Sharon Bolton - Like This, for Ever

A young family were walking along the path towards them. Mum, dad, newborn twins in a double buggy, so wrapped up against the cold that only their noses could be seen. Dana sat up a little taller, her eyes fixed on the buggy. Babies. When had they become so completely fascinating?

Helen had spotted what she was up to. She took hold of Dana’s gloved hand. She did it slowly, as though half expecting it to be pulled away. ‘I wish you’d told me,’ she said.

‘I hardly knew myself,’ said Dana.

Silence.

‘But really, Mark Joesbury as a sperm donor? I can’t see it.’

For a second, her own body’s shaking scared her. Then Dana realized she was laughing, and it felt like a long time since she’d done that.

‘There are things we can do, you know,’ said Helen, after a moment.

Dana turned to face her. ‘There are?’

Her partner nodded. ‘Lots of women in our position have children. Where there’s a will.’

A couple of hundred yards away from them, the geese had landed on the riverbank. They were strutting, over-confident, noisy creatures.

‘Is there?’ said Dana, when she’d plucked up the courage. ‘Is there a will?’

Helen rocked her head, shrugged, pulled her face in a couple of different ways. She was thinking about it. Dana held her breath.

‘You’d have to do the pregnant thing,’ said Helen at last. ‘Not sure I’d be up to that.’

Dana’s hands shot to her face. She gulped. Tears filled her eyes. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Pregnant?’

Helen leaned back against the bench, hands laced behind her head. ‘It’s the usual prerequisite, from what I understand.’

‘Pregnant? Me?’ Dana was staring down at her stomach, as though just talking about it might have made it happen.

Helen shook her head. ‘And already it’s addling her brain. Come on. Let’s go and look at some websites.’

The two women got up. Arm in arm, they followed the newborn twins and their parents out of the park.

‘OK.’ The older of the two Joesburys looked at his watch as they crossed the narrow canal that ran through Regent’s Park zoo. ‘We’ve got an hour. So I suggest penguins, otters, meerkats, and I suppose you could talk me into the insect house. But not the butterflies. Butterflies scare me.’

Huck was looking at the map in the zoo guide they’d bought on their way in. ‘African hunting dogs, Komodo dragons, lions and tigers,’ he announced before looking up at his dad. ‘And finish with the gorillas. Did you know they ripped a woman’s head off last year?’

Joesbury shook his head. ‘Where do you hear such rubbish?’

‘Alex Welsh told me. She broke in at night and went into the gorilla cage and they ripped her head off and the keepers found them next morning using it as a football.’

‘What was the score?’

Huck gave him that you can take the piss if you want to, but I know what I know look and the two of them walked on. Joesbury had his hand on his son’s shoulder. He found it difficult these days not to be close enough to touch. And when he was close enough, next to impossible not to maintain some sort of physical contact, as though the reassurance of his eyes that his son was still there, still safe, just wasn’t enough.

They stopped in front of some monkeys. On a branch above their heads, a mother sat grooming her baby, running her hands over its fur, searching for lice, smoothing, scratching, petting. She bent and nibbled the baby’s ear, then ran one hand along the length of its tail. She, too, didn’t seem able to keep from touching her child. The young monkey, on the other hand, looked bored. It was watching the other monkeys, half wanting to run off and join them, half needing to stay close to its parent for just a bit longer.

‘I’d really like to see something cuddly,’ said Joesbury. ‘Isn’t there somewhere you can stroke goats and rabbits?’

There was a heavy sigh at his side. ‘Dad, I’m not traumatized. And will you please tell Mum I don’t want to see that counsellor any more? She smells of disinfectant.’

‘I’ll certainly pass on your thoughts.’

The baby monkey crawled away. The mother watched it go, not taking her eyes off it for a second. It had reached the end of the branch when two larger monkeys, like over-exuberant teenagers, came racing towards it. The baby scuttled back to its mother, climbing up her body as though it were an extension of the branch, clinging tight to her fur. She nipped his ear in an I told you so way.

‘Bats!’ said Huck. ‘I want to see the bats!’

Joesbury sighed. The kid was winding him up. ‘There is no friggin’ way I’m going anywhere near bats.’

‘I’ll tell Mum you swore.’

He looked down. ‘I’ll tell her you fancy Kaycia Lowrie.’

Stalemate.

‘Come on then, let’s go and find the tigers. But if it’s feeding time, you’re on your own. Which reminds me, where do you want to eat tonight? TGI’s? Giraffe?’

‘We’re going to Trev’s,’ said Huck, as they set off along the path once more.

‘Oh, are we?’

‘I booked a table.’

The kid just got better. ‘And when did you do that, seeing as how you haven’t been out of my sight since I picked you up?’

‘I did it when you were in the toilet. You spend a long time in there, you know.’

Directly ahead of them, two teenage girls turned and stared at Joesbury.

‘Yeah, thanks for that,’ he told his son. ‘Am I allowed to know what time?’

‘Seven-thirty. Lacey couldn’t make it any earlier.’

Now that was just mean. When had his son turned mean? ‘I know you’re winding me up,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got Lacey’s number.’

The look on Huck’s face said there was no end to the pain he was expected to endure. ‘Dad! For someone who claims he works in IT, you know zilch about technology,’ he complained. ‘My new phone is linked to yours by your computer. All the information on yours is on mine.’

Joesbury stopped walking and narrowly avoided being run into by a double buggy. ‘You’ve got all my contact details on your phone?’

‘Yeah. Who’s Nobby McT—’

‘Give me that phone!’

Huck darted ahead, turned and did his nah-nah-nah-nah-nah dance in the middle of the path. He pulled his phone from his pocket and waved it around his head.

‘Oy, get back here! Now!’ Joesbury set off running. ‘OK, I’m serious. Huck!’ Great, his nine-year-old son could out-run him.

‘Someone stop that kid, he nicked my phone!’

Lacey watched Barney lock the cabin and slip the key into his pocket. ‘It’s a nice boat,’ she said. ‘A lot bigger than I expected. Thank you for showing it to me.’

A nice boat on which two young boys had died. Tyler King and Ryan Jackson had been taped to the fold-out table in the main cabin below and left alone and terrified for days, while a badly damaged child battled with his demons. Did that bother her? Should it?

‘Dad’s going to sell it this spring,’ said Barney. ‘I don’t think he’ll be able to come here again.’

‘Yes, he told me.’

Sensing Barney wasn’t ready to leave just yet, Lacey sat down in the cockpit facing the Creek. Barney mirrored her, keeping his back to the water. The tide was high and the boat rocked gently, soothingly, against its moorings. When it was out, the whole of the Theatre Arm would smell of mud. The boat would be grounded, skewed at an angle. No mains water, relying on a generator for electricity, Calor gas to cook. And that rubbish-strewn yard to negotiate several times a day. It would be the most impractical place in London to live.

‘Was there something you wanted to ask me?’ she said, after a moment. Earlier in the day, Barney had been almost too keen to show her around the boat. She’d suspected he wanted to talk to her away from the dad who never seemed to let him out of his sight these days.