Feels Like Maybe

by Claire Allan

  “You didn’t have to. You’ve made it patently obvious what you think of her, of me. I don’t even know why I bothered to come here and tell you.” I held my child to me. “I’m going to talk to Daddy.”

  And I stalked out, leaving my mother sitting there, her mouth gaping open, stunned into silence.

  *****

  When I was growing up, if I was ever asked who my childhood hero was, my answer was fairly predictable. Depending on the time of year and how many times I had sat through Star Wars, I would answer either Princess Leia or my daddy. Yes, my father had the ability to supersede Leia and her buns of steel in my estimation. That was no mean feat.

  We did a lot together when I was wee. Although he had Joe – his perfect son and heir – Daddy always took time out to be with me. He treated me like his princess and I put him so high up on a pedestal that there was no chance he could realistically get off it without injuring him or me as I stood gazing up at him.

  We would walk together, sing together, read stories together. I was his shadow and he was this big, cuddly bear of a man who made me feel completely and utterly loved.

  He didn’t look like so much of a cuddly bear that day in the kitchen. Although I had only grown to a fairly unimpressive 5’6”, Daddy looked small to me. And thinner.

  He was standing, staring out the window at his garden, watching the branches of the crab-apple tree sway in the wind. I remembered when he planted that tree and how I had cried myself to sleep when I wasn’t allowed to eat the fruit that fell from it.

  “Daddy,” I said. Funny how I still called him Daddy. Mum had long since lost her Mammy or Mummy titles, but Daddy could never be called by anything else.

  He moved, just a little, on hearing his name.

  “Daddy, don’t you want to meet Maggie?”

  He sighed and slowly started to turn towards me. “Your mother’s heart is broken,” he said.

  “I know. I didn’t mean to.”

  “I know, Aoife, but how could you do this to us?”

  “I thought you would be angry. I thought I could make it better. That it would sort itself out.”

  He looked straight at me, his eyes misty with tears. “We could have been there for you, Aoife. We could have helped.”

  I nodded, ashamed to the core of my being. Daddy wasn’t angry. He was hurt and confused – but he wasn’t angry with me.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered, head cast downwards.

  “She’s a wee gem, Aoife. Reminds me of you when you were a newborn.” He reached out and I instinctively handed her over. She would be safe with him. He would never hurt her. He would never think badly of her. She would be his princess too.

  “I don’t want to know whatever you don’t want to tell me,” Daddy said. “Who the father is, all that nonsense. It’s your business. Tell me if and when you want, but don’t ever keep this little one from us again.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry, Daddy.” It was all I could say and it didn’t seem enough.

  He moved towards me, kissing my forehead gently. “I know you are, darling.”

  *****

  Maggie had enjoyed her first taste of Cow & Gate Formula, which was just as well because the wine I had enjoyed with Anna had gone straight to my head. God, before I got pregnant I could have had buckets of the stuff (and frequently did). Now one glass and I found myself lying in bed, the room swimming ever so slightly around me.

  “It’ll be all the excitement of the day,” Anna said, pouring a second glass of Pinot Grigio for herself.

  “Excitement?” I rolled my eyes, then winked.

  “Ach, you know what I mean. The nerves, the travelling, the build-up. You fecking lightweight!” She laughed, throwing her hair back. She looked so much younger, so much more alive than Mum. How was that possible? There were only five years between them. It might as well have been twenty-five.

  “It’s been a mad week,” I conceded as I yawned over the Pringles.

  “Look, get yourself on to bed. I’ll look after madam tonight. If she is on the bottle anyway you can get a great sleep. Your boobs will be like footballs in the morning, but the sleep will be worth it.”

  The thought of ten hours uninterrupted sleep seemed like heaven. After months of waking every hour on the hour to pee followed by the feeding demands of my daughter I figured it had been at least four months since I’d slept soundly. For ten hours I could pretend my life hadn’t been turned upside down entirely. Someone was finally taking some of the responsibility off my shoulders and it felt good.

