by Lisa Jewell
‘But I thought, I thought you couldn’t get pregnant when you were breastfeeding?’
‘Yeah, so did I. But there you go. Clearly I was wrong. We were both wrong.’
Ralph looked up at Jem, who was standing in the doorway holding a towel-wrapped Blake across her belly. He looked so small, suddenly, so fresh and newly arrived. How was it possible that so soon after his appearance in their lives, there could be another on its way?
He took a deep breath and considered his position. He had only just got to grips with the concept of his new son. His new son was still very much His New Son. It had taken him five months to bond with him. He had only ever wanted one child to start with and now he was being told that a third was on its way. ‘Right,’ he said in a voice pitched at pragmatic, yet thoughtful. ‘So, what are your thoughts?’
Jem sighed, then joined him on the bed. ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘All I know is that I cried for half an hour non-stop after I took the test.’
‘Oh, Jem,’ he pulled her to him by her shoulder and buried his face in the crook of her neck, ‘why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘Because I thought it was wrong,’ she replied. ‘Because I thought that if I took another test it would give me a different answer, one I actually wanted to see. But, ha, it didn’t. So there you go. And no, I have no idea what to do about it. No idea whatsoever.’ She looked up at him sadly. Ralph could see now that the rims of her eyes were red and swollen. ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘What do you think?’
Ralph sighed. ‘I, er, I might need some time to digest this.’
Jem shrugged. ‘That’s fair enough,’ she said. ‘It took me a while. But, Christ, I have digested it now and I still don’t have the first fucking clue how I actually feel about it. I mean, look,’ she gestured at the baby on her lap, ‘look at him. I mean, he is so utterly perfect and blissful and I should be jumping up and down with joy at the thought of another one. But –’
‘No, I know,’ interrupted Ralph. ‘Timing.’
‘More than that, though, it’s more than that. It’s about dynamic, it’s about me. I just don’t think I would be cut out for a big family. I just don’t think I’ve got the guts and the gumption. You know. I’ll never get my career going properly, the house would be a bombsite, I’d spend all day screaming at people, I would not be a very nice person, and I know it’s another person to love – another little Scarlett, another little Blake – but quite frankly, right now, I don’t want to love anyone else. Quite frankly my hands are full with people to love. And I know,’ she continued, ‘that it is so horribly ironic how hard I tried to hold on to the two babies we lost, how empty I felt when they’d gone, how destroyed I was, and now I am considering taking this baby away deliberately. I get that. It computes. But still, it doesn’t really change anything. Because having a third baby, having a baby now, well, that just doesn’t compute at all.’
Ralph sighed and nodded. He had thought it all his life: if you didn’t want to have a baby, you didn’t have it. It had always struck him as the essence of a civilised society, that the means were there to reverse a terrible mistake and to choose your own destiny. Everything that Jem was saying to him made perfect and utter sense. Everything she was expressing was utterly sound and level-headed. In a way Jem was taking a masculine approach to the situation, a practical, realistic approach, and he respected her for that. But still, he thought, there was something oddly indigestible about the scenario. He wasn’t sure what it was, because he didn’t particularly want another baby and he certainly didn’t want Jem to be unhappy, but neither could he quite stomach the thought of slaughtering the new life in Jem’s womb. It seemed barbaric.
‘Look,’ he sighed, ‘let’s just sleep on this, shall we? And God, you never know, things might just, you know …’
‘Yes, you’re right. We’ve got a fifty-fifty track record on keeping babies. It’s very early days.’
‘Yes. We could be fatalistic?’ he suggested, happy with the non-committal nature of the concept.
‘Yes. We could,’ said Jem, getting to her feet and stroking Ralph’s cheek gently, ‘we could be fatalistic. But not for very long.’
Chapter 5
Ralph received an e-mail from Rosey the next morning. He had not expected to receive an e-mail from Rosey. He had not, as far as he could remember, even given Rosey his e-mail address. But there it was: [email protected].
