The Hidden Girl (15 page)

‘I said “No”.’

‘What do you mean, “No”?’

He tried to think through the fug of alcohol about what he was doing.

‘Will? Talk to me! I’m standing in the freezing cold in the middle of nowhere.’

He took a deep breath: ‘I think . . .’

‘What?’

Then, finally, he said it. ‘I’m just wondering if we should be doing this right now.’

Silence.

‘What?’ Hannah asked uncertainly.

Ice dripped from the balcony above onto Will’s shoulders. ‘Whether we should be carrying on with this.’

Silence.

He rubbed his face. ‘Han, I don’t know what’s going on with you. The more I think about it, I can’t believe you gave up your job like that – Jane can’t, either. And the flat. For that dump?’

A catch in her voice. ‘You bought this house, too, Will. You’re not a child. You could have said no.’

‘No, I couldn’t, because you said you needed it. You said it would make things better, but it’s not going to, is it? And now I’m starting to wonder if we should even be bringing a kid into this . . .’

Her voice splintered. ‘Into what?’

He searched for the word. ‘. . . uncertainty.’

The sirens and helicopter disappeared over to the west.

Will swayed, and pushed his back against the wall.

‘Are you there?’ he asked.

Nothing.

‘Han, come on, what are we doing? You don’t even want to have sex any more; but I bet, if Barbara asked you, you’d say we were. All this lying – and this obsessive fucking decorating to try and create this home that’s not ours – it’s doing my head in.’

More silence.

He knew he was saying things he wouldn’t say if he was sober, but fuck it. It had to be said.

‘Han . . .’

When her voice returned the anger had gone. ‘Well, maybe that’s the difference between us, Will.’

‘What?’

‘You can have kids, and I can’t. You have a choice, and I don’t.’

His girl, who once took on the world, sounded beaten.

In that moment Will felt his heart break – for all that should have been between them, but had never happened.

‘No. That’s not what I’m—’

There was a click.

‘Han?’

He fumbled to ring her back.

Her phone went to voicemail. It was a general message, but one that he knew was designed for Barbara – and Barbara alone. A bright, cheerful voice communicating that all was well with the world.

‘Hi! This is Hannah, please leave me a message and I’ll get straight back to you!’

Will sat on the staircase in Arndale Road, mobile in hand.

There was a click to his right. Clare’s flat door opened.

She was wearing a low-cut long black dress, with a thin green cardigan draped around it, her hair tied up again. He could tell by her face that she’d heard every word. Behind her he saw candles.

‘Drink?’ she asked.

He stood up unsteadily. ‘Nah. I’d better go.’

Clare shot him one of those sunny smiles. ‘Come on.’

For a second, he nearly walked away. Then he hesitated. He was so pissed, and so cold, and feeling so shit. Will turned and followed Clare into the warm. Inside the sitting room he let her pull his jacket off. She motioned to the sofa, and he sat.

‘Sorry. Did you hear all that?’

She touched his arm. ‘You’re soaking. Hang on.’

She returned with a towel and rubbed his hair, unselfconsciously. He let her. After eight months of Hannah not touching him the way she used to, it felt pathetically good.

A man’s jumper, some tracksuit trousers and another T-shirt appeared.

‘Here you go. More from Dave’s plus-size period.’

He forced a smile. She left him to strip off and dress in the dry clothes, then returned with wine, two glasses and a little tin.

‘Do you mind?’

He shook his head. Quiet music played. She sat beside him on the sofa, poured the wine and opened the tin. He watched her rolling a spliff between long fingernails, her silver rings flashing in the candlelight.

‘We’re waiting to adopt,’ he said.

Clare lifted her delicate feet under her and lit the spliff. She gazed at him through the candlelight as she took a long toke.

‘Wow. My friend Rachel did that last year. Not easy, huh?’

She held out the spliff.

He regarded it. It had been years. Eight years.

He imagined Hannah’s face. Her voice, furiously reminding him about questions on the adoption form about recreational-drug use.

He took it and put it to his lips. The smoke burnt into his lungs. The forgotten swell inside his chest pushed him like an invisible hand back against the sofa. He exhaled, feeling the blood pumping round his body.

