Runaway (33 page)

‘Then, how . . .?’

‘I have no idea. Nothing is a hundred per cent safe.’

I had heard of women trapping their men by deliberately getting themselves pregnant. But I didn’t believe that of Rachel for one second. She had no need to trap me. I was unequivocally hers. And we were just seventeen. Having babies wasn’t even a distant shadow of desire on our horizon. Neither of us would have wanted that. We were little more than children ourselves.

At first I simply couldn’t believe it. There had to be some mistake.

‘Are you sure?’ Then clutching at straws, ‘Are you sure it’s mine?’ I withered under the gaze she turned on me.

‘Yes, and yes.’ That flat, toneless voice again.

‘Have you seen a doctor?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who?’

‘Dr Robert arranged it privately.’

I was stabbed by a spike of jealousy. ‘You mean you told him before you told me?’

‘There was nothing to tell. I didn’t know until I had the test.’

I reached over to switch on the bedside lamp. And by its harsh yellow light, I saw that her face was bloodless. She lay like a ghost beside me on the bed and wouldn’t meet my eye.

‘Jesus!’ I dropped my face into my hands. ‘Jesus! What are we going to do?’

I saw my whole life vanishing like smoke in the wind. Everything I had dreamed of doing, of being. And fatherhood had never figured on that list, nor any of the responsibilities that went with it. A job, a flat, a weekly rental. A mortgage if I was lucky. Nights spent stuck at home, building my life around TV schedules. I had watched it happen to my parents. Two weeks on a cold beach somewhere in the summer, a lumpy bed in a cheap guesthouse, and a baby that kept you up half the night. It was my worst nightmare.

‘What do you want to do?’ she said.

‘I don’t know.’ My voice rose involuntarily, out of my control. Panic, I suppose. ‘How the hell should I know? Jesus Christ, why weren’t you more careful?’

‘Why weren’t you?’ I heard the hurt in her voice.

‘Because you said you were taking care of it.’ I turned to look at her. ‘You don’t really want to have a baby, do you?’

‘I didn’t want to get pregnant, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Fuck!’ My voice resounded around the room, and the silence that followed it was deafening.

I fell back, staring up at the ceiling again, and felt the movement of her head as she turned to look at me for the first time. I let my head fall to the side to meet her gaze, and what I saw there was so painful I almost cried out. I suppose, when I think about it now, it must simply have been a reflection of what she saw in me. My fear, my selfishness, my total lack of concern for her or the baby she had conceived. Our baby. And I think I saw her disappointment, too. The realization that I was not, and never would be, the man she had hoped for. All the illusions we had constructed around each other, falling away like so much scaffolding to reveal the ugly reality of the buildings beneath. Just two kids hooked on each other, on having sex and a good time. And one of us, at least, neither ready nor willing to give up his dreams.

I was a mess of emotions, unable to think clearly. And so I clutched at what she said next like a drowning man grabbing for a piece of driftwood.

‘I could get rid of it.’

I was so naive, I hadn’t the least idea what she was talking about. But they were words that brought the first crack of light to the darkness of my nightmare.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There are ways to abort a baby, if you catch it early enough.’

‘Abortion?’ I had heard of it, of course, although I wasn’t at all clear what it involved. But one thing I did know. ‘It’s illegal, isn’t it?’

She sucked in her lower lip, biting down on it, and nodded.

I was confused. ‘Well, how’s that possible, then?’

‘There are women who will do it. For money.’

All the light in her eyes was reflected in the tears that gathered in them. I know now that what she wanted with all of her heart was for me to say no. That I couldn’t possibly put her through some backstreet abortion, that the idea of killing our baby was reprehensible to me and not even a consideration. Every hope, or dream, or illusion she’d ever had about me hung right there, in that room, in that moment. And all I could see was a way out for me. A way to get my life back. Blind and selfish.

I can find all sorts of excuses now for how I was then. Young. Ignorant. Naive. Insensitive. Incapable of seeing the big picture. Lacking the maturity and empathy to understand how it must have been for Rachel. But that’s all they are. Excuses. She saw me in that moment for what I was, and I guess in that moment, too, she stopped loving me. And how I wish with every ounce of my being that I could reel back time and change it. Change me. Change the words that next came out of my mouth.

‘How much would it cost?’

_II

We never discussed it again, and the only person I confided in was Luke. He was more shocked by the idea of an abortion than he was by the news that Rachel was pregnant.

We were in the basement flat, just the two of us, and he immediately closed the door to the stairs. He lowered his voice, and I have rarely seen such intensity in his eyes.

‘You can’t do it, Jack. You can’t let her have an abortion.’

‘It wasn’t my idea.’

Already my guilt was leading me to blame her. I was in denial, and Luke knew it. He took me by the shoulders, and for a moment I thought he was going to physically shake me.

‘You can’t do it.’ He pronounced each word like a separate sentence. ‘Jack, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.’

I pulled away from him. ‘I don’t need your judgement. I need your support.’

‘I’m not judging you, Jack. I’m telling you. It’s not too late, you can stop this.’

I didn’t know it then, but things were already in train. The first I learned about it was when Dr Robert took me aside after breakfast one morning. Rachel had been avoiding me for days. Maurie had leapt to the conclusion that we had split up, and was happier than I had seen him in weeks. Almost gloating, glibly unaware of what had created the rift between us.

