A Friend of the Family

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘Yes,’ he muttered, ‘that’s right.’

  ‘Oh well. Why don’t you wait for her in her office, then?’

  She showed him to the end of a corridor and left him in a room that had Millie’s name on the door. Tony sat down for a moment on a very expensive-looking tubular-steel chair, but then stood up again almost immediately to have a look around. So, thought Tony, this was it – Millie’s office. And what a very lovely office it was. Tony sat down in her chair for a moment, savouring the feeling of his buttocks caressing the indents made by hers in the upholstery. He leafed non-chalantly through her paperwork for a while – assessments, schedules, photographs of chairs and curtains, boring, boring, boring. And then his eye was caught by a small bejewelled picture frame. He picked it up and looked at it. It was a photograph of Millie and Sean, Sean at the forefront grinning like a goon, Millie just behind him with her arms wrapped around his neck and her cheek pressed against his, looking like a goddess. He let the frame drop back, glumly. ‘Fiancé’s brother,’ he muttered to himself, ‘for God’s sake.’

  ‘Tony!’

  He jumped out of the chair.

  ‘Millie!’

  ‘Er – hi.’

  She was wearing a knee-length red felt skirt, a black mohair jumper with beads all over it and tight, leather, zip-up boots. Her hair was clipped back and in a centre parting. And she was wearing glasses. The glasses did it for Tony, completely. Even more than the tight leather boots.

  ‘Well,’ she said, smiling slightly, ‘this is a lovely surprise – what are you doing here?’ She dropped a paper bag on to her desk and leant across to give him one of those big sincere kisses on the cheek, those kisses you could actually feel.

  ‘I’m, um…’ he grinned inanely, ‘er… something I wanted to give you,’ he flapped a big cardboard envelope around a bit. ‘The post’s been a bit useless round our way and I was passing, so…’

  Millie smiled at him, a warm, relaxed smile that said that she didn’t find his presence as unsettling as she actually should. ‘So,’ she put up a finger to slide her glasses up the narrow bridge of her nose, ‘what is it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The thing. For me?’ She pointed at the envelope.

  ‘Oh. Oh! Of course. Yeah.’ He handed her the package.

  ‘Wow,’ she turned it round a bit in her hands. ‘Shall I – can I open it?’

  ‘Oh God, yeah. Definitely.’

  Tony watched her intently, not wanting to miss one tiny nuance. She slid the print out and looked at it – a hardboard-mounted illustration of a small, lonely penguin on a glacier. £250. And worth every penny. ‘Ha! I don’t believe it. Is this for me? Really?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Oh – that’s so… so… kind, Tony. So unbelievably sweet of you. I can’t believe you went to all this trouble. I don’t know what to say. I… I…’

  And then her face suddenly fell apart and she started crying.

  ‘Shit, Millie. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…’

  Millie shook her head and lifted her glasses to wipe the tears from under her eyes. ‘It’s not you, Tony. It’s not. It’s… it’s… oh God, how embarrassing. I can’t believe I’m doing this.’

  ‘Here,’ said Tony, taking her elbow and guiding her gently towards a velvet chaise longue, ‘sit down.’ He searched his pockets fruitlessly for the large white cotton handkerchief he’d never owned in his life. ‘Are you OK? Can I get you anything?’

  ‘Mmm,’ she said, ‘a new life, please.’

  Tony looked at her in surprise. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, dropping her head into her hands, ‘nothing.’

  ‘Millie. Is everything all right?’

  She nodded, shook her head, nodded again.

  ‘Talk to me, Millie. Please. Tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, ‘I can’t bloody talk to you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because – because it’s all top bloody secret and it’s to do with your brother and blah-di-blah-di-blah.’

  ‘Look,’ said Tony, turning up his hands in a gesture of impartiality, ‘I’m neutral. Honestly. You can trust me. Anything you say here will never go any further. Promise.’

  ‘Especially swear you won’t say anything to Sean.’

  ‘I especially swear,’ he said.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

  The whole world seemed to go concave, then, and all the blood rushed to Tony’s head. ‘What?’ he said, letting his hand drop from his chest.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said again, ‘it still sounds really weird saying it. And I’d only just got used to saying I’m engaged. I’m not sure what’s weirder, actually…’

  ‘Pregnant?’ said Tony again.

