The Dilemma

by B. A. Paris

  Rejection was something I had to get used to, during those first years with Adam. He abandoned me so many times that it’s a miracle we made it through. It’s still with me, although I’d never tell him that. He’s tried so hard to make up for it that he’d be devastated if he knew how much it still affects me. It creeps up on me in the dark of the night, and resentment gnaws away inside me, at what he made me go through.

  The first time he left, I was convinced he’d had an accident or been murdered. I could see his body lying beaten and broken in a ditch, hear the knock at the door, see the policeman, accompanied by a policewoman, standing on the doorstep. He hadn’t said where he was going so I thought he’d gone to the shops. When he didn’t come back that evening, I told myself that he must have gone to see Nelson and had decided to stay the night, and I was angry that he hadn’t phoned to tell me. I was also sick with worry. Neither of us had mobiles – they were expensive back in 1997, too expensive for us, anyway – so I couldn’t contact him to find out where he was.

  When he still hadn’t turned up the next day, I went to the police. I could see they thought I was making a fuss about nothing. I think they took one look at our situation – little more than children ourselves with a baby in tow – and I’m sure they presumed he was having an affair. They told me to give it a couple more days, but I couldn’t believe that Adam would leave me to worry about him, that he wouldn’t have tried to contact me if he’d been able to.

  Mr Wentworth was more sympathetic than the police. When I burst into tears in his workshop, he told me not to worry, that he was sure Adam was just letting off steam and would eventually turn up. He did, three days later, and when I realised that not only hadn’t he cared enough to let me know he was alright, but that he was also unrepentant, saying that I should have known he was with Nelson, something died in me. When he did it again and again, I vowed I’d never forgive him for the worry he made me go through, because each time, there was always the fear that this time, something really had happened to him.

  I know it’s mean, and I only think like this when I remember those bad times, but sometimes, just sometimes, I’d like him to experience what it feels like to not know where somebody you love is, to be out of your mind with worry. To fear the worst.

  2 P.M. – 3 P.M.

  Adam

  I have no memory of how I got home but I’m here, standing by my bike in the garage, the air around me familiar with the smell of oil, cardboard, dust. It’s as if the last two hours never happened. All I can think about is Marnie. She must be alternating between relief that she didn’t make her connection, and horror at what could have happened. How can she not be thinking about the people on the flight, the ones who made it in time to get to their seats? I know Marnie, she’ll be inconsolable with guilt for cursing that she’d missed her flight, guilty that she’ll have a story to tell. Guilty that she has lived, when others have died.

  My fingers find my phone, unlock the screen and instinctively check WhatsApp. They’re still there, my two undelivered messages. Come on, Marnie, I just need an ‘I’m ok’. I try to call her again, but get the same as before: silence.

  I go into the house. Josh is standing in the hall, a doorstop of a sandwich in his hand.

  ‘Can I see it?’ he asks eagerly.

  Avoiding his eyes, because I don’t want him to realise anything is wrong, I take off my jacket and hang it on the hook in the cupboard.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mum’s ring. Can I see it, or is it wrapped?’

  It takes me a while to remember. ‘No, I – it wasn’t ready.’

  ‘What do you mean, it wasn’t ready? Why not?’

  ‘The size,’ I invent. ‘They forgot to have it made smaller.’

  He sits down on the stairs and takes a bite of his sandwich. ‘You will have it in time for tonight, won’t you?’

  I move towards the kitchen, needing to be on my own. ‘Yes, I hope so. They’re going to phone me to tell me when I can pick it up.’

  He follows me in. ‘Couldn’t you have taken it as it was? Mum wouldn’t have minded if it was a bit big.’

  I want to tell him to please stop talking, that I don’t give a damn about the ring, that all I want is for Marnie to phone.

  ‘I suppose so. I didn’t think,’ I say instead. ‘I just wanted it to be the right size so that she could wear it as soon as I give it to her.’

