The Family Way

by Tony Parsons

  He snatched up the phone.

  ‘Megan? What? Okay. Okay. I’ll be there, okay? Soon as I can.’

  He slammed down the phone, tearing himself free from the girl kneeling before him. She was still staring up at him, but now there was cold fury in her narrowing eyes.

  ‘You’re making a date with some bitch when you’ve got your cock in my mouth?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go. It’s my daughter.’

  Megan answered the door in her dressing gown. She looked dead on her feet. From the flat’s only bedroom, Kirk could hear the sound of Poppy howling with rage.

  ‘I didn’t know who else to ask. I couldn’t ask my sisters. They do so much already. And it’s so late. What time is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  There was something about Poppy’s crying that chilled his bones. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘She doesn’t stop,’ Megan said. ‘She’s been fed, winded, changed, cuddled.’

  ‘Is she sick?’

  ‘No fever. No temperature. She’s strong as a baby bull.’ Megan wearily shook her head. ‘And she doesn’t stop crying. I’m a doctor, right? I should know why.’

  ‘Well, you’re a woman too. That’s what I always sort of liked about you.’

  Kirk went into the bedroom. It was impossible to believe that something as tiny as Poppy could make so much noise, or express that much anger. Her little face was screwed up with fury, almost purple with apoplexy, and sopping wet with tears. He picked her up and felt the warmth of her through the Grobag, smelled the mint-fresh newness of her skin.

  He laughed and his eyes filled with tears. He loved her so much. He had never known he was capable of such pure, unconditional love. His daughter. His baby daughter.

  She screamed in his ear.

  Megan was in the doorway. ‘Do you want a cup of tea or something?’

  ‘A cup of tea would be great. Do you know what I think is wrong?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think she’s a baby. That’s all. That’s the only problem.’ He patted Poppy’s back. Her scent was of milk and her bath time. ‘And I think you’re trying to do too much by yourself.’

  Megan pulled her dressing gown tighter. ‘I’ll get that tea.’

  Kirk held his baby daughter out in front of him, looking at her through a film of tears, a wide, grateful grin on his face. Poppy was becoming undeniably beautiful, losing that scrawny, foetus-faced look she had had at birth, and beginning to look more like a regular baby, all curves and circles and chubby flesh.

  But even when she wasn’t beautiful, he thought, she was still beautiful. He pulled her close. His beautiful baby girl.

  She was as warm as a hot-water bottle, as new as tomorrow. He had to be careful not to squeeze her too tight, she was still so very small. But it was difficult not to wrap his arms around her, and believe he would keep them there for ever, because she made him feel such a fierce, protective love.

  Perhaps he did hug her too hard. Because just as Megan came into the room with two cups of tea, Poppy farted like a flatulent navvy on Friday night – a great, big burst of wind that was muffled by her nappy. Then she immediately fell asleep.

  Kirk and Megan looked at each other and laughed. Then Megan put a finger to his lips.

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t wake her up!’

  Kirk gently kissed the baby on her cheek. How could anything be that new, that perfect? He placed her back in the centre of her cot.

  ‘Thanks,’ Megan whispered.

  ‘She’s getting bigger.’

  ‘I reckon another month and she will be out of these pre-term clothes. She can start wearing clothes for a newborn baby. All the stuff that Cat bought her.’

  ‘That will be great.’

  ‘It will be the best thing in the world.’

  They went into the kitchen and drank their tea, leaving the bedroom door slightly ajar. But the baby was sleeping soundly. Then the tea was gone, and they just sat there, listening to the night. But it was so late now that even the streets of Hackney were finally silent.

  ‘Well,’ Kirk said, getting up to go.

  Megan stood up with him, gathering her dressing gown around her neck. She placed her finger on his lips again.

  ‘She’s got your mouth.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. It’s really wide. That’s why she’s capable of making such a racket.’

  Kirk placed the tips of his fingers on Megan’s chin.

