Well, then. You should do something about it, shouldn’t you? Get your benefit sorted for a start. Don’t think I’m forking out just ’cause you won’t get your money sorted.
I can’t go to the benefit office like this.
Shouldn’t have fallen pregnant, then, should you?
It wasn’t just up to me, Jace. You are its father.
So you say. I’m not forking out for a bloody kid that’s maybe not even mine. You want to get yourself sorted.
Steph stared straight ahead. The conversation always ended there, so she was right not even to have started it. It wouldn’t have been worth the breath. Every conversation started with Jace going on about something to do with the way she looked, then went on to her lack of money, at which point she would tell him again why she could not go to claim any. Early on in her pregnancy she might also have pointed out something about having to give up college for the baby, reminding him that getting to college had been important to her, and Jace would have said something dismissive about doing A-level art in the first place. Fucking useless. Where’s that leading, fucking nowhere, was how he put it. Then he would shift the attack onto different ground, saying just to torment her that he couldn’t be sure that the baby was his and so why should his money support ‘it’. And anything that she might say in reply to that would make no difference. So Steph squirmed quietly as they drove along, pulled at her T-shirt and knew she was right, again, not to have opened her mouth.
It was less exhausting to run the conversation in her head, which was the closest Steph could bear to go in confronting the mess she was in. Her Nan did not want her any more than Jace did, and she had no money for clothes or anything else. And she could not go and register for benefit because she was going to keep this baby, and if they knew she was having it they would interfere. No more could she go to a doctor, or even have it in hospital, because they would take it off her the minute it was born. Not that Jace had ever suggested she should see a doctor, he didn’t think about things like that. She should be all right, though. It was just nature, after all. She tried to swallow her fear. She would be all right, she had done it once before with no problems, and it got easier with each one, didn’t it? That was what everyone said.
She looked across at Jace again and thought without emotion that he looked bloody stupid with his head going in and out like that. He was a thin person with a very small chin, and Steph suddenly realised that he looked just like the school tortoise, speeded up. If you held out a leaf of parsley to the tortoise- she remembered it had 4F, the class number, painted on its shell but she had forgotten its name- its head would pop out like that and pop back in, just like Jace’s. Anyway, the tortoise was dead now and here she was, sitting here, knowing there was no point in saying I can’t go to the benefit office in this state, can I? They’ll get the social workers at me and then they’ll take it away when it comes and I’m not having that, right? I’m keeping this one, right? She tugged her T-shirt protectively over her belly and felt like crying.
You’re mad, you’re fucking mad, you are. And you got a bloody kid already. Jesus, look at the state of you.
I was too young. I told you that I was only fifteen with Stacey. I wanted to keep her, it’s not my fault they wouldn’t let me.
And so what’s different now? You’ve not even got a place to bring it up, have you?
She remembered, it was called Tommy. Tommy the tortoise. Steph began to cry noisily. He had got run over by a teacher’s car in the playground. That was the kind of thing that upset her now, silly things. Important things, like Stacey, upset her even more. Stacey would be nearly seven now. Seven, and somebody else’s. Steph’s sobs grew louder and more desperate. She had been too young and scared not to go along with what everybody told her to do.
That’s not my fault, is it? You said you’d get us a flat! And we’re not too young, I’m twenty-three and you’re twenty-one, there’s loads of people our age with kids! Loads! You were meant to be moving out of your mum’s and getting us a place. You said.
Jace was looking at her crumpled weeping face with scorn, but there was no let-up in the poke-poke of his head nor in the volume of sound. He shouted, ‘You do my head in, you do! Shut up, can’t you!’
And Steph did, because Jace’s voice was at a dangerous pitch and a whack might follow, even though he was driving. Jace stubbed out his cigarette. He had won that round easily and planned to win the next by changing the subject. ‘I’m out of fucking fags.’
Steph sniffed and blew her nose. ‘You shouldn’t smoke in front of me, it’s bad for the baby. And I’m not giving this one up, we’re keeping it. You said we’d keep it. You said.’
Jace turned off the music. The sudden silence rang round the car. He said, ‘Yeah, well, that was a bloody while ago.’
Steph pulled down her T-shirt again and squirmed as the baby trapped under the too-tight seatbelt wriggled and kicked.
He should not have done it. Michael was perching on the edge of the driver’s seat as lightly as he dared to while driving, as if in some way this would make him less of a load for the afflicted van. He leaned forward, trying to squeeze a little more speed out of it, but actually speed was out of the question. Keeping going, even at twenty miles an hour, was as much as he hoped for now. He should not have done it.
Maybe it was because of the latest bad time he had just gone through, maybe he had not been thinking straight, but he just had not been ready. In fact, it had been mad to go and do a job like this, the first time he had been out of the flat in weeks, and without thinking about the state of the van, without its even crossing his mind that the vicar would see it and might remember it. In fact he might even have got the number if he had been quick. Michael was not sure. He had been too petrified getting the van started to dare look up the churchyard path to see if the vicar was coming after him. If he had been, Michael thought he would have died of fright, or worse, got out of the van and done something silly to him. Without defining to himself quite what might have lain on the other side, he knew that doing something silly to the vicar would have constituted the irreversible crossing of some line. It was not that he had decided not to cross it, it was just that he had not dared look up the churchyard path. And then the van had started.
He should not have done it. As he chugged hopelessly along, Michael’s mind raced and churned with self-reproach. That bloody sprint down the path with the stuff bumping up and down in the backpack, that too had been mad. Not classy, like he took a pride in being. The smart, the classy bit was the impersonation, the getting-to-know-you thing, then lifting the stuff carefully, perhaps coming back later for it, not grabbing it then and there like some cheap little shoplifter. Later, when nobody was likely to be around, when it wouldn’t have mattered even if anybody was because he would be just that visiting curate, popping back again. That was classy, if not easy, so why had he been so stupid? Grabbing and running off with the alabaster effigies had been bad enough, but with the van in this state! There was another terminal-sounding cough from under the bonnet and Michael held his breath. He was so tense that his head pounded, and although he was staring through the windscreen he was not giving enough attention to the road. A white car swung angrily past him and cut in front with a blast of its horn. It must have been sitting on his tail for miles. The bloody van! On the way here he had been so busy feeling like Jeff Stevenson coping with a dodgy alternator or gearbox or whatever that he had not stopped to think about the van’s next journey; it fell a little short of Criminal Mastermind standard for the getaway vehicle to be on its last legs. He was sweating now, and still barely seven miles from the bloody church. If that vicar had decided to get in his car and come looking for him, Michael could be in trouble. He tried to weigh up calmly the chances of the vicar taking such direct action against the more conventional ringing for the police and waiting at the church for their arrival. But all his practical calculations were fading in importance. The more comforting thought of going to bed and staying there (should he ever reach home) was tugging at him, a wanton and persistent desire for oblivion that Michael dreaded, but which his mind was now embracing like an old, disgraceful, but already forgiven friend.