Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel

by Dorothy Koomson

  Carole stares at me. She is on the other side of my wooden kitchen table, a cigarette in one hand, her cup of tea in the other, staring. She has no real idea what I am talking about. But I need her. In a moment of clarity after I had smashed the tea set and repeated the same drinking ritual with the baby clothes, I realized this was a sign and I needed to talk to someone before things got out of control. She is it. From our group, she is the person I am closest to, I suppose. In the first few weeks of college, we’d shared a room in halls until a few of our fellow students realized that university life wasn’t for them and left, so freeing up rooms. Carole slept on the top bunk, and was the one who moved when the girl next door decided that she’d rather go home and start a family with her boyfriend than spend three years away from him, studying. It should be awkward and weird between Carole and me, given that I went out with Vince for two years and then she went on to marry him, but it isn’t. Vince and I were a car crash from the start, it only took us two years of tears, tantrums, visits to the emergency room and threats of being thrown out of college for us to see that. Carole is steady, sweet, suitable. Everything I’m not.

  Carole lifts the cup to her lips, and I realize my mistake. I’ve made tea in the coffee cups. I really haven’t been thinking straight, and hopefully in a few minutes she’ll understand and won’t bring up this tiny transgression in front of the others. We’re a pack of bitches, yes, but it’s been known for us to “discuss” these sorts of mistakes we each make behind each other’s backs.

  My eyes run over the white crockery with a thin, candy-stripe pink line around its base. How did I miss that it is a different shade of pink than the one surrounding the base of the saucers and the teapot, milk jug and sugar bowl? How?

  I lured Carole over saying I wanted us to go jogging; instead I had a cup of tea, cake and packet of cigarettes waiting for her. I’d been too cautious, too shy, to ask her to come over to talk. She might have told one of the others before I’d impressed upon her the need for secrecy, the need to not share with anyone what I am about to tell her. Carole is nice. She likes Mal and she likes us being together. Smoke obscures Carole’s face as she blows out a plume of it. Under normal circumstances, we’d never smoke in here, but these are not normal circumstances.

  “Carole, I’m going to tell you a secret about a lie I once told. The one that needs love and attention and companionship,” I continue, drawing my eyes away from the crockery. Maybe she won’t have noticed. Maybe she won’t tell everyone how I’ve messed up. “I’d—Please keep it to yourself. I—Please.”

  She takes a draw on her cigarette, frowns a little as she nods, and wraps her arm around her stomach as though steeling herself for what I am about to say. “Of course.”

  “I lied to my husband. To Mal. I lied to him. Once. A long time ago. It was only the once, but that lie needed a companion to keep it alive. It needed lots of companions. And as a result of that lie, and its companions, Mal’s son is going to die.”

  Carole’s frown deepens and her eyes flicker for a moment as her mind goes back to her son and daughter. Safe with their father, she hopes. I’m sure all parents do that: whenever they hear about a sick, missing or hurt child they flash to their child and hope they are OK. OK and where they should be.

  “It’s all my fault that the boy is going to die,” I tell her. Suddenly, gorgeously, the weight of guilt lifts a little. That part of the confession has eased my guilt. The rest will hopefully ease me more and more.

  She shifts back in her seat a fraction, only a fraction, as she wonders what I’ve done, how I’ve hurt the boy, how she is going to react to finding out I am someone who is capable of hurting a child. Her voice quavers over every word as she asks, “What happened?” I’ve chosen the right person. She has asked me what happened, instead of “What did you do?” which suggests that she thinks it might have been an accident. Not something I would have done on purpose. She doesn’t believe me to be evil. Which means she might understand when I tell her the rest.

  “Years ago, not long after I met Mal and it looked like it was serious and I sensed he was going to ask me to marry him, I told him I can’t have children.”

  Carole’s anxiety softens a little, her shoulders loosen. Then her mind goes back to the dinner party and shame crawls across her features. “You can’t?” she asks with such sympathy that I’m almost unable to tell her the rest.

  Maybe she will think me evil after all. “I can’t. What he didn’t realize is that what I meant was, I won’t have children.”

  The cigarette stops on the way to Carole’s waiting mouth. She is wearing pink lip gloss even though we were meant to be going jogging. “How do you mean, ‘won’t’?” she asks cautiously, lowering her cigarette over the crystal ashtray.

  I watch the end of the cigarette burn, unable as I am to look her in the eye. “I mean, I decided long ago not to have children because it would mean a huge sacrifice and it’s one I just can’t make.”

  CHAPTER 49

  K eith is definitely not talking to me.

  It hurts like a punch in the chest every time I think about that. We have always talked and this is causing me immense distress.

  We have barely exchanged more than two hundred words in six days. He comes to sit the night shift, to spend the night with Leo even though each member of my family has offered to do it so that he can come home with me. Always he refuses so he doesn’t have to sleep next to me. His texts are signed “Keith,” no “love you” anymore, no “x” kiss. I suspect he wants to type “I don’t know you.” Last night, I had tried to insist that I stay with him and he had said, “No, just go home, Leo will need you to be awake tomorrow,” and refused to speak to me after that.