Hi there Ralph! Seems like a long time since we said goodbye to you! Hope it was good to get back to dear old Blighty and that the weather’s being kind to you. Just thought I’d send over some of these photos I took while you were over. Me and Smith have parted ways so it seemed a bit strange to have all these photos of you. Anyway, I really enjoyed hanging out with you in SM and hope all is well with you and your lovely family. Lots of love, Rosey XX
Ralph absorbed Rosey’s words: ‘Me and Smith have parted ways.’ They didn’t seem quite to make sense. Only a month ago they had been a fully fledged couple, not necessarily following quite the same path but clearly committed to each other. And now they were no more.
Ralph tried to ignore the little wave of excitement and pleasure that came over him. The remarkable Rosey was single. The remarkable Rosey was free. But the remarkable Rosey was also, he quickly reminded himself, over five thousand miles away and not the mother of his children. He opened the attachments. The first one was a shot of Ralph and Rosey that one of the guys from her band had taken in the bar after their gig in the community hall. She had her arm around his shoulder and her head was angled towards his. His body language was more neutral. It was taken before Ralph got drunk so he still looked relatively fresh-faced. But Rosey looked incredible. The light from the street had caught the side of her face and her smile was enigmatic, her full lips furled up like petals. Ralph remembered her words, in the street, outside her apartment: ‘You could paint me from memory.’
Now he could paint her from a photograph. He sent the picture to his printer and listened to the sound of it churning through it while he worded a reply.
Hi Rosey, thanks for the photos. I wonder what happened to that tan?! Actually, I do still have most of it and summer’s on its way so should be able to start topping it up soon. I was really sorry to hear about you and Smith. And kind of surprised. You seemed like such a solid couple. I hope you’re both OK.
Being at home has been great. I’m not quite sure how to put this without sounding weird, but spending time with you really helped me sort some stuff out in my head. You were a really good sounding board and opened my eyes to a lot of stuff that I hadn’t considered before. I have a new appreciation of everything that is good about my life (which is pretty much everything really) and I owe a lot of that to you, so thank you, I am in your debt
He paused as he was about to sign off, because there was something else he wanted to say but he was not quite sure how appropriate it was to say it. But then he realised that he had nobody else to share this with and he really needed another point of view, so he went ahead.
Some unexpected developments on my return, however. Jem is pregnant again. We’re both slightly shell-shocked by this development, as you can imagine, with our little one still so young and we’ve got a lot of talking and thinking to do. Some sleepless nights ahead, I suspect!
Anyway, thanks for getting in touch and if ever you find yourself in London, would love to meet up, possibly over a proper European beer!
All the best,
Ralph
He contemplated signing off with a kiss, as Rosey had done, but decided against it. A kiss was tiny, but still significant, especially in the light of what had happened on Rosey’s doorstep in California. He read and reread his mail three times to check that it contained nothing that if Jem were to read it she would find upsetting or suspicious, and then he clicked on Send. But even as he did so he had an overwhelming sense of having pushed a tiny domino, flicked a tiny switch.
Then he wandered towards his printer and pick
ed the photo from the tray. He stared at it for a moment before slotting it tenderly and with some purpose in between the pages of his sketchbook.
Chapter 6
Jem had not been to the local playground for nearly a month. She had walked half a mile out of her way and taken buses to get to alternative playgrounds. She had, in fact, taken painfully circuitous routes to get to all her usual haunts in her efforts to avoid a street meeting with the increasingly mysterious Joel. But today she had decided to take a chance.
She had just about managed to convince herself that there was no way he’d be there on this random afternoon, but he was. Of course he was. He sat on his usual bench, wrapped in his usual overcoat. His newspaper was folded on the bench next to him and he was peering at his daughter over the rim of a large paper coffee cup. He didn’t see her at first and it occurred to Jem that she could sneak to the other side of the playground and hide behind the climbing frame. But Jessica, lovely, bouncy, over-excitable Jessica scuppered this fledgeling plan and came scooting across the playground towards them hollering Scarlett’s name. Joel lifted his head and acknowledged Jem with a small smile and a slight nod.
Deciding that a stilted, rather awkward conversation was preferable to fuelling his simmering rage with her, she slapped on her best smile and headed towards him.
‘Hi!’ she began. ‘Haven’t seen you here for a while!’
‘I was about to say the same to you,’ he smiled drily.
‘How are you?’
‘Oh, fine, fine, you know. The usual.’ He turned his paper coffee cup round and round between the palms of his hands. ‘You?’ he said after a short pause, as though it had been an effort to pull the word out of his mouth.
