The Two of Us Read online

  I start clapping too, I whoop and whistle and cheer like a lunatic, and the crew have no option but to join in. The last time I was here, when I went home, Ivy was waiting up for me with the news that our baby had stopped moving. Exactly one month ago now, and yet it feels like it was only a day and over a lifetime ago all at the same time.

  ‘So,’ I say to Joe and Suzi. ‘Is someone going to buy me a drink, or are you going to let me drink alone?’

  ‘At ten thirty on a Wednesday morning?’ says Joe. ‘What the fuck else am I going to do?’

  Suzi glances over her shoulder to where our actor (her boyfriend?) is having his make-up removed.

  ‘Just the three of us, hey?’ I say.

  Suzi nods. ‘Sure. But I’m buying.’

  It’s closer to eleven thirty by the time we say goodbye to everybody and finally hit the pub. It’s deserted except for two staff and a scattering of grey alcoholics. True to her word, Suzi buys the first round. She and Joe sip their pints slowly, and I’ve finished mine before they’re halfway through.

  ‘We should be drinking champagne,’ I say. ‘You can’t celebrate a wrap without champagne.’

  Suzi looks at her watch and Joe’s expression flickers.

  ‘What?’ I say, a little aggressively. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Joe says. ‘You’re absolutely right. Let’s get some food with it, yeah?’

  ‘I’m not hungry. Thanks all the s—’

  ‘We’ll get some food,’ Joe says. ‘You sit tight, and I’ll go to the bar. Okay, Suzi?’

  ‘Sure,’ Suzi says. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Three burgers, okay?’

  ‘Burger and bubbles!’ I shout, drawing the attention of the resident winos.

  Halfway through the food, and about the same amount through the champagne, all the energy drains out of me. My stomach is in knots and the drink tastes sour to me now. The last time I saw El I poured him a drink against Phil’s instructions, medical advice and common sense because . . . well, why the fuck not? But as drunk and self-pitying as I am, I’m sober enough to know the same blasé answer can’t apply to me. I’m a father now. Whatever happens to me and Ivy, I’m a father.

  ‘Sorry to be a party pooper,’ I say, putting my glass down, ‘but I should be going.’

  ‘Cab’s waiting outside,’ says Joe.

  ‘Think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?’

  ‘Here,’ he says, passing me three twenty-pound notes. ‘And get Ivy some fucking flowers.’

  The shoot took place in Islington, north London, so it’s a good cab ride back to Wimbledon Village. Long enough to sober up a little, to calm down, to think. It’s a sunny spring day and the streets are full of people living their lives: workmen, students, tourists, mothers pushing prams. The cab driver must think there’s something wrong with me as I watch London pass by with my forehead pressed against the glass, crying intermittently. We cross the river at Waterloo Bridge and I am still holding the three twenties Joe pressed into my hand half an hour ago. ‘Buy Ivy some fucking flowers,’ he said, and maybe Joe was being even more direct than I gave him credit for. I took it as nothing more than male bluff and bravado – a cool thing to say to diffuse an awkward situation. But the more I think about it, the more I think Joe was telling me, in his own sweet and subtle way – to pull myself together and start thinking about Ivy instead of feeling sorry for myself. And he makes a good point. Ivy and I both lost a child when Danny was born, but she’s the one who had to sleep with a dead child inside her, who went through labour to deliver one live and one stillborn baby. And as sick, sad, lonely and depressed as I feel; as much as I want to wipe it all out with drink and sleeping tablets . . . it’s worse, infinitely worse, for Ivy. And if she needs to retreat inside her head and her heart to get through this, then the least I can do is act like a grown man about it. Or, as Joe so succinctly put it: Buy her some fucking flowers.

  I ask the taxi driver to drop me outside the florist, and after I buy twenty-four yellow roses, I pay a visit to the extortionate grocer and the criminal butcher.

  Chapter 37

  It’s around five o’clock on Friday morning when Dad’s snoring wakes me for what must be the sixth time. He came to visit yesterday so, once again, I’m sleeping (or trying to) on the sofa. The sun is beginning to show itself and there is enough light coming through the living room blinds to illuminate the two dozen roses in a vase above the fireplace. Several of the stems are beginning to droop after only two days, which is disappointing considering how much I spent on them. There’s been no shortage of flowers in the flat in the last month, but Ivy cried all the same when I presented her with these twenty-four blooms – I didn’t say as much, but I think she understood these were for her and not for our dead baby boy. I cooked spaghetti bolognese and we ate it at the table. I had resolved not to drink, but Ivy suggested we open a bottle of wine and it seemed churlish to say no. I had one glass and made it last. I told Ivy I was sorry and she asked, ‘What for?’

