowhere, and Andreas was doggedly attached to the idea of family, blood family, in a way that could only come from a Catholic upbringing in the Spanish hills.

  Now Erik had his lineage—but maybe they could have another one. Maybe even two. One for him and one for Andreas. A ginger bear cub like him, and some elegant continental type right off the rail from a fashion magazine like Andreas. They’d be fragile folds in his arms just like Beatriz, indestructible as they grew up just like their parents, and they’d be absolutely, unconditionally adored the way he and Andreas hadn’t been.

  “You’re never going to know what that’s like,” he promised Beatriz. “You’re never going to know what it’s like not to have anyone. You won’t need to be in your twenties or thirties before you figure out that somebody loves you.”

  She slept on obliviously, absolutely perfect.

  Chapter 7

  “I’m sorry. You’re right. You are a saint who knows what she’s talking about, and I am an idiot,” Andreas recited faithfully.

  Lauren laughed. “That’s more like it.”

  Andreas felt better than he had since before he’d gotten pregnant. Lauren’s sister ran a health spa out near Halifax, and Lauren had booked them a private session at mates’ rates. A sauna without anyone but his best friend to see the mess that Beatriz had made of him, and a deep tissue massage from Greg, the only masseuse in the world Andreas would ever trust anywhere near his mismatched body. If any could combat a dizzy day, that was it. He didn’t feel a million dollars, as they stepped out into the car park, but he could probably stretch to a couple of thousand.

  “Lunch? Erik can treat us at the pub.”

  Originally, Lauren had been Erik’s friend. Andreas had come to the UK with nobody but his then-boyfriend in his social circle. And being nearly fluent in English didn’t mean that he’d kno
wn the first thing about the English. They were a confusing, contradictory bunch whose international reputation was nothing like the real deal—and even worse, nothing like their more famous American cousins. Andreas had been utterly lost. Madcap Erik hadn’t helped much.

  Of Erik’s best friends in Mike, Jo and Lauren, it had been Lauren to take to Andreas first, albeit initially for very selfish reasons. She wanted to learn a language. Andreas knew three. Perfect. So Andreas had found himself with a new boyfriend, still struggling to understand ‘latte’ or ‘mocha’ in Yorkshire accents at the coffee shop, and giving Spanish lessons to a Mancunian on Thursday evenings.

  Now he’d more or less poached Lauren from Erik, and had no intention of handing her back.

  “Deal,” Lauren said, throwing her bag into the back seat. “Reckon he’s managed with Beatriz?”

  “Well, I don’t have any panicked voicemails.”

  “Must mean one of the girls took her off his hands.”

  “He’s not that bad,” Andreas said.

  There was a pause. She raised her eyebrows at him expectantly.

  “Okay, he is that bad. But he probably hasn’t done that.”

  “Why not?”

  “We had a bit of a bust-up about it when she was still brand new.”

  “Ahh. Nothing like a new baby to find all the cracks in a relationship.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Hey, I watch daytime TV!”

  Andreas laughed as she threw the car into reverse and shot backwards out of the parking space. Lauren was ace, in both meanings of the word. She had all the knowledge of a thirty-year-old who’d spent most of her life watching her sisters getting into all sorts of stupid scrapes thanks to relationships with men and women alike—but all the irrepressible amusement of someone who’d never had to put up with it herself.

  “He’s just nervous. He still thinks she’s delicate and small.”

  “Eh, he’ll be fine once she starts walking and bouncing off all the surfaces.”