Forwards

There was a picture on the wall in the library at the University I spent one and a half semesters. A young man leaning against a wall, and the words written on the wall behind him: how can I go forwards, when I don’t know which direction I’m facing? It wasn’t written all stark and bold like that, it was blended into the ochre colour of the painted wall, so that you couldn’t read it without stopping to focus – ha! made you look! – and tease out the writing from the background.

I liked that painting.

But I’m not sure I’d say I related to it in those days.

Because I knew what forwards was for me. I was driven. I had plans and ambitions, a path in life; a lofty sense of security and purpose that I carried with me – wearing it like my old, red, ragged coat – wherever I went.

I was pointed straight in the direction of a law degree. And when that was done, a career in the law. I even knew the law firm where I wanted to work – an assistant, a paralegal, to begin with, but then a lawyer, then a partner. My name on a wall. I loved the office, – on the 12^th floor, with a sweeping view over the city, – I loved the colour of the carpets, I loved the fish tank out at reception. I went up there once, when I was enrolling for classes, because I needed a JP to sign something – and I came down in the lift, knowing what I wanted, absolutely sure in myself of the fact.

And you know what? I can’t even remember what that law firm was called now.

#

You see it all began with Cynthia.

She introduced herself as “Cyn”, which of course came across as “Sin” when I first heard it. And since she was standing there in a short red dress, with her hair a bit crazy, a couple of rips in sheer black tights, it was easy enough to imagine how that might fit her perfectly.

The party was loud and boozy, and it was beginning to smell of human sweat and vomit, so I excused myself out into the garden to get some fresh air, sitting down by the river in the moonlight.

Cynthia followed me.

“I don’t suppose you have twenty dollars on you, do you?”

“What? You always do this? Follow guys around and hit them up for money?”

“No. I just needed to get out for a bit. Out of there.” She gestured backwards at the raucous party. I had no idea – still have none – whose house we were at.

“Yeah, it’s a bit much,” I said, shuffling over a little for her to sit down.

“It was fun for a while, but my friends ditched me. I don’t know where they’ve gone. And there’s a guy there who keeps bumping into me – accidentally, he says – and the last time he almost threw up on me. That’s the calibre in there tonight.”

“What’s the money for?” Or was it rude to ask? But twenty dollars wasn’t nothing for a poor student with no job.

“A home pregnancy test.”

Wait – the – what – the?

“You heard me right.”

“That’s what they cost?”

“About that. And bus fare.”

“Where do you live?”

“Orton street.”

“That’s not very close to campus.”

“Oh. I’m not studying.”

“What do you do then?”

“Laundry.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Dry cleaners. Just down the road. Do you? Have that twenty dollars?”

As it happened I did. I handed it over with a small, wry smile. “You think you might be pregnant?”

“I hope I’m not.”

We were young. That went without saying. “Well,” I said, “Good luck.”

She returned the smile I’d just given her with a little interest.

#

“Well, I am,” she said.

I met her in town a few weeks later. She was barefoot in ripped jeans and a pink, knit jumper. She had a couple of copper rings on her toes. She just walked up to me as I was stopped to look in the window of a bookshop and laid that on me.

I turned, “Sorry, what?”

“You remember me, right? Cyn?”

“Yeah. But did you just say… did you mean you’re pregnant?”

“Yup.”

There’s probably something you’re supposed to say to a girl in a situation like that. I had no idea. We’d already established the fact that it couldn’t be ‘congratulations’.  Eventually I came up with, “Are you sure?”

“The test came back with a little plus sign.”

“You have to go Student Health. Check it properly.”

“You know they’ll just use the same test, right?”

“No, actually. Have you done this before?”

“A couple of times.”

“Oh.”

“This was the first plus sign.”

“Um. Oh. What are you going to do?”

“Not sure.”

“What about the father?”

“He doesn’t know yet, and I don’t know how it’s going to go. Hey, if you read about a murder in the papers in the next few weeks…”

She was being dramatic. Right? She was surfing for a reaction, and laughing behind her poker face at the way my eyes widened. There was just this constant look on her face like she was challenging you, like she was saying: yeah, but really? Are you sure? Am I fucking with you?

This was the moment, all the same, when I did the thing that was going to change my life. “Here, put your number in my phone. You can ring me if you ever need anything.”

“My hero.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No. I got it. But you know, I’m not completely defenceless. I do have people.”

