They were sitting in her father's car outside her home, which turned out to be a council house on a hill overlooking the ripped backside of King's Cross.
The front yard - it may once have been a garden - was buried under spare car parts. A couple of blackened exhausts, a grease-smeared engine, a solitary passenger seat, the rusty carcass of an old Mini Cooper, its wheels gone. The sound of trains filled the air like birdsong.
'A lawyer wouldn't drive a Ford Capri,' Misty said absent-mindedly. Then she looked at Terry with what he felt was infinite tenderness. 'You don't know anything, do you?'
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It was true. He was so easy to fool. Here he was, about to become a father, and he didn't know anything. But he was learning. "What does he do, then?' Terry said. 'Your old man?'
For some reason he half-expected her to say - exactly the same as your old man. He half-expected her to say - he's a porter at Smithfield. We are exactly the same, and we have been exactly the same all along. But instead she said, 'He's a mechanic. Self-employed. A small businessman.'
He thought about it for a while. Everything he had believed about her - the home full of Bach and books, the life of easy privilege, an upbringing of skiing trips and pony clubs - needed to be rethought. Many of the things that he had liked about her were receding fast.
'Where does it come from?' he said. He wondered what you would call it. 'This invented life.'
Misty sighed. 'Cosmopolitan, I guess. All those beautiful people living beautiful lives. And the Sunday Times - especially the magazine, the colour supplement. And then all the people I met in the sixth form, after my real friends had left at fifteen.' She nodded thoughtfully. And then the people I met at The Paper.' He still didn't get it. 'But you didn't have to lie to me.'
She laughed. 'Of course I did. I didn't do it for you, or anyone else. I did it for myself. I lied so that I would feel more comfortable. Do you want to go inside? And meet them?'
He took her hands. 'But I don't want us to lie any more. Not if we're going to have a baby. Not if we're going to do this thing properly.'
Misty contemplated the scrap metal littering the front yard. 'Maybe only if we lie for a very good reason,' she said finally. 'Maybe only if we lie because we don't want to hurt the other one.' She smiled, running her fingers down the curve of his face. 'That's what marriage is all about,' she told him. Misty's father laughed and clapped Terry on the back. 'You've had your fun and now you've got to pay for it,' he announced.
He was a large man in a vest, a thick mat of monkey hair on his broad back, and he poured two shots of Famous Grouse into filthy glasses. Ignoring Terry's mumbled objections, he forced a glass into his hand. T know how you feel - her mum was four months gone when we tied the knot.' He raised a glass. 'Down the hatch.'
Terry followed his lead and threw back the whisky, feeling it burn a path all the way down to his Doctor Martens. His head was whirling. Everywhere in the shabby little house there were images of Jesus and Mary. It felt like they were in every alcove, on the wall, all over the mantelpiece. Christ writhing on the cross, Mary's hands together in prayer. All these images of suffering and purity. Terry placed a hand on his sweating forehead, felt the whisky working its dark magic.
'You're a lucky bastard,' her father gasped, wiping his mouth on the back of a hairy hand.'My wife's brothers gave me the biding of a lifetime, even though I was always planning to do the righl thing.' He waved a glass at the three sullen males contemplating Terry from the sofa. Misty's brothers, two bigger, one smaller. Vicious brutes, the lot of them, thought Terry.
'Seems like you're getting off lightly,' her dad said. Then he got down to business. 'I can get you and Mary the Scout hall on the cheap for the reception.' Terry thought - Mary?
And I know someone at the local Westminster Wine who will do the booze and then you and Mary can move in here with us until the council sort you out a nice little flat.'
It was all worked out. Tears sprung to Terry's eyes. It was partly the Famous Grouse, and it was partly the shock of learning the truth about Misty's family, and it was partly that he had been up all night taking drugs and having adventures. But mostly it was the feeling that his life had suddenly been taken away from him.
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This family wasn't like his own. His mother would have gone mental if someone had knocked over a garden gnome in their front garden, let alone covered it in the greasy guts of an abandoned motor. Terry's parents owned the house they lived in, not the council. And Terry's father, for all his hard-man exterior, spent the weekends cultivating his roses, not stripping Ford Escorts. These people, Misty's family, were from the other side of the working class. Cash in hand, one step ahead of the rent man, ducking and diving, too many bodies in too little space. And Terry was an only child.
Misty's three brothers looked like the kind of mean, pogoing peasant who was suddenly turning up in all the places he loved, and ruining it for everyone. They still had long hair! The tail end of the summer of 1977 and they still had long hair! And not because they were like Ray, believers in another way of living, but because they were too slow and stupid to change. That hair - Terry recoiled from it. Hair that five years ago they would have beaten you up for having. Feathered hair, and flared baggy trousers, and stretchy, short-sleeve shirts so tight you could see their disgusting nipples. Their gaunt, gum-chewing faces disappeared behind the film of Terry's humiliating tears.
Ah!' laughed the smallest one. 'Now the cunt's going to start crying!'
'None of that,' Misty's father barked, and while it didn't appear to have any effect on Misty's kid brother, it certainly made Terry jump. 'He's family now - or he will be soon - and I want him treated proper. Now, the lot of you - come on. Shake the cunt's hand.' Nobody moved.
The old man's face was suddenly red with rage. 'Shake the cunt's hand!' he commanded, his rheumy eyes popping. The brothers lined up to shake Terry's hand.
'God bless,' muttered the biggest brother, almost wrenching Terry's arm out of its socket with his meaty paw. Terry shook his hand in a daze, too far gone to feel the pain. 'God bless,' repeated the middle brother, squeezing Terry's hand as hard as he could, making his fingers sound like cracking walnuts at Christmas.
'God bless,' said the smallest brother, briefly touching Terry's palm and quickly pulling his hand away, muttering under his breath, 'and if you ever look sideways at my sister Mary, I'll fucking kill you.'
Terry could see that for the rest of his time on earth he would be known as the Cunt. What are we getting the Cunt for his birthday? Would the Gunt like a drink? Is the Cunt coming round for Christmas? Finally he understood why girls - women - found the term offensive. No wonder Misty had been driven, into the arms of Germaine Greer, after growing up among all these cunts.
Misty and her mother came into the room bearing tea and ginger nuts. Her mother was a willowy heartbreaking blonde with a soft Irish accent. Terry helped her with the tea and biscuits, half in love with her already. He wanted to rescue her from this place. He wanted to be rescued.
'Well,' reflected Misty's father, his mouth full of soggy ginger nut. 'They've had their fun, Mother.'