  ‘I’m just sorry,’ I told her and that set us both off crying.

  It was okay, though. We ate our supper, sipped our wine and watched most of a movie before Baby T woke up crying for his milk. Ivy asked me if I’d like to give him a bottle seeing as she’d had wine. And so I gave him five ounces of formula milk, sitting on the sofa with Ivy curled up beside me. Like a family.

  Even so, Ivy slept on the sofa bed in the nursery and I went to our bed (my bed?) alone. We kissed each other good night – a chaste touching of lips – and I realized it had been weeks since we’d done that. I had nightmares again – indistinct, harrowing, confusing – and needed to take a sleeping tablet to get back under in the early hours.

  I had no nightmares on Thursday, but woke instead to the sound of Ivy shuffling about in the nursery. It was before six in the morning, but I got up and made toast and coffee and we ate it together in the living room while Baby T slept in the nursery. I asked Ivy about the half-read books and she shrugged and shook her head. I was hoping she might tell me it was about moving on, starting afresh, putting the past behind us, but she said none of those things. It rained all day, so we stayed in our pyjamas and watched TV and dozed on the sofa and played cards and rolled around on the floor with our baby.

  What the future holds for me and Ivy, I still don’t know. We’ve been together nine months now, but ninety per cent of what you might call our ‘romantic life’ happened in the first two weeks – before Ivy became pregnant. There have been high points since then – me moving in, my failed proposal, our ‘honeymoon’ – but so much else has happened that I’m not sure either of us knows the way back to the way we were. But the last two days have been good days and whatever happens I will always love Ivy and will always have her and my son in my life, one way or another.

  Dad is still snoring like an old sailor with a whelk in his throat, and I’m worried he’s going to wake the baby. The sleep of the just, maybe. Or just a happy granddad. Of everyone that has visited – the midwife, Eva, Ken, Frank, Phil – Dad has been the least coy on the subject of Daniel’s death. I don’t know (don’t think) that the death of a spouse is as profound a shock as the death of a baby, but Dad has displayed a naked uncontrived empathy that felt like cold air blowing through the flat. He talked about the pain of loss from a personal perspective, and how my mother’s death affected him when he was a similar age to that which Ivy is now. He cried at the memory and smiled at the same time as he remembered everything he loved about my mum. I have only a hazy recall of my own grief and bereavement, partly, I think, because I was too immature to fully embrace and experience those emotions, and partly because, like the cliché says, time really does heal. ‘I don’t know exactly how you feel,’ my dad said, ‘I can’t. But it does lose its edge, slowly. I don’t think you ever fully recover, but . . . that grief, I think it’s a part of the person you lost. In a funny way . . . a silly way, I suppose . . . it’s almost a comfort. Don’t be afraid to hold on to that.’

  Ivy w
ent to my dad then, put her arms around his neck and cried like a child. And he just held her and stroked her hair. I put the kettle on and went to the bathroom where I sat on the toilet and cried on my own – not out of self-pity, but because that was their moment, and it would be more powerful and more healing between just the two of them. Obviously Dad spent the rest of the day annoying the hell out of me, getting down on his knees and braying like a donkey, roaring like a lion, playing peek-a-boo for a bloody eternity, spilling his tea, repeating old anecdotes about my own infancy and generally carrying on like he was demented. But Baby T loved it.

  And now he has woken his grandson. I hear muffled sounds as Ivy creaks out of the sofa bed and lifts Baby T from his cot. I listen to her making soothing sounds – a steady loop of shush, baby, shushhh . . . Mummy’s here . . . shush, baby, shushhh . . .

  I must have drifted off again, because I wake with a start to find Ivy sitting on the edge of the sofa.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, shifting back into the sofa to make room.

  Ivy lies down beside me, her back against my chest, and pulls the blanket over her shoulders.

  ‘Sorry about Dad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The snoring.’

