The Story of You (15 page)

I pulled away, suddenly.

‘God, sorry,’ Joe sprang back from me, his hand over his mouth, mortified.

‘No,
I’m
sorry.’

‘It’s just …’

‘Honestly, it’s okay,’ I said, sitting up.

‘You looked so lovely there, in the sun, and I thought … Shit, what a dick.’ He sat up too then, his head in his hands. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s
okay
,’ I said, embarrassed

Could I not just pretend the baby, the pregnancy, hadn’t happened for a while? I wanted so badly to kiss him! Could we not just snog, and it all be fine, it all not be so dangerous and intense for a while?

‘Robyn?’ he reached out and stroked my arm then. I knew I just couldn’t keep it in any longer. ‘Joe,’ I said. ‘I’m pregnant.’

Somewhere, far on the other side of the lawn, a crowd burst into ‘Happy Birthday’. A text arrived in someone’s inbox with a sound like a bird whistling, a paper cup still with liquid inside made a thud into a bin. Everything was magnified, stilled. In that clichéd way people talk of, the world really did come to a standstill, and then I was underwater again and all I could feel was the beating of my heart, the blood in my ears, like I was outside of my body, watching us.

Joe sat, blinking, trying to compute this information.

‘
Pregnant?
’
he said at last.

‘I nodded.’

‘Have you done a test?’

‘Three. All positive.’

‘Are you …?
Fuck
.’ He put his head in his hands, and it was only when he turned to me that I saw he was actually smiling. ‘But I thought you said it was fine, that …?’

‘It wasn’t fine. It
wasn’t
, Joe,’ I said, panicking. ‘I took a risk, an unbelievably stupid risk. I was very drunk, and it was just so –’ I stopped myself, tempered it, because what I wanted to say, what I would have said if none of this had happened, was that it was the most wondrous, amazing night, the best night of the last sixteen years ‘–
lovely
to see you again, after so long. I got carried away. I’ve no idea what I was thinking! I took the morning-after pill as soon as I got back. I thought I could no way be pregnant. But it turns out the longer you leave before you take it, the less effective it is, and it’s not even a hundred-per-cent effective, anyway. I didn’t know that …’ I was crying now and I wiped the tears away with the cuff of my top and, as I did, I caught Joe’s face again and stopped. There was no doubt about it, he looked actually
pleased.
‘You’d have thought of all people, I would, wouldn’t you? But I didn’t and I’m so sorry.’

Joe reached for my hand. ‘But why are you sorry?’

He
was
pleased! ‘Well, because this is a nightmare, Joe. After everything. I can’t go through that again.’

‘Darling, it’s not going to happen again.’ He said. (How could he sound so sure?) ‘You’d have to be seriously unlucky for that to happen again.’ He was frowning and smiling at me all at the same time, peering at me as if he thought I’d gone mad. He actually thought I was mad for considering not having it. Like this was absolute lunacy. Why hadn’t I predicted this response? Of course he’d be happy and optimistic. Joe was always optimistic.

‘Anyway, I called up Marie Stopes,’ I said, rambling. ‘Because I didn’t know what the hell to do and I thought that might be the answer but, in the end, I couldn’t go through with it. There was just no way I could have ever gone through with it.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Joe. The expression on his face had darkened. ‘You spoke to Marie Stopes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Isn’t that where you call if you want an abortion?’

I’d never seen this expression on his face before: all his features had hardened, even his eyes. It was horrible.

‘Joe, I never would have actually—’

‘You were going to have an abortion and not even tell me?’

‘
No
,’ I said, knowing that at the height of my panic and desperation, I had considered it.

‘After everything we’ve been through, you would have even considered that?’

But I thought you might have wanted that, too, I thought, that you’d have thought it was best for everyone. That you would have thanked me in the long run.

Looking at his face now, he was right, I
must
have been actually mad. What was I thinking of?

‘Joe,’ I said, making him look at me. ‘I never would have gone through with it. But this is a nightmare. I mean, you know
why?
’ I was searching his face – didn’t he?

‘
Jesus
, Robyn.’ The expression on his face was disdain and sadness rolled into one. ‘My
mother
just died.’ He said it so quietly.

I felt so ashamed then. How could I get rid of a life when he’d just lost one that was so close to him? But also just those words, those simple words: a pregnancy, the loss of a mother. This was déjà vu on a whole new, awful level. I stumbled to my feet.

