OMG Baby! (22 page)

‘For you,’ he says, laying it against my chest.

I scoop it up and run a finger over the engraved flowers on the front. On the back is engraved ‘My heart.’ I look at him.

‘I love you so much.’ I smile and then burst into tears, because I do and all kinds of crazy hormones are racing around my body.

He wipes my tears and takes the locket.

‘See there, you put my picture on one side and Angel in the other and wear us over your heart.’

‘You are romantic, after all.’

‘But don’t let on,’ he says.

7
January 1
:07

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject:
Re: Meeting

D
ear Vivienne
,

Thank you for your email requesting a meeting with the Barnes and Worth gift-buying department. We have provisionally scheduled a day to meet with our suppliers on 4 March and could meet with you at 11.30 a.m.

If this time is convenient for you, would you please confirm who from your company will be attending so that we can ensure refreshments are adequate?

Best wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year,

Marion Harrison

7
January 1
:20

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject:
Re: Re: Meeting

D
ear Marion
,

We here at Dream Team would be absolutely delighted to attend the meeting at 11.30 a.m. on 4 March and give you the opportunity to buy into our exciting product range. The whole team will be coming along: myself, my assistant, Christie Thompson, and our IT consultant, Mike Clarke. (I must say he’s really looking forward to seeing you in person instead of just gazing at that framed photo he keeps on his desk.)

A happy New Year to you! One filled with joy and the love of a good man.

Best wishes,

Vivienne Summers

I
’m just
about to click ‘send’, but doubt stays my hand. Is my reply a bit much? Is it less dangling Michael as bait and more promising him as a done deal? Is it . . . lying? I go to delete the line about the photo, but I’m distracted by a bit of streamer falling from the office ceiling and accidentally press ‘send’. Ah well.

I look around the silent office. No one will be back to work until next Monday. I try to imagine my colleagues on holiday. Damon will have seen in the new year with his old mum, I suppose. Christie will have been on the guest list for some achingly cool hipster party, probably so cool and ‘out there’ that the usual party conventions were sniffily bypassed and they all ended up sitting around on crates in a cavernous warehouse somewhere. I shudder to think what Michael has been up to in his free time – he said something about an evening in involving masturbation and maybe a single lace glove.

I think about my New Year with Max. On New Year’s Day we went into Dublin and wandered around the sights; then even more of his family came over for a buffet. I met his aunty Hilda, who’s slightly deaf and insulted almost everyone with her straight-talking. They all had a skinful and a rowdy sing-song. I loved being part of Max’s clan. I can’t remember a better time. Rainey claimed she spent New Year ‘giving something back’. Apparently she befriended the local homeless man who thinks he’s a dog and decided to take him to a shelter for the night to comfort him while he whimpered through the fireworks. It’s not great to be home. It’s like leaving a warm seat by the fire to stand in a cold kitchen. All my worries and concerns lie in wait; not one problem has gone away by itself as I’d hoped. I sigh and flick through my mental to-do list:

A
ll quite straightforward
, then. ‘A lot to do,’ I tut to myself, as I shut down the laptop and pack it away. I’m relieved that we have the meeting confirmed with Barnes and Worth, even though I’ll be less than a month away from having the baby. I lock up the office door, feeling OK, hopeful even. And then I arrive home.

Rainey is sitting on the sofa with her feet tucked up, a look in her eyes like a dog who just stole the roast. Something is wrong; I walk in warily looking from her towards the kitchen before putting down my bag.

‘Where’s Max?’ I ask, and she nods towards the bedroom.

‘Sorry,’ she whispers, and turns in her lips.

I hurry down the little corridor with a sudden sense of unease. He’s packing.

‘Hi,’ I say.

He looks up with a jerk of his head. ‘How’re you?’ he says, and goes back to shoving a checked shirt into a side compartment of his backpack.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m going home, Vivienne,’ he says quietly.

‘What, just for a bit or . . . ? You’re packing quite a lot of stuff.’

‘No, I’m pretty much getting out of here, darlin’.’

‘What? Why? What happened?’

‘What happened?’ He swings the pack onto his back and walks right past me into the living room. I follow. ‘You know what happened.’

Rainey now turns casually in her seat to watch us. ‘I only said—’ she begins, but Max interrupts, turning to me.

