Feels Like Maybe

by Claire Allan

  “I wish I had known,” I muttered through my tears.

  “It wouldn’t have made a difference,” Beth said, a note of resignation in her voice. “And to be honest, I thought if I didn’t say it out loud it wouldn’t be true. We didn’t tell anyone, Aoife, not you, not my mum. No one. The only other people who have a notion of what we are going through is our doctor and the nurse who helped with the tests.”

  “So what now?”

  “We’re seeing the doctor again and asking for more tests. We have to do something, Aoife. It is tearing us apart and that is so not what I want but at the same time I can’t rid myself of the notion that I want – no, I need – a baby. I need one so much that it hurts. I have a physical urge to feel my own child in my arms. I see you, Aoife, when you don’t think I’m looking, I see how you look at Maggie and I see how she looks back at you. I see how she fits into the crook of your arm as if she was made for it. I see how her little eyes open and dart around when she hears your voice because she knows you are her mother and I want that for me and Dan.”

  “I want it for you too, darling, and please God you will get it but in the meantime you have me and this little one to keep you busy. I know this might be shit timing, and perhaps you don’t want to hear this – feel free to tell me to butt out or to fuck off or whatever – but, Beth, would you and Dan please do me – us – the honour of being Maggie’s godparents?”

  She nodded, tears flowing, and I knew that no matter what, I would be there for my friend and she would be there for me and there would be no more secrets.

  ******

  “Well, darling, how was your day?” Anna’s soft lilting tones soothed down the phone.

  “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” I said, curling my feet up under me on the sofa and sipping from my mug of tea.

  Beth had not long gone home and, after feeding Maggie, I was settling down to a cuppa and a couple of chocolate biscuits while I winded her on my shoulder.

  “Try me,” Anna laughed. “You’d be surprised at just how open-minded I can be.”

  So I regaled her with a rerun of the whole day, from my exposed breasts in Tom’s shop to the chat with Beth.

  I had not expected Beth to be so open with me – not now after all these months of her not telling me anything. But it made sense now. The whole episode with Dan in the shop, the emotion on his face. It made sense and they still loved each other, they just had to remember that and work through it.

  “I’ve asked her to be godmother to Maggie,” I told Anna. “She was so delighted. I didn’t know how she would take it, but she was over the moon. We both had a good cry over it.”

  “That’s lovely, darling,” Anna said, but I knew her well enough to sense the hesitancy in her voice.

  “What is it, Anna?”

  “Your mum.”

  “What about her? Still the devil incarnate?”

  “Now, now, Aoife. You know she isn’t that bad,” but still I could sense the smile in her voice. “No, she mightn’t be too happy with your choice of godparents.”

  “But Beth is Catholic. Surely she can’t have a problem with that?”

  “She may be Catholic, but she’s not Joe. Your mum was telling me she was hoping Joe and Jacqueline would get asked.”

  “Jesus no, and have the pair of them look after Maggie if something happened to me? I’d be afraid they would lock her in a cupboard under the stairs and make her do all their housework like a modern-day Cinderella.”

  “I know, pet. I tried to tell your mother that you might have your own notions, but she got herself all excited about it.”

  I felt a headache start to throb just behind my right eye. Rubbing my forehead, I sighed. “Well, I suppose I should be grateful she’s interested in my child’s future at all, even if it is only down to a latent hope that I’ll snuff it and the Sunshine Twins will raise my child as their own.”

  “I don’t think she’d wish any ill on you, she just wants her day in chapel.”

  “God bless her cotton socks,” I sighed, before saying my goodbyes.

  How is it that even the most innocent of gestures, carried out hundreds of miles away from Derry, cause such ructions? This time it hadn’t even involved unprotected sex with an irresponsible wannabe rockstar.

