Goodnight, Beautiful

  Mal never talked about his father. It was an unacknowledged agreement that Uncle Victor was something we never spoke about. This was a revelation to me that Mal not only thought about his dad—although I always suspected he did—but also missed him enough to want him here.

  “Do you?” I said.

  “I wish he was here so I wouldn’t have to do this alone. I know your mum and dad look after Mum, but it should be Dad. And then Victoria wouldn’t have to go away.”

  I understood at that moment why he could let Victoria go. He couldn’t take care of both of them as well as his mother, and if going to boarding school meant Victoria would be looked after, that she wouldn’t have to go through every moment of worry and fear that he had to, then he’d do that. He didn’t want to lose his sister, but if that was the price he had to pay to stop her going through the agony we all went through every time his mother struggled or slipped or spun out into psychosis, then he would pay it. These were adult choices he had to make. He knew that I would have fought my parents to keep us together. I would have made life a misery for all concerned until they realized that we couldn’t be split up. But Mal had decided to let Victoria go to give her the chance to grow up “normal.”

  “Why us, Nova?” he asked. “Why us? Why my mum? Why’d God pick on my mum?” I didn’t think he wanted an answer. He was just asking. Even if he did want or need a solid answer, I didn’t have one. I didn’t know who got chosen to go through life suffering. Having things happen to them. Putting up with things and not having any choice in the matter.

  I doubted I’d ever understand why them and not anyone else. Or maybe I would. Maybe at some point I would grow up. Not in the sense of being old enough to vote, get married, leave home, get a job. But in the sense of being able to understand the world more. Being able to pinpoint why some are chosen, some are not. Why some are blessed and others seem to suffer. Maybe that was what being a grown-up truly meant. You finally understood the ways of the world. You were finally given insight into the truth of life. Maybe you could do all those other things, live as though you were grown up, but you would never be grown up until you had that kind of understanding and knowledge. Until you had that kind of enlightenment. Maybe that’s what enlightenment was. Maybe it wasn’t being able to sit cross-legged while wearing white robes and chanting and feeling “at one with the world,” as I had been reading about; maybe enlightenment was simply being able to understand.

  I put my arm around him and was surprised when he crumpled against me like a cola can being crushed. All fight and strength went out of his body and I realized that what had been meant as a one-armed hug was now holding him up. His whole body weight was resting on me. He looked skinny as a rake, but he was heavy, so it took me a while to move him off my shoulder and pull him onto my lap. His head rested on my thigh as my eyes became more accustomed to the dark and could make out shapes in the small rectangle of our back garden, and through the black rails into the overgrown green that separated the end of our garden from the train track.

  Mal had climbed over that fence so many times to retrieve our footballs, shuttlecocks and tennis balls. And the time our budgie, Birdie, flew over there, he’d climbed over to catch it. He’d gently covered it with his T-shirt to stop it flying away whilst he scrambled back over the fence to bring it home. The wild, spiky weeds scratched his back and chest, but he hadn’t cared, all he cared about was bringing the terrified budgie home.

  He was ten at the time. Mum had told him not to climb over that fence but to wait instead for Dad to come back so he could use the ladder to get over the fence and up the tree. The second she went back into the house to check on dinner, he’d scaled the railings, jumped down onto the other side and shimmied up the tree. He’d only disobeyed Mum because it was Aunt Mer who had let out Birdie. She’d said she wanted to see Birdie fly. She was working on a design for wings for humans and she needed to see how budgies flew. It was a sign. We all knew that, we all knew that there’d be a visit to the doctor soon. Mal at that time hadn’t been able to do anything about making his mother well, but he did what he could, and that was to fix things. In this case, rescuing Birdie. Mal had done this as long as I could remember: anything she did, he tried to set right.

