by A J Waines
‘Edith’s got a new puppy called Bradford,’ said Ben.
‘That’s wonderful sweetheart, why don’t you draw him?’ she replied. ‘Then you can tell me all about him later.’
Daniel swayed gently on the swing waiting for her to join him.
It was warm, but the sky was blighted by a crowd of dark clouds to the east. It could stay bright or disintegrate into a storm; it was hard to tell which way it was going to go.
There was never going to be an easy way to say it, so he decided to get it over with.
‘Mum... Ben isn’t my son,’ he said, without looking at her.
For a moment his mother didn’t react. Daniel dug the heels of his shoes into the soil and the swing stopped abruptly, leaving two crescent-shaped dents in the turf. He turned to her and watched as she pressed her fingers over her mouth.
‘But he must be…’
‘I’ve had the results. We don’t have the same DNA.’
He noticed the heavy clouds had crept closer.
‘They can’t be right,’ she croaked, the shock having stolen her voice. Daniel caught her looking at his eyes, from one to the other, trying to gauge his emotional state.
‘There’s no mistake.’
‘Oh, my God…’ she said, turning to look at Ben, as if checking he was still there. ‘I can’t…’ She halted and cleared her throat. ‘There must have been a mix-up at the lab,’ she said, squeezing her hands into fists.
‘I did it twice. It’s conclusive.’
She let out two hoarse gasps, then sank back into a dazed silence. He gave her time to let it sink in; he was in no hurry to speak again. Words seemed useless at a time like this.
Suddenly she came to life again. ‘And Sophie has the nerve to accuse you!’
‘She’s really been full of surprises, hasn’t she?’
Franciska bowed her head. ‘What are you going to do?’
He took hold of her hand. ‘You’re the only one I can trust, Mum.’ He stared across the garden at the tidy beds of deep purple rhododendrons offset with cleverly placed spires of delphiniums. Everything in her life was neat, orderly and predictable.
‘I’m going to have to see Sophie again,’ he continued, ‘have it out with her. She said she wants a divorce, anyway.’
He narrowed his eyes as another thought struck him.
‘If she knew Ben wasn’t mine, why didn’t she fling it in my face a long time ago? During one of her hateful outbursts towards me. Why didn’t she ever mention it?’ He rolled his tongue over his top teeth. ‘I can’t work out what she’s playing at. She was the one who was cheating, so why try to turn the tables on me? Why not just admit that Ben is someone else’s child and take off with the guy?’
Franciska shifted her gaze to Ben, who had given up on drawing the dog and had started digging a hole in the lawn with a toy car instead. She went over to him.
‘Don’t do that, darling. Come here and see what I’ve got for you.’
She led him inside and they returned with a plastic bag full of toys. ‘Let’s tip them out and see what you want to play with.’
Ben busied himself plucking out various items and bringing each one over to show Daniel.
She joined Daniel again on the swing seat. ‘I can’t believe he’s not your boy,’ she whispered, sounding baffled. She tipped her head on one side following her grandson’s every move, as though seeing him for the first time.
Ben was absorbed in a world where dinosaurs met fire trucks on the grass.
‘What made you think he––?’ she went on. ‘What made you question it? You never gave any indication when Ben was born that you thought Sophie had been seeing someone else.’
‘Well, that’s because I never doubted her. Ever. It’s just with such odd things happening lately, I wanted certainty. Reassurance.’ He laughed. ‘I didn’t expect this. I really didn’t.’
She shook her head.
‘There’s something else,’ he said.
He told her about the photographs he’d taken to Sophie’s unit.
‘Rick wanted to make it look like I was having an affair. He’s hiding something from me. Now this.’
She gulped nervously. ‘Are they connected, do you think?’
‘I’ve thought about it long and hard, but I don’t see how. Not directly. Sophie can’t bear him. Well… she says she can’t. And Rick said she’s too stuck up for him.’
