‘Yeah, I really promise.’ Things are not going to stay the same; they’re actually likely to get a lot worse before they get better.
Part 7
SATURDAY
Cece
11:45 a.m. ‘My name is Gareth Prentice, I’m a police officer.’
I pause in folding up one of Sol’s red T-shirts from the huge dryer pile on our bed when I hear his voice. He wouldn’t. He bloody wouldn’t.
‘I’m here to see your mother,’ he says to Harmony. I throw down the T-shirt and almost vault over the bed. He bloody has.
Sol has ‘taken the day (Saturday) off’ and has taken the boys into Brighton for lunch and to get their hair shaved. Harmony decided to stay home and do her homework. Which of course means watching television in the living room because she rarely gets to do that without one or both of the boys.
‘Has she done something?’ Harmony asks. Her voice tremors with worry and I bet she’s about to start chewing the inside of her cheek. There are also a few threads of fascination, too – she’s a little thrilled by the possibility that I might be a criminal.
‘No, no,’ his voice reassures. ‘No, not at all. I’ve been trying to get her to help me with something and I thought if I turned up to talk to her again, she might change her mind.’
‘She won’t do that,’ Harmony says with certainty. ‘She’s not like that. When she’s made a decision about something there’s pretty much nothing that will change her mind.’
This is the problem with having a big house. It takes an age to clear the bedroom, race down a flight of stairs while trying not to sound like a woman who is desperate to stop her daughter from talking to someone she did not want her daughter to ever even meet.
‘I remember her being like that.’ A pause. ‘I suppose I was hoping she might have mellowed over the last few years.’
The accent. He is turning on the accent, I think as I round the bottom of the upper flight of stairs, dash down the corridor and turn at the top of the next flight, which curls and kinks down to the ground floor. Or is he so unguarded, starry-eyed by the thought of who he is talking to, that he is forgetting himself and how he ‘normally’ speaks?
‘Are you basically trying to tell me you knew my mother before I was born?’ my very clever daughter says.
As I hit the last curve to the ground floor, I slow right down, walking quickly but measuredly. ‘Harmony?’ I call from halfway down the stairs. ‘Did I hear the d—Oh, hello.’ My voice is, I think, normal and then surprised. Especially when I ask: ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Hi, hi,’ he says with a smile. ‘As I was just explaining to … Sorry, I didn’t get your name?’
‘Harmony,’ my daughter supplies.
‘Harmony. What a lovely name … As I was explaining to Harmony here, I’ve come back in the hope you will change your mind about helping me.’
My daughter is reading carefully from the small white business card he has managed to slip her. Sly git. Even if I take it off her now, it’ll be too late – if she hasn’t already memorised his number, she will know his name, and will be checking out all online sources of information about him. And I’m sure that he will suddenly be an open book on the internet. Providing many, many ways to be contactable by the girl he thinks is his daughter.
SHE’S NOT YOUR DAUGHTER! I want to scream at him.
‘I told him you don’t do that sort of thing, but he seemed to think that age might have mellowed you or something. Anyway, laters.’ She turns on her heel without even acknowledging him again. On her way past, she hands me the white card. ‘Think this was meant for you,’ she tells me. She stops and leans towards me. ‘I think he wants to renew your acquaintance.’ She squeezes her nose up towards her eyebrows and nods. Then she heads upstairs, instead of into the living room, from where I expected her to try to eavesdrop.
I step outside, closing the door almost fully behind me, which forces him to take a step backwards. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing here?’ The anger bubbles in my words like ingredients in a witch’s cauldron.
‘You left me no choice,’ he says, not at all fearful of my anger, not at all regretful of what he’s done.
‘Keep your voice down,’ I hiss at him.
He’s about to tell me no, that he won’t keep his voice down, but I slap my hand over his mouth. Of course Harmony went upstairs. When we first moved in, she walked through the house several times, standing at different points in every room, listening. Listening and absorbing the acoustics of each area so she could work out the optimum place to practise her violin. She knows that the best place to capture every last syllable of our conversation is in the front bedroom.
‘I will report you for police harassment if you say one more word,’ I snarl under my breath. I remove my hand from his mouth and hold a warning forefinger up at him while I reach inside and grab the first pair of shoes to hand. I only have on a short-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, but I’m not sticking around to get my jacket, my keys, my purse. I do not want Harmony to hear any of this conversation.
I point to the end of the path, and push him slightly to indicate we need to go. While he walks down the path, I slip Sol’s best running shoes onto my feet. He will go radio rental if anything happens to these shoes. He spent so much money on them and they have become perfectly moulded to his feet, like running gloves.
I jerk the ‘move!’ finger left, indicating Gareth should go in that direction. When he moves too slowly, I fold my arms across my chest to show how proper angry I am, and then overtake him. I lead the way across then down onto one of the streets that bridges our road and the main road and which has a red post box that stands like an exclamation mark on the pavement. I stop there and wait for him to catch me up.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I say to him.
‘I had to see if she could in any way possibly be my daughter, and she is.’ He indicates over his shoulder. ‘She’s the living image of me. She is my daughter.’
