Peter May - Runaway

They shared a bedroom and breakfasted together in the kitchen, spending evenings, when Flet was free, smoking and drinking up on the roof terrace. They went to film premiers and West End shows together, and often dined out, returning in the small hours, tipsy and giggling and barely able to contain themselves until they got to the bedroom.

Flet never made any pretence of the fact that he hated our presence in the house. He was openly rude to us, individually and collectively, and it was apparent that he was deeply jealous of his lover’s relationship with Jeff. A relationship that was not clear to anyone, least of all us.

I knew that there was a showdown looming when I heard them arguing one day. I was coming down the stairs from the top floor, and as I approached the first-floor landing I could hear their voices coming from the doctor’s study.

‘I won’t put up with it any longer, Cliff. I won’t. They’re horrible. Unwashed. Rude. Scottish! I don’t know why you insist on keeping them here.’

Dr Robert laughed. ‘Scottish? Is that a pejorative term, these days?’

‘They’re uncouth. Common as dirt. They contaminate this house with their language and their music, and that boy and girl fucking every night up on the top floor. Honest to God, why do you put up with it?’

Dr Robert’s voice was soothing, persuasive. ‘They have their uses, Sy. And when their usefulness runs its course, they’ll be gone. I promise you.’ A pause. ‘Come here...’

Flet’s petulant voice came back at him. ‘You can’t win me over like that.’

I could hear the amusement in Dr Robert’s voice. ‘Oh yes I can.’

I didn’t like to imagine what they were doing, and tiptoed across the landing to hurry silently down the stairs, wondering just what our ‘usefulness’ was, and how long it might be before it ran its course.

But everything else was pre-empted by the bomb that Rachel dropped suddenly and unexpectedly into the mix. Its detonation destroyed us, ruining the rest of my life, and was probably the single most influential factor in precipitating the tragedy to come.

We hadn’t made love that night, and I had not questioned it. She had been moody and distant for some days, and I had assumed it was just her time of the month. But as we lay in bed, in the dark, side by side, not even touching, I sensed something more. Something much bigger. And because I couldn’t see it, the presence it created was almost frightening.

It grew in my mind until it took over my entire consciousness. I became aware of her slow, impatient breathing. I knew she was not asleep, but neither did I feel her to be there in our bed. Not really. She was somewhere a long way away, and I had never felt so separated from her in all our weeks together.

For the longest time I lay looking at the light from outside lying across the ceiling, divided and subdivided by the frames of the windows. Until I could stand it no longer. I rolled my head to one side on the pillow. She was staring straight up with her eyes wide open, gathering as they always did all the light that there was in the room. I could see it reflected somewhere deep in their inaccessible darkness.

‘What’s wrong?’

There was neither a flicker of her eyelids, nor any indication in her face that she had heard me. And she made no reply for so long that I began to believe that she hadn’t. I was about to ask again when she said, ‘I’m pregnant.’

And I felt the bottom fall out of my world.

I sat up immediately. ‘You can’t be!’

‘I am.’ Her voice was flat and emotionless.

‘But we take precautions.’

‘No. I take precautions. You take it for granted.’

We had never used condoms. She told me that first night that she had a diaphragm. I had no idea what that was, but she said I didn’t have to worry about it. And I never had.

‘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.