Although, so many lies and deceptions had been flying around lately it was hard to tell truth from fiction.
‘You’ve got to have it out with him!’ she exclaimed. ‘And her!’
There was a rumble of thunder. Desperation seeped into his words. ‘I’m totally out of my depth.’
She took a sharp intake of breath. ‘Oh, Daniel…’ He looked into Franciska’s eyes and saw the same pain he’d witnessed when his father died. He wondered at what point emotional torment became too intolerable to bear.
She squeezed his hand. ‘Sweetheart, if there’s anything I can do…’ He’d forgotten to take into account her unwavering resilience and determination. He hoped it ran in the family.
They both looked up, expecting the tiny patter of raindrops to follow. They waited, but the grey clouds dispersed and no rain fell. Daniel was disappointed. A raging storm would have matched his mood.
Ben came to sit between them and, soon after, fell fast asleep; his head nestling against Daniel’s hip.
He stroked the boy’s hair. ‘I need to know who the father is.’
‘Do what you have to do,’ she said ominously.
The phone rang and she jogged inside.
Daniel continued to stroke Ben’s curly blond locks, careful not to wake him. Until the day the test results arrived, he had taken up all the space in Ben’s life as his father, never doubting his position. Nothing had changed within him or between the two of them and yet now, somehow, everything had changed.
‘We’ve done everything together,’ he whispered, ‘you and I. I heard your very first words. You watched your first firework display from my shoulders. I held you the day you stamped that staple into your thumb. And I will take you to your first day at school, be there when you graduate and be proud of you on your wedding day.’ He stared ahead of him, unseeing. ‘But I am not your father’. Warm tears rolled down his face and he could only let them go.
Franciska faltered as she crossed the lawn towards them, then turned and went back inside.
Daniel watched the boy’s abdomen rise and fall, saw his eyelids flicker with the images of innocent dreams. All the aspects of himself; the physical characteristics, the personality traits that he thought he’d seen in Ben as he grew from month to month, had been one thing and one thing alone. Wishful thinking.
As Daniel drove away, Franciska bobbed down to car-level and mouthed, ‘I love you’. Daniel raised his arm out of the window in a silent salute.
On the drive home, he replayed the moment when he’d read the letter from the online DNA service. He’d tried to fool himself into thinking they’d sent it to the wrong person; that they’d got his details mixed up with someone else. He’d phoned the service and insisted on speaking to the test supervisor. Then he’d done the test again.
But, there was no mistake. It was all there in black and white. Innocent patterns of bars across a screen, like Morse code.
But the code wasn’t spelling out his name. Instead, it spelt out the name of a stranger; a nameless person who had slept in Sophie’s bed and who was Ben’s biological father.
He didn’t know how he was going to carry on after this. Only a few months ago, he’d had a devoted wife, been a loving husband and a doting father – and now his whole world had come crumbling down.
How was he going to take one breath after another, take one step after the next in a situation that was broken to the core?
All he could feel was bitter disappointment and rage with Sophie, with Rick for sparking the whole thing off, with the stranger who had come between them, with the w
orld for letting this happen. A scorching savage rage that had a mind of its own. For the first time in his life, he understood how someone could snatch whatever was to hand and launch it at another person. To hit them, shoot them, stab them.
Is this how Sophie felt when she attacked me?
He pulled into a space in front of the house with a fierce jolt. Ben woke up and started to wail. Daniel held him in his arms and they both cried as they made their way to the front door.
As soon as Daniel left, Franciska staggered into the lounge and collapsed onto the sofa. Ben was her only grandchild and he couldn’t, absolutely couldn’t, be taken away from her.
She lifted her head towards the large portrait above the fireplace. To the photograph of dear Tom, who had never known him. Dear Tom, who through his genetic links was living again inside Ben, filling part of the gaping hole left by his absence – or so she had always believed.
She got up and paced into the hall and back again. A burning fury inflamed all her limbs and she didn’t know what to do with it. Divorce was bad enough – all the legal wrangling about who would have Ben. But what happened when Sophie had served her sentence and made a claim for Ben, making it clear he wasn’t Daniel’s son? What then? She might never see him again.
She stormed out into the back garden towards the pile of logs she’d meant to ask Daniel to chop for the fire. She barged into the shed and pulled out a rusty axe from the cobwebs in the corner. Rolling up her sleeves, she took a deep breath before swinging the heavy axe down onto the chunks of wood, one by one, muttering obscenities with every breath.
It began to rain but she didn’t stop. She slashed and hacked until all that was left was a mound of splintered chunks on the edge of the lawn, like a funeral pyre.
Chapter 59
Daniel found the visitors’ car park of Sutton’s Glenbrook Prison after a fraught journey on the A23. The prison had been built recently, with pale orange brick and two lines of silver birch saplings edging the drive. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought it was a new ice rink.
After signing in, he was taken to a room that smelt of sour mattresses and stale deodorant with top notes of disinfectant. There were rows of yellow formica tables and red bendy plastic chairs. Dismal. It reminded him of the unemployment office where he used to wait for Rick, who insisted on signing on in the months before he went to university. Unlike Daniel, who’d got himself a temporary job.
Sophie was sitting on the edge of the seat, her head down and her hands folded in her lap as if she was waiting for pallbearers to arrive. The room was filled with couples leaning across the tables towards one another, desperate to claim some level of intimacy.
Sophie’s skin appeared yellow-grey. Daniel hoped it was due to the fluorescent lighting, but her delicately honed cheekbones certainly appeared angular and protruding. As he dodged around chairs to get to her, he felt a boulder fall in his abdomen and he knew his feelings for her had changed. He felt pity for her, but it was a distant and hollow commiseration, no longer rooted in love.
‘You didn’t bring Ben?’
‘It didn’t seem right today. Edith has him.’
Daniel sat back in his chair and sighed. ‘I wanted to tell you in person that I’m agreeing to a divorce,’ he said.
‘Oh...’ She hooked a loose strand of stringy hair behind her ears, looking disconcerted.
Isn’t that what you wanted?
He couldn’t be bothered to say it out loud.
‘But I’ll fight for custody of Ben,’ he added. That was the important part. He braced himself for retaliation, convinced he was about to hear the announcement he’d been dreading: that Ben wasn’t his own son anyway.
‘Okay,’ she said, hunching over without any defiance.
Nothing.
Her compliance threw him. Surely, now was the time to declare the truth about Ben. To push that knife in, the one she’d failed to kill him with – just a little further to make him really squirm in agony.
But no.
Daniel was confused. He returned to the same question he’d had when he spoke to his mother. During the months before the stabbing, in her most vehement accusations, why hadn’t she thrown Ben’s paternity at him? Didn’t she know that would be the ultimate means of hurting him? She could have told him it was tit for tat. He was playing the field now, but she’d had an affair a few years earlier. Why hadn’t she used it then? Or now?
‘I need to say something and I need you to be honest with me in return.’ His voice was grave and slow, like the tone he’d used to give the eulogy at his father’s funeral.
She looked at him with concern. ‘Is Ben okay? What’s happened?’
‘He’s fine.’ A fleeting inner warning made him hold back from mentioning Ben just yet.
‘I know you had an affair with someone,’ he said. ‘After we were married.’
‘What are you talking about?!’ Her response was instant; her voice like a crisp bell cutting through the hushed exchanges of those around them. ‘I’m the one who was faithful. Every. Single. Day!’ Her face twisted with disdain.
She was so utterly adamant, it threw him off balance.
‘You’re trying to tell me you never slept with anyone? Not once?’
She visibly shivered, her mouth open in disbelief.
‘No way! Where did you get that stupid idea from?’
Something made him hold on to what he knew; made him wary of saying more.