My heart was already firing like bullets as I left Joe. I don’t remember making a decision about getting on the Tube, I simply went down to South Kensington on autopilot, my only thought that I needed to get away from Joe, from talking about the baby, from myself,
and that disappearing underground seemed like the obvious way to do it. I have never wanted the dark, grimy underbelly of London to suck me in and swallow me up and make me disappear as much as I did then, but realized as soon as I was standing on the District and Circle eastbound platform that it couldn’t, because I couldn’t take the Tube any more.

Just the warm air, gusting through the tunnel, signalling an approaching train, was bringing on a panic attack.

The problem was, I couldn’t move. No matter how much my heart was pummelling the inside of my chest, or my teeth were chattering, I was paralysed. It was like one of those awful nightmares, where your conscious mind knows you’re having a nightmare but your body can’t wake itself up.

I looked down the black mouth of the tunnel, trying to focus my eyes on something, focus my breathing, but the two dim lights of the train hurtling towards us were wobbling through my tears. The train eventually slowed and hissed into the station, and I staggered back.
‘Breathe
,’ I was telling myself, ‘just
breathe.
’ Then, it stopped. The doors opened, people piled out, then on. Someone tutted loudly then knocked my shoulder to get past me. ‘
Are you getting on, or what?
’ Whoever it was did me a favour, however, because it brought me momentarily to my senses, out of my bad dream and into the world. I peeled my feet right off that platform, turned and walked away, up the stairs, to the sun.

I felt instantly better once I was in the fresh air; and walked, in a daze for a while, just regulating my breathing, feeling the warm breeze on my skin, noticing the blue sky, the trees thick with creamy blossom, but aware of this twisting feeling in my gut: I’d made the mistake of telling Joe that I’d considered an abortion. I don’t know why I had done that. In that minute, when I’d got up off the grass and walked away, I’d wanted to be as far from Joe as possible, as far away from everything he reminded me of; so why, suddenly, did I now desperately want to be back with him? It didn’t make any sense.

My phone beeped. Someone had left a voicemail whilst I’d been underground and I knew instinctively who it was. I always used to think, when people’s phones beeped as soon as they came up from the Tube, what important things could have possibly happened to so many people, for there to be so many messages left during a short journey? Now, I thought, how possible it was for life-changing things to happen to so many people, all the time. How life-changing events just flew out of nowhere, like a train from a dark tunnel.

‘Robbie, listen, this is totally fucking ridiculous. You don’t have to do this on your own … Call me back, will you
?
’

The message had been left two minutes after I’d left him and I thought, how typical this was of Joe. He could never let the dust settle after an argument. He always had to sort it out immediately. Whereas I needed time to process and form my opinions, he always knew how he felt, about everything, and he’d been like that right from the beginning. It’s part of the reason I loved him so much.

I put my phone in my pocket and made my way down the street, thinking about those first few weeks of our relationship, back in that hot May of 1997, when life had felt so intense. I’d lost Mum just seven months previously, in the October, and now I was falling in love for the first time.

Even in the shadow of my mum’s death, however, that falling in love felt as liberating and exhilarating as free-wheeling, and I thought about how sure Joe had been then, even when, unbeknownst to him, his would-be girlfriend was still drowning in grief, and therefore prone to leaving cinemas in the middle of films and bursting into tears in the middle of supermarket car parks. And yet, perversely, post losing Mum, there’s never been a happier time for me than that summer I got together with Joe.

After the near-drowning incident at the Black Horse Quarry, we’d all gone to the pub for the night, hyper with the drama of the day. I’d got drunk, quickly, and spent the whole evening sitting on Joe’s knee, flapping my hand away at people who said I was a hero – ‘
No, really, anyone else would have done the same
,’
knowing inside that nobody actually did.