  ‘But she’s got your chin. That strong chin. And your eyes.’

  He touched her face by the side of her eyes, felt the hard curve of her cheekbone.

  ‘I’m a mess,’ Megan said.

  She pulled away from him. Not that. She didn’t want that from him. She wanted to show him that she appreciated him coming over in the middle of the night, and she wanted to show that there was a bond between them – that there would always be a bond between them. But not that. She didn’t want that.

  ‘You’re not a mess. You’re beautiful.’

  ‘Don’t say that. Please. Don’t say things that are not true.’

  She was self-conscious about her body. It was like being a teenager all over again. Except now, instead of braces on her teeth and a few spots, she had a scar that would never fade dividing her in half, and sore, useless nipples throbbing on painfully hard breasts, those breasts strange and unfamiliar and heavy, and a stomach that still bulged as if there was a baby in there.

  ‘You’re beautiful, Megan. You’ll always be beautiful to me.’

  ‘No, really. I’m a mess. Look.’

  She pulled open her dressing gown, eased her pyjama bottoms down a few inches and cautiously lifted her T-shirt. The scar from the birth was still livid. He took a step towards her and she watched him trace the wound with his finger, not quite touching her.

  ‘That’s where our daughter came from,’ he said. ‘It’s not ugly.’

  Megan hung her head. She wanted him to stay. But she didn’t want that from him.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ she said.

  ‘Then let’s sleep now.’ He carefully pulled down her T-shirt. ‘All three of us.’

  So she let her dressing gown slip to the floor, and he undressed in the darkness of the bedroom, listening to the steady breathing of their baby daughter. He climbed into the bed. She had her back turned to him but didn’t object when he snuggled against her, making spoons.

  ‘I’m so tired.’

  ‘Then sleep now.’

  ‘Maybe in the morning.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  He put his arms around her, and as they huddled together she felt the warmth of human contact and the glorious blanket of sleep finally closing over her tired bones, and Megan surrendered.

  Part three:

  the most natural thing in the world

  Nineteen

  When Cat was twelve, and Jessie was eight, and baby Megan was a big girl of four, it was decided that the girls would live with their mother.

  The decision was not taken by Olivia, or Jack, but by Cat herself, independently and without consultation.

  In the year since their mother had left, things had become bad at home. There seemed to be less money than there was before, because their father was away working all the time – although years later Cat saw how people sometimes hid from their home lives in their work lives, so perhaps the problem wasn’t money after all.

  The new au pair, a great blonde lump from Hamburg, couldn’t handle them, didn’t know where to start. And suddenly they needed a lot of handling.

  There was a fury inside Cat that she couldn’t explain, Megan had started wetting the bed again, and Jessie kept bursting into tears, wailing that she wanted things to be how they were before. So did Cat.

  Food from tins, that’s what Cat remembered about that time. Food from tins and the fury inside.

  In her twelve-year-old heart, Cat knew that things could never be the way they were before. Not
after the man in the taxi came for their mother. This was the best she could do.

  Take them to live with their mother.

  It was surprisingly easy. Cat had already mastered a good impersonation of the haughty indifference their mother had employed whenever speaking to the help, and she informed the dumbfounded au pair that it was all arranged, they were off to St John’s Wood for the foreseeable future.

  ‘Aber your farter, Cat-kin…’

  ‘My father is quite aware of our plans, I assure you.’

  The girls excitedly packed their bags while the big blonde lump tried, unsuccessfully, to reach Jack Jewell. They took only the essentials – pyjamas, toothbrush, a talking frog for Megan, a flock of Barbies and Kens for Jessie, and a Blondie picture disc for Cat. Then they walked to the tube station, holding hands, Cat and Jessie taking turns to carry Megan when she refused to walk any further.

  When they were on the tube, Jessica presented her big sister with her secret gift – a fistful of Monopoly money. Cat accepted it with thanks, and didn’t tell Jessie that she was a silly little kid. She was going to take good care of her sisters from now on.

