Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (23 page)

“I found the chocolate. And the cigarettes,” he said. He made it sound as if he’d found class A drugs or something. Every woman needed chocolate. Everyone knew that. It didn’t mean anything. And if I wasn’t smoking in the house, around him, if I wasn’t making him inhale secondhand smoke, what was the big deal about me smoking? They were only cigarettes, not wacky baccy or anything.

“I should have noticed,” he was saying. “I should have noticed the signs. I was so wrapped up in work and trying to get the promotion, I didn’t realize how much you needed the serotonin and the nicotine. I’m sorry.”

Were you always this dramatic?
I asked him inside. He made this sound like a big deal.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d left your job?” he asked.

I didn’t tell you because I knew you would react like this. You wouldn’t understand about the gray. You would think something was wrong and you’d bring me here.

“You’ve been pretending to go to work for six weeks, Steph. I don’t understand why. If you weren’t happy there, I wouldn’t have made you stay.”

No, you would have watched my every move.

My wrists were throbbing now I was awake properly, fully ensconced in the conscious world. I hadn’t done the job properly. If I had, this wouldn’t be happening. I wouldn’t be feeling guilty and like a failure on top of everything else.

“What can I do, Steph?” he asked.

“Water,” I croaked. I didn’t realize until I tried to speak that my throat was parched, scratchy. They’d probably stuck a tube down there to purge my stomach of the undigested pills. They
were never gentle. I’d watched it being done, and a couple of times I’d been mostly conscious when it’d been done to me, and it’s as if they didn’t realize that the lining of your throat was really rather delicate and would be raw and sore from having things brutally shoved down it like that.

The water glugging into the glass was theatrically loud, it hurt my head in deep-down places. I wanted to cover my ears, but the restraints wouldn’t let me. He held the straw in place so I could raise my upper body and take a few sips. The water was warm—room temperature—but good considering how dry I felt. Desiccated. I felt so dry that I might blow away like dust particles on a small gust of wind, or if he breathed a little too heavily near me.

“Did you read my diary?” I asked him carefully through my scratchy throat. If he had found the chocolate, my secret supply that kept me going, kept me happy, he must have found my diary. Tucked away in shoeboxes on the top shelf of our wardrobe. He never looked in there. He occasionally made a comment about the number of shoes I owned, but he never knew until now that along with the shoes, each of them had a few bars of chocolate, most had a packet of cigarettes, and the box with my leopard skin boots also had my diary.

When he didn’t reply, I turned my head to look at him. He was fiddling with the straw in the glass, his head bowed. He was avoiding my eyes because he was ashamed.

“You had no right,” I said to him.

He continued to play with the straw, ignoring me. “They want you to see a psychiatrist,” he eventually said.

I frowned, shook my head in disbelief. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said. I had been trying to tell the doctors, nurses and orderlies this every time I woke and found I was in
here and bound to a bed, but they wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t let me free. There really is nothing wrong with me. Over the years, they’d been trying to do this to me. All of them, my mother, my doctors, and now Mal. They’d all been trying to make me go and see someone who would shrink my brain, make me talk to them and make me seem crazy. When I wasn’t. I just felt things. That was all. Everyone felt things. Psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, the whole lot of them all made a big deal out of nothing.

“They won’t let you out until you talk to someone,” he said.

“They can’t keep me here against my will,” I said. My voice, although raspy, sounded weak and insubstantial. I was raging against this, but I couldn’t express that. I was tied down. And my voice wouldn’t express my indignation.

“I signed you in here,” he explained. “Remember, you said I should if this happened again? So I did. And I want you to comply with the treatment they suggest. I know that’s what you’d want as well. If you could see clearly enough.”

One thing was certain. I was trapped here. Stuck.

“Who have you told?” I asked. I had to find another way out. But I couldn’t let Mal know that. I had to play along for now.

“Just your family,” he said casually.

