‘I like working hard. And you’ve helped enough,’ she says. ‘I don’t want you to have to keep on popping up to pay the bills. She’s nearly sixteen, Adam. You should be, I don’t know … your job is done. Your monumental task! You know I’ll never be able to thank you.’
He looks so sad. ‘It’s hardly a job, Beck. It was never a job. I love you guys.’
‘I didn’t mean for it to come out like that.’
She gets up from her chair and throws her arms around his neck.
When she feels him in her arms now, she feels the edges of a possibility. It’s not the first time she’s thought about it. If it was clear-cut between them, if they were just recent friends, if their past wasn’t so sticky and embedded with complication – then perhaps she’d see things clearer and be prepared to throw the dice on the non-precise nature of what is, or is not, between them.
But she can’t afford for it not to work.
So it mustn’t be tried.
Adam’s phone beeps. He glances at the screen, ignores it.
‘Who’s that?’ asks Becky idly. ‘Svetlana who only eats apple crumble? Beth who windsails in dresses? Or Alberta, who keeps getting blocked by Twitter?’
‘None of them,’ he laughs. ‘I’m off internet dating now.’ He pauses. ‘It’s just Kate.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘Yep.’
‘What’s she saying?’
‘She’s just sending over some times for the cinema tonight.’
‘Oh, great.’
Becky returns to her chair and they sit in silence. She is sure Adam can hear her heart racing, can read her thoughts like ticker tape across her head. She reaches for something, anything.
‘Have your birthday here,’ she says. ‘It’ll be nice. Have your birthday with us and your friends, here. Please.’
Chapter 13
Hounslow
29 March 2004, onwards
In the lightless hours before dawn, Janette goes to use the toilet for the fourth time. She has a kidney infection that she blames squarely on the stress of her daughter’s affliction. She pops her head around Becky’s bedroom door, as she has done since she was a child, to check on her. But she finds the room empty.
She searches the other rooms in the house, looking behind curtains and under beds as if playing an age-old game of hide and seek, expecting to find Becky curled up with tea on a sofa or chair – somewhere. The pregnancy seems to have broken Becky’s usual patterns of sleep. She has been keeping odd hours, up through the night and sleeping the days away.
Janette opens the back door and checks to see if Becky is sitting out there, under the cold spring stars, but the garden is black and empty; nobody comes to the call of her daughter’s name.
Janette calls Adam before she calls the police, because lately Adam is the only friend Becky has allowed to visit her at home. Adam says he’ll go and look for her. She’s probably gone for a walk, is all.
Janette is able to go back to bed, and begins to allow herself to be annoyed with Becky again. A teenage girl out walking the streets in the early hours! This is exactly the kind of muddle-headed not-thinking that led to her getting pregnant. She has no common sense! No bloody regard for other people, when it comes down to it. Janette’s kidneys ache. She vows to call the GP first thing; for antibiotics, yes, those are needed. And to ask – is it normal, sitting up all night? Not seeing anyone? Is she actually depressed and, if so, why can’t they just give her a pill for it? Will a pill harm the baby?
Her husband is no use. There is a child growing inside his child, this bright girl who was meant to go on to do this and that, who has chosen instead to be no better than one of those blank-eyed girls with bad skin pushing their squealing brats out of their council estate blocks to collect their benefits. A nothing kind of person who’ll likely raise the same. It’s like he’s forgotten that he loves her, thinks Janette, sipping water as her husband snores beside her. How does that work? Because for all her anger – and there’s plenty of that – she couldn’t ever forget to love her own daughter. Is that why she’s still up? Isn’t that why her kidneys hurt?
It is not hard for Adam to find Becky.
She is sitting – bent over, holding her ankles, facing her feet – on the low scarlet step on the highest mustard platform of the topmost climbing frame in the local park. She snaps up, terrified, when Adam says her name from the top rung of the ladder.
She is shivering in the cold night air. He gives her his jumper and his coat and his hat.
He takes the seat next to her, his arm thrown over her shoulders to seal the warmth between the layers of clothes she now wears. It is then that he sees the half-full bottle of neat vodka at her feet.
‘That’s not ideal,’ he murmurs. ‘Given you’re keeping it.’
‘I’m not keeping it. I’m giving birth to it. Then someone else can take it.’
‘OK. But … you know what I’m saying.’
‘Too late for that.’ She glances back at the bottle with glazed eyes.
‘Maybe once is OK. I don’t know but … it’s probably OK.’
‘Don’t tell me it’s OK. Nothing is.’
He looks out at the stars. ‘Well. Nice night for it.’
‘Did Mum tell you to come out?’
‘No, I felt like a dawn trip to the swings and you happened to be here. Which is nice for me.’ He doesn’t get a smile from her. ‘Yeah, she rang me.’
‘There’s no law against going out.’
‘True. It’s probably why she called me and not the police.’
‘She hates me so much.’
‘She rang me. Which means she was checking on you at five in the morning. That’s not someone who hates you.’
‘Yeah, it is. You can hate someone and still have to
