Baby Be Mine (22 page)

We drive around for half an hour before Barney becomes grizzly.

‘Can you entertain him?’ I ask Johnny.

‘My head,’ he mumbles.

‘Look, what do you want to do?’ I snap. ‘I can’t just drive around all day – Barney will go bananas.’

‘Won’t he sleep?’

‘No, he’s already had his nap this morning.’

Silence.

‘Shall I take you back to your hotel?’ I ask crossly, expecting him to say no and consequently perk up.

‘Yeah, that might be an idea,’ he replies instead.

Angrily, I do a U-turn and begin to make my way there.

‘Will you swing by and pick me up tomorrow?’ he asks me when he gets out of the car.

‘What time?’ I can’t keep the unimpressed tone from my voice.

‘Not too early.’

‘Ten o’clock?’

‘Eleven?’

‘Whatever. Shut the door.’

He does and I drive off.

I can hear my sister’s raised voice before I even open the front door.

‘Can you keep it down?’ I ask irritably, indicating Barney.

‘Where’s Johnny?’ Susan demands to know.

‘I took him back to his hotel,’ I reply.

‘Why?’ she cries.

‘He was hungover,’ I respond. ‘Not very good company.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ she replies.

‘Oh, would you please get over it!’ I exclaim.

‘Meg, that’s enough.’ My dad frowns at me. He doesn’t often tell me off, but when he does it really hits home.

My mum comes to take Barney from me. ‘No, it’s alright,’ I say, clutching hold of him. ‘I don’t have anything more to say.’

I go to bed early that night, feigning illness. My mum puts Barney to sleep. I don’t want company. I just want to be on my own. I have a deep sadness inside me and I don’t want to do anything other than dwell in my own misery for a while. I’ll feel better in the morning. I’m sure I will.

  Chapter 23  

I’m sitting in my bedroom with the phone pressed painfully hard against my ear. My stomach is a knot of tension and anxiety. I’m calling Christian again. It’s the fourth time in three days. But he’s not answering. He’s still not answering.

Johnny left a week ago after a whirlwind trip. I was sorry to see him go. Being around him made for a nice escape from reality, but now I’m back in the real world, and I miss Christian.

Aside from everything else, he was my friend. Plus, of course, he was Barney’s father. Barney still seems completely unaware of – and unaffected by – Christian’s absence. I’m thankful for that, at least.

I stare down at the receiver and end the call, my ear burning from the pressure of having the phone pressed up against it. I wonder what he’s doing. I wonder if he’s doing this exact same thing right now: staring down at his phone. I wish he wasn’t refusing to answer it.

Susan and Tony went home a few days ago and, despite the fact that their brush with celebrity made them more unbearable than usual, I even miss them. They talked about Johnny incessantly after he left – even Mum and Dad were on a strange, Johnny-related high. They all forgave him for refusing to grace them with his presence that day. I think they’ve chosen to erase the negative parts of his stay from their memories so they can reminisce about their time with him with untainted affection.

I come out of my bedroom to hear the unmistakable sound of Johnny’s singing coming from my dad’s study. Frowning, I wander down the corridor to the room at the end. My dad is sitting in front of his small stereo, staring down at a CD case. I stand there for a moment, listening. I recognise this song. It’s one of the album tracks Johnny was writing when I worked for him. I listened to his CD only once – during one of the dark moments I had when I was pregnant with Barney. The track comes to an end and the next song starts to play.

‘Hi, Dad!’ I say brightly, making him jump. He looks guilty. ‘I didn’t know you owned any of Johnny’s CDs?’

‘I, er, found this one in town. I thought it might be nice to hear some of his work – you know, seeing as he’s part of the family.’

‘Fair enough,’ I say, trying to block out the lyrics about the ‘brown-eyed girl’. When this single was released, I remember coming across a music review which said Johnny was paying a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Van Morrison song. But this is the song he wrote for me.
I’m
the brown-eyed girl.

‘Turn it down, Dad, I don’t want to hear this,’ I say cheerfully.

‘Why not?’ he asks, furrowing his brow. ‘I like it.’

‘Yeah, me, too, but I’ve heard it too many times.’

That part’s the truth. When Johnny asked me to go back to LA with him and I said no, he told me he’d wait for me for three months. One month later, I found out I was pregnant. My decision to stay with Christian seemed pretty clear-cut after that, but sometimes, late at night, I would doubt it. When Johnny’s single came out I would play it over and over, not only to torment myself, but also to question whether I was doing the right thing. I only truly decided to cut my losses with Johnny on the day that I had my twelve-week scan. I hadn’t told Christian I was pregnant, so I went alone to the hospital. Seeing that tiny grey and black jellybean shape on the monitor . . . its heartbeat . . . In the first three months, it hadn’t seemed real, but now there was my baby, right there on that screen. And it hit me there and then – with an impact as hard as a slap across the face – that the first person I wanted to tell was Johnny.

