We Own the Sky

by Luke Allnutt

  “Well, he’s enjoying watching his football on it and all the movies,” I said, and Anna’s mother mumbled, “that’s nice” and something else I couldn’t hear.

  I kept thinking about what Dad would be doing now. Sitting down to dinner with Little Steve and his wife. The queen’s speech and a game of party bingo.

  “And how about you, Robert?” Anna’s father said, finally breaking the silence. “Are you working much at the moment?”

  I wasn’t really, but I couldn’t tell him that. When I sold the software and was taken on by the company, I had imagined it differently. I thought I would be living off the interest, coming in to a board meeting every now and again, riding around on a little scooter and playing pool with some of the programmers on a break.

  It wasn’t anything like that. Simtech didn’t have an office anymore. There was no need, Scott, the investor, said. We could just outsource most of the programming to a company in Belgium. So two or three times a week, I sat in a conference call with Marc in Brussels. For everything else, we used email and Google Chat. I never really had enough to do. I spent most of my day writing comments on programmers’ forums and playing fantasy football.

  “Oh, you know, bits and pieces, stuff with the company.”

  I expected Anna’s father to say something, but he just nodded, staring past me at something on the wall. He didn’t approve of my career, thought I had got lucky, as if making money was a magician’s trick.

  It annoyed me that he thought we were extravagant. We put the money mostly into the house, a tall Georgian town house right at the top of Parliament Hill. There were new clothes, a car, but we weren’t jetting off to the Bahamas every week.

  “Well, jobs aren’t easy to find these days, that’s for sure,” he said, as if I was unemployed, as if I was incapable of bringing any money home.

  “And how about you, Anna? Your work, I mean,” he said stiffly, and it was unfathomable to me that they were father and daughter.

  “Fine, yes,” Anna said, and I expected her to go on, to expand, but she didn’t. She was silent and stared at an African wood carving on the sideboard.

  Before I met them, Anna had warned me about her parents. She said they were cold, strange and they had never been very close. The problem, she said, was that they loved Africa and their missionary work more than they did her. When times were good, they were like honeymooning lovers, and Anna felt like an appendage, a third wheel. When things were bad, when her father was away on one of his “trips,” her mother resented her, as if his insatiable lust for village girls was somehow Anna’s fault.

  There was a story she told about Nairobi, which, no matter how she spun it, I could never understand. Her parents would sometimes take in girls from the parish, the destitute or the troubled. Anna was expected to wait on them, not just make them welcome—she was more than happy to do that—but serve them tea, turn down their beds, bring them a towel after they bathed. She understood, she said, the need to help the less fortunate. That had been drummed into her since she had been a child. But sometimes it was as if they were the daughters, she said, and not her.

  That evening at Anna’s parents’, I huddled under a blanket in my room reading an old James Herriot novel. Even though we were now married—an impromptu wedding on a beach in Bali—we were still given separate bedrooms. The room was sparse: a bed, a bedside table and a Bible. There was no Wi-Fi or phone signal, just a single shelf full of old beige hardbacks, their titles worn away. Our sleeping arrangement was punishment, Anna thought, for our unplanned and unannounced wedding, a union that hadn’t been blessed by the church. That was the difference between them. My father couldn’t have been happier, thrilled by the surprise, telling us it was our wedding, we could do whatever we liked. Anna’s parents just smoldered.

  I heard a soft knock at the door, and Anna came into the room, wearing her coat. “I can’t take this anymore,” she said. “We need to find a pub.”

  We said we were just going for a quick evening stroll, but instead marched the two miles into the nearest town. The breeze on our faces had never felt so sweet. So intent on finding signs of life, we barely spoke as we speed-walked along the dark country road.

  The little seaside town of Southwold was dead. Only the lighthouse seemed alive, incongruous and towering over the town, its beam of light dueling with the moon. All we could hear were our footsteps and the soft sound of the sea.

  “Everything’s going to be closed, isn’t it?” I said.

  “We’ve got to keep looking, we must,” Anna said, as we turned into yet another dark cobbled street.

  Just as we were thinking about giving up, or trying to get a taxi to the next town, we turned the corner and light spilled out onto the street. A hotel that doubled as a pub.

  As we opened the door, it was like easing ourselves into a steaming hot bath. We stood in the doorway and took it all in: the warm glow and chatter of the bar, the flicker and ping of the slot machines. In the corner, there was a loud group of locals wearing Christmas sweaters and Santa hats.

  “What do you want?” I asked Anna at the bar, having to shout above the noise.

  “A pint of something, and I think I’ll have a double of something.”

  “A what?”

  “A double. I’d like a double. A double measure of spirits.”

  I started laughing. Anna didn’t drink a huge amount, and I had never seen her drink spirits.

  “Er, okay. I’m just having a beer.”

  “Very well,” Anna said, sounding a little like her father. She was looking at the optics above the bar. “Gin. I think I’ll have a gin.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to catch the bartender’s attention. “A beer and a gin.”

  She nudged me. “But Rob, it has to be a double. Two of them in one glass.”

