The End is Where We Begin Read online

  I already regretted going to Manchester. Now I would have done anything, absolutely anything, to take it back.

  I should have told her straight away, but it was hard. Libby talked a lot when she had a point to make, and when she was on edge, both of which were applicable at that point. And so I’d just let her carry on pouring her heart out, talking as if our weeks apart had been nothing but a bump in our road, while I stood there in stupefied silence, unable to believe she was there. That she had – it seemed – never stopped being there. I felt like I’d stepped off a high bridge, only to realise that there was something to live for after all. And so when she put her arms around me and tentatively kissed me on the lips, I let her, thinking that maybe I could keep what happened in Manchester a secret, make a pact with Hellie to keep it buried forever; beg her, bribe her, blackmail her, whatever it took so that it never got out. Libby was the best thing that had ever happened to me and we had to go back to how we were, whatever it took.

  Guilt hammered at the door of my mind until the early hours of the next morning when, sleep-deprived and drowning in regret, I finally gave into the realisation that I could never keep this from Libby. I knew telling her would ruin everything, that my second chance with her would be gone, but I couldn’t live with the deception. It wasn’t right. Plus, what would happen when we came to take that next step in our relationship? It was meant to be the first time – for both of us. We’d talked about it, edged towards it, but agreed to wait a little longer. What was I meant to do when the moment came? Make out it was my first time too? I couldn’t do it.

  I knew Libby wouldn’t scream or cry or storm off when I told her. Her mother had raised her to believe that women should be strong and independent, and never emotionally enslaved to a man. She did Harmonie proud: pursing her lips, retaining her dignity, maintaining an agonising silence as we stood on the bridge that Sunday morning and I told her everything. But I knew how much it was hurting her and I hated myself for it, hated myself for ruining any chance we had of getting back together.

  “We could pretend it didn’t happen,” said Libby, suddenly, gazing out at the dark, still water.

  I turned to her, shocked and confused, but she just stared straight ahead. I studied her profile; her freckled nose just rising above the folds of her knitted scarf, her eyes steely and resolute, her cheeks tinged pink with cold, the scar she would always bear because of me. Hope shot up in me like a fountain, but then dropped again. I shook my head slowly.

  “But it did happen,” I said, regretfully, “we can’t just pretend it didn’t.”

  Libby turned to me. “But we can move on from it. We can still make this work. It was just a…”

  “A mistake,” I finished, unable to believe what was happening.

  She nodded. “I don’t want to lose you,” she said, tears glazing her eyes, “I can’t imagine not being with you and I don’t care about what happened with that girl. I just want us to go back to how we were.”

  I stared at her, speechless.

  “I promise I would never have done it—” I gushed.

  “I know,” she interrupted.

  “And I’ll change, I promise. I’ll go back to the old me. I’m gonna put what happened that night of the fairground behind me. I think I just need to try and forget about it. Things will be like they were before, I promise.”

  “Okay,” she nodded resolutely, tucking a flyaway strand of hair behind her ear, swallowing down her tears, “okay.”

  My heart felt like it was about to burst out of my chest. I could have cried with the relief of having her back. I wrapped my arms around her, buried my face in the thick wool of her scarf, breathed in the familiar scent of her hair, felt the soft, chill skin of her cheek against my lips once again.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled in her ear, not because I believed I had betrayed her, but because I should have had more faith in us.

  I remember my mum sighing.

  “I’m sorry, Jamie, I really am.”

  I shook my head and smiled bitterly. “Sure you are,” I mumbled.

  “I didn’t want things to turn out like this. Nobody wants their marriage to come to an end.”

  Try not sleeping with another man maybe. That might help.

  “I’ve been trying to make this work for so long,” she muttered, her elbows slumped on the kitchen table, her fingers wrapped in her hair. “I wanted to make it work, wanted us to stay a family… but I can’t carry on like this. I know you must be upset with me.”

