beautiful. With the sight of her naked round body came a burst of hope that entering her would be as easy as it was necessary. It was, she made it so. It was easier than he would have believed possible and, beyond that, infinitely happier. She lay on her side and let him travel her with his hands and tongue, moving as and where he wanted. When he began to understand that he had more than her permission and that she was as frantic as he was, he grew bolder, and when he finally parted her legs and found her so wet that he thought he would die from need of her, she reached down and drew him inside her. She showed him how to glide and twist in her. He delighted in the way she instructed and he followed. For ever afterwards he would remember how his delight seemed to please her as much as her own, which she also knew how to take from him. She showed him how, but it was he who delighted her. He touched, pushed and slid and waited, withdrew, touched again as she pulled him back between her legs. For as long as she wanted he sank in and out of her, entering and leaving her, until with her legs gripping him round his waist he felt her tug and tighten over him and she gasped and swore happily. He was long past speech himself.
In a state of amazed exhaustion they lay together through the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. The bedroom was freezing. Under the covers, they could believe themselves just about warm enough if they did not move. Lying face to face, they laughed because their noses, when they touched, were both so cold. Above them the dog barked, and feet pounded. They dozed. Hours passed and they watched darkness come, the time of day an irrelevance. Then Michael wanted her again, and afterwards Steph fell asleep while Michael lay looking at the ceiling, trying to place himself in this new, re-ordered scheme of things. From his bare past, which already he was thinking of in the way that a freed man thinks of prison, it was like stepping through an archway. It almost eclipsed the finding of his mother but was also part of the same thing, marking the beginning of his life as a person who had other people. He turned and looked at Steph’s face. Her eyes, so large, seemed smaller when she was asleep. The eyelids were thin-skinned and bluish and reminded Michael of a baby bird. Her lips had relaxed and seemed fuller. They were still wet. His eyes wandered down to the swell of her stomach over the duvet, the line of her splayed legs. He placed a hand gently on her and let it climb her curve, barely touching. He could hardly bear the distance her sleeping put between them, but he would not dream of waking her. There was no hurry. They had each other. And soon there would be a baby, and all of them, they would all belong to one another. A voice in his head declared it.
When Steph woke she looked even more tired than before, and she had a headache. When she told Michael that she had eaten hardly anything since he had left the house, he went into the kitchen, where he found her frankfurter spaghetti in a coagulated mess. He brought her tea and biscuits, feeling slight consternation because he was out of aspirin. Then Steph said she wanted a bath, so he switched on the immersion heater. It only produced enough water for one bath, so he washed in cold water and got dressed. Later he returned to the bathroom and ran a bath for her, fetching a clean towel and placing an old one on the floor. It had occurred to him that the wet floor might be dangerous. What if she were to slip while he was out? He explained all this solemnly, warning her to be very careful and to step onto the towel on the floor, while Steph lay propped up on his pillows and drank her tea, listening and nodding, rather stunned. Michael could have laughed aloud with the pleasure of spoiling her. He still had not told her about Jean, and she had not asked. Things had happened too quickly, and even now he was in a hurry to get her the aspirin. Suddenly he was so busy, life was so full.
‘You’re nice and cheerful, anyway,’ Steph said, looking over her mug of tea.
‘Yeah, well, and I reckon you are too,’ he said. ‘Cat that’s got the cream, that’s you.’ She laughed.
He came back with paracetamol, which the pharmacist had told him was better than aspirin for pregnant women, and two or three carrier bags of food including a chicken and a bottle of wine. He found Steph sitting on the sofa in front of the fire, barefoot, dressed in pyjamas and one of his sweaters, combing out her hair, which dangled in wet loops over the towel round her shoulders. She looked up almost shyly because she had planned for him to notice her hair. She wanted him to think it was nice when it was newly washed.
‘You warm enough there like that?’ Michael asked. Steph smiled and nodded, turned her head and continued combing, while he watched.