  Then again, in for a penny, in for a pound. Today had already been so mind-blowingly surreal that phoning my mother and dropping this latest bombshell couldn’t possibly make it worse and the way I saw it was that I’d be better off getting all this over and done with so that tomorrow, like Scarlett O’Hara said, could be another day.

  The phone rang its standard three times.

  “Hello, McLaughlin residence.”

  Ah, Mum and her gorgeous phone voice. My headache moved up a notch.

  “Hi, Mum, it’s me, Aoife.” I don’t know why I felt the need to tell her my name. I guess I never believed she would recognise my voice without further clarification. In truth I was delighted every time she didn’t follow that clarification with “Aoife who?”.

  “Aoife, how are you?”

  “I’m fine, Mum. How are you? How is Dad?”

  “We’re both doing well, considering.” There was a sniff.

  “Considering what?” I asked, although I knew I shouldn’t have bothered.

  “Well, you know we’re both still getting over the shock of little Maggie. Don’t get me wrong, she is quite adorable in her own way but well, a shock is a shock.”

  I rolled my eyes. It had been almost three weeks since she’d found out about my daughter. How long exactly was she planning on milking the shock factor? And as for my darling daddy, he was long over it. Just that morning I had received a parcel in the post of a teddy bear to Maggie from her doting granda.

  “Yes, well, it was a bit of a shock to me too, Mum.”

  “Mary Ferris tells me every child is a blessing. So I suppose I’ve to be grateful for that. After all, it’s not like you were sixteen like that wee cuddy down the road who is walking about, bump wobbling in one of the crop-top thingies, like she has no shame.”

  “Yes, Mum. But don’t forget her child is a wee blessing too.”

  She sniffed again.

  “Speaking of blessings,” I started, “I’ve asked my friends Beth and Dan to be godparents.”

  “Oh, Aoife! Joe was kind of hoping you would ask him.”

  If I had money to spare I would have bet every penny that Joe, God love him, hadn’t even thought about acting as godparent for my child. He would be much too busy fussing over his own unborn child and how absolutely perfect he or she would undoubtedly be and how they could fit into his perfect cream world.

  “Well, maybe next time,” I muttered, even though I know it was cruel to wind my mother up to such an extent.

  “Sometimes I wonder where I went wrong with you, young lady,” she chided before making her excuses and hanging up in a fit of pique.

  As far as conversations with my mother went, it was one of the less painful ones.

  

  Chapter 33

  Beth

  A godparent. Godparents. Dan and me. Standing in a church, promising to protect and love Maggie and help Aoife raise her to feel loved, secure and blessed.

  I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about it. Of course I adored every adorable baby crease of Maggie, but was Aoife only asking me because she thought we would never have kids of our own?

  I tried to shake the thought from my head. This is why I hadn’t wanted to tell anyone. I could handle insensitive comments from people who genuinely didn’t know any better, but I wasn’t sure I could do sympathy. But then, as I told myself, who else would Aoife have asked? I must not try to convince myself she is only asking me because she feels a duty of care to my fragile mental state.

  I cooked dinner for us – steak with garlic potatoes. It was Dan’s favourite and I was still trying my damnedest to make up for that horrible domestic-violence incident. I opened a bottle of red and poured two glasses before set
ting them on the dining-table beside our balcony doors. Looking out at the rain battering against the windows, I longed for the summer. Maybe none of this would feel so weird, so dark and depressing, when the sun was shining.

  We would have a lovely meal and then, when it was all done, I would tell him how we were going to be godparents to the most beautiful little baby in the world.

  On cue the door opened and Dan walked in, sexy with a six o’clock shadow and his tie loosened around his neck.

  I smiled, walking towards him.

  “I’ve cooked us dinner,” I announced as he dropped his briefcase to the floor.

  “Is there enough for three?” he asked, stepping aside to allow Jake Gibson to walk in with his trademark swagger and smile.

  I tried not to say it. I tried to keep the words, the look of utter horror from my face but I failed miserably.

  “You have got to be fucking joking,” I said.

