Folk'd

by Laurence Donaghy

  Maggie made a face. “Once upon a time is right.”

  “Don’t start…”

  “Aw come on,” she said impatiently. “I roomed with her for a year. I thought we were friends. Best friends, as you say. Huh. Didn’t take much to offend her, did it?”

  “Just me,” he said cheerfully.

  “Huh!” she said again. “You’d broken up! You’d been broken up for near a month before we started going out! And she told me she was fine with it!”

  “Really?” he said, curious. “She said that?”

  “Well,” Maggie shrugged, “that’s the impression I got.”

  “Ah,” was his reply to that, in a carefully neutral tone. He rolled his eyes but he was grinning as he did so.

  He accessed the message, and felt the room spin around him.

  Whatever he’d been expecting – some daft joke, or some dopey chain-text (she was prone to sending both), he hadn’t been expecting this. He closed out of the message and stretched across to the bedside table, replacing the phone where it had previously lain.

  They lay together for another few moments. And then it came, as he’d known it would.

  “What did she want?”

  He thought about lying. Lying would be good right now. Lying was fantastic.

  Maggie lifted her head from his chest and looked at him, right into his eyes, and he felt the ability to lie melt away. “Jesus,” she said softly. “Your heart’s goin a dinger all of a sudden. What’s wrong, Danny? She okay?”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  He could see it impact like it was a physical thing; could see it reach in behind her eyes and splat itself on her mind. She pushed herself up on her palms so her body unstuck from his and opened her mouth and then closed it again. He simply stared back at her. They stayed like that for a few moments, and he could hear some small part of him saying reach out, reach out and touch her but his arms, his entire body, was unresponsive.

  She swung her legs over the end of the bed and sat, semi-turned from him, so the eye contact was broken. When she spoke now it was directed at the bedroom wall, in a voice that seemed so distant as to be coming from next door.

  “It’s yours?”

  “…she says it has to be.”

  “I thought...” she said, and the words came out harshly, so she seemed to take a steadying breath and start again, and this time they came out softer, “I thought you used...”

  “We did...” he said, through lips that didn’t seem to want to function properly. “We did,” he repeated again.

  “All the time?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Is she keepin it?”

  He flinched at the question. Since absorbing the text message and what it meant, all that been running through his mind had been along the lines of oh shit oh fuck oh balls oh Christ Almighty for purely selfish reasons, and stomach-churning though how he was feeling now was, at least it was his life he was weighing up. His mind glanced down the other route open and it recoiled, without any conscious input. And this was going to be the hardest thing of all to say.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want her to?”

  “I don’t know. Jesus Maggie. I’ve just been hit with this! You can’t expect me to toss a coin and decide!”

  Maggie nodded, and reached for the dressing-gown draped across the bottom of the bed. “I assume she’s asked to meet you?” she said matter-of-factly, throwing it on.

  “What are you doing? Are you going? Where are you going?” he asked dumbly.

  She flashed him a look, and again seemed to step back from the brink. “I don’t know,” she confessed, and sat down heavily on the bed. There was another long pause and he saw her hands raise to cover her eyes. He couldn’t blame her for the tears, but he couldn’t comfort her either. So he sat, naked, until her shoulders stopped shaking and she stood up and tried to compose herself as best she could.

  “Go. Don’t go. Do what you need to do,” she said, not looking at him. “You know where I am. But I won’t be there forever.”

  He watched her walk out of the room and shut the door. His body twitched suddenly, as if it was making the first move to get out of the bed, perhaps to follow her...and then he froze. His hand reached out after a few seconds and pulled the mobile to him, and he brought up that text message again and stared at it, reading and re-reading it.

  Call button.

  “Hello?”

  “Ellie, it’s Danny.”

  “Oh.”

  “I got your message.”

  “Okay.”

  Long pause. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Well, I wasn’t sure how to tell you. I’m sorry if it was...”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Look,” he said, licking suddenly dry lips, “we need to talk...”

  ***

  Steve had pulled over. It was easier than dealing with the twin jobs of driving without dying and having to defend himself from Danny at the time, who was a hair’s breadth from attacking him physically. Danny, for his part, was reacting how anyone feeling their entire life come undone would react; he was alternating between extreme anger, fear and a temptation simply to shut down altogether and hope it went away.

  “You were at his fucking CHRISTENING!”

