The Child Inside (32 page)

Very slightly he frowns, and then he looks away.

My father is telling him about the bypass that the council is planning to put around the town. Is it a good thing? Is it not a good thing? What does Andrew think?

I watch Andrew as he considers his reply. He tilts his head a little to one side, he locks his teeth so that his chin is slightly jutting, and he nods faintly, repeatedly, weighing up the odds. But I do not hear what he says to my father. I could not care less if they built one road or ten around Ashcroft, and another fifty right through the middle of it. Andrew shaved this morning as he always does, but he is not as thorough as he used to be and, being as dark-haired as he is, it matters. It shows. There are tiny dark specks appearing on his jaw and, worse still, right up under his nose. The sight of them repulses me. And he is so thin; the hollows of his cheeks becoming more exaggerated as he gets older. Simon is thin, too, but on him the effect is ethereal, somehow, adding to his grace. In Andrew’s thinness I see the passing of time; I can imagine how he will look as an old man, and the thought of it fills me with fear.

‘So what did you think of the film?’ Andrew says and his words slice through my thoughts, clean as a knife. My heart flips in my chest and my ears start to buzz.

He is looking at Janice, and Janice is looking at him. His face is turned away from me, but I have a clear view of Janice; she is frowning at him, confused.

‘The film you saw on Friday.’ Andrew’s face in profile is unblinking, impassive. ‘What was it called?’

Janice glances at me, a quizzical sideways flick of the eye. She opens her mouth to speak, and quickly I say, ‘I
told
you, it was rubbish. It’s not even worth talking about, Andrew.’

My words, in their haste, come out waspish.
I told you . . .
like a nag, like a harridan. I flinch at the sound of my own voice, and I am aware that everyone else is flinching too. Andrew is very, very still.

Janice glares at me. She raises her eyebrows and her eyes are as bright and hard as marbles.

Slowly, Andrew turns his face to me. The look in his eyes makes my cheeks burn. ‘Then I am so sorry that I even mentioned it,’ he says coldly, making an awkward moment even worse.

My mother laughs nervously, a shrill whinny of a sound. Any more beef, anyone?’ she chirps. Andrew, let me get you some more.’

And my dad, following her lead, says, ‘Jono, how do you fancy beating me at chess later?’

And Janice still glares at me, and Andrew won’t look at me again, for the rest of lunch.

‘So what the hell was that all about?’

Janice and I are in the kitchen, clearing up. My mother has just taken a tray of coffee through to the others, in the lounge.

I am rinsing plates, and stacking them in the dishwasher. Janice is standing watching me, her hands on her hips, a tea towel, clutched in one hand, dangling down by her side. ‘Well?’ she demands.

And what can I say, except the truth, at least in part? I pick up a dish and run it under the tap, hoping that the sound of the water will muffle my voice, should anyone be listening from next door. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. It is always best to start with an apology with Janice; I learnt that long ago. ‘I told Andrew that I went to see a film with you on Friday.’

‘I gathered that,’ she says loudly, much too loudly; I turn the tap on harder. ‘But would you mind telling me why?’

‘Look, I’m
sorry
—’ I say again, but she cuts across me.

‘It’s that man.’ She flicks the tea towel in her hand and folds her arms now, across her chest. ‘You’ve been seeing him. You told me it was over.’

‘It
is
over. I just – I just had to . . . see him about something.’

‘You lied to me,’ she snaps. ‘You’re lying to Andrew and you lied to me.’

My hand is on that tap, turning it off, turning it on again. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say for the third time. ‘It isn’t that straightforward.’

‘Well, it never is, is it? That’s the trouble with cheating on your husband.’

‘Janice! Please!’ I hiss, and I turn the tap on full blast to drown out her voice.

‘And I suppose that’s what you wanted to talk to me about. You wanted me to cover up for you. How dare you drag me into it?’ she carries on. ‘How
dare
you use me as an alibi for your sordid little—’

‘It wasn’t like that!’

