Authors: Malorie Blackman
Emma’s hands came away from the armchair. I squatted down and opened my arms.
‘Come on, Emma. Walk to . . . me.’ I smiled.
She took two, then three steps before falling straight into my arms.
But she had walked.
And to me.
Adam started clapping excitedly. Aunt Jackie was ooh-ing and aah-ing all over the place. I scooped up Emma and held her above my head. She smiled down at me. I grinned up at her.
‘Clever girl,’ I told her. ‘That’s my gene!’ There was no explaining the pride I felt at that moment. I hugged her to me. ‘Aren’t you a clever girl?’ I said softly.
I was about to kiss her on the forehead, but then I remembered the letter I’d dropped in the postbox earlier. I put Emma down on the carpet again. She immediately crawled away to play with one of her toys. When I looked up, Aunt Jackie and Adam were watching me.
Without saying a word, I headed up to my bedroom.
I needed to be alone – just for a while.
In spite of all I’d promised myself, Emma was affecting my thinking.
I turned to the left. I rolled to the right. I lay on my back. I twisted round to lie on my stomach. I picked up my pillow and buried my head under it. It was no good. I could still hear Emma wailing. At this rate, by morning the bags under my eyes would be the size of holiday suitcases. I couldn’t stand it any more. Hopping out of bed, I headed next door to Dante’s room. I mean, what was he doing? Just letting her cry in her cot? Not bothering to knock, I flung open his bedroom door. Dante was holding Emma and pacing up and down.
‘How much longer does this go on for then?’ I demanded.
Dante’s stunned stare rapidly morphed into a blood-freezing glare. ‘Are you kidding me?’ he asked, his voice clipped and staccato.
I pulled a face, beginning to think that I might’ve been just a bit hasty. ‘Well, I’m sorry, but how am I supposed to get to sleep with that racket going on?’
‘And how are you supposed to sit down ever again once I’ve finished kicking your arse?’ Dante asked. And his expression told me as words couldn’t that he was mere nanoseconds away from carrying out his threat.
‘D’you want some help?’ I offered by way of apology.
‘Make her stop crying and I’ll give you anything you want,’ said Dante.
‘You look completely frazzled,’ I told him.
‘You try marching up and down with a crying baby for two hours. See how you look at the end of it,’ Dante snapped.
‘Maybe you’re holding her the wrong way?’ I suggested. I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about, but it sounded reasonable.
‘Why don’t you come over here and show me how it should be done?’ said Dante.
‘Because Mr Bridgeman only raised one stupid son, not two,’ I told him.
I only just made it out of the room in time before his pillow smacked me in the head.
Dante had the last laugh though. Emma’s crying kept me awake for at least another hour. By the time the house was quiet, I was beyond exhausted. Half-awake, half-asleep, I promised myself that the next time I passed a pharmacy, I would pop in to buy Dante a dozen boxes of condoms. Though it was sort of locking the stable door after the horse inside had been well and truly fertilized.
Over the next few days I tripped and fell into a strange domesticity. My days, nights and thoughts all seemed to revolve around Emma. The daily schedule Dad had written out for me was a life-saver. At least with that I could kid myself that I sort of knew what I was doing.
Sort of.
To be honest, compared to everything I’d heard – and feared – about looking after babies, Emma wasn’t too bad. I guess it was because she wasn’t a newborn. I’m not saying she wasn’t hard work, ’cause she sure as hell was. She demanded constant attention and concentration. Melanie hadn’t just dumped Emma on me, she’d dumped a strait-jacket of anxiety on me which I couldn’t remove. Was I overfeeding Emma or underfeeding her? Was I feeding her the right stuff? Was she getting enough exercise? Was she warm enough? Cool enough? Enough sleep? Enough attention?
Enough?
And yet, in spite of feeling like I was messing up at every second, Emma kept smiling at me and when I picked her up she clung to my neck like . . . like I mattered to her. And
when I blew raspberries against her stomach, she would laugh like it was the funniest thing in the world.