  “Yep, I got it, sweetheart,” I said, smiling.

  We sat at the bar, on two stools facing each other. Anna drank her gin down in one and winced a little, her cheeks flushing red. She let out a sigh of relief.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, chasing the gin with her beer. “About them I mean. I realize it’s not easy.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  Anna shook her head. “It’s not fine actually. They’re so strange, the older they get. And the thing is, this is actually them being nice.”

  “Really?” I said, nearly spitting out my lager.

  “Really,” she said. “They just don’t like it here. In England, I mean. They’re unhappy and it shows.” She took a long sip of her drink. “I much prefer it with your dad. It’s a horrible thing to say, but I wish we could go there every year.”

  I knew now why Anna was so keen to spend Christmas in Romford, at our little row house, which Dad decorated with reindeer lights and a giant blow-up Santa in the front yard.

  I had been nervous the first time I had taken Anna back home for Christmas. Since Mom died, Dad didn’t really want to celebrate. One year we ordered Chinese; another we ate our Christmas lunch in the pub.

  But with Anna coming, Dad said he would do the full works, just how Mom used to do it. He got Little Steve’s wife to show him how to do the turkey and roast potatoes. He got the artificial tree down from the attic and bought some crackers from Tesco. And for the first time in his life, he bought a brown sliced loaf of bread instead of his usual white.

  From the first moment he met her, Dad said Anna was family. I always thought he might joke—got yourself a high-class lady, son—but he never did. That first Christmas, they spent most of their time chatting in the living room. He loved hearing about Anna’s time in Africa and her stories from boarding school. And she loved his tales of the taxi stand and watching football at West Ham.

  When the drinks were flowing later in the afternoon, Dad got out the photo albums and we all scrunched up on the saggy, worn-out couch.

  “And that�
�s your mom, Rob?” Anna said, pointing to a photo of her in a sun hat on Brighton beach.

  “Yep. When was that, Dad?” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t know, son. That’s when you were about seven or eight I reckon...” Dad said, his voice cracking a little.

  “She’s beautiful,” Anna said suddenly, and we all stared at the photo of her again.

  “Yeah, she is...” Dad’s choice of tense was deliberate because he had never accepted that she was gone. “Look,” he said, turning the pages. “There’s a nice one here. That’s us at Christmas. Your mom just had her hair done.”

  “She looks absolutely lovely,” Anna said. “Goodness and look at you,” she said, pointing to awkward pubescent me. “You’re so skinny.”

  “He always was. Don’t know where he gets it from. Certainly not from me,” Dad said, laughing loudly.

  That afternoon, I didn’t think I had ever seen Anna look more relaxed, more at home, her feet up on the coffee table, a can of Carlsberg in her hand. After that, we went to Romford for every Christmas, our family traditions rejuvenated by Anna’s presence. She loved those traditions, the things she said she had never had. The midmorning sparkling wine and ceremonial opening of the giant tin of chocolates. The pub for a pint while the turkey was cooking. The bingo. The party hats that Dad made us wear from dawn until dusk.

  In the afternoon, Dad would get overemotional on the bubbly and would tell me and Anna how much he loved us, how she was like the daughter he never had. And then, at almost exactly the same time every year, he would fall asleep on the sofa, just after the traditional sing-along of “Hey Jude” on the PlayStation karaoke.

  “We could all spend it together, my dad and your parents,” I said, putting my hand on Anna’s arm. “Although I can’t imagine your mother doing the karaoke.”

  “Ha,” Anna said and suddenly she leaned over and kissed me, full on the lips, and I felt a wave of lust, a pent-up desire like that urge to fuck after funerals.

  “Wow. Be careful, Anna. Definitely a public display of affection there.”

  She sat back on her stool. “It’s the gin, I think. I’m being serious, though. I don’t want to come here for Christmas again. I know they’re my parents, but I don’t want that.” Anna lowered her head, almost as if she was embarrassed by what she had said. “I missed you last night,” she said.

  “In your teenage bedroom?”

  “Yes. It made me feel quite randy actually.”

  “Really? Well, I could always come to yours.”

  “No,” Anna said quickly and then looked around her conspiratorially. “But, I will come to you.”

  I started laughing. “Are you drunk?”

  She giggled. “A little actually. It’s the Christmas cheer. But seriously, Rob, I forbid you to come out of your room. It’s much easier for me. I know the times they fall asleep, you see. I know which floorboards squeak on the landing. I know how to close the door without making the latch click.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “I’m not quite as square as you think, darling.”

  “But what if we make a noise?” I said, half joking, happily buzzed from the beer.

  “We won’t. Or at least I won’t.”

  I looked at her quizzically.

  “I went to boarding school, Rob. I learned how not to make a noise.” She smiled at me mischievously and finally got the bartender’s attention.

  “Could I possibly have another gin?”

  The bartender nodded.

  “A double, please.”

  We were a little drunk walking home. For safety, Anna made us walk, single file, facing the oncoming traffic. When cars approached, she pulled me into the shoulder to let them pass.

  On the final stretch, there was a sidewalk and we strolled along arm in arm.

