Non Pratt - Trouble

“Hannah, can’t you just let it go?” Aaron stands up. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m not OK. I’m not even fucking close to being OK, but that doesn’t mean I want to talk about it. Not to you, not to my parents, not to a mental health professional…”

His reaction strikes me dumb. Why is he so angry with me for caring?

“Can’t you just leave me alone?”

“No.” I surprise myself with my answer. “I can’t leave you alone, Aaron. I’m worried about you. I care about you. I want to help you when you need me most — the way you did for me.”

“Tit for tat?”

“No, that’s not what I meant—” But he’s not listening to me.

“Because it doesn’t have to be.”

“What do you mean?” I’m scared. A dead, dark feeling in my heart.

“If the price of being your hero is having you try to save me like this, then I resign.”

“Resign?” I whisper. I feel like I’ve lost control of everything that’s happening around me. Aaron’s unravelling and I can’t seem to grab the end of the string.

“I’m out. Done. Finished. Go find Jay and get him to do the honourable thing.” Aaron looks through me, his eyes hard and glassy. It’s like he’s someone else. “I’m not the hero you’re looking for, Hannah…” Aaron suddenly sits down on the bed, the heels of his hands pressing into his eye sockets. “I’m just not. You expect too much from me.”

“I don’t expect anything.” I move closer and crouch down in front of him, my hands reaching up to his…

“You expect me to let you in.” His hands open and he meets my gaze. My hands stop where they are.

“Is that so much to ask?” I’m pleading with him. I don’t want him to shut me out.

“Yes. It is.” He presses his hands back to his face. “Please. Leave me alone, Hannah. Please…”

When I take my hands away from my eyes, she’s gone — and she cannot see that I’m crying. For Neville. For Chris. For myself.

And when I slide down onto the floor and let go, I realize that I’m crying for Hannah because she thinks she’s lost me when she doesn’t know the first thing about loss.

I haven’t been sick the entire time I’ve been pregnant. Until now. I’m forced to do it over someone’s garden fence, but there isn’t much I can do about it, so I just hurry away, wiping my mouth and trying to get a grip on my tears.

Whoever was in that room wasn’t Aaron. Not my Aaron, not the Aaron who stood by me when Jay wouldn’t, not the Aaron who stopped Marcy in her tracks, who called Jay out for being a coward, who turned pretending into reality.

A fake father I can live without, but I’ve just lost my best friend and I don’t quite understand why.

Aaron hasn’t called. Three days. I want to break the deadlock, I want to call him, but the last thing he said was to leave him alone. This is what he wants from me and I’m trying to do it. I’m trying to be his hero, even if it means crying myself to sleep every night with worry.

Mum asked if he was coming today, but I said I didn’t think so. The date’s been on our calendar for ever, but I hadn’t mentioned it to him. I wasn’t sure whether we’d still be living the lie we created by the time I went to check out the birth centre at the hospital. Did I think I’d have come clean about Jay? That he’d have done it for me?

That would have been very stupid of me.

This place seems all right, although I’m a bit put off by what sounds like a cow mooing in one of the rooms down the hall. When I look at Mum, she pretends that she can’t hear it. Instead she makes a fuss of reading out every leaflet she can find on the table, bamboozling me with questions:

Do I want a water birth? (Erm…)

Or do I want an epidural? (Now you’re talking.)

Do I want to be on the ward or in my own room? (Surely the answer to that is obvious?)

Who will I nominate as my birth partner for the antenatal classes?

The last one gives me a burning lump in my throat as I try not to cry. Obviously I want Mum there — but the word “partner” makes me think of Aaron. I wish I’d not left it so late to ask him if he wanted to come today. I was going to do it at the weekend, but after…

Oh God, I miss him so much and he’s not even the real father.

Go find Jay and get him to do the honourable thing.

Maybe it’s time I did.

My source tells me that Jay got back from his Scottish piss-up yesterday. My source is unhappy that his son chose to go to his mum’s instead of ours, but, of course, he can’t possibly know that it is because his son is scared of what I will do if he does. So. I will take the fight to him.

Jason’s mum answers the door. “Hannah!” Huge smile and eyes desperately trying not to stare at my bump. It’s an expression I’m familiar with. She calls up the stairs and Jay shouts something I don’t hear.

“He says he’s in the shower.” She doesn’t suggest I wait.

“I’ll wait.”

She walks through to the kitchen, where the walls are coated in photos — the other half of Jay’s life: a couple of cheesy school photos and loads of holidays with him and the evil Step Goons plus parents. His mum sees me looking and says something about the twins being out with their dad for the day. Good. I don’t need them around to judge me too.

“So, how far along are you?”

“Thirty weeks.”

“You’re looking big for thirty.”

“It’s all the ice cream.” I shrug. It’s probably not, but I try and tell myself it’s better to be fat than to have a humongous baby to push out. The mental version of putting my fingers in my ears and singing “LA LA LA”.

“Do you know what you’re having?”

I resist the urge to say, “A baby,” and go for, “Nope.”

“Have you got some names lined up?”

