Little Big Love

by Katy Regan

  I gave Kelly the photo back so quickly, it was like I’d thrown it at her. Her hands weren’t ready.

  “We’ve got to go now,” I said, kind of just blurting it out because I still couldn’t really talk properly, and Kelly looked surprised.

  “But what about the trampoline?” said Libby. “I wanted to go on the trampoline with you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I felt bad; she looked disappointed. “But we’ve got to go and meet my mum now.” I just wanted to get out of there. My dad met me … That was all I could think. He met me and he still left.

  27

  Juliet

  Zac sits on the bench outside the newsagent’s and stares straight ahead, his face blotchy from crying. Teagan is sitting beside him, her arm looking minute around his shoulder.

  “Zac, speak to me, you’re scaring me,” I say again, standing over them; but still, nothing.

  “Teagan, will you tell me what happened, then?” She shrugs apologetically but is also mute. “Please? Someone?”

  I need some water; my mouth has gone completely dry. I don’t know what was said at Kelly’s house. I just know that as he walked back to meet me, my son was giving me evils for the first time in his life and I hated it; it was awful.

  When I contacted Kelly on Facebook I had no idea how she felt about me, or Zac, or my parents; whether she was on Liam’s side in all of this, because he was her brother, or whether she even cared. I just knew she was a direct link to Liam and that it was worth a shot, for Zac. After all, the worst that could happen (I thought) was that she’d say no. But she didn’t; she (somewhat reluctantly, I admit) said it was all right if Zac went round for a chat about his dad. And I’d specifically said when I’d messaged her: Please don’t tell him about the night Jamie died and Liam’s part in it. I may well have to tell him, but it needs to be me that does, or his grandparents—nobody else. He’s not ready yet. It would devastate him. He knows Liam left, but he doesn’t have to know why. He just wants to know where he might be now, and also some general information about his father—I’d hesitated, my fingers hovering above the keyboard before writing the next bit, but I’d done it in the end—about the person who is, after all, the other half of him.

  She’d sent a message back an hour later saying simply You can trust me with a thumbs-up emoji, and I’d thought to myself, I hope to God I can. But now, looking at Zac’s face, I wonder if I should have trusted her, if she’d told him anyway. I knew, when I contacted her, that this was risky; that if she said yes to meeting Zac, that we could be one step closer to finding Liam but also to the whole sorry story emerging. However, I knew that I’d made a promise to Zac. And so I pushed any concerns to the back of my mind and got in touch. But now I wish—God, I wish—that I hadn’t.

  Teagan is lightly—almost maternally—patting Zac on the back now. Zac is glowering into the middle distance, his eyes still full of tears. I’ve never seen him like this.

  I sit down next to him and put my hand on his knee, but he jerks his leg away so I remove my hand, put them both between my knees, and try to distract myself with the comings and goings of the bus stop over the road.

  Suddenly Zac speaks. “Mum, you lied to me,” he says, and it feels like my bowels have turned, instantly, to liquid. “You’ve lied to me forever—why did you do that?” He shouts that bit, and then he’s in tears again. Not just little, trickling tears either, but heartbroken tears. He’s doing that awful, awful, utterly defeated sobbing that he’s not done since he was six or seven.

  I’ve dreaded this moment since he was born, and now it’s here, and it’s so bad, it’s like some pitying greater power has decided to airlift me out of my own body to save me from myself so that I don’t have to live through it, because for a few seconds, I feel completely absent. Is this what they call an out-of-body experience?

  Zac, though, is still looking at me, sobbing, and waiting for an answer. Teagan is swinging her legs and looking at the floor, probably appalled with me too.

  I stare up at the low, gray Manchester sky, which seems to be lowering itself down on me, like a tomb, and close my eyes. “Oh, Zac.”

  Everything then is in sharp focus: how he’s always put Jamie up on a pedestal; how much he loves his grandparents and how it would destroy him to know his own father was the orchestrator of their misery—no matter how accidental; how his own ideas about who his dad is, or might be, will now be smashed to smithereens. This is catastrophic. Zac is taking breaths, trying to calm himself down now, and blinking back tears, fighting them with all he has. He hates crying in front of me—but, more so, in front of other children. Even Teagan.

