by Calvin Wade
“But what if someone gets to her before me, that’s what happened last time. Whilst I kept thinking about whether or not I should ask Nicky out, Jason McLaren just went straight in and asked. What if that happens again?”
Mum looked at me like I was clueless in matters of the heart, which indeed I was.
“Simon, she’s a seventeen year old girl with a nine month old little boy! She’s not going to be out every night, she has responsibilities. Be there for her, but for now, just as a friend and then, as time passes, you’ll know when the time is right to move things along.”
“Mum, I’m not sure, I’ll ever know. I’m hopeless at things like that, I’ll either make a clumsy attempt at kissing her and ruin our friendship or there will be a moment and I won’t spot it and Nicky will just think I just want to remain good friends.”
“For goodness sake, Simon, have faith in yourself. I’m telling you a moment will arrive and it’ll just feel right.”
“I bet I won’t spot it.”
“Trust me, Simon, you will.”
NICKY – July 1993
I opened the door. Jason was standing on the doorstep with a bouquet of flowers. He had never bought me flowers before, even when I had Will, he didn’t bring flowers into the hospital. Some of the other mothers were brought eternity rings, most flowers, but Jason had never bothered with elaborate presents, until now.
“I don’t want your flowers, Jason.”
It was two o’clock in the afternoon and I still wasn’t dressed. I didn’t have the energy to get dressed, not because of Will, he had been a little sweetheart from the moment he was born, but because of Jason. I must have looked a right state, but I no longer cared how I looked to Jason.
“Why?”
“You know why, Jason, they’re guilt flowers. Go and give them to your fancy piece.”
“Oh I see.....I knew the minute I saw him in there, he’d come running to you, telling tales,” Jason said.
“Who would come running to me?”
“Simon Strong. I’m not stupid, Nicky. I’ve seen how he looks at you. He’s been looking for an excuse to break us up since before Will was born. Go and ask your Dad, he says exactly the same.”
“Jason, I haven’t spoken to Simon Strong for three weeks.”
Jason looked genuinely shocked, then disbelieving.
“Yeh, right!”
“No, honestly I haven’t. If you went out and bought those flowers because you ran into Simon Strong then you wasted your money. Actually, you’ve wasted your money anyway. Can you go home now, please? I don’t want to see you.”
Jason remained rooted to the spot, outside our front door. He was an intelligent lad, but at that point I don’t think his brain knew how to react. He was used to girls fawning over him. He wasn’t used to girls giving him the brush off.
“Come on, Nicky, please let me in,” he practically begged.
“No, the baby will be waking up from his afternoon sleep any time now and I don’t want you to be here when he does.”
“He’s my son, Nicky.”
Jason was practically crying now. He deserved no sympathy, we all have choices to make in life and if he wanted to make choices based on vanity then I couldn’t justify being around to provide a degree of security. What security was Jason giving me?
“You should have thought about that before you went sneaking off to Tokyo Joe’s with some blond floozy.”
“She isn’t a floozy, Nicky.”
“If she’s hanging around with a seventeen year old with a baby, in my eyes she’s a floozy.”
Jason didn’t reply, he just bowed his head a little and stared downwards.
“Oh, right, you didn’t happen to mention to her that you had a girlfriend and an eight month old son?”
“She’s just a friend, Nicky.”
“I don’t care what she is, Jason. You told me you were too ill to come around and help me with our son and then you went off clubbing to Preston!”
I started to close the door. Jason put his foot in the way so I couldn’t.
“I’ll give you a ring later, Nicky, once you’ve calmed down. I can explain,” Jason pleaded through a half-closed door.
The thing was, I was calm. I didn’t feel like throwing things at him or shouting like a mad woman. It was simple, our relationship was over. I knew for sure I could no longer trust Jason and I just wanted to sever all physical and emotional ties. I knew we would still have to remain in contact because of Will, but for the moment, I just wanted him out of my sight. He had no respect for me and if I had stayed with him, I would have had no respect for myself either.
“Just leave it for a few days, Jason. Give me some breathing space.”
Jason started crying now and his voice cracked as he spoke,
“I don’t want us to have breathing space, Nicky. Let’s sort this out. I can tell Natalie that we can no longer be friends, if that’s what you want.”
“Jason, it’s over. I won’t be changing my mind, no matter how much you beg or promise to change, it’s over. I’m tired of all this now.”
I pushed the door closed. I would have loved to have taken five minutes to sit against the door crying or done some equally dramatic gesture, but there wasn’t time to waste feeling sorry for myself, Will would be waking up soon. I took the iron and ironing board out from under the stairs, opened up the board, took a load of Will’s clothes out from the tumble dryer and started ironing.
There was no going back this time. Once a relationship is dead, it is dead. It is not like Jesus, it should not be brought back to life three days later.