  ‘You think you don’t snore?’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Like a tramp,’ Ivy says. ‘Anyway, T always wakes up around now for his milk.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Sleeping like a baby,’ Ivy says with a small laugh at her own joke.

  I drape my arm around her, my hand resting on her still-soft belly. We lie quietly for a while and this is probably the most intimate we’ve been in the five weeks since the babies were born. I press my face into the back of Ivy’s neck and kiss her there.

  Ivy moves her head away from me, subtly, but enough to break the contact between my lips and her neck. ‘I think we’re done,’ she says, matter-of-factly.

  So this is it.

  ‘Is that what you want?’ I say.

  Ivy nods, something I feel rather than see. I hug her tightly and she smells of baby – of milk and heat and musk. I love Ivy in a thousand small and large and trivial and important ways. I want her in my life and in my bed, and I want us to be a family, but I’m not going to try and talk her into it. I only want her if she wants me too. Anything else is un—

  I realize that Ivy is still talking.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Is that okay with you?’ Ivy says. ‘I want it to be okay with you, too.’

  ‘Well . . . not really, not if I’m honest. But if that’s what you want, what can I do about it? What can I say?’

  ‘We’ll put all our love into Baby T,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t . . .’

  ‘I know it sounds selfish but . . . I don’t want to share him with anyone else . . . with another baby. Not after everything that’s happened.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘We’ll be a three,’ Ivy says. ‘Just the three of us.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘You, me and . . . him.’ Ivy rolls over so she’s facing me, and her smile is big, true and beautiful. ‘We really need to pick a name, don’t we.’

  The night after we discovered Ivy was expecting twins, we drove to Bristol to see her parents. During the drive she asked how many children I wanted; I prevaricated, but Ivy’s answer to her own question was an unambiguous three. And now I understand what she is telling me – when she said ‘we’re done’, Ivy meant she doesn’t want any more children, she wants us to be a three – and that three includes me.

  ‘Yes,’ I tell her. ‘We do.’

  ‘This sofa is lumpy,’ she says.

  ‘I know.’

  Ivy stands up from the sofa and holds her hand out to me. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Come and sleep with us in the forest.’

  Chapter 38

  ‘Ti. . . t. . . t. . .’

  ‘What does it sound like?’ I ask.

  ‘T. . . t. . .’ El screws his face up in concentration, his skin – clean-shaven now – turns red with effort. Without the beard he looks smaller and frailer than ever.

  ‘Slow down, Elly,’ Phil says, ‘take a nice slow breath.’

  ‘B. . . b. . . breaths!’ says El. ‘Breaths, breathty dumplings!’

  ‘Breasts?’ says Craig.

  El nod nod nods and points a trembling finger at Ivy’s chest. ‘Tits. Y. . . y’tits’re s. . . still m. . .’ El holds his cupped and shaking hands in front of his chest.

  ‘Massive?’ tries Ivy.

  ‘F. . . f. . . fuggin huge,’ says El, stamping his feet and clapping his hands. And his laughter is rampantly, virulently infectious.

  At home we still have our low hours and low days. We sleep in the same bed now, and often Ivy cries in her sleep – not waking, but sobbing gently, tears leaking from behind her closed eyelids. Some days she can’t motivate herself to get out of the house, others she struggles to get out of bed. But we have good days, too – we smile, play, cuddle and sometimes we even laugh. Never like this though. But that’s El for you. This is the first time I’ve seen him since before our boy was born, and if it wasn’t for Phil’s birthday I might have stayed away even longer. The last thing we need is El saying something tactless. Fortunately, the fact that we were expecting twins seems to have slipped his failing memory.

  Phil is forty-five today and we are having a quiet barbecue in his back garden. It’s just the six of us: me, Ivy and T; Phil, Craig and El. Two families of three; two babbling dependants; two sets of circumstances that have thrown joy against sadness.

  ‘I wish the sun would come out,’ says Phil, shivering.

  I turn to Ivy, waiting for her to scold Phil for making a ‘shit wish’, but she says nothing. She just looks up into the cloudless sky, smiling resignedly. ‘Me, too,’ she says.

  Craig and Phil are no longer concealing their affection for each other – nothing bold or insensitive, but a candid touching hands, a hug, a simple kiss. El mocks, of course, but his pleasure shines through from behind the façade.

