Chapter 11 Damon
Damon
This clinic pulsates with the essence of life and what could be, yet I remain consumed by death and that boy and whatever the hell has been. I rub my thumb against a tattoo of a semicolon on my wrist, a habit I’ve developed when I’m distracted, like when I play with my absent wedding ring.
Three days have passed since the boy last appeared to me, and I’m on tenterhooks, awaiting his return.
I still haven’t mentioned it to Melissa.
She’d only tell me what I already know, that I’m imagining him.
But in the moments the lad is here, he feels so very, very real.
Like if I stretched out my hand, I could touch him.
And as much as I want to believe that, even if he existed and his death is real, it has nothing to do with me – I can’t shake how I felt as I was kneeling by his side.
Like I wanted him dead.
Thinking those words sets me thrumming in my chair. I concentrate on trying to take deep, silent breaths that Melissa and Adrienne can’t hear. Stay calm and get this morning over with.
Our appointment at the clinic is for a mandatory counselling session to ensure none of us are being coerced and that we all understand the journey we’re about to embark upon. It’s a formality, because we are all on the same page.
It’s been eight months since Melissa and Adrienne first approached me out of the blue over dinner at their house, to ask if I’d consider co-parenting a child with them.
Melissa and I had miscarried our baby not long before we split up.
I was devastated by losing the opportunity to become a dad – the father I never had – but it was hard to gauge how that loss affected Melissa because she never talked about it.
Still hasn’t. But I think it frightened her off trying to conceive again.
Adrienne, however, had always wanted to experience pregnancy.
And since a uterine fibroid condition meant she’d be less likely to conceive without the help of IVF, and neither wanted to pick an anonymous sperm donor from a catalogue, they turned to me.
‘You can have as little or as much involvement with the child as you feel comfortable with,’ Melissa was quick to establish. ‘All we’d ask is that you don’t dip in and out of their life. Kids need consistency.’
She knows I’m not that kind of man. I have only mental snapshots of my dad, at best an irregular presence throughout my childhood.
Stolen moments here and there, more absent than present.
Never a proper explanation of where he was or why he’d gone.
I will never understand why, how, any parent would play little to no part in their child’s life.
When they first asked me, I was afire with the chance to make that right in our child’s life.
They suggested I take some time to consider their offer, but I agreed to it there and then.
Which is why we are here today for the next stage in our journey. The girls have saved hard and chosen to go private rather than wait on an NHS-funded list for the next two years. Once we get the go-ahead, STI and genetic tests will follow, before checks to see if my sperm is fit for purpose.
By the time the clinic’s receptionist invites us to follow her up a narrow set of stairs, I’m calm again.
But it isn’t to last. Because the dead boy has reappeared.
And I’m transfixed by him. His face is contorted in pain, his black mouth wide open.
I want to point to him, shout what I’m seeing to the receptionist, Melissa and Adrienne, but I hold back because I know this is not real.
I don’t see dead people, I imagine them.
I reanimate them. His pleading eyes bore holes into mine; his arms are outstretched as if he’s begging me to help him.
And then he moves towards me, so close that I see my reflection in his corneas.
Only it’s not me here, now, in this room; it’s me kneeling over him, watching and waiting for him to die.
‘No!’ I yell at the top of my voice.
The boy suddenly vanishes and I spit out an apology as I hurry into a nearby bathroom where I’m sick into a basin. Then I take deep breaths and rinse my mouth out with cold tap water.
I know the version I saw of him when I was drowning was real.
And I know the version I’ve just seen of him is imagined.
But for the sake of my own sanity, I need to discover once and for all who he is and what happened to him – alive or dead.
Only then might he leave me in peace. And until that happens, I fear he will continue edging me towards the point at which I no longer have any sense of what is real and what isn’t.
Madness, I believe that’s called.