Then You Were Gone (26 page)

There was a moment’s silence, then Mack said, ‘I’ll ring you later. Or maybe come round, or…’

‘OK,’ Simone said hurriedly, already turning and moving towards the door. She was acutely conscious of Jazzy watching her and Mack intently, but neither he nor Ayanna made any indication of following Simone’s lead and going home, not that she wanted them with her right now. Ayanna was still unashamedly agog and Simone knew how nosy Jazzy could be; she surmised that curiosity had got the better of the pair of them and they were planning on staying until they had extracted every last juicy detail. Simone could wait to hear it from them though; she was too tired to hear any more today.

Maria followed her to the door. As Simone stepped out onto the front path she said, ‘Thank you again. And sorry again for turning up like this. God knows, it sounds as though you’ve been through enough.’

Maria gave a tight smile. ‘Seriously, don’t worry about it.’ And then, as Simone was turning to leave, she felt Maria’s hand on her shoulder.

‘Listen, I think we need to talk, don’t you?’

Did they?
Simone wondered. She was not sure she had the energy for any more talking.

‘There’s a pub on the main road,’ Maria indicated the direction in which Simone had been planning on heading towards the bus stop, ‘The King William? I’ll meet you in there in about ten minutes, OK? I just need to make my excuses to this lot.’

The King William was a Wetherspoons amongst a row of chemists, newsagents and grocers’ shops. Its dimly-lit interior was peppered with a few solitary daytime drinkers and the migraine-inducing flash of gambling machines. Simone ordered a pint of cider and sat in a booth opposite the bar so that she would be able to see Maria when she arrived. Simone wondered what excuse the other woman could possibly be making for dashing out of her own house when she had only been reunited with her daughter a matter of minutes ago. Had she left Mack, Jess, Jazzy and Ayanna alone together in the house? Simone suppressed a smile at the thought of what the hell kind of conversation that particular foursome might be having at that exact moment.

After about a quarter of an hour Maria came in wearing a black leather trench coat, her hair tied up in a scruffy top-knot. She clocked Simone, then indicated that she was going to the bar first. When she sat down she brought a cup of coffee with her and Simone felt a moment’s shame at the pint of mid-afternoon cider in front of her. Maria flashed her a warm smile. ‘I don’t blame you for that,’ she said, indicating the pint. ‘Really I could do with one myself but I’m so tired I think one sip would send me into a coma.’

Simone smiled and took a sip, but she could think of nothing to say.
What do you want?
sounded too rude, but anything else was utterly disingenuous. Because after all, why on earth should she sit here making small talk with this strange woman, as interesting and personable as she did seem?

‘Look,’ Maria said with a tone of determination. ‘I had to bring you here, I had to get you on your own. I could see Joe’s face, I could see what he’s thinking. He thinks he’s home now, it’s all over now and he can just go back to his nice, simple life that he was living before.’

Simone nodded. That was exactly what she had seen in Mack’s face too, it was exactly that which had propelled her out of Maria’s house so quickly earlier on. Mack had had the look of someone who was beginning to hope that he had got away with something – something pretty major. The fear that she might never find out what it was fought within Simone with the fear that she was about to find out now, when she was so emotionally ill-equipped to deal with it. ‘I know what you mean,’ she said.

‘And you seem so nice. And you obviously care about him so, so much – and don’t get me wrong, he definitely feels the same about you.’

Simone raised an eyebrow, wondering what Mack could even have told Maria about her.

‘When I got in touch with him, when he came to get Jessica, I asked him if he was married and he said “not exactly”…’

Simone nearly choked on her pint. ‘We don’t even live together,’ she said flatly.

‘I know, that’s what he said,’ Maria continued. ‘But I know Joe, and I knew straight away that he’d found the right woman for him. And I asked him, was it going to be a problem him taking Jessica because it would mean him being away from you for – well, for as long as it took. It could have been months. I mean, maybe we were being hysterical and over-reacting, but we thought it could have been years. Even if she decided not to testify, Liam Marston isn’t a bloke who gives up easily. He wouldn’t have stopped trying to find her. And I could see it was a struggle for Joe, I could see it was going to be agony for him, choosing to be away from you. It nearly killed him.’

