by Lisa Jewell
“Why not?” he said.
“Because she’s your child.”
“Yeah, well, life’s not that straightforward, is it? I mean, look at us. With our mysterious French dad and our sister we haven’t met yet and some other brother who doesn’t even know we exist and you with no parents and me with a baby with no mother. It’s all fucked up, isn’t it? The whole fucking thing. What makes me any different? What makes the baby any different?”
“You,” said Lydia simply. “You’re what makes the baby different.”
He looked at her through slanted eyes. Her answer had taken his breath away. “Not in a good way though,” he continued. “What have I got to offer a baby? No home. No job. No family. No future.”
“That’s not true, is it?”
“Of course it’s true. I’m a fucking waste of space.” The people in the booth behind theirs eyed their table surreptitiously. Dean lowered his voice. “You know something,” he said quietly. “When I first saw that baby, when they first pulled her out, she looked at me and I could tell, even then, even with her all tiny and scrunched up and blue and covered in blood and stuff, I could tell that she was clever. And when I saw that, I already knew that I couldn’t do it. Even then I knew that I wouldn’t be good enough for her . . .” He stopped and caught his breath deeply, dragged it into his lungs so hard it hurt. But it wasn’t enough. A tear left his right eye and splashed onto the leg of his jeans. He watched it soak into the dark fabric and then rubbed at it with his thumb. It was soon joined by another wet mark, and another. He pulled a napkin from the table and put it to his cheeks.
“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck. I’m really sorry, I just . . .”
“It’s okay,” said Lydia, covering his hand with hers. “It’s totally okay. Let it out.”
“Ha!” he said. “You’re a fine one to talk.”
She blinked and smiled. “Yeah, I know. I know. The pair of us. But honestly, Dean, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’ve got me now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, whatever happens, with you, with your baby, whatever you decide to do, I’ve got your back. It’s not just you anymore, is it?”
He was about to protest, to say something negative. His mouth was halfway open, full of words of dispute. You don’t even know me, he wanted to say, you don’t know anything about me. You don’t know what it feels like to be nothing. You with your big house and your maid. How can I trust you to be there for me? How can you trust me not to let you down?
“I’m going outside,” he said, “just for a minute.”
She nodded, and then she smiled and took her hand from his, letting him go. “Okay,” she said softly.
He found a small alleyway three shopfronts down from the restaurant. Once away from the streetlights he quickly assembled himself a spliff. He huddled down against a damp wall on his haunches and lit it. He was freaking out. Suddenly and totally. He’d gone from being Mr. I’ve Got a Cool New Sister to a nervous wreck in the space of ten minutes. He felt the tension lift as he pulled the smoke into his body, and he let his head flop back against the wall. He hadn’t factored this into the equation, he thought. He hadn’t factored in the possibility of meeting someone who would care about him enough to make him do something about the mess that was his life. He hadn’t thought he’d meet someone who would love him. And it was there in Lydia’s eyes, the same look of defiant intelligence as in his daughter’s. And the same look of expectation. Lydia had high hopes for him. In a world where no one had high hopes for him, where no one had ever expected anything from him, it was a difficult concept to accept.
He stared into the jagged red tip of the spliff and he remembered how he’d promised Sky that he’d stop smoking. That he’d finish what he had and then stop buying it. And that would be it. He hadn’t meant it for a moment. Not for a second. He’d said it to shut her up. He was always saying things to shut Sky up. Because the thing with Sky was that she was quite stupid. She would talk and talk and talk and it was all just noise because there was nothing substantial behind the noise. Just gas and air and bullshit. He never had to make his mum shut up because she never said anything he didn’t want to hear. But it was different with Lydia. He couldn’t make her shut up, because everything she said meant something. Because she was worth listening to. She was saying things that he needed to hear. But he did not want to hear them.