  Teagan leans forward slightly, so she’s looking at his face, and touches him lightly on the arm. “Should I go?” she says softly. “Do you want me to go, Zac?” A ten-year-old dealing so maturely with this fallout, it puts me to shame. I send her off to look in WHSmith for a bit and I turn to him, but he won’t look at me.

  “Darlin’, what did Kelly tell you?” It feels like I’ve never dreaded an answer more. “What did she say?”

  Zac looks at me and blinks; a tear trembles, then runs down his chubby cheek. Whatever it was, I know he wants me to say that it isn’t true, but I can’t. He doesn’t speak. And neither do I.

  I never wanted him to find out at all, ideally, but I certainly didn’t want him to find out like this. I choose my words carefully; I tread ever so gently. “Look, I know you must be so shocked right now. You must have so many questions, Zac, but I want you to know that any feelings you have—whether you feel angry or sad or both or none … whether you even feel ashamed. They’re perfectly okay, okay?”

  He frowns, confused. “Why would I feel ashamed?”

  Oh. I didn’t expect that response. “Well … you wouldn’t, you shouldn’t, but just in case …” I’m stuttering, stumbling over my words. “Sometimes, if someone else does something bad that hurts someone else—especially someone else we love—then we, because we’re related to them …” Where am I going with this? This is all wrong. I feel ashamed, that’s what I’m really saying.

  Suddenly his face kind of curdles. “I don’t get it. Why would I feel ashamed when it’s you who’s told me all my life that he never even met me? You told me my dad did a runner before I was even born, but he didn’t. I know he didn’t, because Kelly showed me a picture of him holding me on the day that my dad and you brought me to visit her when I was two weeks old. She said that Dad didn’t leave till I was nearly three weeks.” He pulls the cuff of his shirt down and wipes away a tear.

  I think back to the Facebook message. I was so adamant that Kelly not tell him about the fight and Liam being instrumental in Jamie’s death that I forgot to tell her the other story I’ve always maintained: that Liam never met Zac. I forgot to tell her there was that secret too. I can’t believe how stupid I was, not to think of that.

  Zac’s face is crumpling. “She said he was dead proud of me, that he couldn’t wait to show me off. She said he loved me.”

  “And he did, Zac! He loved you so, so much.”

  He looks at me for a long time then, searching my face, then he looks straight ahead. “No, he didn’t,” he says flatly. “He didn’t really love me. Why, if he loved me so much, if he was my dad for nearly three weeks, did he still leave me, then?”

  *

  • • •

  THE TRAIN JOURNEY home is much quieter than the journey there. Zac falls asleep almost immediately, exhausted from all the emotion; and Teagan, after playing on my phone and fighting it for half an hour, follows, her head intermittently lolling onto Zac’s shoulder and back up again.

  I try to nod off too, but sleep won’t come, so I watch the world whiz by outside the window for a while, trying to calm my thoughts with the trees and the fields and the cows, then I watch Zac and Teagan, the two of them completely dead to the world: Zac with his forehead against the glass, mouth open; Teagan with her head flung in the opposite direction now, her dark hair, which could be beautiful
if she’d only brush it occasionally, swept across her face. Perhaps if I’d been able to comfort Zac, I think, to have said with conviction, I’m sorry I lied to you, but he did love you, he really did, I’d feel better, but the fact is, I couldn’t, because I don’t believe that to be true anymore.

  In fact, if anything, him saying those words—“He didn’t really love me”—only makes that more solid in my head because he’s right. How could he have done? How could Liam have truly loved my son, if he can stay away like he has? Not at least try to seek forgiveness from my parents, to make them see that even Jamie wouldn’t have wanted this: for Zac to lose his father and Liam to lose his son.

  But Liam has stayed away. He’s never tried to seek forgiveness. And I feel an awful leaden feeling like wet concrete settle at the pit of my stomach at the thought that Zac is right and therefore this whole mission to find him is futile and will only hurt Zac more.

