If I Die Before I Wake

by Emily Koch

  ‘You don’t want me to waste your paper,’ I said, panicking.

  Rick struck a pose next to the ladder, one hand on his hip. ‘I think you’ll find I’m quite easy to paint, old boy.’

  How had I got myself into this situation? I couldn’t draw a circle without making a mess of it. I suddenly felt very light-headed – it must have been the paint fumes.

  ‘I find that you can tell a lot about a man from the way he paints,’ Rick said, looking me in the eye from across the room.

  Shit. He was really going to make me do this.

  ‘Beatriz is our only child, you know,’ Rick said.

  I nodded at his non sequitur. Instead of working out how to reply, I painted an egg shape for his head, in the middle of the page. He had only given me blue and yellow paint, which put me at an immediate disadvantage in creating a realistic portrait.

  ‘She’s talented,’ he went on. ‘She should really be focusing on more creative projects. Not this newspaper illustration work.’

  I used yellow for the A-shaped frame of the ladder next to Rick’s floating egg-head.

  ‘Do you think she should make a go of her own stuff – look into that graphic novel idea?’ he asked, casually.

  There was clearly only one answer, but I didn’t want to give it just to impress him.

  I painted in the rungs of the ladder as I spoke, slowly. ‘I think she should work on it, yes. But she is really good at the newspaper commissions.’ The ladder now had about twenty rungs – at least three times too many. ‘Perhaps she could do both.’

  I risked a glance up at him: he was still staring right at me. He changed tack. ‘Could your salary support her?’

  Christ alive. No, was the short answer. Before I could reply, Rick started to say something else, but stopped himself. ‘Hmm.’

  And then I got it: I was being sized up for an entire future with Bea. We’d been together for a year, but this was a serious man-to-man chat. I stood there holding my dripping paintbrush, like an idiot.

  At that moment, Megan and Bea walked in, laughing at Rick’s efforts to wind me up by insisting on a portrait, and saving me from what had rapidly descended into a very awkward conversation. At the time, it seemed odd. But when I told Tom about it later that week, I couldn’t help but crack up as I recounted my embarrassment. The rest of the weekend had been fine, Rick was perfectly pleasant and didn’t mention Bea’s career again or that she was their only, precious child. He’d just been having a bit of fun making me paint him, putting me on the spot – father’s prerogative and all that. Hadn’t he?

  Now I saw it all differently. I remembered his stance by the ladder, hand on his hip, shoulders square to me. Trying to make me look ridiculous at the easel.

  He had never liked me. Not even back then.

  14

  BEA HAD GOT truly angry with me only twice before in our relationship. Of course, we’d had our shouting matches, and plenty of bickering. But those two times, when her furiousness peaked, it was different. The control she exerted over her rage terrified me. The first time was when I told her about my night with Josie. The second was on the anniversary of Mum’s death, about three years ago.

  I had made the last-minute decision to take the day off work. Bea had meetings all day and was going for a drink with Tom in the evening to advise on some kind of graphic he needed for work. Did I want her to cancel so I wouldn’t be on my own? No, I told her – I planned to go for a walk, maybe put pink lilies on Mum’s grave. Her favourites.

  But after she went out, I suddenly had a better idea. There was a cluster of bouldering problems I’d never tried at Oxwich Bay in the Gower, where we used to go camping when I was a kid. I remembered watching a woman ride a horse along the water’s edge on that beach when I went for a walk with Mum. Building sand castles with Philippa, and burying Dad up to the neck of his ‘Geology Rocks’ T-shirt that we’d bought him for his birthday. I checked the tides: they would be at their lowest around one o’clock – perfect for me to spend a few hours scaling the large rocks at the foot of the cliffs. I got in my car and set off for a day of climbing, in a place Mum had loved.

  The day’s beauty stunned me: a salty winter breeze blew in off the sea, the sun shone and the skies glowed blue. When I arrived at the beach, I went to check my phone in my rucksack, but couldn’t find it. I must have left it at home. It didn’t matter, I thought. I would make sure I arrived back in the flat before Bea missed me.