  A slither of wetness ran down my bare thigh and I instinctively checked the sky for rain. The sky, a beautiful, rich, velvet blue-black, didn’t have any clouds in it, and the air didn’t hold the heavy, musky scent of rain. Another slither crawled down my thigh and I realized what was happening. I wanted to place one hand on his back in comfort and to use the other to wipe away his tears. I wanted to love him better, but I knew that was what I wanted. What he needed was for me to pretend it wasn’t happening. For me to overlook the fact that he wasn’t being strong and capable and wise beyond his years, that he was going to allow himself to cry.

  I rested back on my elbows, leaned my body back and stared up at the sky. What he needed me to do was to be there, but to leave him be. So I did the one thing I did best—I talked. I talked and talked and talked.

  The door to Leo’s bedroom is open.

  It has been since he went to the hospital. I always resist the temptation to go in, smell his clothes, run my fingers over the lines of his furniture, lie down on his bed. That is the sort of thing that the bereaved do. When they are trying to cling onto what they have lost. And that hasn’t happened. It won’t happen. This is only a pause, a break while he gets better.

  I’ve been spoiled with Leo, really. I’ve had him all to myself for so many years, I suppose I’ve forgotten that many single mothers have to share their children with their biological fathers. That some women are forced to live without their children for half the summer holidays and weekends, that their children have two families and get to make a set of memories that don’t include them.

  Until now, I’ve spent maybe ten nights without Leo. Mostly when he goes to stay with his cousins up near Crawley or with my parents for the night, but other than that my life has revolved around him, and his life around me. He even came on the honeymoon with Keith and me to Spain. Lots of people—Mum, Dad, Cordy and Aunt Mer included—had asked if I was sure I didn’t want time alone with my new husband, a holiday from it all, a break. Of course I did, and I was going to get one. With Leo. Keith had come into his life as well, he needed a break to get to know Keith in that different context. Besides, I told them, what’s a holiday without Leo? I might as well leave my right arm at home as well.

  His room is an organized mess. He has books on the floor, and anyone who doesn’t know my son would think they’d just been dropped there casually after reading. But no, he has put them there in special places to fool the burglars. One book squeaks, so if the burglar steps on it, it’ll wake Leo up. Another book has a bell on it, so if the burglar moves it aside, it’ll do the same job as the squeaking book. The other books and a couple of toys are placed in a pattern that will make it complicated and treacherous for someone to navigate. We’ve never been burgled, he’s never known anyone who’s been burgled, it’s just Keith’s job that makes him conscious of such things. I’ve had to memorize the pattern and then come in during the night once he’s asleep, remove them all and then replace them in exactly the same place in the morning before he gets up. It doesn’t occur to him when he’s laying his traps at night that he might trip and hurt himself if he wakes up to go to the toilet, or to come into our room to tell us something important that has come to him in a dream.

  Leo had been in the hospital three days before I remembered not to go to his room and replace the traps. I did it automatically, without even noticing his bed was empty. Now I’ve left the traps in place so that when Leo wakes up, I’ll be able to tell him that his room is safe, there have been no burglars because the traps are all there, laid in perfect, innocent-looking formation, waiting to trip up the unsuspecting.

  “Do you mind if we go?”

  It was barely midnight and the dancing had only just started at the uni disco, but Mal wanted to
leave. He was up in Oxford visiting me for the weekend, and for some reason he hadn’t brought Cordy with him. The last two times he had driven up—three weeks after I first started here, and then to collect me for the Christmas holidays—he had brought my sister because she was still at home and he had chosen to go to college in London so he could live at home.

  When he’d climbed out of the car without her, I’d wondered if she was being punished, because apart from that, the only other way he would have come alone would have been to sneak off without her knowledge while she was at school. I didn’t envy him the wrath of Cordy when he returned if that was what he’d done.

  I peered up at him through the dense fog of smoky air mingled with the heady musk of people trying to get together in the union disco, wondering why he wasn’t having a good time.

  He took my hand, laced his fingers through the gaps between mine. “I’ve hardly spoken to you,” he explained. “I want to talk to you.”

