Non Pratt - Trouble

“I don’t think anything.” I should leave it there. “Except—”

“Except what?”

“Whoever it is has a right to know.”

Hannah winces at this. “He will not want to know. Trust me.”

So she does know who it is. “I would,” I say.

“Well, he’s not you.” She looks at me with such intense sorrow that any suspicion we were talking about Tyrone dissipates. “Can we just leave it?”

“OK.” Hannah obviously has her reasons. “Consider it left.”

She looks at me for a moment longer, her face softening before she puts her head back on the table. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” I finish my can and look for a change of topic. “Can I have a ginger nut?”

She pushes the packet towards me and then waggles her fingers for one, still face down on the table cloth.

“Anything else?” I ask, wondering if she needs a top-up of milk.

“A dad for my baby?” she says with a laugh.

My joke wasn’t exactly funny, so I don’t think his silence is rude as I sit up and down the dregs of my milk. It’s only when I start to stand, turning to offer him another drink, that I realize he’s watching me.

“Me,” he says.

“You what?” I say, caught somewhere between sitting and standing.

“I could do it, if you wanted.”

I sit down with a thump.

“You could say I was the father.”

My parents have had a lot to deal with in the last year. One thing I must do is be straight with them.

“No. No. Don’t do this. Don’t do this to us, Aaron…” Dad is shaking his head as he backs out of the door, as if leaving the room will save him from what I’m asking. I look at Mum sitting on the sofa, hands pressed together between her knees, staring at me as if I’m something she hallucinated.

I don’t know how to make them understand.

Dad fetches two glasses of whisky from the kitchen and hands the largest to Mum, who snaps out of her trance and takes a swig so large a little of it spills on her jeans.

“Let me get this straight.” She holds up a hand as I open my mouth to explain. “This Hannah girl is pregnant and doesn’t know who the father is, so you have volunteered your services as… what exactly?”

“The father. For now.” I look at Dad, who’s seen the Facebook page. “You’ve seen what they’re saying about her.”

Mum hasn’t. I can see she finds it hard to believe it’s that bad. “Just because she doesn’t know who the father is?”

The way Dad’s looking at me, I know he’s thinking about a list of names that includes mine.

“I know it’s not me,” I say, just to be clear.

“Have you even asked her who it is?”

“Not exactly.” Mum opens her mouth. “Look, shush—”

“You are not in a position to be shushing anyone,” Dad snaps and I shut up. I feel a flare of frustration in my chest and imagine myself pressing it back down, folding it forcibly back into the box it belongs in. This is not the time for me to turn.

I need them to see that this is not about Hannah. This is about me.

“I can’t keep on like this.”

There’s an immediate shift in mood.

“Like what?” Mum murmurs and I notice they’re now holding hands. It’s a subtle movement, because they’re already sitting so close, but I see the way their fingers slide together, each drawing strength from the other.

“You think it’s working. That I’ve got new friends.” I look at Mum. “That I’m moving on.” Dad. “But I’m not. And I can’t.”

The rage that threatened to rise has subsided and I’m close to tears.

Mum stands up and puts her arm around me. “Aaron. We have done everything we can to help you. Everything. What else is there we can possibly do?”

They have moved house. Moved job. Moved mountains. And I’m still stuck in the same place I started. I need Hannah to help me out.

“I know it’s a lot to ask. But let me do this. Let me matter. Let me make up for it…” And I’m crying now, my mother holding me in both arms and kissing my head.

Dad walks out of the French windows and through my tears I see him punch the back fence until it splinters, then kick the panel until his foot makes it through to the other side. Then he walks back in and puts his arms around us, the blood from his hand smearing on my shirt, and he sobs so hard I think it might break him.

This time I don’t reject the call when his number comes up. How much worse could it possibly get?

“Four months?” His voice is not unkind and it makes me want to cry. “You said that you’d take the morning-after pill.”

I say nothing. He’s done the maths — arithmetic and probability — and he’s come to the right answer.

