After the End(77)

“If it was down to Alistair, we’d have takeaway every night, and that one would look like Buddha.” Tom looks at Alistair, eyebrows raised, but he can’t sustain it and they both break off, laughing. “Right, let’s eat!” He takes his seat at the end of the table and waves a hand expansively. “Beef, potatoes, parsnips, peas, carrots, and some sort of cheesy thing I bought at M & S and am pretending is homemade.”

“It looks amazing.”

“Hungry, cherub?” Darcy’s high chair is pushed up to the table next to Alistair, and she bangs a plastic spoon against her tray in anticipation, as her dad fills her plate and cuts her food into bite-size pieces. “Do you think she should have molars by now? It can’t be easy, chewing beef with your gums.”

“Not the way you cook it, certainly.” Tom blows a kiss down the table, and Alistair pretends not to have heard.

“Dylan’s were late coming through,” Max says. It jolts me, not because I don’t talk about him, but because other people don’t. Mentioning his name prompts awkwardness and silence; embarrassed flushes and changes of subject. People shy away as though losing a child is catching, as though talking about it breaks some unwritten rule.

“That’s reassuring. Hear that, cherub?”

Something brushes against my leg. Max’s foot stroking mine. I look up to find him watching me. OK? he says silently. OK, I tell him. I can still read him, I realise, and he can still read me. We just haven’t been listening to each other.

At close to three years old, Darcy Bradford has her fathers wrapped around her perfectly formed little finger. She was late to walk, and seems to have adopted a similar approach to talking.

“She’s had lots of tests,” Tom says, “and neurologically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with her. She just doesn’t want to speak.”

“Probably can’t get a word in edgeways.” Alistair leans across the table and refills my wineglass.

“They all get there in their own time,” I say. “Dylan said his first word really early, but it was ages before he said anything else.” I look at Max. “Do you remember? Then he said ‘Dada.’”

Max smiles. “To every man we met, from the postman to the supermarket cashier. Gave me quite a complex, I can tell you.” We all laugh, and I feel Max’s leg pressed tight against mine. I hold his gaze, and something relaxes inside me, as though I’ve been holding my breath. We’ve had two years without Dylan, but we had longer with him. We had holidays and birthday parties and cuddles—so many cuddles. We were lucky—luckier than many, many couples.

“This is lovely.” I look between Tom and Alistair. “Thank you for inviting us.”

“We were on the brink of sending out a search party and staging an intervention.”

I flush. “It’s been hard.”

Alistair puts a hand over mine. When he speaks, the jesting tone has gone. “We simply can’t imagine.” They both look at Darcy, who is smearing cheesy leeks across her face with unqualified delight.

“It could just as easily have been us,” Tom says, and there was a time when I might have thought, Why wasn’t it? Why was it us instead? but I don’t. It could have been them. It could have been the Slaters in the bed next to Dylan. It could have been—it is—any number of families across the world. Right this moment, two other parents are sitting in a quiet room, holding hands and listening to the words that will end their world.

I hold Max’s gaze and raise my glass. “To the children.”

“To the children!” the others repeat.

“Do you think you’ll have any more?”

Alistair shoots Tom a glance. “Tom!”

I shake my head. “I can’t go through that again.” I catch Max’s face harden.

“Totally understandable,” Tom says. “We won’t have any more. Although there’s a woman started at work with flaming-red hair. Imagine that hair, with my bone structure and—” He’s interrupted by Alistair’s napkin flying across the table and landing on his plate.

“You, Thomas Bradford, are incorrigible.”

Tom dips his head. “And that, Alistair Bradford, is precisely why you married me.”

I move my foot to nudge Max’s, but it isn’t there, and when I look at him, to continue our silent conversation, he doesn’t meet my eyes.





thirty-five





Max


   2016


I tell Mom I don’t want to do anything this Christmas. She goes to her sister’s instead, where she can play with Cousin Addison’s living, breathing children, and I lie on my bed and think about Dylan. I figure she’ll be gone till around four, which means I have six hours to cry.

Pip used to say it made her feel better.

“I probably just need a good cry,” she said once, at the end of a long week, when she was low and slightly tetchy. It was before we had anything meaningful to cry over, and she put on Titanic, and sobbed over Kate and Leo, and threw a cushion at me for making fun of her.

A good cry. The ultimate oxymoron. There is nothing good about crying—about my crying. My tears seem to come from deep inside me, ugly, noisy sobs that wrack my whole body and stop me from breathing. The more I cry, the more I cry, until it’s physically hurting. And all the while the voice in my head: You’re such a failure. Real men don’t cry. Look at you: bawling your eyes out in your mom’s house like a lovesick teenager. Get a grip. No wonder Pip left you.