NICKY – July 1995
I am sure most teenage girls have their heart broken at some stage. Falling head over heels for a good looking boy is something most of us do and as the majority of us don’t marry the first boy we date, we learn from the experience, dry our eyes and move on. Jason McLaren should just live long in my memory banks as my first love, my first lover and the first boy to break my heart. Unfortunately, however, he is remembered as the father of my first child. As a result of him fathering Will, I longed for him to be a good Dad and when it dawned on me that he was failing miserably at that basic task, every action, every lie, every no show, was magnified one hundred fold. In my eyes, he became the worst father in history. When you put your faith in someone and they let you down so spectacularly, it is not easy to just dust yourself down and move on.
Whilst our personal issues were hitting new lows, Jason fulfilled a longstanding ambition to go to Loughborough University. I was glad he moved away as prior to him leaving, every time he came around to see Will, I had to bite my tongue. I had learnt that pointing out his failure as a father, just led to arguments and prolonged absences from visiting his son, so I learnt to keep my frustrations to myself. The initial collapse in our relationship had been caused by Jason embroiling himself in a relationship with one of his College lecturers and as that affair blossomed, his daily visits became twice weekly visits, then weekly, then a couple of times a month. To see your own son twice a month when you only live three miles from him is an absolute disgrace. Several times Jason actually said he would call around and then just didn’t bother, without even a phone call to explain why, Will was too young to understand, but if you want to establish an emotional attachment to your child, you don’t just show up for an hour twice a month because you are too busy the rest of the time shagging your fancy piece.
Ironically, the relationship Jason had deemed to be more important than the one with his son, did not last. One of Miss Fulbright’s work colleagues, a Mrs. Stevens, had reported her to the Head Teacher for engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a student. Miss Fulbright was suspended pending an investigation and although I’m not exactly sure how that investigation panned out, all I do know is by the time Jason started at Loughborough, Miss Fulbright had returned to her native North East. I have no animosity towards her, perhaps she should have known better but ultimately she wasn’t the one with a baby
. If it hadn’t been her, I’m sure it would have been someone else.
As my relationship with Jason collapsed, Simon Strong arrived back on the scene, purely, I may add, in a platonic way. I had known Simon since I was a little girl and despite continual warnings from my father that Simon hankered after a relationship with me, I initially thought he was just being a loyal friend. I loved being in Simon’s company, he was generally considered to be a serious soul, but in my company, he was relaxed and very funny. He was also great with Will. Perhaps I chose to ignore the tell tale signs, but I had no idea that Simon wanted anything more than friendship until one day the truth came out.
One summer’s evening Simon and I were sat in our lounge, Dad was out at his allotment where he tended to stay until it went dark during those summer months. Dad had bought what he called ‘his summer house’ for the allotment, which was not much more than a shed with a large window at the front. After tending to his vegetable patch, he would sit in there on a deckchair listening to old music on his battery operated Bush radio, smoking away on his pipe and generally chilling out. My objections to his pipe smoking had become more vocal since Will had been born, so the ‘summer house’ was a place he could do what he wanted without incurring a telling off. This particular evening, Will was flat out in his little bed, shattered from an overdose of fresh air. Simon had passed his driving test and had a battered Ford Escort, so we had taken Will over to Rivington and up Winter Hill. It’s not easy pushing a pushchair up a steep hill like that, so we ended up abandoning that idea, folding it up and taking it back to the car. Simon carried Will throughout our walk, most of the time putting Will over his shoulders. Will squealed with delighted, Simon definitely had a special bond with him and I was aware every passer by would naturally have presumed he was Will’s father, which I didn’t mind at all, as he was certainly a better father than his real one.
“What’s on TV then, Si?” I asked putting my feet up on the settee and stretching them over the tops of Simon’s legs.
“No idea, switch it on and find out.”
“I can’t,” I replied putting on a childish voice, “I’m comfy. Can’t you do it?”
“Nicky, if I do it, I have to remove my legs from under your feet and then you’ll no longer be comfy.”
I gave him a smile.
“Go on, you know you want to! I’ll time you.”
Simon had told me a story once, that him and his late brother, Colin, were always timing each other with their digital watches to see who could complete menial tasks the quickest. As Simon was three years older, he would always win, and as he got older, when their parents asked Simon to do tasks around the house, he would get out of doing them by getting Colin to do them, but promising to time him. If ever I wanted to get out of a job when Simon was around, washing dishes, vacuum cleaning or even switching the TV on, I would revert back to the old joke and offer to time him. It was a joke that took a year or two to wear thin.
“No, you’re alright,” Simon replied, “I’m happy here with your legs on me. Can we not just forget watching TV and have a good old fashioned chinwag?”
“Talk?” I scoffed, “John Logie Baird did not go to the trouble of inventing the television so people could talk. Whatever next!”
“Well, I’m not moving,” Simon said defiantly, moving his shoulders in exaggerated fashion from side to side to illustrate how comfortable he was.
“I guess we will have to talk then, because I’m not budging either. Ok Einstein, what shall we talk about? Politics, religion, art, solving third world debt?”
“Let’s just talk about you and me,” Simon suggested
I guess with hindsight I should have realised what he was angling this conversation towards, but at the time I didn’t see it at all. I thought he meant the two of us, independent of each other. I had no reason to think otherwise, I had always seen Simon as a big brother.
