‘That’s his problem.’
‘I have to live there.’
‘Not for long.’
‘I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I just can’t.’
He throws the last of the glass into the bin and returns to her. Facing her, he begins to push her on the swing. There is a wobble in his voice when he asks her, ‘What do you mean when you say you can’t do it?’
She turns to face him: her eyes clear, tearless, determined now. ‘I mean that I don’t want to be here any more. And I don’t even want to talk about it with you because I don’t want you to end up feeling bad, like you should have done something to change it, or like you can do something to change it. You can’t. Nobody can.’
‘You’re talking like you’re going somewhere …’
‘It’s my fault. I took drugs with him. I should have known.’
‘Becky, look at me.’
‘I don’t want to.’ She pushes her feet off the asphalt and swings, her eyes closed now.
‘Please hang on a bit longer. Just while we work it out.’
‘It’s OK.’ She cuts him off. ‘I will.’ But in her flat and firm words, delivered to silence him, he understands that calculation replaces honesty. She has put him on the other side of an invisible wall. Her decisions are being made behind closed eyes.
He is afraid of her unhappiness now, at how deep and impregnable it is. He can’t shift it.
‘Let me take you home,’ he says finally.
‘OK,’ says Becky. Going through the motions now. She is, he knows in his gut, waiting to be alone again so that she can do what she needs to do to remove herself. He wants to make her promise not to kill herself, but that moment has gone.
Janette opens the front door and lets Adam and Becky in. She didn’t go back to bed after Adam called her. She knew she wouldn’t sleep a wink.
‘Have you been drinking?’ she asks. She can smell the vodka.
‘No,’ says Becky. There is no life in her voice. ‘I’m going to go to bed.’
‘Let’s have a cup of tea first,’ says Adam. ‘I’m quite cold.’ Becky moves seamlessly towards the kitchen and the kettle. Janette looks at Adam: he sees how frightened she is, and she sees that same set of fears in him. They follow her.
Bill lumbers down the stairs in his dressing gown.
‘Bit early, isn’t it?’ he says to Adam. Adam shrugs.
‘Do you want tea?’ Janette asks him. ‘Becky’s making.’
‘No.’
‘Can I help?’ Adam asks Becky. She shakes her head. He sits down.
The kettle boils with a click.
‘It’s my baby,’ says Adam. ‘I’m the father. She’s been protecting me because she didn’t want me to feel like it was up to me to have to sort things out. We made a mistake. And I have to take responsibility for that.’
Becky turns. In her expression, her mother reads the final revealing of a secret.
‘You stupid fucking prick!’ shouts her father, at Adam. ‘You’ve ruined her life!’
‘No, I haven’t,’ says Adam, firmly. This skinny guy, talking like he’s made of iron: how can he be a teenager? ‘Becky’s going to have a great life. Becky’s brilliant. This is just something we’ve got to get through first.’
Bill takes two steps and punches Adam in the face, knocking him to his knees. Becky cries out and runs to intervene, Janette flies in, and for a moment the four of them are locked in a surreal, wild struggle, blood flowing from Adam’s nose and Janette wailing and Becky putting herself between her father and Adam, her father vibrating with rage.
‘Coward!’ shouts Bill. ‘You stitched her up and you let her hang!’
‘I know,’ says Adam, bleeding down his T-shirt. ‘I’ll try to be better.’
Afterwards they sit in her bedroom, the two of them, two plugs of toilet paper up his nostrils to stem the bleeding.
‘This way you can’t kill yourself,’ he tells her. ‘I know you’re my friend and you care about me, at least on some level. And if you kill yourself then I’ll always be the cause of it. For your family and my family and everyone we know. So you won’t do it.’
‘But you’ll be the person who got me pregnant. And gave away their child.’
‘I can live with that. I can’t live with losing you.’
‘I don’t want you to be making that choice.’
‘Tough. I made it. Even if you try and say you don’t know who the father is, now they’ll think you’re lying. To protect me.’