  It didn’t work out quite like that. On the drive home, my car broke down. I sat on the hard shoulder of the M4 near Cardiff for ages, waiting to be rescued – it was a busy afternoon, the call handler explained, when I’d walked half a mile to the nearest emergency phone. At seven o’clock I finally managed to get hold of Bea, by borrowing the recovery driver’s mobile. She burst into tears when she picked up and heard me. ‘Where have you been? I’ve tried calling you about twenty times.’ Her voice was shaky. ‘I saw you’d taken your climbing shoes. I was starting to think something awful had happened.’

  Another couple of hours later when I walked in the door she took one look at me and walked out of the living room into our bedroom, closing the door gently. No slam. I left her there for a few minutes, unsure what tactics to employ. Then I knocked softly, and went in. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor by the radiator, reading her book, looking quite content. I was bewildered. She looked beautiful. I wanted to pick her up, hold her, kiss her. But something told me I wasn’t welcome. She put her book down, took her glasses off and tilted her head up towards me.

  ‘You didn’t need to change your plans,’ I said.

  ‘For some reason I didn’t feel like it after two hours going out of my mind with worry.’

  ‘Look, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to leave my phone. I thought I would be back.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have left a note?’

  ‘I should have done. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I called Eleanor, I called everyone. No one knew where you’d gone.’

  I bit my lip. She was overreacting, but now wasn’t the time to say so.

  ‘You know I hate it when you go climbing on your own,’ she said. Rage was boiling underneath the calm surface.

  ‘I was only bouldering – you know I don’t need to go with anyone else to do that. I wasn’t going high. A few metres at most. It wasn’t dangerous. I took my crash pad.’

  ‘Did you take a helmet?’

  ‘I don’t need a helmet.’

  ‘You know what your problem is? You think you’re indestructible. You think nothing can hurt you. It’s pure selfishness.’

  ‘I’ll always make sure I take my phone with me, from now on. I’ll make sure it’s the first thing I pick up.’

  ‘Your dinner’s in the bin, if you’re hungry.’ She put her glasses back on, returned to her book, and refused to talk to me for two days.

  The next time I found myself on the receiving end of a similar level of carefully measured rage was here, in this room – a few days after the visit with her parents. She hadn’t been in for a while, presumably because she was busy entertaining them. I should have expected it earlier, but I’d forgotten all about the letter.

  I hardly had time to notice her presence before she slapped the side of my face. Hard.

  It hurt – but like any touch from her, I wanted more, to make me feel alive. I inhaled the scent of the lavender hand cream that had transferred from her skin to mine.

  ‘That,’ she whispered into my ear, ‘is for cheating on me again.’

  Again?

  Chair legs scraped to my left. I had no idea where this was going. Blood pumped in my ears, so loud I feared I wouldn’t be able to hear her explain. The lavender smell crawled down from my nose to my tongue and I felt like throwing up.

  ‘How could you do this to me?’ she hissed. I heard the rattle of keys, pens, her purse, as she looked through her bag.

  ‘It’s a good job, isn’t it? A good job that I haven’t been sat here like a mug, d
ay in, day out, for a year and a half. Waiting for my loving, faithful boyfriend to wake up. Because that would be tragic, wouldn’t it?’ She laughed.

  I don’t understand.

  ‘How long did it go on for?’

  The chair scraped again and I listened to her footsteps as she walked away from me.

  ‘And a baby? Christ.’

  A baby.

  ‘And here I am, refusing to even think about anyone else.’

  Her hand smacked the wall.

  A baby.

  Her words triggered a half-formed memory in my mind.

  ‘I need explanations and I’m never going to get them.’

  I heard paper rustling.

  The letter.

  You found the letter.

  ‘Let’s have a look what she says, shall we?’

  As she read, I saw the typewritten words before my eyes, just as I had when I opened that envelope, so many months earlier.

  Dear Alex,

  You will pay for breaking my heart twice over.

