by Dani Atkins
*
We said nothing as we stood in the hallway and waited for the lift to arrive. I pressed the button for what had to be the third time, but all I could hear was an alarming clanking of metal parts coming from the shaft.
‘Just to clarify,’ began Pete, breaking the silence of the hallway. ‘She said she was scrappy, not crappy, didn’t she?’
How did he always manage to find a way to do that? To make me laugh when I felt more like howling? The smile was still lingering on my face when the lift finally arrived. Its doors swept open and the most appalling smell billowed out from the carriage.
‘Stairs?’ questioned Pete.
‘Stairs,’ I confirmed.
*
‘About what you said in there.’
I’d waited until we were back in the car and heading away from the lawyer’s office before the question burning through me like a forest fire could finally be asked.
‘I said a lot of things in there. Which one are you talking about?’ Pete asked, but I wasn’t fooled by his feigned nonchalance. I’d seen the way his fingers had tightened on the steering wheel and the small revealing twitch of a muscle beside his mouth.
‘About moving back into the house.’
His sigh was long and measured. ‘You think it’s a bad idea?’
I was rattled to have the question batted so swiftly back to me. ‘I didn’t say that. I just think it’s a pretty important decision that we need to discuss properly.’ Perhaps I’d picked the wrong moment to bring it up. The traffic was heavy and I knew Pete had only been able to get a couple of hours off work to attend our meeting that morning. The car swerved sharply to the left, but it was a deliberate manoeuvre as Pete changed lanes and then pulled over to the side of the road. He unfastened his seat belt and turned to face me.
‘So let’s discuss it.’
‘What, now?’
‘Why not now?’
I looked out through the windscreen, suddenly unable to meet the scrutiny in his eyes. ‘This wasn’t how I thought it would be.’ My voice was a whisper, confessing to something I don’t think he even knew I’d been feeling. ‘If I thought about you coming back – when I thought about it, it would be because we both wanted to give things another try. Because we both realised we’d made a mistake.’
‘I always thought we had.’ His words snapped my gaze back towards him. ‘Although I know you didn’t,’ he added sadly.
It was a mistake – one I wanted to take back almost as soon as I’d said it. But you agreed to it; you agreed with me. Why couldn’t I say those words to him now? Even more crucially, why hadn’t I said them nine months ago?
‘All I know is that things are different right now,’ Pete continued, unaware of my inner turmoil. ‘If being a united family is what the courts need to see, then I have to come back. For Noah, and also for us. You do see that, don’t you?’
I nodded dumbly, trying my best to hide the pain of hearing him saying all the right things for all the wrong reasons.
‘So, this is just temporary. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I don’t have an end date, Izzy. I just know that we have the toughest challenge of our life ahead of us, and I think we need to face it side by side, not living on opposite sides of town. Besides, the money I’ll save on rent will at least go some way towards paying Frankie’s bill. If she’s the one we decide we want to go with.’
He was changing the subject, and for once I was happy to let him do so. Our living arrangements were an insignificant drop in an ocean that was far too stormy to navigate alone. Pete needed to come back home right now, and I needed him for a thousand different reasons, most of which I would probably never reveal.
‘Okay,’ I said, turning my head and looking out the side window, so he couldn’t see the tears suddenly filling my eyes. ‘Come home then.’
14
Beth
The red light on my answering machine was blinking like a one-eyed dragon in the darkness of my lounge. There was only one person who still left messages on that machine rather than using voicemail. After six weeks of almost daily phone calls, I was no longer surprised to hear my father’s voice when I pressed the play button, although initially it had felt distinctly odd. He’d always been more of a ‘hang on, I’ll just get your mother’ kind of phone conversationalist.
I kicked off my shoes and curled up in the armchair as I reached for the phone. ‘Hi, Dad. Sorry it’s so late, I was catching up on some paperwork at the shop and lost track of time.’