  Steve, who had started off bemused thinking this whole thing was a bit of a gag, through being annoyed at the tirade of abuse that came his way after the initial “who’s Luke?” question, was now rapidly progressing toward outright concern for his friend.

  “Lad...” he shook his head, speaking quietly and softly so as not to provoke Danny further, “I don’t know what to tell ye. I wasn’t at a Christening. Are you sure this-”

  No amount of speaking quietly and softly was going to calm Danny. “Why? Why the fuck are yous doing this?!” Danny yelled, each sentence getting progressively louder and his face going a shade further into the crimson spectrum. “Have you gone fuckin’ mental or are yous all hopin’ to drive me fuckin’ mental, what, what is it, what’s the fuckin’ plan??? Eh??? Is there some fuckin’ JOKE THAT I‘M NOT FUCKIN’ IN ON???”

  By this point there were people outside, walking past the car, who had stopped and were looking inside curiously to see what the racket was. Steve felt their eyes on him, as well as the laser-intensity glare of his best friend, who looked as if he were about to launch himself at him and tear his throat out at any second. Steve wasn’t accustomed to fearing Danny, but in addition to being afraid for his friend, he realised he was afraid of him.

  “Maybe we should head back to yours,” he said. The last thing he wanted to do now was to go to some random guy’s house with Danny in this form; he was liable to say the wrong thing and be on the receiving end of a forehead.

  “Yeah,” Danny said, to his immense relief. “Yeah, we should. Let’s fuckin’ do that.”

  They passed the journey in silence, Steve not daring to talk, Danny trying not to hyperventilate beside him, his mind racing. He could have phoned ahead, told his Ma they were coming back, but he didn’t. He felt like phoning the police, telling them there was a fuckin’ conspiracy going on, but again he simply couldn’t face the thought of it. Steve was no more a conspirator than he was the Dalai Lama.

  The car pulled up outside his house and he was out of it in a flash, throwing open the gate and the front door within seconds. As he moved into the house he could see his Ma in the kitchen, getting herself a cuppa by the looks of it. She reacted to him coming in and his expression with a frown but he ignored her for the moment; he ran into the living room.

  No blankets. No changing mat. No wee bucket of supplies. The emergency nappy was gone from the second-to-top shelf of the bookcase in the corner. Ellie’s big book of Child Health she’d got from Bargain Books for £3 was missing too.

  “Danny, what’s-“

  He pushed past her and into the kitchen, threw open the fridge. No bottles in the door. No steriliser in the microwave. No baby rice mixture packets in t
he cupboard. Each fresh discovery seemed to reduce him a little, as though he were shedding parts of himself.

  “Will you just tell me what’s-“

  Again, he pushed past her. That time would come, he knew, but not just yet. He ran for the stairs and climbed them two at a time and was inside his bedroom in a heartbeat.

  Where the cot had been, there was nothing. He dropped to his hands and knees and ran his hands over the carpet. There weren’t even four depressions where the legs of the cot had pressed into the floor.

  He threw up, suddenly and violently, his stomach convulsing and unable to cope with the panic that was pounding through him in great waves.

  A shadow fell across him from the doorway. He looked up into the concerned eyes of his mother, and he knew the time had come. Linda Morrigan lived for her grandson. If Steve had no reason to lie, his mother lacked even the capability to do anything that might harm that baby. Whatever she told him, he knew she would believe it as the truth.

  “Where is he,” he croaked. “Ma, where’s my wee boy. Where’s my Luke?”

  If there was some conspiracy going on, some sick joke, it might have claimed his best friend. Might even have gotten as far as some sort of incredibly knowledgeable clearout of his house.

  But there was not, and there would never be, a power on this Earth capable of making his mother forget about the little grandchild that she adored more than anything else in the world.

  Before she answered, he saw the look in her eyes. He knew what she was going to say.

  He was right.

  Steve and Linda had to move him bodily downstairs. They sat him on the sofa, and talked to him, but he simply stared back at them not bothering to reply to their questions. He had been through too much. His mind, finding no solace in logic, no crumb of comfort to cling to, had chosen simply to succumb to the temptation of winding down and so there he sat, dumb and silent and staring.

  When they retreated to the hallway to talk amongst themselves, leaving the way to the front door unguarded, Danny was past them and outside the house in an eyeblink.

  “Danny!” Steve called desperately, chasing him down the garden path. “Danny!”