  “Beth, nice to see you,” said Jake with his usual smarmy smile.

  Dan just stood there. His shoulders shrugged and his eyes pleaded with me not to say too much more.

  “Can I help you with dinner?” he asked, darting his eyes towards the kitchen.

  Jake walked to the table and lifted a glass of wine, gulping it back as if it were apple juice and slumping down on the sofa like he owned the place.

  I looked at Dan and he raised his eyes, pleading with me to follow him. I set my wine-glass down and traipsed in behind him, slamming the door probably too loudly behind me.

  “Calm down,” Dan started before he turned to look at me.

  “This had better be good, Daniel Jones. I thought we agreed that man was not welcome in this house ever again.”

  “He called to my office. He said he needs to talk about things. Much as I wanted to tell him to fuck off, he deserves a hearing. He says he’s going to change.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “He wants to see them both. And Aoife wants to see him too. He spoke to her a few weeks back.”

  “Yes,” I said, “a few weeks back. And then nothing. He has a daughter who is almost a month old and he has spoken to her mother once. Am I – are we – really supposed to believe that him being in their lives will be a good thing?”

  “No, Beth, but as I’ve said before, it’s not our decision to make. Much as we might love Maggie, she isn’t our responsibility.”

  “Well that, Dan, is where you’re wrong,” I said indignantly. “Aoife has asked us to be godparents and that means that Maggie is our responsibility in a roundabout way and the part of me that is responsible for her doesn’t want that dirty bastard anywhere near her.”

  Dan rubbed his eyes. He looked so tired and fed up of everything and yet the part of me that wanted to make it all better was overruled by the part of me that was utterly disgusted by the creature sitting on my sofa.

  Dan walked to the stove and started checking the dinner. “This should go three ways,” he said.

  “Dan –” I started.

  “Beth, we can give him dinner and then we can kick him out. We can be there to pick up the pieces if and when it all goes wrong with Aoife, but we can’t stop it from happening. They are linked now. They have a child and he might be a bastard, but he is Maggie’s daddy and you don’t want that child to turn around to you in ten or twenty years and accuse you of denying her a relationship with the man who gave her life.”

  “Jake didn’t give her life. He gave her sperm. It’s hardly the same thing.”

  “It’s very much the same thing. Trust me,” he said, a wounded look on his face, and once again, even though I had not touched him, I knew I had slapped my husband – my gorgeous, sexy, tired husband – square across the face.

  “Okay.” I said. “I’ll put out another place setting.”

  It galled me to sit across the table from Jake. We had been so close once and now every time I looked at him I felt betrayed. I felt betrayed not only for what he had done to Aoife, but what he had done to Dan and what he had done to us as a foursome. It had been perfect, or thereabouts, until he walked out on my best friend and shattered everything about us. All those nights out drinking, dancing, shagging, laughing. All those day trips to the beach, all those nights watching the sunset, drinking cold beer and chatting about what it would be like when we achieved our dreams and had become successful. Aoife and I would design rooms for stars of TV and music, who Jake would introduce us to because he would, obviously, be on the A-list. And Dan would be a high-flying lawyer negotiating his cousin’s record deals. We would holiday in the Seychelles and Milan and spend lazy weekends poking through the Paris antiques market choosing trinkets for our shop which we would then keep for ourselves.

  But he smashed that dream, and I just didn’t know that I could ever forgive him.

  We made small-talk. The usual topics of the weather, the pollution levels in central London, the congestion charges and who was shagging who and where came up. I smiled through gritted teeth and resisted the urge to spear him straight in the head with my fork.

  “So how’ve you been?” he asked, gazing from Dan to me and back again.

  He had been in our house for an hour now and had not once mentioned his daughter.

  “Oh, just fine,” I answered.

  “Same old, same old,” Dan chimed in. “You know – work, work and more work. Things are going really well.”