‘Yeah, great. Nice to have got winter out the way.’
‘Well, yes, although today is not exactly a precursor to balmy summer nights.’
‘No, today is a bit rubbish, it has to be said.’
‘How’s the little one?’ He gestured at the increasingly fat baby dangling from her chest.
‘Er, not so little. Blowing up like a barrage balloon, in fact. Not sure I’ll be able to carry him around in this thing for much longer.’
‘Must put quite a strain on your back?’
‘Yes. It does.’
She smiled tightly and perched herself on the arm of the bench. The conversation was going absolutely nowhere so she decided that she could either slink away now or get something out of it. ‘So,’ she began, ‘funny to see you outside my sister’s house again the other day. Do you have a friend in the area?’
‘No,’ he said bluntly. ‘No. It’s, er, it’s more of a … it’s a group thing I attend. For partners of people addicted to drugs. A support group thing.’
Jem nodded. It was a plausible and decent explanation that made perfect sense in the light of what Lulu had told her the other day, but still, there was something about his delivery that didn’t quite ring true. Feeling a strange need to prod at Joel, she continued.
‘That sounds great,’ she said. ‘Must be brilliant to be able to talk to other people who are going through the same thing as you?’
‘Yes.’ He dropped his head and stared into the lid of his coffee cup. ‘It’s really useful.’
They fell silent for a moment and watched their children playing together. ‘Does Jessica know?’ she said. ‘Does she know about her mother?’
Joel shrugged. ‘You know what?’ he said, turning to look at her for the first time since she’d sat down. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I’d prefer not to discuss my family life with you. I mean, it’s clear to me that the time we spent together last month was just a little blip in your perfect world,’ he made facetious quotes with his fingers around the words, ‘just something to do because you were bored and your perfect trendy artist husband wasn’t paying you enough attention. I get all that, and now I think we should just get on with our lives. Don’t you?’ His face was set hard with repressed emotion as he returned his gaze to his coffee cup.
Jem stared at him in amazement, unsure whether what had just happened was real or something vile offered up by her imagination. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘OK.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, to his cup. ‘OK.’
Jem wanted to remove herself from this unsavoury situation, but she also wanted to try to understand why it had happened.
‘Listen,’ she began, ‘I’m not sure what I’ve done to make you angry –’
‘I am not angry,’ he muttered. ‘I am just a quiet, ordinary man, wanting to get on with his life, without any of this shallow yummy-mummy bullshit.’
‘Sorry? What?’ She was almost amused.
‘Yeah, you women with your stupid boots and your perfect little houses and your fee-paying nurseries and your big cars …’
‘I haven’t got a big car!’
‘You think because you’ve moved to some “edgy” little corner of London that that makes you all kind of urban and cool. But it doesn’t, you know. Cause all you do is make your edgy little corner into yet another chi-chi, gentrified little mini Hampstead.’
‘Right,’ said Jem again, feeling a chill anger slowly percolating through her. ‘I think it’s clear that you and I have had some kind of misunderstanding …’
‘No, there’s no misunderstanding,’ he said slowly and coolly, ‘none whatsoever. You know exactly what I’m talking about. See that?’ He pointed at their two girls playing together. ‘That’s real, that is. That’s two people, different backgrounds, different personalities, coming together, killing time. You know, for fun. You and me,’ he turned his mouth down to demonstrate his disapproval, ‘that was just a game, a little fantasy you were playing out inside your pretty little head full of fluff and kittens and organic bloody this and that. Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I’m blind? I saw the way you looked at my shoes the other day.’
‘What!’
‘Please, don’t patronise me by trying to deny it. I saw it, it was blatant. You looked at my shoes like they disgusted you, like I disgusted you. And that’s fine. I don’t really care either way. But do me a favour, eh, don’t treat me like some special case, like, oh, I know this guy, his wife’s a crack addict, yadayadayada. Like I say, I’m just a guy, living his life. I’m not here for your entertainment. I’m not here to give you something to talk about at dinner parties.’
Jem got to her feet. She was halfway between tears and fury. ‘Look,’ she started, ‘you’re entitled to your opinion.’
