‘Joe!’ I shouted after him. I knew what Joe could get like when it came to Ethan, but that was back when he was sixteen, seventeen. Now he was thirty-two, but I worried he’d forgotten that, that he still thought he could run and fight like a sixteen-year-old. ‘Joe, come back, they’re not worth it!’
Ethan turned around now. ‘Where’s Joe?’ he said
‘Oh … just going for a wee,’ I said, cursing him.
‘But why is he running so fast? Is he desperate?’
‘Yes, yes, it was a close call. Look,’ I put my hand on Ethan’s shoulder, ‘can you just stay here for a second? I’ll be right back, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Don’t wander off so we can’t find you, will you?’
‘No, I’ll stay with Dolores!’
The ground was wet with rain and I was worried about slipping as I ran after Joe – well, I say ‘run’, it was more of a light jog. As it was, I didn’t have to go very far, however, because suddenly I heard this ‘
Ow
,
Jesus!
’ followed by an almighty smack.
And then I saw Joe, about fifteen metres in front of me. He’d tried to hurdle over a bollard but had somehow got his foot stuck, meaning he’d landed pretty much face first. I ran over to him. He’d immediately got himself sitting up – I think he felt more stupid than anything else – and, in fact, on closer inspection, his injuries weren’t as bad as the accident may have suggested (he was lucky he hadn’t broken his neck, the force with which he’d buckarooed over that bollard).
He had a badly grazed chin with a Dracula-esque dribble of blood running from it. He’d also taken the top layer of skin off by his right temple.
I knelt down beside him. ‘Oh, Joe,’ I said.
‘Where’s Eth?’ he said. ‘Is he all right?’
‘He’s fine and, considering he didn’t hear anything those boys said and thinks you just went for a wee, he’s going to be pretty confused.’
‘Ow, shit. Call yourself a nurse?’
‘Behave,’ I said, wiping gently at Joe’s face with an antiseptic wipe. We were back at mine, sitting on the bed while I cleaned him up. Ethan was in the lounge, watching
Pirates of the Caribbean
on DVD. ‘I’ve known patients have electric-shock therapy and whinge less than you.’
He rolled his eyes.
‘And keep your face still,’ I said. ‘I can’t do this properly if you keep jigging about.’
His injuries didn’t warrant this much cleaning, but I was just enjoying being this close to his face. I was so close, I could see how his eyelashes were dark and glossy but then went lighter at the roots; the crease in his deep, smooth eyelids (Joe’s eyes are wasted on a bloke, he would look incredible in make-up), the tiny capillaries on the curved, narrow bridge of his nose. The way his two front teeth turn inwards on themselves. Things you’d only know about someone’s face if you’d spent a long time studying it, which I had. All those years ago, and during the last few hours, too. I suspected that Joe also knew that his wounds were clean long ago.
‘This is going to be a nice scab in a few days,’ I said, rubbing Sudocrem onto the graze next to his temple. ‘And you’ll probably have a nice shiner, too.’ To be fair, that bit was quite bad. The top layer of skin had come off and it was raw and glistening underneath.
‘Do you think I’ll look hard?’ said Joe.
‘Uh, nope,’ I said. ‘I think you’ll look like you tried to hurdle over a bollard and fell flat on your face.’
Joe tutted. ‘I’m really not hard, am I? I can’t even run after a couple of teenagers without doing myself some damage.’
‘You were quite angry,’ I said.
‘He’s my brother,’ Joe said. ‘My little brother. I won’t have anyone talk about him like that.’
I’d forgotten how protective Joe was. The scrapes he’d got into over Ethan, how he’d stuck up for me when girls had been bitchy at school – you know, just the stuff you’d imagine. Calling me a slut because I was knocked up at sixteen. I can’t say I was ever that surprised. I had other things on my mind, anyway, like ever bumping into Saul Butler. Like Joe ever finding out the truth.
Joe winced again. I was convinced he was doing it for attention.
‘You’re a terrible patient,’ I said, dabbing some more. It was becoming increasingly obvious that I wasn’t so much tending to wounds now, just caressing his face with a tissue. I could feel myself softening, weakening. I knew the risks but I wasn’t sure I could hold back anymore. I ditched the tissue and just stroked his face.
Joe shifted closer to me, so our noses were almost touching.
‘I think that might be enough now, what do you think?’ he said.
‘Um, I think you might be right.’