  “OK,” I replied with a shrug—he had a point: after he arrived we’d gone straight to the canteen for an early dinner, then, still hungry, had walked into town for a pizza, then had been dragged out to the bar for drinks by a couple of my friends. I moved to take my hand back so we could find my friends to tell them we were leaving, but he didn’t let go. He held on like he was worried about losing me in the crowd. When I said we were leaving to Rebecca and Lucy, they looked from me to him a few times and in unison broke out into huge smiles. They obviously thought … And they couldn’t be more wrong. “See you tomorrow,” they chorused drunkenly as we navigated our way through the virtually mating bodies on the dance floor.

  He didn’t let go of my hand until I shut my room door behind us, and then he seemed to think it was safe, that I wouldn’t disappear.

  “Do you want to top-to-toe it like Cordy and me usually do, or use your sleeping bag?” I asked him as I grabbed my T-shirt and pajama bottoms to start changing.

  “I don’t mind sharing the bed,” he said. “If you don’t mind?”

  “Course not.”

  As soon as our bodies touched when we squeezed into my narrow, single bed, everything changed. He wasn’t my best friend/brother any longer. I didn’t have a name for him, a role in my life, but what we were to each other was different.

  His scent had changed. He smelled like the guys I had kissed since I’d been at college: of heat and desire and physical need. He smelled of something unnamed that I suddenly wanted. Without thinking, we rearranged ourselves in the bed, his slightly bent legs slotted perfectly behind mine, his arm across my stomach, his other arm under his head. He moved again, pressing our bodies closer, nestling his chin against the curve of my neck, the slight beginnings of his beard gently prickling my skin, his breath, deep and slow, moving softly over my cheek.

  I could feel he was interested, down there. I’d felt it when kissing men before, but this was different. It was more than this being part of the normal urges of two people who were sharing a space made for one. I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted him to touch me. And if he did, I would. I would do it with him.

  I knew that I was slightly odd, that I was one of the few girls at university who, even after all this time and kissing a few men, still hadn’t—what was it Rebecca called it?—still hadn’t “taken the first bite of womanhood.”

  No one, not even Rebecca and Lucy, understood that I was waiting for someone special. I was waiting for someone who I was in love with and who was in love with me before I did that. They thought I was a little scared of sex, when really, I wanted to wait. You only get one first time; I wanted it to be with someone special. I wanted to look back and know that physically it may not have been great, but it had been with the right person. I didn’t realize until we were two curls in my narrow college bed that I had been waiting for Mal.

  Through the walls of my room, I could hear chatter, laughter, people ransacking the communal kitchens that were located on every floor for food to satisfy middle-of-the-night, drug-induced munchies. There was music, too. The girl in the room next door had her stereo on a bit too loud, and the sound seeped through the brickwork into my room. She had probably come in, pressed “play” on her tape deck, and passed out fully clothed on the bed as she did most Friday nights. This Friday it was Roxy Music. She’d been playing it to death all week, and everyone was sick of it. Which was probably why she kept playing it.

  Above the beginning beat of “Dance Away,” Mal’s breathing slowed. He shifted a fraction closer, too close for it to be accidental. As the metronomic beat of the song got louder, more insistent around us, he slid his hand under my T-shirt and rested it on my stomach. My eyes slipped shut. His palm lay over my skin, imprinting the heat of his body, of desire, on me. I inhaled him, drew deep on the scent of him and became slightly drunk and giddy. Slowly, his thumb stroked across the dip of my navel.

  Bryan Ferry’s voice began. Mal sighed and his hand moved lower, to the top of my pajama trousers.

  With all the other men I had kissed, I’d never felt this. The crush of longing that was bearing down on my chest; the tight ball of yearning that was unfurling between my legs; the craving of excitement swirling in my bloodstream. It made perfect sense that he was the one this would happen with. I’d never regret it with Mal. He’d been around for so many of my other firsts—tooth, step, crush on a TV star, kiss with Jason Butterworth at the sixth-form disco—of course he’d be the first one for this.

