Trouble (15 page)

“Oh God,” I mutter and shake my head as I offer Aaron a drink from the fridge.

“How are you?” Aaron asks, as he cracks open his can of choice. (Diet Coke – huh.)

“Pregnant,” I say. This is so weird. I feel like I’m having tea with the queen or something.

“So I hear. How’s that working out for you?”

I look at him. He’s a funny one. I can’t figure him out. He’s so direct about stuff but at the same time it’s as if he’s far away from it all, not a part of things.

“Pregnancy’s fine – it’s just my friend that’s a bitch.” I sip a glass of milk. MILK. I used to hate milk, but these last few days I can’t get enough of it.

“You know most people are just curious, they’re not actually hating you or anything.” He looks away, embarrassed almost. “I guess you’ve seen the Facebook page?”

“What Facebook page?”

Aaron

I show her on her laptop upstairs, hating myself for it, figuring it’s worse
not
to know something like this … but I’ve seen more expression on my dad’s face when he’s checking the BBC weather page.

She clicks off the page and shrugs.

“You OK?” I’m the epitome of lame.

“Not really.”

“As I said, most people …”

“… are just curious,” she finishes. “Well, it’s none of their fucking business, is it?”

Hannah gets up and kicks the chair out of the way before storming downstairs and, since I don’t know what else to do, I follow her. She’s opening the back door and rushing outside, then she’s standing in the middle of the lawn and screaming so loud I think her voice will break.

“I’m pregnant. All right?”
She spins round to look at the neighbours’ twitching curtains. “ALL RIGHT? And I’m fifteen! Fuck off!”

“Hannah…” I say, edging closer, not sure if now’s the right time to point out that she’s still in her pyjamas and slippers.

“FUCK OFF!” She screams right in my face before collapsing forward so fast I nearly drop her, and she’s kneeling in the cold, wet grass, sobbing and screaming and growling – actually growling. We stay like that a while, me crouching awkwardly, treading the corner of my blazer into the grass, Hannah contorted into my arms, crying herself into silence. I wonder what the neighbours are making of this and I look up to see an old lady and her husband staring out of one of the windows. I give them the finger and enjoy their outraged reaction. They shouldn’t be looking. This is private.

“I’m wet,” Hannah mumbles and staggers to her feet. “Got to shower.”

I follow her indoors and stand in the hallway, where she turns, halfway up the stairs, and asks me if I’ll stay, apologizes for being mental. I tell her not to worry and that I’ll wait in the kitchen. There’s a book in my blazer pocket, one I’ve read before, but since I don’t have anything better to do I start at the beginning once more. Maybe it was a mistake to come here – it’s not as if I was invited. But Hannah needs someone and that someone may as well be me…

“Hi.”

I jump.

“I didn’t hear you,” I say, putting my book down.

Hannah smiles, picks up the book to look at the cover and wrinkles her nose. “Never heard of it,” she says before pouring herself another glass of milk and digging out a pack of ginger nuts. I decline the offer as she sits down next to me – she smells of coconut and her hair’s still wet. When I look at her, I see someone I recognize: myself, I think. Not in a literal sense. I don’t wash my hair with coconut shampoo and I have certainly never worn a Little Miss Naughty T-shirt. But she looks soul-weary and I know about that.

“Thanks,” she says and meets my eyes. “I mean it. It takes guts to tell a person something they don’t want to hear. Most people would be too scared to face up to it.’

“You’re not,” I say.

“Wrong. Facing up would have been telling Mum sooner, or my best friend.”

“You didn’t tell anyone?” I say, surprised.

Hannah smiles. “I told Gran.”

I smile too, but hers has turned into a sigh and she slumps forwards, her forehead resting on the tabletop.

“Fletch isn’t the dad,” she tells the table.

“Thank God for the baby. Anybody would make a better dad than him.” It’s meant to be a joke, but something tells me she’s a long way from finding it funny.

“You think I don’t know who it is, don’t you?”

“I never—”

“That’s what my mum thinks.” Hannah lifts her head to look at me, the imprint of the tablecloth on her forehead.

