‘Bring me some, pweez!’ called Anna in a baby voice from the other room. She’d gone to bed and called out occasionally, by turns grumpy and imploring, like some giant kid they were babysitting.
Kate wandered about the room, touching things as Charlie fussed with the kettle and dropped the sweeteners. Charlie’s writing had commandeered the poky flat. Towers of lined pads tottered on the rug. Post-It notes snaked across the walls. A plot diagram was drawn in the dust on a window pane. None of the books leaning chummily against each other on the shelves were by Charles Garland: all that effort and nothing published.
‘Charleeeee! Me want a cuddle!’
‘In a min, darling.’ Charlie fobbed off Anna as he joined Kate on the sofa, an aged behemoth only made bearable by a myriad of cushions.
Sex doesn’t cure everything, Anna. Kate heard the tone of her own thoughts and wondered if she was finally turning into her mother. The old, pre-Mary model.
A welcome contrast to the wine bar, the quiet room, a catch-all cooking/eating/relaxing space, was pure Charlie: no order, all charm.
Having rehearsed and discarded a number of phrases, Kate chose to open with, ‘I’m sorry you had to find out this way.’
‘You silly sausage,’ said Charlie. ‘I already knew.’ He leaned back, closed his eyes. ‘Remember how bad things got between me and Lucy at the end?’ He opened his eyes and glanced at the door: mention of the most recent Queen was outlawed by the present monarch. ‘We tried for a baby. It wasn’t like me and Anna, just silly talk. Lucy, God bless her, was desperate to be a mum.’ Charlie looked into the middle distance. ‘It was a sticking plaster, sure, a bad idea, but we both wanted it.’
The sigh made Kate suspect that not only Lucy was ‘desperate’ for a child.
‘Weeks passed. Months. Nothing. Lucy was jittery because, of course, I was obviously fertile. Flo was proof of that. She wanted to get herself checked out and I said I would too because, well . . .’
‘You’re a nice guy,’ said Kate, feeling intently how near he was. And how far away.
‘Not really.’ Charlie ducked the compliment. ‘I just wanted to support her. You can imagine what happened next. Lucy got the all clear. I was told I was infertile.’
They were quiet for a moment, giving that memory the space it needed.
‘She’s got a little son now, did I tell you?’ Charlie tried to smile. ‘Lucy’ll be a great mum.’ He slapped his knees. ‘Ah, well . . .’
‘What was the problem? With you, I mean?’ Kate thought of those miscarriages and didn’t like the light it shed on Becca.
‘You sure you want to know?’ Charlie gave her a sideways look. ‘None of the story is pretty, as you can imagine. I have ejaculatory duct obstruction.’
‘Right,’ said Kate, uncertainly.
‘Don’t worry. You’re allowed to pull a face. I pulled a face for about a month when I first heard the term. Basically . . .’ Charlie sighed, hating putting it into words. ‘Me tubes are bunged up. I can make, you know . . .’
‘Semen?’ said Kate, helpfully. She hadn’t expected the evening to end this way.
‘Yeah, that stuff,’ smiled Charlie. ‘But there’s very little sperm.’ He rubbed the end of his nose, suddenly and viciously. ‘Not something blokes like to admit.’
‘Oh Charlie, it’s only me.’ Kate moved nearer. ‘Can’t the doctors do anything?’
‘There are procedures. I won’t explain. It’d put you off your dinner for life. It’s very invasive, lots of possible side effects, and even then only a twenty per cent possibility of a natural pregnancy for the partner.’ Charlie shrugged, understating. ‘It wasn’t the nicest afternoon of my life.’
‘How did Lucy react?’
‘She was shocked, like me. We couldn’t speak about it, or anything else, until the next morning. And then we talked about nothing else. Lucy had had a ton of tests herself by this point, and she was sick of waiting rooms and statistics and bad news. She didn’t want to make me go through the treatment if it might not make a difference. I told her I’d do it for her and that was . . .’ He exhaled sadly. ‘That did it, really. Lucy wanted me to do it for us.’
‘I suppose,’ said Kate, ‘there’s a world of difference between those two words.’