  ‘Are they adjusting it now, then?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘But did they say it would definitely be ready this afternoon?’ he insists, his mouth full. ‘I can go and get it for you, if you like.’

  I round on him. ‘Josh, they’re going to phone me. Until they do, I can’t do anything!’

  He stops in mid-chew. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Murphy look up, disturbed from his sleep by my raised voice.

  ‘Are you OK, Dad?’ Josh asks.

  I fight to keep calm. ‘Yes, fine. I’m disappointed, that’s all.’

  ‘You don’t look too good.’

  ‘I’ve got a bit of a migraine.’

  ‘That sucks. Have you taken anything?’

  ‘No.’ The need for space is so strong my skin physically itches. I head for the stairs. ‘I’ll go and see what there is in the bathroom.’

  ‘Why don’t you go and lie down or something? There’s nothing to do for now, it’s all under control. Max is coming over to help with the lights and stuff.’

  The mention of Max throws me. ‘Does Mum know Max is coming?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  I shouldn’t have said that, my mind is all over the place. Josh hasn’t been here enough to notice that Liv is different around Max at the moment. We’ve known him since he was a child, so he’s like family to us. Max is to Josh what Nelson is to me and, until a few months ago, Livia loved having him around. But suddenly, that all changed. She has this closed look on her face whenever he comes to see us on his visits home from university, and she’s been using avoidance tactics – an urgent phone call to make, an errand to run. When I mentioned it to her, she told me I was imagining things. But I know Livia. And I know that Max has noticed, even if Josh hasn’t, because he’s now avoiding her as much as she’s avoiding him. I should have pushed Livia harder about it, and I will at some point. But not today.

  ‘No reason,’ I tell Josh. ‘Actually, I might go and lie down for a bit.’ He throws me a look of surprise because I’ve never gone to lie down in my life. ‘Just give me an hour.’

  I go upstairs, and when I get to the landing, I notice the door to Marnie’s bedroom like I’ve never noticed it before. I’ve seen it hundreds of times since she left for Hong Kong, on my way up the stairs and on my way down, going into my bedroom, going out of my bedroom, but it’s never really registered like it’s registering now. The way the white paint is scuffed in the bottom right corner. The worn-down brass of its original door knob. The three small nail holes left over from when she’d insisted on hanging a little wooden sign with her name on it, that she’d found in a Christmas market over ten years ago.

  I open the door and go in. There’s so much of Marnie here. Her posters are still on the wall – one of them I recognise as an actor from Game of Thrones. Her books are on the shelf – Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Northern Lights trilogy, but also books by Jane Austen and Nancy Mitford. Her photos are on the marble mantelpiece – a couple of her with me, Livia and Josh, but the majority with her friends from school and university. Unsurprisingly, Cleo features in most. In fact, there’s a whole section dedicated to photos of the two of them fooling around and pulling faces.

  But there’s also so much of Marnie that isn’t here. The pile of clothes that I’d have to move onto the bed so that I could sit on the chair whenever I went in to chat to her, the books and magazines strewn over the floor. Her bed is unmade; there’s a cover over the mattress to protect it from dust and her quilt has been neatly folded into a plastic bag. I should at least make her bed for her.


  Pushing the silky blue curtains right back, I open the windows to air the room and see Max arriving on his motorbike. Good. There’s no danger of Josh coming upstairs and seeing what I’m doing. I fetch sheets from the cupboard and make up Marnie’s bed. After a bit of searching I find her pillows on the shelf in her wardrobe.

  Her fluffy white dressing gown is hanging on the back of the door and a memory hits me, of her coming into the kitchen wrapped tightly into it. She loves her dressing gown, says it’s the most comfortable thing in the world. It must be dusty from hanging here since she left in August. I take it from the hook; there’s a faint yellow stain on the collar so I take it downstairs to the utility room, almost tripping over Mimi as she makes her way down to the kitchen, and put it on a quick thirty-minute cycle.