‘I can come clean. Tell them what happened to me …’
‘I don’t want you to have to do that. And you don’t want to do that. This way’s better. Let them blame me. Your dad can hate me. I mean, I don’t give a fuck if he does. I can take it.’
‘Is your nose broken?’
‘I don’t think so.’ He smiles at her. ‘No bad thing if it is. I’ll look like a tough guy. The kind who strangles thugs with his cardigan if they make trouble.’
‘This thing you’re saying, it … it isn’t something we can take back.’
‘I know that.’
‘Adam, your mum …’
‘My mum will be nice about it.’
‘It’s not just me people will look at differently.’
‘I know. Becky, I’ve thought all that through. It’s so much less shit for men. So this is something I can do. Let me do it.’
‘My dad will be on at you about everything.’
‘Do they know you’re going to put the baby up for adoption?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, so this is only for a little bit. Just let me be the one whose fault it is. If that’s what your dad needs, to stop blaming you. It’s easy.’
How is any of this easy? Still, she feels something lift, fractionally. She tests the idea of killing herself: the idea she has run toward and then pushed away for weeks now. And she sees that he is right: she finds that she cannot bear the unfairness of it, as she pictures Adam castigated, blamed, and screamed at for destroying her.
He has trapped her into staying alive. And she hopes against hope now, that maybe he is right about the consequences of that: that someday she will find all this behind her and be glad of her existence again.
She feels the kick against the side of its soft balloon home and she finds herself wondering: does it know her heart?
It’s not like it’s uncomplicated.
When Adam’s parents come round with Adam, and they sit, the six of them, Becky comes close to breaking.
They are so kind. They offer to help out with expenses, like post-natal care. They offer to contribute to Becky getting some help with therapy, if she wants it.
Adam’s mum suggests, tearfully, that maybe if Becky changes her mind and decides to keep it then they will help, they’d love it, really they would …
‘Mum,’ says Adam sharply.
‘I’m just saying that it would always be loved. I’m sorry, but I have to say that. But I won’t say it again. I’m sorry.’
‘Becky’s going to university,’ says Bill. Becky tries to picture herself in Freshers’ Week, running riot with her new friends in student halls. But she can’t see it. There is no future where she is so light, and free, and rootless.
All she sees is Scott’s expression as she steps back from him and he lets go of her wrist. As she readjusts her jeans. Pure disappointment. Had he planned everything from that moment onwards? Was it always going to be her? Would the same have happened with another girl in that room or was it something about her?
‘What are the arrangements for the birth?’ asks Adam’s father. He has brought a notebook with him so that he can capture any to-do items that he agrees to take on. He volunteers to drive Becky and Adam in, when it’s time.
‘You don’t have to be there,’ says Becky to Adam, and she means it. In fact, she wants him not to be there. She wants nobody there.
‘I’ll be there,’ says Adam.
‘Fucking right you will,’ says Bill.
&nb
sp; ‘I’ll give you all my mobile number then,’ says Adam’s dad. ‘I read that women often go into labour at night, so … I’ll bear that in mind.’
‘We’ve cleared the diary,’ says Adam’s mum, blinking back tears. She wants to ask: Can I see the baby? Can I hold it? Can I take it home? When it looks like my son, can I refuse to let anyone take it away from us? And instead, she looks down at her lap.
Two weeks before the baby is due, Bill leaves his family.
One morning, the three of them are sitting round the kitchen table, plates of burnt toast and cups of cold tea in front of them.
Janette leaves the room and comes back in brandishing a thin cardboard box. Janette has spent money on an expensive cream for stretch marks. She thinks it will gee everyone up.
‘It’ll help her get back to normal,’ she says.
Bill stares at the receipt. ‘Forty quid? For that?’
‘It’s a good one. We want her to have a good one, don’t we?’
He goes upstairs and Janette calls after him, ‘I’m not taking it back. And anyway, you’ve already taken the top off, so I bloody can’t.’