  He is still floored by what I have become in his mind: someone who could give a baby away. Someone who would have given her own child away if the intended parents had not changed their minds. Keith does not believe that anyone could do that and be able to live with themselves; he believes every surrogate—paid or not—is actually every intended parent’s worst nightmare because she will ultimately decide to keep the baby. Knowing that I had been prepared to give the child who became Leo to his “real” parents after nine months has shaken him. Keith does not like to be shaken. Leo being in the hospital is bad enough; this revelation is one shake too many. So he has taken to ignoring me, speaking to me if and when it is absolutely necessary.

  “You think I’m going to stand by while another man’s baby grows inside you?” he shouted at me all those years ago. Talking and talking at a normal volume hadn’t got us anywhere; now he was trying to shout some sense into me. “It’s not like I can pretend it’s not there when you’ll be getting bigger every day. We’ll be walking down the street and everyone will look at us thinking it’s ours and ask us questions and, what, we’re going to lie?”

  “I’ve told you, I don’t care what other people think. What you think is important, not what anyone ‘out there’ thinks.”

  “I think it’s a bad thing to do.”

  “How can doing this to make someone happy be bad?”

  “It’ll be bad for you. You’ll be a mess afterwards.”

  “You mean it’ll be bad for you if I’m a mess afterwards because you won’t want to look after me.”

  “Why do you say that like I haven’t got a right to worry about how this will change everything between us? You won’t be able to drink, you’ll be sick, they’ll always be round here to see you. Your body will change, you won’t be able to do as much. I’ll be watching this baby move, and we’ll only be able to have sex in certain positions. And after all that, we won’t even have a baby at the end of it to make it worthwhile.”

  “Is that what this is about? Sex?”

  “Lucks, if you think I’m going to be able to fuck you when I know you’ve got someone else’s baby growing inside you, then you don’t know me very well.”

  “We’re getting nowhere with this,” I said. He was right, there was no denying it. I hadn’t
considered him when I’d agreed to it. I hadn’t thought I needed to, I’d assumed he’d understand, when in reality I was asking him to put our relationship on hold for the best part of a year, while I put two people before him. I should have consulted him or have been prepared to lose him.

  “Let me lay it on the line: if you do this, then …” He stopped because he did not want to do it. Not when it wasn’t his fault. They weren’t his friends, he hadn’t grown up with one of them, why should he drastically alter his life for people he had no real loyalty to? And why should he have to be the one who ended our relationship?

  “I’m doing this. I love you, but I’m doing this. I said I would and I’m going to. So I guess it’s over.” I wanted to cry. When he was gone, I was going to collapse into tears.

  Slowly he looked me up and down, like he was trying to remember details about me. “I’ll go and get my stuff.” When he returned with two carryalls full of clothes and books and CDs and other things he’d left at my place, he looked me over again. “I keep telling myself not to get back together with you,” he said. “Because every time we break up, it takes me that bit longer to get over you.”

  “Me, too,” I replied, feeling the corners of my mouth turn down. I wanted him to get out before I cried. Because every time we broke up and I cried, he would comfort me and we would end up in bed and I’d cry again afterwards.

  The next time I saw him, he’d decided to look me up because he found out that I was living in East Sussex and he was living in West Sussex. I told him straightaway I had a son, and when Keith found out his age, he assumed that I had decided to keep the baby.

  “Please talk to me,” I say to him later. Everyone left a couple of hours ago and I’ve been reading to Leo and trying to work out how to fix things with Keith. He is back in his suit this week, and for the first time ever I’m tempted to ask him about his job so he’ll go into an elaborate explanation as to why he can’t and won’t tell me. I want to hear his voice, to have him direct his words at me for more than a few seconds. He stops in the middle of shedding his jacket and shrugs it back on. I’m scared suddenly he’ll walk out again. Instead, he stares at Leo as he asks, “About what?”

  “About anything. Talk to me, please stop ignoring me.”

  He turns slowly to face me and I see that he isn’t angry with me, he is confused, uncertain. He doesn’t know how to talk to me. He sighs with his whole body, and I’m reminded how strong he is. Muscular, tall, quiet, confident, strong—in such a different way to most of the men I dated. He is honest and that gives him strength. Nothing he says is dishonest, or untruthful, or spun, which gives him fortitude. That’s why this has upset him—I haven’t lied to him outright, but if I am able to keep the whole truth from him it makes him unsure about who I am.

  That is why he stopped talking to me: he has been trying to work out what else I haven’t been completely honest about. He nods his head toward the door. “Outside.”

  He doesn’t want to do this in front of Leo. He doesn’t want to—what, say it’s over?—in front of Leo.

  In the wide, brightly lit corridor outside Leo’s hospital room, I lean against the wall opposite so I can still see in through the open doorway, can keep his bed and him in sight. Keith swamps me, though. He stands over me, one arm resting on the wall above my head, his body shutting me off from anyone who might approach. Men do this to women in clubs and bars to mark out their territory, to show a woman belongs to them.

  “I keep trying to work out if I’m a bad person because I have a problem with what you were going to do,” he says.

  “Course you’re not. It’s something I had to do,” I reply. “Not everyone could do it.”