  Back in Marnie’s room, I sit on the freshly made bed, wishing there was something else I could do to fill in the time until she calls. I’ve been trying not to check my phone, hoping to lessen the worry that isn’t going to stop building until I hear from her. But it’s become like a tic. I take out my phone, look at the screen, curse, put it back in my pocket. I need to stop. When Marnie can call, she will.

  Livia

  I’ve never had a facial before. The creams the beautician is using on my face smell so delicious I could eat them. But for some reason, the whole experience is making me tearful. I think it’s something to do with the darkness, because the lights are dimmed, and the music playing in the background – gentle breeze and trickling water. Maybe it’s regressing me to when I was in my mother’s womb. They say that, don’t they, that some experiences take us back to before we were born.

  The warm blanket covering me is removed and I’m asked to turn over onto my front for the massage. There’s a convenient hole cut in the bench for my nose and mouth so that I don’t suffocate. When I filled out the form before my treatments, I had to say what sort of massage I wanted, strong, medium or soft, and I went for soft because I’ve seen those programmes where they pummel you to bits. But it’s not gentle enough. Her fingers are digging into my neck, kneading away tension which isn’t there because, after my facial, I felt totally relaxed for the first time in weeks. Maybe I should tell her, when she asks me if I enjoyed it, that they should have a fourth category, stroking.

  I can’t help thinking that my mother might have been a better person if she’d been stroked a bit more as a child. I didn’t really know my grandmother because she went to live in a home when I was five years old, and we only went to see her once a year, out of duty. I think everything my mother has done has been out of duty. I don’t think there’s ever been any real joy in her life. In the photos of what should have been her happiest times – her wedding day and my birth – she looks as grim and unsmiling as ever. And I realise that I can’t remember her ever smiling, except when she greeted our parish priest on the way out of church.

  She certainly never smiled around the house but then neither did my father. Were they really that unhappy? She did seem slightly less severe when we looked through bridal magazines together, planning the wedding she and my father would give me when I eventually got married. I still don’t understand, for a woman so austere in every way, why it was so important to her. If she hadn’t made such a big thing about it, I wouldn’t have become so obsessive about having a party.

  It’s not as if I wasn’t happy on my wedding day. I’d already moved in with Adam and his parents, and when I woke up that morning, Jeannie – Adam’s mum – brought me breakfast in bed. Adam wasn’t there because he’d gone out with his friends the night before and had stayed over with Nelson, who’d been warned to get him to the pub in time for pre-wedding drinks. Jess had come over to help me get ready – we’d gone shopping together and I’d bought a pretty, pale-yellow knee-length dress, paid for by Jeannie. She’d offered to buy me a proper wedding dress but I knew my parents would be horrified if I dressed like a traditional bride, and anyway, it was only going to be a small wedding.

  I knew my parents wouldn’t come to the pub, so there were just the nine of us – me and Adam, Jeannie and Mike, Adam’s sister, Izzy, and her husband Ian, Nelson, Rob and Jess. It had been a happy couple of hours. To Adam’s disgust, Ian played soppy song after soppy song from the jukebox playlist.

  ‘Can’t we have a bit of Aerosmith or Queen?’ he’d groaned. ‘Bob Dylan, James Brown, even?’

  Ian had laughed. ‘How about this?’

  ‘Unchained Melody’ had come on and Adam and Nelson had covered their ears until Ian pushed Adam and I together and insisted we slow-dance while they all sang along. By the time the song finished I was in tears, not just of laughter but also because Adam had stopped fooling around and as we danced, had held me tight and murmured promises of how he would love me forever. Even though Adam hates it, ‘Unchained Melody’ has become ‘our’ song.

  My parents didn’t turn up at the registry office, which brought fresh tears to my eyes. But it struck me recently that I’d never really put myself in my mother’s position. It must have been a huge shock when she realised I was pregnant, and although our lives and experiences are very different, I know now that sometimes, when you’re least expecting it, your children can throw you a massive curveball.