But it wasn’t just me that Rachel was avoiding. It was everyone. She had gone back to sleeping in the single bedroom in the basement flat, while I had stayed upstairs in the big room, sprawling sleeplessly in the big empty four-poster, hoping against hope that one night the door would open and she would slip in beside me to tell me she still loved me, and that everything was going to be alright.

The others had already trooped out to the waiting VW minibus when Dr Robert called me into a downstairs lounge. It was a room I had never been in before. A room overcrowded with antique furniture, every shelf and surface playing host to framed photographs of what must have been the doctor’s family. His parents. Brothers and sisters, or perhaps cousins, since he was the only one who seemed to have inherited. Aunts and uncles. Grandparents. Black and white images of dead people, locked away in this forgotten room that was never used.

He closed the door carefully behind us. Through the window behind him I could see the VW waiting for me in the street.

‘Rachel tells me you want her to get an abortion.’

My hackles rose immediately. ‘I never said that.’

He sighed impatiently. ‘Well, do you or don’t you?’

It was decision time, and still I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Perhaps I was figuring that if I just went with the flow I wouldn’t have to blame myself. I shrugged, paralysed by indecision.

Irritation crept into his voice. ‘Look, I can fix it, or we can drop it. Up to you. I know someone who knows a woman in Stepney. A former nurse. She’ll do a good professional job. But it’ll cost.’

‘How much?’

‘A lot.’

‘I don’t have any money.’

He shook his head. ‘No, you don’t.’ He sighed again. ‘I’ll lend you it. But you’re going to have to pay me back.’

‘How?’

‘There are always ways you can earn it. We can talk about that later.’

I felt like I was standing on the edge of a precipice. One step forward and I would fall, irretrievably, into the big black hole of regret. And yet stepping back just didn’t seem like an option. I reached out, clutching at straws, desperately searching for some way to avoid the decision.

‘How safe is it?’

‘Safe?’ Dr Robert very nearly laughed. ‘There’s no such thing as safe. Women die in childbirth. Everything in life has risk, Jack. Everything we do. Abortion is no different. Are there risks? Yes. Is it riskier than going full term? Yes. But these are the choices we make.’

The driver of the minibus peeped his horn, and I felt something like panic rising in my chest.

‘Well?’

I drew a deep breath and nodded. The die was cast.

_III

The morning that we took the taxi to that crumbling red-brick terraced house at 23A Ruskin Avenue will probably rate as the worst and most shameful of my life. Several days of fine, warm weather had seen the trees of West London spring into full leaf. The air was balmy, warm and laden with the scent of early summer. The fact that the sun rose into the clearest of blue skies seemed only to mock our misery. A bruised and weeping sky on a bleak, cold day would have provided a much more appropriate backdrop for what I can only see now as an act of murder and betrayal. I was the perpetrator, and Rachel and our baby the victims.

Dr Robert had given me the money in a brown envelope that I had stuffed into an inside pocket. Everyone else had gone to Bethnal Green, and I had made a point of avoiding them before they went, so that I wouldn’t have to find an excuse for not going with them.

Rachel was waiting for me in the hall when I came downstairs, caught in the sunlight from the door, diminished somehow, and vulnerable. All I wanted to do was take her in my arms, and waken with her in the four-poster bed to the realization that it had all just been some awful dream.

She was carrying a small holdall and wouldn’t meet my eye.

I said, ‘Do you have the address?’

She nodded, and the taxi sounded its horn out in the street.

And that’s how we left, without a word, on that fine, sunny morning to take a taxi across town and kill our child.

Ruskin Avenue was one street back from a small square around a fenced-off area of gardens. These terraced homes must once have been quite grand but were now divided, and sometimes sub-divided, into flats and studios. Number 23A had a nicely kept lozenge of garden at the front and steps up to a door with only two names on it. Griffin was the one we wanted, and I pressed the bell-push with a slightly trembling finger.

A voice barked out of a loudspeaker. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s Richard. We’ve come about the cat.’

It sounded so ridiculous that in almost any other circumstance we might have laughed.

‘Upstairs.’

A buzzer sounded and the door unlocked. I pushed it open and we entered a dark, dusty hall that smelled of stale cooking and body odour. An old people’s smell. It reminded me of visits to my grandmother as a child. I followed Rachel up to the next landing. We had not uttered a single word during the thirty-five-minute drive from west to east, sharing the bench seat in the back of the taxi, but with a gulf between us wider than could ever be measured in feet and inches.

Miss Griffin was a lady in her fifties. I was surprised when she opened her door to us on the first landing. I’m not sure what I had been expecting. Someone witchlike, I think. Thin, with bony, clawlike hands and sunken cheeks and the reek of death about her. Instead, she had a round face and a pleasant smile and there was the smell of baking coming from her kitchen.

‘Come in, come in, my dears,’ she said. She took off her pinny and draped it over the back of an armchair in a small comfortable lounge with a window looking out over a garden at the back. Sunlight came dappled through the leaves of a large chestnut tree, like daubs of yellow paint. A large TV sat on a cabinet in the corner. A radio on the sideboard was tuned to the BBC Light Programme, playing
Housewives’ Choice
. A woman’s bright, Home Counties voice read out requests and chattered like one of the birds in the tree outside the window, introducing records that were as anodyne as the paper pasted on the walls of this incongruously cheerful little room.