A Part of Me

by Anouska Knight

  ‘Who are the kids?’ I asked Carter, trying not to watch Rohan walk along the entire length of the path. The two lads were pulling chunks out of the battered little rowing boat while John Harper directed their efforts.

  ‘They’re the kids who want to ride the ramps every weekend. Ro cut them a deal. No messing around during the week, getting up to no good with the law, and they can use his set-up. Once they’ve helped him clean up, of course.’

  ‘Are they really going to try to fix up that boat?’ I asked, looking at the rickety hull of the little boat.

  ‘Hope not. If they do, I won’t be testing it out – not without armbands and a life vest.’

  ‘You can’t swim?’ I said in surprise. Carter shook his head. I didn’t press him on it. ‘Did the kids whitewash the lounge, too?’

  ‘Nah, Ro didn’t quite trust them that far, but they’re doing a pretty good job around the boathouse.’

  ‘Why did he do that? Sounds like they stand to gain more from the arrangement than he does,’ I pointed out, watching Rohan disappear beneath the balcony at our feet.

  ‘Probably.’ Carter shrugged. ‘But what’s the alternative?’

  I popped another cherry tomato into my mouth as a VW Beetle of the same colour cruised down the lane towards the mill.

  Carter tied his hair up in a knobbly bun on his head, watching the car as it drove into the yard. ‘Uh-oh. And it was such a nice morning,’ he said, stepping further out onto the balcony. I moved forward a little, just enough to look down through the open doors onto the scene below.

  Rohan was standing in the front yard, watching as the blonde pulled up beside his truck, and something in his stance became less friendly. No one said anything as the blonde got out and rounded the car to the rear passenger side. She looked up to the balcony and I nearly jumped backwards. ‘Hey, Isaac,’ she called, smiling up at Carter. She had a plait made up of a million shades of blonde draped over one shoulder. I was too far away to see if the eye flicks were still perfect.

  ‘Meg.’ Carter smiled bashfully. Rohan stood stock still as she opened the back door of the bug, scooping something from the seat there. When Megan moved aside, a miniature version of herself was standing outside the car, blonde hair flopping in every direction over her tiny face. ‘Oh, crap,’ Carter muttered under his breath. ‘You might want to close these doors up,’ he said, walking back into the bedroom. I followed him in as the familiar sounds of adult voices forced reluctantly to an even level began sparring in the yard out front.

  ‘Carter? What’s the matter?’ I asked, looking back towards the balcony.

  ‘Megan’s just gate-crashed the last of Rohan’s boundaries.’

  ‘Boundaries?’

  ‘Ok, rules. Actually, it’s just one rule, the one Rohan does not flex on. Ever.’ I frowned, waiting for more information to fill in the gaps. ‘That he always goes to Lily,’ Carter said, as if that explained it.

  ‘Who’s Lily?’ I asked.

  ‘Lily!’ Carter smiled. ‘Lily Bywater. Rohan’s daughter.’

  *

  That fuggy feeling I’d had in my head yesterday made an unexpected comeback, sweeping downwards through my stomach and into my shoes. Carter had just stunned me.

  ‘This is not part of the agreement between her mom and him. Ro is going to be seriously pissed off that Meg’s just turned up with her.’

  ‘But … I didn’t even know he had a child,’ I said, dumbfounded. Rohan was not the fathering kind, he’d said so! I hadn’t imagined it!

  ‘Well, he does. And now she’s here. On forbidden ground.’ Carter sighed.

  ‘But … he told me that …’

  ‘What? That he didn’t have a kid?’

  I tried to recap our very brief kid conversations. ‘No, but … What do you mean, forbidden ground?’ For some reason, I felt that Carter was about to burst a bubble, and tell me Rohan was another indifferent father.

  ‘Ro likes to keep Lily settled in her home life. He’s never brought her here, or to any of his houses. Too much upheaval for a little kid, he reckons.’

  ‘But he sees her?’ I croaked.

  ‘Sure. Every weekend. But only at her place. Only at Megan’s. That’s his rule.’

  I didn’t understand it, but then it wasn’t taking much to flummox me at the moment. Rohan had a child … who he did see … but he didn’t want to really be a parent to? Or did he just not want to be a parent at his own place? Is that what Carter had just said?