‘Yes, it was!’ she snaps right back. ‘It’s
always
like that.’

She’s right, of course. Cynical, self-righteous, hypocritical Janice – she’s right and she knows it. She glares at me and I glare at her, and I’m searching for something to say, for some justification . . . It’s on the tip of my tongue just to
tell
her. Then maybe she’d understand, maybe she could even
help
me. She is my sister, after all.

I think I’m pregnant.

It’s there; it’s on the tip of my tongue. I’m about to say it. She stares at me as if waiting.

‘I—’

But then my mother walks in, pushing the door open noisily and plonking down the tray on the counter. ‘Goodness!’ she exclaims. ‘What are you two arguing about out here? You’re making an awful lot of noise!’

Would I have told her?

Here, in my mother’s kitchen, with my husband, my parents and my son just the other side of the wall? Would I really have told her? Panic –
horror –
shoots down my arms, sending pins and needles stinging into my fingertips.

What was I
thinking
of?

My mother clatters about with the kettle and the cups, making more coffee for those who want it, and Janice and I stand there and watch her, both of us silenced. I am so weak I can barely hold myself up.

We were making a lot of noise, my mother said, but they didn’t hear what we were saying, surely? Please God, surely they didn’t hear?

But if they did hear, my mother wouldn’t be out here now fussing around us making coffee and saying, ‘Come on now. Come and sit down. I’ll finish the dishes later.’

Would
she?

I cannot believe I so nearly told Janice. I cannot believe this is happening at all.

I sit down on the sofa next to Andrew, who makes room for me, but doesn’t acknowledge me. He is watching Jono playing chess with my dad. My dad is sitting in the armchair with the chessboard laid out on the little table in front of him; Jono is kneeling on the floor. I too pretend to watch. I am feeling punched, stunned by my own insanity. I sit with my hands clasped in my lap, wanting to be good, like a child; wanting to be forgiven. There are tears stinging in my eyes; I have to keep blinking them away, hoping nobody will see. Just in case they do, I sit with a taut smile pinned into the cheeks of my face. I must be happy. I must be okay. Desperately I want comfort, but the person I would have comfort me is the person who has driven me away; the person I have wronged. My husband sits beside me, but I am on my own now.

Andrew drives us home from my parents in silence. From the corner of my eye I watch him; I study his face in profile, his focus fixed upon the road. The tension in the car is excruciating; Andrew’s silence is so wilful, so accurate in its aim. What does he know and what does he not know? I cannot tell. The book that was once so open to me is now firmly shut, the page lost.

‘I’m sorry I snapped at you,’ I say when I can stand it no more. ‘At lunch.’

Andrew concentrates on the driving, careful, controlled man that he is. Regularly he checks the mirrors. His hands upon the wheel grip loosely, but firmly. I look at those hands; at those long fingers and those broad knuckles, and I think of Simon’s hands with the bitten nails; hands as tender as a pianist’s.

‘The way you spoke to me is the way you always speak to me these days,’ Andrew says, at last.

I need to know for sure. I cannot focus on anything in this excruciating state of limbo.

So on Monday morning when I am in Sainsbury’s I buy a pregnancy-test kit, sticking it in the trolley along with the weekly shop. How my heart thumps as I move slowly along the pharmacy isle, searching shelves stacked with deodorants and tampons and vitamin pills. And how my face burns when at last I find what I am looking for, and lift the box down, and drop it nonchalantly into my trolley, where it lies among the usual tins and vegetables and various packets and cartons. I swear that there are a hundred eyes upon me.

And see how it glides along the conveyor belt when I place my items onto it at the checkout to pay. The shop assistant picks it up, scans it and chucks it with a bored, dismissive flick of the wrist onto the heap of stuff piling up on the other side, too fast for me to pack. I feel the woman in the queue behind me watching, as we all watch. She’ll see the standard of my shop: where I spend and where I save. She’ll see my organic milk and vegetables, and my economy tin foil and pasta. She’ll see my pregnancy-test kit.