  “Are you still coming to my room?” I said.

  “Yes, of course. We have an agreement,” she said, almost solemnly. She then stopped, I thought for another car, but the road was empty.

  “Maybe we should try...” she said.

  “Try what?”

  “To have children.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Tipsy,” she said.

  “Really?” I said. We had never really spoken much about children. We were happy with our childless London lives: Anna’s career; Star Wars marathons and pop-up food festivals on the weekends. Boating in the park, museums on rainy days, lazy afternoons in pubs. It was the London life we had always imagined. A world with children was still in the distant future, a future that was no more real, or no more ours, than a future that would have us living in Peru.

  I watched Anna whenever she was around children. She didn’t seem to coo and caw like other women. I saw her hold the baby of a friend once, and she cradled the infant so awkwardly, like a careless Mary in a nativity play. After she had returned him to his mother, I saw her discreetly wipe some of the baby’s saliva on the back of her trousers.

  “Yes, really,” Anna said, biting her lip nervously. “During lunch today, I was thinking about your dad and how much I love going there for Christmas. Just that warmth of being in a family. And I really want to have that, as well, to make that my own.”

  I pulled her close to me and kissed the top of her head. Loving Anna was like a secret that no one else knew. A secret you kept close to you, that you would never reveal. Because I was the only one, the only who that she let in. We stood like that for a while, on the side of the road, gently swaying in the moonlight.

  * * *

  I think we conceived that night, or perhaps the morning after when Anna’s parents were at church. A couple of weeks later, Anna called me into the bathroom. She was sitting on the side of the bath, examining, up close, in various angles of light, the clear blue line on the pregnancy test. I read the instructions, to check that we were reading it right. Yes, it was really there, irrefutable, a thick blue stripe.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said.

  “I know,” Anna said. “Let’s not celebrate yet, though. We still don’t know for certain.”

  She saw my face drop and put her hand on my arm. “This brand, by the way,” she said, “has the lowest rate of false positives on the market. I chose it precisely because of that.”

  I didn’t say anything, and she put her arms around me and buried her face into my neck. “I just don’t want to get too excited, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, and we stood and looked at the strip, the blue line now brighter and clearer than ever before.

  durdle door

  it wasn’t the water, you said, that made the big hole in the rock. it was batman with his batarangs and his blaster. we looked down at the cliff jutting into the sea, a rubber boat full of kids going under the arch, and then you started running and jumping through the grass, dodging the rabbit holes, shouting at the top of your voice, so I started chasing you, trying to catch you, and we were laughing so hard as we ran and ran, kicking up rainbow showers in the leaves.

  3

  A blue line. In the end that was all it was. I remember the doctor’s pause. I thought that the ultrasound monitor had frozen, because the little gray-white shadow wasn’t moving. I could feel Anna next to me, holding her breath, trying to decipher the shadows on the screen above her.

  “Hmm, I’m afraid I’m not picking up a heartbeat, right now,” the doctor said, moving the wand across Anna’s belly. Where we had once seen a heartbeat, an electronic wobble, a quiver of white, now there was nothing.

  She began to measure the size of the fetus. Has it grown, I said? It’s small, eight weeks, the doctor said, but Anna was ten weeks gone. So it’s small, I said, because I didn’t understand these things. He’s underweight?

  Anna did understand these things. Without prompting, she wiped down her stomach with a piece of paper towel and sat up on the side of the be
d, her eyes fixed on the monitor on the wall.

  The second time Anna miscarried, it was at thirteen weeks.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “We’re just not seeing the growth we would have expected at this point.” This time, it wasn’t just a little cluster of amniotic cells, but it had a human form, with limbs, a heart, a mouth. The baby had eyelids. That child, which had to be evacuated from Anna’s body, could have been held in the palm of a hand. Even though we didn’t know the sex, Anna later told me she had named her Lucy.

  Anna grieved silently. She didn’t tell her mother; she didn’t tell Lola, who wore her own miscarriage on her sleeve. Because that was Anna’s way, that was how she had been taught. Stoicism, above all.

  Growing up in Kenya, a latchkey kid in a poor, dusty parish, the locals greeted her every morning on her walk to school with stones and insults, calling her a white devil and a smelly buffalo cunt. When Anna told her parents, they said she was complaining, spoiled, was not prepared to suffer for the Lord.

  We kept things to ourselves. Our lost babies were our secrets. They bound us together. Yes, those secrets were devastating, but they were ours and ours alone.

  She told me everything, even the feelings she said were shameful. She thought she was being punished, but she could not say for what. She said she could not bear to go to the supermarket and see young moms because she thought they had taken her babies away. She said she did not believe there was anything wrong with her eggs, the fetus we had created together, but the fault was in her ability to carry the child. She thought she was damaged, that her body had a mechanical defect. Mis-carriage. I had never thought of it that way, the carriage part.

  Anna, however, wasn’t to be deterred. She applied herself to having a baby in the way she had got her first-class honors. We went to see specialists on Harley Street and they ran tests, tests galore, but they found nothing wrong with her. Just one of those things, better luck next time.