‘So how come you’re still keeping me as some sort of Münchausen by proxy hostage, then? Is this giving you sexual kicks? Next, you’ll be putting arsenic in my dinner then taking me to A&E.’
‘Shut up,’ I said. I was looking into his eyes. We both knew where this was going. We hadn’t been kneeling on my bed facing one another for half an hour with one wet wipe for nothing. I hesitated for a long time and then, almost quickly, as if I didn’t dare, kissed him on the lips and he kissed me back.
Joe reached out and stroked the side of my face, then stuck his tongue in my mouth, dirtily, sillily, but it was lovely. I giggled.
‘Now that’s definitely not medical,’ I whispered.
He went back to stroking my face, ever so slowly, with the back of his hand, and I closed my eyes, felt the undulation of every single knuckle, feeling at an impasse; like my life from now on would be split into before this kiss and after it. I imagined ten years from now, twenty years, thirty years, and I decided I wanted it so much, that it had to be worth the risk. Joe cupped his hand around the back of my neck and I leaned into him. In the other room, I was faintly aware of the babble of the television, but otherwise it was like we were in a bubble, a cocoon. When our mouths met, I felt like I’d let go of something and was in freefall and had no idea how I would land. ‘Joe,’ I said.
We were kneeling opposite one another and he shuffled even nearer on his knees so that our bodies touched, our necks interlocked and he was cradling the back of my head in his hands and planting kisses on my neck.
‘I don’t know,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t know if … Oh God, I’m scared.’
‘Of what, baby?’
Never, ever being able to tell you the whole story. Being with that, alone, for the rest of my life. Our baby dying again, because I don’t deserve it, I don’t deserve to be a mum
,
I thought. But then I thought about Grace: ‘I’ll never get over it, darlin’,’ she’d said. ‘Some people just don’t.’ Well, I didn’t want to be like Grace, I didn’t want
Grace
to be like Grace: one of life’s Great Irrecoverably Damaged. I did not want to wind up in Highgate Mental Hospital in too-short tracksuit bottoms and Crocs, mumbling about that gorgeous man called Joe I once knew, who came back into my life, giving me a new chance at happiness, and I screwed it up just because I was scared. I wanted to move forward, to be happy, to be a family with Joe.
‘What of?’ he said again, gently pulling me onto the bed. I let myself go.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’ I knew in that moment that this was the right thing to do. ‘You got me,’ I said. And he kissed me.
‘After sixteen years. I got you back,’ he said. ‘Jesus Christ alive, you know how to make a man wait.’
We kissed then, for a very long time, and it was the sweetest, most wonderful kiss. Sweeter even, perhaps, than the kisses in the barn, because I had decided on this, rather than got carried away.
After a while, when our jaws were starting to ache, Joe said, ‘So like, are you my girlfriend?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘What are you, sixteen?’
‘I feel like it.’
I smiled, hesitantly. ‘I guess I am then,’ I said.
‘Can I see you tomorrow then?’
‘
What?
’
‘Can I see you tomorrow?’ he said, and I started to laugh because I remembered when he’d last said that to me, standing outside the pub, the night after his Black Horse Quarry near-death experience.
‘Can I see you every night this week?’ he added. He was laughing, too, kissing me again and again.
‘No, you can see me Thursday,
if
you play your cards right.’
Suddenly, from the kitchen, came an almighty din: the sound of cupboard doors being opened and closed, something dropping to the floor, the scraping of a stool against the tiles. I looked at Joe. ‘What the …?’
‘That’ll be Eth,’ he said, not taking his eyes from mine. ‘Making a start on tea.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Should I be worried?’
‘No, but you should come here for another kiss.’
There was another bang.
‘You okay there, Eth?’ shouted Joe. ‘We won’t be long. We’ll go and get pizza in a minute.’ Joe turned back to me. ‘He gets hungry a lot. It’s part of the Down’s.’
More clatter from the kitchen.
‘Well we can’t just leave him,’ I said, slightly panicked now. ‘He must be starving, poor thing. I’ll have to go and help.’
‘Oh-wer,’ Joe groaned, dramatically, rolling onto his side as I got up. He tried to pull me back to bed but I resisted.
‘Poor thing hasn’t eaten for hours,’ I said, pulling on the nearest thing: Joe’s T-shirt, just long enough to cover my bum, and smelling of him.
‘He ruins everything that boy,’ Joe teased as I went into the kitchen.