  Upset? Upset! I was more than upset. I was hurt. And angry. And disbelieving. But most of all I was terrified.

  “You said you’d be here to help. When the baby comes. You said—”

  “I will be here. I’m not going to be leaving Timpton. I’ll be available as much as you need me.”

  I’ll need you all the time! I wanted to scream at her. How am I meant to do this without you?

  “But you won’t be here,” I said.

  “I won’t be in this house, but I’ll be around. Nothing’s changed. Me and your dad meant every word we said, we’re going to help you as much as we can. And there’s no animosity between us, we’ll still work as a team to help you. But we don’t even know how much time the baby will be spending here, Jamie. We have no idea how all this is going to work yet.”

  “I know that!” I snapped. “We don’t know anything, that’s the whole point. The whole situation is just…” A nightmare, I wanted to say, but how could I say that about my own baby?

  Several months after the initial blow, it seemed like everyone was expecting me to man up to the situation, come to terms with the position I’d put myself in. You made your bed! my mum had snapped at me during of one of many stress-fuelled arguments. She’d even started buying “bits and pieces” for when the baby arrived. But I couldn’t come to terms with any of it.

  I still awoke each morning believing I was back in my old life. As I opened my eyes, I spied books scattered around my bedroom, my bag, a calculator, pens… But then, as my brain stretched and yawned, it started to dawn on me that everything looked different. Instead of seeing one of the smart suits my parents had bought me for sixth form hanging on the back of the door, hooded tops and jeans were scattered around the room. In place of my leather satchel emblazoned with the crest of St John’s, a rucksack slumped beside my desk. And then every morning the realisation hit me, making my stomach lurch. St John’s had suggested, not too politely, that I might be better off continuing my A levels elsewhere, given my current situation. If, indeed, continuing my A levels would even be possible.

  “And after we lifted your suspension and allowed you back to school,” the headmaster had tutted with a despairing shake of his head, “what a waste of a second chance.”

  Fast-forward a few weeks and at least the local community college didn’t care for smart suits, crests and stuck-up attitudes. They didn’t even care if I turned up or not.

  “Jamie, I know everything’s hard right now,” said my mum, reaching out to touch my hand.

  I pulled it away.

  “I just can’t believe you’re doing this. To Dad. To…” I was about to say “to Laura”, but would she even be bothered? She’d moved in with Steve, her dopey new boyfriend, and only ever called in for food, washing or money. I wanted to say “to me”, but I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to need her anymore. If you’re about to become a dad yourself, is it okay to still need your mum? I had a feeling that I was expected to be all grown-up now. And yet my parents still paid for everything, my mum cooked my meals, my dad drove me into the college where he worked…

  My dad. My heart ached when I thought about what he must be going through. How could my mum be leaving him? Hadn’t he always been there for her? Hadn’t he supported every decision she’d ever made? All the hours she’d spent buried in her thesis, the conferences, the meetings, and then, later, her long working hours at the university. Or had she been with him all that time? It made my stomach turn to think about it. And the
way my dad had been ever since the pregnancy announcement – unflappable, stoical, quietly supportive. My mum always said he must have the patience of a saint in order to spend so many years teaching maths to young people who had failed their GCSE first time round and were highly likely to do so again. She’d always urged him to move on, to get into management or higher education like her, but he was committed to his job, as challenging as it could be.

  Still, as much as I appreciated my dad’s patience and understanding, those qualities weren’t going to help me handle a baby. My mum was the one who knew what she was doing when it came to these things. She was the one I needed.

  “Your dad understands that I haven’t been happy in a long time,” she said. “He understands that I need to go. I’m grateful to him for all the years we’ve been together—”

  “Grateful?”

  “Yes, grateful,” she repeated, tersely, “for being a good father, a good husband. But I’m not just a wife and mother, Jamie, I’m a person, a human being. I have my own needs and desires and ambitions, and I’ve been supressing those for a long time.”