“Good. Um. Best of luck, with everything. You know…”

“Thanks for the money. You’re obviously a sweetheart. I’ll see you round.”

What are the odds? I thought, but then, what was the chance of this meetup or last one? Who knows which direction the wind is going to blow you in? I shrugged my bag fully onto my shoulder as I walked away, still under the delusion I was being blown forwards.

#

A month later: a sideways wind. A gale.

She called me. “It’s Cyn. Do you remember me? From the party on Wilson Road…?”

“I remember.”

“Seth, right?”

“Yeah. Hey, what’s wrong. You sound weird? Have you been crying?”

“Um. Yes. And… he… you remember the guy I said was the father? Well, I told him.”

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t know how to answer that.”

“Wait – did he hurt you?”

“Not that much.”

“You have to call someone.”

“I am.”

Crap. I didn’t want to be anybody’s knight in shining armour. I didn’t know how to be. But I couldn’t pretend not to have understood what she just said. It still took me a couple of seconds to be able to say anything. “Where are you?”

“Hold on a second. Um. I think it’s Grant Street, next to… Fairground Avenue.”

“I don’t have a car…”

“It’s all right. There’s a bus stop nearby.”

“Okay. Come to 44A Boulder Street. Okay?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Of course I’m sure. I’ll be waiting for you.”

#

She looked a mess. She had a bag over her shoulder and smears of blood on her face.

“We need to go to a hospital,” I said.

She shook her head.

“You’re pregnant.”

“It wasn’t that bad. He hit me a couple of times, just with his hand. It’ll be okay.”

“You can’t go back there.”

“I know. Seth, you don’t know what he’s like. He got this crazy look in his eye, like he suddenly owned me. But he was suspicious. He doesn’t know if it’s his or not. One minute he was talking about it being ‘our kid’ but then he wanted a paternity test. He didn’t want to raise ‘some little bastard’. He told me I was keeping it like the decision was his. He said, ‘don’t you go doing anything to our kid. Don’t you talk about giving it away’ That’s the way he was talking. Then he goes off a different tack, like I did it on purpose, and it was my way of trapping him.”

“Shit. You can’t go back to him.”

“No. But I don’t know where to go.”

“You said… you had people…”

“I lied about that. My dad’s dead. My mum hates me. My friends aren’t talking to me right now. Why else did I call a near stranger? Can I stay here?”

“There’s only one room. Literally. What you see is what you get.” I had a poky little studio, with a kitchenette and an en-suite. I considered myself lucky – it was all mine and self-contained. You see, I liked my privacy, my independence. I liked to be able to get away a bit from all the crazy, and from other people. But what was I going to do? Turf this pregnant girl out into the street?  “Stay,” I said, “mi hovel, su hovel.”

#

She was there weeks later. “I’m trying to find a place,” she told me. “I’m looking.”

“There’s no hurry.”

And weirdly, there wasn’t. We gelled in an unexpected way. I found that I was just so completely unintimidated by this girl – not my usual situation at all – that I could say just about anything to her. We would sit up late talking, or we’d go out to the local gardens to walk, or we might sit in bed watching movies and late-night tv and eating waffles.

Before you ask: no, it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t doing her. I kept my hands to myself, and though we might snuggle up a bit under the blankets watching the scary bits, the whole thing was platonic. And maybe I could have nudged it another way; but I felt as if she didn’t want that, she wanted to get away from that, she might agree – to keep a roof over her head – but she didn’t want to get tangled up in another man. Not after her last one.

Phil. He was about five years older – she was nineteen at the time, and so was I – and he was the quintessential controlling, suspicious boyfriend. He could go from fun and smiles to accusations and fisticuffs in a couple of seconds. He was volatile. And I considered him a danger to her, so I made her promise not to go back to him.

“Oh, I won’t,” she assured me.

But she’d seen something in him once. Enough to fuck him, and then enough to move in with him.

Then he called her.

I was in the kitchen – which is really the same room as the lounge/bedroom – so I could hear her talking, I could hear her voice go quiet, see her eyes crease, her jaw set, the more he went on. “No. I don’t want you to come here. You don’t know where I am.”  Then her face paled: “How do you know that?” A silence, then: “You don’t get to decide that.” Then: “I’m not alone here. Phil. I’m not alone here. Phil. Phil, don’t.”