‘
Robyn King saved my life
,’ Joe had kept whispering in my ear, even though I already had a feeling he was going to be the one to save mine; to be a light in these dark times. Little did I know what darkness there was still to come. I can still feel the thrill now, of sitting on his knee, with the giddy anticipation of what the summer might hold. My sunburn had been heating up his thighs. ‘You’re like a little radiator,’ he’d said. The intimacy of the comment had thrilled me. ‘Your sunburn is actually burning through my jeans … feel
that
.’ When he’d laid his hand on my bare, hot thigh, I swear, it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. This tsunami of desire rose up in me. I remember feeling like,
This has got to go somewhere or I’ll explode
. As it was, there was somewhere, because that night in the car park of the pub, the Lakeland fells black and sleeping in the distance, we kissed for the first time. Bomber honked his horn all the way through because he was supposed to be giving Joe a lift, but all the while we kissed, Joe held one finger up to Bomber over my shoulder. That kiss was the first proper kiss I’d ever had and also the best. It still is. I can still remember the sound of our eager breath, the feel of his lips, gossamer-soft, the glorious bloom in my belly – like a craving you could never fill; like no other feeling I’d ever known. I remember the taste of him, the slightly sunken shadow of his cheek under the lamplight as a train roared past and laughter broke out inside the pub, and the big sky enveloped us in its thick, blue, starry velvet.

‘So, like, will you be my girlfriend?’ he’d said.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I’d teased, kissing him again.

‘Can I see you tomorrow then?’ he’d said, and I couldn’t believe it because who says that?! Even if you want to? (Which I did, desperately.) Wasn’t he supposed to play it cool? But I said, yes, he could.

‘Can I see you every night this week?’ he’d added, kissing me again, at which point I’d done this big, snorty snigger (wholly attractive) into his mouth.

‘Are you joking?’ I’d said.

‘No.’ He’d looked almost offended I could ever think he was.

The irony was, I thought, as I wandered towards Knightsbridge, along the Brompton Road, the warm air like a soft sheet around me, I’d been in love with Joe from afar for months before that night; since he’d played Christy Brown in the Year 11 Christmas production of
My Left Foot
. After all, who’d dare play a wheelchair-bound man with cerebral palsy in a school like ours and expect life to ever be the same again? But Joe stormed it. He wheeled on, his hands contorted, talking through the side of his mouth, and he didn’t care what anyone thought. I don’t think he was even aware of the audience. We went to the pub after that. I remember I minced over with my Bacardi and Coke, and I said:

‘Joe, we don’t really know each other, but I just wanted to say, I thought you were unbelievable tonight. I mean, do you actually have cerebral palsy, or …?’

He burst out laughing. ‘No. But my little brother is disabled.’

I was the one to laugh then, because I thought he was joking.

‘No, he is,’ Joe had said. I’ve never been so mortified in my life.

He’d been getting some stick from so-called mates. One said, ‘All right, Sawyer, you spaz,’ or something like that. Joe replied, ‘I was acting, mate, what’s your excuse?’ I spat my Bacardi out, I was laughing so much. I thought, I’m going to marry Joseph Sawyer.

I eventually caught a bus heading to Highgate and sat at the top, where the blossom-laden trees lolled and brushed against the windows; candy-floss-pink against the cloudless sky. Now I’d calmed down, I could start to unpick why I’d had such a strong reaction; why I’d had to make off like that, some textbook example of the ‘flight or fight’ response, mine clearly being flight. The truth was, I knew Joe wouldn’t have been able to hear my news and walk away from it, any more than I could have walked into a Marie Stopes clinic and had an abortion. It was just wishful thinking. Because I couldn’t handle the potential fallout of this, the risk of him hurting more than he already did; because I couldn’t handle his emotions as well as mine, I was hoping he wouldn’t have any. And, yes, I do know how mental that sounds.

Even when the bus finally got to Archway, I didn’t want to go home. Normally, I didn’t have a problem with living alone but, today, I could not bear to turn the key in the lock, knowing that only silence lay on the other side. Then I’d end up calling Joe back, and I didn’t want to call Joe back yet. I hadn’t worked out what to say to Joe, or what I was going to do. I sauntered in the general direction of home, thinking of the look on Joe’s face as I’d left: disbelief, confusion but, most of all, in his big, hazel, sloping eyes, was the sort of pain that a man of thirty-two shouldn’t know and, if he’d never met me, wouldn’t. And now I felt like I’d come back into his life, carrying the risk of it happening again, like the carrier of a dangerous disease. If I could have turned back time, I’d have never even have gone to the funeral and none of this would have happened. The worst thing was, I couldn’t even tell him the whole story, I couldn’t explain why I’d had to run away like that. Still, I couldn’t just leave him with absolutely nothing from me. I texted him: