Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel Read online

  I hesitate. Why does he want me to come outside? Why hasn’t he been in? Have I been a bit too hasty in being relieved?

  “Get a nurse to watch him, but come outside.”

  He is trying to hide something by forcing his tone to come out even and flat: something is going on.

  “Is it important?” I ask, feeling the barrels of the worry lock starting to spin again.

  “Life or death,” he replies seriously.

  I jerk myself upright, ignoring my vertebrae complaining as they try to click into place, ignoring the book falling off my lap and onto my bag with a dull thud, and the blanket pooling over the top of my bag and the book. “Where are you?”

  “By the main entrance.”

  I open the door to Leo’s hospital room and peek out, looking for a nurse. One who often sits with Leo when I need a break for food or the loo is walking past. Melissa is her name. She is curvy and pretty, with a mane of curly red hair she always pins back and a beautiful Welsh accent. Leo would be enchanted by her; he would follow her around with his eyes out on stalks, trying to get her to talk so he could copy her accent. Nurse Melissa arches an eyebrow at me, then glances pointedly at the sign with the mobile crossed out on the wall opposite.

  “I’ll be right there,” I say to Keith, cutting the line. My heart is already galloping in that familiar, sickening way it does when I fear something bad is about to happen. “Can you watch Leo for a few minutes?” I ask Melissa. “My husband needs me.”

  Suddenly concerned, she nods as she pulls at her plastic apron and deposits it in the nearest bin. She washes her hands with the gel from the dispenser on the wall, and steps into the room. I set off, walking quickly toward the exit. At the end of the corridor, after a left turn, is the door to that ward. I know this place so well I could navigate it with my eyes shut. Often it feels as if I have, because I rarely sleep for more than two hours when I go home. No one knows this, but I actually use my doctor status to get access to online medical journals and spend most of the hours away from here reading up on comas, hemorrhages and aneurysms. I try to find out as much as I can so I can help Leo. I don’t tell Keith what I do because he would tell me I am stressing myself out unnecessarily, I don’t tell the doctors because I don’t want them to think I am trying to take over, and I don’t tell my family because they don’t yet know how serious all this is.

  I squirt a little antibacterial cleaner onto my left palm, “wash” the slippery gel over my hands. Out of the door, I’m into the corridor with the lifts and I hit the call button. As I wait for one to arrive, I run through the possible scenarios: someone has crashed into my car in the car park; someone has broken into the café and Amy had forgotten to cash up the day’s takings; Keith has been injured on his shift and doesn’t want to tell me in front of Leo.… Oh, God, what’s happened? What else is going to be heaped upon us?

  On the first floor, I start running. Down the long corridor, around the corner, down another flight of steps—I cannot wait for another lift—past the security desk and out the main entrance. The heat of the air hits me as I run out into the warm, muggy May night. This is the type of night we’ve had, in recent years, during September. But tonight it is warm.

  And it is snowing.

  Over the small whir of an engine and through the warmth of the air, it is snowing. In May, it is snowing. Small flakes of it fall from the sky, covering the world around me in a thin film of white. I stop, stand still and watch the snowflakes dance around me in the warm breeze. It’s a miracle. A pure, momentary miracle.

  I love snow. The way it makes everything it touches seem softer. There are no sharp edges when snow has fallen; everything is smooth and soft. A road is not long and difficult, but velvety and inviting, as short as you want it to be. I hate the cold, I love snow. And now, I have it all: snow, without the cold. I stick out my hands, trying to catch the snowflakes. I spin in delight as I tip my head up to gaze at the sky, which is not just lit by orange streetlights, but illuminated by the pinpricks of stars, by the glittering of falling snowflakes.

  The snow is warm on my skin; it doesn’t melt on contact—it sticks to my hands, my oversized, chunky-knit cream cardigan, my navy blue jeans and my black hair.