Now that she had found her feet, she toddled here, there and everywhere. And I mean, everywhere. She got hold of one of Dad’s slippers and started banging it against the DVD player which was on the floor in the sitting room whilst I was otherwise occupied in the loo. When the DVD tray sprang out, Emma decided that what the slipper really wanted was to go through the hole in the centre of the DVD tray and all it needed was a little brute-force persuasion. When I entered the room, the tray was creaking ominously. One more shove and it would’ve broken off completely.
‘No, Emma. That’s naughty. You mustn’t do that,’ I told her, snatching the slipper away from her.
One brief look of surprise, then she scrunched up her eyes, opened her mouth and wailed.
‘Emma, you can’t put your slipper in there. It wasn’t designed for that. You wear slippers on your feet like this.’ And I proceeded to demonstrate. ‘Or you can use the slipper as a football and head it, or you can wear the slipper as a hat.’ I put the slipper on my head and started strolling up and down the room like a model on a catwalk. Emma started giggling, thank God. Major tantrum averted. So I did it some more, really getting into it now.
‘
Dante is wearing the latest in designer slippers. This slipper is made from the finest er . . . synthetic material and the lining is pure er . . . synthetic material
.’
‘Something you want to tell me?’ Adam quipped from the door.
I spun round. The slipper flew off my head. Adam gave me a round of applause. Chortling, Emma joined in. I bowed low to my adoring fans.
Not a day passed without me having to fix something Emma had ‘redesigned’. Like when she managed to pull two of the hob control knobs off the cooker before I could stop her. I pushed them back on, hoping no one would notice. That same night when Dad was heating up some soup for his dinner, one of the knobs came right off in his hand.
‘DANTE!’
Emma’s fixation with slippers continued. I caught her dipping one of Dad’s slippers in the downstairs loo. After telling Emma what she was doing was wrong and naughty, I rinsed off the slipper and put it back in the hall, hoping that by the time Dad came home it would dry out and he wouldn’t notice. No such luck.
‘DANTE!’
One time, I was in the sitting room with Emma and telling her more about each of her toy-farm animals. The morning was reasonably bright, though it was more cloudy than otherwise. Emma was banging the heads of a cow and a goat together when a ray of light suddenly hit the empty crystal vase on the windowsill and a whole host of rainbow colours began to dance across the cream-coloured wall in front of us. The animals in Emma’s hands hit the carpet and she took off on her hands and knees like a shot. Using her hands against the wall, she pushed against it to rise to her feet. Bracing herself with one hand, she tried to snatch the dancing colours off the wall with her
other hand, chuckling with glee as she did so. And in spite of myself, I couldn’t help laughing with her. How amazing that she could find so much joy in
colours
.
And as I watched, I realized that Emma’s antics weren’t so much getting to me as she was. I had to catch myself from laughing too hard with her, or smiling at her for too long, or letting her get inside my head too much.
I didn’t want her inside my head.
My life was already spinning around so fast that I had no idea which way was up any more. My thoughts and feelings were all over the place, and with each passing day it grew worse, not better.
And on top of all that, Adam was up to something. I didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out. His new routine quickly became predictable. Shower at six-thirty each evening for at least twenty minutes, take at least another thirty minutes to get dressed, spend around ten minutes on his hair, leave the house between seven thirty and seven forty-five. And he didn’t get home till about ten each night. Once or twice and I probably wouldn’t have noticed. But he started going out every night, which was rare for my brother. Dad had to work late to make up for the couple of days he’d taken off when Emma first arrived, so he wasn’t around to question my brother the way I would’ve liked. So it was down to me.
‘Where’re you off to? Again?’
‘Out,’ Adam replied.
‘I gathered that. Out where?’
‘Out out.’
My brother was being even more annoying than usual. ‘Adam, where are you going?’
‘How is it any of your business?’ Adam frowned.
‘In case something happens to you,’ I argued.
‘And how will knowing where I’m going stop anything happening to me?’ asked Adam.
Like I said, bloody annoying.
‘So you’re not going to tell me?’
‘Dante, Emma is your child, not me,’ said Adam. ‘I’ll see you later.’
And he was out the door.
Why was he being so secretive? I shook my head; Adam was right. Emma was the one who needed looking after, not my brother, and if he wanted to play Man of Mystery that was his business.