A dark-haired couple walked past him then, in their mid-thirties, smartly dressed, laughing uproariously at something. “You would not do that!” the woman was saying through her laughter. “Oh, yes, I would!” said the man and the woman laughed even louder and then they both turned and saw Dean crouching down in the shadows and their laughter stopped and the woman grabbed the man’s arm and they looked at him nervously. He heard their shoes echoing against the pavement as they hurried on and then he heard them resume their conversation, their shrill laughter rebounding once more around the quiet street, their momentary brush with the dark side over.
Dean finished his spliff and then crushed it roughly against the brick wall. He felt like a small animal. He felt like a rodent, a grimy stray, something to be scooped into a plastic box and removed in a white van, taken somewhere to be put down and then thrown away. He didn’t belong here, he didn’t have a place in this world. He walked to the window of the restaurant and he saw Lydia leaning back against her chair, staring through the restaurant window, looking for him. Then he saw a waitress appear at the table and ask her something. Lydia shook her head and smiled, and then she nodded and the waitress walked away. He saw the people at the table nearest the window look up from their meal and glance at him, anxiously. He didn’t want to go back in there. He didn’t want to eat a chicken and drink a beer and pretend that he was someone he wasn’t. He wanted to slink away like the rat that he was, back through the sewers and the underground, beneath the black currents of the river and into the safety of his mum’s house where he could just continue to exist in his pointless state forever.
He ducked into the nearest shadow and pulled his phone from his jacket pocket. He wrote a text to Lydia. It read: I’m really sorry. I had to go. Take care. Dean. He pressed send and then he turned up the collar of his jacket against the quickly descending evening chill and found his way back to St. John’s Wood tube station as quickly as he could.
MAGGIE
Maggie sat on the bench and watched her daughter push her granddaughter on a swing. Matilda gripped the bar of the swing with her two fat fists and leaned down low, her face staring at the black rubber matting beneath her, marveling as it came in and out of focus, smiling every time she looked up and saw her mother’s face in front of her.
Maggie smiled. How many hours of her own life had she spent beside children’s swings? How many pushes, how many “just ten mores,” how many cold winter afternoons and sunny spring mornings spent in that swaying, rhythmic dance? She’d known even as it was happening that it would end too soon. She’d known her children would first learn to swing themselves and then not ask to be brought here anymore. She’d appreciated every last push.
Libby had had Matilda when she was twenty-two. Younger even than Maggie had been when she’d had Tom. Libby had been devastated. A year out of university. Five months into a new relationship and only four years into adulthood. Maggie had been secretly delighted. This way, she’d thought, I might even get to be a great-grandmother. And this will keep her here, she’d thought, keep her in Bury. Not that she wanted her daughter to be tied down young, but still, it would be nice to have her around. And Maggie did love small children. She’d once read that David Attenborough had been asked what was the most incredible animal he’d ever seen, and he’d replied: a two-year-old child. She agreed with him. Babies she liked and older children were fascinating, but a small child, a toddler, a creature that had spent a year learning to walk, that was beginning to talk, that was incapable of lying or of knowing that it was being lied to, utterly without guile or malice, was a rare thing. A
precious thing. An all-too-fleeting thing.
Libby pulled Matilda from the swing and set her back on the ground. She saw ahead of her a pigeon and made after it, her fat arms extended before her. Libby turned to Maggie and smiled.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked, joining her mother on the bench.
“Oh, nothing much. Just children. Just life. The cycle of it. You know.”
“You’re getting all philosophical in your old age.”
“Less of the old age, if you don’t mind,” teased Maggie. “And, yes, I suppose I am. It’s all this business with Daniel. You know. Him being so ill, these children he’s had. All the babies. All the dreams.”
Libby looked at her curiously. “What’s going on there? With Daniel and the Registry?”
“Well, nothing yet. I’ve sent off all the paperwork. Haven’t heard anything back yet. I pop over to his place from time to time, check if anything’s been sent. But not yet.”
“And how much longer . . .”
“I don’t know. Weeks, they say. But, I mean, that could be a fortnight, it could be three months. It’s the brain, you see. It’s in his brain. And it depends how quickly it grows in there and how much damage it does. It’s not got much bigger so far. But who knows? Cancer. It’s a tricky bugger.”