‘Have you been waiting long?’ Clare asked. She let her hair down again and made herself comfortable.

Will took another toke and felt his head space out a little. He nodded. ‘Eighteen months.’

‘Eighteen months? That’s insane.’

He passed it back. The perfumed smoke hung in the air between them. He averted his eyes from the swell of her cleavage as she leant forward to take it.

She’s taken off her cardigan
, his brain told him.
She took it off in the kitchen
.

Clare regarded him gently. ‘So I gather it’s not going that well . . .’

He let his head fall back. He heard each guitar string perfectly in isolation from the others. The singer’s notes as pure as a piano key.

He opened his eyes and felt dizzy. He sat up again and sighed.

‘Last summer our social worker put us up for this kid. A little boy. But there was another couple in the running, too, and his social workers chose them and not us.’ He took the spliff back from her. ‘Hannah had her heart set on him and it’s caused a bit of a . . . situation.’

Clare bit her lip softly. ‘Oh no. Can they do that?’

He shrugged. ‘They’ve got to find the right family for the kid – which is the way it should be – but Han . . . Well, we’d been waiting nearly a year already and so,’ he drew in the smoke, then exhaled, ‘it was hard.’

He looked for an ashtray.

‘I’ll get one,’ Clare said. When she sat back down, it was closer to him. He felt her leg touching his. He was too wasted to move it.

‘God, Will, that must have been awful.’

The image of Hannah curled on the floor appeared in his head, more vivid than usual.

‘Yeah,’ he said, passing it back to her, ‘and it was worse because the other couple were on holiday, so we had to wait a month after we saw his photo for everyone to meet each other and make the decision, so . . .’

Clare put it to her lips. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Hmm.’

‘I’ve always wondered. The first time I saw Jamie I felt this – God! – overwhelming love, straight away. When you see the photo of a child you might adopt, does it feel the same?’

Will tried to think how to describe it. ‘It shouldn’t, because he’s not your kid yet, but you’ve been waiting a long time, and then you see his face and it’s difficult not to, you know . . .’ He stopped. His head was buzzing.

‘So why do you think they didn’t choose you?’

She picked up her wine and passed him the spliff. Her bare arm brushed his. He thought how easy it would be.

‘Hannah thought it was our fault.’

‘Why?’

He blew smoke at the ceiling. ‘Well, when his social workers came to meet us, Hannah turned up late.’

‘Oh . . .’ Clare tucked a long strand of hair behind her ear. He saw a small emerald ear-piercing in the upper part.

‘Yeah, she was in the States at a work conference and her plane got delayed because of a storm, so she got home on the Monday instead of the Sunday.’

He didn’t tell her the worst bit. That Hannah was so jet-lagged she had confused the time. That she had burst into the flat from the airport with a bag of flowers, shouting, ‘I need vases, Will! Quick, they’ll be here in ten minutes’ while the child’s social workers sat in the kitchen, where they’d been chatting to Will for nearly an hour. Or that, after they’d gone, she’d screamed at him for not putting the toilet descaler away in the bathroom, as if there was already a child in the flat.

‘What, and you think that mattered?’

‘No. I don’t think they cared. I think social workers know you’re trying to be “perfect”, and they know that’s not possible. They know you’ve got lives and jobs. They just want to know you’re safe, reliable people who can be trusted with a child. I don’t think they care if you have flowers in your house.’

‘But Hannah does?’

He shrugged. Who knew what Hannah thought any more?

‘Well, she convinced herself it was because the other woman didn’t work, and the guy worked from home. And they had a big house with a garden. In Essex.’

Clare nodded. ‘Which is what you’ve got now. That explains it. I did think you were the last person I could imagine moving out to the sticks.’

Will passed the spliff to her, surprised that she’d formed any impression of him at all, before this week. His head felt heavy, as if it were falling off his neck. He tried to keep it upright, like a football on a stick.

‘But it’s not what you want?’

‘I don’t know.’

His limbs felt leaden, too. The sofa seemed to sink below him. It would be very easy just to sink down and stay on this sofa all night.

‘So what about you? How did you feel, when it didn’t happen?’

Will scratched his head. Hannah had never asked him that. ‘I don’t know. You imagine it happening and then, when you see their photo and there’s a chance, it feels real.’

