Happy Endings (18 page)

‘I’m pregnant, Jack,’ she said, searching my face for a reaction. ‘We’re having a baby.’

Suddenly everything seemed to tumble and fall away beneath me. Everything I thought I was and had seemed different and changed forever. How could she be pregnant? She was on the pill and we’d been together for so long and I didn’t understand. I was going to be a father. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have a proper job. I hadn’t made it as a writer. I couldn’t support them like my own father had with us. But then suddenly it didn’t matter. Emma and I were having a baby. All the negative thoughts and worries evaporated and a huge rush of love and protection shone like a lighthouse through my body, illuminating everything around me.

I’d thought about having kids one day, when our careers were sorted, when we could afford it, when it seemed right, but sitting there at Frank’s, it felt right. It wasn’t planned, we couldn’t afford it, our careers were far from sorted and maybe we weren’t ready, but it felt right.

‘Seriously?’ I managed to mumble out between the tears that had suddenly appeared on my face. ‘I’m going to be a dad?’

‘Seriously,’ said Emma and I buried myself in her knowing that nothing in the world really mattered anymore except Emma, me and the little person growing inside of her.

Ed

I love Kate. I love Kate. I love Kate.

I was sitting at my desk repeating the same three words over and over in my mind, trying desperately to erase in some way the waterfall of guilt that kept tumbling and cascading unrelentingly down my body. Since my night with Georgie, I’d felt sick nearly every moment of every day. I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, hoping and praying it had all been just a horrible nightmare, then realising it wasn’t a bad dream at all but my actual life. I’d see Georgie at work, smiling, laughing and without a care in the world and my heart would sink. It meant nothing to her. I had been just a casual shag, another notch on her bedpost.

‘Do you have those numbers?’ barked Hugh, suddenly standing in front of me. His bear-like silhouette blocked out the sun that was coming through the window.

‘Sorry, sir, what’s that?’

‘The numbers, Hornsby. The numbers we spoke about this morning,’ said Hugh again. The hostility in his voice because he’d been forced to repeat something spat at me and I was surprised not to find my face suddenly damp. I could see his brain ticking over as he waited, calculating the seconds he’d wasted having to repeat himself. Oh, the humanity.

‘Right, yes, the numbers. I’ll email them to you. Five minutes?’

‘To the second, Hornsby. To the second!’ he said in the same venomous tone and then he turned around and marched towards his office. I quickly started working on the numbers he’d requested and managed to email him in a little under five minutes. My heart was racing, my hands were sweaty and I needed a quick break. I didn’t smoke, but grabbed my coat and headed outside anyway.

Kate and I were walking along the Thames path in Putney. It wasn’t long after we officially became girlfriend and boyfriend. We talked about everything and nothing and stopped for lunch at a little pub. I was twenty-one and I didn’t think life got any better. Growing up in Slough, this was what I had always dreamt about. I had a beautiful girlfriend, I’d just graduated university and I had my whole life ahead of me. I remember it so clearly and the conversation we had that day.

‘Love you,’ I said for the first time.

It had been on my mind for days and the moment felt right. I’d known I loved Kate so quickly it had taken even me by surprise. I hadn’t intended to fall in love so soon. I always thought I’d get my career on track first, make some serious money before I delved into a proper relationship. However, from the moment I met Kate in the student union, I just knew.

‘Love you too,’ she said, her eyes glistening with pure, unadulterated happiness, but then her face dropped and she held my hands and looked at me. ‘Just promise me one thing.’

‘Anything.’

‘Promise me you’ll never hurt me.’

One of the happiest moments of my life and Kate still had those doubts. The doubts put upon her by her useless father. This was what happened when parents got divorced. There I was, from a fully functioning two-parent family, wrapped up in layers of love and the future all mapped out: a wedding, a house, kids and a whole lifetime of happiness, because in my world that was what happened. But Kate was worried it was going to nosedive into disaster and we were going to end up like her parents, because that was all she knew.

I promised I wouldn’t let that happen. I told her I’d protect her, give her the life she craved and that I’d never hurt her. Maybe it was youthful folly or just wishful thinking, promising something I could never guarantee, but I had let her down. Let us down.

‘Could I?’ I said to a bloke I barely recognised. He offered me the packet and I took out a cigarette. He sparked up his lighter and I inhaled, taking in the smoke and then almost coughing my guts up, but I managed to keep it in.

I smoked for a few years when I was younger, but quit during university. My father was a lifelong smoker and I didn’t want to end up like that: the gravelly voice, coughing every morning, the yellow-stained fingers and not being able to walk up a flight of stairs without wheezing.

‘Cheers,’ I said and then stood there with the rest of the smokers in the cold.

We were like a police line-up. All clutching our cigarettes, trying to finish them quickly so we didn’t get in trouble for being a minute too long, but trying to draw some happiness from being out of the office for a moment. I usually walked past the smokers line-up on my way out to grab lunch and always felt a sense of pity for them. But here I was, one of them, clutching my cancer stick, tapping my feet to an imaginary beat to keep warm and trying to enjoy it.

‘I didn’t know you smoked.’ The voice came from nowhere. An instantly recognisable voice. Georgie was standing next to me looking her usual gorgeous self in a warm coat and scarf. She sparked up a cigarette.

‘Oh, you know, occasionally.’

‘Stress?’

‘Something like that.’

We hadn’t spoken much since our night together. She’d rung me a couple of times, but I’d ignored it and let it go to voicemail. She hadn’t left any messages. The truth was I didn’t want to speak to her again. Strictly professional was the only way I could cope.

‘You shouldn’t be stressed, Ed,’ she said with a salacious grin. ‘Not about us anyway.’

‘I’d better get back.’ I had a last toke on my cigarette before I stubbed it out in the smokers’ bin.

‘Wait,’ said Georgie, grabbing my arm. ‘Don’t leave because of me.’

I noticed a couple of heads look across from the line-up. The last thing I needed was a smoking-break scene. It would be all over the office by lunchtime and I’d be standing in front of Hugh before the end of the day.

‘No, it’s not you. I just have a lot to do,’ I said with a smile. ‘You know Hugh.’

‘More than I’d like,’ said Georgie, giggling. ‘Listen, Ed. I’d hate what happened to get in the way of our friendship.’

‘Right, yes, of course,’ I said, but knowing there was no way we could be friends. Just seeing her face at work was a constant reminder of what I’d done. Talking to her was worse. ‘Friends.’

‘Good. Friends,’ said Georgie and then she leaned across and gave me a hug, pushing her body against mine. The smell of her perfume tickled my nose and the feeling of her hands around me made me want to pull back and run as far away as I could. I didn’t though. I couldn’t. Keep it together, Ed, I told myself. Just smile and walk away, and that’s exactly what I did.

March

Kate

I was standing at the open door of an aeroplane, fifteen thousand feet in the air, and looking down at the ground far below when I realised two very important things. One: death was only a failed parachute opening away. Two: I wasn’t ready to die.

Until twenty-fours before, I wasn’t even thinking about skydiving. It wasn’t on my bucket list because I was a scaredy-cat and my bucket list didn’t contain things that could lead to my death. I saw it as slightly counterproductive to have things that might actually kill me on a list of things I wanted to do before I died. I didn’t mind the occasional bit of risk, but jumping out of a perfectly good aeroplane didn’t seem like the best way to spend a Wednesday afternoon. If it hadn’t been for Orla and what happened with Ed, I wouldn’t have even thought about it, but there I was about to take literally the biggest leap of faith and I was shitting myself. Orla, on the other hand, who was standing just behind me with her burly Aussie attached to her like an oversized snail shell, couldn’t wait.

‘Ready?’ said Andy, the Australian crackpot whom I entrusted with my life.