‘You’re entitled to your opinion,’ he mimicked. ‘How very Jeremy Kyle of you. That’s exactly the sort of thing someone says when they don’t give a shit about anyone else’s opinion. Look, I’m not saying I don’t think you’re a nice person. You are a Very Nice Person. You’re just not what I thought you were. That’s all.’
Jem drew in her breath. She wanted to let it out and scream, ‘What the fuck is your problem, you crazy son of a bitch?’ After a moment she managed to say this: ‘Well, I must say, neither are you.’
He shrugged at these words and then he sank his face back into his coffee cup, looking, for all the world, like a sulky teenage boy.
Jem strode then to the other side of the playground, to hide behind the climbing frame. She sat there for a moment, determined that she would not be chased from her local playground by a psychotic man with a gigantic chip on his shoulder, but once the adrenalin had stopped pumping through her veins she realised she needed to cry and she did not want him to see her crying so she ignored Scarlett’s squawks of protest and two minutes later they left the playground and headed for home.
Ralph came downstairs a moment after they returned home. Scarlett was still screaming and crying because of the unexpectedly abrupt end to her playground jaunt and Jem had had to drag her pretty much the whole way home by the wrist, looking, no doubt, to people passing by, like she was abducting her. Her shoulders were aching from the weight of the hefty infant Blake and she was hot, flustered and out of sorts. It was ironic that after all the times sh
e had cursed Ralph for cloistering himself away from moments such as this when all she wanted was another human being to appear and say, ‘God, looks like you’re having a bad afternoon,’ that now she wished he had stayed in his studio. She was not ready to see him. She was not ready to see anybody. The last fifteen minutes of her life had been so unsettling on so many levels that she needed just to sit down with a glass of wine and stare at a blank wall for half an hour.
‘You’re back early,’ he commented.
‘Yes,’ she said, stepping over Scarlett’s prone and writhing form on the kitchen floor. ‘It was a bit chilly. And this one was getting cranky. That one,’ she pointed at the hysterical Scarlett, ‘as you can see, was not impressed.’
Ralph gathered Scarlett into his arms and she threw her arms around his neck with melodramatic relish. Ralph smiled at Jem over her small heaving shoulders. ‘Oh, well,’ he soothed, ‘you can always go tomorrow. The playground will always be there.’
Jem smiled tightly. No, she thought to herself, no, the playground will not always be there. Some insane man had set up camp in the playground and now it was somewhere she would have to avoid for eternity.
‘What are you going to have for your tea?’ he continued, trying to distract Scarlett from her tantrum. ‘What’s for tea, Mummy?’
‘Er,’ she pulled open the fridge door and stared at the contents blindly. None of it made any sense. Her head was too full of Joel and his cold, hard face and his spiteful words. ‘Pizza?’ she offered, her eye suddenly caught by the royal blue of a Pizza Express box. Pizza Express. What would Joel make of that, she wondered. Would that be shallow and yummy-mummy? Would that make him hate her even more?
Scarlett shook her head glumly, but Jem knew that it was just her mood, that if Jem just ignored her and cooked the thing, Scarlett would eat it. She switched on the oven and appraised her surroundings. They still had the kitchen that had been here when they bought the house nearly four years ago. It was farmhouse style, distressed pine, wrought-iron fittings, and Jem had a strange fondness for it. She did tend to salivate a little when passing kitchen showrooms full of sleek lines and glittery extractor fans that looked like chandeliers, and shiny aubergine veneers, but in her heart she knew she wasn’t that type of person. In her heart she knew that she and this rather modest, rather bashed-about kitchen were soul mates. In fact there was nothing in her entire house that could be seen in any way as aspirational or chi-chi, nothing to inspire the ire and contempt that she had just been subjected to. And so what if she’d looked at his shoes in a less than enthusiastic manner. The only reason she was looking at his shoes in the first place was to persuade herself that she should not have a potentially seismic extramarital affair with the man, not because she was some snotty, four-wheel-drive-owning, high-maintenance gym bunny. What did he mean, she wasn’t what he’d thought she was? What had he thought she was? As these thoughts swarmed angrily around her head, she began to take out her feelings on inanimate objects. She slammed the oven door open and smashed the baking tray on to the draining board. She ripped the Pizza Express box apart and pulled violently at the Cellophane wrapping. Cubes of cheese fell from the top of the pizza on to the floor and she growled loudly.