‘But he did it anyway,’ Simone said quietly, trying to keep the accusation out of her tone. ‘He went with Jessica anyway.’
He chose the daughter of someone he has hardly seen for the last fifteen years over me, despite me supposedly being the love of his life
, was what she wanted to say.

Maria nodded slowly and took a sip of her coffee. ‘He had to though, you see.’

Simone shook her head. She did not see.

Maria took a deep breath. ‘Look, Simone, please stop me if you’ve already worked this out, but in my experience it never hurts to spell things out so there’s no room for doubt.’

The woman was procrastinating, Simone realised, putting off the evil moment when she had to blow Simone’s world apart. ‘I haven’t already worked it out,’ Simone said truthfully.

‘Joe – Mack – he’s Jessica’s father.’

Simone absorbed the words as she might absorb a blow to the head. She was unsure at first whether she was physically rocking back and forth in her seat, or if she simply felt as though she was. Her mouth was full of cider and it was several moments before she was able to swallow it. For a brief, mad second she thought she was going to have to spit it out onto the table. Many fears, many possibilities had swung through her head since Maria had grabbed her on the doorstep and arranged this assignation. Was Mack really the father of Jessica’s baby after all? Was he somehow indebted to Maria, either financially or morally (had she perhaps once helped him pass an exam at school or something?). This – the truth – was better than the first option, although only marginally, and was far, far worse than the second option. How pathetic she was, Simone chided herself, how small-town and naïve to think that cheating an exam could be the worst thing you had done in your life, could be the thing that you needed to hide so badly it could lead you to this.

‘But,’ Simone stuttered once the cider was out of her mouth and she had regained sufficient breath to speak. ‘But he’s too…’

‘Too young?’ Maria interrupted with a wry smile. ‘I know. Tell me about it. I’m too fucking young too. Too young to be a mother to a teenager, certainly too bloody young to be a bloody grandma. I said to Jess when she told me she was pregnant, I said, “You do know I’m the same age as BRITNEY SPEARS? I can’t be a granny!” But,’ she took a sip of her coffee, ‘looks like I’m going to be.’

‘So… when did…’ Simone could find no words other than the merest basics, but Maria seemed to get the gist.

‘We were fifteen,’ she said, putting a hand on Simone’s arm. ‘Look, I’m going to tell you my side of it because that’s all I’ve got. Joe’ll have plenty of chance to give you his side of things, but I’m going to get in there first. He owes me that much.’ She gave a humourless laugh.

So Maria gave her side of the story, and to her credit she did try to give as unbiased an account of how Jessica came to be as possible, but even so Mack was not cast in a good light.

‘We were just kids,’ was how Maria began the story, and that was impossible to argue with. Mack and Maria had got together over the summer holidays between Year 10 and Year 11, and anyone who deals in academic years and summer holidays is still a kid. But, Maria said, they did not feel like kids. Nobody who is fifteen really feels like a kid; they feel like an adult trapped in someone else’s world, a world of petty rules and uniforms and curfews, a world where they are without money, freedom or status. Simone nodded her understanding, remembering the thrill of sitting in the front seat of Jed’s car, smoking a Marlboro Red he had given her, feeling like she’d finally escaped the narrow confines of her parents’ world.

‘We didn’t have a clue,’ Maria said, ‘and we weren’t the first. But it was that bloody Catholic school. They gave us so much half-information and non-advice that we sort of knew that having sex was wrong but somehow in our minds using contraception was even worse.’ Maria laughed drily. ‘Looking back on it now the only thing that should have surprised us was that it took three months for me to get pregnant. Well, that and how shocked we both were when we found out. For Christ’s sake, what had we bloody expected?’

Simone did not know what to say so she took another gulp of cider. Her glass was now nearly empty.

‘Joe cried when I told him,’ Maria went on. ‘I mean, I was crying too of course, cried my bloody eyes out, but it was when he started crying too that I thought,
Oh God, what have I done? This guy can’t look after me
.’

Simone swallowed. ‘And did he?’ she asked, although she knew the answer.

Maria sighed. ‘Look, I don’t want this to sound like I’m just trying to smear Joe and make him look like the bad guy. He was so young and so scared. We both were. And his mum did try. I mean, I presume you’ve met Sheila?’