“Is he still, you know, compos mentis?”
“Well, yes, I’d say he is. On the whole. I mean, the drugs can do funny things to him sometimes. And he’s a bit more . . . oh, what’s the word? He’s a bit more forthcoming, I suppose. He’s more open, tells me what he’s feeling, has a little joke. He’s more human. And I don’t know if that’s the drugs, the tumor, or if it’s just what happens to a person when they know they’re, well, when they’re getting ready to go. But he’s ever so sweet. He told me . . .” She paused. She never wanted to be one of those mothers who blurred the line between friendship and parenting. She never wanted her children to see too deeply into the reality of herself. “He told me that he wishes things had been different. That we’d been—together.”
“Aw,” said Libby. “That’s nice.”
“Yes,” said Maggie dreamily. “It is nice. It’s very nice indeed.”
“But better in a way, though? Better that you didn’t get too close?”
Maggie smiled sadly. “Ah, well, actually, I don’t think that makes any difference. Actually, I think that what’s happening now, me sharing these days with him, I think that’s making us closer than any amount of kissing and cuddling would have done. And now with me trying to trace these children for him . . . that’s not an experience that many couples get to share. I think what we’re doing now, well, it’s going to make it very hard for me when he’s gone. Very hard indeed.”
Maggie let a small tear slide from her eye and Libby looked at her aghast. “Oh, God, Mummy, I didn’t mean to . . . I’m sorry. I just thought . . .”
“It’s all right, sweetie. Honestly. It’s fine. I’m bound to feel like this from time to time. It’s all so draining.”
Libby put her arm around Maggie’s shoulders and gave her a small squeeze. Libby was not an affectionate girl. She had not been an affectionate child either, so Maggie appreciated the gesture. “Funny old world, isn’t it?” said Libby. “Just minding your own business and then suddenly, twelve months later, you’re spending every day in a hospice and helping someone track down their long-lost children.”
“You’re not kidding,” said Maggie, enjoying the strange proximity of her youngest child, wanting her daughter never to let go of her. “If someone had told me a year ago . . .” She let the sentence fade away. A year ago, she thought sadly to herself, she was falling in love.
Matilda came bounding over toward them then, her hands brown with gravel dust. In her enthusiasm to grab hold of her mother’s knees, she tripped over her own feet and landed facedown in the grass. Maggie never got to tell Libby what she’d have said if someone had told her a year ago how different her life would be now, because Libby was consumed with the business of persuading her toddler that she was fine and administering magic kisses. Instead they slowly gathered together their bits and pieces and headed away from the playground and back toward Libby’s little flat in a converted terrace near the town center.
Maggie stayed for long enough to watch Libby delicately spoon some tomatoey pasta into her daughter’s mouth and complain a bit about Matilda’s childminder. (Maggie believed that these complaints were in fact a subtle attempt to coax an offer out of her to look after the child during the week. Maggie loved being a part of their lives but she had no desire whatsoever to spend entire days alone with her granddaughter. She was not one of those modern types of granny.) Libby’s partner came home at about three o’clock. He seemed to be a bit grumpy. Libby’s partner often seemed to be a bit grumpy and Maggie had no idea whether that was because he found her presence displeasing or if that was just his everyday demeanor. Either way, she was ready to go, the flat was too small for the four of them, and she collected her handbag and headed off in her small red car to Daniel’s flat.
She didn’t linger now in Daniel’s home. It was always strictly business for her there. In, check the doormat, check the sinks, out again. Today there was a larger than usual pile of mail on the floor, including, she was inappropriately excited to note, something with a French stamp on it and a handwritten envelope. She sorted through the pile efficiently, pulling out flyers for pizza firms and window cleaners (although his windows did need a cleaning, she couldn’t help but notice). She stuffed the mail into her handbag and then went straight to the hospice where, she was alarmed to note, Daniel’s bed was empty.