They said little else for a while, and their silence lapped generously to the edges of the room and enclosed them.
Then Steph said, ‘It’s like a little church in here.’ It was true. The small room was dark but for the fire, the fairy lights and the candles. Michael stretched himself out on the floor in front of the fire, and said he knew what she meant.
He had seen a chapel like that, once. He had been persuaded to go to Spain for a week, years ago, with three other lads who drank in the pub where he was working. On the first night they had gone round the bars and the other three had brought girls back to the apartment, all of them so drunk they paired off and then, Michael told Steph as she slowly pulled the comb through her hair, ‘they just screwed all over the place, right in front of each other, four of them in the bedroom, two in the main room. I didn’t know where to look.’ He had spent the night on the concrete balcony and woken the next day with mosquito bites on his lips and eyes. The others, when they surfaced in the afternoon, thought it hilarious. Michael had hardly seen them after that. He spent the week alone, disfigured and miserable, keeping different hours. He couldn’t face the pool or the beach so instead he took buses inland, alighting in hill villages and walking about in the heat to the silent bafflement of old people and children who watched him from sitting places in the shade. To get out of the sun he would buy soft drinks at cafйs that had only two or four white plastic chairs and an umbrella, or he went into churches. He liked the brick floors, dusty here and there with sprinklings of fallen plaster, the green stains in the joins where a little damp seeped between whitewashed walls, and the peeling Madonnas in their painted, fairground colours. He knew that these places were in poor taste, mawkish and out-of-the-way, and that the country saints they elevated were obscure, but it had seemed to him that the plastic chrysanthemums, the tinsel and the coloured lights somehow made them precious, contained, intricate.
‘If it’s like a church in here, that makes us a couple of saints,’ he said.
‘Sinners more like,’ Steph said, with satisfaction.
They grew comfortable. One of the candles burned down. Steph could not lay her hands on the matches to light a new one and Michael found them in her pyjama breast pocket, or pretended to. He set about roasting the chicken, and when Steph suggested they bake potatoes at the same time since the oven was already on, he thought her brilliant. He opened the wine and between them they finished the bottle. Soon afterwards the gas ran out again. Michael had spent the last of his money on the food, so they went to bed. They lay while Michael stroked her bump, and asked her what it felt like to be pregnant. Did she want a boy or a girl? He kissed the bump. Did she talk to the baby?
‘You’re meant to,’ he said. ‘I read it somewhere. You’re meant to talk to it.’
‘That’s plants,’ Steph said sleepily. ‘Anyway, I do sometimes. Hello, baby!’ she whispered, to prove it. ‘Why don’t you talk to it, Michael? Say hello. ’Cause if it’s a boy,’ she added nervously, ‘I was thinking of Michael.’
Michael turned to her and tried to see from her face if she were serious. But the flickering light from the silent television was dancing over her features and he could not tell. ‘You mean
Steph nodded. ‘So you’d better get to know it, it ought to know who it’s named after. Or it could be Michaela, if it’s a girl.’ She pronounced it Michael-ah.
‘Michael-ah,’ he repeated.
‘Talk to it, go on. Tell it something nice.’
He kissed the bump again and stroked it, and when his lips brushed the taut skin of her stomach and he felt the ridges of her stretch marks on his mouth he was aghast at the intimacy of it. He whispered something that Steph could not hear, and she realised she was not meant to. She could not fight sleep any longer. Seeing her settle down, Michael switched the television off. As she was letting her eyes close, she remembered with a shock that she had not heard a word from Michael about his mother.
‘Your mum! You never said! Was it all right, then? Seeing her? I can’t believe you never said. She is your mum, isn’t she? What was it like?’
Michael smiled in the dark. He too was almost asleep. ‘Oh, oh yeah, it was great. She’s my mum all right. It was great. You wait till you meet her. I’ll tell you tomorrow. Plenty of time tomorrow.’