  Despite it being Phil’s birthday, our celebrations are restrained. Because this square on the calendar holds a significance beyond another candle on Phil’s cake. Between today and El’s birthday, Phil will take my best friend and the love of his life to Switzerland. They will visit Dignitas (or ‘Diggitass’, as El insists on calling it), and on the return flight Phil will sit on his own – getting smashed on gin and tonic, I hope – while El travels in the cargo hold inside a sealed box. El doesn’t want anyone but Phil to know exactly when it’s going to happen, but it will be before the end of November.

  ‘H. . . have tr. . . f. . . treat me g. . . n. . . nice now. Treat me l. . . like a p. . . f. . . princess. Ha ha!’

  ‘The things you’ll do for attention,’ I tell him.

  ‘D. . . d. . . dyin’ f ’ttention! Ha ha ha!’

  El doesn’t know about baby Daniel, but Phil does and he winces at El’s outburst, glancing in our direction to check we’re not offended by this gleeful raspberry in death’s face.

  El stamps his feet. ‘Dy. . . dy. . . dyin’ f ’rit!’

  ‘El!’ says Phil. ‘You’ll wake the baby.’

  El turns to look at Ivy and Baby T. ‘C. . . can I h. . . hold her?’ says El, extending his thin, spasming arms.

  ‘It’s a he,’ says Phil.

  ‘L. . . looks like a sh. . . she.’

  ‘El!’

  ‘M. . . maybe h. . . he’s a p. . . puff.’

  ‘Not on my watch,’ I say reflexively, and earn a thump on the arm from Phil.

  ‘H. . . hold her . . . hold her.’

  ‘El, I don’t th—’

  ‘Here,’ says Ivy, carrying Baby T across to where El is sitting in his wheelchair. ‘You have to be very careful, okay?’

  El nods and a calm settles over him. Ivy places T in his hands, but stays crouched at El’s feet like a wicket keeper ready to spring into action.

  ‘Th. . . that’s nice,’ says El, holding Baby T gently
to his chest.

  ‘Wh. . . what’s her n. . . name?’

  ‘It’s a boy,’ says Ivy. ‘He doesn’t have a name yet.’

  ‘How long has it been?’ asks Craig.

  ‘Thirty-seven days,’ Ivy and I say in unison.

  Legally we have forty-two days from T’s birthday to pick a name and register his arrival. I don’t know what the punishment is for failing to do so, but if we don’t choose a name in the next five days, we’ll find out shortly after.

  ‘N. . . no n. . . name!’

  Ivy shakes her head. ‘Can’t find a good one.’

  ‘E. . . El’s a good n. . . name. S. . . speshly if she’s a p. . . puff.’

  ‘I’ll put it on the shortlist,’ Ivy tells him.

  El frowns as if something is troubling him. He turns to Phil. ‘D. . . din you s. . . say they’re h. . . havin t. . . t. . .’

  We hold our collective breaths.

  ‘Twins!’ El says. ‘T. . . twins.’

  We have alluded to our tragedy today, and talked about it in fragments and oblique references that sail over and around El’s head. But this has caught us all with our guards down. I can feel Craig and Phil trying to bore holes into us with their eyes.

  Ivy shakes her head. ‘Just the one, El,’ she says. ‘It was just the one.’

  ‘So,’ I say to El, ‘you got bored of the beard?’

  ‘If I g. . . go Swissland with a b. . . beard,’ he says. ‘I’ll have it f. . . f ’rever, won’ I? M. . . m. . . might go out fashion!’

  ‘Maybe you’re right, Ivy,’ says Craig.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Maybe he,’ Craig nods at the baby in El’s lap, ‘maybe he was only ever meant to be one baby.’

  Phil stares at Craig but his expression is impassive.

  ‘I mean . . . that’s how they start out, isn’t it?’ He glances at El who is distracting himself by poking his tongue at Baby T. Craig mouths the words Twins. He says, ‘When they’re identical . . . they start out as just the one, don’t they? I. . . I’m sorry, I don’t really know what . . .’

  Ivy gathers Baby T up from El, she holds him above her head, smiling up into his face. The sun turns Baby T’s thin spiky hair into a fuzzy halo of light. ‘Is Uncle Craig right?’ she says in a sing-song baby voice.