  “Happy anniversary,” Keith says, stepping out from the shadows beside the entrance to the hospital. He’s been standing there, observing me. He walks toward me while I still watch the white flakes land on me and blanket the ground, making it soft and gentle. Transforming it from the hard path I have to walk up every day to see my son into something soothing.

  “You did this?” I ask him as he comes closer, until he can encompass me in his strong, muscled arms. Suddenly I am caught up in him, protected and safe. “For me?”

  He nods. “Happy anniversary,” he whispers against my hair.

  Anniversary? As a couple, Keith and I have more than our fair share of anniversaries. We met when I was nineteen and I applied for a job in the bar he managed in Oxford city center. He was nearly ten years older than me and didn’t look twice at me, of course. Two years later, days after my twenty-first birthday, when I no longer even worked in the bar, he called me up and asked me out. “I had to wait until you’d completely cleared your teens before I could come near you,” he explained. We had two first dates. On the first first date, I was so nervous I self-medicated with a little too much Dutch courage and passed out in the front seat of Keith’s car before we got to the end of the road, and he had to carry me back to my shared house and hand me over to my flatmates. The second first date, which I had been surprised had happened, was a week later and I didn’t drink at all. Then there were other notable dates for our diaries: when we split up for the first time because I thought he was too old for me; when we got back together; when we split up again after five months before his need for commitment made me break up with him again. We got back together and split up many times over the years, until the last time he left me, eight years ago. And then three years ago we got back together for the final time, and two more memorable dates were created: the day he moved in with Leo and me, and the day we got married. I have a memory for dates, and I know, across the spread of the twelve months that make up a year, none of the dates worth remembering fall in May.

  “It’s not our anniversary,” I say.

  “Not our wedding anniversary, no,” he agrees.

  “It’s not our anniversary,” I reassure him. “I’d remember.”

  One of his hands moves down to cup my left bum cheek, and he yanks me closer to him as he places his lips against my ear, his warm, fragrant breath tickling my cheek and my neck. “It’s the anniversary of our first fuck.” He draws out the last word, somehow making it seductive and dirty, romantic and loving, all at the same time.

  “Of all our anniversaries to choose from, this is the one you thought needed such public celebration?” I say, laughing.

  “It’s a reminder that miracles do happen to the same person twice.”

  “You’d better mean that it’s a miracle that I slept with you rather than the other way around, or you’re in trouble, mate.”

  “But of course,” he says, squeezing my bum again.

  I smile at him. “I can’t believe you did all this for me.”

  “Who else would I do this for?” He drops a kiss on my forehead. “I, of course, have to thank my supporting cast—Peter, who actually got out of bed to open his shop so that I could hire the snow machine; the security guard who went up to a higher level to work said snow machine; and, of course, you for reacting so perfectly.”

  “Thank you,” I say to him. “No one has ever given me a miracle before.”

  At that moment, if there was anything I could wish for, it was a miracle. A miracle that would bring Leo round, a miracle that would return my life to how it was. It didn’t have to be a divine miracle that brought Leo back to me, it could be a human-created one. The dreams are settling into my sleep at a rate now of one a day, always moving him a little further and further away from me
; a miracle is exactly what I need.

  “Lucks,” Keith says gently, holding me closer. I only vaguely hear him calling me, using the name he gave me when we first met in the bar (Nova … exploding star … lucky star … Lucks).

  “Lucks,” he repeats more urgently. “Stop it, please. Stop thinking about it for the next two minutes. After that, we’ll go back and deal with it. We’ll go back to all that. But right now, just be here with me in this moment, and enjoy the snow. OK?”

  Two minutes.

  Two minutes is a lifetime. Every second Leo is asleep is a lifetime. Is like living a hundred and twenty lives without having a heart beating in my chest or blood running through my veins.

  Two minutes is the blink of an eye. Is the time in which everything can change. He could wake up in those two minutes. He could take thirty seconds to come back, and then spend a minute and a half wondering why I am not there to welcome him back, like I promised him I would be before he went to sleep. Keith isn’t asking for two minutes, he is asking for a lifetime and for a nanosecond; he is asking for the whole of space and time. He’s made it snow for me, now all I have to do is give him back the whole of space and time.