  His fingers tentatively reached below the lip of my bottoms and all breath left my body in one steady stream of expectation. I felt his fingers brush slowly over my pubic hair, his head moved toward my neck and I opened my legs a fraction, waiting for him. His hand moved lower still, reaching for me, closer toward where he would become a part of me.

  As his lips reached the curve of my neck, he gave a small, strangled, guttural cry at the back of his throat and took his hand away, the elastic waistband of my pajama trousers snapping unceremoniously back into place. He moved his body away from me, took his face away from mine, dropped his head heavily on the corner of pillow I had left for him.

  What happened?

  I could hear him breathing heavily behind me, but couldn’t turn around. I knew he wanted me, I had felt it in the electric sensations of his body, the hardness that had been pressed against me.

  What did I do wrong? Why did he change his mind?

  Loud and fast, as though he had just crossed the finish line of a 200-meter sprint, his breathing filled the room, some of it falling on the back of my neck.

  Is he scared that he won’t be experienced enough? He has done it before, so is that why he stopped? Or is he scared of being my first?

  He pulled aside the covers and slipped out of bed. The room was dark, but light still filtered in from the corridor lights, which were garish and harsh and permanently on so the rooms were never truly blacked out.

  Is it my body? Isn’t it as good as the other girls he’s been with?

  He went to the bank of wardrobes that stood, a big, tall, oak monstrosity, in the corner. Behind one set of doors, a space for my clothes and shoes; behind the next set, a sink and mirror. I heard the water running, I heard him splash his face with water, I heard the stillness of him standing motionless in front of the mirror, his breathing still loud and uncontrolled in the darkness. I didn’t have the courage to turn around, to see what he was doing. Instead, slowly and carefully, avoiding moving the bed, I curled toward the wall, making myself as small as possible while tugging down my T-shirt to cover my stomach.

  I heard him rustling by the other wardrobe, where he’d dumped his belongings, then the sharp rip of Velcro being opened and the soft nylon hush of his sleeping bag being laid out on the floor beside the bed.

  “There’s not much space in the bed,” he whispered, over the sound of undoing the zipper on the sleeping bag.

  In response, I closed my eyes and started to breathe deeply, as though I was asleep. Speaking to him was not an option; embarrassment and humiliation
had made me mute.

  Why did I think he’d want to, with me?

  “I’ll sleep on the floor,” he whispered. “Goodnight.”

  The dying strains of “Dance Away” filled the room, then petered out to silence. It’d taken less time than a song took to play itself out for all that to happen. For us to come so close and then …

  Neither of us slept very much. I could tell by the rhythm of his breathing, by his stillness, that he, like me, spent most of the night wide awake, staring into the partial dark. Neither of us brought it up the next morning. We went about the business of a normal weekend as though nothing had happened. But I did catch him staring at me, as though trying to work out something, trying to make a decision.

  I knew Mal—I didn’t know why he had changed his mind, but I did know there was a deeper reason for what had happened, what had gone wrong; something he couldn’t explain to me yet.

  “Cordy’s going to murder me when I get home,” he said as he was leaving on Sunday evening.

  “Yup, I don’t know why you didn’t bring her along.”

  “I wanted you all to myself, didn’t I?” he replied. “I never get you alone anymore.”

  “Well, I hope for your sake it was worth it,” I said. “ ’Cause she is going to make you suffer.”

  He took me in his arms and I didn’t melt into them as usual, he didn’t hold me as close—we hadn’t talked about what happened but our bodies hadn’t forgotten that we were meant to be awkward, stiff, uncomfortable with each other.

  “Of course it was,” he said. “Every second with you is worth it.”

  I stepped back first, unable to stay that close for too long. “Tell that to Cordy, I’m sure she’ll forgive you,” I smirked.