Becky wishes the ground would swallow her up. She wonders if she could move into Adam’s parents’ house, at least just until this is all over with. And then she remembers the look on his mum’s face and that love will ruin everything. Love will persuade and cajole her to keep the criminal’s baby and turn one blacked-out moment into the rest of her life.
What if the baby looks like Scott? The thought of it makes her sick.
Bill returns thirty minutes later, carrying a suitcase. He doesn’t announce his departure. He just goes.
‘Is he going?’ Janette asks Becky. ‘Is he actually going?’
Janette chases after him, calling him a selfish prick all the way down the street.
When her mother returns to the kitchen, Becky is bent over and throwing up all over the kitchen floor. Janette goes to her quickly and scoops handfuls of her daughter’s hair back up and around her neck. ‘There, there,’ she says. ‘There, there.’
Adam comes round and they sit on her bed watching eighties comedy movies, eating popcorn. They don’t talk much. What is there to say now? They are waiting out their lie together.
Word has got out at school. Mary gets in touch to say: Adam??!
Becky doesn’t reply.
‘Have you seen Scott?’ she asks Adam.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m not even sure he knows.’
Here comes life. This screaming, wriggling, red-faced hungry thing. Becky feeds her, only because it seems cruel not to. The milk is there. Her breasts hurt. The baby latches on. The tightness of the connection surprises her. The baby’s other hand rests on her breast.
She looks nothing like Scott.
None of them are meant to come, not Janette or Adam’s parents, but they come anyway. And what can she do? Turn them away?
On the face of it, Adam looks like a little boy himself. All that steel going. He wants to protect her and he doesn’t know how.
Janette holds the child and its tiny red fingers clamp round her little finger. ‘I can’t believe your dad’s missing this,’ she says, blunt to anything but the truth of what she feels.
Adam’s mother changes the baby’s nappy, with quick expert movements.
‘You haven’t forgotten anything, have you?’ says Adam’s dad.
‘You don’t,’ she replies, stooping to kiss the baby’s belly. ‘Are you going to hold her?’ she asks Adam.
And the moment Becky sees Adam kissing the child’s head, holding her in his arms, she knows without doubt that something catastrophic has happened.
They have all fallen in love, and so fast.
It will fall to her to cut these ties. To break one, two, three, four hearts, not including her own. To hand this baby over to someone else, someone who will smell unfamiliar. Who can offer her a bottle where she had a breast. Will the child remember?
‘Do you give her a name or do the other people do it?’ Adam’s mother is doing her best not to cry as she asks it.
‘Maisie,’ says Becky. The name comes unbidden. From out of nowhere, like the child herself.
‘It means pearl,’ says Adam. ‘From the Greek.’
‘Margarites,’ says Adam’s dad, himself born half-Greek on his mother’s side. And bearing a name now, the baby adds another stitch. It is one thing to give away an unwanted child; it is another to give away Maisie.
Becky looks to Adam, willing him to be resolute where she fears she won’t be. Tell them all it’s time to go. Begin the arrangements. Strip away her name, gifted in a moment of weakness, of instinct. Take it back; it’s not hers. The child, the name, none belong to her. Take them away now.
Maisie opens her eyes and blinks. Her lips move. The beginnings of a cry. The baby is handed back to Becky and Becky looks at him, silently pleading: doesn’t he know what to do any more? He has been so certain.
Maisie latches onto Becky’s other breast and begins to feed again.
‘She’s going to be tall like you,’ says Adam.
Becky’s bones ache with exhaustion. She reaches for the last thing she can find.
‘Adam,’ she says. ‘Don’t you realize? If I keep her, you’ve got a daughter for the rest of your life.’
Let him decide.
If he can carry that weight, she’ll carry hers.
‘OK,’ says Adam.
‘No,’ says Becky. ‘Listen to what I’m saying.’
‘I know what you’re saying,’ he says. ‘If you want to keep her, I’ll try my best to be a good dad.’
It is incomprehensible, this offer. This stupid, kind, too-generous teenage boy. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s making her decide.