  I stared at the tabletop, following the familiar patterns in the wood grain with my finger. I didn’t want to hear about my mum’s desires. Why was she suddenly talking to me about such things? Because now it was evident that we had both had sex she thought we could be open about such things? I’d done it once, just once, and it felt like the biggest mistake of my life. Because, unlike her, I didn’t get to walk away. And mixed with the anger and the hurt came a surge of jealousy.

  “You said I needed to own up to my responsibility,” I said, bitterly, “but you… you’re just walking away from yours.”

  “I’ve done my time!” she snapped, colour rising in her cheeks.

  “God, you make it sound like a prison sentence!” I retorted. “I’m sorry we’ve been such a burden!”

  “You haven’t! I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean that I’ve been here for as long as I can be. You and Laura are both grown up now.”

  “So now I’m a grown-up?” I asked angrily. “Because four months ago when I told you about the pregnancy, I was a child. That’s what you said, wasn’t it? That I was just a child and how could I possibly have a baby? But now that it suits you, I’m suddenly a grown-up, and so it’s okay for you to just leave?”

  “If you really want to know, I’d been planning to leave when you turned sixteen all along! It was only the fact that you stupidly got yourself into this situation that meant I stayed as long as I did! I thought I had to be here, I thought I at least had to stay until everything got settled, but I just can’t do it! Because if I stay then that’s it, isn’t it? I’ll never fucking leave!”

  I stared at my mum in shock. I don’t think I had ever heard her swear before. And to hear that she’d been wanting to leave us… My mum? It couldn’t be true.

  “What do you mean you’d been planning to leave all along?” I asked, quietly, unsure I wanted to hear the response. “How long have you and Jack been…?”

  My mum sighed heavily and rubbed her eyes. “I didn’t mean… I just meant I’d had it in my head for a while—”

  “No, you said all along. What does that mean? How long have you been—” I searched for a word that didn’t make me feel too disgusted, “—with him?”

  My mum rubbed at her eyes. “Our history,” she said quietly, “goes way back.”

  I already knew that Jack had been my mum’s boyfriend in her college days. They’d kept in touch and, over the years, he’d call in for a visit now and then. I didn’t know what he did for a living and didn’t much care, but I knew he travelled a lot. He wore battered leather jackets and smelled of cigarettes, and he tried to make conversation with me in a way that showed he had no kids of his own. I’d extricate myself from these situations at the earliest opportunity and go hang out with my dad in his workshop. My dad, for his part, always greeted Jack with polite detachment and then left my mum to entertain him. I would sometimes hear the two of them talking about their college days, the places they’d travelled, the memories they shared. My mum seemed giddy around him, laughing loudly and talking too much, but I also had memories of harsh whispers, hushed disagreements and sudden, unexpected exits. Had he been trying to lure her away from our family all along?

  “My feelings for him never really went away,” my mum continued, quietly. “I resisted them for a long, long time, but…” She looked up at me imploringly and I glared angrily at her, willing her to get to the point. “We’ve only been together these past six months or so,” she conceded, “but I think it’s always been heading—”

  “Six months! You’ve been having an affair for six months?!”

  “I was going through a tough time, Jamie! I needed someone to talk to, he was here and—”

  “Dad was here!”

  “But your dad’s part of it, Jamie! He’s in it! He’s been under just as much stress as me. I just needed to talk to someone outside of it all and then…” she trailed off with a long sigh.

  Six months ago. So around the time I “lost my way”, as my dad referred to it. My mum referred to it as me becoming a “complete bloody nightmare”. It started after that night at the fairground, gradually at first and then building momentum, until I didn’t know what to do with all my stress and anger other than stay out all night drinking until I forgot about everything, shouted at the people around me, turned every disagreement into a fight, and finally got myself suspended from the school my mum had so desperately wanted me to go to. Then, just as I was coming through it, the final blow; there was a girl, something had happened, she was pregnant, it was mine. My mum had cried and ranted and raged for most of a month – I’d ruined my life, wasted my opportunities. I was only a term into my A levels – how on earth was I planning on finishing those? In the moments when my dad had managed to calm her down, she had been the mum I wanted – putting her arms around me, telling me it would be okay. But her stress and disappointment would soon get the better of her again. I was the one she’d pinned her hopes on.