  ‘Yes. Marvellous isn’t it? Thirty-six years old, thought I was going to end up alone and childless, and I managed to get engaged and pregnant within the space of two months. I should be an inspiration to Bridget Joneses the world over.’

  ‘But – whose is it?’The minute the question left Tony’s lips he wanted to suck it back in. Of course he knew whose baby it was. It was just… Sean. Urgh. It was distasteful, somehow, incontrovertible evidence that he and Millie had… and that Sean was capable of… And with a woman as magnificent as Millie. Or any woman at all, come to that. He felt slightly weak with nausea as the truth percolated through his system. He looked down at Millie’s stomach and tried to imagine what was happening in there, his brother’s cells and genes doubling and doubling and making a little Sean. In Millie. Oh God. How revolting.

  ‘Well,’ said Tony, searching for the polite response to such shocking news, ‘that’s really… God, that’s great. Congratulations’. There it was, that word he’d been looking for.

  ‘Thank you,’ she sniffed.

  ‘So, when’s the baby due?’

  ‘First of December.’

  ‘That’s Mum’s birthday.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘coincidence, isn’t it? I’m not supposed to have told anyone yet. Wanted to wait till I was three months gone. You know, be on the safe side. So promise you won’t say anything, however much you want to.’

  Tony’s mind was reeling. Sean. A dad? It didn’t seem possible. It had been hard enough to reconcile himself to Sean being a prospective husband. ‘So. Sean – is he excited?’

  She shrugged. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think so. I mean, I think he’s a bit shell-shocked, to be honest. It’s not exactly what he had in mind. But he’ll come round, eventually.’

  Tony didn’t like the sound of that. Sean’s beautiful, magnificent, way-out-of-his-league fiancée was pregnant with his child. What was there to come round to, exactly?

  ‘So,’ said Tony, bracing himself to ask a sensitive question, ‘why all the…?’ He trailed his fingertips down his cheeks to indicate her tears.

  ‘Oh God. I don’t know. Hormones, probably.’

  ‘He does want you to have this baby, doesn’t he?’

  Millie shrugged and sniffed and started crying again. ‘He says he does, but, I don’t know – he seems a bit… a bit… nothing.’

  ‘A bit nothing?’

  ‘Look – I’d really rather not talk about it, Tony, if you don’t mind.’ She laid a hand against his and looked up at him beseechingly. ‘It’s making me feel all disloyal. You know what Sean’s like – intensely private I believe is the correct term.’

  ‘Do you want me to talk to him for you?’

  ‘No! Absolutely not.’

  ‘Look, Millie, whatever’s going on, I’m sure that deep down Sean’s really thrilled about all this.’ He pointed at her belly. ‘I mean, if it was me, I’d be over the moon, I’d be so delighted. I just can’t believe he could possibly feel negative about something so amazing.’

  ‘Aw, Tony – you’re really lovely, aren’t you?’ she said, laughing. ‘You’re such a lovely bloke.’

  ‘I’m all right, I suppose,’ he said, resisting the temptation to move a strand of
hair off her cheek.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘can you just forget that this conversation ever happened? I shouldn’t have said anything to you. Ultimately it’s going to be my decision. Mine and Sean’s. I’m sure he’ll come round in the end… But, thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For turning up unannounced and letting me let off a little steam. I really needed it. Oh – and thank you for the penguin, too.’ She gestured to the print on her desk. ‘That was incredibly thoughtful of you.’

  He shrugged it off.

  ‘Have you had lunch?’ she said.

  ‘Er, no, actually, I haven’t.’

  ‘Would you like to share my panini? Emmenthal and ham?’

  Tony glanced across at the sweaty paper bag still sitting on her desk-top.

  ‘Is it a big one?’ he said.

  ‘Huge. Way too big just for me.’