Just
my family.
JUST
my family. “Oh, shoot me now,” I said. My mother would come here and try to clean the place, in between crying and praying and wondering what she’d done to deserve this. My father would think I was wasting everyone’s time and I was a willful brat who he hadn’t beaten enough when I was a teenager. Mary would sit and glare at me, resentful that I didn’t do the job properly and that she’d had to take time out of her busy life to come here—like I’d asked her to come or something. And Peter would show up in a few weeks, probably after
I’d been discharged, and would be genuinely surprised that the world hadn’t waited for him to catch up.

“They were really worried. I told them to come in a few days, when you’re feeling stronger.” I suppose that was something. “I ring them every day and tell them how you are.”

“Have you told Nova?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t told anyone except your family. I won’t tell anyone else.”

“OK,” I replied, feeling my body relax. “Thank you.” It was odd thanking someone for not gossiping about me.

“What about me, Steph?” he asked quietly, his voice as small and weak as mine was. I turned my head to look at him. He had shrunk in on himself a little; sudden anguish and torment were gouged deep into every part of him. “I know you didn’t want to be here anymore for that moment, but what about me? What am I supposed to do without you?” He pressed his forefinger and thumb on the bridge of his nose, tightly screwed up his eyes. “How am I supposed to carry on if you’re not here?”

I swung my head back to look up at the ceiling; his words were seeping into me like the gray had begun to do. What I did wasn’t fair to him. But it wasn’t about him. It wasn’t about anyone except me. Like everyone else, he couldn’t see that. He couldn’t understand that. You never could until you were here. Where I was. Until the gray had so taken over, you had to stop it. And sometimes, the only way to stop it, to stop the slow, agonizing suffocation, was to leave. To walk through the door marked Exit, knowing gratefully that there was no way back.

It was the end.

“I need some sleep,” I whispered and closed my eyes.

I heard him stand, place the water back on the table on the
other side of the room. He came back to me, pressed his lips to my forehead. “Love you,” he whispered and left.

When I opened my eyes again, I looked at the door, wondering how I’d be able to get out of here. He was still standing there. Tall, silent, strong. He stood by the door, staring at me. He smiled at me with his lips curled into his mouth before he turned around and left.

F
or two weeks I made him dinner every night.

I rearranged my shifts so I only worked days, so every night I could make him dinner. It was always a Ghanaian meal: beef stew; rice with kidney beans; plantain; fish soup; fu-fu; gari; black-eye bean fritters; jelof rice. The food of our childhood, the food Mum would feed us up with during good times and bad.

I did it because I loved to cook. And I did it because I could see that the smell of the food, the taste of it, would relax him. Would pull him out of the fog of fear that surrounded him when he arrived at my flat after having seen Stephanie. He didn’t tell me what was wrong with her, I didn’t ask. Instead we ate and we talked, and we fell asleep on the sofa.

On the sixteenth day he didn’t turn up, so I knew she was home. I knew she was fine.

I
want a baby,” I told him.

It had been bubbling away for a long time. It was the last trigger and I could see that I could prevent it happening again. Talking about this trigger would make it less scary. He could do what he always did, he could try to face it with me. Of course he couldn’t, not completely, but knowing he’d listen and understand made me feel less alone in all of this.

“I’ll pick you one up at the supermarket next week. Or do you want me to go down to that new delicatessen? They’re organic and ethically sourced.”

I laughed, despite myself, and then punched him lightly on the arm to ask him to take me seriously. “I’m being serious,” I said to him. “I want a baby.”

His footsteps on the walking trail stopped and he paused. He said nothing for a while, just stared off into the vista, a breathtaking tessellation of green that made up the Welsh countryside.

“How long have you felt like this?” he asked.

“Six months, maybe a year.”

It clicked in his mind, behind his eyes:
What.

Loss and disruption, two huge triggers for me. When I was thirteen, our dog, Duke, died and six months later we moved from London to Nottingham. I was lost up there, I found it hard to make new friends and I missed Duke so much. Nothing was ever really the same after that.

“Is that why?” Mal asked.

“I think so. One of the reasons, anyway.”

