‘That’s his problem.’
‘I have to live there.’
‘Not for long.’
‘I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I just can’t.’
He throws the last of the glass into the bin and returns to her. Facing her, he begins to push her on the swing. There is a wobble in his voice when he asks her, ‘What do you mean when you say you can’t do it?’
She turns to face him: her eyes clear, tearless, determined now. ‘I mean that I don’t want to be here any more. And I don’t even want to talk about it with you because I don’t want you to end up feeling bad, like you should have done something to change it, or like you can do something to change it. You can’t. Nobody can.’
‘You’re talking like you’re going somewhere …’
‘It’s my fault. I took drugs with him. I should have known.’
‘Becky, look at me.’
‘I don’t want to.’ She pushes her feet off the asphalt and swings, her eyes closed now.
‘Please hang on a bit longer. Just while we work it out.’
‘It’s OK.’ She cuts him off. ‘I will.’ But in her flat and firm words, delivered to silence him, he understands that calculation replaces honesty. She has put him on the other side of an invisible wall. Her decisions are being made behind closed eyes.
He is afraid of her unhappiness now, at how deep and impregnable it is. He can’t shift it.
‘Let me take you home,’ he says finally.
‘OK,’ says Becky. Going through the motions now. She is, he knows in his gut, waiting to be alone again so that she can do what she needs to do to remove herself. He wants to make her promise not to kill herself, but that moment has gone.
Janette opens the front door and lets Adam and Becky in. She didn’t go back to bed after Adam called her. She knew she wouldn’t sleep a wink.
‘Have you been drinking?’ she asks. She can smell the vodka.
‘No,’ says Becky. There is no life in her voice. ‘I’m going to go to bed.’
‘Let’s have a cup of tea first,’ says Adam. ‘I’m quite cold.’ Becky moves seamlessly towards the kitchen and the kettle. Janette looks at Adam: he sees how frightened she is, and she sees that same set of fears in him. They follow her.
Bill lumbers down the stairs in his dressing gown.
‘Bit early, isn’t it?’ he says to Adam. Adam shrugs.
‘Do you want tea?’ Janette asks him. ‘Becky’s making.’
‘No.’
‘Can I help?’ Adam asks Becky. She shakes her head. He sits down.
The kettle boils with a click.
‘It’s my baby,’ says Adam. ‘I’m the father. She’s been protecting me because she didn’t want me to feel like it was up to me to have to sort things out. We made a mistake. And I have to take responsibility for that.’
Becky turns. In her expression, her mother reads the final revealing of a secret.
‘You stupid fucking prick!’ shouts her father, at Adam. ‘You’ve ruined her life!’
‘No, I haven’t,’ says Adam, firmly. This skinny guy, talking like he’s made of iron: how can he be a teenager? ‘Becky’s going to have a great life. Becky’s brilliant. This is just something we’ve got to get through first.’
Bill takes two steps and punches Adam in the face, knocking him to his knees. Becky cries out and runs to intervene, Janette flies in, and for a moment the four of them are locked in a surreal, wild struggle, blood flowing from Adam’s nose and Janette wailing and Becky putting herself between her father and Adam, her father vibrating with rage.
‘Coward!’ shouts Bill. ‘You stitched her up and you let her hang!’
‘I know,’ says Adam, bleeding down his T-shirt. ‘I’ll try to be better.’
Afterwards they sit in her bedroom, the two of them, two plugs of toilet paper up his nostrils to stem the bleeding.
‘This way you can’t kill yourself,’ he tells her. ‘I know you’re my friend and you care about me, at least on some level. And if you kill yourself then I’ll always be the cause of it. For your family and my family and everyone we know. So you won’t do it.’
‘But you’ll be the person who got me pregnant. And gave away their child.’
‘I can live with that. I can’t live with losing you.’
‘I don’t want you to be making that choice.’
‘Tough. I made it. Even if you try and say you don’t know who the father is, now they’ll think you’re lying. To protect me.’
‘I can come clean. Tell them what happened to me …’
‘I don’t want you to have to do that. And you don’t want to do that. This way’s better. Let them blame me. Your dad can hate me. I mean, I don’t give a fuck if he does. I can take it.’
‘Is your nose broken?’
‘I don’t think so.’ He smiles at her. ‘No bad thing if it is. I’ll look like a tough guy. The kind who strangles thugs with his cardigan if they make trouble.’
‘This thing you’re saying, it … it isn’t something we can take back.’
‘I know that.’
‘Adam, your mum …’
‘My mum will be nice about it.’
‘It’s not just me people will look at differently.’
‘I know. Becky, I’ve thought all that through. It’s so much less shit for men. So this is something I can do. Let me do it.’
‘My dad will be on at you about everything.’
‘Do they know you’re going to put the baby up for adoption?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, so this is only for a little bit. Just let me be the one whose fault it is. If that’s what your dad needs, to stop blaming you. It’s easy.’
How is any of this easy? Still, she feels something lift, fractionally. She tests the idea of killing herself: the idea she has run toward and then pushed away for weeks now. And she sees that he is right: she finds that she cannot bear the unfairness