  “OK?” he repeats. “Two minutes. For me. For us. Let’s just enjoy the snow, enjoy these two minutes of our anniversary, and then once we’ve done that, we’ll be stronger. We’ll find it easier to go back there. OK?”

  My gaze goes to his face, and for the first time since we started this life, I see my husband. He is a relative stranger. His black eyes, his wide nose, his full lips, his mahogany-brown skin are all alien to me. I’m probably a stranger to him as well because the seams of our relationship are being unpicked.

  I know that couples are often split by the loss of a child, but I didn’t realize until this that an illness can divide you as well, much more slowly, much more insidiously but just as decisively. For better or worse, we vowed, but we didn’t realize it was for powerlessness as well. We deal with problems in different ways, Keith and I. He needs to divide up the time to deal with a crisis. To deal with Leo being in suspended animation, he needs to step away, recharge himself, and then he can head back into battle, he can face and fight whatever is thrown at him. I have to immerse myself in it. To make it all I think about all the time, to keep wishing and hoping and wanting it to be OK because I know it is in the moment I don’t that something awful will happen.

  That is why we are coming apart. Our two coping mechanisms are incompatible, so while we’re aware of the other’s pain, we do little more than acknowledge it. That is why, seam by seam, stitch by stitch, the fabric of us is being undone. And that is why Keith has made it snow for me. He wants me to try it his way, to see if it can possibly work for me, and if we can stop what is happening to us.

  I nod. “OK,” I say, smiling at him. “OK.”

  Two minutes. I can give him that. It might work. It might save us. After all, it’s only two minutes to stand and enjoy the May snow.

  He watched her, her head looking down at the book when she should be looking at the TV.

  She was being naughty. She was being a naughty girl. Mummy put on Bob the Builder, now she had to watch it, too. He was happy in his room, drawing on the wall with the big pen, but she picked him up and sat him on the sofa beside her and put Bob the Builder on the TV. He didn’t like Bob the Builder all the every time, but Mummy did, she put it on all the every time, so she had to watch it.

  “Mummy, no book, watch Bob the Builder,” he told her.

  She looked at him. “Pardon?” she asked.

  He pushed the book away. “No book, watch Bob the Builder.”

  “I just want to finish this chap—” She stopped talking because he was looking at her. “OK. I’ll watch Bob the Builder.” She put down the book and turned toward the TV.

  He patted her leg. “Good girl, Mummy. Good girl.”

  Leo, age 2 years and 6 months

  CHAPTER 4

  I really need a cigarette.

  More than anything in the world right now, I need a cigarette. It will help to turn the temperature down on my blood, which is hovering somewhere around the boiling point. And the smoke will erect a physical barrier between Mal and me, although the current mental one that separates us in the car is amazingly effective. I’m not sure who isn’t talking to who, who is more angry with who, but it’s clear: we are not talking. It’s been fifteen minutes since we left the dinner party and so far the drive has been in total silence. Even the purr of the engine, our breathing, the little clicks and ticks that make up the sound of our car have been smothered by the anger that has created the silence. We have at least another fifteen minutes to go until we get home, and we are not going to be talking for the entire drive. That’s a promise.

  The worst part—the part that slides into the space between my ribs and jabs at my core like a blunt knife trying to find a partially healed wound to reopen—is that he thinks he’s done nothing wrong. He seriously thinks he’s done nothing wrong.

  I glance sideways at him. His jaw is set, his teeth are gritted, his russet eyes have darkened and stay fixed on the road ahead. His body is a straight, rigid line that could have been carved from rock, and his hands are almost bone-white from how hard he grips the steering wheel. Every time he changes gear, I expect him to wrench the stick out of its socket.

  He showed us up in front of all those people and he is angry.

  I really need a cigarette.

