Tightrope

by Marnie Riches

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Boo said, feeling like an old car, jammed in reverse. Her frustration came unstuck all of a sudden. A defensive barrage shooting past her inner censor. ‘But I saw you smiling at the blonde one, for fuck’s sake. You winked at her!’

  ‘I didn’t. You imagined it.’

  ‘Come on, Mitch. You did! You were leering at her legs.’

  He rubbed her arm and smiled at her hopefully, like a puppy dog wanting to regain the trust of its owner. ‘The only legs I have eyes for are yours, Boo Boo. I’m so sorry if you’re unhappy. That’s the last thing I want for you.’ He took a swig from his stout. Already on his third pint with sobriety several hours away. ‘But it makes me sad that you’ve called me a liar.’

  Boo started to breathe faster to match the pace of her pulse. Cortisol rapidly chilling the blood in her veins. She felt suddenly light-headed. Clenched and unclenched her hands, trying to stop her fingertips from prickling. Why did this have to happen now? Like things weren’t stressful enough.

  Stand up to him, she counselled herself. He can’t keep pulling this stunt. And yet, the enormity of her situation loomed large in the forefront of her overburdened mind. She wanted to yell, ‘You are a difficult, moody bastard and you were giving her the eye, right in front of me. You’re full of crap and you’re suffocating me.’ But instead, Boo simply said, ‘I’m sorry. I know you’re not a liar. Of course I know. Look, I am really really sorry. OK?’ She put her hand on his, knowing she had to break the news and break it fast. Maybe a shock like that would put paid to this bickering.

  He pulled his hand away. ‘You make me feel bad, Boo. You can be so cruel. And all I want to do is—’

  ‘Love me. Right. Yeah. Listen, Mitch.’ Here I go. Come on, Boo. Spit it out. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  Mitch’s face crumpled up into a quizzical frown. ‘What?’ He was looking so directly at her now, his gaze seemed to penetrate skin and bone to find her soul beneath. ‘How?’

  She shrugged. ‘Happy accident.’

  Would he buy it?

  Boo cast her mind back to the one-night stand with the rugger bugger from the college bar. What was his name? Had his eyes been brown or blue? It had hardly mattered at the time. He’d bought her a drink. They’d chatted briefly about themselves, revealing that they’d had nothing in common whatsoever beyond a shared love of an HBO cop series. She’d known that the rugger bugger had been all wrong for her, but she’d seen him weeks earlier when she’d been orientating herself in her new academic home-from-home. A fresher like her, he’d been clutching his kettle in his doorway, on a corridor that was as far away from her own room as she could get. Away from Mitch.

  Sitting in the pub now, overlooking the river, Boo felt heat in her cheeks as she recalled that, what had begun as a fun grapple on the guy’s bed, as she’d been coming down from acid, had quickly turned into something more sinister. Overwhelmed by his sheer bulk, the strange chemical smell emanating from his pores and the realisation that she hadn’t wanted sex, even in exchange for safety from Mitch in the throes of a bad trip, she’d said no. No, I’m sorry. No, I’ve changed my mind. But her conquest hadn’t seemed to hear her. He’d pressed on – not violent, per se, but still forcing himself on her, apparently oblivious to her protestations or lack of desire. She’d fallen silent once he’d prized her legs apart and entered her. In any case, it had seemed pointless, given her size, to fight against a giant like that. Staring at the ceiling, Boo had heard her mother berating her, loud enough to be standing in a corner of that room, watching. You should be flattered that a feller like that should want a girl like you. You always were ungrateful. Or had that just been the LSD-fallout talking?

  Five minutes of Boo gritting her teeth and it had all been over. She’d lain in whatever-his-name-was’s bed until 5 a.m., unable to find sleep as he’d snored beside her.

  Having decided that Mitch would have crawled back to his own hole by that time, she’d dressed hastily and fled back to her room. Only realising once she’d burrowed inside her poorly made bed that she had no memory of the rugger bugger having used a condom. Damn it.

  As Boo sat there, waiting for Mitch’s reaction to the news, she admitted to herself that she’d failed to take the morning-after pill because she’d wanted this baby. She’d wanted a fresh start and someone to love unconditionally, no matter who his or her father might be. It was a need that now consumed all the other ambitions she had harboured at the start of her university life.