  “Okay. You’ve twisted my arm,” I said, rising to my feet and kissing Anna on the cheek. I then leant over the Moses basket. “Be a good girl, Princess. I love you,” I whispered before climbing the stairs and curling up in bed.

  I was just starting to fade out of this reality into another and more favourable domain where I had no stretch marks, an intact perineum and a mother who loved me when my mobile phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “How did it go honey?” Beth asked.

  Damn, I knew I should have phoned her. She would have been worried sick.

  “Well, they stopped just short of treating me to a chorus of ‘Love Child’,” I said.

  “So it went well?”

  “Yes and no. Joe was okay – well, okay for Joe which is a start. Mum is disgusted. Daddy is upset, but he loves me and he adores Maggie.”

  “A good start then?”

  I stifled a yawn. “Not the worst.”

  “You sound tired, will I let you go?” Beth asked.

  “Sorry. I’m a bloody lightweight. I’m telling you, B, make the most of your wine and song now because once children come along you’ll lose all street cred. Would you believe I’m already in bed? How sad is that?”

  “Not sad at all. You’ve only given birth.”

  “Still, I’m thirty-one not fifty-one. Beth, you are so right waiting to start your family. Don’t get me wrong, I love Maggie. You know I love her, but I don’t see me ever getting a life back.”

  “Maybe not your old life,” Beth replied. “But a different kind of life. It doesn’t have to be worse.”

  “S’ppose,” I answered. “Night night, honey. Tell Dan I said hi.”

  “Will do. And give Maggie a kiss from us.”

  “Will do.”

  She seemed to hesitate before hanging up. The silence was there but I couldn’t resist breaking it. “Beth, hang on. I hate to ask but has Dan heard anything from Jake?”

  She paused. “Sorry, honey.”

  We both sighed and then we hung up. I rolled over and closed my eyes, trying to block out everything that had happened that day. I imagine Beth went out to a swish wine bar and drank her bodyweight in Chardonnay. The lucky cow wouldn’t even have had a hangover the next day.

  

  Chapter 16

  Aoife

  By the time I’d walked into town I was soaked through. The fleece jacket I’d pulled on wasn’t all that great at keeping out the bitter Derry rain. I know I’d looked a disaster when I walked into Jackson’s, pulled up a seat at the bar and ordered a double vodka and Coke.

  I didn’t care. I don’t think I’d ever felt as wretched in my life as I did at that moment. This was worse – much worse – than giving birth alone, than being dumped the day I found out I was pregnant, than having my mother look at Maggie as if she were nothing.

  Anna was annoyed with me. My one ally here at home had turned against me and to make it all worse I’d even turned against my own daughter. What kind of mother did that make me?

  I loved Maggie. I knew I loved her with every fibre of my heart but life was easier without her. Yes, my family had been highly dysfunctional but at least we were all equally responsible for that. Now it seemed like it was more or less all down to me and I didn’t like that burden. I hadn’t asked for any of this. I wanted children some day – not now, not like this. No amount of love for my child could change that. Right person, wrong time.

  I lifted th
e glass to my lips and took a deep gulp, the sharp taste of the vodka making me take a deep breath. I felt it work its way down my throat to my stomach, leaving me feeling warm and cosy inside. I drank some more. Feck them all! I was going to drink for as long as it took for me to forget about this sorry mess.

  My mobile rang and I lifted it out. It was Anna, but I wasn’t in the mood for answering. She thought little enough of me as it was, so I didn’t see the harm of going the full distance and making her hate me. I could live up to the name of the family fuck-up if they wanted.

  I drank some more, sitting my phone on the bar.

  My phone rang again. It was Joe. Again I ignored it. I knew Anna would have been on to him for help as soon as I slammed the door. Instead I ordered a second double vodka and Coke (not even Diet Coke – I was that much of a rebel) and pinned it as quickly as I did the first. I started to feel floaty, chilled out and more like the real me – the one who hadn’t just had her life snatched from her. I could pretend none of it mattered.

