There was a silence except for the sighing of the gas fire. Steph asked, ‘Did you go?’
‘Oh yeah. I had to meet her husband and all that first, he was OK, friendly. Barry, he was called, he wanted me to call him Dad. The day they came to get me from the ward Sister Beth was in tears, hugging me the whole time. I was there till I was fourteen. Then they sent me back.’
‘Why did they do that? They sound nice.’
‘Oh, yeah, they were. Wasn’t their fault, I s’pose I was messing around. It just didn’t work out.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just didn’t.’ Michael stretched and sighed. ‘I just wasn’t like them. I wanted to be an actor, for a start. I always wanted to be an actor, they didn’t understand that,’ he said, trying to close the matter.
‘I’m sorry. Honest.’
‘S’okay. I didn’t become one, anyway, did I? Didn’t work out. It doesn’t always.’ He was sitting in his usual place leaning against the sofa, and now shifted his legs and tipped his head back just a little towards her. It was less than a clear sign but Steph reached with one hand and stroked his hair, once.
Michael sniffed and drew in a deep breath. ‘What about you, then?’ he asked.
‘Me? Oh- I’m a survivor, me,’ Steph said, automatically. ‘Nothing’s going to hold me back. I’m an art student. Only I’ve got to take a bit of time out, for obvious reasons.’ She glanced down at her stomach. ‘I’m going back, though. Definitely. When I’m sorted,’ she said. But it was no good. She petered out in simple disbelief and stared into the gas fire, remembering that she had once impressed Jace with all the survivor talk. That was when she’d just got into Bath City College, at twenty-two, to do A-level art. Jace had been doing an NVQ in something to do with building and came in one day a week on day release. When she had told Jace she was a survivor, it was not as if she had not meant it. Look where it had got her.
‘Oh, that’s all bollocks,’ she sighed. ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue.’
‘I know,’ Michael said, complacently. ‘You’re as bad as me.’
‘Bloody cheek. Who asked you?’
‘Well, not your kid’s dad, anyway. Where’s he?’
‘What’s it to you?’
‘Maybe nothing.’
Or maybe something, Steph thought. She did not dare ask if he wanted her to leave. She had been here for weeks now, and the longer something went on, the more that meant that it was all right, surely? They had worked out a kind of routine; she cleaned and shopped for food, using money that Michael left on the kitchen worktop next to the kettle before he went out in the mornings. To begin with she tended to go through it too fast and once he had complained, but apart from that not one word had been said about the arrangement, nor how long it was to last. Usually she lay down and rested in the afternoons, and Michael would be back by the time she woke up. Quite often now he cooked; he said that takeaways cost too much. At the end of each evening they would say goodnight, Michael would go to his bedroom and she would make up her bed on the sofa with blankets and Michael’s coat.
‘He’s not around, OK? If that’s what you mean,’ she said.
‘OK. So it’s not a problem, then.’
A few nights later Steph explained what the matter had been with Jace. She added a little of what had been the matter with one or two others, including the father of her first child.
‘He was called Lee. We were far too young, we didn’t know what we were doing. I left school and had her. I called her Stacey. I wanted to keep her but I didn’t have anywhere, I couldn’t get myself together, so they took her off me.’
‘Didn’t you have no family that could help? What about your mum and that?’
‘She told me to get her adopted. They all went on at me. Said I had my life ahead of me and anyway she’d be better off with a mum and dad that could look after her. They said I’d soon get over it.’
‘Sometimes the gran looks after it, if you’ve had a baby too young.’
‘Yeah, well. My mum had her own baby then, with my stepfather, my second stepfather. My Nan wouldn’t do it neither. She’s not that sort of Nan. Got her own life to lead.’ After a pause she added, ‘Besides I don’t particularly get on with any of them. They can be quite awkward. I still think of Stacey, though, most days.’
‘So what did you do after that?’
Steph shrugged. ‘Usual- bummed around, did stuff, stayed with friends, sometimes with my Nan. She put up with me on and off after my mum moved to Colchester but she don’t like it. I had jobs sometimes, retail, shops and that. I was always good at art, though. Got sorted in the end, went to college, met Jace, got pregnant. Bloody hell, I never learn, me. Told you I ain’t got a clue, didn’t I?’
‘Yeah, well. Nobody’s perfect.’ It really did appear that that would do. Not only was he not going to criticise her and tell her what she should have done instead, Michael did not even seem to expect from her the effort of pretending that she bounced back from failure all the time. The thought made her tearful.
‘I’m keeping this baby, though. No way am I giving up this baby, all right?’
Michael said nothing. Later, settling down in the sudden silence that followed the click of the gas fire being turned off, and surrounded by the smell of curry, which seemed stronger in the dark and which tainted even the stuffy air under her Nan’s blankets, Steph hugged herself and hoped that everything would be all right. Because really, she hardly knew where she stood, or even where she wanted to stand. Michael had never tried anything on with her, and while she supposed she would have been flattered by an attempt, the practicalities might have made it difficult. She was getting so much bigger. She wondered if Michael were one of those men disgusted by pregnancy. She smoothed her hands over her stomach. She quite liked it, getting so round and important-feeling, and she had the idea Michael liked looking at her. Could it be he was old-fashioned, a proper gentleman who would never exact favours in return for bed and board? Or perhaps he was just gay. The filthy soup tins that she had cleared from the bedroom pointed to straight male slobbiness, but the cooking, the nearly becoming an actor, and the suspicious number of books in the flat suggested otherwise. Whichever it might turn out to be, Steph was grateful that Michael had neither asked her, nor shown any sign of wondering privately, when she might be moving on. In the dark she tapped a rhythm on her stomach with her fingertips, and whispered to her baby that everything would be all right.
I was under instructions to look through the post, bin the obvious junk mail, catalogues and so on, and leave anything else in the desk in the library. The owners had arranged matters, Shelley said. They had given their forwarding address to all the important people, banks and all that, so anything that came to the house could either be chucked out or could wait. I hadn’t given it a thought. I’ve done enough houses not to be curious about other people’s arrangements, but I began to think what a cheek to put me to that trouble. Why hadn’t they re-directed everything via Royal Mail? Or left a stack of printed labels with a forwarding address, so that I could simply stick them onto things and give them back to the postman, when I remembered? Actually, I thought, why don’t they correspond by the internet or e-mail or whatever they call it? It irritated me to have to think about them at all.
In fact the only reason I didn’t jam the entire post into the kitchen bin without looking at it was because I had begun to wait for my own letter. The post came early. I watched for the van before I was properly awake, and when I heard the bump and fluttering of envelopes coming through the door I would be down at once, still in my pyjamas, my hair in a dreadful mess. It was quite long now, and it took me a while to learn how to manage it. I frequently forgot to brush it and tie it back at night, and although I found clips for keeping it up in the daytime, they took some time to master. Still, there was nobody to see, not yet. Every day I scanned every envelope but my letter didn’t come and didn’t come. It was awful to wake each day with such excitement, feeling sure that it must be today, to pick up the post, to read envelope after envelope that was not mine, then to realise that I would have to spend another day waiting, another night hoping. With every day it didn’t come I got more convinced that it must come the next. And when it didn’t, I would wonder what I was going to do with all the rage and disappointment I felt, where would I put it? For it seemed like somebody’s fault, my letter failing to arrive.