I shrug and look at the door, hoping Jay will come and save me from this small-talk torture. I have a shortlist, but I’ve not told anyone what’s on it in case I change my mind — or in case someone else tries to change it for me. When Mum was pregnant with Lola, she had a list going on the whiteboard in the kitchen and me and Jay would wipe off the names we hated when she wasn’t looking. She never wrote “Lola” down and if she had I’d have totally wiped it off, yet Lola is so the right name for my little sister that I can’t even remember what others were in the running.

“Jason would have been called Jasmine if he’d been a girl,” Jay’s mum says and smiles. “I liked names beginning with ‘J’.”

I nod. Come on, “J”. I’ve always hated coming here. Jay’s mum isn’t like mine — she’s all cashmere jumpers and pearl earrings. She doesn’t have a job and Jay once told me that everything his stepdad earns goes on the twins. The house they live in, the clothes Jay’s mum wears — it’s all a lie paid for by Robert. The only truth in this place is Jay’s shitty old car that he bought himself.

There’s thumping on the stairs Lola-style and then he’s in the doorway, his eyes looking bluer than usual as if he washed them in the shower too. Jay throws me a tight smile and his mum leaves with a “Goodbye, Hannah.”

Jay grabs a can of Coke for me without asking and waves me out to the conservatory, where the wicker sofa creaks as he sprawls into it. I ignore the can of caffeine I can’t drink and take the chair opposite. I don’t want to sit next to him.

“In ten weeks I’ll be having your baby.” I get straight to the point, not giving myself a chance to think about what happened last time we were alone and within kissing distance. The time for wasting is over.

Jay nods, not looking at me, not saying anything.

“I’m due the eighteenth of June.” Every time I say that it sounds sooner. Duh. I mean, I know it is getting sooner, but it’s really starting to feel it. Jay is still saying nothing, but I’m going to wait.

I wait.

Wait some more.

He’s sipping his drink and not looking at me.

This feels so much like the last time I spoke to Aaron. Misery claws at my heart when I think of him, wondering how he is… No. Not now. This is about me and Jay. And our baby.

Jay sips his drink again. “What do you want me to say?”

“I want to know whether you’ll be there for me.”

“What? On the due date?”

I swallow. No tears for this one, remember, Hannah?

“I wasn’t thinking that specifi—”

“It’s in the middle of the exams—”

“Yeah, and? It’s in the middle of mine too!”

Jay gives me a look so cold that it freezes the heat of my anger. “This wasn’t my choice.”

What can I say to that?

Silence stretches out across the room and beyond, into the space between us. I’m on one side of a valley, screaming for help, sobbing because I am all alone over here… and he’s on the other side, turning away with a shrug.

“But it’s happening…”

“Not because of me.” Jay is glaring at the can in his hands and I can see the pads of his fingertips bulge with the pressure of his grip. “You never asked me what I wanted, Hannah. You never gave me a chance to be a part of this until it was too late.”

I swallow. “You’d have asked me to get rid of the baby.”

“I don’t know.” He scrunches his eyes shut and shakes his head a little before opening them. He’s still not looking at me. “Yes — probably. You’re my…”

And we don’t finish that sentence, either of us.

“Why didn’t you take the morning-after pill? How hard could it have been?”

I stare at him. The boy I was in love with was leaving for university — going a week earlier than he had to because he couldn’t wait to leave us all behind. I was tired and I was emotional and the journey from my house to the chemist in town was too much to do on my own. And I was stupid. Very, very stupid. I thought that because he’d pulled out, I didn’t need to bother.

“What’s the point talking about it? It doesn’t change the facts. This baby is yours. And I—”

The way he jerks his head up stops me. He does not want to hear that I love him — and I’m not sure that I want to say it, because no matter how much I might lie to myself, I know that what I really want, why I came here, crawling on my knees, is to hear Jay tell me that he loves me.

“I want you to be there.” My voice sounds feeble and suddenly I feel heavy, like the weight of everything has just hit me. I’m having a baby — Jay’s baby — and he’s not got it. Still. I am sitting in front of him, my bump barely covered between my top and leggings, and I have asked him in every way I know how. There is nothing more I can do.

“You have Aaron for that.” Jay is still looking at me when he says this and I wonder if he can see the hurt written on my face because he thinks he can simply pass this on to someone else. And the hurt that cuts deeper: the someone else has told me to hand it back.

I haul myself to standing and Jay looks up as I wait for him to tell me to stay so that we can sort this out. But he doesn’t say anything at all as I walk into the kitchen, silently begging him to follow me as I strain my ears for the sound of his steps on the tiles behind me. I try and stride slowly towards the front door to give him time to change his mind. With my hand on the lock, I pause and close my eyes.

Please, Jay.

But I open the door and when I turn to shut it behind me there’s no one there.

On the other side of the door lies misery. For the first time since I took the test in my gran’s bathroom I feel fear. Raw, terrifying, uncontrollable fear that I have made the biggest mistake of my life.

In the back of my wardrobe there is a suit that I have worn only once. It should still fit. I haven’t grown that much and it was a little big to start with. I take it out of the carrier and hang it on the back of my door and look for a clean school shirt, then I go next door and find one of Dad’s ties — he left early to play golf and Mum’s at work. They still don’t know. I went out on Friday — walked to Chris’s grave and sat there for a couple of hours, long enough to lose the feeling in my toes and fool my parents into thinking I’d been to Cedarfields.