‘That’s okay, sweetheart. I just thought I’d give you a quick call.’ He coughed then, giving us both a moment to acknowledge that he was nowhere near as good at acting as my mother was. He feigned a casual nonchalance on every single call, which frankly had about as much chance of flying as a dodo bird. ‘Just thought I’d call to ask how things are jogging along.’ That was father-speak for: How is it going with the lawyers? What are the latest developments?
I smiled in the darkness. My dad was trying so hard to give me the space I’d asked for to handle this alone, and yet the need to be involved in the legal proceedings was clearly an itch he was finding it almost impossible not to scratch. Once a lawyer, always a lawyer, I guessed.
‘Can’t you just let him help you?’ Karen had asked when we’d spoken about it a few days earlier.
‘No, for all kinds of reasons,’ I’d replied. There was no mistaking Karen’s sigh of frustration, which travelled with perfect clarity all the way from Sydney.
‘He is footing the bill for your legal team,’ she pointed out unnecessarily, a sister’s censure in her tone. Was that the real issue here, I wondered? Did Karen begrudge the amount of financial help our parents were giving me?
‘I know that. And I’m going to pay them back every last penny, if that’s what you’re worrying about.’
‘Of course it isn’t. I just think he’s feeling a bit left out of things. He still thinks like a lawyer.’
I sighed, acknowledging she’d hit the nail squarely on the head. ‘I know he does, and that’s half the problem. If I open that door even a crack, he’ll be in there one hundred percent. And I don’t think he should be getting stressed, not at his age. I might not be able to stop him worrying about me, but I’d rather he did it with his dad hat on, not his lawyer one.’
*
‘When is it you’re meeting with Patterson – that is the family law expert you’re seeing, isn’t it, Bethie?’
My lips twisted into a wry smile, which I tried to keep out of my voice. My father knew perfectly well which lawyer William Sylvester was bringing in to assist with my application for contact with my child.
‘Next week, Dad. But I’ll be speaking to you before then, I imagine.’
My dad coughed again, knowing he’d been rumbled. ‘Yes, love, you probably will.’
*
By my fourth appointment with William Sylvester I stopped dressing as though I was going for a job interview. By then I’d realised I was never going to feel completely relaxed in that unfamiliar environment, so I might as well be comfortably dressed. Today I was wearing dark skinny jeans and a fitted white shirt. Externally, I think I pulled off ‘smart casual’ pretty well, but inside was a different story altogether. My heart always raced as I waited in the reception area for William’s PA to escort me to his office. Just being in the building sent my system into a mini meltdown, with trembling legs and palms so sweaty that shaking hands was downright embarrassing.
Surprisingly, after that first encounter I’d never bumped into Liam Thomas again. I’d heard his voice once, talking in the distance to a colleague, and I’d caught a fleeting glimpse of his back disappearing into his office, but that was as close as we’d come to crossing paths over the past six weeks. Perhaps he knew the dates and times when I was meeting with William Sylvester, and was deliberately avoiding me. It was fine if he was, I told myself as my foot drummed out a nervous tattoo against the leg of a coffee table. It was probably far less complica
ted if we kept our acquaintance under wraps.
As usual, the sheer number of people waiting for me in William’s office unnerved me. I had to keep reminding myself that these smartly dressed, sober-faced professionals were on my side. It was the other party who were supposed to feel nervous of them, not me. Family X, as my lawyers referred to them. Their identity was being scrupulously protected, William had told me, his expression sombre. I’d wanted to ask Who from? but I already knew the answer to that one. From me. In the eyes of Family X, I was the enemy.
With his customary good manners, William greeted me with a handshake and came around the desk to hold out an elegant upholstered chair for me. I settled into it and then greeted the other occupants of the room with a smile and a nod. In addition to the PA, who’d positioned herself in one corner of the room, laptop at the ready, there was a legal assistant who barely looked old enough to shave, who had a habit of blushing painfully whenever he spoke. Perhaps that’s why he seldom did.
