Lifesaver (38 page)

She propped him up and examined him, limp as a rag doll in her arms, seeming not to notice the stench of vomit-wet duvet. The sight of the sweaty imprint of Max’s feverish body in the sofa cushions made me cry harder, and I had to turn away - although Max was too out of it to register. He was crying too, weak mews of pain and confusion that made me want to crumple, boneless with grief.

‘Spesh,’ he whispered. ‘I want Spesh.’ I turned back, and he looked at me then, his eyes moving around me, as if he was watching me dance even though I stood still.

‘I’ll get him for you, darling.’ I ran upstairs, grabbed Spesh from the floor at the side of Max’s bed, and thundered back down, handing him over to Max. His fingers closed briefly around Spesh’s front paw, but then he let him drop out of his grasp, forgotten again.

It seemed as if only two minutes earlier we’d been lying in bed looking forward to our day together, and now life had turned on the spin of a coin and come crashing down on me all over again, just when I thought I was happy; that even if things would be messy with Ken, I was where I wanted to be, and everything would be OK.

‘If you haven’t yet called his father, then I think you should,’ said Dr. Lark, replacing the thermometer in her bag. ‘He’s not a well little boy.’

My head was whirling with disbelief and nausea and terror, and I felt so much as I had after Holly died that I kept looking down at my stomach, expecting to see it still distended and flabby in maternity trousers, recently emptied and redundant like an accusation of failure. Please God, I prayed, not again.

Nine hours later, the crisis—at least for Max—was over. He was sleeping peacefully upstairs in his bed, in clean pyjamas, under a fresh duvet cover, with Spesh tucked up next to him. He was still pale, coughed occasionally, but his temperature was normal and he hadn’t been sick since Adam got home shortly after lunch.

‘It’s just a virus,’ Dr. Lark had confirmed, after having scared the living daylights out of me by telling me to ring Adam. ‘Nothing more sinister. He needs rest, plenty of liquids, and Calpol and he’ll be right as rain in a couple of days.’

I wasn’t sure that the same could be said for me, though. I was an emotional wreck, and felt as if that nine hours had aged me at least nine years. I’d phoned Adam, pleading with the secretary at the place he was teaching that it was an emergency, and to go and interrupt him in his classroom. She’d hauled him out to talk to me; and the terror in my voice had caused the poor man to abandon his class then and there, leaving a lot of old ladies struggling alone with their gouache and watercolour washes, grumbling about course refunds and let-downs. He had got home within the hour - although before then I was able to ring him on his mobile and tell him that Max was going to be fine, that it was nothing to worry about after all.

Nothing…well, that didn’t quite describe what I went through that day. I’d thought Max was dying. I’d thought that, after everything they’d already endured, Adam was going to arrive too late, and I’d have to tell him that Max was gone and it had all been my fault. Daddy, Holly, and then Max - I couldn’t have handled it. I pictured myself handing Spesh over to Adam in a sorrowful gesture; pictured Adam’s kindly face crumpling and him turning away from me. It had all been so real in my head that I had almost begun imagining Max’s funeral, and what type of tranquillizer I’d need to be on in order to endure it.

Adam was talking to me. When I looked at him, I could see his mouth moving and that he was making eye contact with me, but I didn’t seem able to work out what he was saying.

‘What?’

He crossed the room and put his arms around me. ‘Oh baby, you’re really been through it today, haven’t you?’

My last reserves of strength deserted me. I’d just about managed to hold it together since Adam got home, for both their sakes, but Adam’s solicitous cuddle was my breaking point. My knees buckled and I collapsed against him.

‘Adam…I thought he was going to die.’

‘Ssh, baby, it’s OK. He’s fine. He’s fine. You did the right thing. I’d have done the same. Don’t worry.’

Even through my gut-twisting sobs, I realized that Adam thought I was apologizing for overreacting, for having Adam hauled out of his class and making him panic like that, when all Max had needed was Calpol and a snooze.

‘No, you don’t understand. I thought he was dying!’

‘I know, I know. You gave me a nasty moment. But he’s fine.’

Suddenly I was infuriated. I wanted to shake Adam, hit him, even. He was stroking my head, but I jerked away, causing him to get strands of my hair caught between his fingers, snaring us together in a cat’s cradle of complicated connections and tangled knots.