  I was at work when the call came through. It was Marnie. She was home from university for the summer holidays, working at Boots to earn some money before leaving for Hong Kong at the end of August.

  ‘Mum, are you busy?’

  ‘Well, yes, I’m expecting clients any minute now.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Why, what’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t feel well.’

  ‘Are you at work?’

  ‘No, I didn’t go in. I don’t suppose you could come home, could you?’

  ‘What, now?’ My meeting wouldn’t take more than an hour and I hoped that Marnie could wait until it was over.

  ‘Yes. I really don’t feel well, Mum.’

  ‘Are you being sick?’

  ‘Yes. No. Mum, could you just come home, please.’ For the first time, I caught the panic in her voice and all sorts of terrible illnesses flew through my mind, from a violent stomach bug right through to meningitis.

  ‘How bad is it, Marnie?’ I asked, already on my feet. ‘Do you need an ambulance?’ I kept my voice as calm as I could but the word ambulance brought worried looks from my colleagues.

  ‘No, I’ll be fine until you arrive. Can you leave now?’

  I caught Paula’s eye and she paused, watching me. ‘Yes, I’ll be home in twenty minutes. Is that OK?’

  ‘Yes.’ I heard her voice break. ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  In fact, I was home in less than ten minutes because Paula insisted on driving me rather than letting me walk, as I usually did.

  ‘Promise to let us know how Marnie is,’ she said, as I got out of the car.

  ‘It’s probably that bug we were talking about. Apparently, it’s pretty nasty.’

  I expected to find Marnie lying on the sofa in the sitting room, but her anguished ‘Mum!’ drew me upstairs to the bathroom where I found her sitting on the floor, bleeding heavily. It took me a moment to realise she was having a miscarriage.

  Later, at the hospital, once everything was over, there was so much I wanted to ask her – and so much I was beginning to understand. When she’d first been accepted to study in Hong Kong, she was ecstatic. By the time she came home for the Easter holidays, a couple of months later, she was telling us that she wasn’t sure she wanted to go.

  ‘Why not?’ I’d asked, amazed that she was thinking of giving up such a wonderful opportunity.

  ‘It’s so far away.’ We were having lunch at the time and she stabbed a potato half-heartedly with her fork. ‘I wouldn’t be able to come home for nine months.’

  ‘If you were really homesick, we could see about you coming home for Christmas,’ Adam said, and I flinched because I knew tickets at that time of the year would cost over a thousand pounds. He looked back at me, a look that said, Once she’
s there, she’ll be fine. For now, she’s got cold feet and needs a safety blanket. ‘But isn’t it too late to back out now?’ he went on.

  ‘I’m sure there are plenty of students who’d be willing to take my place,’ she said, pushing at the potato.

  ‘Are you serious, Marnie? Do you really not want to go?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just that I’m enjoying uni so much.’

  Even though her head was bent over her plate, I saw her cheeks flush and wondered if she had a new boyfriend. But Marnie had never been shy about introducing boys she was dating to us, so I really did think it was a case of cold feet – until I was sitting next to her in the hospital.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

  ‘Tired. Sad.’ She looked at me and there was so much pain in her eyes that my throat closed. ‘Relieved,’ she added guiltily.

  ‘Had you been feeling ill for a while?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. I meant relieved because now I don’t have to make a decision. I don’t think I’d have been able to keep the baby.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I know that’s an awful thing for you to have to hear when you kept Josh. But you had Dad. I wouldn’t have had anyone.’

  ‘You would have had us, you’ll always have us,’ I told her gently. ‘We would never have tried to persuade you one way or another, just made sure you knew what your options were.’ I hesitated. ‘The father – did he know you were pregnant?’

  She nodded, spilling tears from her eyes. ‘Yes. But he made me understand that I wouldn’t be able to keep the baby, that it wasn’t the right time for us.’