  And so it was me, was it? I’d been the one to finally push her into the arms of another man. Not Laura, who had been a constant, steady source of concern and frustration for years, but me, the good boy only recently – but quite spectacularly – fallen from grace. I was the reason our family had disintegrated.

  “You don’t get to pin this on me,” I said defensively, standing up so abruptly that my chair fell backwards and clattered against the kitchen floor.

  My mum frowned and looked exasperated. “I wasn’t… Where are you going?”

  “What else is there to say?!” I snapped.

  My mum, her face pale and exhausted, opened her mouth, searching for the words to make things better, but nothing came out.

  “Just go then,” I said, storming out of the kitchen.

  “Jamie, come back!” I heard her shout, as I ran up the stairs. “I’m sorry!”

  Chapter 7

  Struggles

  I’m concerned and bemused by the amount of time my son spends glued to his phone. Concerned because surely it can’t be healthy, and bemused because I can’t understand why anyone would want to be connected to other human beings twenty-four hours a day. I can count the number of people I care about on one hand, easily, and I know what they’re up to because they talk to me about it all the time, whether I want them to or not. I love them, but they exhaust me, all of them. One day, once Josh has left home and my dad’s no longer around, I plan on moving to the Peak District, renovating my great-great-grandad’s crumbling two-bed cottage and living in splendid isolation, working by myself, hiking and biking by myself. I could be happy like that. I really think I could.

  But Josh isn’t like me. He’s sociable and outgoing, the centre of his friendship group. I suppose I was more like that once, but even at his age I always needed my time alone, my space apart from the world. He can’t seem to go an hour without being on social media, commenting on someone else’s life, sha
ring details of his own. Maybe he’s just typical of his generation. But I think it’s also in his genes.

  His mother was very outgoing, very extrovert. Her threshold for boredom was non-existent, as evidenced by the fact that her infatuation with her newborn infant burned out within a matter of weeks. She loved being the object of gossip and revelled in the scandal of her pregnancy. Josh brought her all the attention she desired, and in those early weeks I felt my son belonged more to her gaggle of friends than he did to me. But as everyone else’s interest in the baby died down so did hers. And then she was off chasing the next thing that would make her centre stage. When I first met her, I thought she was fearless and uninhibited, and I was fascinated and perhaps a little in awe. Later, I realised she was needy and desperate, and her vulnerability made her more human to me. It took a little longer to realise she was completely and inexcusably self-centred, but by then it was too late.

  So, no, maybe my son’s not so much like his mother after all. Maybe he has her better parts – her sense of adventure, her air of confidence, her zest for life. But he has none of her selfishness, none of her clawing need for approval. He enjoys attention, but he doesn’t rely on it. He likes to be heard, but not to the exclusion of others. Perhaps my introverted genes have balanced out her more dramatic ones. Perhaps, somehow, out of the mess that was us, we created something that was just right.

  Anyway, when I walk in from work and find Josh lying on the sofa texting, Snapchatting, WhatsApping or whatever else, I’m hardly surprised.

  “All right?” I ask from the doorway.

  He makes some kind of non-committal noise without bothering to look up.

  The TV’s on, even though he’s not looking at it, as are the lights, despite it being a bright summer’s evening. Aren’t today’s teenagers meant to be concerned about the environment? I flick the light switch off and bite my tongue, determined not to start the evening by making a fuss about his waste of electricity. Or the mess he’s created by leaving plates, glasses, crisp packets and biscuit wrappers around the lounge. Or the fact that the washing I asked him to put away is still sitting in a pile on the coffee table. What helps me restrain myself in these situations is the guilt I feel at leaving him to his own devices almost every day of the summer holidays while I work.