2000 - Thirtynothing Read online

  She was going to tell Dig that she was in love with him. Why should she let Delilah win again?

  In her room, Nadine threw off her shoes and landed with a bounce on her freshly made bed. She found the bit of laminated plastic that gave instructions on how to make an international call and began dialling.

  Her heart raced as she waited for the call to connect. ‘Come on,’ she muttered to herself, ‘come on, Diggy-boy, pick it up.’ The phone rang, five times, six times, seven times, and Nadine was about to hang up when there was a click, a second’s silence and the muffled sound of someone’s skin rubbing against the mouthpiece. Nadine caught her breath.

  ‘Hello?’ came a woman’s breathless voice.

  Nadine dropped the receiver and it landed with a crash on to the cradle. Delilah. Delilah Lillie. Answering Dig’s phone. In Dig’s flat on a Saturday night. The slightly insane smile that had been etched on to Nadine’s face for the last quarter of an hour disappeared. Stinging, salty tears sprung to her eyes, taking its place.

  Nadine pulled a handful of Kleenex from the box on her bedside table and rubbed her damp face into them. Her hysterical happiness turned to hysterical misery, and the more she wiped away her tears, the more she produced. She didn’t have a place on Dig’s corduroy sofa any more, she didn’t belong in his flat. She’d lost again—lost to Delilah Lillie. She’d had ten years to love Dig, to have Dig, to be Dig’s—ten years. And she’d left it a week too late.

  She didn’t laugh now as she looked at herself in the mirror opposite her bed. There was nothing funny about the blotchy-faced girl staring back at her; there was nothing funny about being in love with her best mate; there was nothing funny about Dig being in love with Delilah. None of it was even vaguely amusing.

  She slowly lifted two fingers to her head, made them horizontal, pressed them into her temple and pulled the trigger with her thumb.

  ‘Bang,’ she said, sadly, letting her hand drop to her side.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Dig had sat numbly for a moment after the family disappeared in their Mercedes estate, unable to absorb what had just taken place. He looked over at Delilah, who had turned to face the water and was staring pensively across the river, her hands clasped together tightly in her lap and, for a moment, he desperately, desperately wanted to rush over to her and take her in his arms and share her trauma. He had to bite his tongue and hold himself down.

  Instead he waited for a while and watched her. After a few minutes she stood up and shuffled down the grass towards the towpath. She stopped a man with a red setter and he nodded and pulled something out of his inside pocket. As she walked back up the hill, Dig saw what he’d given her. She was smoking a cigarette. She took a couple of puffs, looked down at it between her fingers, scowled and threw it out towards the river.

  She stood at the top of the grassy hill, nibbling at her fingernails. And then, finally, she picked up her two bags and strode towards the middle house. She stopped at the front door, pulled the gigantic bunny from inside the Hamley’s bag and perched it on the doorstep.

  It was a grey and white rabbit, with a large bow round its neck, and was carrying in its paws a red-felt heart with the words ‘Birthday Girl’ printed on it.

  Jesus Christ, Dig thought, this is so fucking heavy.

  And then he started doing some pretty basic maths. Today was 21 November. He counted nine months backwards on his fingers: 21 February. Delilah’s eighteenth birthday. The last time they’d had sex. The last time they’d been happy together. Just before everything had gone sour and Delilah had disappeared. There was still the possibility that the girl was younger than twelve, had been born long beyond the end of his relationship with Delilah, but it was looking increasingly unlikely. She couldn’t have been younger than twelve—she looked sixteen as it was.

  And then another thought occurred to him. Maybe she was older than twelve. Maybe Delilah had had her and given her away before she’d moved to north London, before he’d ever even met her. But then…but then…no—he would have known. She would have told him. She used to say that young girls who got themselves pregnant were pathetic. She said that she would never let that happen to her. She said that she never wanted children. She said…oh God. Dig dropped his forehead on to his fist with frustration and confusion. This was so heavy, so unbelievably heavy.

  Delilah was crouched down on the front doorstep of the middle house. She was fussing with the rabbit, arranging it, trying to balance it. She leaned in towards it, and Dig was rooted to the spot with sadness and tenderness when he saw her suddenly grab it in her arms and squeeze it tightly, her face buried against its cheek and tears rolling down her face.