  ‘OK, then,’ he said, even though he wasn’t hungry and wasn’t even particularly fond of Emmenthal. He watched her take the panini from the bag and pull it apart with her fingers. The same fingers he dreamt about every night, sliding into his linen trousers, cupping him, caressing him. He watched her tear the sandwich, spellbound for a moment. Jesus Aitch Christ. She was incredible. She really was. She was quirky and strong and beautiful and funny and vulnerable and sexy. She was everything he’d ever wanted in a woman.

  And she was engaged to his brother and pregnant with his child.

  He chewed on a corner of lukewarm panini but when he tried to swallow it it got stuck in his throat.

  Sean’s Psychotic Parrot

  On Friday night Sean and Millie went to their local trendy Italian for dinner. Sean had prosciutto and figs followed by papardelle with chicken livers. Millie had risotto of wild mushroom with an enormous rocket-and-Parmesan salad on the side and tagliatelle with smoked pork, cream and broad beans. They shared a huge panna cotta for pudding, but in reality Millie had seventy-five per cent of it. As well as the main meal she ate three slice of ciabatta with (thickly spread) unsalted butter and not only the biscotti that came balanced on the side of her own coffee saucer, but Sean’s too. She claimed that she had an insatiable craving for carbohydrates and cupped her swollen belly while they waited for the bill to arrive.

  Sean couldn’t help feeling a bit concerned about this sudden doubling in the size of his girlfriend’s appetite. Surely it wasn’t normal for a woman, even a pregnant woman, to eat that much? ‘So,’ he said, tearing his eyes away from her distended belly and downing the last of the wine, ‘where to now? Paradise Paul’s?’

  Paradise Paul’s was a late-night, semi-legal, subterranean drinking establishment in Brewer Street, run by a wild-eyed, dyed-hair fiftysomething guy who was actually called Paradise Paul – he’d changed his name by deed poll when he was twenty-one. Apparently, when Millie first went to the bar as a pink-haired teenager in the eighties, Paradise Paul was a colourful, lively, eccentric character, but now he was somehow drained of colour, like a photograph that had been left out in the sun for too long. He never said anything that made any kind of sense and he smelt a bit of grimy shirt collars, but he did run a fantastically charismatic after-hours bar and Sean loved it there.

  Sometimes they’d turn up after dinner and have a couple of beers and a surreal chat with Paradise Paul and then leave. Other times there’d be a dozen or so of Millie’s seemingly never-ending circle of friends there and they’d stay until the early hours, drinking rum, whiskey and champagne, and, if Millie’s friend Ruth was there, having a line of coke or two as well. It was a genuinely bohemian world full of unique characters and slightly odd encounters and, because Sean had never been there sober and certainly had only the haziest memories of actually leaving, he sometimes wondered if the bar really existed, so he’d been incredibly surprised to stumble upon it one lunchtime when he’d taken a back route to his agent’s office. In the daylight hours, though, it was just a derelict-looking basement strewn with litter and without any kind of signage. This gave Sean an unsettling sensation, similar to the time he had bumped into his headmaster wearing a red shellsuit at the Whitgift shopping centre in Croydon.

  Friday nights at Paradise Paul’s were a ritual for Sean and Millie and without them Sean’s insight into the human psyche would be informed entirely by his family, Robert Kilroy-Silk and the man in the local paper shop. It was an element of his life that he could feel developing layers of nostalgia even while it was happening – he could already hear the conversations that he and Millie would have in the future. Remember Paradise Paul’s, they’d say to each other, what a time that was. And they’d both get a wistful, faraway look in their eyes and remember the magical days when they were still new to each other and the world was all shiny and perfect.

  But looking at Millie across the table from him now, yawning dramatically behind her hand, grey shadows under her eyes and an untouched glass of wine in front of her, Sean had the distinct feeling that a night living it up at Paradise Paul’s was most probably not on the cards.