‘She is not!’ I only just manage to stop my voice from screeching at him. ‘What is wrong with you? If she was your daughter, I would have told you. I wouldn’t have wanted to, but I would have … And don’t you dare flatter yourself with the whole “living image of me” bollocks. She looks like herself. Her gorgeous, beautiful self. All right?’
‘What it comes down to, Cece, is that I don’t believe you. I just don’t. You can’t dispute the timings. Until you tell me who her father is … Actually, I want a DNA test.’
‘You can go whistle,’ I say. Find your calm, find your calm. I close my eyes and run my fingers over my face, trying not to get any more annoyed than I am right now. ‘OK, her father is …’ I cringe every time I think about it. Every time. And when I think about it, I think about Gareth and I cringe even harder. ‘OK, her father is …’
OK, her father is a man who I should never have gone near. You have to understand that after I left the Met, I slid very fast into a very bad place. Being a police officer was all I’d ever wanted to do. And when I realised that I couldn’t, and why I couldn’t, my mind kind of collapsed in on itself for a little bit. I had made what I thought of as friends, I had met someone, you, who I knew spent a lot of time trying not to tell me he was in love with me when he so obviously was. All of that had been wiped away because I’d gone to a pub one night to celebrate an achievement.
I moved into a tiny little studio, well, bedsit, but everyone calls them studios now, and sort of checked out for a while. And by check out, I mean going out and getting as drunk as possible whenever I could. I was properly messed up by leaving that job. I mean, it was the right decision, there’s no doubting it, and, over the years, I’ve looked back and thought, What the hell were you thinking going down that career path? but right then … I still remember it, in a very real, visceral way. Sometimes, I get that drop from the very top of a rollercoaster feeling in my stomach when I think about it. The years have rolled on over me, I’ve grown up (emotionally), I’v
e grown out and in (physically) but I still can’t completely erase that falling-away feeling, that sensation of feeling completely destroyed. Dismantled, broken. It was the making of me, sure. But at the time, I was in a terrible place, wrecked almost.
This guy, Elion, was in a pub one night. He bought me drinks, we went to a club, he came back to my place and we spent most of the night having drunken sex. And then in the morning we had hungover sex. He stayed most of the day, and we both sobered up, we hung out, messed around a bit more, and he ended up staying the night. Next morning, he had to go, and I lay in bed thinking about what I’d done with a complete stranger.
I didn’t even realise for a month. And then, one night, I lay in bed, having been out till the small hours almost every night, thinking over the past few weeks, and then sat bolt upright when I realised what I hadn’t been doing for the past month or so. I had been on the Pill since I was eighteen, never missed a day, always took it at the same time every day, followed the instructions to the letter because that’s what I’m like, and then I had stopped when I left the Met. But, of course, I’d had (a lot of) unprotected sex with that guy. And then I did a test, blah, blah, positive. Have a passenger on board, blah, blah. Oh my God, what a disaster. Oh my God, maybe it’s not such a disaster. Oh my God, am I really going to do this? Oh yes, I am, which means I should probably tell the father.
Do you get what I’m saying? I remembered enough about him to find him again, to go to his flat – more than once, actually – to go tell him. And I did my very best to tell him. Because that’s the sort of person I am. I did what I had to do despite it being uncomfortable and he being one of the worst people to have gone near, let alone have all that unprotected sex with. But anyway, there you are. Do you understand now?
‘I did what I had to do despite it being uncomfortable and he being one of the worst people to have gone near, let alone have all that unprotected sex with. But anyway, there you are. Do you understand now? You are not my daughter’s father. Not biologically, not emotionally. She has one of each and you are neither, OK?’
Gareth stands and listens to my confession, my explanation of one of the most humiliating, uncontrolled parts of my life, with an impassive face. He reads my body language, he reads my facial expressions, listens to the words I use and the way I deliver them. He knows I’m telling the truth. No one would admit to that sort of messed-up behaviour unless it was the truth. Or as close to the truth as you could possibly get.
‘Why was he one of the worst people you could have got involved with?’ he eventually asks.
I roll my eyes at myself. At what else is going to have to come out of my mouth. ‘Because he was a druggie. It was so obvious when I met him. That was the reason why I had to keep going back to tell him. He was so out of his head every time I came near him that he never remembered what I said. I thought he’d remembered the last time, by the way he nodded and asked a couple of questions, but when I bumped into him in the street when Harmony was about two months old, he remembered me but was totally blown away by the idea that I had a child. Even asked if me and the father were coping with having a new small person around. He wasn’t messing around or trying to deflect any sort of claim I might make – he was genuinely surprised I had a baby.’
Gareth frowns, narrows his eyes. He’s been watching me; he knows this is the truth. Or does he? He might be good at reading people, but he knows he’s not infallible, he knows that I may be the one person who could lie to him and get away with it.
‘If he was so obviously a mess, why did you go near him?’
Another eye-roll. I have to do this, don’t I? I have to tell him everything. And get judged accordingly.