  Enough, he thought to himself, I’ve seen enough.

  He got to his feet and very quickly, before she turned around, scampered down towards the towpath and ran, through the crowds, along the river, down the high street and back to the station.

  He was home a couple of hours later.

  His thought processes were dizzying as he went from train to Tube, from Tube to bus and from bus to front door. Absolutely breathtaking. His head felt like it was strapped into a terrifying fairground ride. He was frightened, exhilarated and nauseated, all at the same time.

  Most days the most important thing Dig had to think about was his car breaking down or having a row with Nadine or forgetting to send his mum a Mother’s Day card. Today he was being forced to reconsider his entire existence, his history, his identity.

  He felt bigger, physically larger, as he paced his flat back and forth that afternoon, waiting for Delilah to get back. His feet felt wider, his arms felt thicker, his legs felt chunkier. He felt older, too, like all those grown-up people he’d seen out and about at quarter to nine this morning.

  His initial instinct was to say nothing to Delilah when she returned. He might have been reeling from the shock of it all, but Delilah would be feeling worse. He’d spied on one of the most intensely private moments of her life. He’d seen her crying into the rabbit’s fur when she’d thought nobody was looking. He’d been somewhere he had no place to be. He felt guilty. The last thing Delilah would need on her return from such a traumatic event was Dig sticking his nose in, asking questions, turning the whole shocking situation into his own drama.

  But as afternoon turned to evening and the sky darkened and his head became so inflated with questions it felt like it would explode, his mood changed. He became angry. Delilah was in the wrong. No matter whether that beautiful girl was her daughter or not and whether he was the father or not, no matter what the truth of the situation, Delilah should have involved him. She should have told him why she was in London. She’d treated him like a child with no capacity for dealing with adult realities. Which was, he supposed, true on many levels. But still, she’d found other uses for him, hadn’t she? He was grown-up enough to own the flat she was staying in, to have paid cash for the sofabed she was sleeping on, and he was responsible enough, apparently, to look after her precious dog every day.

  As his frustration and impatience had grown during the course of the afternoon he’d tried phoning Nadine. Over and over. He’d never before needed to speak to Nadine so badly, never needed to hear her voice, the voice of normality and routine, of light-heartedness and easiness, the voice of his best friend in the world. He didn’t care about all that awfulness the previous evening. He just wanted to see her. But where was Nadine when he needed her? Not at home, that was for sure. Nadine’s absence in his hour of need had served only to compound his sheer, throbbing panic, and by the time he heard the key in the lock and lifted himself from the sofa to confront Delilah at the front door, he’d lost all sense of reason. He no longer cared whether or not Delilah was emotionally ready to discuss the blonde girl in Surrey, and he was no longer ashamed of his act of deception and craftiness in following her there this morning. All Dig cared about now was getting answers to questions.

  And, it had to be said, that of all the possible opening gambits to such a monumental c
onversation, he’d probably chosen the most bizarre and unsuitable.

  ‘So,’ began Dig, ‘what happened to the rabbit?’

  Delilah jumped and clutched her heart. ‘Oh God, Dig,’ she said, ‘you nearly gave me a heart attack.’ She hooked her sheepskin on to the coatstand and clicked the front door shut behind her. Digby bounced off the sofa and went hurtling towards her. Dig leaned against the living-room doorpost and folded his arms.

  ‘What did you do with the rabbit?’

  Delilah glanced at him curiously and then with concern. ‘What rabbit?’ she asked, slipping her sunglasses off her head and dropping them on to a table.

  ‘Oh, you know, the big one’—he extended his arms to describe the height—‘the big one, with the floppy ears.’

  She looked at him quizzically. ‘Sorry, Dig. You’ve lost me.’ She moved towards the kitchen and Dig followed her.

  ‘You had him when you left the house this morning.’

  Delilah stopped in her tracks for a moment and then spun round towards Dig. ‘Ah!’ she said, brightly, ‘that rabbit.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dig, ‘that rabbit.’

  ‘Oh he was a—er—gift. For a little girl I know. In Surrey. It was her—um—birthday.’ She pulled open the fridge and removed a large jar of pickled onions, twisted off the lid nervously and forced an onion the size of a satsuma into her mouth. ‘Mmmm,’ she mumbled through the sphere, ‘yummy.’

