The New Neighbours (35 page)

“Don't 'ave to worry about 'im,” Scott said roughly. “I'll sort 'im out, no problem. Listen, Bel, I'm sorry, I shouldn't of said what I did. I was, like, caught surprised, see? I believe you. Still we have to do something about it now, don't we?” He looked at her hopefully. “OK?”

“No,” Annabel replied calmly. “It's not OK. I'm having my baby, and neither of us will have anything to do with you, Scott. You don't want us, and we don't want or need you.” Suddenly Annabel felt much older and more mature than Scott. She looked across the table at him and said quietly, “You mean nothing to me, Scott. For a while I was one of your women, oh, yes, your friend Chrissy told me about those, but not anymore.” She got to her feet, pushing her chair away behind her. “I don't want to see you again, Scott, ever. If you ever had any feeling for me, which I doubt, leave us alone now. Thanks for the tea.”

“Bel! Wait!” Scott called, but Annabel didn't hesitate or turn back, she simply walked out of the café door into evening gloom. She continued to walk, ignoring the buses that ran along the Dartmouth Road, and as she walked the tears began to stream down her cheeks. By the time she reached Dartmouth Circle, she felt shaky and weak and the tears were still flowing. She knew she couldn't go home like this and so she slipped into the Circle garden and sat down on the bench to try and recover her self-control. It was beginning to get cold, but still Annabel wouldn't go into the house, she felt completely wrung out like a limp rag and she knew her face was blotchy and tear-stained.

Suddenly she was aware of someone standing beside her and looking down at her in concern. It was Charlie Murphy.

“Are you OK?” Charlie asked tentatively. “Is there anything I can do?”

The kindness in her voice made Annabel begin to cry again, and Charlie immediately sat down beside her and gently put her arms round her and held her close.

“You know,” she said at last, “things can't really be that bad. Will you come in to our place for a while to get warm? You're shivering. Come in with me and have a cup of coffee, and tell me what's wrong. OK? I don't think anyone else is home, but if they are we can go into my room and be private.”

Annabel didn't reply, but she sniffed, wiped her eyes and nodded. She hardly knew Charlie, but she was in sore need of someone to talk to. Together the two girls crossed out of the garden and went to number seven. Annabel glanced across at her own house and saw that the lights were on and Mum's car was in the drive, which meant she ought to go home, but she couldn't face it yet. Following her glance Charlie said, “If they'll worry, you can phone.”

There was no one in the living room when they went up, but they could hear Dean's music thudding from his room next door, so Charlie said, “We'll go up to my room so we shan't be disturbed.”

They carried mugs of coffee upstairs to Charlie's room. It was the smallest of the bedrooms, but she had made it very cosy, with a kingfisher blue throw over the bed and cushions, so that it could double as a sofa in the daytime. Her work was spread out on a desk by the window, and there was a pile of clothes on a small armchair. These Charlie dumped unceremoniously on the floor in the corner. “Have a seat,” she said, waving towards the chair, while she dropped on to the bed.

For a moment or two, they sipped their coffee and then Charlie smiled encouragingly at Annabel. “So, what's the problem?”

Once she started to tell, the whole story came flooding out of Annabel.

There was no one to whom she had told the entire story, no one, until now that she had felt she could trust. It's odd, she thought even as she was relating the getaway drive, how much easier it is to speak to someone you hardly know. She held nothing back, it was as if a dam had burst and everything was carried out on the flood.

“We managed to lose the police car,” Annabel said, “and then Scott changed the number plates as we drove round through the city centre. It was scary, I can tell you. I was sure we'd be picked up. Anyway, we went to a lock-up garage Scott's got off Camborne Road, and unloaded the stuff there. Nobody saw us. It's a little yard with three garages in, and his was the one in the middle. There wasn't anyone about. After that… well we went to the dunes, and that's when it happened. It only happened once. We'd kissed and stuff before, you know, but never, well done it properly.” She looked across at Charlie. “It was the excitement of the chase that did it,” she said. “I don't think Scott could get it up properly before, but after that police chase… well he couldn't hold back. Know what I mean?”