‘Keep her.’ It spills out of Janette, who has lost a husband but gained a granddaughter, and who finds that she cannot now lose her too.
‘We’ll help,’ says Adam’s father to Adam.
‘You don’t have to decide now,’ says Adam to Becky. ‘You can change your mind any time, if you think about it.’
The people from the agency tell Adam much the same. People change their minds all the time, he reports back. Sometimes forever, sometimes only for a few months.
‘She needs to smell your skin as well, son,’ says Adam’s dad, who has done all the reading, despite the situation. ‘That’s how she recognizes you to begin with.’ So Adam peels off his T-shirt and holds Maisie against his skinny chest. He rocks her gently, cradling her head and neck, kissing her cheek. It comes easily to him. Of course it does, thinks Becky. He’s generous with this as with everything else.
For a moment she thinks: look at everything that Scott is missing here. Maisie is hers alone. Scott doesn’t exist in the baby’s universe, and never will. Becky feels knowledge harden into the kind of secrets that are kept forever. She’ll never tell. And so Scott will never face justice. She cannot have one and keep the other.
Maisie falls asleep in Adam’s arms as he sings a low, private song to her.
Later, Janette does what she can with the night feeds and nappies between the extra shift work she has to do, covering the mortgage on her own now that Bill isn’t coming back.
On a good week for Becky, Adam visits often, bringing cakes and pies and lasagnas from his mother, changing nappies, rocking the baby, walking and playing with the baby while Becky sleeps off the long nights of feeding. He falls asleep with Maisie on his chest before returning home. But there are days at a time when he doesn’t come, and it’s those days Becky finds the hardest and loneliest – missing him bitterly on those occasions for the lightness and warmth he brings, for the break in tedium. But she doesn’t complain, it would be so ungrateful to make a fuss when he has his own future to build, what with exams and coursework and an on-off girlfriend called Charlie with pneumatic tits and good Nike Air Max.
He’s been so generous already with his time and his friendship. She can’t complain. Her loneliness isn’t his fault. It’s hers.<
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They throw a party at Adam’s parents’ house on Christmas Day, and his dad roasts a turkey with all the trimmings. With his mum and dad and Becky’s mum and the baby, they are six.
Adam takes his A-levels and declines to go to university. Becky suspects that he is concerned with leaving them, though he denies it.
He leaves college with his accountancy qualifications and a good group of friends who like music festivals and pub lunches and getting high, sometimes. Later he starts a business of his own, and still he comes to the house, plays with the toddler, their little girl, bringing lunch and dinner, paying bills, bringing a steady stream of nappies, and later new clothes, so that Becky almost never has to buy anything like that. And the days he doesn’t come? Glastonbury, and most other summer weekends when there are barbecues or park gatherings. On weekday pub nights and long periods of study. She gets it: she and Maisie are just happy to see him whenever he gets a moment.
She continues to battle loneliness: no one her age is in a similar situation and all the women who are have careers and husbands and mortgages. She’s stuck in a no man’s land, but Adam doesn’t need to be brought down with talk of that.
Becky wonders when he will turn around and say, Right, it’s time now, we should tell people the truth. But Adam’s parents love their granddaughter too and all of them are banking memories of Maisie’s first words and steps, like they are precious treasure.
‘No rush. Perhaps let’s not,’ says Adam, when she asks him about it. ‘She’s my Maisie now. That’ll never change now.’
Maisie is at school the day Grandma Janette dies.
Becky finds her, lying on the carpet of the living room.
Everyone grieves, a layer of their Russian doll family removed.
Bill does not come to the funeral.
Adam’s parents do, of course. They organize most of it.
Becky thinks she is to blame for breaking up her parents’ marriage, for her mother having to take on double shifts to pay the mortgage, for keeping her up through long nights of baby-screaming and later bed-wetting. For everything that caused her heart to give out.
Becky cries and cries and hugs Maisie tighter, with all her love: this precious child who has come into their lives at such a cost.
Blurred Lines: The most timely and gripping psychological thriller of 2020 Page 12