The kitchen was a state. There were various tins and packets out on the side, including a box of Weetabix, the white packet with half of the biscuits gone and a sweep of Weetabix crumbs across the worktops. It looked like some sort of conceptual-art installation. Ethan was sitting at the breakfast bar, eating a dry Weetabix like it was a sandwich. I frowned at him.
‘Ethan,’ I said, ‘what are you doing? You know you can have some milk with that.’
But he just carried on chomping, bits of Weetabix exploding out of the sides of his mouth.
I went over to the fridge. ‘Were you starving?’ I asked, looking for milk. ‘I’m so sorry, I bet you thought we’d forgotten about you; we really will go and get pizzas now, don’t worry.’
I closed the fridge door and was just standing there, holding the milk and some yoghurts, when Ethan stopped eating and pointed at me, grinning.
‘What?’ I said, glancing down at myself. For an awful second, I wondered if I’d walked out of the bedroom naked.
‘Baby’s coming!’ he said, pointing at me, spraying Weetabix everywhere. ‘Baby’s coming soon.’
I looked down again, and realized the view was blocked from around the belly-button onwards. Sure enough, my eighteen-week-old bump was round and perfectly visible.
‘Baby’s coming,’ he said again, a look of delight on his face. We both started laughing.
‘It is, Eth,’ I said. ‘You’re right.’
When Joe got dressed, we did eventually go to Domino’s on the high street and pick up some pizzas. The sky was bruise-coloured, threatening more rain. And yet, as the three of us walked home, Joe, in the middle, balancing three pizza boxes and a garlic bread box like some sort of magician, reminiscing about all the amazing pizzas he’d had in his life (nothing beat the American Hot he’d had on holiday in Devon once; this we named the Holy Pepperoni, which Ethan thought was hilarious), I felt oddly happy. Hopeful. Maybe this was a new start; maybe I could learn something from Ethan’s design for living, his version, of the world: a simple version, where people got married before they had babies, and whose memories didn’t amount to anything more serious than the last great pizza they’d eaten.
Dear Lily
So, last night, Joe turned up completely uninvited and unannounced at our house (God knows how he even knows where my student house is), having driven all the way from Kilterdale to London in his Metro with the wing mirror on the driver’s side held together with a rubber band and a dodgy exhaust (it’s a wonder he made it here alive). And do you know what he said, when I asked him why he’d come? He said, ‘I just had an urge to see you.’ Who drives 250 miles just because they have an urge to ‘see you’? And without telling you? I could have been in bed with someone else.
I wouldn’t mind (at least I’d understand) if he then declared his undying love for me, said that he’d come all that way because he couldn’t live without me, but he didn’t say anything like that, he just sort of loafed around, got drunk at the pub with me, then slagged off my friends; then, when I suggested that he couldn’t get over the fact that I’d moved on with my life, he said I was flattering myself. I mean, I can’t win!
My head is all over the place now. I’m totally pissed off with him; I felt like I’d moved on; I’ve got new friends, I’m starting to meet guys, I’m starting, just, to put 1997 behind me, and then he turns up and it all comes flooding back again. I think I still have feelings for him, but I’m only twenty-one and he’s only twenty-two. Even if he is The One, it’s too soon for us to settle down with him. I think we both need to get out there.
Kaye guessed the second she saw me at work that something momentous had happened over the weekend. Jezza had called everyone into a meeting. He loves a meeting, does Jezza. He gets this look on his face when he announces we need to have one: sort of grim, but with barely concealed joy. In the same way some people live to be on stage, Jeremy lives to get into one of those rooms with a carpet that makes your hair go static, and lecture us about well, anything really; the subject matter is not important. He’s been known to talk for half an hour, for example, about the hazards of bringing wet umbrellas into the office and not ‘shaking them out’. I imagine he has a notebook somewhere, entitled ‘Things I Could Have Useless Meetings About’.
Anyway, we all piled into this meeting. Jeremy was banging on about professional boundaries. Too many of us were treating our clients like ‘friends’, he said, we were seeing them outside designated times (so inconsiderate, these people who call us from the top of a cliff, armed with a bottle of vodka, with an urge to kill themselves when it’s not our shift); we were buying them
coffees
; it had come to his attention that someone had bought a client a present. That someone was me – I knew by the way he was eyeballing me. I’d bought Grace a copy of
The Photographer
magazine because it had a feature about a photographer she liked in it. It was £3 from WH Smith, so hardly a present.