‘I said I’d do it, said I’d do anything. I loved Lucy. You know that. But not enough, it turned out. The pressure pushed at the stress points in our relationship. We tried and we hung on but in the end we parted and we were right. It still feels right,’ said Charlie, a lump in his throat strangling the words.
‘Oh Charlie.’ Kate felt for him, wanting to make it all better.
‘As well as the implications for me and Lucy, there was, of course . . .’
‘Flo,’ said Kate.
‘My Flo,’ said Charlie.
‘Is there any chance she is yours?’
‘I’ll tell you what the experts told me. Ejaculatory duct obstruction can be something you’re born with, but in my case it was late onset. They pinpointed 2000 as the approximate year the problem began. They were sure it was no later than 2001.’
‘Flo was conceived in . . .’ Kate counted on her fingers. ‘Summer 2002.’ Her shoulders wilted.
‘It’s not like CSI. They can’t be completely accurate.’ Charlie had trawled back through his life, remembering a period when Becca had seemed elusive, when he hadn’t always known where she was, when she’d been twitchy, touchy. ‘Hiding something.’
Kate remembered how she’d done the same thing with Becca, retracing her steps, unpicking the betrayal.
‘Obviously Becca was impatient to fall pregnant again. Whether she had a proper affair or just a drunken one night stand . . . It doesn’t really matter. But the diagnosis plus Becca’s behaviour plus my own sixth sense added up to the fact that, although the early babies, the children we lost, were mine, Flo very probably wasn’t.’ Charlie’s demeanour changed. No longer reflective, he was almost angry. ‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘It wasn’t my job.’ Kate was firm. Her decision to keep quiet hadn’t been taken lightly. ‘It would have blown your marriage apart. More importantly, it would have had repercussions between you and Flo.’
‘Yeah. Me and Flo,’ said Charlie slowly. ‘Look, you and Becca, you like to thrash things out, go over things again and again. But me, I’ve done my thinking and it’s this.’ Charlie sat up, deaf to the yowled ‘Chaz babes! Pleeease!’ from the bedroom. He stabbed a cushion with his finger as he made his points. ‘I was the first to hold Flo. All that love can’t go to waste. I rank her happiness and safety far above mine. That child needs me and I don’t just need Flo. They haven’t minted the word that covers how I feel about her. So I’ve done my thinking. Flo’s my little girl. And I’m her daddy.’
Every second word was a crackle.
‘I crackle hate crackle crackle Skype,’ said Charlie, as he flew apart into technicolour fragments and then came together again.
‘Hang on, hang on. That’s better.’ Kate smiled as his face, grumpy and discombobulated, sharpened up.
‘I only half believe you’re getting on that plane tomorrow.’
‘This time I mean it.’
‘One month my arse. Seven months you’ve been there. What’s it got that London hasn’t got?’
‘Stop teasing.’ Charlie knew what Beijing had. It had challenge, it had promise, it needed her.
‘Even with this crappy technology I can see in your face that you’re already planning your next trip.’
‘You could always come with me . . .’
‘I can’t see Anna swapping swinging London for Fangshang district.’
I didn’t invite Anna, thought Kate. The girl had grit. Even Becca had to admit that. Anna had chewed up and digested the horrible scene in the wine bar, telling Charlie it didn’t matter. Kate reminded herself that the girl was only twenty, that her earlier talk of wanting a baby and subsequent change of heart were probably just attitudes she was trying on for size. Anna had plenty
of time to work out what she really wanted. When I was that age I wasn’t thinking about babies. At thirty-eight, almost twice Anna’s age – Kate gulped and shooed away that thought – Kate realised she’d spent almost two decades believing the cosmos had a little being with her name on it, waiting for the perfect moment to waft the child her way.
‘So,’ the fuzzy Charlie said, ‘did you read it?’
‘Every word.’
‘And?’
‘Charlie, I love your book.’
‘Really?’ The elation lasted all of a second. ‘You have to say that, though.’
‘True. But luckily I really do love your book.’
The four hundred pages and one hundred thousand words of BLOKE had engrossed Kate in her tidy single bed at the orphanage. Charlie’s aim to write a story that enthralled on a human scale, without explosions or plagues or a plot to blow up the Eiffel Tower, had resulted in a beautifully detailed novel of the impact that ordinary love has on an ordinary man. ‘I loved it. Every word.’ She’d searched for herself in the pages, at first trepidatious, then disappointed. If not the love interest, couldn’t he have included her as a villain? Or even a thumbnail sketch?