  After an agonising minute, Mitch’s look of utter confusion gave way to a timorous smile, like the morning sun daring to peak through the night’s heavy storm clouds as dawn broke. He swaddled her in an embrace, their conflict instantly forgotten. Hot tears leaking onto her neck as he held her tight.

  ‘Oh, that’s amazing, Boo. Amazing. Christ. I’m gonna be a dad. I’m the happiest man alive.’

  They parted momentarily. Boo felt relief and abject terror curdle inside her abdomen, as though the foetus growing within was now the epicentre of her gut feelings. Mitch was bad for her. Mitch made her feel alive. Mitch was the making of her. Mitch was her ruination and downfall.

  ‘Will you marry me, Boo?’

  The following weekend, Boo returned to her parents’ house. Dreading breaking the news to them that their eighteen-year-old only child was up the duff and engaged to a hedonist whom she loved and feared in equal measure.

  The train slowed, grinding and squealing its way past derelict factories, lumber yards and part-worn tyre warehouses. These gave way to the blackened red-brick walls of a neglected station, in the one-eyed hole of a town Boo called home.

  She disembarked, lugging her case onto the platform, wishing that her pregnancy was already showing enough to arouse sympathy in the male travellers who might offer to help. No such luck only a month in. Beyond swollen ankles and constant nausea, Boo looked the same as ever. Whey-faced and poorly dressed in Primark jeans that would no longer fasten and a bobbled old black coat from Top Shop that just about fastened across her chest.

  Hastening to the taxi rank, she watched her fellow travellers being collected at the main entrance by enthusiastic relatives and friends.

  ‘Thirty-eight Milltown Street please, and can you give us a lift putting my case in the boot? I’m pregnant.’ It was the first time she’d told anyone apart from Mitch. Now she’d confessed her deepest secret to a taxi driver whose ID badge declared he was Aleksander.

  Aleksander looked her up and down, making silent judgements, of course. Under different circumstances, Boo might have found him attractive, with his Eastern European high cheekbones and green eyes. But it was all she could do to stop herself from vomiting in the back of his old Mazda.

  Home looked the same as ever. A two-up-two down on a gardenless street, where the neighbours who worked in factories, on building sites, in supermarkets couldn’t quite fathom how a nice, quiet tiler like Boo’s father had come to be with a loud, drunk woman who said she was an artist and who spoke, ‘with plums in her gob’. As ever, a dreamcatcher was visible in the lounge window and the retro floral curtains were wonkily drawn in the main bedroom above.

  Left alone on the doorstep, Boo slipped her key in the lock and opened the door to the smell of turps, oil paint and cigarette smoke. No welcoming committee for her. No, ‘Boo, darling! Come in and I’ll get the kettle on. We’ve missed you so much.’ That sort of reception was for other girls.

  ‘Hello?’ she shouted.

  No response. Though she knew there was somebody home because she could hear the familiar dash-dash-smush sound of her mother’s paintbrush, daubing a canvas in the back room.

  Standing in the middle of the shabby, hippy-trail throwback of a through-lounge, wondering how long it would take her to realise her daughter had arrived, Boo watched the old lady at work. Dressed in paint-smudged overalls, her bleached hair, yellowed with nicotine and scraped into a high ponytail, she was clutching a palette in her left hand, stabbing colour onto a large canvas with a long brush h
eld in her right. How did she not see Boo, standing there? Her easel had been placed against the neighbouring wall, meaning the front lounge was certainly in her peripheral vision. How the hell did you not notice a five-foot-three girl enter the room?

  No need to ponder further. Boo spied a tray on the sideboard, sporting a half-empty bottle of budget vodka and a full glass, smudged with greasy-looking turpentine fingerprints and a waxy neon pink lipstick mouth-mark. It was only two in the afternoon. The first half of the bottle would have been breakfast. The Olympic-standard lush was drunk, as usual, or perhaps simply winding her daughter up. Hadn’t Boo texted from the station? Announced her arrival as she’d opened the door? And yet, her mother painted on, seemingly oblivious to anything beyond her own tiny world, there in the back lounge, in the space she liked to call her, ‘atelier’.