‘That’s not the point! That’s not why I’m upset!’ Why are you always so bloody
calm
? I thought, beginning to feel the plot slip away from me. I wanted to tell him then, tell him everything, tell him how stupid he was that he had been going out with me for six months and hadn’t realized that he’d never seen my credit cards or my driver’s license; that, like Ken, he’d never gone online and discovered that I wasn’t mentioned on any soap opera website, because some other actress, and not me, was playing the part of Trina in
Merrydale
.

At that moment I stopped feeling touched that men were so trusting, they didn’t question anything when they were in love; and instead experienced a wave of rage that they could be so stupid, so gullible—or, in Ken’s case, care so little about me and my life that they didn’t even
try
and express an interest. A woman would never have stood for such a huge part of their partner’s life to be such an unknown quality. In the (admittedly unlikely) event that either Adam or Ken had ever claimed to have a job in a soap opera, I’d have badgered them for visits to the set, invited cast members round for dinner, scanned the cables listings in the TV guides for mentions of it. I’d have wanted to know every twist of plot and cliffhanger, every costume change and edit.

How could neither of them have noticed I was living a lie? That it was Max who’d lured me there and, if I was honest, kept me there. Regardless of my strength of feeling for Adam, I wouldn’t have had an affair were it not for Max.

‘Anna? What is it, darling? Please calm down.’

But I was in full-on meltdown. I couldn’t speak for hiccuping and snorting—I never had been a ladylike crier - and the artifice my life had become came hammering home to me, like a tide swirling over a painstakingly-constructed sandcastle, crumbling it back into smooth oblivion from the moat upwards. I’d been kidding myself that I was coping, enjoying it, living—but not anymore.

‘It’s Max,’ I sobbed, hunched on the sofa with my face in my hands. ‘He’s the reason I’m here.’

‘What do you mean, baby?’

I heard the tone of anxiety in in his voice, and suddenly I wanted to go home. I looked between my fingers at the clean mint-green walls we’d painted together that spring, and wished that it had been mine and Ken’s house I’d helped redecorate:
London Live
on the transistor instead of
Wiltshire Sound
. We’d have needed longer ladders for the stairwells, and twice the amount of paint, but it would have been lovely when it was finished. Perhaps we could have tried for another baby.

I’d heard on the radio the week before about a woman who had just successfully given birth for the first time at the age of forty-two, after having nineteen miscarriages over fourteen years. That was the sort of faith I could only dream of. But just maybe I could give it one more try. At that moment, I wanted Ken. At least, I wanted to feel about Ken the way I felt about Adam.

For a while I had almost hoped that Ken had found someone else, that he was buying stilettos for his PA to wear in bed—but now I desperately hoped he hadn’t. That he was still mine.

I was overcome with self-loathing. How pathetic and selfish I was, that instead of trying to sort my problems out with Ken, I’d merely run away and latched on to Max and Adam. Max wasn’t my child. Yes, I’d helped save his life, but only in the happenstance collision of compatible blood-groups and bone-marrow—there were probably dozens of other suitable donors on the Register who could have done the job as well. I’d wormed my way into his life, and now that he loved me, I was about to let him down. I wasn’t sure whether I was thinking of Adam or Max, although the same could be said for them both.

‘Anna, please, talk to me.’ Adam crouched down beside me, in full sympathetic social-worker mode. I heard his knees crack in chunky stereo, sickeningly loudly.

‘My name isn’t Anna Valentine,’ I mumbled, my face in the arm of a sofa, my body curled up in a foetal question mark, the disgraced child. ‘It’s Anna Sozi. I’m the woman who gave the bone marrow donation to Max.’

The room was silent except for the sound, drifting through from the kitchen, of Max’s baseball cap knocking around inside the spin dryer.

‘What do you mean?’ Adam asked eventually. ‘Why didn’t you..?’ His voice trailed away to nothing. ‘I’ll get us some brandy,’ he said, treading gingerly into the kitchen as if my revelation was live ammunition, landmines peppering the carpet. But before he could return, the doorbell rang.

