Yet when I was with Cheryl – sexy smiling Cheryl – I felt awake, appreciated and alive.
I thought about the retirement home again, about Dawn, Lou and Lucy being my real family. And I wondered if it was salvageable.
* * *
Cheryl, quite reasonably, wanted an answer, and in the end, after a few months of anguish, I said ‘yes’.
It wasn’t an unconditional yes, and I didn’t say yes to everything, either.
I never promised, for instance, that I’d leave Dawn, even though I thought that I might. And I didn’t say I’d be around for the kid either, though I think we both expected that I would.
But I thought,This is a chance for a second, completely different life.
To die having had one family, one daughter, one son, one wife – it seemed mean on the part of whoever had set the whole thing up that we only got one turn on the merry-go-round.
So refusing to accept a second life, when it had been served up on a plate like that, struck me as kind of churlish.
But the main reason I didn’t just say ‘no’ was that the more I thought about it, the less I felt I had the right.
I could stop seeing Cheryl – I had that right. But to force her to choose between me or having a kid? That wasn’t fair. And it especially wasn’t fair when she’d reached a point in her life where she might not even meet another potential partner before it was too late.
As for telling her she needed to carry on taking the pill, actually trying to dictate what drugs another human being did and didn’t take, that struck me as something that would have been the worst kind of misogyny. When I thought about it I imagined Dawn telling me about some other guy saying it to one of her girlfriends. ‘What an arsehole!’ she would have said. ‘Can you evenimaginethe gall of the guy?’
So I didn’t say, ‘Carry on taking the pills.’ Instead, I said, ‘OK.’
I said, ‘It’s your body and if you’re happy to have a kid, no matter what I end up deciding about the rest, then that’s totally your choice.’
‘Good,’ Cheryl said. ‘Because I think I was going to stop taking them whatever you said.’
That whole debate had been fraught and emotionally charged and, as far as my potential future role as father and partner, nothing had been resolved anyway. And all that serious discussion, all that messy back and forth-ing, it made the whole thing feel a little bit less ‘fun’. Sex, too, suddenly seemed less amusing when the result just might be a pregnancy. When Cheryl squashed her knees against her chest after I’d pulled out, a gesture she claimed made pregnancy more likely, it actually made me feel a bit sick.
Meanwhile, back home, Dawn and I glided around each other, barely touching, like champion ice-skaters.
Dawn was spending a lot of time with her mum. Tracey had some unspecified girly health issue but as she’d sworn Dawn to secrecy it all remained very mysterious. My guess was she was having a hysterectomy or something, but I honestly didn’t have a clue.
They were both still busy with Home from Home too. Since the Brexit vote, attitudes to refugees had taken a turn for the worse, and charities like theirs had more and more desperate cases to deal with. Add that to the fact that I was busy at work, and fake busy at fake work (read: spending time with Cheryl), and we weren’t exactly seeing masses of each other.
But when we did find ourselves together, we got on fine. We were polite and thoughtful towards each other and disagreed only rarely. We were heavily into the Arctic Monkeys at the time, and more surprisingly perhaps, Lana DelRey. The Arctic Monkeys CD had been a gift from Wayne, while Lana had been left behind by Lucy. So for a while those were the two albums we listened to. We agreed on our TV preferences as well, and were both addicted toChernobylandGiri/Haji, so when we weren’t running around separately we’d eat takeaway Indian and catch up on those.
I thought a great deal about Ryan’s grandparents around that time – that visit had really marked me. I imagined how easy it would be to find myself with Dawn in a little sheltered housing unit one day, listening to Arctic Monkeys and The Stone Roses.
Cheryl favoured reality TV and twenty-four-hour news channels – the same anxious stories going round and round and round. She liked Kanye West and Drake, Adele and Ed Sheeran, and favoured fish and chips over Thai, which she claimed ‘burned her tongue’.
For the first time since I’d met her, the differences felt less exciting. If anything (though I refused to let myself think this clearly), they were actually beginning to grate.
TEN
LOSING TRACK (BY DAWN)
Mum had breast cancer. She was devastated aboutlosin’ a boob, as she put it.
Other than her inability to put up with any man for any length of time, she had very few faults, my mum. But one that she did have was vanity.
Not that worrying about losing a breast is vanity – I’m not suggesting that for a second. It’s clearly one of the worst, most terrifying things that can happen to a woman.
But because Mumwasvain and because she still liked to seduce – stillneededto seduce, I suppose – I do think that it was even worse for her than it would have been for a no-shave-Shirley like myself.
‘You’re so lucky, being married,’ Mum said one day. I was driving her home from a consultation with the surgeon, the one where he’d announced she was going to need a partial mastectomy.
