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It was almost midnight before he came back, and she knew immediately when she saw his face that whatever his mother had wanted to tell him could not have been good news.
‘Ben!’ she cried out in sympathetic alarm. ‘What’s wrong? Is someone ill? Is…?’
There were dark shadows under his eyes, and his skin looked drained and sallow, his blue eyes which could glow warmly with love and tenderness bleak and empty.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked him gently.
He sat down heavily on the old sofa they had inherited with the flat. Zoe’s mother had wanted to have it re-covered for them, grimacing at the unknown identity of its many stains, but Zoe had firmly refused, flinging over it instead a richly patterned rug she had picked up from one of the street markets.
Now she sat down next to him, not touching him… waiting…
‘It’s Sharon,’ he told her emptily. ‘She’s pregnant.’ He turned his head and looked at her, but he wasn’t seeing her, Zoe recognised, not really; his expression was too controlled, too hard and full of starkly bitter bleak despair.
Uncertainly Zoe waited, instinct telling her not to speak… not to touch… not to do anything; and then abruptly he seemed to focus properly on her, the blood surging into his face, burning it with a heat that left stains like bruises against his cheekbones.
‘She’s sixteen years old, for God’s sake, and she’s pregnant.
‘Mum thought she was on the Pill, but apparently she forgot to take it and Sharon, of course, like the little fool that she is, didn’t say a word to Mum about anything until she was just about bursting out of her school uniform.
‘My God… hasn’t she learned anything? Hasn’t she seen from Mum? Doesn’t she realise?’
Zoe swallowed painfully, knowing that his anguish was something private, something beyond the bonds that the two of them shared, caused by his knowledge and experience of a way of life that was totally alien to her.
Even so, she tried to reach out to him, asking hesitantly, ‘And the father… the boy?’
‘The boy…’ The face he turned towards her was white now… not with exhaustion but with a bitter savage fury, the expression in his eyes one that made her shiver; one which she thought would always haunt her.
‘The boys, not the boy,’ he corrected her thickly. ‘Sharon told me that she isn’t sure just who is the father. And of course the stupid bitch has left it far, far too late to have an abortion. Mum can look after it, she told me. Either that or the council can rehouse her.’
Not knowing what to say, Zoe reached out and touched his arm gently.
‘It might all work out for the best,’ she began unsteadily, only to recoil in shock as Ben threw her hand off his arm so violently that she fell back against the settee. His eyes blazed fury and, even worse, contempt.
‘What the hell do you know about it?’ he demanded savagely. ‘It might all work out for the best.’ She winced at the hatred in his voice as he mimicked her voice, her accent. ‘How? Like it did for my mother, with three kids under five by the time she was twenty, an unfaithful husband… no income, no home, and no hope of ever doing anything but watching your life slide away from you, with no hope of ever getting out of the mess you’re in; with no hope of anything, just the sickening reality of snotty-nosed kids dressed in other kids’ cast-offs, and perhaps the odd few days of sex from some man you might happen to meet in the pub, who if you’re lucky won’t leave you with another unwanted and unsupported brat on your hands when he walks out on you. Is that what you call things working out for the best?’
‘She… she could have the baby adopted,’ Zoe suggested shakily, trying not to let him see how much his reaction had hurt her, how much it had excluded her… how much the starkness of the picture he had drawn for her contrasted with the home she had just left, the life and world her parents inhabited.
‘She could, but she won’t… girls like “our Sharon” don’t. They haven’t got that much sense… they love them, you see, the poor bitches, or at least they believe they do, and they can’t even see that by loving them they’re destroying them, submitting them to empty, wasted, dragged-out lifetimes of sterility and apathy. If they really loved them, they’d have them aborted.’
The ugliness of his comment took Zoe’s breath away.
‘And if they really loved themselves they wouldn’t get pregnant in the first place. And who’s to blame for that, do you think, Zoe…? The stupid little tarts for whom sex is about the only pleasure, the only excitement they’ll ever have in their lives, if in fact it does give them any pleasure, or the middle-class liberals like your parents whose liberality took away the only things that used to protect them.
‘Before your parents and their destruction of “the rules”, girls like Sharon got married when they fell pregnant, or at least most of them did.’
‘And was that any better for them?’ Zoe asked him in a low voice. ‘To be married at sixteen to someone they probably didn’t love and to have to stay in that marriage for the rest of their lives? Were they really any happier?’
‘Happier?’ He looked at her in disgust. ‘People like us, like me… like Sharon… like my mother… all my family… happiness doesn’t come into our lives, Zoe. It isn’t an option or a choice. No, Sharon might not have been “happier”, but she’d have been a darn sight better off. She’d have a husband to support her, her child would have had a father…
her children would all have had the same father. She wouldn’t have been living alone in some grotty tower block isolated from her friends and family, driven to drink or depression, to drugs and sex… driven perhaps to abusing her children as much as she would be abusing herself.’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Zoe cried out, horrified.
‘No, it doesn’t have to be,’ Ben agreed. ‘Maybe some fairy prince will ride up on a white charger and sweep her off to happy-ever-after land. Is that what you think?’ he asked her in disgust.
There was nothing Zoe could say, no comfort she could offer.
‘Do you know that when she was eleven Sharon was the top of her class… a clever girl, her teachers said, capable of going far, doing things; and then came puberty and suddenly Sharon wasn’t clever any longer. Clever girls don’t get pregnant and ruin their lives and the lives of everyone around them with unwanted babies. Only stupid, selfish girls do that.’