“You didn’t, did you?”

“No,” I say, very small, very quiet.

“Hannah—”

“Don’t. Don’t say it. I know. All right? I know.” My voice isn’t going to hold up to a full sentence so I stop. The silence that follows is filled with conversations we haven’t had because I didn’t try hard enough to tell him the truth when it mattered.

“Shit.” He whispers it. I can picture his face and my heart hurts so much it’s as if someone’s crushing it in their fist. “Does anyone know?”

“You mean apart from everyone at school, the whole of Facebook—”

But he’s not in the mood for my jokes. “I meant about me.”

This is my chance. I could ask him to do this — I don’t have to have a stand-in, I could have the real thing…

“I think we should keep it that way for now,” he says.

Which is exactly what I knew he’d say.

My sister is upstairs. Mum and Robert are in the sitting room. Aaron and I are in the hall. He isn’t holding my hand or anything cheesy like that, but he’s standing close and it’s nice to have someone standing shoulder to shoulder with me for once.

Before we go in he says, “We can do this.”

We.

Well, that was fun. Not the all-night discussion I had with my parents last night about how to pretend to be the parents of a boy who got an under-age girl pregnant. Not the epic planning session Hannah and I had whilst sitting on a bench near her house in the ever-darkening dusk. Not the tears and the recriminations that we went through in her front room; Hannah’s mother’s relief and anger resulted in some ugly blame-throwing that her daughter had to scream to stop — “I just wanted to tell him FIRST!” Not the moment when Lola, Hannah’s kid sister who I’ve never met, came down crying because she’d heard all the noise and was frightened.

No: the journey home.

“Hannah is my daughter,” Robert said, looking straight ahead at the traffic, his expression prompting my pulse into a drum roll. “I love her like I love Lola, like I love Jason.”

Robert flicked the indicator and we turned down the back road. The darker, lonelier back road…

“I haven’t forgotten what it was like being young and in” — he paused, squinted slightly — “lust. And I know that, in the heat of the moment, things happen. What’s done is done.”

He stopped speaking and I listened to the engine rumble as he went down a gear for a particularly tight corner. I tried not to worry about how fast we were going. It was an expensive car — if we crashed, we’d survive. Probably.

“I know that when this happened, you weren’t thinking about anyone other than yourself.”

I didn’t correct him on the technicality.

“Only now, there’s someone who you actually have to think about. You have to put that person first and make decisions that aren’t easy, ones that you wouldn’t make if you only had yourself to think about. Do you understand?”

“I think—”

“You don’t.” He swerved the car into a lay-by and stopped. He turned to face me and looked at me with terrifying gravity. “You have no idea what I’m talking about. You don’t know what it’s like to put another human being before yourself. You don’t know the lengths that parents will go to to protect their children.”

“I suppose not,” I said carefully.

“Parents will die for their children.”

For a second I honestly thought he might try and kill me to see whether I would die for Hannah’s baby. Robert eased back into his seat a little and looked at me carefully, studied my face.

“When I say Hannah’s my daughter, it means I’d die for her, and anything else in between — even if it meant she hated me — so long as I felt it was the right thing to do. So I’m doing one of those things right now.” Robert met my eyes. “If you aren’t serious about Hannah, if you aren’t serious about being there for her baby — for your baby — then when you get out of this car, I never expect to see you again.”

He turned back to the front.

“You have the rest of the journey to consider what I just said.”

We drove the rest of the way back in silence. When he pulled up, we both sat staring forwards for a few moments. I unclicked my belt and got out of the car. Leaning back in, I met his eyes and nodded, just once.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

It’s late. Robert’s not come back from dropping Aaron off and I’m about to sneak across the landing to Lola’s room for a cuddle when I hear a murmur from the hallway. I step over to the banister and look down. The sitting-room light’s still on, but the murmur I can hear isn’t the TV, it’s Mum talking to someone on the phone. I can just see the side of her face as she sits on the chair by the door. I’m about to leave her to it when I hear his name.