“He’s in the music room,” said a large girl called Pippa who was passing her in the corridor in the opposite direction. Maggie brought her panicking heart to a resting beat and smiled gratefully at her. “Thank you,” she said. Daniel was sitting in an armchair plucking at the strings of an acoustic guitar. He was wearing a sweater over his pajamas so at first glance it looked almost as if he were dressed. His hair was neatly combed and apart from his grisly pallor and the fact of the bag of his own urine contained on a pole at his side, it seemed almost impossible that he was ill at all.
“Hello.” She smiled, kissing him on his cheek and stroking his arm.
“Bonjour.” He smiled, brushing gently at the guitar strings again and sending a diaphanous chord of music across the space between them. “How are you?”
“I’m absolutely fine,” said Maggie, taking a seat opposite him. “But more to the point, how are you? I wasn’t expecting to see you up.”
“Yes, I am vertical! But don’t be deceived. I am not always going to be vertical from now on. And getting me in here was not an edifying spectacle, I can assure you.”
“So what made you decide to come in here?” she asked, looking around at the room, which she’d not been in before.
Daniel shrugged and slapped his hand against the strings, causing the guitar to issue forth another melancholic shimmer of sound. “I heard a nurse mention it. I hadn’t seen it. I didn’t even know it existed. So I asked to be brought here. They tried very hard to make me change my mind.”
“I didn’t know you could play the guitar,” she said.
“I cannot play the guitar.” He laughed.
“Oh,” said Maggie, slightly nonplussed.
“I can play no musical instruments. Yet another regret, another failing in my miserable life.”
“Oh, now,” began Maggie, “that’s not—”
“You must stop taking everything I say so literally, Maggie May! Of course I do not believe that my life has been miserable and a failure! But I do wish I could have left this place knowing that I could at least strum a little ‘Jailhouse Rock’ on a cheap guitar . . .” He stroked the strings fondly and smiled. “So!” he said. “Tell me about the other place.” He indicated the outside world with his heavy eyebrows. “What is happening beyond these walls?”
“Oh, nothing much,” she said. “I’ve been at Libby�
��s all morning. With the baby. That was nice. Oh, and I went to your flat. There was some mail. Just the usual junk. And this.” She rifled through her handbag for the handwritten envelope. “Look,” she said, passing it to him. “It’s from France.” She attempted to keep her voice buoyant, but she knew even as she passed it to him that the letter might not be a welcome development.
She watched his face carefully and saw it tremble and then sink. He sighed. “Ah,” he said eventually, nodding his head up and down, very slowly and knowingly. “Here it is.”
She looked at him expectantly.
“It is my brother. Either my mother is dead or she is about to die or my brother is dying or maybe I am wrong and something truly wonderful is happening . . .” He sighed again and tore through the paper of the envelope with one gnarled finger. She watched him read, his dull eyes skimming the lines fast and then slow and then fast again. He came to the end of the missive and then he laid it down upon his lap and stared at it unhappily.
Maggie caught her breath, her fingers lightly touching the skin of her neck.
“Well,” Daniel said eventually, “he is coming. My brother is coming.”
“Oh,” said Maggie, who had expected worse, “really?”
“Yes. Next week. He is coming next week. And expects to find me in my nice cozy flat, waiting for him with a bottle of Sancerre and a cheery welcome.”
“He doesn’t know that you’re ill?”
“No. He does not. This is the first I have heard of my brother in almost five years. Last time we were in touch I was fit as a flea.”
“Oh, your poor brother, he’s going to get such a nasty shock.”
“Pah! No! It is I who will have the nasty shock, not he. I was the one who chose to live elsewhere. I was the one who chose not to be there anymore. And now he is coming here. To my place. Never once in thirty years has my brother come to this country. It is all too much. He cannot speak a word of the language. He has never left France, except once, to pick up a dog in Belgium. Some small thing, I don’t know, with hair like this . . .” He described a quiff with his fingers. “Anyway. No. It is I who should be worried. It is I who will be invaded.”