And it’s not as painful or as embarrassing as she would have imagined. Tim’s sympathetic without being patronising, and telling him the truth about at least that one aspect of her life, laying all her insecurities out so candidly, is liberating. She feels lighter when she’s done, as if she’s shed an unnecessary layer of heavy winter clothing.
But when he asks what she does in the attic she finds it impossible to answer him. She doesn’t want to lie, but nor can she tell him the truth. Not yet. She bites her lip, turns away.
‘It’s okay,’ he takes her hand. ‘Forget I asked.’
And so they talk of lighter things, music and sport, their favourite movies. They have more in common than she would have guessed. For a while she forgets everything – her history, her sadness, her anxiety – and simply lets herself believe that this can be real, that she can be happy again, that she can be the sort of person who laughs easily, who kisses boys. The sort of girl who can fall in love.
49
AT TWO A.M. WE GO UPSTAIRS. WE HOLD HANDS AND WALK slowly, reluctant to go our separate ways. We stop outside my bedroom door.
‘You could come in,’ I say. ‘It would be nice to have some company. I’ll wear my shorts. Your virtue will be safe, I promise I won’t—’
‘Shut up,’ she says, laughing.
‘So?’
‘Okay.’ She nods, bites her lip, looks mildly nervous for the first time that night. ‘I’ll just go and put my nightie on.’
While she’s gone I brush my teeth and change into a pair of tracksuit pants and a T-shirt. I turn the main light off and my bedside lamp on, then get beneath the doona. I lie on my side and wait. When she returns I lift the doona for her. She slides in beside me, right up close, and turns so that her back presses against me. I switch the bedside light off, put my arm around her.
‘You okay?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ she says, and she takes my hand, squeezes. ‘I’m more than okay.’
‘Me too,’ I say.
I close my eyes. And for the first time in what feels like weeks, I don’t worry about weird noises or intruders, I don’t jump at every noise and shadow, and pretty soon I’m sound asleep.
50
WHEN I WAKE THE NEXT MORNING SHE’S GONE. I ROLL ONTO MY back and sigh, assuming she’s done a runner, that when I see her next she’ll be anxious and cold again, and we’ll be back to square one. But she appears a minute later with two steaming mugs of coffee.
‘Hey.’ I sit up. ‘Good morning.’
‘Hey yourself,’ she smiles. She hands me both mugs then climbs up onto the bed and sits cross-legged on top of the doona.
‘So,’ she says, taking her mug back. ‘I have to say something.’
‘Okay.’
‘God, this is hard.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Well, first of all, last night was great, don’t get me wrong. It was so nice spending that time with you, and getting to know you. And sleeping with you.’ She smiles shyly. ‘But I feel I have to say, well, that I don’t want you to feel obliged to me in any way. I mean . . .’ She pauses and breathes again, her cheeks now burning red. ‘I like you. I like you a lot. But I know that – especially to someone like you, Tim – the whole agoraphobia thing must seem really full on. Something you probably wouldn’t want to get involved with. And I understand that. I understand completely.’
She puts her hand on my knee over the sheet, and runs her thumb around and around while she speaks, in a way that I find very distracting. ‘Just, please, don’t think that you have to feel sorry for me. If you don’t want to . . . if you don’t like me that way, I can deal with it. Trust me. I’ve dealt with a lot worse in my life.’
I could back off at this point. I could apologise and tell her that I’ve reconsidered. She’s giving me the perfect chance. And a few weeks ago I would have done exactly that. I would have run a thousand miles from a girl like Anna and such a messy situation. Instead, I decide to let this happen.
Primarily, I guess, I’m in lust. I want to have sex with her. The idea of it was planted firmly in my mind the day before, when she kissed me, when I felt her boobs against my chest, smelt the clean tang of her hair. And now she has her hand on my knee and even though I don’t think she means it that way, the movement of her fingertips feels incredibly sexy.
Also, the fact that Anna has just been so courageous makes me feel that I should be equally brave. She’s taking a risk, so why shouldn’t I? And what is there to lose, anyway? What’s the worst that can happen?