  I’d like to stop it, now. All of it. It’s too late for that, though. It’s already hurt Zac; and the awful part is, I know there is worse to come.

  28

  Mick

  For the first couple of years after Jamie died—and still occasionally now—Lynda said that she didn’t want any new photographs of the family in our house, because all she saw when she looked at them was the space where our Jamie should be. I used to agree, just so she felt understood. But it wasn’t the photographs without him that bothered me, so much as the ones with him, since every time I looked at those, I saw him die, over and over and over again.

  It would seem as though his face was coming closer to me—that lovely, big Jamie grin that I’d give my right arm to see one more time. And then, just at the moment I felt it was safe to reach out and touch it, it would morph into another face—a face being thrown backward, or his face with all the tubes taken out because he didn’t need them anymore, lifeless on a hospital bed. It lasted for six months after he died. If I’d have told anyone, they would have told me to go and get help. But I didn’t talk to anyone about my suffering; never have, never felt I deserved it. And anyway the visions left me, until now.

  Now they’re back with a vengeance. It’s like my mind is trying to test me—How much can you take until you snap? How close do you have to get to the edge to finally confess? The first one came a week ago when I was down here writing in this journal. I felt something sort of give in my head like a fuse being blown, and when I looked up from the page, there he was, my boy, his face coming toward me. It was glorious, and then, just at that point that I reached out to touch it—pow! It was being pounded from the side like a boxer in a ring; thrown back. A day or two later, the next vision came. In this one, I am in the pub, knocking back drink after drink. My face is getting ruddier, my eyes wilder, the edges more blurred. And all the time, Jamie is sitting at the other side of the bar, shouting, “Dad, Dad!” But his voice sounds like it’s underwater, it’s muffled and I can’t hear it very well, and anyway, I’m too busy getting drunk. I’m too lost in the booze and sweet oblivion to take any notice of my son.

  29

  Zac

  Fact: Usain Bolt is the fastest man on earth.

  I don’t even know how it happened. All I know is that I was staring into the plastic box, and that there were only three fairy cakes left.

  “Well, where did the others go, Zac?” It was just my luck that Mr. Grimshaw (PE teacher) was the one running the after-school cake sale today. He’s got it in for me anyway—this morning he made me take my jumper off to do PE and told me that his mum who is seventy-eight could run faster than me. I don’t care, I wasn’t even trying. “Did you eat them? That’s pretty good going for before the cake sale has even started.”

  I stared into the box, with the sick/starving feeling. I knew my face would be bright red, because I could feel it and it was mega hot. It was as hot as it was after dancing at Jason’s mum’s fiftieth birthday party, but without the dancing. I knew it was me who had eaten them too (and Teagan—she ate two of them), but I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t even remember doing it. I just know that I came in this morning with ten chocolate fairy cakes (they were the best I’d ever made too—not too dry, with just the right amount of buttercream; I made them with Nan) and now there were only three. I’d have got away without anyone noticing, but just before going-home time, we all had to line up in the playground with the cakes we’d brought in and help Mr. Grimshaw put them out, ready for the sale at the end of the day. The cake sales are to raise money for the school; it’s a different class’s turn to do them every month and this month it’s Dory class (my class—all the classes are named after fish). You have to lay all the cakes out on tables that we put out in the playground, so everyone can buy them after school.

  I was still looking in the box, but only because I didn’t want to look up at Mr. Grimshaw’s face.

  “I gave some to Teagan too,” I said, but Mr. Grimshaw was helping Courtney get hers out now—he wasn’t interested in my excuses.

  “And Connor.” That was a white lie, but I knew Connor wouldn’t let me down if I asked him to be my alibi. (We’re good friends now—even more so after I went to his party.) I just stood there. I wasn’t sure if I was meant to get them out anyway, or just take my three cakes home. Neither seemed like the right thing to do.