  St John’s Wood was another world, completely unlike their leafy suburb. There were black people here, lots of them – it wasn’t until years later that Cat realised they must have been there for the cricket at Lord’s – and everyone seemed to be a millionaire. Megan stumbled over some litter on St John’s Wood High Street, and it turned out to be a half-smoked cigar, the size of a Wall’s sausage.

  A fabulously wealthy black neighbourhood. That’s what St John’s Wood looked like to Cat. She knew that they could be happy here.

  That illusion was shattered as soon as their mother opened her front door.

  ‘That’s not who I am,’ Olivia kept telling Cat – as if she hadn’t heard the first time – as she tried to reach her ex-husband on the phone, while Jessie and Megan bumped around the pristine apartment, getting in the way of the Filipina housekeeper – who smiled at them with some sympathy, it seemed to Cat – and touching all the things that were not meant to be touched by the sticky fingers of little girls – ‘Megan, not my photograph with Roger Moore’ – and Cat, increasingly desperate, tried to explain why it was a good idea if they came to live here, following her mother around the flat as Monopoly money fell from the pockets of her jeans.

  ‘But I thought you would be pleased to see us. I thought it would be nice if we were together again. I thought –’

  ‘You thought, you thought, you thought. You think too much, young lady.’

  ‘Don’t you want to live with your children? Most mothers –’

  But Olivia had turned her back on her eldest daughter. She had reached Jack, and now she spoke softly but angrily, urgently, as if convinced that he had planned this invasion just to wreak havoc in her love nest.

  When she hung up the phone, Olivia turned to face Cat, and the child looked at the woman and saw that there was no softness in her, no shame, no love.

  Years later, Cat had no trouble in turning back the clock to when she was that twelve-year-old girl standing in her mother’s rented apartment, her younger sisters now silent on the sofa, the photographs of their mother with various celebrities unmolested, the housekeeper’s vacuum cleaner buzzing distantly in some other room, and being told – as her mother furiously snatched up the Monopoly money from the carpet – that all her childish hopes were ridiculous.

  ‘Do you get it yet, Cat?’ her mother told her. ‘The woman you want me to be – the mother you want me to be. That’s not who I am.’

  And as she waited for the day in her diary when she would find out if there was a baby growing inside her or not, and all the momentous what-if doubts began to stir – was it ten years too late? was the risk of miscarriage and disability too great? would Rory be happy if she was pregnant, or would he feel trapped? – there was one thing she knew with total certainty.

  If she was pregnant, she would never be the kind of mother that her own mother had been. She had to be better than that.

  She might not be the best mother in the world – the other date, the potential birthday on next year’s calendar both excited and terrified her, she had been childfree for so long – and she might not even be a particularly good mother. She had seen with her youngest sister that the sleepless, milk-stained reality had no resemblance to the expectation.

  But she knew she could never walk away from the life she was creating. She could never be so cruel, or selfish, or cold.

  That’s not who I am, Cat thought.

  Here was the problem, as Rory saw it.

  Once upon a time a woman had a baby with the first man she met. But these days she was far more likely to have a baby with the last man she met.

  You could see how having a baby with the first man she met could cause all sorts of problems, and they were mostly the problems of what she would be missing.

  An education. A career. Recreational sex. Lots of that, with a wide and varied selection of men. And all those priceless moments when you know that you are young and free and at loose in the world. Watching the sun come up over a beach in Thailand, driving through Paris in an open-top sports car, waking up to the sound of the Caribbean outside your open window…and even if Rory’s hypothetical woman never did any of these things, then at least the possibility was always there.

  But you can’t fit a baby seat into an open-top sports car. It just doesn’t go.

  He knew how it changed your world. His mother had constantly reminded him when Jake was born – your life is not your own now.

  She was trying to be encouraging. But she made it sound like a life sentence.