I walked over to the bed.

She put the phone down. “He’s coming.”

“Here?”

“Yeah. And I don’t know if he’s lying, but he says he’s got a gun.”

“What?”

“I think he’s lying. I’ve never seen a gun…”

“Well, we’re not staying here to find out. Put your coat on, let’s go.”

“I’m sorry I got you into this.”

“Never mind. Come on.”

#

It was the middle of the night. And it was the only place open. We sat in the window and looked out at the street, at the rain coming down and mixing with the streetlights. A lurid, drowning beauty.

“He’s probably there, right now.”

“You think he’ll break in?”

“I’m sorry, Seth. I’m sorry.”

“Are you sure we can’t call the police?”

“Please don’t.”

“They’ll get a non-association order. He won’t be able to come near you.”

“He won’t care.”

I took a bite of my burger. “What then? This guy is going to haunt you for the next eighteen years or so if you do nothing.”

That was when she looked at me, when she fixed me with a full, piercing gaze. It was the moment when I saw something beautiful and steely in her, when I realized she was like nobody else I had ever met. “I do have this thing, this fantasy.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s a little town on the West Coast, Hillberry, I think it’s called. When I still had a family, we used to spend a couple of weeks there every summer. It was… nice. We could… I mean…”

“You want me to go with you?”

“You’re my only friend.”

I had exams in six weeks, but I said, “Yes, of course. We’ll make it work out.”

#

Hillberry. Idyllic. Quiet. Sleepy.

I started working there at a service station. But then Cynthia found a stray cat. He was a poor old ragged thing, clearly hungry and abandoned, too gentle to be feral, with a gimpy leg and serrated ear. “Please,” she said, “we have to look after him.”

We had a little flat with one and a half bedrooms. “Okay,” I said.

“I love you,” she told me, though she didn’t mean it like that.

Actually, a woman came into the service station at seven every morning, when I was working. She was probably a couple of years older than me, beautifully put together, a redhead. The way she smiled… I couldn’t help but wonder… and Cynthia encouraged me. She was trying to talk me into making a move on her. While the two of us shared a bed, but only for the sake of there being so little space, not because we ever did anything in that bed that involved getting naked.

We took the cat to the vet. We named him Lucky. I learnt through his care and through his head-butts and soft meows, that I loved cats. The vet saw that in me too. He told me I was good with them. “Why not?” he said, “They need volunteers down at the animal shelter on Vine Street. And foster families.”

And so, now we have five cats – ours, and the crazy fosters – who range in temperament from smoochy to all claws and teeth. I’ve enrolled, next year, to do a course in veterinary science at the local polytechnic.

Mum called me last week. She asked me if I was coming for Christmas.

“Sure?”

“Are you thinking about going back to law school?”

“Not right now.”

“You could still take the exams again, take a gap year, re-sit them. You could apply for second year if you pass. I’m sure they’d let you do that.”

“I’m taking a different set of classes,” I explained to her - again.

“Oh.”  Veterinary science wasn’t her idea of heading forwards.

“Yeah. Hey, can I bring a friend for Christmas?”

“Um. Okay. It’s not that pregnant girl…?”

“Well, yes, it sure is.”

“Are you sure…?”

“Oh, quite sure.”

“It’s just… we’re not really clear on… what she is to you? Cynthia, was it? Is she your girlfriend?”

“Just a friend and a flatmate.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“It’s just… it is a bit odd, isn’t it? People must think that you’re the father, and you’re with her. And this baby is going to think…”

“We’re friends, that’s all. It is a bit weird, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Once you meet her you’ll see she’s all right.”

“Oh. Well, all right then. You’ll come over on the bus?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess I’ll make her up a separate bed.”

“Good thinking.”

“She’s not going to… at our place…”

A man shouldn’t laugh at his mother but… “No. She’s not that far along yet.”

“Take care,” her tone was still hesitant.

I guess, for a mother, it’s a lot to absorb.

We have a view of the ocean from our little front porch. I sit there, looking out at it, looking past it at the horizon. It’s not the horizon I thought it was going to be, but you know, that’s all right. Horizons change. They turn pink and gold when the sets, or angry red, or blue-purple in the last few minutes of dusk. Whatever way I end up going, it’ll still be forwards. I’ll know it’s forwards, because whichever direction I decide to face, it’ll be right in front of me.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work