  Mr. Grimshaw finished helping Teagan get hers out (she’d brought a Swiss roll; it was from a shop and you had to cut it up, but it didn’t matter), then leaned over the table and looked at me. He was shaking his head and smiling. “All right, Zac, get out what you’ve got then. It’s better than nothing. Just, you know, try and hang on till the sale actually starts next time, won’t you?” I put the three cakes out as quickly as I could, took my plastic box, and left. I didn’t stay for the sale, even though Nan had given me a pound to spend—I was too angry.

  I’ve been feeling angry a lot since we went to Manchester. I was mad with Mum for lying to me (and I hate being mad with my mum; if you’re mad, you can’t relax and have fun) and I was mad with myself. I wasn’t mad with Teagan, but we were having a break from the Find Dad mission club. I wasn’t saying I definitely didn’t want to do it, but I wasn’t feeling very excited about it anymore, and I didn’t know what the point was. My dad spent nearly three weeks of his life with me and still didn’t want to be my dad, so obviously the magic bond hadn’t worked for us. Or maybe he just didn’t like the look of me.

  It made me think about the facts in my Factblaster book—maybe they weren’t all a hundred percent true. How did they test them anyway and how could you be sure? Who says that babies look like their dads so that their dads stay around? I didn’t know what to believe anymore.

  It felt like loads of troughs had come at once—and not just for me. Teagan heard last week that her dad is moving away to Sheffield. He didn’t even ask her if she minded, he just said he was going because Gayle from Ladbrokes’ son lives there and she wants to be near him. It’s totally unfair, though, because Teagan is her dad’s daughter—doesn’t he want to be near her? Teagan says she’s all right about it and that she never wants to see him again anyway, but I can tell she’s upset. I don’t even know if she wants to help me find my dad now. I just know that, probably, the FDM is off.

  Never mind, it was good while it lasted. We did a lot of cool stuff. If we hadn’t done the mission, we’d never have gone down the docks and met Barrel, or called up Finder Genie; we wouldn’t have got to go to the Sea Life Center, or Manchester, or done loads of stuff.

  I started to walk back home. I didn’t want to get on the bus with Aidan Turner and Luke Shallcross and everyone on it. I just wanted to be on my own and not think about anything for a bit. I wanted to get back home, have my tea, and watch telly. I decided to go a different route through the park. There was no reason, I just fancied a change of scenery, but God must have been against me, or I must have done something to make him angry at me, because then something bad happened.

  I’d got halfway across the park—I was even feeling a bit bett
er—when someone shouted, “Oi, Jabba,” from behind me. My heart kicked in my chest, but I didn’t turn around, I just ignored them. But then they said, much louder this time, “Oi, Jabba, can we have one of your cakes? Oh no, we can’t, because you ate them all, you fat lardy git!”

  I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t run, because then they’d just run after me, and I didn’t want to turn around and give them the satisfaction. So I just carried on, looking straight ahead. I wasn’t thinking anything. I was using all my brainpower to keep walking, to get closer to the other end of the park and to the street, where there would be people so they couldn’t start on me.

  “Fat Mango!” someone called then, but it wasn’t Connor, I could tell—they weren’t saying it like an affectionate nickname. “Fat Man-gooo, yes, we’re talking to you.” I started walking faster then; there was an alleyway not far away that I knew came out onto the street, and I thought if I could just get to that and run through it, then I could get to the street a lot faster, and if they were still picking on me, I could just shout out dead loud. But I could hear footsteps getting faster behind me; I could hear them laughing.

  “I don’t know why you’re so scared.” It was Luke Shallcross, I could tell, because his voice is all croaky (it’s because it’s breaking—he’s going through puberty early). “You’re so fat after all them cakes, if we punched you, you wouldn’t feel it anyway.”

  “Yeah, there’s about three meters of flab to get through first,” said another voice—Aidan Turner. “There are some advantages to being as fat as you, you know. There’d have to be, otherwise you’d probably feel like killing yourself.” They started laughing even louder then, but I started crying, I couldn’t help it, and I looked around just to check how close they were, but it was the worst thing I could have done, because Aidan Turner saw my face. “Aw, don’t cry!” He was laughing his head off; it sounded like a donkey. “We’ve got something to help with the flab. We’ve got something to help with those moobs, Jabba. You’ll be glad you bumped into us.”