  Carter was watching me think it all through.

  ‘But he has all this space? This beautiful place to enjoy.’ He also had a beautiful little girl. What Carter was saying did not make sense to me.

  ‘It’s just Rohan’s way. And Meg knows that. She’s been pushing him for weeks to take Lils while she flies out with work. Meg’s folks usually stay over when Meg’s on an assignment but apparently her mum hasn’t been well.’

  Assignment. I rolled the word around my head a few times and decided that you had to be both intelligent and engaging to fly out anywhere on an assignment. I already had a mental image of Megan seared into my mind, in her denim shorts and khaki vest and beads. In just five minutes, she’d gone from intimidating biker chick to bohemian milf with jet-set lifestyle and great legs. And then there was the beautiful little toddler, stood beside her.

  ‘Why aren’t they together?’ I blurted.

  ‘Who? Ro and Meg? Why aren’t they?’

  Had I asked a stupid question? ‘I guess it’s complicated,’ I muttered, trying to undo my intrusion.

  ‘No, not really. It’s pretty simple.’ Carter scratched his hand over his chest. ‘Rohan is a bit of a mixed bag. He’d jump out of a plane just for the thrill; risk life and limb in the pursuit of an adrenalin rush; run into a burning building to save the idiot who started it. He’s the bravest guy I know, like that. But no man is without fear of some kind, even Ro. And what’s just stepped out of that car down there, well, that’s what Rohan is afraid of.’

  I didn’t follow. No surprise there. Carter read my face perfectly.

  ‘Ro’s afraid of two things, only. One, of being relied upon. And two, of relying on somebody else.’

  The voices below had settled into an undercurrent of interchanging sounds. Her voice bubbling up here and there, interrupted by excitable squeals from the little girl.

  ‘I’d better go and check they aren’t death-staring the hell out of each other,’ Carter said, traipsing out of the bedroom. I waited until he was gone before edging back to the doors, stealing a look through the crack at their hinge side.

  She had little legs, brown like her mother’s, dangling over her father’s hip. White sandals were nearly falling from her feet as she huddled into his arms. Rohan was trying to talk around her, but she was trying to put her fingers in his mouth. Megan was less at ease, one hand on her hip, the other flat on her head. They’d reached a stand-off when Carter bobbed out beside them.

  I left them then. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a spectator sport.

  Megan hadn’t stayed long afterwards. I assumed that Rohan spent the rest of his day working it out in the meadow. James had offered to cook, so I was making an effort too, and leaving on time.

  There was a reassuring rustling in the trees around me when I walked across the yard to James’s car. Behind me, I heard a truck door slide open. I hadn’t expected to see him again today, he still looked uneasy after Megan’s visit. I was probably being paranoid, but he seemed reluctant to stop what he was doing to make conversation with me. I took the hint and began loading my things into the back of the car.

  No, I was being paranoid.

  I shut the car door and turned around. ‘Hey. Busy day baking?’ I asked light-heartedly.

  He widened his eyes as if surprised that that was the best I had to offer. It made me feel insubstantial. He really was reluctant but now I’d left a conversation hanging in the air. ‘I didn’t know you had a daughter, Rohan,’ I tried softly, sending it with an easy smile.
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br />   ‘I didn’t know you had a BMW,’ he retorted.

  He looked at me, eyes cold with something I wasn’t sure I’d earned. I looked behind me, at my reflection in James’s passenger window, and felt the whispers of some sort of betrayal I didn’t understand.

  When I turned back, Rohan was already disappearing around the walkway.

  CHAPTER 21

  JAMES LOOKED LIKE an Adidas poster boy when I went down for breakfast. I hated his Gore-tex bibtights. I didn’t understand their popularity amongst the cycling community, or why nobody had come up with a more flattering design, maybe something with a bum-bag to hide the lumpy bits of the male form. Even so, I probably couldn’t blame my unease on James’s cyclewear. It was early days, but I still felt like a stranger in my own home, and this morning wasn’t bucking the trend any.

  ‘Morning, gorgeous.’ James smiled, eager blue eyes happy enough to see me. ‘How did you sleep? You were doing a lot of mumbling last night.’ He chanced a kiss at the side of my head.