‘Well,’ I say in the soft folds of a deep sigh. ‘Well, I did that because … I can’t even believe I have to tell you this … I went with him anyway because, urgh, because he reminded me of you. I was really hurt and stressed and heartbroken and he looked so much like you and he had an Irish accent like you, and I wanted to pretend for a little while. OK? Not proud of myself for any of it, but there you go, no one’s perfect.’
There it is: the smug little smile from a man who has had his ego boosted in the most unexpected way.
‘It was only that one time, though. After that, I remembered why I wasn’t a police officer, why I didn’t see you, how you’d hurt me and why I was in the mess I was in and all positive thoughts of you went out of the window.’ Even that doesn’t stop the self-satisfied little twinkle that sits in his eye. ‘Do you believe me now, Gareth?’
Thankfully, that acts like a hose of water turned on him, and splashes him out of his fantasy world where he is a sex god, and he focuses back on me.
‘Not completely, no,’ he says. ‘I was really stupid not asking about contraception, simply assuming you were on the Pill.’
‘I was on the Pill. I’ve been on it since … Oh my … I can’t believe I’m starting to justify myself to you. I was on the Pill. I was completely stupid not using condoms with you – you could have had anything.’
Offence at the idea of it flashes across his face.
‘It’s true, I was totally irresponsible – twice. Which isn’t generally like me. Actually, it’s not like me at all. I don’t know what I was thinking, really. Obviously I wasn’t thinking. But you know what? None of that means anything except the fact that you are not the biological or anything else of my daughter.’
Gareth has that look that tells me he still doesn’t believe me. He wants to say more but hasn’t got any foundation. ‘I don’t have any choice but to believe you, do I?’ he says.
‘You can believe whatever you want, Gareth.’
He nods. Suddenly his face softens, the lines smoothed out by a deep affection, transporting him back to how he used to look at me in 2001 when we’d moved beyond simply fucking at every opportunity we got, to long, languid love-making followed by talking, sharing, planning.
‘You were right, you know, I did love you,’ he says, staring right into my eyes as though I am sixteen years younger. The look and what he’s just said repulse me so much, I have to look around to check I’m not going to step into anything unsavoury on the pavement behind me – people don’t often scoop in this area – before I take myself a step away from him.
‘What the hell has that got to do with anything?’ I reply.
‘Nothing. Everything. I don’t know. I want you to know that. In case … in case it changes anything. In case you realise that if we did make a child, it was conceived with love.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I ask.
‘I wanted you to know in case it changes anything.’
‘What could it possibly change?’
‘It could … Look, Cece, when you love someone, like I loved you, you do remember the important things about them. Like I remember, not long before we finished our training and we broke up, that you got a kidney infection. You were so insistent that I didn’t look after you, even though you clearly knew how much I felt for you.’
Like he really remembers that. I barely remember it and I lived it.
‘And I remember you had to go to the doctor’s in the end because you were in so much pain and couldn’t carry on ignoring it any more.’
‘And?’ I reply. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ I am panicking inside, of course. I know where this is leading. It is hurtling down the road of thought my mind has meandered down several times over the years. Of course I’ve had the luxury of having my mind simply wander and knowing it is a dead end because, well, it wasn’t really possible with the timings, but Gareth has spent these past few days hurtling up and down this road, trying to find a theory that fits with the one that has clearly taken over all his sensibilities. He was always like that, though: he will have a theory and will find everything he can to make that theory true. Even if it isn’t possible. That’s why that line of thought is always a dead end in my mind: it wasn’t physically possible. I am the one with access to the timings, I know my body, I kn
ow all those other things that Gareth doesn’t and I know the truth.
‘You started taking antibiotics, didn’t you?’ Gareth tells me. ‘I remember because you were so meticulous, would make sure you took them at the same time every day. Just like you said you did with the Pill. I remember that really clearly – other people kept saying it didn’t matter if the timing was a bit out, but you were insistent that it was at exactly the same time.’
‘So?’
‘So, don’t antibiotics often interfere with how the Pill works? Can’t antibiotics often render the Pill ineffective?’
‘Until thirty seconds ago you wouldn’t believe I was even on the Pill,’ I say, ‘and now it’s all “rendered ineffective”? Go to hell, Gareth. Go right to hell.’
I begin to walk away, but then return to him. Get so close I can feel the heat from his body. The heat that used to ignite heat in me but now makes me want to rage at him. I do not want this – him – in my life. ‘Stay away from me, and especially stay away from my daughter, Gareth, I mean it. She is nothing to do with you.’
I don’t wait for a response, don’t need to listen to anything else he has to say. I know what he’s thinking, though. In response to my warning to stay away from my child, he is thinking: Not until I get a DNA test.
12:05 p.m. Harmony is sitting on the third step of our staircase and glares at me with her dark-chocolate eyes, angry and betrayed by the fact I have robbed her of the knowledge she could have gleaned from eavesdropping. That was one conversation, probably of all the conversations I’ve had since she was born, that she feels she had a right to hear. Instead, I have snatched away the chance to find out if the tall, handsome policeman who came to our door and gave her his number is in fact the father she has never asked about. I wonder sometimes if she never asks about him because she’s not curious, because she’s worried it will upset Sol or because she doesn’t trust me to tell her the truth. I’ve never been brave enough to find out which it is.
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