  We deserved better than you.

  I hadn’t thought of those words for so long. Had I even remembered the letter since being in hospital?

  ‘And then this photo with it,’ Bea spat. ‘A baby. I—’

  I know it looks bad.

  It wasn’t what it seemed, but how could she know that? I felt nearly delirious with the desire to break free and hold her.

  ‘Here are my questions. One. Who sent this to you? Two. How long were you seeing her for? Three. Was it one of the girls at work? Do I know her? Four. The baby. How old is it? I can’t tell when this was taken.’

  She breathed heavily and jaggedly.

  ‘I bet it’s that girl – Josie, wasn’t it? You told me you didn’t sleep with her. Was that a lie?’

  She paused, leaned forward again, and spoke in a slow, deliberate whisper into my ear: her lips so close that I could feel the moistness of her breath, her glasses butting up against the side of my head. ‘How. Could. You. Do. This. To. Me?’

  I had received the letter and photo not long before my accident. It was posted to our flat. The idea that someone was telling me I was a dad had sent me into shock. It was all I could think about. Did I really have a kid? What was I supposed to do with that information? And who was the mother? Since I had been with Bea, I had barely looked at another woman. Could it be Josie, like Bea said? I couldn’t remember my night with her, but she’d told me we hadn’t had sex – and there was no reason for her to lie. Or was it one of my girlfriends or one-night stands from the first couple of years of uni, before Bea and I started seeing each other? It didn’t make any sense. Why wait so long to contact me, in such a strange way? I tried to piece the memories together as I lay in my bed and Bea sat next to me, silent.

  The problem was, I couldn’t remember all of them. I’d probably been with about ten, maybe fifteen girls in that time. It could have been any one of them. Although I had always been careful, there had definitely been a few girls who told me I didn’t need to worry about a condom. I couldn’t remember which ones they were. I’d been so stupid. There were some pretty girls at the university climbing club, and others who came to the inter-university events. But I wasn’t interested in anything more serious than a few nights of fun, maybe a couple of dates here and there.

  When the letter came, the one name that kept coming back to me was Clare, the barmaid at the Union with the dark fringe and big eyes. I’d been on more dates with her than with most of the others. She was clingy, and she’d flipped out when I stopped returning her calls – she’d turned up my flat. I’d come home from lectures one day to find my flatmate John sitting with her on the sofa, comforting her while she cried and said she had been sure I was different to the other arseholes she had dated. She’d found out that I’d been texting another girl who worked behind the bar – I definitely wasn’t the model gentleman back then. Looking back, I think I was in love with Bea all that time, and probably overcompensating for not being with her by bedding any girl I could get to talk to me for more than ten minutes. It was my way of saying to myself, I don’t care about her, it doesn’t matter that I’m not with her, I can have whoever I want. I pretended to myself that she was just a friend. And she didn’t like climbing. It would never work. Now, I wished I hadn’t been so stubborn and cowardly. If I’d been with Bea, I would never have been with all those girls, and there would be no letter.

  I remembered that when I received it, I had planned to contact old uni friends, see if anyone knew any of my exes, any of the girls we used to hang out with at the climbing walls, and whether they had children.

  I had wanted to talk to Tom about it – did I talk to him? I couldn’t remember. Had he told anyone? I tried to bring to mind his reaction. I thought I could remember a look of disapproval, but I could have been confusing it with when I had told him about my past recklessness with Josie – he was very fond of Bea. Maybe I had never got round to finding the right moment to show him the letter. Those weeks before I fell remained hazy.

  I definitely remembered that I was going to try and track Clare down, if John could help me remember something more about her. I was going to see what had happened to Josie.

  ‘I’ve been holed up in the flat since Mum and Dad left. I’m trying to avoid going out more than I absolutely have to. So I decided to tidy through your stuff, your paperwork in the cupboard.’

  I could see the pile. I had slipped the letter into the middle to hide it.

