My Best Friend's Girl

by Dorothy Koomson

  I laid her gently on the cot bed, then nearly jumped out of my skin as her eyes flew open. With her dirty blond hair fanned out around her as she lay on the tiny bed, Tegan’s eyes didn’t leave me as her pale oval face slid into a mire of fear. She was terrified. Wide awake and terrified.

  Join the queue, honey, I thought. I was terrified too. The implications of what I had done were only just starting to hit me. I’d done something big and stupid and I was petrified because of it.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked cautiously. My fear that she might burst into tears outweighed all my other fears. I had no clue how to handle a crying child, except maybe to scream “Shut up!” In all the preceding years, with all my nieces and nephews, with Tegan herself, when a tiny person got crysome, I handed them back to the person responsible for them, secure in the knowledge that nothing I could do would appease them so I didn’t have to try. In other words, I passed the buck back to the person who’d chosen to become a parent, who’d chosen to deal with tears, snot and tantrums.

  Tegan’s visage of terror didn’t slip, not even for a microsecond as she stared up at me.

  “Do you want to sleep in the big bed?” I asked, taking a wild guess at what might be troubling her—apart from being abducted from the place she’d called home for the past few months and being held hostage by a woman she hadn’t seen in two years.

  Tegan nodded.

  “OK, but let’s have a bath first, all right?”

  She nodded.

  “And maybe something to eat?”

  She nodded again. “OK, good.” That was a plan. A good plan. I could work with this. Bathe her, feed her, get her to go to sleep. Sorted. I got to my feet as Tegan sat up on the small cot bed. She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them and watched me go across the room to the table with the phone and menu.

  I picked up the laminated menu card and scanned it for something that she might like. It was clear that she wasn’t going to speak to me so there was no point in asking her. Burger and fries seemed the easiest choice.

  She didn’t move as I did homeyfying things like turning on the telly, flicking through the channels to find something unlikely to corrupt her young mind and putting on a couple more lights. I searched through the bags, found her blue checked pajamas, a clean pair of white knickers and a white undershirt. I lay them on the big bed and went to the bathroom.

  It was a functional bathroom with possibly the tiniest showerhead in the world hanging over the bath, but it was clean and mildew-free, a miracle considering it had no window. I pinned back the white shower curtain, then sat on the side of the bathtub to push the plug in and turn on the taps. Once the bath was half full, I drizzled in some bubble bath and agitated the water to try to make some bubbles. It wasn’t as impressive as I would have liked, but it wasn’t as depressing as a white hotel tub with just water in it.

  I went back to Tegan and knelt down in front of her. “Can we take off your clothes, then?” I asked gently.

  She hesitated, possibly unsure if this was the right thing to do. Then, resigning herself to it, she uncurled her body, slid off the bed and stood in front of me, patient and passive. I took off her jacket, then gently tugged her grubby pink top over her head. I had to stop myself from recoiling in horror. She was reed thin, she hadn’t been fed properly in weeks. Her arms were frail little sticks that hung from her scrawny shoulders; her ribs were prominent under her skin and her stomach was concave.

  It wasn’t just her thinned body. Her skin…Tears punched at my eyes and my lower jaw started to tremble. Her skin, her beautiful, beautiful skin was blotched and dappled with dirt and bruises and welts. Each of the bruises looked like the result of a slap, a punch or a grab. Each mark was long and straight, as though she’d been whipped with a belt.

  How could they do this? How could anyone do this?

  I never knew this sort of thing went on. I mean, I knew it existed, and I knew it was awful. But it wasn’t real because I’d never seen it. I’d heard it all from Del, I’d seen her scars, but I couldn’t know, I couldn’t believe until this moment.

  Stop it, I ordered myself. Don’t let her think you’re disgusted by her, that it’s her fault.

  I blinked back my tears and inhaled deeply through my nose. I couldn’t fall apart in front of her—it wasn’t fair.

  I finished undressing her, fighting every fresh batch of tears that arose with every item of her clothing I removed. It was all over her: the dirt, the bruising, the marking. Then I wrapped her in a big white towel and led her into the bathroom. I stopped, got down on my knees and enveloped her in my arms. “You’ll be all right, sweetie,” I told her. “I’m going to take care of you, OK? I’m going to take care of you.” I had to let her know she was all right. This wouldn’t happen again, she was safe now. She didn’t react as I tried to hug away her pain. How still and silent she stood in my arms made me pull her tiny body closer to me.

  While I bathed her I was reminded of the last bath I’d given her. The one where she’d soaked me through and I’d had to borrow a T-shirt from Del. I was reminded this time because it was so different: there was no boisterous splashing, no giggling at the shapes the bubbles made, no trying to wet my clothes. She sat still and let me clean her bruised skin. I wished she’d give me even the slightest indication that she was there in the room with me but her eyes stayed fixed on a point on the tiled wall, her body not resisting any swipe of the washcloth.

  Her blond hair fell in straight golden waves to her shoulders when I’d dried it and she was pretty damn cute in her blue checked pajamas. Cute, but silent. A knock at the door made both of us jump, we looked at each other, then at the door. After a few fraught seconds I realized it was probably room service with our food.