He looked away again, replaying what had happened eight months ago now he could hang it all on a “what.” Mal came back for me, took my hand and we started walking down the bumpy trail again.

“What are our options?” he asked.

“None,” I said. “I can’t have children. That’s it. I only told you because I don’t want to start slipping again, not if talking about it will help.” We navigated our way over the path, twigs snapping under our sturdy boots. It was a unique kind of peaceful up here: there were birds and other creatures, but they all made up rather than disturbed the backdrop of silence, so pure and uncluttered. “I didn’t understand what you’d given up until recently, you know. You gave up the chance to be a father to be with me, that’s a huge thing to have done. Thank you.”

“Do you really want a baby, Steph?” he asked in reply.

When I thought of babies, I felt emptiness. It was something I couldn’t do. But I wanted one. To have, to hold, to be mine. I wanted someone to take care of, to love. “I really do,” I replied.

“Then we’ll find a way to make it happen,” he said, as he wrapped his arms around me, drew me toward him, transferred his heat and strength to me with that hold. “OK? We’ll find a way.”

It all kept coming back to the same thing.

IVF was out. There was a waiting list on the NHS and it would cost too much privately. And how would all the hormones I had to take interact with the other medication I was on?

Fostering was not an option. I couldn’t stand to take care of a
child for only a few days or weeks and then have to lose them again.

Adoption was viable, Mal thought. But I was scared. Of the questions they’d ask, what they’d want to know. How closely they would monitor us if they found out about my medical history. What they would demand I do. I could see them making me jump through hoop after hoop so that I could fit their criteria. Mal didn’t think it would be that bad, we should at least investigate it, but then
he
wasn’t the one who always had to tick “yes” to questions on forms about taking regular medication,
he
wasn’t the one who had to regularly visit the doctor to have his blood checked,
he
wasn’t the one who might have to inform the DVLA at any point that he wasn’t allowed to drive. Mal didn’t have what I had, so he couldn’t understand how it felt to be constantly singled out as “other,” “broken,” “damaged.”

So, it all kept coming back to one thing: find someone to have a baby for us.

“Victoria is out of the question, obviously,” Mal said. We’d talked and talked about it for weeks and the conversation always went the same way.

“I don’t know, two Wacken genes combined, it’d be a very cute baby,” I said.

“Stop it, stop it now,” he said. “It’s too heinous a thing to even joke about.”

“Mary would tell me that I was cursed and I deserved this. There’s no way on earth I’d ask her,” I said.

“What about your cousin Paula? She was your bridesmaid, and she’s had two children already.”

I didn’t
really
like Paula that much, I’d only asked her because her mum was my mother’s sister and I’d stayed with them once and it was expected. “Yeah, maybe,” I said noncommittally.

“What about your friend Carole? Or Ruth? Or Dyan?”

“They’re not those kinds of friends.”

There was someone else, of course, but in all the discussions, we never mentioned her. I hadn’t because he hadn’t. And I was surprised he hadn’t. I didn’t know why.

We lapsed into silence and it was at this point one of us would say, “We really need to get to know more people.”

“We could pay someone, sign up to one of those agencies,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said halfheartedly. “Apart from the cost, I don’t know, it wouldn’t be the same as someone we know. I know you get to meet the surrogate first, become friends with her and everything … but I suppose I want someone I can talk to every day. Drop in and see her, be there with her. Be a part of the day-to-day rather than just seeing her for stuff like the scans and the birth. Do you see what I mean? A friend would let me do that; someone who I’ve become friends with for a specific purpose probably wouldn’t let me take over so much of their life.”

“If we search for the right person through an agency, we can explain all that.”

“I suppose so,” I replied.

At this point he’d bring up adoption again and I’d have to explain why I didn’t want that.

“Nova,” he said instead of “adoption.”

“Nova,” I repeated.

“She’s that kind of friend, she’d let us both be a part of the day-to-day, and the baby would be beautiful.”

“And half black.”

“Yeah, and …?”