Charlie said nothing, but listened without interruption until Annabel finally came to a standstill. “And you've just left this Scott bloke now?” she asked at last.

“Yeah,” Annabel nodded. “Somehow I kept my cool while I was with him in the café, but after, when I got outside, like, I just seemed to go to pieces.” She brushed her hand across her forehead. “I'll be OK in a little while, I just didn't want to go in home while I was still so upset. Mum would've sussed straightaway that there was something wrong.”

“But you said she knows all about the baby.”

“Yeah, she does, except who the father is,” Annabel sighed. “She'll know soon enough now, because Oliver Hooper will soon work it out. He's an evil boy. He's been absolutely foul to my sister. I think she's like really quite scared of him, you know? And now he'll know something about me, too.”

“He may not say anything,” Charlie said consolingly. “He may not even put two and two together.”

“Oh, he will,” Annabel assured her, “and I really don't want my parents to know what sort of person Scott really is, you know? It's bad enough about the baby, though they're being really good about that, but, well to be honest, it was an awful shock seeing Scott again today. He wasn't at all like I thought.” Annabel's voice cracked again. “I can't think what I was doing! It's like I was hypnotised or something, you know? I couldn't wait to see him. I was a different person when I was with him, like, someone else, he was so exciting. Then, like, today he wasn't exciting at all, he was just… ordinary, you know?” She buried her head in her hands.

“I do know, exactly,” Charlie said softly, “really I do, because it happened to me too.”

Annabel looked up. “What did?”

“I fell for someone, just as awful as your Scott. I got pregnant and his reaction was just the same as Scott's, i.e. was it his? And if it was he didn't want to know.”

“What did you do?” asked Annabel.

“Same as you're going to. I had the baby.”

“But where… I mean, like, what happened to it?”

“My daughter, Kirsty, is safely at home in Ireland, being looked after by my parents.”

“Your parents? Don't they mind?”

“Well,” said Charlie philosophically, “they'd have preferred it not to happen of course, but they love her like one of their own and she's just an extra daughter for them. I'm the eldest, you see, and I've seven brothers and sisters, so my youngest brother, Declan, is only four years older than Kirsty.”

“But does she know? Kirsty I mean?”

“That I'm her mother? No, not yet, she's far too young, she's only one. When the time comes I'll tell her.”

“Only one! But I thought you were at college here…”

“I was, but no one here knows why I stayed home in Ireland for a while.” She smiled ruefully. “I tell them glandular fever. They don't query that. I had to repeat a year, I finish in the summer.”

“And did you never think of having an abortion?” asked Annabel. Charlie shook her head, “No. I'm a Catholic. There's no way.”

“But the father…” Annabel asked hesitantly, “he wanted…”

“He was much older than me, married of course, and so he wanted everything sorted, without any fuss.” Charlie gave a bitter laugh. “He offered me the money for an abortion. I told him what he could do with it.”

“So he knows that you had her.”

Charlie shrugged. “He must assume I did. I've had no contact with the bastard since he told me to get rid of her. I certainly didn't tell him when she was born. I have seen him a couple of times in the distance, shopping with his wife. Been very tempted to go and accost him then and tell him, just to see his face. Wouldn't be fair to his wife though, poor woman, would it? But you know, I look at him and I think, how could I have loved that?”

“Like me today,” mused Annabel, “like I was seeing Scott for the first time… and I felt… nothing.” She looked across at Charlie, sympathetically. “Do you miss her?”

“Kirsty? Like hell, but I know she's in the best place for her. She's loved and looked after. What more could I ask for her? I don't want to be a struggling single mum over here, when there's a home and family for her over the water. Anyway, my parents were determined I should get my degree. They persuaded me to come back and finish. ‘You'll get a far better job with a good degree,' they told me, ‘and if you aim to provide for Kirsty in the future that's what you need.' ”

“They must be wonderful parents,” Annabel said.

“They are, so,” Charlie agreed, “but aren't yours as well? Aren't they standing behind you, now?”

“Yeah, but it's not so easy for Mum, with Dad having gone and everything. It'd break their hearts if they found out what I was doing with Scott, that I'm a criminal, you know.”