  Any hunger that had been lurking around my stomach had been knocked out of me when I saw Tegan’s body but when the waiter slid the tray onto the big table, Tegan’s eyes lit up as though she hadn’t seen real food in an age.

  I took the burger, fries and soft drink to her, then sat opposite her on the big bed. She didn’t move toward the food for a few seconds, then tentatively reached out and picked up the burger and moved it to her lips. Before she bit into it she looked up at me, silently checking it was OK.

  I conjured up my brightest smile then nodded at her. It’s all right to eat, I silently replied. She took a nibble of the burger and kept her eyes on me as she chewed. She took another look at me before taking another bite. I welded the encouraging grin to my face and kept it there the whole time. “You don’t have to eat it all,” I said several times, “if you don’t want to finish it, you don’t have to.”

  She did want to. She cleaned her plate and drained the soft drink carton, then sat back, staring at me with big scared eyes. Tegan took all her cues from me, unsure what to do next—a case of the completely lost leading the completely lost. I didn’t know what to do next, either. However, being the adult meant I had to pretend or we’d sit here all night.

  “Are you tired?” I hazarded.

  She nodded. Good, she was sticking to the plan: bath, food, bed.

  “OK, come lie down.”

  The corners of her mouth turned down, then her jaw started trembling as her eyes filled with tears. No, no, not crying! I can handle anything except crying. Weariness was plain on her face, exhaustion was obvious in her movements, so why wasn’t she eager to lie down and sleep?

  “What’s the matter, Tiga?” I asked.

  “I be scared on my own,” she whispered, then cringed as though she expected me to explode at her.

  “Do you want me to lie with you?” I asked gently.

  She came out of her cringe but was cautious as she slowly nodded. Her surprise that I didn’t start shouting was palpable.

  “OK, you lie down and I’ll take my shoes off.”

  Tegan nestled down under the blankets, made sure I was lying facing her, closed her eyes, then fell asleep. Just like that. Out like a light. I waited until I was sure s
he was deeply asleep before I slid noiselessly out of bed and sat in the chair staring out of the window.

  I shifted in the chair, arched my back to try to unknot it, blinked unseeingly at the window.

  How had I got myself here? Here. Where this thing called adoption was a serious issue.

  I’d left Adele’s bedside determined to only think about it. And hadn’t. It wasn’t as if I had to think about it right away, so I had stored it away somewhere in my head to be brought out and considered another time. Except another time had come around a lot quicker than I thought it would.

  Less than twenty-four hours ago my biggest decision was which bra would maximize my cleavage in my gold sequin dress. My gold sequin dress. Now that was a memory from a distant age. Was that really me? Was it really me who was planning on dusting my cleavage with gold dust? Because if it was, then how could I be the same person sitting in a hotel armchair thinking about adopting a child?

  Me and child.

  Kamryn and child.

  Never meant to happen.

  Children had never been in my sphere of destiny, not on my list of things to do. There were lots of children in my life—eight of them courtesy of my two brothers and sister—and while I loved each one of those little people with all my heart, they weren’t enough to make me want to partake. The time-limit factor was what heightened my enjoyment of being with children—anything more than twenty-four hours with them was asking too much of me.

  You had to be prepared to give up everything for children. Everything. Time, space, affection. I wasn’t that altruistic, and I wouldn’t pretend I was inclined that way just to look “normal.”

  When I was younger, most people thought my lack of interest in children was because I hadn’t met the right man. The right man, they theorized, would conjure up in me the need to procreate. When Nate and I started talking about marriage, everyone—Del included—thought I’d change my mind. That this much-vaunted thing called “maternal instinct” would kick in and I’d start cooing at kids in buggies, swooning over tiny clothes in shops and start planning which room in our flat would become the nursery. Because Nate, my husband to be, was meant to have been the inspiration I needed to crave the fertilization of my eggs.

  People constantly asked me when Nate and I would be having children and I replied, “Erm, never.” There was, without exception, surprise then sympathy at my response, then I’d get a variation on, “Are you sure you want to marry Nate when he doesn’t want children?” I began to wonder if anyone had ever seen me as a person in my own right and not simply as a baby-making machine.

  I put down the coffee cup on the floor by the armchair, hoisted myself upright. Careful not to bounce the mattress, I slid back into the bed. I lay facing Tegan, examining the contours of her face, seeing Nate. A smile spread across my face as I remembered the number of times I’d done that to Nate over the years we were together: lay in the middle of the night, watching him sleep, resisting the urge to run a finger over his nose, or kiss his eyelids, or whisper “I love you” in his ear. With Nate, I found it nearly impossible to hide my affection, especially when he was asleep and unlikely to witness my weakness for him.

  My parents, out of everyone, were hurt the most by my canceling the wedding.

  They couldn’t believe that, two months before their big day, it was all off. I had no illusions about that, it was their big day. It was what they’d been waiting for most of their lives. I’d thought they were going to throw themselves at Nate’s feet and worship him when we told them we were getting married. Finally someone was willing to take their troublesome eldest daughter off their hands. All I had to do was not ruin it before I said “I do” and then they’d be home free.