And then there’s Lilla. I’m sick of myself and how pathetic I am around her: the way I always make myself available whenever she wants me, the way I always end up feeling bruised and angry afterwards. I don’t fully understand the hold Lilla has over me, but I know that it’s destructive, damaging. A new relationship could be the perfect antidote – the cure to my obsession with Lilla.
‘My dad told me I should always have an open mind, be willing to try anything,’ I say.
‘He did?’
‘More or less. Yeah. He did.’
‘He probably didn’t have me in mind when he said that.’
‘Who knows what he had in mind,’ I say. ‘I get to interpret it any way I like. I’m not worried about your agoraphobia. I don’t care. I know you’ll get better.’
Anna smiles then, and it’s such an enormous and unabashedly happy smile that it makes me laugh. I grab her hand, rub my thumb over the soft skin of her palm.
I have loads of questions. The spiders on my bed, the destroyed kitchen – did she do those things and if so, why? But I don’t want to overwhelm her, or come across as critical. I don’t want to ruin what feels like the fragile beginning of trust. So I decide to ask about Benjamin. I get the impression that he might be at the heart of things, that understanding what happened to him will explain a lot of the crazy stuff that has been happening.
‘Can I ask you a question? About Benjamin?’
Her smile fades. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t move away or tell me to shut up, either. Eventually she nods.
‘What happened to him?’
Her eyes fill with tears. She sits up straighter, and tries to pull her hand away from mine, but I don’t let go. She starts to cry. A stream of tears runs down her cheeks, her neck, into the neckband of her T-shirt, so that it is soon stained dark. She cries without making a noise. She doesn’t try to wipe her tears away, or hide them. Instead she stares straight ahead, at some point directly over my shoulder, and lets them fall. It’s as if, just by mentioning Benjamin’s name, I’ve smashed down a dam wall. There are so many tears.
I’m alarmed at first, sure I’ve done the wrong thing. I’ve never seen someone cry like this before and I don’t know how to stop it or how to help her. But eventually it occurs to me that it’s okay. It’s not my job to stop it, not even my job to try to make her feel better. The best I can do is just stay here with her. Let her cry.
I don’t know how long we sit there like that. I do know that she cries for ages, that my back starts to ache from sitting in one position for so long, and the palms of our hands grow sweaty together. At some point I lean forward and use a corner of the sheet to dry her cheeks; the top of her lip. I don’t let go of her hand, and she doesn’t move or react. She just keeps on crying.
Just when I’m desperate to move, and about to ask if she needs a glass of water or another coffee, she takes a deep, shaky breath.
‘He died just over six months ago now,’ she says.
‘You must have loved him a lot.’
‘Of course I loved him. Of course I did.’
‘He was your boyfriend.’ It’s a statement, not a question. I’m sure I’ve got that part, at least, figured out.
‘Oh God, Tim, no. He wasn’t my boyfriend.’ She looks upset by my mistake and I make a quick mental readjustment. Not her boyfriend. So who the hell was he?
‘He wasn’t my boyfriend,’ she says. ‘He was my son.’
51
SHE HASN’T ALLOWED
HERSELF TO PROPERLY REMEMBER BENJAMIN SINCE HE died. The sequence of events that led to her pregnancy, his birth, the horrifying day he died, is too painful to recollect. All she knows is that the moment she knew he was gone – his little body cold and pale and lifeless as a piece of stone – all the light disappeared from the sky. The world became black – her very soul abandoned her.
She feels now as if the past months of solitude and silence have left her roughly stitched up, a vulnerable layer of new skin covering the boundless black inside. But remembering is agony. Remembering is like pulling on the scar, tearing the stitches apart, exposing the gaping black hole where her heart used to be.
52
‘WHAT? HE WAS YOURSON?’ I FEEL AS THOUGH MY HEAD HAS BEEN filled with something heavy and dense. Her words have gone into my ears, but can’t get through to my brain. What she’s saying makes no sense.
