Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (31 page)

I loved coffee; the baby didn’t. This also meant that I had to sit outside in cafés; thankfully the weather was pleasant enough to do that at the moment. Mal had asked me to meet him at our favorite café in West London. He and Stephanie had been on a walking holiday—that was one of the best
things about him meeting her, he had someone else to drag along to those activities—and he’d rung me, it seemed, the second they got back.

This had been our favorite place for years. I think we wandered in from the street one wet day and kept finding our way back here. It wasn’t large, more like cozy, and strikingly beautiful in its simplicity. It had oak wood floors, clean white walls, and chrome fittings. They’d squeezed a tan leather sofa in the back and small, round pedestal tables with stools in the rest of the space. The staff were always smiling and made wonderful small talk whilst they frothed up your cappuccino. I always wanted to kick off my shoes and curl my feet up under me whenever Mal and I sat here. This really was our place—since before he met her.
We
met her, I suppose. But we spent hours in here, even after he met her—she’d never been here—just talking and laughing and drinking coffee.

Outside, in front of the huge picture window of the café, they had placed small circular wood-topped pedestal tables with chrome chairs, and that’s where I sat whilst I waited. Sipping at peppermint tea and trying not to mind that I couldn’t sit inside on the sofa, nor sip a cappuccino.

Taking a sip of the tea, I replayed his voice on the phone. Involuntarily, my heart skipped a little. He sounded so serious. Maybe he was going to explain what was going on with Stephanie. She had been weird on every level recently. She looked tense and wary every time she crossed my threshold; cornered. That was it: cornered. As though her back was against a wall and she was waiting to pounce on me at any moment to free herself. Being around her had become exhausting. I had learned about so-called psychic vampires during my many studies of all things esoteric: people who would—usually
unintentionally—drain your energy as those undead creatures drained the blood of the living, leaving you wrung out or in a bad mood. Usually I didn’t allow people to do that to me, but for some reason my usual defenses and tricks for distancing myself from people weren’t working with Stephanie. She had become like Dracula, zapping my energy, and whenever she left I felt a great cloud lift from me and I would only be fit to lie down. All the excitement and happiness that had infected her in the previous weeks, had caused her to call me her “best friend,” had evaporated. What was left was a black hole into which anything positive was sucked and destroyed.

Hopefully, Mal would explain it and things would get back on track. I closed my eyes, enjoying the feel of the warm and comforting sun on my face. There was little traffic on the street, and few people walked by. I could hear the sound of the air rushing past. This time next year, when I got to Australia, it would be the middle of winter—sun like this would be unlikely.

“Hi,” he said.

A slow grin moved across my face, and I took my time opening my eyes. “Hi,” I said. The happiness I had felt withered in the deepest cove of my heart as I saw him.

I knew his expression well. It was the one he wore when he was about to tell me Aunt Mer had relapsed: agony dressed up in a thin, watery smile and sleep-deprived eyes.

“Have you ordered a drink?” I asked.

He shook his head. Slowly, gently, he cleared his throat. “I’m not staying long.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked, sitting up straight in my seat.

He ran a hand through his hair, curled his lips into his mouth to moisten them. “You know I love you,” he began. “You’re my best friend and no one is closer to me on earth than you.”

If we were going out together, I’d know without a shadow of
a doubt he was about to chuck me. But people didn’t chuck friends, did they? If you wanted to end a friendship, you allowed it to die, you stopped calling, you stopped seeing each other, you distanced yourself so much that the next time you saw them it was like you had been apart for decades and you had nothing real or meaningful to say to each other. You didn’t ask a friend out to a public place to tell them it was all over.
Did you?

“I … You’ve been so amazing to me all these years. Even when I truly didn’t deserve it. We’ve had a lifetime together. But I need to make a lifetime with Stephanie now. That’s what I committed to when we got married. It’s only recently that I realized that I can’t do that if you’re still in my life.”

Apparently, you did ask a friend out to a public place to chuck them.