Occupying the fifth chair in the room was a man who could easily get a job moonlighting as a department store Father Christmas if the family law business ever dried up. Edward Patterson got to his feet, a rotund Humpty Dumpty of a man in a Savile Row suit. His shock of white hair and matching candyfloss beard drew your first glance, and it was only on your second that you saw the tempered steel in his cerulean-blue eyes. I’m sure I wasn’t the first client to have seriously misjudged the sharp legal brain beneath the Santa Claus exterior.
‘Beth, how are you?’ Edward asked in a booming voice, sandwiching the hand I held out within his two beefy ones.
‘Very well, thank you,’ I answered, unable to keep a smile from my lips.
‘Splendid, splendid,’ he enthused, still holding my hand hostage. It continued to surprise me that every one of his comments wasn’t finished off with a resounding Ho-ho-ho.
‘Don’t be fooled,’ my father had warned me, when I’d given him my initial impression of the man who would be championing my application for contact with the courts. ‘He’s nothing short of a legend within the profession. If anyone can make this happen for you, it’s Edward Patterson.’
The ‘legend’ eventually released my hand and settled his considerable girth back on a chair identical to mine, which I seriously hoped was sturdier than it looked. The focus of my meetings with William Sylvester was primarily on the case for negligence he was compiling against the clinic. I nodded a lot during those consultations, which shouldn’t be confused with understanding what was going on, because most of the time I had no real idea what I was agreeing with. William was the kind of lawyer who should probably come with subtitles. He spoke fast, dropping in and out of legalese and Latin as though everyone was bilingual.
It was only on the sessions where Edward Patterson was in attendance that I truly felt engaged with everything that was being said. At our very first meeting, when I was still shell-shocked by what had happened, he’d cut straight through to the heart of the matter.
‘What is it that you hope we will achieve, Beth?’ he’d asked carefully, his features – which looked like they belonged on the front of a Christmas card – suddenly as unreadable as a professional poker player. They didn’t even flicker when I cleared my throat and said ‘Custody. I want to know how to get our child back.’
The other professionals in the room were nowhere near as adept at hiding their reactions. William had winced sharply, as if something very heavy had just been dropped on his toe, while the trainee’s eyes had widened so much he’d looked like a cartoon character. But perhaps the PA’s reaction had been the worst of all, because she’d just looked so incredibly sorry for me.
Edward Patterson’s fingers had steepled together, and he’d leant as close as his beach ball stomach would allow him to get across the desk towards me. ‘I’m going to be frank with you, Beth.’ Sentences that begin like that are never likely to end well, and this was no exception. ‘Custody of a child who has been born to another woman, and been raised exclusively by her for the last eight years, is highly unlikely.’
I’d looked at every face in the room in turn, as though seeking a different response, but they’d all worn carbon copy expressions of agreement.
‘But it wasn’t her embryo.’ Even I could hear the childish petulance in my voice, but the injustice of it felt suddenly overwhelming.
Edward’s eyes had softened then, and there was genuine sympathy in their brilliant blue depths. ‘I’m not suggesting we give up before we’ve even begun, but there are certain truths and legal aspects that we simply cannot ignore.’ I sat up straighter in my chair, my hands clasped so tightly that each finger had turned to the colour of bone. ‘In the eyes of the law, the woman who gives birth to a child is legally the mother, and her husband is legally the child’s father.’
‘Even though – biologically – they have no connection to that child?’ I argued, dismayed to hear thick threads of emotion in my voice.
‘Even then,’ he confirmed. He must have seen the desolation in my eyes, which was about to dissolve into tears, for he was quick to give me hope. ‘But your circumstances are completely unique and because of that I feel we are in a good position to apply for shared contact. That is the route I suggest we pursue.’
*
‘Unfortunately, Family X’s lawyer has once again rejected our request for a meeting,’ Edward advised, his head shaking regretfully, as though the offending lawyer was sadly now going to have to be put on the Naughty List.
