Page 74 of Days You Were Mine

How many hours pass? One, two? I sit motionless on the sofa, too shocked, too downcast, to think of crying. I miss Jake with a savage ache, but I won’t tell him about my father’s visit. I will never share the things that might push him down. I feel I can guard him when we are together, I can watch over him with vigilance and make sure he is safe. But I have no control with him away on tour. All I can do is make sure each phone callwe have is a good one, and he hangs up feeling positive, calm, reassured.

‘What’s wrong?’ Rick says when I call an hour or two later.

For a second or two I am too choked to speak.

‘My father came.’

‘What did the bastard say?’

Rick knows my father as a bully, not an abuser; I hadn’t realised that myself until today. Not that I care, not that it matters. I’m a little flattened by it, that’s all.

‘Can you come over?’

‘On my way.’

I haven’t bothered to look in the mirror, and when I open the front door, Rick takes a step back and yelps in surprise.

‘Alice! Your face!’ He screeches it and then he makes a sequence of noises I’ve never heard him make before, a gasping, wheezing sound that turns out to be Rick crying.

We sit on the sofa with a bowl of ice and water and a flannel that Rick presses against my swollen cheek, tears running down his face until I tell him, ‘This isn’t really helping, you know.’

‘You’re right, I’m sorry. But I hate the fact that he did this when Jake was away. He’ll kill your father when he finds out.’

‘He won’t find out. Rick, you have to promise me that. He couldn’t handle it.’

‘I think you underestimate him sometimes.’

‘Hardly. Are you forgetting how he disappeared on a bender for almost a week? He’s so fragile, I’m only starting to realise how much. I hate him being away.’

‘You’ve got to stop stressing, it can’t be good for the baby.’

‘I just need him home.’

‘And he will be. Come on, let’s forget about your father. Stop worrying about Jake. Can’t we do something normal and everyday? Just you and me.’

I watch as he lights all the candles in the sitting room, the way Jake usually does, so that this orange and red space is filled with a calming night-time glow. He makes tea in the cream and gold pot I bought at Portobello Market and flips through the stack of records, selectingThe Dark Side of the Moon, a perfect choice.

While we drink our tea, he flips through our book of baby names, reading out the most outlandish ones. Jake and I have already chosen our names: Charles for a boy, Charlotte for a girl, both shortened to Charlie. But I indulge Rick while he suggests Aristotle and Prospero, and Cassiopeia for a girl.

And soon I’m laughing, the horror of today almost forgotten as I sit drinking tea and laughing with my best friend and his pitch-perfect interpretation of ‘normal’.

The last time, as it turned out, that my life would ever be normal again.

Now

Luke

It begins as a perfect Saturday. We sleep late, all three of us, or rather the late that is 8.30 and not 6 a.m., woken by Samuel, who rolls over and pokes his feet into my stomach. When I open my eyes, he is staring at me intently. I grin, a nought-to-thirty-second response when faced with this joy-giving human being, and he does his uproarious laugh, which is how Hannah wakes.

‘Hello, laughing boy,’ she says, kissing him.

She reaches for my hand and pulls it up to her mouth.

‘It’s Saturday,’ she says. ‘Two whole days of just being us.’

‘Breakfast in bed?’ I say. ‘For three?’

We get the weekend papers delivered, so I carry up a tray laden with tea and toast and the SaturdayTimes, a warm bottle of milk for Samuel. I open our curtains and the early-autumn sun spears in through the window, aStar Warsbeam of gold.

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