Clare touched his arm. ‘That must be hard.’

He sipped his wine, knowing where this was going and wondering why he was not stopping it.

‘Can I ask why you can’t have kids?’ Clare said.

It wasn’t a secret. All their friends and family knew. ‘Hannah. It was unexplained.’

Clare’s eyes narrowed through the smoke. ‘Really? Poor her. I just can’t imagine. I always wondered if that was difficult, as a couple, you know – if one of you could, and one of you couldn’t – how you make that work?’

He felt a twinge of protectiveness towards the couple he and Hannah had been.

‘It’s not really like that. It creeps up. You try, and nothing happens. Then you have tests and nothing’s wrong, then you start treatment and it doesn’t work, but they say there’s still a chance. And the next thing it’s IVF, and then another IVF, and then another one; and by that time it’s been a couple of years and you’ve spent fifteen grand. So, by the time you realize it’s not going to happen, it’s a relief. We both liked the idea of giving a home to a kid that needed it, so . . . it wasn’t a big deal.’ He didn’t add that not passing on his old man’s genes was no loss to anyone.

Clare stroked his arm. ‘God – sorry. It sounds like you’ve been through it.’

He turned and found her face close to his. There was a ring of green pencil around her silvery eyes. He saw her eyebrows were drawn on with a brown pencil. A flick at the end had gone astray.

He should have stopped it there; gone to the toilet, or leant forwards to get his drink, but he didn’t.

She kept stroking his arm, and he shut his eyes.

He let the music drown everything out.

A heady perfume close to him.

He drifted off, and then Clare’s hair brushed his ear, and he drifted off again. Then her hand was in his hair, and her eyes and lips were close to his. When she kissed him, he didn’t stop it.

Strangely, her lips didn’t feel unfamiliar. They were soft, and tasted like weed and toothpaste, and although his brain was dragging through mud, he knew that she had brushed her teeth while he was putting on the T-shirt, and that this was planned.

Even then, he didn’t stop her. Her lips didn’t push him away like Hannah’s. He kissed her back, because he could, wondering how it could be so easy to do this after eight years with Hannah.

Her breasts pushed into him.

And then . . .

. . . spinning. It came out of nowhere.

Will opened his eyes and blew out his cheeks. ‘Whoa.’

Clare’s cheeks were flushed, a metallic glint in her eyes. ‘What?’ There was a new tone in her voice, too. A hint of angst.

‘Oh . . .’ He sat up and tried to focus. ‘Sorry. I need to go.’

‘You don’t.’

‘I do.’

The brightness in her smile extinguished.

He stood up and pulled away. Grabbing his wet jacket, he lurched out of the front door.

The ice-cold air hit Will like a shovel in the chest. He found his way to the top of the stairs, stumbled down two flights to the pavement and threw up in the snow.

After her phone call with Will, Hannah marched back up the pitch-black lane towards Tornley Hall, her arms out for balance, trying not to slip on the frozen ice under the snow.

Will’s words raged in her head.
I’m just wondering if we should be doing this right now.

She turned into the driveway, furious.

Uncertainty?
After all they had been through together.

‘You fucker, Will!’ she shouted into the night.

As she approached the house she saw that the garage doors were lying open. Her mouth fell open. They had been here. Right under her nose. The donkey was gone.
Farmer Nasty had come and taken him
.

For some reason that, more than anything, made Hannah cry. With a yell of frustration, she picked up the spade and ran at the snow penis. She smashed it to pieces, sending shards of ice flying into the darkness.

Furiously wiping away tears, she then ran inside and up to the second bedroom and flung open the door.

The unopened box sat in the empty room.

With a strangled sob she opened it and took out the pristine packs of childsafe cupboard locks, door stops and electrical covers that she’d bought eight months ago and never used. She chucked them on the floor.

At the bottom, she found a blue denim elephant.

‘I saw this in the village fete – I couldn’t help it,’ her mum had said five years ago, when Hannah had stupidly confided that she and Will had started trying for a baby; when they were still full of naive optimism. ‘Sorry, I know I shouldn’t have, but it’s so gorgeous. Keep it for later.’