  I was on my fourth double vodka and Coke when my phone rang again. “Shut up!” I shouted at it, staring as the screen lit up. Why couldn’t Anna just realise that I wanted to be alone for a bit. Why were they always, always on my back?

  Except it wasn’t Anna on the phone. The name displayed in big, bold letters was JAKE.

  My heart thumped in my chest as I looked again at it. I wasn’t sure that my mind, helped by the vast quantity of alcohol I’d just downed in record time, wasn’t playing tricks on me.

  No. It definitely said Jake. I opened the phone and held it to my ear, almost too afraid to speak in case it would break the moment and none of this would be real.

  “Hello? Aoifs, is that you? Are you there?”

  “Jake?” It was a statement as much as a question. It had been eight months since I’d heard his voice and yet I knew it as well as I knew my own.

  “Look, Aoife. I hear you’ve been looking for me.”

  “You – we – have a baby,” I slurred, the room spinning from a mixture of shock and alcohol consumption.

  There was silence at the other end.

  “I know. Are you looking for money or something?” he said eventually.

  “I thought you might want to meet her. Your daughter. Maggie.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “You should. You have to,” I said, sensing the slightest hesitation in his voice, knowing that if I tried, really tried, I could talk him round.

  “Can I call round then?”

  Fuck, fuck and treble fuck. He wanted to call round and I wasn’t there. No, I was stuck in fecking Derry in a fecking pub and he was there, ready to call round and give me a chance to make him fall in love with me utterly and properly.

  “I’m in Ireland,” I said, trying and failing to hide my abject disappointment. Tears sprang to my eyes.

  “Well, look, I’ve a bit of work to do. Call me when you’re back. I’ll set something up.”

  He hung up. No goodbye, just an offer to “set something up” sometime in the future. I hung my head in my hands and finished my drink. I was just about to order another when I noticed my top was soaking wet – and it wasn’t from the rain. Two damp, round patches shouted out from my chest that I was a breast-feeding mother and here I was pissed as a fart in a pub having just lost out on the chance to make things right with the man I loved.

  When they write the story of my life, this will be the bit they put in the chapter called “Not her Finest Moment”.

  I stumbled to the toilet, threw up and decided it was time to go home. As I walked out of the pub into the pouring rain, I’m pretty sure I heard someone say “Moo!” behind me. I walked on, head held as high as possible and threw up again in the street.

  I was feeling pretty damned miserable. I had decided to walk home, hoping the fresh air and pouring rain would sober me up. Besides which, I doubt very much any self-respecting taxi driver would allow me into the back of a cab. I looked very much like the Creature from the Black Lagoon – a hardened street drinker with leaking nipples and weepy eyes and hair stuck to my face with rain. I’m sure I smelled of sick.

  I cried the whole way home, gulping snottery sobs. I’m pretty sure I talked to myself the whole way too, cursing at myself for being so far away from London now when Jake wanted to get in touch. Cursing myself for being drunk when I was supposed to be a responsible grown-up adult. Cursing myself for showing my family they were right and that I was a fecking useless lump of a thing.

  By the time I reached Anna’s, I was incoherent. I braced myself for her anger. I knocked on the door and Joe answered – taking in my sorry state from head to foot. He shook his head. “Where the fuck have you been, Aoife? We’ve been worried sick. Maggie needs feeding. Have you been drinking? Jesus, you are a mess.”

  He continued in the same vein for quite some time and I just stood there, listening, nodding, crying. The fight that had kept me from falling to pieces for the last nine months had gone. They could say what they wanted now. It was all true.

  As he ranted, his lips moving, my heart thumping and head swirling, I saw Anna walk into the hall, her face lined with worry.

  “Let her be, Joe. She’s been through enough,” she said, but she didn’t pull me into her arms and didn’t offer me any comfort. Her eyes were dulled, her face white with worry. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” She turned to Joe and told him to be on his way. She would take care of things, she said, and there would be no need to be telling our mother or father about this sorry episode. He nodded, giving me one final look of disappointment before leaving.