  “Great. Things are looking up for me too,” he grinned. “My latest demo is getting a lot of hits on My Space and there are a few interested parties.”

  We’d heard all this before, of course, and had long since stopped believing it. But then again, knowing the bastard that Jake was, now probably was the time that his life would take off – just as everything in ours was crashing and burning.

  “Great,” said Dan.

  “And what about you, Beth? Work busy?”

  I bit my tongue. There was no way to answer this without telling him what an utter shit I thought he was for leaving my gorgeous best friend in the lurch, which of course had left me in the lurch in the business sense. Dan looked at me, his eyes pleading with me not to say something which would cause friction.

  I smiled. “Same as always.”

  I was ultimately very pleased that I resisted the urge to ping a garlic potato into his smug and selfish face.

  He downed two glasses of wine – wine that cost £15 a bottle – and sat back declaring the dinner I’d cooked as “decent scran”.

  “Glad you liked it,” my husband replied, as he rose to his feet with the remaining dishes. “I’ll put the coffee on.”

  And that left just me and Jake alone in my living-room, sipping wine and pretending everything was okay. The only problem with that is that I was all out of pretending everything was okay.

  “So . . .” he said.

  “Buttons,” I replied with the stock response from my childhood.

  “What?”

  “You said ‘so’, I said ‘buttons’. Sew buttons. Geddit?”

  He raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Look, Beth, I know you think I’ve been an awful bastard.”

  “That would be the understatement of the year.”

  “Just remember, you only know one side of the story.”

  I nodded. “Would that be the side of the story where you played around with Aoife for nearly four years, made her believe you loved her, got her pregnant and walked out before the pee could dry on the testing stick?”

  “I never said I loved her.”

  “You were with her for almost four years, Jake. You practically lived in her flat. You went everywhere together. You ate her food, drank her wine, slept with her every night and spent her money. She could reasonably have assumed you loved her.”

  “I’m not the kind of man who falls in love,” Jake said. “I’m like the bloke in that Status Quo song – ‘The Wanderer’.”

  I snorted, because this was all utterly ridiculous. Jake was a grown man. He was thirty-two. He knew as well as I did that, whether or
not those three words had passed his lips, Aoife was entitled to think they had a future together.

  “Look, I wasn’t ready for a baby,” he added. “She caught me on the hop. Can you imagine what it’s like to be told out of the blue you’re going to have a baby?”

  “No,” I said, my heart lurching, “I can’t imagine that one little bit.”

  “Well, then you get it then, don’t you?”

  “No, Jake, I don’t. There are things in life you can’t just walk away from and your own children are among those things. You helped make that baby, the least you could have done was stayed around to see her come into the world. What you did was the lowest of the low.”

  “Well, I’m going to change all that now, aren’t I?” said Jake, defensively.

  “Well, unless you are Superman I doubt very much you have the power to fly aroundthe world so fast you manage to turn back time.”

  “I know that, but I can make it better. I’m going to see Aoife and do right by her and the baby.”

  “Maggie,” I said. It irked me to hear him call her “the baby”. She was so much more than just “the baby”.

  “I want to be a part of her life and of Aoife’s too if she will have me.”

  My heart sank. Once again I’d managed to fuck up. I wanted him to clear off forever but it seemed I had talked him into taking responsibility and going back into Aoife’s life. I might not have been the cleverest woman in the world but I knew that particular scenario was not going to end well.

  “She’s doing okay without you,” a voice from the kitchen said.

  I looked around at Dan.

  “You’ve done enough damage, Jake. Why don’t you just leave Aoife and Maggie be. They don’t need you.”

  “I’ve changed,” Jake replied and I heard myself snort in unison with my husband.

  “I don’t care if you believe me. I’ll prove it. I can be a father, and a responsible partner.”

  “But you don’t love her . . .”

  “Who said that?” Jake asked with a sly grin.

  “You said so yourself!” I could no longer hide the exasperation from my voice.