“We’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching these past few weeks and even more so the past few days, and we realized that we’re not ready to have a child. We haven’t had any real time together. Just me and Stephanie. I’ve been torn a little, only a little, about my feelings for you, but it’s been enough to mean I’m not a hundred percent committed to her. It’s not fair to her. It’s not fair to our marriage. Bringing a child into this would be unfair on everyone. The pair of us just aren’t ready for that kind of responsibility. We don’t want the baby anymore.”

“The thing is, Malvolio, if this was a meal that had gone cold in my restaurant, I’d understand why and how you could say, ‘I don’t want this anymore,’ but this is a baby. You can’t change your mind. You know, what with it being a
baby
and everything.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, lowering his line of sight to the tabletop.

“You’re sorry?” I asked. “I’m having your baby, you’ve changed your mind, and you’re saying you’re sorry?”

“I can’t say anything else.”

“Yeah, you can, you can tell me why.”

“I’ve told you.”

“You have talked a lot of nonsense. You haven’t actually told me why you have changed your mind about something it took so much for me to agree to. And I only agreed to it because I knew how desperately the pair of you wanted this. Up until you went on holiday, I couldn’t keep your hands off my stomach, which leads me to believe that you don’t mean anything you’ve said.”

Mal looked at me, his face set, his dark eyes fixed; it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything else.

“What am I supposed to do about the baby, Mal?” I asked him quietly. Because they may have talked about a baby not fitting into their lives, but I was sure they wouldn’t have thought more beyond that. And they absolutely had to.

He lowered his gaze to the tabletop again. “You … you could … abortion.” As he spoke, his voice was so quiet I had to lean forward to strain to hear. “That would be easiest.” He started to worry at a spot behind his right ear; he did that when he was anxious. “That’s what would be best.”

“Easiest? Best?” I repeated. “What would you know about it?”

He kept his eyes lowered. “Stephanie had one. When she was fifteen; she seems fine.”

Fine? Stephanie? Don’t get me started on that one.
“There’s a difference between having an abortion when you’re young and have an unplanned pregnancy, and when you’re in your late twenties and have gone out of your way to get pregnant.”

“Keep it, then.”

“Right, and tell everyone what? That you’re the father? And you want nothing more to do with me? And, don’t worry, I didn’t shag him and his married butt to get up the duff, no, I used a
turkey baster because I was going to have the baby for him and his wife. No, no, they didn’t drug me, I did it willingly because I care about them so much.”

“That’s what I meant about it being easier.”

“No, Mal, what would be easier is if you were to have the baby as planned.”

“We can’t, I’m sorry.”

“At least look me in the eye when you say that, because otherwise I won’t believe you,” I said.

He raised his eyes again and as they met mine, I saw that he wasn’t there. He had dissociated from this. I had learned about this in my clinical training. A person would remove themselves so they could do something they didn’t want to do, so they could survive a traumatic situation, so they could see through a deeply difficult decision. He had removed himself so that he could tell me this.

I’d only seen him do this once before. We were eleven. Mal, although tall, was sinewy, quiet and always with a girl—either me or Cordy—so a lot of boys took that to mean he was weak and an easy target. Billy Snow, who was large and bullish-looking, sat behind Mal and me in math, and one day called Aunt Mer a loony. He whispered it, knowing our teacher wouldn’t hear but that it would needle Mal. And would probably provide a new line of bullying. Mal was out of his chair and on top of Billy Snow before anyone—least of all Billy Snow—could react. He knocked Billy Snow backwards out of the chair, and didn’t say anything as he pummeled Billy Snow’s face. Everyone in the class—including Mr. Belfast—was shocked into inaction, and we all watched in horror as Billy Snow’s face became a bloody, pulpy mess. Eventually, Mr. Belfast came back to life and hauled Mal off the unfortunate would-be bully. Mal’s eyes, instead of
being wild, slightly murderous, were blank. For the first time in my life, I was scared of Mal. He was not the boy I knew; he was a person capable of severely hurting someone and looking vacant as he did it.

