Page 60

Then

Alice

We do all the things we normally do, Charlie and I. We walk down to the pier, stopping off at the hall of mirrors for our daily cheap laughs, extreme thinness, fatness, shortness our shared, fail-safe joke. I take some scraps of bread to feed the seagulls, a new fetish; the birds swoop down right next to the pushchair and Charlie whoops and catcalls his excitement.

On the way home, we stop off at the phone box on the high street and I park the pram outside it. I call Directory Enquiries and scribble down the number they give me and dial again before I can change my mind. When I give my name, it’s obvious that the girl on the other end of the line knows exactly who I am. She sounds intrigued, excited; she begs me to wait while she fetches Mrs Taylor Murphy.

‘Alice, hello.’

There’s a pause now where I am unable to speak, and after a while she fills the gap.

‘You’ve been so brave,’ she says. ‘To try and manage by yourself. You must love your baby very much.’

The deal is struck. Tomorrow at eleven o’clock. No one else. No parents, just her and Charlie and me.

‘We’ll meet on the beach,’ I tell her, because we have been at our happiest there, me, Charlie, Jake.

When we get back to the cottage, Rick is finishing a sketch of Charlie, asleep in his cot with one fist curled beneath his cheek.

‘What do you think?’ he asks. ‘I’m thinking love-struck new parents with dosh to spare. Reckon I could get some commissions?’

He sees my face.

‘What? Alice?’

My voice is wooden as I reveal the facts. I can tell it no other way.

‘The woman from the adoption agency is coming to collect Charlie tomorrow. Eleven o’clock.’

‘No!’

He covers his face with his hands, unable to look at me at first. When he does, the grief in his face breaks my heart. His pain is exactly the same as my pain.

‘He’s mine too, you always say so. No one will love him like we do.’

‘You gave me these months with him, Rick, and I’ll always have that. One day he will come and find us. And when he does, he’ll belong to you just as much as me.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure. You need to go back to the Slade and have the career you were meant to have. And Charlie needs stability, security, the things we can’t give him. This house could be sold at any minute, and then where would we live? Your squat? I don’t want that life for him.’

‘How will we bear it?’

‘We’ll take it minute by minute, as we have done all along.’

I don’t sleep much, curled around my baby for the last time, whispering to him in the darkness.

‘You will have a big garden to play in and a pony to ride and a brand-new bicycle. You will be loved and happy. And I will wait for you.’

In the morning I feel strangely calm, waking to the sound of the gulls outside our window. While Charlie sleeps on – he has turned into the world’s best sleeper – I pack up his clothes and nappies and bottles, keeping back a few of my favourite things. The little orange shorts, a yellow and brown striped top, his dungarees.

When it’s time to go, I hand him to Rick and tell him I’ll be waiting for him outside the cottage. I’m not going to stand around and witness his private farewell. I’ve already said mine throughout most of the night, holding Charlie’s tiny fist in my hand. Goodbye, my love. Goodbye.

Walking down to the beach, baby in one arm, plastic carrier full of clothes in the other, I think I will make a funny face so that Charlie laughs one more time, but it’s too difficult, my facial muscles will not obey. And perhaps it’s true what Mrs Taylor Murphy said, because this contented, happy child of mine is solemn and unsmiling, as if my sorrow has somehow transferred itself to him.

She is there waiting for us, wearing a flowered dress with flat shoes – I did wonder about those heels on the beach – and she waves, though she seems rather sombre too.

I hand over the plastic bag of clothes. ‘These are his things.’

And then I remember. His bear is still sitting on the kitchen table.

‘I’ve forgotten his bear. He can’t be without it.’ My voice is frantic, my eyes have blurred over with tears.

Mrs Taylor Murphy puts her hand on my shoulder.

‘I promise I’ll buy him one exactly the same. I think you’re going to need it more than him.’ She looks at me. ‘You’ll want some time to say goodbye,’ she says, and I shake my head because I can’t speak, I can’t see, and if we delay by even one second, I won’t be able to do it.

I pass Charlie over and he tries to cling to me, grabbing at a strand of my hair.

‘I know you’ll see him again, Alice,’ Mrs Taylor Murphy says as Charlie starts to cry. She places a hand over her heart. ‘I can feel it.’

I watch them walking away, the flowered dress getting smaller and smaller, the plastic bag just a white dot in her hands. And above the shriek of gulls I listen to my baby, programmed so acutely to hear him as he cries all the way along the beach.