  There had been lots of these kisses, gentle repetitive contact. It was good. We were on the right path then. I wondered what I’d been mumbling about, and how it had been loud enough to carry downstairs to him. ‘Sorry. Did I wake you?’ I said, moving into the kitchen. He’d already laid the table out with an impressive array of freshly squeezed juices, berries and muesli; two places set with our new Vera Wang tableware, a gift from his mother.

  ‘Only when you started yelling.’ He flicked his head just enough to shake the blond hair from his eyes. ‘Something about not letting her get too close? And armbands?’ A lightning bolt shot through my recollection. I vaguely remembered dreaming of a large body of ominous black water. It wasn’t necessarily the millpond.

  ‘Sorry,’ I repeated, taking my place at the table. James brought the cafetiere over, sitting it on a small glass mat. He walked back to the fridge, pulling on its handle when the door jarred defensively against him.

  ‘Damn it, do we have to have these sodding door locks on everything?’ he growled. I couldn’t blame him, my finger had only just healed over.

  ‘It’s not for much longer,’ I reassured him. There were still things, lots of ugly things, that we would have to talk though at some point, but not now. Not when we were so nearly there. I got on with pouring the coffees while James busted his way into the fridge. ‘Blue top?’ he remarked, taking out the milk I’d bought yesterday. ‘How can a supermarket run out of milk?’

  I waited for him to pour it begrudgingly into the serving jug he had ready on the side. ‘They didn’t run out. I thought we’d try blue for a while. It tastes better in coffee,’ I added, defending my boundary-pushing decision.

  ‘Okay,’ he said agreeably, ‘but it’s easy to forget how quickly all those added calories add up over a month, Ames.’ I watched as he brought the offending milk to the table. ‘I have this new app on my phone, it lets you log everything, every last gram of food you consume over a day, offsets it against your exercise log, then gives you your accurate calorific intake. I’ll download it onto your phone later, then we’ll see how long you’re buying blue top.’

  James watched me pour twice the usual amount of milk into my cup as the phone began trilling in the hall. ‘I’ll get it,’ I said, grateful for a chance to leave the kitchen. I walked into our hallway, barren except for a few abstract pieces hanging on gallery-white walls. James liked art, liked to collect beautiful things, then keep them all neat and tidy in their place. I picked up the phone from the hall console and checked again in the mirror there that I hadn’t made the wrong decision abandoning my hair straighteners this morning.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Amy? Hi, it’s Anna.’

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘Sorry to ring you early, but I’m going to be in meetings all day.’

  I saw my gormless expression gawping back at me in the mirror and promptly turned away from it.

  ‘No, that’s okay,’ I offered, glad she hadn’t caught me at Mum’s again.

  ‘It’s about our meeting next Monday, I’m really sorry to do this, you must be on tenterhooks I know, but can we push it back to the Friday? Same time?’

  I skimmed through my mental calendar. ‘Yeah. Sure. Is everything all right? We haven’t forgotten to tick any boxes anywhere, have we?’

  ‘Oh no! Nothing like that. I thought you’d worry, but really no need. This is good news, Amy. I just need a few more days to organise myself before I accost you with any more paperwork.’

  James had come to stand in the doorway, listening. I tried not to be distracted by his skin-tight shorts.

  ‘Okay. We’ll see you next Friday instead then,’ I said for James’s benefit.

  James folded his arms. ‘What box haven’t we ticked?’

  ‘None. She just needs to organise more paperwork,’ I said, checking the phone was down properly.

  ‘Paperwork? What paperwork? What’s the next lot of paperwork about?’

  I didn’t want to say it out loud in case I jinxed anything.

  ‘You look … odd, Ame. Are you okay?’

  Maybe. Anna had sounded upbeat, enthused even. I shook my head to relax him, but I found myself wanting to cross the hall and sink myself under his spandex-clad arms. James watched me as the possibility that was taking shape in my mind grew. I mean, it wasn’t unheard of to be matched so soon, just as James had already pointed out. Not impossible that Anna had a child in mind for us, and that the paperwork she was referring to was the child’s permanence report.

  I tried to imagine my hands holding a CPR, the chronicle of his or her life, all neatly collated for us to absorb in rapturous anticipation. It had to be, had to be the reason for the delay.