If I hadn’t walked past the newsagent’s inside the hospital, maybe it would have all turned out differently. But I did, and there on the front of one of the tabloids was a picture of Johnny with his arm around a girl – a girl I knew. The headline read: ‘Going to put a ring on it’. I stopped dead in my tracks and snatched up the paper. It was a trashy story about Johnny finally falling in love, and the girl he was with was the same one he slept with in LA. She was the final straw for me back then. And here she was again. It was a message: my three months were up. He was moving on. I remember standing there, clutching my stomach as I read this stupidly speculative story – which turned out to be totally untrue because he never did settle down with her – and finally my breathing slowed and I calmly put the paper back where I found it. Then I went home and told Christian my news.

I take a deep breath as the memory of all of this comes back to me now.

‘When’s he coming to stay again?’ Dad asks casually.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You should call him, invite him again. He can stay with us next time.’

‘Mmm, maybe.’

My dad turns the music back up before I leave the room.

My parents’ love affair with Johnny takes a nosedive a week later when there’s a picture of him looking wasted in one of the papers.

‘He’s looking a bit the worse for wear,’ my dad sniffs. ‘Who’s this lass, here?’ He points to Dana, who’s dressed all in black and is hanging off Johnny with her arm around his neck. Her dark eye make-up looks smudged – maybe the panda-bear look is fashionable these days.

‘Dana Reed,’ I explain unhappily. ‘She’s his girlfriend.’

‘I didn’t know he had a girlfriend,’ my mum says.

‘I did tell you about her,’ I say.

‘No, you didn’t,’ she bats back.

‘I’m sure I did.’

‘You didn’t,’ she insists. Oh, I give up. ‘Well, that’s a shame,’ she says, putting the paper back on the table with disgust. My dad picks it up again and brings it closer to his face to study it.

‘She’s quite a looker, isn’t she?’ he muses.

My mum snatches the paper back. ‘Too much make-up,’ she decides.

‘I thought he wasn’t supposed to be drinking anymore?’ Dad chips in.

‘I’m not his keeper. I can’t force him not to drink,’ I say.

‘You managed to stop him when he was here,’ my dad says.

‘That was different.’

‘When’s he coming to stay again?’

‘I don’t know, Dad . . .’

Two days later there’s another story about him. Another party, another picture of him looking wasted on the arm of Dana Reed. The press speculate it’s only a matter of time before he ends up back in rehab.

‘Have you spoken to him yet?’ Dad demands to know.

‘No,’ I say firmly.

‘I think you should call him, give him a revving.’

‘What he does with his life is his own business,’ I reply, trying to keep calm. The truth is, I’m feeling sick again.

‘He’s the father of your son,’ Dad barks crossly. ‘His life is your business, now.’

‘I don’t want to talk about this in front of Barney,’ I reply as an excuse. I take my son and go outside to the garden.

Dad slaps a different newspaper in front of me at breakfast the following day. He jabs his finger at a small story in the gossip column. Tensing up, I scan the words and discover Johnny and Dana took an impromptu dip in a pool at an after-show party for a hot new band, and this was after doing seven shots of whisky in a row.

‘This sort of behaviour is not on.’ My mum pulls a face. ‘You should talk to him about it.’

‘You don’t know Johnny very well if you think I can do that,’ I reply wryly, trying to ignore my churning stomach.

‘Have you heard from him?’ Dad chips in.

‘Not since you last asked me about it,’ I reply, putting the paper back on the table.

‘I hope we’re not going to be greeted with a story like this every day,’ my mum says.

‘Don’t read the tabloids. That’s what I’ve learned to do.’ I continue to eat my Coco Pops and try to pretend that all this doesn’t bother me.

‘We can’t not read the papers,’ my dad scoffs.

‘You can
not
read the tabloids,’ I reply, raising my eyebrows. ‘You never used to.’

They’ve been buying them these last few weeks. It’s not hard to guess why.

‘I like the tabloids,’ Mum says. ‘They’re a bit of fun.’

I glance down at the paper on the table. This doesn’t feel like fun to me.

That night I try calling Christian again. He doesn’t answer.

  Chapter 24  

‘I don’t remember these roads,’ Johnny says from the driver’s seat.

It’s the end of September and we’ve arranged to go away on a trip together, just the three of us. My parents weren’t at all happy with the idea of Barney and me going off with Johnny alone, and they made their concerns known when there was another story about him in the papers, but I was insistent. Barney needs to spend some time with his dad. His real dad. And who knows where Johnny’s crazy life will take him in the months and years to come. We have to make the most of our time when he’s not touring or working or doing God knows what while we still have it.