Page 16 of Things We Never Said
So no, he won’t be going to dinner with Jenny and Mike, or with any of the other couples they know. He’ll be drinking his cans of beer alone. He’ll be listening to his old records, alone. And he’ll be waiting for Sunday to arrive so that he can open the next damned envelope.
Snapshot #6
Computer printout from Google Street View. The image, in the middle of a large empty sheet of A4 paper, shows a pub called the Dog and Doublet.
Cassette #6
Hi Sean.
I don’t think we ever took a photo of us in Kipps wine bar, so I asked Maggie to help me out. Unfortunately, this is all she could come up with.
Don’t worry, by the way. Maggie doesn’t know anything about what’s in these tapes. What you tell and to whom and when you do it are entirely up to you. If you do have a need to share any of this, feel free. I won’t, being dead, object.
So, The Dog and Doublet is what they’re calling Kipps wine bar these days, or so I’m told. I’m pretty sure they changed the façade too, because I don’t remember it looking like that at all. I hope it’s the right place. I secretly suspect that Maggie got this wrong.
Anyway, it’s important because it’s supposed to be Kipps, and Kipps is where we spent some of the best nights I’ve ever had. And because Kipps is where I told you I was pregnant.
I’d spent three weeks arguing with Mum – she wanted me to have an abortion and she had finally (almost) worn me down. She had very nearly convinced me that it was the only sensible option. I was only eighteen, after all. I was too young to have a baby. I had my whole life ahead of me and blah blah blah.
But as far as I was concerned, the main reason was that I didn’t know who the father was.
Even though I never told you that, I suspect it doesn’t come as a complete shock to you. I reckon you must have worked that out.
So that night we went to Kipps and we got our drinks. I needed some Dutch courage in order to say what I had to say. I was terrified that you would dump me on the spot. I was imagining sleeping on the bench in the bus shelter and going home the very next morning. I could hardly breathe, I was so scared.
You could sense that something was up, and you asked me what was wrong. By that point I had a couple of pints of Tennent’s inside me, so I blurted it out. ‘I’m pregnant,’ I said.
I was going to tell you that it might be Phil’s, I honestly was. It was the very next thing that I was going to say. But I didn’t get any further than, ‘But the thing is ...’
Your face slipped into this enormous grin. It wasn’t what I had been expecting at all.
‘What?’ I asked. I thought you were maybe about to laugh in my face.
‘I don’t know,’ you said. ‘That’s just amazing. That’s brilliant!’
And so I couldn’t bring myself to tell you, there and then. I promised myself I’d tell you the next morning, or at the very least before I left.
I asked you, instead, if you thought that I should keep it. I thought you might ask why not, in which case I could explain that things weren’t as simple as they seemed.
But you said, ‘Of course! Of course you should keep it! We’re going to have a baby!’ And then you leaned over the table to kiss me and knocked your pint over.
I was soaked, but we stayed and I spent the evening putting up objections. Where would I live? What would I live on? And you just got drunker and drunker and happier and happier. ‘I don’t care,’ you kept saying. ‘I don’t care about any of that. We’ll sort it.’
I woke up late the next morning with a terrible hangover. I lay in bed for ages thinking about how I was going to announce my bad news.
But when I came downstairs, you, Alistair and Theresa, who had just moved in, were having one of what you called your ‘house meetings’.
It had all been decided, you announced. I could stay. We would live together. Alistair and Theresa agreed. ‘It’ll be like a commune,’ Alistair commented. Theresa was looking forward to babysitting, she said.
It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me, so I didn’t say a word.
I phoned Mum from that call box at the end of the road and told her the news. I told her that I wasn’t coming to my appointment at the abortion clinic and then I told her I wasn’t coming home at all.
She went all weird and shrieky on me then, and in the end I had to hang up on her.
I don’t think she ever forgave me for that, or not until she met April at any rate.
I’m sure this was hard to hear, my darling. So I apologise again for that. But brace yourself, for there are, I’m afraid, a few more shockers to come.