  So he had no difficulty understanding why the women of the modern world needed a baby with the first man they met like they needed a hole in the head. But had it all gone too far in the other direction? What about the problems of having a baby with the last man she met?

  The later maters – that’s what they called them, later maters, the women who had body-swerved around their childhood sweethearts, and unplanned pregnancy, and their college squeeze, and a ragbag of romances formed on holidays or in offices, clubs and bars. The women who experienced fifteen years or so of being unfettered by maternity, and left a tiny window for babies, a fleeting ten years of fertility.

  They had had the education, the career and the recreational sex. And now they were ready to squeeze out a baby while the biological option was still there.

  But here was the problem – a lot of the good ones, and maybe even the best ones, were already gone. Surely there was a random element to the last man, just as there was to the first. Rory worried about the later maters. He worried that they were not nearly as smart as they thought. The later maters were like last-minute shoppers on Christmas Eve. There simply wasn’t a lot left to choose from.

  And what about Rory himself? Was he the love of Cat’s life, or just some guy who happened to be there? The thought depressed him. This was no way to bring a new life into the world. And yet he didn’t know how to refuse her, or even to say that he had his doubts.

  You couldn’t tell the woman you loved that you weren’t sure you wanted a child with her.

  It wasn’t natural.

  ‘Nobody will fuck your brains out like a bored housewife,’ Michael told Paulo. ‘Think about it. The kids are grown or growing. The old man’s falling asleep in front of Match of the Day. And she suddenly thinks, what exactly am I saving it for? I go to the gym – this is her thinking, right? – I do my Atkins diet. I’m still a relatively young woman. I have my needs.’

  ‘And then there’s you,’ Paulo said.

  ‘And then there’s me,’ Michael said, his voice heavy with resignation. In the end, he had not been able to keep his hands off Ginger. In the end, he had brought her back for more than answering phones and posting VAT forms. Michael could resist everything except the hired help.

  My brother the junkie, Paulo thought sadly. Michael thought he was in control, but Paulo knew tha
t was no longer the case. The addiction was taking over. And Paulo saw at last that it wasn’t the pursuit of fun that made Michael do the things he did. It was the pursuit of something new, the pursuit of someone who wasn’t his wife.

  Fun had nothing to do with it.

  Paulo knew that Michael and Ginger were slipping off for early evenings in the local Hilton – a time when their absence from their homes was easily explained by bad traffic, work running late – or perhaps not even explained at all.

  Paulo felt depressed when he thought of them coupling in that sterile businessman’s room, with its little sachets of tea and coffee, the ignored trouser press parked ludicrously in the corner, the Do Not Disturb sign warding off the maid. Paulo could feel the guilt and regret in his brother but it was buried under layers of all of the old cockiness.

  Michael thought he was going to get away with it.

  ‘The good thing about married women is that eventually they have to be somewhere,’ Michael said. ‘It’s not like single birds, who want you to hang around and talk about your feelings and go out for dinner. The married woman has to be off pretty sharpish.’

  Paulo was tired of hearing about his brother’s sex life. There had been a time when he thrilled to hear of Michael’s adventures, which he had always dressed up as a kind of personal philosophy, a way of looking at the universe.

  Yet that was when they were boys, that was before the promises they had made at their weddings, and now he was sick of it. Let Michael screw up his life if he wanted to. Paulo just wanted to sell cars. He wanted hot shots from the City to come in with their big fat six-figure bonus and talk to him about the Ferrari Pininfarina of their dreams. But business was slow, and most days the showroom echoed with the voices of the two brothers, and nobody looked at the cars for sale.

  ‘There’s this motor show in Hong Kong,’ Paulo said. ‘Baresi Brothers has been invited by their board of trade. Two club class tickets. Hotel.’

  Paulo handed his brother a glossy brochure. The cover showed the soaring Hong Kong skyline rising behind next year’s F1 Ferrari. A pretty Asian girl in a short skirt was beaming on the bonnet.