‘Yes.’
We’re both silent for a minute while I try to take it in.
‘You had a son and he died?’
‘Yes.’
And though I knew something bad had happened to her, this is so horrible, so far beyond any of the possibilities I could have imagined, that I’m rendered speechless. I shiver, feeling suddenly cold, as if someone has dragged an ice cube down my spine. I suppress a powerful urge to stand up and pace the room, to swear and kick the walls, to let off some of the nervous energy that has flooded my body. I force myself to breathe, to be still, to stay put.
I watch a tear slide over her cheek, down her neck.
‘I just, I can’t . . .’ I shake my head. ‘You were a mother?’
‘I am a mother,’ she says. ‘I still very much think of myself as Benjamin’s mother, whether he’s here or not.’
‘Anna. Bloody hell. That’s . . . I don’t know what to say.’
‘There’s nothing you can say. Don’t say anything.’
We sit there without talking while she cries some more. I don’t say a word. What can I say? This is so far out of my experience. I’ve never even been close to anyone who died, and from everything I’ve ever heard, losing a child is the worst thing that could happen to a person. It’s unthinkable, an offence to the natural order of the universe.
As I watch Anna cry, I’m struck by how dignified and beautiful she is. She has endured the worst possible thing a person can go through. And all the time I’ve been living with her she has dealt with this grief, keeping it to herself, trying to cope alone with something so tragic and huge. Before, I thought she was weak; I ignorantly assumed that a stronger person would have been able to overcome the anxiety that kept her trapped. Now I think she’s courageous.
‘I didn’t mean to get pregnant,’ she says, wiping her face with her sleeve. ‘It was such a terrible shock when I found out. And Mum and Dad were dead and I had no other family left.’
She sniffs again and takes a big, shaky breath. And then she tells me.
53
SHE WAS EIGHTEEN, ONLY MONTHS OUT OF SCHOOL. FAR TOO YOUNG to be a mother.
The positive pregnancy test felt like a joke at first – too insane to be real. She giggled in a strange, hysterical way when she saw the two lines. Then she burst into tears. When she’d dried her eyes and cleaned up her face, she went straight back to the chemist to buy another test.
She didn’t see a doctor. She didn’t tell Marcus. Or Fiona. She stopped drinking alcohol and cut down on coffee. It wasn’t hard. She felt queasy and couldn’t tolerate the thought of such extreme flavours anyway. Marcus and Fiona didn’t suspect anything – she would accept a glass of wine and simply forget to drink it, and they’d just laugh at her and tell her she was vague. She explained her tiredness, her sudden need for early nights, by saying she had some kind of persistent bug.
She didn’t make a decision to keep it. She simply did nothing. By the time she went to the doctor she was sixteen weeks pregnant.
‘You can still have an abortion,’ the doctor explained. ‘It’s just a little more complicated. You may need to stay in hospital.’
‘But I don’t know what to do.’ Anna put her hand on her stomach. ‘I haven’t decided.’
The doctor smiled kindly and put her hand on Anna’s shoulder. ‘Actually, I think you have.’
The following week she felt the baby move for the first time. The tiniest flutter, like the wings of a moth brushing against her insides.
The week after that, she told Marcus and Fiona.
‘My God,’ Marcus said.
‘How many months?’ demanded Fiona, her eyes going straight to Anna’s belly.
‘Four. Nearly eighteen weeks.’
‘Oh. So, you’re—’
‘Yes. I’m going to keep it,’ Anna explained. ‘I’ve decided. It’s due in June.’
Marcus didn’t say a word. He cleared his throat and sat down, then got straight up again and went to the window, stared out.
Fiona glanced at him irritably, sighed, and turned back to Anna.
‘That’s – well, it’s all just quite unbelievable,’ she said, frowning. ‘Frankly, I think it’s a bit irresponsible. You’re just . . . well, you’re just too young.’