“I should wait and cross that particular bridge if you come to it,” advised Charlie. “For now go on as you are, and maybe they'll never know. Didn't Scott say he'd take care of this Oliver boy?”

“He did,” said Annabel, “but whether he really can or not, I don't know.”

“Look, it sounds to me as if Scott can take care of himself and his own interests, and it's in his interest not to be linked with you, isn't it?”

“Yeah, I suppose so,” answered Annabel dubiously. She picked up her coffee mug, only to find that it had gone cold. “Oh hell!” she cried, leaping to her feet. “I never rang Mum, she'll be frantic.”

“Better go then,” Charlie agreed and got up too. “But if ever you want to come over for a chat, just come, OK? I'll be here, and if not, not far away. Don't forget I really do know what you're going through. Oh, but my housemates don't know… about Kirsty I mean.”

“Don't worry, I shan't say anything to anyone,” promised Annabel, “but thank you for telling me, it does help to talk to someone who's been through it all, you know.”

When she'd gone Charlie sat on her bed thinking, remembering her own rage, impotence and misery when she'd found herself pregnant. She thought of Kirsty's father, Duncan, a wealthy and respected professional man in the town and felt the usual stab of anger at his callousness. Since she'd returned to college she had steered well clear of anywhere she might run into him, but on the odd occasion when she had seen him in the distance, she found that her original impotent rage had cooled to contempt. She'd actually seen him a couple of days ago, and he, seeing her, had turned away, stalking off in the opposite direction. Now she gave a mental shrug and said aloud, “It's your loss, Duncan, you'll never know Kirsty.”

Charlie had settled in to The Madhouse very easily. She hadn't known her housemates well before she moved in, and that, to her, was a plus. She wanted to have a complete change in her last year at college, keep away from her old haunts and make a new set of friends. She'd repeated her second year, she explained, because she'd been at home in Ireland with glandular fever and had missed too much of the course, so that made it easier to meet new people. When she'd come back she'd attended different lectures and was at a different stage in her studies from the crowd she'd started with, but Charlie had always been a bit of a loner and it suited her very well.

She liked the other Madhouse inhabitants, particular Mad and Ben, and living in a house like this meant there was always someone to do things with if she wanted to. She liked Dartmouth Circle as well. It was ideal for the university, but quiet, on the edge of the town.

Charlie sighed and picked up the letter home she had started earlier in the week. She had just an hour before she was due to baby-sit for Mike Callow, and she really ought to finish her letter and get it into the post. As a family, the Murphys weren't good letter writers, and Charlie knew she should have written long before this, but somehow the days passed and she kept putting it off. Still, she always justified herself, Mam was as bad, she hadn't written either! She re-read the letter as far as she'd got.

“Dear Mam,” she'd written

“I'm safely back here and settling in to the house. It really is called the Madhouse, tell Declan, there's even a sign on the door!

It's in a lovely little cul-de-sac with a central garden, off the main road. The house is quite nice and I like the guys I'm sharing with, though they're majorly untidy and the kitchen is a tip! Still, we have organised a rota now for the clearing up, so it may get a bit better, but I'm not putting my loan on it! My room's OK though, so when I can't stand it I go up there. We had a great party here the first weekend we got back, no not in the house, though I think Mad is planning one for her birthday in December, but in the gardens of the Circle, as this street is known. It was some old lady's ninetieth birthday, think she lives at number 1, and all the people who live in Dartmouth Circle had a BBQ to celebrate… a real street party! We were all invited too, and it was a good chance to meet our neighbours. The ones next door are pretty dire, at least one side they are, but the other side don't seem bad and there are some quite nice families too. Have been able to pick up some baby-sitting too which is great, as always could do with the cash!!”

Charlie paused here, thinking about the babysitting she'd done for Mike Callow, well not babysitting exactly, but he'd asked her several times to come over and give a hand when he had his children visiting. Though the boys didn't need her much, they always seemed pleased to see her, and she had become quite fond of Debbie. On two occasions, Mike had asked her to go with them to the swimming pool.”