  I call them up in my mind: hidden in the pack of tampons under the sink in the bathroom, waiting for me to light them up and suck them down. Waiting to do their duty and hug me on the inside. Mal doesn’t know I smoke anything more than the odd one or two in social situations, or to keep my boss company during working hours. He doesn’t know that every three or four days I have to buy a new pack of twenty, that there’s a crystal ashtray hidden in the bushes outside the house, and that I use breath freshener to hide the evidence. And he certainly doesn’t have the slightest inkling that those cigarettes are probably the only things that are going to stop me taking an axe to his head tonight.

  “So, Steph, Mal, when are you two going to have kids?” Vince asked us.

  We’d all settled down to dinner and had, for the most part, been enduring Vince’s brand of party entertainment—picking on people—with relative good humor, because he was the co-host (his wife Carole, who is lovely, had invited us), and this was what Vince did. He didn’t mean anything by it, he was just a moderately belligerent drunk. Even at his most obnoxious, he usually stayed away from this subject with us, though. Just like no one mentioned the war, no one mentioned our childlessness. From the way the room stilled after he spoke, the way a few heads dipped to stare at their plates while a few more tried to master a look of vague interest, I knew instantly they had all been talking about this before Mal and I arrived.

  That was always the danger of turning up last at a gathering of friends, they talked about you. Discussed and dissected your life, relationship, looks, and decided they knew everything about everything. They knew where you were going wrong, what you could do to work it out, how you could fix the chasms in your life. They’d obviously discussed Mal and me and decided what was missing in our lives was a baby. Ten years of marriage meant nothing, as far as they were concerned, because we did not have a child.

  They knew me better than they knew Mal, they knew how I loved to be around children, so they decided that our childlessness was Mal’s doing. And what they, as my friends, could do about it was to publicly shame Mal into doing the right thing: show him that they could all see my baby pain and he should ease it.

  None of them knew the truth of it. Not even Mal. But I didn’t think about that. I couldn’t think about that. If I did, then … Mal didn’t know. Mal could never know. Neither could any of them.

  My eyes darted to Carole—she was one of the head-dippers. She did that a lot where her husband was concerned: he opened his mouth, she cringed and dipped her head, wanting nothing more than fo
r him to stem the stream of outrageous offensiveness that was no doubt flowing from his lips. Ruth was struggling and failing to look mildly interested as she looked at me, her lips curled together in a supportive smile. Opposite Ruth, Graeme, her husband, was sipping on his wine and openly watching Mal. Dyan was another head-dipper—even though I couldn’t see her face, I knew her cheeks were red with embarrassment. She hated this type of questioning that Vince subjected us to. She and Dan, her husband, had got together at college in our final year. Dan and Vince were best friends, so he was backing Vince up by leaning forward and staring at me. Julian was another head-dipper, although his head was dipped probably because he listened more than he watched. He studied the intonation of people’s voices, the words they emphasized and those they flitted over. His girlfriend, Frankie, was smiling benignly at everyone. “Vacant” was the word we most used about her. We couldn’t understand why ultra-intelligent, slightly superior Julian had been with her for six years. Although, at that moment, I could see the spark of interest in her eye. She was twirling a long lock of her black hair around her finger, as usual, but she was definitely in the room, following what was going on. They must have been talking about this for a long time before our arrival to get even her to pay attention. And finally, Nicole and Jeremy—the fifth couple—both looking vaguely interested, were waiting eagerly to see what either of us would say.

  I hadn’t been on the receiving end of a Vince interrogation for months. Mainly because I was usually the first to arrive at these things so no one had the chance to properly discuss me. Us. Unfortunately, hiding from those women in the toilets had taken away precious time. Also, Vince and I had a history that meant I knew more about him than most people at the table. If he got out of hand, I could stop him with a look. A reminder that I knew things about him that he didn’t want shared around. Things that not even Dan knew.

  I lowered my eyes to my plate, stared at my dinner, wondering how to react. Too defensive and they would assume it was a subject to pursue. Too casual and they would think that I was faking it. I had to pitch my reply just right.