“I don’t think anything.” I should leave it there. “Except—”

“Except what?”

“Whoever it is has a right to know.”

Hannah winces at this. “He will not want to know. Trust me.”

So she
does
know who it is. “I would,” I say.

“Well, he’s not you.” She looks at me with such intense sorrow that any suspicion we were talking about Tyrone dissipates. “Can we just leave it?”

“OK.” Hannah obviously has her reasons. “Consider it left.”

She looks at me for a moment longer, her face softening before she puts her head back on the table. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” I finish my can and look for a change of topic. “Can I have a ginger nut?”

She pushes the packet towards me and then waggles her fingers for one, still face down on the table cloth.

“Anything else?” I ask, wondering if she needs a top-up of milk.

“A dad for my baby?” she says with a laugh.

HANNAH

My joke wasn’t exactly funny, so I don’t think his silence is rude as I sit up and down the dregs of my milk. It’s only when I start to stand, turning to offer him another drink, that I realize he’s watching me.

“Me,” he says.

“You what?” I say, caught somewhere between sitting and standing.

“I could do it, if you wanted.”

I sit down with a thump.

“You could say I was the father.”

AARON

My parents have had a lot to deal with in the last year. One thing I must do is be straight with them.

“No. No. Don’t do this. Don’t do this to us, Aaron…” Dad is shaking his head as he backs out of the door, as if leaving the room will save him from what I’m asking. I look at Mum sitting on the sofa, hands pressed together between her knees, staring at me as if I’m something she hallucinated.

I don’t know how to make them understand.

Dad fetches two glasses of whisky from the kitchen and hands the largest to Mum, who snaps out of her trance and takes a swig so large a little of it spills on her jeans.

“Let me get this straight.” She holds up a hand as I open my mouth to explain. “This Hannah girl is pregnant and doesn’t know who the father is, so you have volunteered your services as … what exactly?”

“The father. For now.” I look at Dad, who’s seen the Facebook page. “You’ve seen what they’re saying about her.”

Mum hasn’t. I can see she finds it hard to believe it’s that bad. “Just because she doesn’t know who the father is?”

The way Dad’s looking at me, I know he’s thinking about a list of names that includes mine.

“I
know
it’s not me,” I say, just to be clear.

“Have you even asked her who it is?”

“Not exactly.” Mum opens her mouth. “Look, shush—”

“You are not in a position to be shushing anyone,” Dad snaps and I shut up. I feel a flare of frustration in my chest and imagine myself pressing it back down, folding it forcibly back into the box it belongs in. This is not the time for me to turn.

I need them to see that this is not about Hannah. This is about me.

“I can’t keep on like this.”

There’s an immediate shift in mood.

“Like what?” Mum murmurs and I notice they’re now holding hands. It’s a subtle movement, because they’re already sitting so close, but I see the way their fingers slide together, each drawing strength from the other.

“You think it’s working. That I’ve got new friends.” I look at Mum. “That I’m moving on.” Dad. “But I’m not. And I can’t.”

The rage that threatened to rise has subsided and I’m close to tears.

Mum stands up and puts her arm around me. “Aaron. We have done everything we can to help you. Everything. What else is there we can possibly do?”

They have moved house. Moved job. Moved mountains. And I’m still stuck in the same place I started. I need Hannah to help me out.

“I know it’s a lot to ask. But let me do this. Let me matter. Let me make up for it…” And I’m crying now, my mother holding me in both arms and kissing my head.

Dad walks out of the French windows and through my tears I see him punch the back fence until it splinters, then kick the panel until his foot makes it through to the other side. Then he walks back in and puts his arms around us, the blood from his hand smearing on my shirt, and he sobs so hard I think it might break him.

HANNAH

This time I don’t reject the call when his number comes up. How much worse could it possibly get?

“Four months?” His voice is not unkind and it makes me want to cry. “You said that you’d take the morning-after pill.”

I say nothing. He’s done the maths – arithmetic and probability – and he’s come to the right answer.

“You didn’t, did you?”

