Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (21 page)

The stench of fresh smoke rose in the air.

“Have you been enjoying a cigarette with your cake?” Willow asked hopefully.

“Oh, no. Sorry, Willow. I did say I thought it was a bad idea, what with the baby and everything, but after she went to the garage to buy me wine it did seem like a terrible double standard to lecture her.”

“Right. Well, I’ll leave you”—at that point India retched violently and Willow made a tactical withdrawal—“to it.”

Chloe was lying in the bed in the spare room plugged into her iPod, watching the TV, tapping cigarette ash into the saucer that was resting on her swollen abdomen, half a glass of wine on the bedside table.

Willow watched her for a second, trying to pair up this alien creature with the little girl she had once known, unable to make any coherent comparison.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she said, but Chloe seemed intent on ignoring her.

Suddenly furious and unable to stop herself, Willow marched over to her and yanked the earphones out of ears.

“Oi!” Chloe protested as Willow snatched the cigarette out of her hand and threw it out the partially open window.

“What the fuck?”

“What the fuck? What the fuck? I’ll give you what the fuck. How about what the
fuck
are you doing smoking and drinking when you are six months pregnant? How about what the
fuck
are you doing smoking and drinking when you are fifteen years old? You might not want that baby, but that’s no reason to try and fuck it up before it’s born!”

Willow stopped mid-rant, pointing finger frozen, belatedly realizing that she may have gone in a little heavy-handed.

“Fuck this,” Chloe said, heaving herself off the bed and barging past Willow.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Willow asked her, following her into the living room.

“I don’t know and I don’t care, as long as it’s not here,” Chloe said, pulling a coat on over her nightshirt and slippers. “I’m not staying here to be talked to like that by
you,
of all people.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Willow bellowed at her.

“It was just a couple of fags. I’m stressed, all right, I thought they might calm me down!”

Willow just stared at her. “But you know,
everybody
knows that drinking and smoking can hurt an unborn baby.”

“Yes, yes I know—but what about me? I am still here, I am still a person, I haven’t turned into a baby carrier overnight. I still get stressed—it’s not even going to be my baby anyway . . . so what do I care?”

Willow ran her hands through her hair, at a loss. It was hard to find reasons to tell the girl to care, when for most of her life she’d been struggling and failing to do exactly the same thing.

“You care. If you didn’t care you wouldn’t be six months pregnant, you’d have had a termination, you wouldn’t have thought about adoption.”

“That’s not true,” Chloe said, her voice dropping. “I would have. I would have gotten rid of it, but I couldn’t, not without Dad finding out. I tried, but they won’t let you when you’re under sixteen. And I couldn’t . . . I just couldn’t tell him. I wasn’t ready to see that look on his face. So you see, I’m not a good person, I’m not a caring person, I’m not thinking about the baby or the woman out there who really wants a kid. I just couldn’t face talking to Dad, that’s it. And when it got too big to hide it anymore, well, this was the only place I knew to come. So . . . there. That’s the truth.”

Willow closed her eyes for a moment, knowing she was in danger of getting this all wrong.

“It’s the thought of seeing a doctor and the social services, isn’t it?” Willow guessed. “That’s what’s freaked you out.”

Chloe nodded, unable to look her in the eye, fiddling with the hem of her dressing gown sleeves.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think. You seemed to be taking it all in your stride. I just thought you were okay.” The two stood for a moment and then Willow held out her arms. After a second’s hesitation Chloe walked into them and let Willow hold her. It was an awkward, uncertain embrace for both of them, but they persisted, each aware that the other one was something of a beginner at hugging. “I’m not very good at this,” Willow confided in her. “Knowing what to do, or what to say to people. Sometimes I think I could be good at it, but then I mess up. I always mess up.”

“That’s not true. When you came to live with us, you were brilliant,” Chloe said into her shoulder. “At first, when Dad told me he liked you, I was pissed off. I didn’t want you around, I liked it just being me and him. But then, after a while, I liked it. I liked getting to say what the other kids said at school. I liked getting to say, ‘I’ll ask my stepmum, my stepmum said . . . ’ I liked you being there.”

Willow was silent, battling the quiet rent that was ripping open inside her chest, the uncharacteristic ebullience she had felt earlier ebbing away as she was faced with a reflection of her past. A version of herself that she hated to face at all.

“I couldn’t believe that Dad took you away from me, I couldn’t believe it. I came home from school and you, you just weren’t there, and he wouldn’t say anything except that he didn’t love you anymore.” Chloe looked up at Willow. “I wasn’t even allowed to call you.”

“Chloe . . .”

“And you didn’t try to call me, did you?” Chloe went on, her dark eyes searching Willow’s. “I mean, I looked, I thought maybe you’d written and Dad had intercepted the letters and hidden them, I don’t know why, I saw it in this film once. So I looked for them, but I couldn’t find any. You never called, or came around, did you? You never turned up at the school gate. You didn’t try to see me at all . . . did you?” Chloe’s tone was finely balanced between heartbreak and hope.

“I . . . well, it was what your dad wanted. He thought a clean break was for the best,” Willow said, engulfed in cowardice.

“I hate him,” Chloe said flatly.

“Why? Because of me and him splitting up?”

“Because he hates me,” Chloe said, simply.

“Chloe, you might feel like that, but it just isn’t true. You are everything to Sam.”

“It is, it’s so true. He used to love me when I was cute and funny and never did anything wrong, but now I just wear him down. I know it’s true because I heard him telling bitch-face, that’s what he said. He said I wore him down. She was the one who suggested boarding school. ‘You need to give yourself a break, darling. Don’t let her drag you down too.’” Chloe’s face contorted as she mimicked the woman. “He didn’t stand up for me, not even a bit.”