‘You told her to stay as long as she likes,’ he says, and I glance at Rainey. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘What? Hold on, it wasn’t like that. I just said while she was looking . . .’ I trail off, looking at the fury in his eyes. ‘Yes, I did. I said . . . I told her that.’

‘And you lied to me,’ he says, jerking his head forward in disbelief. ‘You told me you were dealing with the situation. You said she was going. You lied to me loads of times. Why?’

‘I was trying to make it work. See, I thought—’

‘You lied to me!’ he roars.

‘I didn’t want to lie,’ I begin, but he shakes his head as if my words are buzzing around him.

‘I think you should just calm down,’ says Rainey, getting up.

Max takes a step towards her, his eyes flashing. ‘Listen here, woman, let me tell you this – there’s no use in you bleating to me: you can’t rule me or control me like you do her, OK?’

Rainey blinks at him, her hands hanging limply by her sides. Max turns and looks at me before opening the door. I don’t see our connection in that look; I see only hurt there.

‘Please, Max,’ I say, as he walks out. ‘Don’t go,’ I cry in a panic, following him out onto the stairwell. What the hell is happening? I catch hold of his hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

He looks down. ‘I can’t compete with your mother anymore, Viv. You’ve chosen her over me.’

‘No, I have not! Max, I love you.’

‘Not enough to tell me the truth.’ He shakes his head. ‘There’s no trust when you lie to me like that.’

‘I’ll go back in there and make her leave!’

‘It’s not about that now; it’s about you and me. I have to be able to trust you.’

‘You can trust me!’ I shout, hurting my throat.

‘No,’ he says, and he looks at me coldly.

‘So you’re leaving me, are you?’ I hear my voice crack.

‘I need to get out for a bit,’ he says quietly. ‘Maybe you need time with her to get her out of your system, I don’t know.’

‘Well, then I can’t trust you, can I? I can’t trust you to stay when things get tough, so good – better to find out now than when we have a baby! Go on, then, if you’re going!’

‘Viv, I’d stand by you for ever, through anything, but you let her come between us and you’ve done that before. If you’d told me the truth . . .’

‘The truth! Truth!’ I say, impersonating him. ‘I’ll tell you now!’

‘But you’ve had every chance to tell me, to stand up to her, but you chose to lie. To me!’ He thumps his chest, angry again. We stare at each other.

I scratch at the top of my head. ‘You can’t love me if you’d do this,’ I say, feeling a sob choke me like a wad of wire wool. I start to take off the engagement ring and a thump of fear hits me in the chest. What am I doing? How is this spiralling so badly out of control? A quiet, reasonable thought in my mind points out that this might be a bad and stupid thing to do, but right now I don’t care.

‘I love you, Vivienne. That’s why it hurts. I’d never lie to you.’

‘You’d better have this back,’ I say, handing him the ring. ‘You don’t want to
marry
a liar, do you?’ I give him the ring and he shakes his head sorrowfully. ‘People who love each other don’t just fucking walk out, Max!’ I scream.

‘People who love each other don’t fucking lie,’ he shouts back, and takes off down the first flight of stairs.

‘Don’t ever come back, then,’ I yell after him stupidly, and I lean over the stair rail crying.

He turns and looks at me sadly. Then I watch him go, a flash of battered leather jacket turning the bottom of the stairs. The door slams and I sink to the floor.

D
uring the long
, slow days following Max’s departure, I spend a lot of time slouched on the sofa contemplating the web of shadows moving across the laminate floor. Outside the window, the cold slab of white sky threatens snow. Rainey keeps walking in and delivering lectures, something about self-reliance. I half listen. I watch my belly move as Angel kicks and turns. I now know why people say they have the blues; this exactly describes me. This is not the hot, hysterical struggle of heartbreak I’ve experienced before; this is something different – dull, cold and numbing, like being locked in a freezer. Everything is colourless and empty; there’s no clowning around or loud laughs, rude sex, beards or big boots, nothing to look forward to.

But if he so much as shows his big Irish face here, I’ll kill him. I don’t even know if I’d let him come back after he left me so easily. Thinking along these lines drives icicle daggers into my heart.

I spend a lot of evenings watching soap operas with Rainey. She munches bowls of crisps and falls asleep peppered with crumbs.

A couple of torturous days later he rings.

‘How’s the baby?’ he asks.

‘Heavy,’ I say in a flat voice.

‘How are you?’

‘Fine. What do you care?’