One of my friends at school was the product of a late pregnancy. An
accident
, we liked to joke. I went round to her house once and her parents were ancient. She had a sister, fifteen years older, married and with kids of her own. Her father had false teeth.

If I am pregnant there will be a thirteen-year gap between Jono and this baby – this unknown baby – inside of me. He will be eighteen when she is only five. He will be taking off on his life, when she will merely be starting out on hers. He will be fully grown, a young man, off to university, and leaving me, when she is merely starting at school. In the blink of an eye I see her sweet, trusting face, the softness of her skin. I see her hand held out to me.
Mummy
, she says.
Mummy.

I want to shake myself. I want to slam my head against a wall and blank out my thoughts. Why must I think of this baby as a she? And yet how can I not? I do not think of her as a new person; I think of her as the one that I lost, come back.

I stuff my shopping into bags, clumsy, angry with myself. How can I even think of having this baby if I am pregnant? How could I possibly see it through?

I ask myself this and yet the answer is obvious:
how could I not?

I have not used a pregnancy test before. With Jono, and the second time, too, there seemed little point. You know when you are pregnant. You don’t need to see a little bit of blue on a stick to point out what you already know. But now . . . there is the chance that I am wrong. And should I not hope that I am wrong? If I
am
wrong, I can close this episode. Andrew and I will chug along as before. I will live in the coldness. I will accept that this is it, for me, somehow.

Because what can I possibly do otherwise? I
have
to be wrong. It cannot be any other way.

But I’m not wrong.

At nearly a quarter to twelve, after I have unpacked my shopping in the kitchen, emptied the dishwasher, sorted the post and procrastinated until I can procrastinate no longer, I go upstairs to my bathroom with that little box and I do what I have to do.

And half an hour later I am still sitting on the edge of the bath, too numb, too stunned to move.

Outside, I can hear the distant scream of a car alarm, and the doors of a delivery truck, slamming shut. These sounds sear across my consciousness, magnified. I hear the sway of the wind in the trees, the clattering of bottles being put out for the recycling, and the persistent shrill of a telephone ringing in the house next door. Footsteps come running up the street, growing louder as they get nearer, and for some bizarre reason I think they are coming to
my
house; I catch my breath, wait for the creak of the gate, the ring of the doorbell. Irrationally I think,
I am caught
, and my stomach grips and lurches on a sudden rush of panic. But the footsteps just carry on by, pounding out their pace on the concrete,
boom, boom
, till slowly they recede again, and fade, like the echo of my heart.

And still I sit there.

I start to cry; stupidly, uselessly and horribly noisily, in the confines of my small and functional bathroom. Andrew has left his bathrobe pegged on the hook beside the door. It hangs there like a slumped, dark shadow of a man; redundant and abandoned. I cannot bear to look at it. But his things are everywhere: his shaver by the sink, his towel upon the rail. His toothbrush shares the glass with mine; their two bases meet and cross at the bottom of the glass, but then out they stick, their heads far apart, and facing away. I look away from these things and stare at the floor, and I see where the white tiles are marked here and there by the random stray hairs that Andrew has shed from his body; every day I sweep up those hairs, and every day when he showers he sheds some more. There are traces of Andrew everywhere. This is his home. But it doesn’t feel like his home to me; it feels like the place that
I
must inhabit and through which he merely comes and goes like a transient judgemental ghost, a cruel shadow of the person that he used to be, the marker by which I measure my own discontent.

What will I do?

The walls of this room squeeze in on me. I can smell the faint dampness from the sink plughole; the combined familiarity of old soap, old toothpaste and the lemon-scented spray that I use to clean. Saliva rises in my mouth and I have to swallow. I force myself to stop crying; I need to get a grip. I need to think.