  “But it was Leo. How could you have watched him grow up with someone else, knowing he was yours?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know, I just would have.”

  “You’d have broken your heart to make two other people happy,” he says. “But you don’t want to have our baby, what am I supposed to think? What am I supposed to say to you?”

  “I do want our baby,” I protest.

  “If we could make love right here, right now, you’d panic. And you’d do whatever you could to avoid it.”

  My heart is galloping, it is echoing in my ears, I’m convinced he can hear it, can feel it because he is so close to me, and then he will know that I am scared of having another baby.

  “Am I wrong? Because we both know this began way before Leo got sick.”

  Now he knows what really happened, that being pregnant lost me my closest friend, I could explain the fear I have. I know it is irrational, I know in time I’ll be able to overcome that fear, but right now I can’t. And I can’t explain to Keith because he won’t understand. He will think I am being silly, and I can’t stand the thought of revealing my fears to anyone and having them dismissed.

  “I do want more children with you, but I’m not ready.”

  “When will you be ready, Lucks? You’re thirty-seven, I’m forty-six, time isn’t on our side.”

  I look into his eyes, deep and dark, an almost-black brown. When we first met and I had that crush on him, I used to forget what I was saying when I looked into those eyes. I had to stop making eye contact because the resulting muttering and mumbling were incredibly embarrassing.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be ready,” I say. “But I do want it. I promise you.”

  “Let’s talk about it again. When Leo is better, we’ll talk about it again, and you can maybe tell me what you’re so scared of. All of your fears, and we’ll see what we can do about them. Does that sound fair to you?”

  I nod. I forget sometimes that he may have been in the Army, he may work in the police force, he may seem like a typical bloke, but he loves me. And because he loves me, he tries to understand me. It is my fear that stops me talking to him. Because even if it is irrational and it isn’t what he wants to hear, Keith has loved me for so long, he’d find a way to make what I feel work for us both. I would do the same for him. That’s what our love is about.

  He kisses the center of my forehead, a wonderful, chaste blessing. He kisses my nose, another touch of his love. He kisses my lips. And he doesn’t want anything more. He doesn’t want sex, he doesn’t want me to be on the same page as him physically, and that is what I need right now. I just want him to love me without expectations. Without wanting me to deal with Leo how he does, without wanting me to start planning a future, without him wanting me not to have been able to give my child away. This is wonderful. Being with him like this is a little piece of heaven we haven’t had in so long.

  We have heaven, so that is when all hell breaks loose.

  Machines start frantically bleeping in Leo’s room, the lines and numbers on the monitors start flashing. A nurse comes running, followed by two doctors and another nurse. I move to join them, to go to Leo, but Keith’s strong hand holds me back. He wants me to leave them to do their job.

  “Not yet,” I want to scream, but there is no sound. “Not yet, not yet, I’m not ready.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Y ou probably think I’m selfish. That I don’t deserve to have a loving husband and a good home if I could lie to him about something like not being able to have children. You might think that having contraceptive injections on the sly every three months and doing the odd pregnancy test in the toilets at work are no ways for a woman who claims to love her husband to behave. But you don’t understand. I told the lie and now I can’t take it back.

  I … I have an illness. A disorder, they call it now. They have a nice name for it now, and every other celebrity seems to be talking about how they are suffering from it, but when I found out what I had, it didn’t seem so glamorous. It has never been glamorous and I don’t understand how those people who have it don’t seem to suffer like I did. Like I do. When I found out that I had this disorder, it was the beginning of the end as far as I could see.

  I was always aware that I was different, that I didn’t fit in. I didn’t see
the world like the other girls I went to school with, but I wanted to so badly. When I was thirteen, Duke, our family dog, died, and we moved to a new city. And the differences became more obvious.

  I found life so hard sometimes. Little things—a C grade, a cross word from my mother, the troubles in Poland—would literally leave me lying on the floor unable to move because it hurt so much, it hurt so physically. I’d cry. I’d spend hours in my room crying because Mum had told me not to leave my bag on the floor by the door. I didn’t know what was wrong. My mother kept taking me to the doctor to find out what was wrong with me. Why I wasn’t like other children, not even my brother and sister, but the doctor kept saying it was just teenage hormones, or simple naughtiness. Something I would grow out of at some point. They’d talk about me as though I wasn’t in the room. I soon learned that I wasn’t me, I was a set of behaviors that no one liked.

  If I was down all the time, it might not have been so bad. Bad for them—my parents, my siblings, the few people I could vaguely call friends at school. If I was down all the time, they could explain it as simple moodiness.

  No one could understand the other times as anything other than willful misbehavior. During the other times, the times I lived and longed for, the world was an amazing place. Everything was vibrant, colors were rich and deep and you could almost touch them they were so tactile.

  I used to dance in the back garden, I would throw my arms up in the air, throw my head back and dance to the music I heard in my head. I’d want to write this music down or sing it out loud and have it recorded in the air. Anything so other people could hear it, could move to it, could be as happy as I felt. I had so much energy. I could run forever. I would draw and paint. I was in love with the world. I was in love with everything and everyone.