‘I care a lot,’ he says, and my heart leaps like an enthusiastic puppy.

‘So are you seeing anyone?’

‘Don’t be stupid!’ There’s a pause. I hear him breathing into the phone. ‘Why did you say that? We’re not broken up.’

‘Er, you walked out and left me . . .’

‘Did you or did you not tell your mother she can stay as long as she likes?’

‘That’s not the point! You left me.’

‘
Because
you told your mother to stay as long as she likes! Why
do
you lie to me, Vivienne? Is it a condition or something? What other lies have you told, eh?’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I mean, how the hell can I trust you?’

‘You obviously can’t!’ I shout, and hang up.

The phone immediately buzzes with his name. I bury it under a cushion, staring straight ahead until it stops. I walk over to the window and look down into the street. I start to imagine a life without him, raising our baby alone. It makes me want to cry. My eyes get red and itchy. I throw myself on the sofa and try to cry just as Rainey appears.

‘What’s wrong with your eyes? Are you allergic to something?’

‘No,’ I snap.

‘So what shall we do today?’ she asks, as if we’re on a package holiday, choosing a boat trip. She’s been very chirpy since Max left.

I look to the side, away from her, sliding my hand over the sofa cushion. ‘I need to do sitting and staring today.’

‘You did that yesterday. Don’t take this personally, Vivienne, but I really think you are too reliant on others for your own happiness. You need to understand that other people will always let you down, always. You should expect it, especially from a man.’

I let my eyes trail over her as she stands by the sofa with her hands on her hips.

‘That’s actually quite funny coming from you,’ I say.

‘Oh, I let you down. I know you think that and you’re right! But let’s not dwell on things we can’t fix.’

‘Why not? I fancy a right good dwell. Why don’t you make us a brew and tell me about my father?’ Her eyes skitter away to the window. ‘Why won’t you talk about him?’

‘Why do you want to drag all that out into the light and pick through it?’

‘Oh, I dunno. Maybe I’m curious about half of my genetic make-up. Just tell me and I’ll stop asking.’

‘There’s nothing to tell,’ she sniffs. ‘He was just a boy. We were messing around.’

‘What was his name?’

‘He didn’t even know I was pregnant, and if you’re thinking of tracing him, you can’t – he died in a car accident.’

I glance at her as I take this in, another bond severed. I’m now almost totally anchorless, I think sadly.

‘Am I like him?’

‘Only a bit. Same bushy hair,’ she says, waving a finger up and down.

‘What was he called?’

‘Arthur Poole,’ she announces with an embarrassed shrug.

‘What did you like about him?’

‘I can’t remember.’ She shakes her head. ‘He was older than me – he was nineteen, and I was fifteen. He was the youth-club leader. Arty, we called him. All the girls were mad about him, but he liked me, and one night we went behind the clubhouse and then I was pregnant.’

‘How romantic.’

‘It wasn’t.’

‘Why didn’t you have an abortion?’

‘Because I didn’t face up to being pregnant and by then it was too late.’

I hear this, feeling something like a punch in the chest. I came into existence because she was too late. I slipped into life under the net. Go, me!

‘And you never told anyone about him?’

‘I was underage.’ She sinks onto the armchair.

‘And how did Nana react?’

‘They were upset.’ She nods.

‘But they didn’t kick you out or anything?’

‘No. They were angry at first but supportive, I suppose.’

‘You said they put you in the back room. I thought they must have driven you away.’

‘No, Viv. I left of my own free will,’ she says, looking into my eyes.

‘Are you telling the truth? I never know anymore.’

‘I left of my own free will.’

‘Well, everyone does.’ I shrug, feeling a wave of sorrow engulf me. Why does everyone I love leave me? Why? Am I so unworthy? Now I’ve lost my father as well . . . poor old Arty!

‘When did my father die? I’d at least like to visit his grave.’ I picture myself in a black headscarf placing a single rose by a forgotten headstone somewhere windswept.

‘Uh, I don’t know . . . sometime in the 1990s. Don’t be sentimental, Vivienne. Self-pity is an ugly emotion.’

I gaze into space. The gloom seems to hang like smoke. God, I miss Max.

‘So anyway, I thought I’d take you shopping in the sales for baby things if you like,’ she says.

‘You haven’t got any money,’ I remind her. Hell, this little heart-to-heart has made me feel terrible. I’m running with the ‘I’m unworthy so everyone leaves’ theme, adding evidence, and it’s really gaining momentum in my brain. I wonder what the point of human love is when it only ever brings pain.

