I climb off the bed, take a single step over to him. I’m desperate for comfort perhaps; I don’t know.
He puts his hands to my hips, then nudges up my T-shirt to expose the flesh of my midriff, dipping to kiss it once, twice. His breath is wet and warm against my skin.
‘I’m sorry, Rach. I wish I could just... not be afraid. I wish we didn’t have to think about any of this stuff.’
I lower my lips to his head, drop a kiss into his dark jumble of hair. ‘Then let’s not. Let’s stop talking, or thinking.’
With a nod, he pushes me silently back on to the bed, the mattress so tiny it can barely hold us both. The room is snug enough that we’ve been colliding with the furniture, and each other, the whole time we’ve been here. He eases down my shorts, and then my underwear, then his own. And soon he is inside me on a bed that rocks and creaks comically in a way that would ordinarily make us laugh, and perhaps relocate to the bathroom, or, failing that, the floor. But not tonight. Tonight, we make love as though there is something at stake. Breathless and urgent, as you might if you’d just been told an asteroid was on course to obliterate earth. As if it might be the last time ever.
13.
Josh
February 1989
The first time we ever talked about having kids of our own, we’d only been dating a couple of months. Rachel was staying with me at the house I still shared with Mum, who was away for the weekend with my aunt.
Rachel had risen early, sliding out of bed before I was even awake. She told me once she found it impossible to lie still once the day had begun. It was down to guilt, she thought, because her dad had always had to be up at dawn for work.
I paused in the kitchen doorway, as I always did on the mornings after she’d stayed over, watching her wholly absorbed in sketching, or cooking French toast, or warming milk to add to espresso. And I would imagine we were years in the future, that we were living together. Even that she was my wife.
If ever she looked up, I’d yawn and rub my face, as if I hadn’t been gazing at her for a couple of minutes already. I didn’t want to scare her. Hell, I was scaring myself. It had only been eight weeks, and already I was fantasising about spending my life with this girl.
That morning, Rachel was sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped up in my dressing gown, blonde hair spilling out over the collar. She’d made coffee, in the stovetop espresso pot my mum had been using since visiting Rome with my dad in the sixties.
It wasn’t yet light outside. Through the kitchen window I could still see stars, scattered like spilt diamonds across the vault of darkened sky.
Rachel was reading the latest draft of my novel, holding the printed pages delicately by their edges.
‘Why did you want him to be a father?’ she asked as I sat down next to her.
I leaned in to kiss her. ‘Hello. Who?’
‘The lead detective.’
Rachel had a knack for this – asking questions nobody else had thought to, not even Wilf, or my agent. She maintained she didn’t have any particular career ambitions, but I sometimes thought she might make a good journalist. She was the most curious person I’d ever met.
‘I guess he felt more real to me that way,’ I said.
‘But you don’t have kids.’
‘You don’t think he feels authentic?’
‘No... the opposite. He feels really convincing. I guess I’m surprised you can write so fluently about having kids without actually having had them.’
I smiled. ‘My mum gave me some pointers. And there are a fair few kids in my extended family.’
Several moments passed. Rachel sipped her coffee, and I thought again how beautiful she was. Those searching, doe-brown eyes. Her long hair a honeyed tumble against her freckled face. The soft slope of her bones. Cheeks slightly pink from the coffee, pale hands cradling her mug. I couldn’t believe how lucky I’d got, to have crossed paths with her mere moments before I left university for good.
‘Do you think you’ll want kids, one day?’ I asked her, as casually as I could, looking down at the table. But I suspected that, in reality, I was fooling no one.
She paused for a moment, even though I guessed she was unfazed by the direction in which the conversation seemed to be heading. The opposite, really. I’d already noticed that one of her very favourite things was getting to know people, understandingwhat made them tick. How good she was at listening. The mostinterestedperson I’d ever met. I loved that about her, and I sometimes wondered if it was because of her childhood. Because she’d spent so long with a mother she never really knew.
‘Yeah.I really want all that stuff. That’s the one part of my future that’s always been clear to me.’ She turned to look at me, brow crumpled in earnest, and tucked her hair shyly behind one ear. ‘Do you think that’s weird? After what my mum did?’
‘Not at all,’ I said softly. ‘Doesn’t it actually make perfect sense? That you want all the stuff you missed out on as a kid?’
I was speaking from experience. I knew how it felt to fantasise about the kind of life my peers had appeared to take for granted, growing up. How things that were normal – perhaps even boring – to them felt extraordinary to me. Two parents at school plays, sports days, birthdays. Daydreaming in the back seat of the car on long journeys, rather than sitting up front. A third person at home at night, the hum of conversation disguising the tick of the clock.
