The Child Inside (22 page)

I imagine what it must have been like for Andrew as a boy, tiptoeing around his mother, learning to keep his feelings in. When he told her we were getting married, she responded with a drawn-in breath and the advice to
Think carefully
, even though we’d been living together for years. Andrew actually told me this, though I’d really rather he hadn’t.

I cannot feel connected to Lois. I do not feel that I am connected to Andrew, even though I am of course; I am bound to him forever, as Jono is bound to us both. We will never be free. I picture the ties that bind Jono and me as being like ribbons; red, silk ribbons they are, in my mind’s eye. Sometimes I picture myself cutting those ribbons – snip, snip, snip – and then I see myself, not him, just floating away.

If only it were so easy.

But the ties that bind me to Andrew are of coarser stuff, more tangled, more barbed. He is the father of my son. He knows what I know. Our love for Jono tangles and traps us like wire. We share a child, but we share a dead child, too. That fact is always there between us, unspoken.

I loiter in the doorway of my living room, observing this family gathering; my son, my parents, my husband and his mother. I observe the strangeness of their interaction; the way Lois just sits and stares at Jono because, much as she loves him, she doesn’t know how to talk to him. The way that Andrew, hovering anxiously beside her like a go-between or a circus host, can’t stop clicking his mental fingers, willing Jono to turn his tricks. My parents, sitting side by side on the edge of the other sofa, making chat – endless cover-the-gaps-up chat – and sipping their tea while it’s still too hot, sensitive perhaps of an atmosphere. And Jono, struggling in the middle of this, desperate to escape to his PlayStation.

And I am reminded of when they all came to visit on Jono’s third birthday, and the conversation then was all about a new baby sister, and
Won’t it be lovely, Jono, to have someone to play with?
I didn’t loiter in doorways, then; I sat on the sofa, glad to take the weight off my feet, proud to show off my growing bump, with Andrew perched on the arm beside me, his hand resting on my shoulder.

All of these people in this room – do they ever think about my baby?

After she died, my parents came back to visit. They put on brisk, efficient smiles. My dad built a train track with Jono, and my mum said, ‘Do you have any ironing I can do?’

No one talked about what had happened. About what should have been, but now was gone.

We sat in the living room, drinking tea and watching Jono, praising and encouraging him as he pushed around his trains. We got on with things.

And I tried to be grateful for what I had.

For a while we tried to have another baby. For a while, that seemed like the answer, and we went at it hammer and tongs, Andrew and me, not in love, but in desperation. As if we could get another baby in quickly, and then we need not feel the loss so. Much like people do when a pet dog dies: they rush straight out and buy another, and more often than not they get one of the same sort – another Labrador, say, or a collie. And apart from the fact that the new one is a little younger, you really can’t tell the difference. Fido, Bonzo, Spot . . . who’s to know? It’s a dog, that’s what matters.

Though in our case, of course, it would be a baby.

And it would save having to explain things to Jono. Oh sure, there’d be a time delay, but Jono was young; he wouldn’t understand about that. We could fob him off.
It takes a long, long time for a baby to be made
, we could say. Or,
There was a little delay in getting the right parts, but she’s all there now, you’ll have your sister soon.
Or, perhaps,
And guess what – it’s going to be a little brother instead.

Rather than what we did end up telling Jono, which was that he was so perfect that we couldn’t possibly make another one as good as him.

So we went for it. Andrew filled me up and filled me up, but like a clapped-out old machine, my womb just never kicked back into life.

Soon, sex became something to apologize for. It became something to dread. I saw Andrew’s eyes slide away from mine as I lay underneath him. And I felt myself hope and die, and hope and die. Again and again and again.

I thought of going to the doctor, but I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear the thought of all those medical fingers poking and examining me, of the questions, the tests, only to be told the blindingly obvious: that I’d shot out my last decent egg. That my chances were up – over.