I hadn’t been that scared of Mal again. Not until this moment. The fact that he had to remove himself to do something difficult meant that they didn’t want the baby, and he didn’t want to see me anymore.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We shouldn’t have done this in the first place, but it’s best we tell you now rather than in a few months when it’d be far more difficult.” He reached out, held his hand over mine. He’d held my hand so many times over the years, and now this was the final time, he was telling me.

“Be safe, yeah?” He stood up, and walked away, leaving only the faint scent of his aftershave and the lingering impression of his warm hand on mine.

H
e opened the door, about two hours after he left, and shut it quietly behind him.

His keys jangled as he dropped them on the hall table, and he didn’t put his head around the living room door to say hello, he went straight to the kitchen.

I heard the fridge door open and shut, and a chair being pulled out from the table. I waited a few minutes, gave him time to decide if he was going to settle there or come back to talk to me. When he didn’t come back to me, I went to him.

He was sprawled on the chair facing the window, a beer in one hand, staring out into the garden. In front of him were four bottles of Sol and the bottle opener. He put the beer in his hand to his lips and knocked it back with a jerk of his head. I usually made him drink from a glass, but right then, it didn’t seem an important thing to enforce.

“How did it go?” I asked him from my place in the doorway. The sadness he was swaddled tightly in kept me at bay.

He didn’t reply, but paused for a second in gulping down his beer, letting me know he had heard my question but wouldn’t speak to me.

“What did she say?” I asked.

He put down the empty bottle, reached for another, flicked off its cap and began to drink.

I ventured into the room, deciding to put my arms around him. Love him better. It must have been hard for him, but it was for the best. In time he would see that. This would have come between us. Even if they hadn’t been plotting to keep the baby for themselves, I would always be wondering if they had, and that wouldn’t have been good for our marriage. How would it impact on the baby, too, if I always blamed it for making him fall in love with her again?

I touched him, knowing he would stand up, fall into my arms and let me surround him with love; soothe and support him. Help him start the move toward putting this behind us.

His body flinched away from me in revulsion. I took my hand away, stepped backwards, scalded deep inside by his reaction. “I did what you wanted,” he stated. I knew then we wouldn’t talk about it again. He wouldn’t be sharing with me the details. It was done. Full stop.

As he stood up, I saw his face. Torture branded into every pore. The image of it instantly imprinted itself onto my heart and mind, a permanent wound of what I had made him do. I’d never forget it. He swiped another beer from the table, took the bottle opener and went to the garden, slamming the door behind him to signify that he wanted to be alone.

It was going to take time. Slightly more than I had at first anticipated. I had slightly underestimated what this would do to him. But time would blunt the sharp edges of pain, smooth out the ragged parts. We would be fine. We would be happy again.

M
al stopped short outside the revolving glass doors of his tall office building when he saw me.

Something flittered across his face. Irritation? Fear? I’d never seen it on his face before when looking at me, so was taken aback. Every time he saw me, he looked pleased to see me. Even when we were in the midst of rowing with each other, when he could push me into shouting and ranting and raving at him, he still never looked so … uncomfortable. That was it. He looked uncomfortable.

Inhaling deeply, he came toward me while securing a pleasant look on his face.
Pleasant.
As though he was going to speak to a client he didn’t want to speak to. It was the look I put on my face when I had to go and talk to an irate customer about the food/service/ambience: a necessary inconvenience, one you had to endure to get your job done.

“Hi,” he said, his eyes skimming over me to focus somewhere else.

“Hi,” I replied, quavering over that one word, because I couldn’t hide my anxiety. Pride had told me not to come here, to leave him to it, to decide what I was going to do and get on with it. But pride was not pregnant, alone and, basically, terrified.

I waited for him to say something else. To continue the conversation. I thought … I thought when he saw me he’d realize
what he’d done. That he couldn’t possibly mean it. Even if they had changed their minds about the baby, he couldn’t possibly mean it when he said he wouldn’t be seeing me again. But he clutched his black leather briefcase, the one that I had bought him for his first day at work, in one hand, shoved his other hand in his trouser pocket. He had nothing to say to me. He had said everything there was to say ten days ago. That was why he hadn’t called.