Page 82 of One Night With You

‘It’s really serious with Sandeep. You’re not biologically my kids, you and Ollie, but I’d take a bullet for you, wouldn’t I? If she’s marrying this man, it’s going to …’

He looks to Mum.

‘Edge you out a bit, that’s all,’ Mum finishes, sighing and coming to sit beside me on the sofa. ‘We know it was never right between you and Millie – we know you were unhappy, especially towards the end.’

‘And so all we mean,’ Steve says, leaning forward to put ahammy palm on my knee, ‘is that the baby is being taken care of. Millie is being taken care of. We’re managing our own expectations, too, about being grandparents. If you and Millie were together the pair of you would be popping over all the time, but if there’s Jeanette and Clive, and then Sandeep’s parents too, we’ll be pushed down the list.’

‘So I should just let them get on with it? Let another man raise my kid?’

The penny is dropping now, and I’m able to access the anger that I’m pretty sure is two hundred per cent justified. The thing with parents is that they know us, and love us, and value us and they raised us and so should know us best. It’s easy to default to what our parents think because when you’re a kid, what they say is the law, and the world. So it doesn’t come naturally for me to tell them that they’re out of their minds.

‘Mum, you can’t be serious. I mean – Steve has been everything to us, but you can’t say that’s the preferable choice, surely?’

‘Have you ever felt less than totally loved by him?’ Mum says, and I acknowledge that I haven’t. Dad did a runner and Steve stepped up, and once, drunk at my cousin Flora’s wedding, she did once tell me that she shudders to think how different everything could have been, that Dad leaving was the best thing that ever happened. The memory comes back to me in technicolour.

‘You think this baby would be better with Sandeep than me? You think I’m as bad as Dad?’ I press.

‘No, no, love, of course not.’ She puts her arm around me. ‘All I mean is that you’ve got options, and we support those options. Moving back here when you’re so full of life, now – nobody would expect that. You can come up every otherweekend for the day and spend time with the baby, see what happens. If Millie does need you more, then think about moving. But we’re just worried it’s going to go the other way for you – that she’s actually not going to need you very much at all.’

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Millie is telling me I don’t have to get involved, my parents are telling me I don’t have to get involved … this feels like the twilight zone. I’ve made a baby with a woman who I did love, once, but I feel like the protagonist in a Greek tragedy, the chorus telling me in surround sound that that doesn’t matter and I can pretend it’s not happening, if I like. It’s all so bizarre.

After another awkward hour of hashing out my responsibility in everything, I finally go to bed. When I can’t sleep, I pull out my phone and do some googling, plugginghow do dads bond with their babyinto the search bar.

The measure of it is basically cuddles. Dads need to cuddle their kid loads. Which of course means actually being in the presence of my child – there’s no hugging over FaceTime, is there. In a forum for single dads somebody has posted about getting ‘skin-to-skin’ contact, too.

Yo, it sounds crazy but you’ve gotta tell the midwife it’s what you want!! That little fresh-out-the-oven bb has got to feel your heartbeat and learn what you smell like. They do that with Mummy all the time when they breastfeed but Daddy gotta get his too! Real talk!

Honestly, what made me feel closest to my son was done even before he was born. I was so so scared that I wouldn’t know what to do with him, or he wouldn’t like me or thatwe wouldn’t bond since I didn’t grow him in my body for basically most of a year. They say women become mums as soon as they know they’re pregnant, but men become dads only when the thing is born. I didn’t want to miss out on a second. I read that babies can hear from like, 4 months or something really early like that, so I’d talk to her bump all the time, reading books to it in bed and singing wake-up songs in the morning. Sang every lyric of Frank Ocean’s first album to him almost every day, and I swear down (he’s almost a year old) if we put that on in his room he calms down immediately. Coincidence? I don’t think so!!!

Touch is so important – even as they get older and you don’t want to be carrying them all the time – touching their face, tickling their hand or toes, all of that … It sounds so lame but I do it all the time and I can feel the bond getting stronger.

I’m known as the baby whisperer in our house. Our daughter wants Mommy for almost everything – except when she’s upset by something, and then only Daddy can fix it. My girlfriend hates it!! So I’m not allowed to say out loud how needed it makes me feel because it upsets her, but it’s true, I do. She’s 3 soon and still calls for me in the night or when she has a boo-boo, and her favourite thing to do is hold either side of my ugly old bearded face and push her forehead to mine. It melts me every time. I think about her on her wedding day. I know it’s so archaic and marriage will probably be a dead concept by the time she’s old enough but I just think about holding her even when she’s grown, twirling her around the dance floor ina white dress and putting my forehead to hers, to tell her that I’ll never not be her daddy.

Shit. A big fat splash of something pulls me out of the forum and back into the single camp bed pulled out in Steve’s ‘office’. I’m crying. The splash is a tear, and then another one, and another one. I use my fingers to blot them away, and it’s so clear to me then, in that moment, what I want and how it’s going to go from here. Everyone else is wrong. I get to be in this kid’s life. I’m going to move back to Liverpool. I’ll leave London and face up to my responsibilities. There’s absolutely no doubt.

I call Millie.

‘Hello,’ she says, obviously confused as to why I’d be calling out of the blue when texting exists, but too polite to ask as much. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Millie,’ I say, urgently. ‘I want fifty-fifty, all the way, okay? I want this baby to call me Daddy, and Sandeep is going to have to figure out another name to go by okay? I’m Daddy. Me.’

‘Okay,’ she says, simply. ‘I hear you.’

‘I’m Daddy,’ I repeat again, and I think I’m waiting for her to fight me on it. I hear her excuse herself over the noise of the telly, telling Sandeep she’ll be right back, and a door close behind her.

‘Listen,’ she says, and I almost don’t let her talk because I don’t want her to try and convince me of anything other than what I’ve decided. But her tone – she’s speaking softly. I swallow, forcing myself to let her say her piece. After all, I just did.

‘I’m glad,’ she tells me. ‘I could never have asked this of you, and I wouldn’t have done. I love you. Not like I did.Differently, now. But it’s love, and it will never go away, and it’s there because you’re a good man, Nic. And I’d be an idiot not to want you around to show this little girl what that looks like.’

‘But …’ I say, ‘why didn’t you just tell me that?’

‘I didn’t want to ever wonder,’ she says, kindly. ‘You deserved to move and have the life you wanted for yourself. If there was a way for us to be in London, I’d consider that, but there just isn’t. I want to be near Mum, my friends. My support network. But if you’re going to move back here of your own accord, I won’t ever let myself feel guilty about it. You’re a big boy. A man. This is all on you. I offered you a get-out clause.’

‘I don’t think I was ever going to take it.’

‘I know,’ Millie says. ‘Like I said: one of the good ones.’

I don’t want to be edged out. I’m having a baby, and I’m going to be a father. And what’s more, I’m going to be a brilliant one – close by. It’s going to hurt, but I’m moving back home.

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