‘Not really.’

‘Too late to back out now,’ said Andy salaciously, and that’s when it happened. We jumped.

Twenty-four hours earlier

I hadn’t spoken to Ed in over two weeks and I was starting to feel uneasy about it. Maybe it was because of Jez, but I felt like I was losing touch with him in more ways than one. Ed seemed to belong to an old life that had no relevance to my current one, but I still missed him terribly, or at least the idea of him.

I was sitting on the beach in Byron Bay when I decided to give him a call. It was just past nine o’clock in the evening back home and so I figured he’d be back from work and probably parked in front of the telly. I imagined him in my head: feet up on the coffee table, glass of wine in his hand, a tired frown on his face and falling asleep to the news.

It was strange to imagine our house. It was even stranger to imagine myself back there again. Cutting and pasting myself back into my old life was going to be much harder than pushing a couple of buttons on a keyboard. Maybe that’s the problem with our generation. We’re so used to controlling everything with the click of a button and yet the one thing we can’t control is our lives. We think we can break hearts and then magically erase the problem, but love doesn’t work like that. I’m part of the Ctrl+Alt+Del generation and it feels like I’m the pair of tits they hired to be the spokesperson.

‘Ed,’ I half-shouted along a crackly line.

‘Hi.’

‘What you doing?’

‘Just watching TV, drinking a bottle of red and wondering where in the world my girlfriend is.’

‘Byron Bay, between Sydney and Brisbane.’

I went on to explain how Orla and I had left the comforts of Sydney and taken an overnight coach to Byron Bay. It was the first stop on our girl’s tour up the east coast of Australia: four weeks of hedonistic partying and seeing as much as we could until it was time for me to head to Melbourne.

Byron Bay was a gorgeous little surf town and we were staying at a hostel a hop, skip and a jump over railway tracks to the beach. It wasn’t quite as idyllic as Koh Phangan, but it had a nice relaxed vibe and we quickly got into the habit of waking up and going to the beach before walking into town for night-time fun and giggles. Being in Byron Bay reminded me of the holiday I took to Newquay when I was seventeen. I went with Emma and another couple of friends from sixth form. It was our first holiday without our parents and so we all went a bit crazy, the liberation making us feel like proper adults. It had been a real rite of passage and being in Byron Bay gave me the same feeling.

‘Sounds great,’ said Ed and I could detect a shard of something in his voice.

‘You all right?’

‘Tired. Not sleeping well without you.’

‘You should try sleeping on some of the hostel beds I’ve been in, more like planks of wood. It’s doing my back no favours.’

‘It’s one of the reasons I didn’t come.’

‘Yeah, right. We could’ve stayed at five-star hotels and you still wouldn’t have budged from the sofa.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing, I was joking. Are you sure nothing’s bothering you?’

‘Just tired,’ he said again and then there was a silence.

Neither of us knew what to say to each other. It was pitiful. We’d gone from living together and longing for each other to almost complete strangers in less than three months. I didn’t want to go on and on about what I was doing and it seemed like he didn’t want to talk about anything. I felt like I was losing him when we didn’t talk and completely lost when we did. Maybe it wasn’t meant to work. Could being apart for such a long time ever really work?

‘Glad I called then.’

‘And what do you want me to say, Kate? How’s the trip? Tell me about all the drinking, partying and blokes you’ve been messing about with?’

His tone took me completely by surprise. It was angry and short, but what threw me the most was the unwitting reference to my fling with Jez. He shouldn’t have had any right to be angry or jealous, but he did. I felt awful and a part of me wanted to tell him. He deserved to know the truth, but I was too afraid. I didn’t want to lose him. Technically, it was only a kiss and a shared bed, but I suppose deep down it was more than that. I had felt something for someone else and thought about being with them and surely that was a lot worse than just a kiss.

‘It’s not like that . . .’

‘And what’s it like, Kate?’