  So that phone call, the one I made from a hotel room in Leeds two days after I found out what had happened between Nate and Del, the one that went “Nate and I have split up, the wedding’s off and I’m moving to Leeds,” was well received. Well received in that they didn’t have a way to reach down the phone line and throttle me.

  Canceling the wedding was a typical Kamryn move as far as they were concerned. I could never get it right; couldn’t do this one normal thing for them. I’d always dressed shabbily, I was never pretty, I’d never had boyfriends, I’d never fit in, and now, the one thing, the one thing that would prove I was normal, was off. My siblings—both the older one and the two younger ones—had managed it, had gotten married, had settled down, had reproduced, so why couldn’t I? What was wrong with me?

  They’d told all their friends. Relatives from abroad were planning to fly in. They’d done their share of helping me to prepare. My mum had been searching for the perfect outfit and there I was, saying it was all for nothing. All that hard work for nothing. Although they never actually said it, I knew they were thinking, What did you do wrong, Kamryn?

  My siblings and my friends were more understanding. Most of them said that if it wasn’t right, it wasn’t right, but I knew they all wanted to know the real reason for our split. Was he cheating? Was I cheating? Had he hit me? Had I panicked? Had he discovered something hideous about me at the last minute? Everyone was supportive but I knew I could never be honest with them. I could never say to another human being: “My fiancé and my best friend made a child.”

  That was what Adele and Nate had done. I wasn’t simply hurt by them having sex, I was humiliated, disgraced and, ultimately, isolated. When you can’t be honest with people, you can’t ever relax with them in case you let something slip. I couldn’t have stayed in London, among the friends and elements of that life, even if I wanted to. It would have been too hard on a daily basis hiding what had happened.

  Tegan stirred and I held my breath in case she awoke. A dozen little expressions flitted across her face as her dream played itself out, then she settled back into sleep.

  Del knew what a ginormous thing she was asking of me when she made the request to adopt Tegan. She knew I couldn’t look at Tegan the same ever again. I sent her Christmas and birthday presents, I sent her postcards if I went abroad, I bought her little gifts that I posted off to London. All done from a distance. At no point did I have to look at her while I made those contacts. To look at her would be to remember what my two favorite people had done. And to remember how I hurt the day it had all come out. How I’d hurt every day after that.

  I gently brushed a stray strand of hair away from Tegan’s face.

  Could I do this? Could I adopt the child of the man I had been two months away from marrying? In sleep she looked so much like him. In waking life she had shades of him too. She might grow into her looks, might become more like her dad every day. Could I bear that? Every day, day after day, for the rest of my life staring at mini Nate, being reminded of my best friend and my fiancé making love.

  This was all moot, though, wasn’t it? There was no going back now. I’d taken Tegan from her grandparents in Guildford. I’d had to—she couldn’t have stayed there a second longer—but I’d still taken her. That meant I hadn’t simply said yes to adopting her, I’d screamed it from the top of my lungs.

  chapter 7

  Kamryn and I had a lot of sex without love or even real emotion in our younger days.

  Of course, it wasn’t the done thing, us being women and all, but we had our reasons.

  My reason: weariness. I, Adele Brannon, was weary. Tired of meeting another new man, of hoping he was The One, of waiting for love to blossom between us, then finding he wasn’t The One and love wasn’t planning on paying us even a fleeting visit. I believed in love, so while I waited for its arrival in my life, I concentrated on having the best sex with the best-looking men in London, just to pass the time, you know.

  Kamryn, on the other hand, didn’t believe in love. She’d experienced every type of being screwed over by men there was and had decided to give a little back—in kind. Years and years of being told you’re ugly and fat will do that. She’d often say, “It’s over, there’s nothing to talk about” but sometimes I’d catch her off gu
ard and she’d reveal how deeply she’d been scarred by the things people used to say to her. Every day at school, bombarded with abuse. And then at home, she’d get silent calls and notes. When I met her she was a good-looking woman, but as she got older, she got better-looking, grew into her features and went from good-looking to striking. She had huge dark eyes, long eyelashes and this amazing smile. The tragedy being she never saw it, never believed it. No matter how many times you told her, she wouldn’t believe she was beautiful.

  I wasn’t surprised she was wary of people, didn’t know who to trust. The worst part was the better-looking she got, the more she attracted men who seemed to be after one thing—to make themselves feel like real men by putting down a gorgeous woman.

  It was the nice ones, the ones who’d sucker me in too, who hurt the most. They’d start off treating her well, then they would erode her confidence, put down her looks, try to douse her spark. After she’d dated a creep for six months only for him to suggest she diet to trim down her size-fourteen frame so she could fit into the size-ten dress he wanted her to wear to his work do, Kamryn changed. He was the last of the men who would make her feel like nothing, the last of those men who would be allowed to behave as if she should be grateful they even glanced in her direction. After him, Kam refused to show her soft side to another man. She didn’t have to say it for me to know that this went back to her school days. The only thing for it was to use men for sex and never let any of them get so close they could hurt her.