Desperate for detail, Charlie asked, ‘And the scene where the hero gets together with the love of his life after all they went through? Did it ring true?’
‘I wept. Actual tears.’ In Kate’s head Charlie had voiced the hero’s lines and the heroine had sounded suspiciously like herself. ‘It was my favourite chapter.’
‘Mine too. Not my editor’s, though. I have rewrites to plough through.’ Charlie exhaled showily. ‘Man, I feel as if I’ve been writing this book since I was born and it’s still not finished.’
‘Works of art are never finished,’ said Kate, in the lofty tone she used for aphorisms. ‘They’re merely abandoned.’
‘Very true. You’re my personal guru. Can you believe that next May you’ll actually be able to walk into a bookshop and buy a novel with my name on it?’ Charlie looked the way Flo did on rollercoasters, just before she threw up.
‘Charles Garland.’ That person was a stranger to Kate; the book was pure Charlie, all the way through.
‘You weren’t here to celebrate the deal.’ Charlie leaned in, his face suddenly enormous. ‘You owe me a big night out.’
The stars had aligned above the last-gasp pitch by Charlie’s disenchanted agent. The twentieth editor to read his manuscript had seen potential in it, renaming it on the spot. ‘BLOKE’ ran contrary to all of Charlie’s earnest suggestions, but he had to admit that in shiny black lettering on a plain white cover it was eye catching. After the publishers named a figure more than he earned in five years of consulting, Charlie would have let them call his book anything at all.
‘And that’s only the beginning,’ his agent claimed. Charlie’s life had gone up a gear overnight. His agent, now his bestest friend in all the world, had danced off to sell translation rights in over thirty territories and was currently standing by his phone waiting to hear from Sony about a possible movie version. Charlie and Kate had spent happy hours on Skype casting BLOKE: THE MOVIE, and fantasising about Charlie’s Oscar acceptance speech. ‘If you don’t thank me,’ Kate warned, ‘I’ll beat you senseless with your little gold statuette.’
As Charlie dissolved into fizzy lines, Kate said, ‘You do know that Becca’s only pretending she hasn’t read it to annoy you, don’t you? She thinks it’s brilliant. She’s sorry now that she nagged you so much about leaving your job to write. She had no idea you were so talented.’
The Charlie on the screen tried not to look chuffed. ‘Does she realise the character of the horrific ex-wife who drowns in a speedboat accident is based on her?’
‘Not. A. Clue.’
‘Typical.’ Charlie sat back in his chair and gazed at his ceiling, so far away in London. ‘I love that woman. Even after all the crap she put me through. There’s nobody quite like Becca. It’s as if she’s full of love she can’t express and it all comes out sideways. Now I’m getting older I appreciate one-offs, people who really are themselves and make no bones about it.’
‘I love her too. It’s a life sentence.’ Charlie had more to forgive than he knew. Kate would never squeal about the double-cross that split them up. Kate held up the top page from the pile. ‘I bet Anna’s enchanted by this!’
BLOKE’s dedication read For Anna, this bloke’s bird.
‘She doesn’t know yet.’
‘Funny that you dedicate your book to her but you won’t give her a key to your flat.’
Hints, many of them heavy enough to break through to the flat below, had been dropped by Anna about taking their relationship to the next level but Charlie had misconstrued them all. ‘Plenty of time for all that. Why get bogged down in domesticity when we’re having so much fun? I want to chase her around in her underwear, not argue about whose turn it is to bleach the loo.’
‘This is so you, Charlie. You make out it’s just fun and games yet you dedicate your book to her. You’re in love.’ Again. Charlie falls in love, thought Kate, with the same regularity I have a bikini wax.
‘I like being in love.’ Since ‘that’ call from his agent it had been impossible to dent Charlie’s good humour. ‘You like being in love, too, madam. It’s not just the dodgy connection that’s making your face glow. You look different. You look ten years younger. Still not as young as Anna, but it’s a start. And all because you’re in love.’