‘Ignore it,’ he called through, somewhat needlessly, since I had absolutely no intention of opening the front door in my current state. But whoever it was rang again. ‘Oh get lost,’ I heard him mutter. There was a hard edge to his voice that I didn’t like.
Why
had I told him like that? Even amid my hysteria, the worm of uncertainty in the pit of my stomach told me that it had been the wrong way to do it: the wrong way, and the wrong time. I switched mentally straight from missing Ken to a horrible hollow fear that I’d just blown things with Adam.

There was a pause. Adam got two tumblers out of the cupboard, and I managed to stop crying. My nose was stuffed up, my temples were pounding, and my eyelids felt like two inflatable bath pillows. I desperately wanted the brandy, could feel its fire in my throat already, warming me and calming me down.

‘I think they’ve—’ It rang again, cutting Adam off. ‘Oh hell, I’ll have to get it. Whoever it is will wake Max up if they carry on like that.’ He wouldn’t look me in the eye.

I heard his body brush up against the rack of coats in the narrow hallway. Heard the door squeak open. Then silence. At first I thought the visitor must have given up and walked off, and that Adam was peering after them trying to decide whether to call out. But then a woman’s voice said, ‘Mum called me straight after you rang her…ow is he?…Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

My heart sank. Not bloody Pamela. Why on earth had Adam rung her mother? I presumed he’d tried to get hold of Pamela herself, and then called her mother when he couldn’t find her. I hadn’t realized he felt so close to her, and it really annoyed me. Now she’d come beetling round, and we were probably stuck with her for the evening. I leaped up from the sofa—there was no way I was prepared to let her see me like that—and scurried upstairs to the bathroom, trusting Adam to stall her until I was in some way presentable.

I splashed cold water on my face, powdered my nose, and combed my hair, noticing the first silvery threads streaking through it. My eyes were bloodshot and droopy looking, and my skin blotchy. I pulled at the bag under my left eye, and it took its time returning, settling into small puffy creases which never used to be there.

I’m getting old, I thought, in heavy despair. I may never have a baby of my own. It’ll get harder and harder every month, and in a few years’ time it’ll be too late. I imagined my few remaining eggs rolling one at a time dispiritedly along my fallopian tube, like badly-hefted bowling balls which stood no chance of knocking down any pins. That woman they were talking about on the radio, how had she felt after the eighteenth miscarriage? What had there been within her that made her say, just once more. I’ll try just one more time? I knew I could never be that strong.

When I came out of the bathroom, I tiptoed into Max’s room. He slept more peacefully now, far under, lost in his dreams. I stroked his hair and pulled his quilt so it covered him more evenly. He stirred when I kissed his warm cheek, and made a soft guttural groaning sound, almost a creak. I remembered that semi-conscious sensation from my own childhood, the gentle kiss in the night which brought me swimming up to the surface, just long enough to feel the emotion of the parent kissing me, before rolling over back into the deep, safe in the knowledge that I was loved.

I had to remind myself that I wasn’t Max’s parent, though; and as I half-closed the door so that Pamela’s penetrating voice wouldn’t wake him, I was fighting hard against a bleak, depressed feeling, and the dread that I had messed everything up.

I’d been so sure that it had been Pamela at the door that when I came downstairs and didn’t recognise her, I thought it was because she’d been on a diet and dyed her hair. Then I noticed that she was at least six inches taller than the last time I’d seen her. And surely Pamela would never have worn jeans? Then I looked at her face and saw with shock that it wasn’t Pamela at all. Her voice had sounded similar, but this woman was younger, more attractive. She had round, soft features, like a cloud with a face. She reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think who.

‘Anna,’ said Adam, holding out his hand to me—but still not looking into my face. I went across and stood next to him, shoulder to shoulder, in an unconscious show of possessiveness.

‘This is Marilyn, my…um - Max’s mother. Marilyn, this is my girlfriend Anna.’

We both gawped at one another. She seemed as nonplussed to see me as I was her, but then she raised her chin and lowered her eyelids, giving me a defensive sort of nod.

‘Hello,’ she said, her cloud-face freezing into icicles instead, losing its soft edges.

I nodded back at her, aware of the heat which flooded my own face and swept down through my body. I felt at such a disadvantage, tear-stained and ravaged: but more than that, I felt guilty, found out, exposed.

‘You’ve decorated,’ she said, although she wasn’t examining the walls. She was staring at the picture of Max and herself on the bookshelf.