‘I’ve had some cash wired through.’

‘Cash wired through? Where from? I don’t want to spend your ill-gotten gains on my precious baby.’ I imagine myself raising Angel alone. We’d be content, poor but honest.

‘I want to buy you a Bugaboo. I saw a lovely lime-green one in John Lewis’s window. It has a matching bag. It would make me happy to buy that for you.’

I look at her with narrowed eyes and she nods encouragingly. I really want one of those Bugaboos and she knows it. She caught me looking through the catalogue. I wonder, If I let her buy me that, what are the consequences? Will I be betraying Max? We were bidding for a cheaper version on eBay, but it was a boring beige and the hood was a bit torn.

‘Max and I were buying one,’ I say half-heartedly.

‘Max! He’s left you. He’s gone. He’s let you down. Am I right? You don’t owe him anything. You sitting here alone out of some misplaced sense of loyalty isn’t going to bring him back now, is it? Better to forget him and go shopping.’

‘I’ll get my coat.’

T
hat afternoon Rainey
returns to the flat with the Bugaboo baby buggy in ‘lime zest’ and I meet Lucy at Oxford Circus. We take a walk down Regent Street, towards Leicester Square. She’s supposed to be in mourning, but she’s wearing a bright pink beret, and although she seems sad and quiet, she’s not as broken as I’d expected.

We mooch about the ground floor of Liberty.

‘Purses. My mother loved purses. She had about twenty, all with odd coins and lists and stamps in,’ she says, trailing a hand through a display of leather coin pouches. ‘All this stuff we collect and then one day we’re gone, but the stuff is still here and someone has to sort through it and shove it in a bin bag.’

I smile sympathetically.

‘Sorry, that’s a bit of a miserable thing to say,’ she sniffs.

‘No, it’s not. You’re allowed to be miserable.’

‘The thing is, I’m not miserable. I should be. I always thought I didn’t know my mum, but the truth was that I did know her – really well. There just wasn’t much to know. She wasn’t this deep person keeping it all in; she was as light and see-through as a cobweb.’ She looks at me, surprised. She squirts a perfume tester onto a card, makes a face and puts it down. ‘Even her death was simple – went in her sleep, no fuss.’

‘That’s how I’m doing it,’ I say.

‘You?’ She squints at me. ‘You’re far too dramatic for that; you’ll be eaten by a tiger or something.’

We walk back out onto the busy pavement.

‘So your dad met Reuben?’

‘All dad really said to him was, “Bad timing, old son,” just before we left.’

‘Huh.’ I link her arm with mine as we face a flotilla of Spanish schoolchildren. I think about Lucy’s father rattling about in their big family home. ‘Parents,’ I say sadly.

Lucy suddenly turns on me. ‘I hope you haven’t got all sentimental about Rainey because my mother died,’ she says, and so I spill the whole story about Christmas and Max leaving and Arty dying until we’re nearly at Piccadilly.

‘Shit. So your peace plan backfired massively, then?’

‘Yep, and don’t say you told me so.’

‘You and Max will be fine.’

‘No, we won’t. He left me.’

‘Not really. If Rainey left, he’d come back.’

‘I don’t want him back.’

‘Well, that’s sorted, then. Congratulations – you now live with your mother.’

‘She’s being very nice, actually. She bought me a Bugaboo.’

‘But what will you do for sex?’

I laugh and look sideways at her. Her cheeks are red. She smiles; her teeth are wet and creamy white.

‘It’ll be all right,’ she says. ‘At least you’re pregnant. Me and Reubs are still trying. Oh God, I have to tell you this! The other morning it was the perfect time in my cycle to conceive, but I had a train to catch for this urgent meeting and had to dry my hair, so I told him to get himself ready to come while I dried my hair and then I just sat on him at the end.’ We turn left into Leicester Square. I walk with my head down, taking this in.

‘What do you mean, you “just sat on him at the end”?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘You never cease to amaze me.’ I smile. ‘Look, I have to rest for a while – there’s only so far I can waddle without needing the toilet, anyway.’

We find a café and take an outside table underneath a heater.

‘I’m completely alone,’ I moan, flopping down.

‘You’re not alone; you’re just annoyed,’ she says. ‘Have a non alcoholic mulled wine.’