“Alrighty then. How has your day been Simon, have you enjoyed your little self?” I asked, once again reverting to a silly voice. I’m not sure why, but I used to use an exaggerated child-like voice sometimes. I kept doing it well into my late teens, before I eventually phased it out. Thinking back, it must have been really annoying for whoever I was speaking to.
“I have actually, it’s been great,” Simon replied with a contented look on his face, “I think Will enjoyed it too.”
“He definitely did,” I said, back in my normal voice, “there’s nothing better than a toddler’s laugh, is there?”
“No, he’s a great little boy, Nicky, I’m sure you must be very proud of him.”
“I am, he’s not having the sort of life I wanted him to, which is a shame, so it is extra special when I hear him laughing like he did today.”
“What do you mean ‘not having the sort of life I wanted him to’?” Simon asked quizzically.
“You know...his father’s abandoned him, he has a teenage single mother, we’re not exactly rich....”
This comment, said without a great deal of thought, seemed to rile Simon. He is a very laid back man, so it would be wrong to say that he was fuming about it, but a visible frown and his subsequent tone indicated he was not in agreement.
“How do you define rich, Nicky?”
“We’re not exactly millionaires, Simon.”
“No, but you have a roof over your head, you have food, clothing, central heating, happiness...”
“Happiness? I can’t exactly say that being a teenage, single Mum was ever an ambition of mine.”
“So you’re unhappy?”
“I’m not exactly jumping for joy.”
“Nicky, I’ve seen you and Will most days in the last twelve months. A year ago, fair enough, Will was only a small baby and Jason had swanned off, so there were reasons for you being down in the dumps, but I’ve seen first hand how you’ve bounced back from that. To me, I would say you seem happy and I would say Will is very happy, because he has a mother who adores him. Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself, Nicky. You have a lot to be thankful for.”
“I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself,” I said defensively and feeling a little upset that Simon would jump down my throat for a passing comment.
“It sounded to me like you were.”
“I wasn’t,” I insisted despite realising I probably was.
“Well, that’s alright then.”
“I’ll have you know, Simon Strong, I am grateful for a lot of things in my life.”
“Like what?”
“Food, water, shelter, health, especially Will’s health and his unconditional love. Let me see, I’m also thankful to have my Dad, even you, I’m glad to have you as a friend, Simon.”
“Even me, eh?” Simon said warmly, as if I had now been forgiven.
“Yes, even you, Simon. Don’t let your head swell up out of all proportion, but I’m not sure I would have got through the last couple of years without your friendship.”
“Nicky, you would have been fine,” Simon replied earnestly.
“I’m not so sure, Simon. Two years ago, when Jason did the dirty on me, I needed a shoulder to cry on. I needed someone who knew me, who would support me regardless of what sort of mood I was in or whether I looked like a bag of shite. I wasn’t flooded with offers, Simon, you were the only one who stepped up to the plate. You’ve been a really, really good friend to me. Thank you, Simon.”
“You don’t need to thank me,” Simon replied, a little awkwardly, as he fidgeted under my legs.
“I know, but I want to.”
“So where do we go from here?”
It was my turn to look at him quizzically.
“What do you mean, Simon?”
“OK. You just said the last two years have been tough for you, I’ve been there to help you through them and now things have picked up. What happens now?”
“Simon, I really don’t know what you are getting at?”
He was making me feel on edge. I wasn’t used to our conversations having this sort of intensity.
“Nicky, I’ve helped you fix your broken wing, but now it’s fixed and you can fly again, what happens now? Do I just set you free and watch as you fly off into the sunset?”
“I’m not exactly going to do that, am I? There’s a little bird in my nest, with his big gob stretched wide open begging for food, I’m not exactly going to fly off and leave him.”
“I know that, Nicky, but I’m asking whether you need me.”
“Of course I do, Simon, we’ll always be friends, you know that.”
“Will we? We didn’t see much of each other when Jason was on the scene.”
“That doesn’t mean we weren’t friends, Simon!”
“I know, but during that time with Jason you didn’t need me.”
“It’s different now though.”
“It won’t be when you get a new boyfriend.”
“I won’t get a new boyfriend.”
“Ever?”
I must have looked at Simon like he had been struck down by some temporary madness, as that’s honestly what I thought must have happened. This friendly, caring man had suddenly gone all weird on me.
“Simon, this is silly, I’m only nineteen, I can’t say whether or not I’m ever going to have another boyfriend in the rest of my life, but I certainly won’t be getting one soon.”
There was an awkward silence that prevailed for perhaps fifteen seconds. At the time I thought it was because Simon was digesting what I had said, but then he asked inquisitively,
“Do you think I could ever be your boyfriend?”
I should have given more thought to what Simon was asking. The thirty five year old version of me certainly would have done, but I was just nineteen years old, the art of pausing and reflecting was not something I had learnt. If I had been a little more worldly wise, I would have been more sympathetic to Simon’s feelings, but instead I just blurted out my response without as much as a thought.
“No, of course not, that would be weird!”
“Oh...ok.”
Those two little words were all he needed to say. They were the words of a man whose pride was hurt. I felt uncomfortable and a little guilty, but still wasn’t completely sure why. I tried to backpedal a little.