  ‘Oh, there you are!’ Finally, the old cow turned around, brush in hand. She opted to snatch up her V&T, rather than offer Boo an embrace. Of course. ‘Get the kettle on.’ Her bleary eyes were devoid of warmth. Her lips, thinned to a pruned pink line where the neon pink pigment of her lipstick had feathered upwards onto the crepe of her skin. ‘Your dad’s not had a drink since breakfast. We don’t want him dehydrating, do we?’

  At that moment, Boo knew she’d made a mistake coming home. The rest and solace she sought would not be found here. Not in her mother. But perhaps in Dad, if he was speaking . . .

  Carrying a mug of strong tea upstairs, Boo could already smell the bedroom where her dad had been holed up for weeks, according to her mother. Stale breath. Unwashed body in bedding that hadn’t seen the washing machine for a month. Poor ventilation. The cowbag’s caring ministrations were clearly almost non-existent.

  ‘Hey, Dad. I’m home. I’ve brought you a cuppa.’

  The loud floral curtains let little light in beyond an orangey glow. Boo could see her father’s dark hair peeking out above the duvet. Bottles of his medication next to the bed. Was he asleep?

  She set the tea down. ‘Dad,’ she said, sitting on the edge of the bed and cupping his shoulder gently. He was wearing the same old U2 T-shirt he’d been wearing when she’d left for the start of the new term. She leaned over. Kissed his stubbled cheek. ‘It’s me. Boo.’

  As he opened his eyes slowly, she saw a sharpness in his focus that said he’d not been taking the meds. He smiled. Stirred beneath the bedclothes and shuffled into a sitting position, ‘Oh, it’s smashing to see you, love. I have missed you.’ His voice sounded hoarse from disuse. He held his arms out. ‘I know I pong, but come and give your old Dad a hug.’

  It was exactly what Boo needed. She allowed him to wrap her in his strong, hairy arms, only holding her breath slightly against his sweaty odour. The tears started to flow immediately as she let out all the tension that had accrued over the past few weeks. The break-up. The make-up. The drugged-up, boozed-up bust-up. Getting knocked-up. She told him everything, apart from the details of her sort-of date rape. Then, she told him about the baby.

  ‘You’re kidding?’ he said, sipping his tea. His hazel eyes looking even wider than usual behind the thick lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses. ‘A baby? How far along are you? Is it a boy or a girl? Jesus, Boo!’

  Pulling a tissue from the box at the side of the bed, Boo dried her eyes. ‘I won’t know for ages, Dad. It’s still very early days.’

  ‘Are you going to keep it?’ He blinked fast. Dark shadows beneath his eyes meant he’d slept little, despite his refusing to get out of bed for weeks. How long had he been off the meds?

  ‘Yep. I don’t know how I’ll manage with uni and that.’

  He squeezed her hand. ‘We’ll make it work, kiddo. Daddy’s here for his little Boo Boo no matter what scrapes she gets into. We’re a team, me and you. Right?’

  ‘You bet.’

  She nestled against her father’s warm body, no different to the way they’d snuggled when she’d been a small girl.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked after a while, looking up at his bristled face.

  He peered down at her, smiling properly so that his crow’s feet crinkled up. She hadn’t seen that in a long, long while.

  ‘I think it’s smashing, love,’ he said, treating her to a gap-toothed grin, then. ‘A baby in the family. Fancy that! It’s grand.’

  That night, despite sharing a soul-destroying Chinese takeout with her mother downstairs, listening to the witch talk incessantly about herself, when she wasn’t admonishing Boo for being a ‘dozy tart’ for getting knocked-up, Boo slept deeply in her childhood bed. Knowing Dad was on her side was exactly what she’d wished for. Perhaps having a grandchild to fuss over would pull him out of his funk of despair once and for all.

  She revisited her childhood in her dreams – a time when her father had been happy. A master tiler, working to build his own business ; providing. Always available to talk to or play with, thanks to starting work at the crack of dawn and finishing early. He’d had self-respect and a goal in life. He’d always been the one to give a shit.

  On waking, Boo sprang out of bed, patting her stomach. ‘It’s all gonna be smashing, babba,’ she told her stomach. ‘Dad’s going to get well and I’ll marry Mitch and fatherhood will straighten the bugger out. We’ll be fine. Maybe I’ll be able to stay at college too. Take you with me to lectures.’