  As we climbed the stairs, Anna leading me by the hand, I asked how Maggie was.

  “Sleeping like a lamb,” Anna answered. “She’s been as good as gold.”

  I nodded, my mind racing with a mixture of pride, guilt and shame. Anna filled me a bath and, as I soaked away the grime and the rain, she set my pyjamas out on my bed for me. She left her towelling robe there too. I was to put it on, she said, to get the chill from my bones. She brought me pint after pint of water and Milk Thistle to abate the churning stomach.

  “Get dressed and come downstairs when you’re ready,” she said. “I’ll put the kettle on and we can have a cup of tea.”

  I nodded again. A cup of tea sounded perfect. When I finished, the effort of bathing having wiped me out, I walked downstairs. Maggie’s Moses basket was in the corner of the room. I walked to it and stared in at her delicate, trusting face. I kissed the tip of my fingers and pressed them to her rosebud lips, feeling the warmth of her breath on my hand. I stroked her soft cheek and prayed with every ounce of me that she would never, ever feel just how I felt at that moment.

  I curled up in the armchair, letting the embers of the fire warm me. Anna walked in, teacups and hot buttery toast with her, and sat down.

  “I don’t want you to tell me you are sorry, Aoife. I know you are sorry. But I do want you to tell me what is going on with you. If you’re going to stay here, be it for one night, one week, one month or however long, then you have to be honest with me.”

  “Jake phoned.”

  Anna looked at me blankly. The name Jake meant little to her and why shouldn’t it? “Maggie’s dad,” I reminded her and Anna nodded. “While I was out. He wanted to call round to the flat to meet her.”

  “And you are here.”

  “I’m here,” I said. “He’s been ignoring me for nine months and now he wants to meet me and I’m in another country. You’ve got to admire the sense of cosmic timing there, don’t you?”

  “So he never once showed an interest in his baby?”

  “Never. He walked out about twenty-three seconds after I announced the big news and went missing in action.”

  “Sounds like a rotten fucker to me,” she said, biting into a slice of thick, buttery toast.

  “Funnily enough, you aren’t the first person to say that,” I answered. “But there is something about him, Anna, that draws me in. I want to hat
e him. I really do want to hate his guts but I can’t. He is Maggie’s father and when we were good together we were very, very good.”

  “Not good enough that you ever told us about him,” Anna said, one eyebrow slightly raised.

  The woman had a point.

  “Our relationship wasn’t exactly the kind you phoned home about, Anna,” I said, the vodka having loosened my tongue a little.

  “Obviously,” Anna said.

  “I always hoped it would turn into something more. There were times when I really thought it could work out.”

  “But you don’t still feel it can work out, do you?”

  I know she wanted me to tell her that I never wanted to see him again, let alone get close to his todger, but I couldn’t help it. I was addicted to Jake Gibson and if he had walked into Auntie Anna’s living-room right there and then I would have done whatever he asked me to.

  “I don’t know,” I muttered.

  “Are you going to go back to London then?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that either. Present company excepted, I don’t see much of a reason to stay.”

  “You have to give your family time, Aoife. It’s been a shock. I don’t like to be harsh with you when it’s clear you’re being harsh enough with yourself, but you are a grown woman and you need to start acting like one. Running away solves nothing.”

  “Nothing I do, or have ever done, has been good enough for them,” I protested. “I should just let them get on with thinking badly of me and be done with it.”

  “Your mother is exceptionally proud of you, sweetheart. She might not show it but she is always boasting away about your fancy job and the fact you run your own business.”

  I sighed, because I know my mother loves my job. But that is just it: she loves the job – the success – not the individual behind it.

  “I know,” I replied. “It’s the one thing I’ve managed not to feck up in my life.”

  “You do love it? Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I smiled. “It allows me to be me. And you know what, Anna, people like what I do! We have a waiting list of people waiting for a consultation. People have us on retainers to do their whole houses. We did it all ourselves, Beth and me.”