  ‘The envelope is postmarked 1st August. You had weeks to say something. If you’d explained right then, maybe …’

  I hadn’t wanted to worry her, not until I knew what it meant. Had I really got someone pregnant? How was I going to break that to her? Would she believe that it must’ve happened before we were together? She’d made it very clear to me after Josie: one more chance. I should have shown her straight away. If it was Clare, then perhaps Bea wouldn’t have been too angry – but if it were Josie … Maybe, if I’d had just a couple more days before my accident, I would have summoned the courage.

  Since the slap, Bea hadn’t touched me. Her voice stiffened into a distant coldness. How could this be happening?

  ‘Maybe you got back together with her, whoever she is – after you got the letter. Has she been visiting you, too?’

  No, that’s not what it’s like.

  ‘God, my dad would hit the roof if I told him about this.’

  So don’t tell him.

  ‘I don’t know what I would have done, if you’d told me when you had the chance. Would I have stayed? Probably not. So where does that leave me?’

  I heard Bea pick up her bag. ‘Where the fuck does it leave me?’ She hissed the words and let them hang as she stood there. The door closed with a click. No slam.

  I honestly didn’t know if she would ever come back.

  She didn’t visit the next day, but Dad did.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ he asked, after I heard him limp in and awkwardly lower himself into the chair next to me. ‘Bea came over last night, interrupted me and Philippa having dinner. This letter.’

  Bea, Dad, Philippa – everyone was going to think I was a lying philanderer at this rate. It was killing me not to be able to explain myself.

  ‘I told her it would be a mistake. You can’t have a child. I would know. It’s probably a prank. One of your friends.’

  I don’t know.

  ‘Bea was asking if we knew anything, and if I had any other paperwork of yours still in the loft. I tried to tell her to stop, but she says she’s going to start contacting all your old friends.’

  He sniffed. Blew his nose.

  ‘I’m worried about her. She looks ill. Tired. She was jumpy – not herself at all. When she left she asked if I’d walk her to her car.’

  As I listened, I felt liquid dripping from my nose, running down my skin to my lips.

  ‘Philippa said—’

  The door clicked open. ‘Cuppa, Graham?’ I heard Pauline ask.
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  ‘No, no. I don’t think so. Not right now. Thank you.’

  ‘If you’re sure, my love.’

  ‘Don’t want to trouble you,’ Dad said quietly as the door clicked shut again.

  He wiped at my nose with his handkerchief. For a moment I could smell him intensely. His soap, the strong alcohol of his aftershave. Leather.

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘We talked about other things, too.’ He paused. ‘We talked about how you wouldn’t want … this.’

  Another sniff. The jingle of coins in his pocket, and then the flick of him flipping one with his thumb, the slap as he clasped it against the back of his hand when it landed.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to be kept alive like this.’ Flick, slap. Flick, slap.

  My whole body strained. What are you saying?

  ‘Diane would know the right thing to do,’ he said. ‘I can’t have quite the same conversations with your sister. It would just be nice, sometimes, to have someone to talk to about it.’ A couple more flicks and slaps. Then the jingle of his pocket, as he presumably deposited his coin back with the others.

  ‘Bea still thinks it’s too early. She said, not until she finds out the truth about this letter.’

  Let me go, Bea.

  ‘I told her, that’s not reason enough to keep you alive.’

  You’re going to do it? Thank you. Thank you, Dad.

  Elation flooded my body, like a drug.

  ‘It’s the only thing she and your sister have ever agreed on, I think,’ he said. ‘Philippa refuses to talk to me about it, she says I’m giving up on you.’

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that Philippa wanted to keep me alive, after the way I had heard her talking to the doctors about doing their utmost to make me better. But for some reason I’d assumed it would be the other way round. Given how distant our relationship now was, I thought Philippa would be the practical one, trying to persuade my dad that the time had come to let me go. I could imagine her putting on her stern lawyer voice to convince him, maybe even bringing up other cases to show precedent for the best thing to do. I couldn’t envisage the scenario of Dad trying to talk her round.