Charlie was the only one who knew. ‘Wish I felt ten years younger but yes, OK, you got me, it does feel amazing. I’ve never felt this way.’ Not even about you. One day Kate would tot up how many of her sentences were finished off in her mind when she spoke to Charlie.
‘When it’s right, you know it.’
‘Like you and Anna?’
‘Naughty. Putting words in my mouth.’
‘What’s that I see behind you? Already spending your loot?’ It had been an age since Charlie had disposable income; the majority of his earnings went straight to Becca and Flo.
Swivelling so Kate could appreciate every one of the widescreen TV’s fifty glorious inches, Charlie said, ‘Isn’t it great? Now I can watch all the shit programmes I normally watch, only huge.’
‘It makes your flat look tiny.’
Even Charlie’s modest home looked like another, ostentatious planet after seven months at Yulan House. The squashy sofa, the pile rug, the old fireplace with quaint tiled surround, the framed Picasso print, the nostalgic lava lamp all added up to a busy opulence quite unlike the room Kate sat in.
It was a cell. Bare and clean and neat, her allotted bedroom affected the way Kate thought. When she sat on her iron bed, just wide enough for one and covered with a simple striped cover, Kate could focus. She had civilised her scampering wayward feelings between these cream walls.
It was easier to differentiate between the important and the trivial in this spartan environment. Answers became obvious, rising out of the fog. At first she’d found the room austere but now she knew the few items in it like friends. They all had an application and most had the patina of the second-hand and well used. Kate scrunched up her toes on the rag rug the children had made for her, appreciating its softness all the more for the contrast between it and the ubiquitous blue lino.
Happily isolated, Kate hadn’t missed the constant stream of news and comment the internet had pumped into her brain back in the UK. The important events got through; Jia Tang wanted the children at Yulan House to grow up as world citizens. For the trivial, Kate relied on Becca, who had told her breathlessly about the leak of nude celebrity photos on the web. That had seemed inconsequential to Kate, who’d spent the day holding a traumatised, abandoned four year old, but the news of Robin Williams’s death had saddened her. The world needs its funnymen.
‘Charlie, can you hear that?’ Kate cocked her head. A song Kate had taught the children about the English alphabet drifted in from a classroom across the courtyard. It sounded like small bells chiming
.
‘Nah. I can only hear the traffic outside my window. How’re you going to cope with noisy old London after all that time down a dirt track in China?’
‘Honestly? I’m not sure.’
The doorbell sounded at Charlie’s end, a murky sound as if underwater. ‘That’ll be Anna. Gotta go. We’re eating at some overpriced hipster shack she heard about on Twitter.’
‘See you soon IRL.’
The screen died.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Wedding snaps
5 Nov 2014 13.32
Jesus it’s cold. I have icicles in me hair. Mary sends her love and says to tell you she’s nearly finished the gloves she’s knitting for you. She had to start again because she gave you an extra thumb.
I’ve attached more photos of the wedding. Mary says you’ll be sick of them but sure you’re not are you? Mary says I must have sent you a hundred by now but I counted and it’s only seventy-two. I want you to feel as if you were there even though you weren’t because you considered some kids in China more important than the wedding day of the woman who endured fourteen hours of labour for you. As you know I don’t mind one little bit that you missed the wedding. In fact I never think about it.
Becca was over yesterday with Flo, who’s nearly as tall as me now. Lovely manners but I wish she’d wear something that wasn’t black now and again. Show off that pretty face. Becca has found a grand diet and is after losing a whole pound. She looks very different. Poor woman misses you terrible. Says it’s like having her arm cut off. Mary says at least that way she’d have one less arm to eat biscuits with but Mary can be awful sharp and I’ve told her so.
Becca and Leon are off to THE BAHAMAS if you don’t mind. Another holiday! Me and Mary have just put a deposit on a week in Wales.
Now, listen, don’t shout but me and Mary and Becca want to throw you a little party to say ‘welcome home’. Not on the night you touch down. We’ll let you get over your lag jet or whatever it’s called. The night after. Nothing fancy, now. Maybe a sausage and a Daniel O’Donnell CD. We’ll save the glitter cannons for your four oh! You never know, you might even have a fella by then. As my granny used to say, for every old sock there’s an old shoe.
These Days of Ours Page 23