“No,” I say, very small, very quiet.

“Hannah—”

“Don’t. Don’t say it. I know. All right? I know.” My voice isn’t going to hold up to a full sentence so I stop. The silence that follows is filled with conversations we haven’t had because I didn’t try hard enough to tell him the truth when it mattered.

“Shit.” He whispers it. I can picture his face and my heart hurts so much it’s as if someone’s crushing it in their fist. “Does anyone know?”

“You mean apart from everyone at school, the whole of Facebook—”

But he’s not in the mood for my jokes. “I meant about me.”

This is my chance. I could ask him to do this – I don’t have to have a stand-in, I could have the real thing…

“I think we should keep it that way for now,” he says.

Which is exactly what I knew he’d say.

SATURDAY 9
^TH
JANUARY

HANNAH

My sister is upstairs. Mum and Robert are in the sitting room. Aaron and I are in the hall. He isn’t holding my hand or anything cheesy like that, but he’s standing close and it’s nice to have someone standing shoulder to shoulder with me for once.

Before we go in he says, “We can do this.”

We
.

AARON

Well, that was fun. Not the all-night discussion I had with my parents last night about how to pretend to be the parents of a boy who got an under-age girl pregnant. Not the epic planning session Hannah and I had whilst sitting on a bench near her house in the ever-darkening dusk. Not the tears and the recriminations that we went through in her front room; Hannah’s mother’s relief and anger resulted in some ugly blame-throwing that her daughter had to scream to stop –
“I just wanted to tell him FIRST!”
Not the moment when Lola, Hannah’s kid sister who I’ve never met, came down crying because she’d heard all the noise and was frightened.

No: the journey home.

“Hannah is my daughter,” Robert said, looking straight ahead at the traffic, his expression prompting my pulse into a drum roll. “I love her like I love Lola, like I love Jason.”

Robert flicked the indicator and we turned down the back road. The darker, lonelier back road…

“I haven’t forgotten what it was like being young and in” – he paused, squinted slightly – “lust. And I know that, in the heat of the moment, things happen. What’s done is done.”

He stopped speaking and I listened to the engine rumble as he went down a gear for a particularly tight corner. I tried not to worry about how fast we were going. It was an expensive car – if we crashed, we’d survive. Probably.

“I know that when this happened, you weren’t thinking about anyone other than yourself.”

I didn’t correct him on the technicality.

“Only now, there’s someone who you actually have to think about. You have to put that person first and make decisions that aren’t easy, ones that you wouldn’t make if you only had yourself to think about. Do you understand?”

“I think—”

“You don’t.” He swerved the car into a lay-by and stopped. He turned to face me and looked at me with terrifying gravity. “You have no idea what I’m talking about. You don’t know what it’s like to put another human being before yourself. You don’t know the lengths that parents will go to to protect their children.”

“I suppose not,” I said carefully.

“Parents will
die
for their children.”

For a second I honestly thought he might try and kill me to see whether I would die for Hannah’s baby. Robert eased back into his seat a little and looked at me carefully, studied my face.

“When I say Hannah’s my daughter, it means I’d die for her, and anything else in between – even if it meant she hated me – so long as I felt it was the right thing to do. So I’m doing one of those things right now.” Robert met my eyes. “If you aren’t serious about Hannah, if you aren’t serious about being there for her baby – for
your
baby – then when you get out of this car, I never expect to see you again.”

He turned back to the front.

“You have the rest of the journey to consider what I just said.”

We drove the rest of the way back in silence. When he pulled up, we both sat staring forwards for a few moments. I unclicked my belt and got out of the car. Leaning back in, I met his eyes and nodded, just once.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

HANNAH

It’s late. Robert’s not come back from dropping Aaron off and I’m about to sneak across the landing to Lola’s room for a cuddle when I hear a murmur from the hallway. I step over to the banister and look down. The sitting-room light’s still on, but the murmur I can hear isn’t the TV, it’s Mum talking to someone on the phone. I can just see the side of her face as she sits on the chair by the door. I’m about to leave her to it when I hear his name.