Simone nodded.

‘Well, she’s a tough old bird, but she did try and get Joe to do the right thing. Said he had to leave school after his exams and get a job, try to support me. I think my mum and dad wanted us to get married – they’re Polish and pretty old-school – but I knew that was never going to happen. Me and Joe had already got sick of each other even before I found out I was pregnant. We were too similar, we’d have ended up killing each other, and I think Sheila could see that, but she still tried to get Joe to see that he had to take responsibility for us.’

‘So, how come…?’ Simone thought about Mack’s mum and wondered how much guts it must have taken to get on her wrong side.

Maria rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t know if Joe’s ever mentioned a bloke called Keith?’

Simone went cold. ‘Yeah, I know who you mean.’ She did not feel up to going into the details of how intertwined Keith still was in Mack’s life.

Maria shuddered. ‘Horrible, creepy old guy. Well, this is not my secret to tell, and I don’t know if even Joe knows, but Sheila came to see me once, just after Jess was born, and she told me that Keith is Mack’s dad. She and him had one drunken night together that she’s regretted ever since, apart from the fact that it resulted in Mack. But apparently Keith never got over it. Sheila told him nothing was ever going to happen between her and him, but that she’d let him be involved in their lives providing he never let on to Mack that he was actually his dad.’ Simone felt sick. Vile, creepy Keith with his gold fillings and leather slippers. He must be twenty years older than Sheila. The eyes, she realised with a jolt. That was where Mack’s cold, blue eyes came from, explained the difference between his eyes and Sheila’s greenish, murky pools.

‘Anyhow,’ Maria went on, and Simone remembered with a pang of nausea that Keith’s sex life was the least of the horrible things she was having to learn about today. ‘I rang Joe’s house one day not long after we first told our parents and his mum said, sorry he’s gone. And when I asked what the hell she was talking about, she told me that Keith had said he would pay the fees for Joe to go to this posh boarding school out in Essex and do his A-levels there.’

Simone remembered the mysterious exam certificates, the school with its own climbing wall where you could bring your own horse. ‘Keith sent him there? Rather than let him stay in London and look after you and Jessica?’

Maria nodded. ‘Yeah. See, I’ve had seventeen years to dwell on this and my theory is that it all comes down to Keith hating women. Which he definitely does.’

It was not a question, but Simone nodded her agreement nevertheless.

‘Joe was a real bright spark, loads of potential. He was the cleverest boy in our year, and the best-looking, and the most popular. He could have done anything he wanted, and Keith and everyone else knew that. In Keith’s world view I’d trapped him on purpose because I wanted to, I don’t know, have some clever, successful man to look after me or something. Keith was always banging on about Joe being this golden boy and how he was going to be a CEO of some big company or a city stockbroker or something. He wasn’t going to have a little Polish slag like me stop him.’

Simone was shocked at the venom in Maria’s tone, but not at the thought that Keith might have done something like this. ‘So that was it?’

‘Yeah. The next time I saw him – the first time he met his daughter – was a few weeks ago when he came to take her away in the middle of the night because I was scared someone was going to murder her.’

‘Shit.’ Simone felt sick. Her glass was empty now and she desperately wanted another drink. ‘He really did abandon you? Just like that?’

Maria shrugged. ‘I’m being a bit harsh I suppose.’

‘You’re not,’ Simone muttered and Maria smiled.

‘What I mean is, Joe was under a lot of pressure from Keith – whether or not he knows Keith’s actually his dad, he’s certainly the closest thing Joe’s got. He was torn between pleasing him and pleasing me. And by that stage I don’t think he even really liked me. We all make mistakes when we’re young. It’s just that some of us are forced into circumstances where the mistakes are worse than others.’

Simone, thinking again of Jed, nodded.

‘I’m actually being unfair on Keith too, really. I still can’t stand the man, but every month since Jessica was born he’s sent me a cheque for a few hundred quid, plus something extra on her birthday. He knows it’s his fault that Joe left us and, Keith being Keith he’s tried to buy his conscience’s silence. That’s how I got in touch with Joe when I needed him to help Jess. I wrote to Keith and asked him to pass a message on. He took his time but he came through for us in the end.’