My hands fisted with frustration. If these people weren’t even willing to meet with us across a table, how would we ever reach a point where they’d be prepared to allow me to become part of my child’s life? As ever, I winced inwardly at the sexless phrase. It seemed so wrong that I still had no idea if our embryo had grown into a girl or a boy. The thought was like a small electrical charge, galvanising me. I bent down and plucked my handbag from the floor. Edward Patterson was outlining his next proposed course of action, but for once I wasn’t listening as I rummaged among the detritus that lived in the bottom of my oversized tote for the small white envelope I’d brought with me. I’d discovered it the day before, waiting on the coconut doormat of Crazy Daisy when I’d opened up for business.
My searching fingers finally located the envelope and I held it up like a football referee sending someone off. It had the desired effect as everyone fell silent. ‘This was posted anonymously through my shop’s letterbox yesterday,’ I said, passing it to William.
‘What is it?’ he asked, his long elegant fingers already reaching below the flap to draw out the greeting card. There was confusion on his face as he looked down at the blue-coloured card in his hands. He studied the cartoon drawing of a stork with a newborn infant dangling from its beak as if it was a painting in a gallery that he couldn’t quite understand.
‘I don’t get it,’ said William, looking up from the card with a frown.
‘Open it,’ I instructed, my voice suddenly a little huskier.
‘Noah,’ he said, reading the name that was neatly printed below the cheesy verse inside the card. ‘Do you know anyone of that name?’ I shook my head.
William shrugged his shoulders expressively. ‘I don’t think this means anything. It could have simply been posted through the wrong letterbox. Perhaps it’s meant for one of the neighbouring shops.’
The disappointment felt like a crushing weight, as though a small elephant had suddenly sat down on my chest.
‘May I?’ asked a voice that for once was missing its usual jovial tone.
The card looked lost in Edward’s chunky fingers. He turned it over several times, as though looking for a hidden clue, and then spent a very long time staring at the handwritten name.
‘Why would someone called Noah put this card through my door?’ I asked, wondering if William had been right, and that it was all just a genuine mistake.
‘I don’t believe they did,’ said Edward Patterson, carefully laying the card down on the desk before him. I
could practically hear him saying: ‘With the court’s permission, allow me to present Exhibit A.’ I shook my head to dispel the idea, but there was something in his eyes… something that was starting to make my heart pound.
‘This card isn’t from someone called Noah, it’s about someone with that name.’
Edward’s hands gripped mine for the second time that day, but I scarcely noticed, because I was staring unblinkingly into his ruddy-cheeked face.
‘Noah is the name of your son,’ he said gently. And then, in a much cooler voice, he turned to William Sylvester. ‘And we, my friend, now have a very serious problem, because someone, somewhere, has leaked out highly confidential information.’
15
Beth
The meeting was cut short, and forty-five minutes earlier than expected I found myself back on the street, although I couldn’t quite remember how I got there. It was hardly surprising because I’d taken in very little after Edward Patterson’s shattering disclosure. A little boy. A son. Together, Tim and I had created a baby boy.
‘Noah.’ I said the name out loud for the very first time, and earned myself a startled glance from a passing postman. I smiled at him and shook my head, before saying the name again, no doubt upgrading my status from slightly odd to decidedly crazy. I didn’t care. ‘Noah. Noah. Noah.’
I started to walk, with no real idea where I was going. There was a thrum of excitement coursing through me that would have made standing still impossible. The name from the greeting card looped in my head, like a song on the radio that you can’t shake off. It was a silent mantra, a rhythm my feet marched to as they took me away from the main road and down narrow side streets. Noah, Noah Brandon. My footsteps faltered and brought me to a standstill on a deserted street corner. No, no, that wasn’t right; not Brandon. Our child obviously had a completely different surname, and if Edward Patterson knew it – which I suspected he did – he clearly had no intention of divulging it yet.