  His friend vaulted the front gate and made for the far end of the street, his arms and legs pumping. Steve considered for a half-second doing the same but somehow knew if he attempted an acrobatic leap he’d end up with a fucked ankle. By the time he was outside the garden Danny was rounding the corner at the top end of the street.

  “Danny!” he called. His friend was already gone.

  “Let him go,” a voice said behind him. He turned to see Linda coming toward him.

  “Did he ask you? About…some baby?” Steve said.

  She nodded, dabbing a bit of tissue at the corner of one of her eyes. “I think it’s got too much for him,” she said quietly, staring up at the end of the street where her son had vanished. “Ellie goin missing like this…he’s starting to think what might have been.”

  Steve frowned. Something about the way she’d said that…

  “What do ya mean?”

  She looked at him and her lip trembled a little. “Ellie had a miscarriage,” she said, and was about to say more when emotion got the better of her and she was forced to walk back inside the house to hide her tears. Steve watched her go and stood there for a moment longer, debating whether to jump in the car and chase after his friend.

  Eventually his shoulders fell a little and he walked toward the door, but not before something caught his eye, something in the garden beside him.

  The mound had returned. Perfectly circular, raised, unblemished. Steve stared at it, a frown forming on his face, as if he were troubled by something.

  In another moment the frown passed, the crease in his brow smoothed, and he turned and followed Danny’s mother back inside without a backward glance.

  ***

  “Are you alright?” Ellie asked for the hundredth time.

  He looked down at her, lying on a hospital bed, wearing some flimsy hospital issue nightie, not a drop of makeup on her, forehead covered in sweat, with a large midwife between her legs.

  “Uh…yeah, not too bad,” he answered.

  “Right, when I tell you to push…you PUSH!” the midwife ordered.

  Ellie looked up at him. Her eyes were very blue and very clear and very sincere. “I,” she said in a reasonable tone, “am going to murder her.”

  Danny patted her shoulder. It seemed the least hazardous course of action. He flinched as she let loose with a godawful yeeeeeeowwlwwwlwlwllll of agony at his touch; but it wasn’t him that was causing the pain-

  “PUSH! PUSH, ELLIE!”

  Ellie arched her back and howled like a wild beast and Danny felt his hand, which she was squeezing, begin to occupy far less space than should have been humanly possible. He bit his lip, fucked if he was going to howl in pain for someone pressing his fingers together while she was trying to squeeze a human being out of…

  Out of…

  I’m not fuckin’ alright. Not in the slightest.

  Jesus, why was everyone so relentlessly casual about this sorta thing? Coming for one of those interminable ante-natal classes, they’d been subjected the sort of nudge-nudge wink-wink school of patronisation, the “women have been doing this for millennia - do you really wanna be the big girls’ blouse?” theory. And then they asked the Da’s present were they gonna be there for the birth and as one all the fellas had glanced at each other and then at their wives and the nurses taking the classes and realised it was one of those female multiple-choice questions that ran something along the lines of:

  Are you going to do this for me?

  A) Yes

  Or

  B) Yes.

  Successful completion of this initial question would lead to the sub-question:

  But are you doing it because you want to do it, or because I made you do it?

  A) ‘Cos I want to love, Jesus Christ of course, why wouldn’t I?

  Or

  B) Why, because you made me do it, of course! Now, I grow weary of existence - give me the shotgun.

  This was horrific. And worst of all, because Ellie’s view was blocked with the realities of the shape of her body and, y’know, the fact that she was in tremendous pain, every time a new milestone was reached, she kept asking Danny could he go down there and confirm it.

  “I can see hair!” the midwife exclaimed.

  Ellie let out a sort of half-laugh, half-cry. She turned to him with eyes full of heroism. “What colour is it? What’s it like?”

  He rotated around on his axis, hand still attached to hers, and brought his eyes to bear on the target. He was instantly put in mind of the half-second shot of Ben Stiller’s balls caught in his zipper in There’s Something About Mary. There was a heavy element of “oh fuck, I didn’t just see what I thought I saw, did I?”. It was at times like this that having synaesthesia really did seem like a fucking disability; each new sight wasn’t just experienced by the eyes alone, but flashed across to a sound, a smell, a taste…

  “mmmBlack,” he said, and moved as quickly back around to where her head was as he could without losing his dignity. It was all proving too much for even the fixtures and fittings in the delivery room to take; the clock fell off the wall with a crash that didn’t faze Ellie or the midwife in the slightest, but that made Danny almost jump out of his skin.