  Sean looked at his watch, absent-mindedly. It was eight-forty-five. He’d spent all week alone, sitting at Millie’s window just waiting for her to get back and relieve his isolation. He couldn’t face going home now, watching the telly, getting an early sodding night; and, as much as he knew he should be putting Millie’s needs and feelings before his own now, he really didn’t want to. She’d been knackered all week, said that all she wanted to do was ‘sleep, sleep, sleep’. She’d got in at seven on Wednesday, poo-pooed Sean’s suggestion of a night at the cinema, and crawled into bed at eight-thirty claiming that she’d never known such tiredness in her life. Sean’s sympathy reserves were being rapidly drained. I mean, how knackering could it actually be, carrying a small cluster of cells around inside you? She hadn’t even started showing yet, so why was she so fucking tired all the time?

  As if reading his mind, Millie yawned again. ‘I am sooo knackered. Do you mind if we just go home?’

  A seven-year-old version of Sean pole-vaulted its way to the surface and pouted at her. ‘What – really?’

  ‘Yes, Sean, really. I’m all done in.’

  He looked at her wan expression and baggy eyes and felt a huge surge of resentment. He forced a jolly smile. ‘Well, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m oozing with excess energy.’ He slapped his hands together to demonstrate his energy oozing. ‘How about a quick one?’

  ‘Oh, Sean…’

  ‘Come on. It’ll be fun. Just a quick one. Home by midnight. Promise.’

  ‘Midnight?! I was planning on being in bed by ten.’

  ‘Oh, Millie,’ he wheedled, ‘come on. I’ve been stuck indoors all week. I need a life fix.’

  ‘Sean,’ she said with a distinct note of exasperation in her voice, ‘I am not going to Paradise Paul’s – or anywhere else, for that matter. I’m completely exhausted, the smell of cigarettes makes me want to hurl and I can’t even have a drink. I’ll be miserable.’

  ‘Oh – so is that it, then? Do we just stay in for the next eight months?’

  ‘Seven months.’

  ‘Whatever – do we just stop going out?’

  ‘No. Of course not. Just at the moment, while I’m this tired.’

  ‘But why?’ whined Sean, knowing that he was spraying verbal lighter fluid on to a conversational barbecue, but unable to stop himself. ‘Why are you so tired? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh Jesus, Sean. I’m preg-nant,’ she delivered the syllables slowly and separately. ‘I am busy nurturing human life in here,’ she pointed at her belly, ‘in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Yes, but, why does that make you tired?’ He was on the wide open road to self-destruction now but he was past caring.

  ‘I don’t know, Sean. I’ve got no idea. I’ve never been pregnant before. It’s all a bloody mystery to me.’

  He took a deep breath, rubbed his hand across his chin and prepared to launch the Exocet missile of a question he’d been wanting to ask her all week. ‘Are you su
re this tiredness isn’t all in your head – you know, psychosomatic?’

  Millie opened her mouth and started gawping at him like a pike. ‘Sean,’ she said, her voice chillingly steely, ‘what the fuck is your problem?’

  ‘My problem,’ said Sean, ‘is that I want to go to Paradise Paul’s on a Friday night with my girlfriend, have a few drinks, have a laugh and then come home and I can’t because of this so-called tiredness that seems to have taken over your life.’

  ‘Tell you what, Sean,’ said Millie, pushing back her chair and dropping her napkin on to the table-top, ‘why don’t you go to Paul’s, eh? You go on your own and have a good time. But promise me one thing: don’t bother coming home until you’ve grown up – you child’

  And then she pulled her jacket off the back of the chair, threw a £20 note at him and stalked from the restaurant.

  Sean sat there for a while after she’d gone, assessing his emotions.

  Relieved: a little bit, yes. He’d been wanting to question Millie’s ‘tiredness’all week, convinced it was all part of some female ploy to ‘seem’ pregnant and be made a fuss of.

  Remorseful: a bit. He’d spoilt the evening and let Millie go home on her own. He’d been insensitive and selfish. But this was his life, too. He was allowed to question things, wasn’t he? He didn’t have to accept every change this pregnancy foisted upon his life. He still counted, even if the being growing inside his girlfriend had other ideas.

  Confused: very much so. All his natural instincts told him that he should be changing, becoming a more selfless person. But he had this bloody great psychotic parrot sitting on his shoulder shouting, ‘Self-preservation! Self-preservation!’ at him morning, noon and night. He was very fond of his life and he was buggered if he was going to let something over which he had no control mess it all up for him.