Once, when I lay on my bed sobbing my heart out because I’d got my period yet again and I’d really thought –
really, really
thought – there was a possibility that I wouldn’t be getting it that month, Andrew sat down on the bed beside me. I saw the resigned slope of his shoulders, the years fading by in his eyes.

‘We’ve got Jono,’ he said. No, he didn’t just say it, he
pleaded.
‘Rachel, we’ve got Jono.’

When I am with Simon I can forget all of this.

When I lie in Simon’s arms on the crisply ironed sheets of his bed, or stand wrapped in his bathrobe looking down at London in all its promise and anonymity; when I help myself to a coffee by pouring fresh beans into his expensive steel coffee-machine and taking milk from his immaculate fridge in which his housekeeper has arranged salads, cheese, pâtés and hams in neat, clinical order; or when I stand under his shower and feel the water hit my skin and mix with the scent of his Roget & Gallet soap, a scent that will stay with me all day . . . I can forget. I can slip right out of my life.

Sometimes, when we have very little time, he stares at me hungrily, not taking his eyes off mine for a second as he yanks off his tie and kicks off his shoes. We have done it against the kitchen counter with most of our clothes still on, fast and brutal; we have done it on the sofa countless times, with that view a spectacular, cinematic backdrop. We do it when we can. I will go to his flat just for ten minutes with him: a quick, potent fix.

I do not think about Andrew when I am with Simon. Even Jono becomes oddly distant, temporarily stilled within my head. The house, the domestic, the endless silent ache . . . all of it just fades away. What we have, Simon and I, is an escape. We are clawing back something lost, reclaiming something precious. We do not talk about our day-to-day, our separate daily lives. We talk about Vanessa, and the old days. And Simon talks with the same passion and urgency with which he makes love to me. ‘You remember her,’ he says to me, over and over, touching my face, searching my eyes as if he cannot believe I am really there. ‘You knew her too.’

And I can become the girl that Simon remembers – or
thinks
he remembers – from those golden, enchanted days. I can be the girl I always wanted to be.

I have something of Vanessa’s.

It is an item of clothing; a soft blue cotton jacket, not denim exactly, but that sort of thing. In fact it’s more of a shirt than a jacket, but you’d wear it over things. Vanessa wore it over things. The strip of lining down the front behind the buttons, and just inside the cuffs, is pink-and-white-striped velvet. Vanessa wore it with the cuffs turned back, so that you could see that lining. She wore it open, with a little vest top underneath and her jeans. And on her feet her brown suede pixie boots with the tassels at the back, and looped through the waist of her jeans that brown leather belt with the blue mosaic clasp. I loved that belt, even though half the pieces were missing. She’d have her hair tied back, in a long French plait, if there was someone around to do it for her, or that side-of-the-head pony tail, like she has in that photograph with Tristram, the one that Simon showed me. Or else she’d just leave her hair down, and that’s how I loved it best, left to ripple and flow around her shoulders in a mass of Pre-Raphaelite waves.

I acquired this jacket from Leanne. Vanessa had left it at Leanne’s house one day, and there it stayed, waiting to be collected. It hung from the back of the chair in Leanne’s room, along with a varied assortment of other clothes. And I’d see it there, when I came over on a Sunday afternoon and listened to Leanne’s tales of the night before. I’d see it there, and sometimes I’d try it on. It didn’t look half as good on me as it did on Vanessa, but I loved it anyway. And I remember it
smelled
of her, and it continued to smell of her, for years and years, long after she’d gone.

I asked Leanne if I could borrow it.
Do you think Vanessa would mind
, I asked,
if it’s just for a night?

Oh, sure
, Leanne said, barely even listening.

I’ll bring it back tomorrow
, I said, but I never did.

I only wore it the once, to some party or other at college, and then it hung in my room, not from the back of a chair, but in my wardrobe, hidden. Leanne forgot all about it. As far as I know, Vanessa never knew I had it. Maybe she never even realized she’d mislaid it.