“That doesn’t sound like your dad,” Willow said, guiding Chloe back to the spare bedroom and slipping her coat off of her shoulders. “He’s a good man, a strong man—when I first met him . . . before he knew that I liked him, I used to look at him and I knew, if he’d only put his arms around me, I’d be safe.”

“But he didn’t keep you safe, did he?” Chloe asked her. “He didn’t keep you, he couldn’t.”

Will sighed, wondering how on earth she could explain the unexplainable to Chloe, that she had once loved Sam and he
had once loved her, but that sometimes circumstances smothered even the strongest heart and made it weak and brittle. That even the one person in the world she had once been so certain would keep her safe hadn’t been able to look her past in the eye and stay on his feet. That didn’t make Sam a bad person, or even a weak one, only fallible, only human.

“Listen, your dad will fight to his last breath for
you
. He would move mountains for
you
.”

“Not now, not now he wouldn’t,” Chloe said as she sat wearily in the bed. “Even bitch-face doesn’t make him happy, she just makes him look old. Nothing makes him happy anymore, the business is failing, he can’t really afford to send me away to school. And I just make things worse.”

Willow sighed.

“If that’s true then Sam’s changed into another person entirely and I just don’t believe that. I’m not going to lie, getting pregnant at fifteen isn’t going to help. But this isn’t a new story. Millions of people have gone through what you’re going through, and they get through it. You will too. Look, let’s just take this one step at a time, together. Somehow, between us, we will work it out.”

“Do you mean it?” Chloe asked her as she lay back on the bed.

“Of course I do.”

“There’s just one thing I don’t get,” Chloe said. “If you’re prepared to do all this for me now, when I’m like this . . . why didn’t you stick around for me then. I needed you then too.”

“I . . .” Willow opened and closed her mouth, looking longingly at the open bedroom door. “I just wasn’t . . . I’m not a good enough person.”

“Bollocks, that’s not it,” Chloe muttered, but before Willow could respond she was asleep.

Chapter
           Ten

W
illow hesitated a few yards down the road from where Daniel Fayre was waiting for her to take her clothes off. She wrapped her coat around her and stood stock-still in the middle of the pavement. Until this moment she hadn’t given this very particular event a second thought, her life had been so full of other people, every time the idea nagged at the edges of her consciousness, she’d pushed it away. And then all of sudden here she was. About to be naked in front of Daniel.

Seeing the typically fashionable people of Hoxton eye her suspiciously as she loitered in her fur coat and shoes, looking like she’d been stranded in the present from a black-and-white film, Willow made a point of going to the nearest shopwindow and looking in it. For several minutes she stared unseeing in the window before realizing that it was a small art gallery displaying an exhibition of watercolors of vaginas.

Willow checked her watch. In three minutes she would be late and she had a pathological inability to be late for anything no matter how she tried, no matter how she might dread whatever appointment fate had in store for her, whether it was root canal surgery or her yearly appraisal with Victoria or holding the world’s neediest soap star’s hand during a bikini wax, she was always, always exactly on time.

Her stepfather had once told her that lateness was the ultimate insult. “If you are late,” he explained when she and Holly had once returned from the park just as the sun was setting and only moments before her mother had sent out a search party, “you are wasting the precious moments of another person’s life. Moments that they can never get back. Do you see?” He hadn’t been cross, just worried and a little conspiratorial, winking at them as if to let them know that he was secretly on their side. Pleased to see them home safe, he’d patted them on their heads and then left it to their mother to do all the shouting and angry crying.

Ian’s words had stayed with her, though, and the idea that another person could eat away minutes of your life without a second thought appalled Willow. She couldn’t stop other people from being late; in fact, if she calculated her life expectancy and deducted all the minutes she had spent waiting for celebrities, she would probably die at forty-seven. However, she was never, ever late herself—Ian had left her with that legacy.

Which meant that she had three minutes to both ask and answer the question that she had been studiously ignoring even though it had been following her around in ten-foot-high neon flashing lights since the moment she’d agreed to Daniel’s request. What exactly did she think she was doing taking her clothes off for Daniel, especially after everything that had happened earlier that day?

There had been numerous occasions over the weekend when Willow considered calling Daniel and backing out. She’d even kept her phone on her at all times, certain that he’d think the proposal through, realize it was a terrible idea for many obvious reasons and call it off. But he didn’t call it off, and in the fuss and bustle of keeping two young women from killing both themselves and each other, Willow put the whole ridiculous business out of her mind.

Having Chloe there again, even as she was, was like going back in time. Willow had forgotten, or rather struggled hard not to remember, how much they had laughed together. How Willow would make up preposterous stories about wolf-eating monster pigs or nasty, prince-stalking Cinderellas and tell them to Chloe on the way to school and back. Sometimes Chloe would be doubled up with laughter, sometimes they’d have to stop in the street, holding gloved hands and leaning on each other while they gasped for air, their giggles materializing in the frosty air. Making Chloe laugh had fast become Willow’s main objective in life; every night as she went to sleep she’d think about things that would elicit that lovely gurgling giggle from the little girl, that would make her eyes light up and sparkle.

Chloe wasn’t quite so willing to laugh at Willow’s jokes now, but in the midst of the terrible horror-movie marathon, all kinds of junk food and homemade style makeovers, she had seen Chloe’s tired, worried face transform with laughter. Her smile was like a balm, like a miracle salve that eased any pain. Willow had watched her as she plastered India’s perfect English rose complexion with about as much gothic makeup as it could take and wondered if that was what it was like to love your own child, that aching mixture of joy and anxiety. Did Chloe have any idea of what she might be giving up with her baby? How could she possibly know what it was like to miss a child you had no rights to anymore?