She went on, lecturing, chastising, telling Anna how difficult it would be, how hard and life-changing babies were. Anna let her rant. She knew it came from concern, rather than judgement or unkindness. She tried to catch Marcus’s eye while Fiona talked. She wanted to let him know – through a smile, an expression – that he didn’t need to worry. Fiona would never need to know. Though he had never explicitly told her so, she knew that Marcus feared Fiona’s disapproval. And somehow Anna understood that this baby being Marcus’s was something that Fiona would disapprove of, very much.
For her own sake as well she wanted to keep the truth hidden. She valued her relationship with Fiona and Marcus too much to jeopardise it. She would happily keep a secret if it avoided upsetting the status quo.
Anna and Marcus had never discussed the night they’d spent together, never made a single reference to it. They weren’t more physically intimate afterwards, or closer, or more casual. It was as if it had never happened at all. Anna wasn’t offended. She knew it was just the way Marcus was, and that his reticence had nothing to do with her. He was just far too self-contained to want or need that kind of relationship. Romantic love, he had told her once, wasn’t something he understood. And that was fine by her. She liked things the way they were between the three of them, and a more intimate relationship with Marcus would only change things unnecessarily. The baby didn’t need to change anything. The baby was his, yes, but that didn’t matter. Nobody had to know. It could be their secret. They would never have to discuss it, or even properly acknowledge it. It would just be.
‘And the father?’ Fiona asked eventually. ‘Where is he? What does he think?’
‘Oh.’ Anna waved her hand dismissively, made sure she didn’t look at Marcus. She willed herself not to blush. ‘He’s nobody. He doesn’t want to be involved. He’s not really the type. I don’t mean to sound flippant or anything, but it’s just not important.’
Fiona sighed again and Anna thought she was going to argue, insist on knowing who the father was and forcing him to take responsibility. But instead she came and stood behind Anna’s chair, put a hand on Anna’s shoulder.
‘I know you must be afraid,’ she said. ‘But we’re here. We’re here with you. You’re not alone.’
*
Fiona and Marcus moved in and the next few months were some of the happiest of Anna’s life. With people in the house, it was transformed. Marcus and Fiona helped her paint her bedroom – a soft green, a beautiful, calming colour – and together they hung fresh curtains and filled the room with new things for the baby. A white cot, beautiful bed linen, an upholstered chair, things for the baby to chew on and squeeze.
And as the months went by Anna grew bigger, slower. She spent a lot of time dozing, content to do nothing but wait. Wait for Marcus and Fiona to come home from work and keep her company, wait for the weekends
, when they would play Scrabble, take long, slow walks in the sun. Wait for the baby to come.
Anna and Marcus never discussed the baby’s paternity. But Anna knew that he knew. When the baby started kicking, she suggested that he try to feel it. He refused at first, becoming shy and uncomfortable, but one day he succumbed, put his hand on the taut skin of her stomach and waited. Anna watched his eyes become wide and round. His obvious amazement made her laugh. In the later months, when the baby was much more active, kicking visibly through her skin, he’d willingly put his hand on her belly when invited. And he would look at Anna as if she was amazing, the first woman in the world to grow a baby. A miracle. And even though she’d really done nothing at all, except have unprotected sex, beneath his gaze Anna felt clever, unique, irrationally proud of herself.
*
Labour started in the middle of the day, which surprised Anna. She’d always assumed it would happen at night, while she was in bed. But it started while she was shopping at the mall. She was buying baby clothes – impossibly tiny little T-shirts and socks, things that seemed far too small to fit an actual human being. The first pain was in her back, and though it was sharp enough to make her stop and take a breath, she assumed she’d pulled a muscle, or twisted herself the wrong way. She was thirty-eight weeks and didn’t expect the baby to come early. She didn’t expect to feel it in her back.
The pains kept coming as she strolled around the mall until she found herself standing still during each contraction, pressing her hands into her back, breathing deep. They had agreed that she’d ring Fiona when labour started so Fiona could take her to the hospital, but she found herself wanting Marcus. She called his mobile.
‘Marcus?’ she said when he answered. ‘I think it’s started. I think I’m in labour.’