‘How can you ask me that,’ she went on, ‘after everything we’ve gone through?’
Her tone softened. ‘I’ve been thinking about those fake photographs. Have you seen Rick? Have you confronted him about it?’
‘He admitted everything. He wants to punish me for something.’
Her face contorted as though finding something stuck in her throat. ‘Punish you for what?’
‘He refuses to tell me. I have no idea what I’m meant to have done.’
‘So you accuse me of having an affair? How is that related?’
He didn’t want to come out with the truth. Not yet. He was still testing the waters and didn’t trust her. ‘I… it crossed my mind.’
‘Rick’s stupid trick made everything worse, but it wasn’t just the pictures…’ She avoided his eyes.
‘So you say,’ he said with a sigh. He didn’t want to go through it all again.
‘But, I have been thinking,’ she said. ‘My medication has been adjusted and I’m feeling almost back to normal again. I was irrational, completely distraught before, but now…’ He let her grab his arm, but he kept it rigid against his body. ‘I thought, perhaps we might…’
‘Might what?’
‘See if we can make peace between us, perhaps even start again. Not just for us, but for Ben.’
He shook himself free from her. ‘Too much damage has been done,’ he said, his mind flashing back to the unambiguous letter from the DNA clinic. Maybe in her deluded state, she really believed she’d never slept with anyone else. But, the facts were there.
‘I don’t think we can come back from this,’ he concluded.
A frown quivered between her eyebrows. ‘But we have Ben, we are a family. We have to try.’
He hadn’t expected this. Not at all. Only recently she’d wanted a divorce and now she was taking a U-turn. She really was deranged! So much for her mental state improving. It looked to him like she needed a rigorous reassessment.
She reached over the table to grasp his hand, but he pulled away. Her pleading only made him want to get it over with.
‘I’m sorry…’ Daniel got up and held up a palm to make the prison officer aware he was leaving. ‘I’m ready to sign the divorce papers,’ he said, and left the room.
As his heels echoed along the corridor, his mind began to overload with images of Sophie and a faceless man sleeping together behind his back.
How many times had it happened? How many times when Daniel had initiated love-making had she tolerated it, gritting her teeth, thinking
of someone else? Perhaps there were even times when they had both made love to her on the same day. The idea made him want to retch and he had to slap his hand over his mouth and make a run for it.
Daniel went straight to Edith’s to collect Ben.
Once they were alone inside the house, he held him, hugged him, kissed him and pressed his face against his sugar-smelling hair.
‘My boy,’ he crooned. ‘We’ll get through this. You and me. It’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be all right.’
Ben threw up his arms and said, ‘Biscuits!’
‘Yes – you’re absolutely right – this deserves some biscuits,’ said Daniel, pumping up his spirits for the sake of his boy.
They spent the next couple of hours in and out of the backyard playing Cowboys and Indians, making mud-pies in the sand pit and seeing how many balloons they could blow up and burst.
Finally, Ben flopped onto the sofa. One minute he was talking to his furry rabbit, the next he was fast asleep. Daniel, on the other hand, felt like an aeroplane in a tailspin, not knowing if he was heading for a crash landing.
Sophie had denied sleeping with anyone. She was completely insane. It was the only explanation.
Now there was one more step he had to take.
Chapter 60
‘I need to ask you a favour,’ said Daniel without preamble.
‘Oh. It’s you. I didn’t think I’d hear from you again,’ she said.
Jody sounded like she was on the move; he could hear her heels in a regular click-clack in the background, together with passing cars.
‘Nor did I, if I’m honest, but I think you’re the only person who can help. If you’re up for it?’
There was a tiny hesitation. ‘Depends what it is. I’ve got myself into a lot of trouble lately by doing favours for people.’
‘That’s true,’ he said, picturing the twist of her jaw which no doubt accompanied the irony.
‘What’s the mission should I choose to accept it?’
He sketched out his idea, interrupted every now and then with trills of intrigue from Jody.