‘Oi.’ Ted appears in front of her, blows at his black quiff, smooths one side with the flat of his hand. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’
She nods at the puddle between them. ‘Mind your shoes. Suede never comes right if you get it wet.’
He steps over in one stride and grabs her by the shoulders. His fingers are thick. He’s hurting her a bit, but she doesn’t say anything. In the blinking coloured lights, his dark eyes shine with something like mischief. She can smell Old Spice, whisky and cigarettes – things she’s been told to avoid.
‘Carol? Didn’t you hear me, what I was shouting?’ He hitches up a trouser leg, gets down on one knee.
‘Ted! Your good suit!’ Around them, people stall, stare, nudge each other’s elbows, oh heavens above.
‘Carol …’
‘I did hear you,’ she whispers. Her hand comes to rest on the swell of her belly, a bump it’s getting harder to hide. ‘But you don’t have to, you know, just because …’
‘Don’t be daft. I’d’ve asked you anyway.’ In his black eyes, the white sliver of moon – tiny and still grinning in a smaller, darker sky. He is so handsome. She can only bring herself to look at him for a couple of seconds at a time. Any longer and she begins to feel like her make-up needs fixing or her hair has gone wrong or something.
Ted doesn’t flinch. He never flinches. ‘Come on, Carol Green. You’d be a fool not to marry me.’
Two
Nicola
Merseyside, 2019
That’s how it starts, for me, the story of my mother. In Blackpool, that midsummer’s night, with Ted Watson, a man I ceased to call father a long time ago. All that followed would never have occurred without his flamboyant proposal in that damp, defiant funfair. So yes, it starts there, but of course there is a before. There is always a before. My mother was pregnant, her parents had thrown her out, she was living, as she called it, in sin. Marriage was the only way out of shame, as far as she was concerned, and if I can remember every detail of that scene, if I can see those flying rockets and smell the oil and the candyfloss, it is only because, in sentimental mood, she would tell me that particular story over and over. For her, it still had a romance to it, even after everything he did to her.
It wasn’t me in her belly. It was my older brother, Graham. Conceived if not in love, since I don’t believe my father capable of it, then in passion – the furtive fumblings of late-sixties sex. Any swinging associated with the decade had not yet reached the small towns of Merseyside in anything other than music and fashion, jukeboxes and coffee bars; the pill, out of wedlock, was not something my mother ever would have dreamed of. Brought up on a Northern working-class diet of fear and gratitude, she would never have had the confidence to ask for such a thing. She would not have had the vocabulary.
The call came a week ago. I was on my way out of court. I was meeting Seb for a drink at Waterloo before we caught the train home together. It was Friday. We always try to meet at the station on Fridays after work. On average, we achieve this twice a month, if I’m honest, sometimes once. A shared bottled of Pinot Grigio in a busy station is what passes, what has to pass, for a date just at the moment. There’s a bar called the Cabin on the upper level, where you can drink and talk and watch the train timetable on a television screen and we know we can make it to our platform in three minutes. It’s our way of being together for as many minutes and seconds as we can, and that we still want to do this is, to me, romantic. The train ride also counts. Once home, domesticity will, we know, swamp us, and by the time we are alone again, our last remaining drops of energy will have been spent on the girls.
So when the call came, I was on the Strand. A GBH case had taken less time than I’d anticipated, and I was considering texting Seb to tell him I was heading back to chambers and that I’d see him later at home. I took my phone out of my coat pocket, and at the sight of my brother’s name, my body