  Sensing from the silence below that she was the first one up, she crept downstairs, ravenously hungry for breakfast.

  Her father’s feet were the first thing she saw from the stairs, swinging round from back to front. Then, as she descended slowly, barely able to breathe, with icy dread all but paralysing her, she saw his legs, clad in tartan pyjama bottoms. Finally, standing in the doorway to the lounge, she beheld the horror of it all. Noticed the overturned chair beneath the body of her beloved father. Already grey-skinned, he hung limply from a complex rig-up of electrical cable. He’d somehow strung it around the supporting wooden beam that bisected the through-lounge. A white envelope perched centrally on the mantelpiece with ‘Boo’ written on the front in his distinctive capitals.

  Her champion, her best friend, the only parent she’d ever loved, was gone.

  CHAPTER 18

  Bev

  ‘It’s all lies!’ Bev shouted, waking herself up from the too vivid dream – a recurring nightmare of her dismissal at BelNutrive, where each time, she faced the board of directors wearing only her oversized period knickers and a bobble hat.

  Wiping the drool from her mouth, she rubbed her head where it had been uncomfortably pressed against the chilly car window, for the best part of . . . She checked her watch . . .

  ‘Five hours?! Oh, you’re kidding me.’

  She wiped the fogged up windows, struggling to see clearly the suburban 1930s semi she’d followed Jerry Fitzwilliam to. Bev smacked her lips. Adjusted the red wig that now hung crookedly over her left eye, as though it too had fallen asleep unexpectedly. Desperate for coffee and the toilet. She checked her scribblings in her notebook to see if she’d been hit by the genius stick at some point during the previous evening and tried to reconstruct the night’s events :

  During the late afternoon, Angie had texted her to say her husband had finally returned home from London. Bev had followed Fitzwilliam from the family home to the nerve centre of his Cheshire seat – an office above a health charity’s second-hand furniture shop.

  The shadow Science Minister had then left his campaign HQ in the early evening and headed north to what appeared to be the most boring street in Stockport, lined with uniform, well-kept red-brick houses. What had he been doing there? Who owned this house with its anonymous-looking venetian blinds and the overgrown bamboo in the front garden?

  Got mistress?

  That was all she’d written about the case, as she’d sat in the courtesy car on her stakeout. The rest was first-draft copy she’d penned for her new freelance marketing gig – four pages of heart-rending text for the charity’s new annual report. She’d have to present it, along with visuals she’d
commissioned, to Graham and his fundraising director when she was next in London. Hardly useful for the task currently in hand.

  ‘Oh, Bev, Bev, Bev, you dopey-arsed tool!’

  If Jerry Fitzwilliam had appeared at the semi’s front bedroom window at any point during the night, in a clandestine clinch with some mistress, she’d completely missed it. And the opportunity to collect photographic evidence of his inability to keep his winkie in his Saville Row trousers. Had he left already? Walked or driven past and spotted her? Surely even if he had, he wouldn’t have recognised her in the wig, slouched in the driver’s seat of a fogged-up turd-brown Ford Fiesta. Especially not with her face well-scrubbed of any make-up.

  She examined her reflection in the vanity mirror inset into the car’s sun visor. Wiped her hands along her sallow cheeks, noting the dark circles beneath her eyes and the parallel furrows that had visibly deepened in her forehead, of late. ‘What a mess. You look a million years old. But at least you look nothing like Cat Thomson.’

  Shivering, she realised it was time to go home, where a hot shower and some breakfast beckoned. She pulled off the wig and scratched at her scalp, sighing. Yawning. Deepening those furrows on her forehead as she frowned. Two days had passed and Doc’s phone was still out of order. Concern had started to niggle away at the back of her mind. The Jiffy bag he had promised was on its way had not shown up yet. Was it possible her post was being intercepted?

  Hitting the M60, the landscape changed. Bev was glad to leave the cramped, steeply inclined streets of Stockport behind, with those hulking, sulking disused brick mills on the horizon that bore neglected, crumbling testament to the town’s industrial past. She sped past the car dealerships and signs for Cheadle, turning onto the M56 that took her past the promise of the airport and the threat of Wythenshawe. Home. Not her own home, but it would do.