  Dig looked at her with disbelief.

  ‘Anyway,’ she frowned, ‘why do you ask?’ A dribble of vinegar ran down her chin and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. Dig was surprised to notice that this failed to ignite in him even the slightest flicker of desire. In fact, it almost disgusted him.

  ‘Did she like it?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘The little girl. In Surrey. Did she like the rabbit?’

  Delilah shrugged and crunched. ‘Yes. I think so.’

  ‘It was a nice rabbit.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Delilah, looking at Dig worriedly, ‘it was.’

  She popped another onion in her mouth, picked up the jar and walked out of the kitchen.

  Dig leaned back against the work surface and put his face in his hands. Great, he thought, bloody great. I really am a smooth operator, aren’t I? I really handled that so well. ‘It was a nice rabbit.’ Jesus. What an arse.

  But then what, exactly, was the right way to handle a situation like this? Dig was fairly sure that no rules applied to how to conduct yourself on discovering that you have unknowingly fathered a child in your youth and that the mother of that child has kept you in blissful ignorance of the situation while taking full advantage of your flat, your facilities and your good nature.

  He’d thought that by mentioning the rabbit he would immediately confer upon Delilah a full realization of the day’s events, that she would instantly understand that he’d followed her to Surrey and watched her crying into the rabbit’s fur and that a luminously enlightening conversation would immediately follow. Instead, she probably thought he was mad.

  It was time to start this all over again.

  ‘Delilah,’ he said sternly, striding into the living room, ‘I know about Sophie.’

  His heart bounced into his throat as the words left his mouth, and his voice caught on the last syllable. It was the most dramatic thing he’d ever said in his life. He suddenly felt like an actor playing a part in a silly soap opera. He didn’t know quite what to do with his arms while he waited for her to respond.

  Delilah looked up at him. She’d been unzipping her black-suede boots. She kicked one off mindlessly and continued to stare at Dig.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sophie. I know about Sophie.’ His arms felt like strange, long things over which he had no control. He folded them across his chest to get them out of the way.

  ‘Sophie who?’

  Oh God, this was starting to sound like the rabbit conversation. Dig walked over to the sofa and sat down next to Delilah. He turned towards her, looked into her red eyes and felt himself relax. He stopped feeling like a soap actor.

  ‘I followed you today, Delilah. I followed you to Surrey and to the river. I watched you. I saw everything.’

  Delilah froze momentarily, one boot suspended from her hand.

  ‘I saw the girl. I saw Sophie. She’s beautiful…’

  Delilah placed the boot carefully on the floor and rested her hands on her kneecaps. She stared into space for a moment and then turned towards Dig. ‘Why did you do that, Dig?’ she sighed, and Dig suddenly felt ten years old again.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged. ‘I didn’t give it too much thought really. Just saw you outside, waiting for a cab this morning, and something snapped. I didn’t plan it, or anything…’ He tailed off.

  There was a moment’s silence. Dig contemplated the dirt under his thumbnail while he waited for Delilah to say something. The silence continued, leaving Dig more than enough time to ponder again his lack of emotional finesse. He wanted, as ever, someone else to take responsibility for the situation. He wanted Delilah to take over now—he’d done his bit. But he realized that that wasn’t going to happen. He’d started this, therefore it was his responsibility. There were a million questions he could ask her right now, but only one truly definitive one. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth.

  ‘Is she—Sophie—is she mine?’

  Delilah spun round and stared at him. Dig held his breath. This was it. This was, potentially, the biggest moment of his life.

  Delilah’s eyebrows knitted together and she frowned. And then she grimaced. ‘No,’ she stated, ‘of course not.’

  Dig exhaled, felt his heart start beating again, a little too fast. He licked his dry lips and nodded distractedly. ‘Ah,’ he murmured, feeling curiously deflated, ‘of course not.’

  Dig had never known his flat so quiet before, as if the entire building had been wrapped in cotton wool. He heard the pilot light flick on in the kitchen, signalling the arrival of central heating. It was the only sound.