I couldn’t wear it again, in case Leanne saw see me in it, and then she would remember and no doubt ask for it back. And so I hid it away, and took it out just to look at it and touch it, and to smell its precious smell. The longer I had it, the more I couldn’t bear to part with it again.

And then Vanessa died.

Now, one morning when Andrew is at work and Jono at school, I hunt for this jacket. It was relegated to storage long ago, when I left home. I packed my old books along with various other relics and keepsakes from childhood into two cardboard boxes, which are now in the loft, untouched for all these years. And the loft is not a place I would normally go.

The entrance is via the landing ceiling. We have one of those hook-down ladders, and it takes me an age to work out how to hook it down. Then gingerly I climb up. I’ve been up the steps before once or twice; I’ve even gone as far as to stick my head through the hole while Andrew was in the loft, getting down the Christmas decorations. But I’ve never actually climbed the last bit, right into the roof.

I reach the top of the ladder, put my arms inside the hatch and heave myself up, not thinking about how I will get down again.

There’s a mass of stuff up here. This is Andrew territory. I stand on the boards that he’s put down across the beams; I see the shelves that he’s rigged up for the various things that he deems to be useful. I see things divided into sections, evidence of his constant project-making. Here are the old broken appliances that he thinks to fix one day, though anyone in their right mind would throw them out: the old radio; an old cine-camera that belonged to his dad; our ancient record player for which you can no longer get a needle. And here are the records that can no longer be played on that record player, all stacked up and gathering dust. There’s the old TV, and a mini drinks fridge that was won in a raffle and will never be used. There are bags and bags of Jono’s old clothes, and his baby toys; I spy his box of Duplo and his pull-along dog. Pushed back under the eaves is Jono’s white-painted changing stand, his high chair and baby-bouncer. And the cot. I cannot bring myself to look at the cot.

I focus on the task in hand.

I find my old boxes tucked down behind a crate of Andrew’s own college books. His books, I notice, show signs of recent disturbance, whereas the lids on both of my old boxes are covered in dust. I have not touched them since the day we moved into this house, and then merely to move them. I have not looked inside. I am not even 100 per cent sure that the jacket will be there; it is very possible that I didn’t pack it up with my stuff after all, but maybe left it at my parents’ house. Maybe it has even been thrown away. This last thought twists in me, and fills me with dread. When I moved my things out of my parents’ home I didn’t want to cling to my past. I’d moved on. Leanne and I had grown apart. I’d been through college and just come back from a year in Paris; I was with Andrew, I had a future to look forward to. I thought about Vanessa still, but as a memory, more distant then than she is to me now, somehow. But in my twenties I was too busy looking forward, whereas now I have become entrenched in looking back.

I reach down to lift the lid off the first box. I am incredibly nervous; afraid that I won’t find this jacket, but just as afraid that I will. I don’t know how I will feel when I see it again. But this first box is full of old school books and valentine cards and exam certificates, all stuffed in, never to be looked at again. I have no desire to look at them now.

What if the jacket isn’t here? What if it did get thrown away? But I pull the lid off the other box and there it is. I find it straight away, wrapped up in a paper bag. And suddenly I remember putting it in that paper bag and tucking it away, as though to rest. The bag is crisp and brittle to the touch now, and I’m afraid that the jacket will be rotten, or full of moths. I lift it out carefully and peel the paper away. And I unfold the jacket. The blue has faded to a dirty white along the creases, and the velvet of the lining is rough now under my fingertips. And it smells musty and stale. I’m
disappointed
by the smell. I feel robbed by it. I thought that if I were to find this jacket I would fall upon it, holding it to my face and breathing in the scent of Vanessa, filling my head with the memory of her. Instead I find myself recoiling slightly. I wish I had left it hidden and untouched, instead of finding it like this. It is a reminder of what is gone, that is all; of what is vanished and turned to dust. I wish I’d let it stay as it was in my memory, the first time I tried it on, so soft, so new, so still of
her.
Now it is the stuff of jumble sales; it is dead man’s clothes.