  I really needed to hold onto him while this sank in, but my legs had gone dead. James leant against the bottom of the stairs, studying me. We knew that there were lots of children waiting to be matched, but so many of them had brothers and sisters to consider, sibling groups that absolutely had to be kept together. Needed to be. James had been reluctant to adopt more than one child, so we’d agreed it would be a single child that we applied for, however long it would take for us to be matched with one.

  I looked at James. A contemplative smile was warming his face. He’d come to the same conclusion, we’d been matched. It was happening! I was smiling now too, and began to move across the hall to him, but James’s smile threw me.

  ‘Are you going to work?’ he asked, his eyes sloping off to check his watch.

  I ground to an abrupt halt. ‘What? Yes, why?’ I stuttered.

  ‘You’re cutting it fine, aren’t you? It takes you half an hour to sort your hair.’ He smiled. ‘It’s after eight now.’

  I lifted a robotic hand to feel the waves I’d left in my hair tumbling past my shoulders.

  James checked his watch again. ‘I’d better get a move on, I’ve got to be back for a call before ten.’ He walked over to fish his keys from the key dish on the console table, and laid a chaste kiss on my cheek. ‘Have a good day, baby. Don’t worry about Anna and her paperwork. Any kid will be lucky to have us, they know it.’

  CHAPTER 22

  THERE ARE FEW times I enjoy more than sunny lunchtimes in the city. The traffic seems to flow a little slower, the noises of the city are a little quieter, the birdsong a little more harmonic. Everything is hushed down beneath the billowy canopy of sun-infused sycamore leaves lining the avenue across town. We often headed to Marquis Avenue on days like these, there was a spot beside the memorial fountains just perfect for lunch from the deli on warm grass.

  I’d spent seven nights back at home. After Megan had turned up with Lily last Tuesday, I’d hardly had any interaction with Rohan. The rest of last week had seen me spend my days wondering how to strike up a comfortable conversation with him, and my nights how to avoid an uncomfortable one with James. Cyan had actually made for a welcome alternative this morning.

  ‘So, how’s it all going at Hotbun’s place? Has he been rustling up something else f
or you in the kitchen?’

  I pulled my sunglasses out of my hair and slipped them along my nose. Phil had been notably quiet on the matter all morning. ‘He was just being friendly, Phil. No big deal,’ I tried. I had no right to feel hurt that there hadn’t been much friendliness from him since. No daily stocking of the mini-fridge, no salads, and definitely no pies. He was busy, with Lily. And I was back home, with James. ‘I expected to see a bit more of you there,’ I said, deflecting her enquiry.

  Phil just smiled, lifting her chin to take in the sun on her face. ‘With a kid running wild around the place? I’ll pass. So has she been there every day?’

  ‘Who, Lily?’

  ‘If that’s the kid’s name,’ Phil purred disinterestedly.

  The city was alive with other lunchtimers with the same idea, queues of dressed-down office types in each of the bistros we passed.

  ‘No. Not every day. I think Rohan goes to her at the weekends.’

  ‘So what’s this Megan doing? Leaving the kid with him while she goes out partying?’

  ‘No, Megan picks her up every afternoon. Carter says they’re getting Lily used to being at the mill, before Megan flies out tomorrow and leaves her with Rohan.’

  Phil had already scouted a sunny spot and was steering us through the cool air thrown off by the fountains towards it. ‘Flies out where?’ she asked, weaving through the ice-cream-eaters and student tourists snapping each other on the fountain’s ornate plinth.

  ‘Barcelona. She’s some sort of photographer. Covers sporting events, or something.’ Phil had edged into the lead, eager to stake her claim on a particular patch of grass. She glanced back at me over her shoulder.

  ‘Hate her already. Is she stunning? Of course she’s stunning. He’s stunning. So why isn’t she with him? If he’s good with the kid and they’re all so photogenic?’

  I didn’t know the answer to that. So I didn’t offer one. Phil had already lost interest anyway. We ran a rudimentary inspection for anything sinister lurking on the grass before we sat down, Phil settling gracefully like a swan beside me. Her pink glossy lips drew into a smile, and I realised why she’d wanted this spot.