The days when I was home alone with Emma were the most nerve-racking. Dad phoned on the hour every hour to make sure everything was OK. I didn’t know whether I should resent his regular check-ups or be grateful for them. I settled for somewhere in-between.
But this constant not knowing what to do next was doing my head in. I had to make some hard decisions. I couldn’t afford to waste any more time dithering. It wasn’t fair on Emma for a start. And even though I now had a kid, that didn’t stop me from trying to hold onto some of my old life, but it didn’t seem to be working. I phoned Collette – more than once – but all I got was her voice-mail or her answering machine. I tried phoning Josh but he had plans every night of the week so he couldn’t come
round. A few of my other mates like Ricky, Ben and Darren dropped by to see me, but Emma demanded and got most of my attention so they didn’t stay long. My other friends were busy during the day and I couldn’t go out at night, not without Dad being able to guarantee he’d be home in time to baby-sit.
Saturday morning brought drizzle, the postman and the DNA results – in that order.
One glance at the white envelope and I instantly knew what it was. One deep breath after another as I tried to steady my racing heart. This was what I wanted – proof positive. And it had arrived at last. I stared down at it.
‘Dante, open the damned envelope,’ I told myself.
And yet it remained unopened in my hands.
‘Annggg . . . annggg.’ Emma was calling me from her high-chair in the kitchen. Taking my letter and three for Dad back to the kitchen, I dumped them on the work surface as I went to see what was wrong with Emma. She’d dropped her spoon on the floor. Not that giving her a spoon was that effective. It usually ended up on her lap or on the floor but Dad said it didn’t hurt to start early so she’d get used to the feel of it.
‘Morning, angel. Morning, Dan,’ yawned Dad as he entered the kitchen.
‘Hey, Dad,’ I replied.
‘Nnyaang,’ said Emma.
Dad walked over to the baby and kissed the top of her head. He doted on her already. I took Emma’s spoon over to the sink to give it a quick wash before handing it back to her. It was another warm, sunny day outside.
Maybe later we’d go to the park. Emma enjoyed it there. Plus I got kudos for not being too full of myself to take out my baby ‘sister’. On two separate occasions, different girls had struck up a conversation with me when they saw me pushing Emma on a swing. So having a baby around had some perks after all!
‘Dante, what’s this?’
Dad was looking down at the semi-unfolded piece of paper in his hand. One glance at the other opened letters on the work surface told the whole story.
‘You opened my letter?’ I accused.
‘It said
Mr Bridgeman
on the envelope. I thought it was for me.’
‘It said Mr D. Bridgeman.’
‘I was opening them on autopilot and only registered Bridgeman,’ said Dad. ‘What is this?’
I closed my eyes briefly. So much for not getting the result via email in case it got intercepted. Any chance of bluffing my way out of this one? From the look on Dad’s face, there wasn’t much hope of that. And how ironic that he should read the results before I’d even had a chance.
‘Dante?’
‘You know what it is. You’ve read it,’ I said.
‘Not all of it,’ Dad denied. ‘I read enough to know it’s not mine, but not the whole thing.’ He’d obviously read enough to get the gist of it though.
I straightened up and looked directly at my dad. ‘I sent off for a DNA test. Those are the results.’
‘You did what?’ Dad asked me, astounded.
‘I needed to know for sure.’
Dad stared at me. ‘Dante, anyone with half an eye could see Emma is yours.’
‘I needed to know for sure,’ I repeated.
‘Still trying to wriggle away from your responsibilities? Is that what this is all about?’ Dad’s tone was scathing. ‘And if this test says Emma is your daughter, will you have another test done, and another, and another after that till you get the answer you want?’
‘No, Dad.’
I doubt he even heard me. I’d seen him angry with me before, but never anything like this. His body was held rigid and his lips were clamped together so tightly they had practically disappeared.
‘I’m not trying to get out of anything, Dad,’ I said quietly. ‘I just wanted to know the truth.’
‘The truth? Here’s a newsflash. The truth isn’t going to bend itself to suit you.’
‘I know that.’
‘I don’t think you do,’ Dad shot back. ‘What are you doing about your offered university place, or have you already accepted because you reckon Emma – my granddaughter – will no longer be a problem by the time term starts?’
We regarded each other with varying degrees of dislike.