  This wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d expected floodgates to open at the mere mention of the girl in Surrey, he’d expected Delilah to abandon her reticence of the last few days and open up to him. Instead she was still keeping it all locked away inside, even now she didn’t have to. Dig took a deep breath and forced himself to keep pushing. He hadn’t come this far to let it all slip away again.

  ‘But she is yours—right?’

  Delilah was silent again. She let out a huge sigh and turned towards Dig. ‘I can’t believe you followed me, Dig. I really can’t.’ There was a trace of disappointment in the tone of her voice which cut right through him like a switchblade.

  He looked at her then and felt suddenly and icily detached from her. Who was she? Who the hell was this girl, Delilah ‘Biggins’, who he thought had left him twelve years ago because she was scared of commitment but who’d actually gone off and had someone else’s baby, who lived some fairy-princess existence in the countryside that he couldn’t even come close to relating to, who had a horrible dog and terrible taste in music, who veered constantly between onerous silence and bubblegum chatter, who was incapable of hanging up a wet towel or cleaning a cup?

  He had absolutely no idea.

  The Delilah of his dreams and memories was a girl; this person eyeing him with disappointment and disdain was a woman, a real woman, a woman who’d given birth and had to give her child away, a woman who had moved on in her life and had left her past behind her. Including him.

  He’d been a fool to imagine that there was a future for him and Delilah. He felt faintly ridiculous to have ever considered such a notion.

  Dig suddenly felt a burst of intense anger.

  ‘Jesus, Delilah,’ he shouted, ‘what the hell was I supposed to do? You turn up here at my flat without warning, you—you kiss me in the back of a cab, you dump your dog on me, you make—you make—you make a…a…fucking mess, you tell me nothing about what you’re doing here. Y
ou treat me like a mug. You haven’t made me a casserole. I clean up after you all the time. And then I ask you a perfectly normal question and you don’t even give me the decency of a straight answer. I’m sorry, Delilah, if I stuck a toe into your private areas, but I didn’t know what else to do.’

  Dig gulped when he realized he’d just said ‘stuck a toe into your private areas’. What a ludicrous thing to say…

  ‘I just want some answers, Delilah,’ he sighed, before getting up off the sofa and walking meaningfully towards the kitchen.

  He pulled open the fridge door and enjoyed the blast of cold air against his flushed skin. He picked up the last of his big Buds and made a pig’s ear of trying to get the lid off on the corner of the work surface before giving up and taking it off with a bottle-opener. Had he ever, he wondered, been less cool?

  He stomped back into the living room and sat next to Delilah again.

  She turned towards him and placed a cool hand over his hot one. Her face had softened. ‘Dig. I’m sorry. You’re right. I’ve been unfair. I hadn’t really thought about any of this from your point of view. I’ve been so preoccupied, trying to track the family down, trying to avoid…trying not to see other people, and you’ve been so patient and so sweet. You’ve kept out of my way and I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’

  Dig pulled his hand away. ‘There you go again,’ he said, ‘you’re doing it again, treating me like a pet, or something, treating me like Digby here.’ He pointed at the dog. ‘Well, you might have named him after me but I am not a Yorkshire Terrier, Delilah, I am not your pet,’ he finished indignantly, his features set with pride, his thoughts in shock at the sheer idiocy of some of the things he was coming out with this evening.

  Quote of the Night: ‘I am not a Yorkshire Terrier’, closely followed by ‘you haven’t made me a casserole’ and ‘it was a nice rabbit’. It wasn’t like this on the television.

  ‘Look, Delilah. I’m not very good at this sort of thing, as you’ve probably noticed. But I’m confused. I appreciate what you must have gone through for the last week—well, the last twelve years, I imagine. I appreciate how hard this must all have been for you, how emotional and tough. And I understand why you kept it all from me, I really do. But I haven’t had a moment’s peace since you kissed me in the back of the cab on Tuesday. You sent me down the wrong turning when you did that. Made me think you were here because of me. Made me think that what we had when we were kids still existed. You being here has made me re-evaluate my entire life, you know. I was happy before you turned up. And then you kissed me. And then you moved into my flat. And then I thought we’d had a bloody kid. I’ve fallen out with my best mate over you. And now—and now, I’m just in a right old two and eight.’