Chapter 29
29
FEbrUARY 1991 – HONG KONG
Lisa
‘Any word from Moira yet?’ Lisa asked, as she lay on her bed popping grapes in her mouth.
Lying across the end of her bed, Nate took a sip of his beer. ‘Nope. And I’m trying not to open that wound, so let’s just skip right past that and change the subject. Can we talk about how I’ve known you for a year and I’ve never seen you eat fruit?’
Lisa flicked a grape in his direction, and he caught it with one hand, then put it in his mouth, laughing.
It was good to see him smile, because he hadn’t been doing much of that lately, not since Moira had done a runner. Lisa loved them both, so it was hard to take sides on this. All she knew was that it tore Moira up to leave Nate, because she loved him. She’d left Lisa a note with her home address, ‘so that they’d never lose touch,’ it said, but it also asked her not to share it with Nate until Moira knew whether she was coming back in a week, or a month, or a year. Lisa had already decided that she would drop her a card when she got home to tell her about the baby. Carina was long gone too – moved out the morning after she got engaged and was now on holiday somewhere in Singapore being the glamorous rich chick she’d always been on the inside. Even now that they were both gone, Lisa still meant what she’d said a couple of weeks ago, on that last performance at the bar. Along with Nate, Moira and Carina were the best friends she’d ever known. At school, she’d been the kid whose mum had died of an overdose. Who didn’t have a dad. Whose granny had to raise her. And a couple of those kids were fecking merciless. That’s why she’d spent most of her teenage years in her room, with music that sang to her, took her mind off a world that – with the exception of her lovely gran – made her feel like crap. Nate, Moira and Carina hadn’t treated her like that though. Someone once told her that the best thing about being an expat was that you could be anyone you wanted to be, and no one knew any different. Her friends hadn’t judged her on her past, they’d just accepted her as she was and loved her anyway. They hadn’t cared about her flaws, and they’d never pushed her to give more than she was able to. They’d supported her, even when she was a fecking mess, which, let’s be honest, was often. They were her first true mates, and now that Moira was gone and Carina had quit the bar and moved into Spencer’s swanky apartment, she’d miss having them in her life. And she’d miss the guy that was lying on the end of her bed popping another of her grapes in his mouth.
‘I suppose you’re still set on leaving me too?’ Nate said.
Without thinking, Lisa put her hand on her stomach as she answered. There was no bump there yet. When she’d first realised she was pregnant, she’d tried to work out her dates and she reckoned she was about ten weeks gone now. Ten weeks. No time at all. And yet it already felt like forever.
‘I’m sorry. I have to. For me and for the baby.’ Her hand was still trailing back and forward across her non-existent bump. She’d told Nate about the baby the night after Moira and Carina left, because she wanted him to understand why she wasn’t drowning her sorrows in a vat of Jack Daniels. He hadn’t judged. Hadn’t criticised. ‘The dad?’ he’d asked but they’d both known the answer to that.
‘Messed up as this sounds, I have no idea,’ she’d admitted. There had been way too many men, way too many risks, way too many nights when she couldn’t remember what happened. Way too many nights when she hadn’t cared about her own safety or her own life, because what did it matter? She had no family to miss her when she was gone. Now, she wasn’t proud of that, but it was too late to go back and change it. All she could do was make it different from here on.
That’s why she was sitting here tonight with Nate, instead of out raising hell and life had never felt so right.
How could she put into words how happy she’d been for the last month? Since the day her gran died, she’d had no family, no-one to belong to, nothing, except a deep void of sadness in her soul, one that no amount of alcohol or men had filled. And God knows, she’d tried. Drinking had been the only way she’d been able to block out the loneliness of having no one on this earth who loved her, who really knew her, who needed her, who cared if she was alive or dead. And the men… the physical stuff was a distraction. Just for that moment, that hour, that night, she didn’t feel alone, until she woke up in the morning and hated herself for settling for some bloke she didn’t even know. And so she drank, to numb that disgust… and on and on that cycle had gone, until there had been a reason to break it.
Because now… there was a baby. And her baby needed its mother. Needed her . For the first time in a long time, she had something to look forward to. That’s why she’d changed everything. No booze. No cigarettes. No drugs. No men. She’d cleaned up her room so that she was living in a healthy environment. The reason she’d known what changes to make was because she’d seen the other side of it. When she’d been a child her mum had been a mess, her life ruled by drugs and alcohol, both substances far more important to her than the daughter who loved her, the little girl who’d been devastated when the drugs killed her. She would never let her child experience that pain, the fear of waking up every morning, not knowing if her mother would be sober or wasted, calm or raging, loving or dismissive, alive or dead. She was going to create the kind of childhood the other kids at school had – one where they never had to worry because everything was always the same: their worlds were calm, organised, safe, secure, protected. That was the life she was going to give this child.
And perhaps Nate deserved an explanation about that.
‘Did I ever tell you about my mother?’ she said, surprising herself by talking about the one subject that she’d avoided her whole life.
‘Only that she was dead,’ he said, and she saw the genuine interest on his face. He’d asked her about her family before and she’d shut the subject down.
‘She was an addict. Coke. Weed. Booze. Anything she could get her hands on. Died of a heroin overdose when I was eight and left me to be brought up by my gran.’
‘The one who passed away a few years ago?’
She’d forgotten he knew that detail. He’d walked into her room one morning when she was listening to her gran’s voicemail recording, and she’d been caught off guard and explained what it was. He’d hugged her, but she’d shrugged it off. Sympathy was the worst. It was the thing that should make you feel so much better, yet it always made her heart ache just a little bit more.
‘Yes, that was her. She was nothing like my mother though. My mum partied, got wasted, would bring home all sorts of guys to our house…’ If he recognised a pattern, he was kind enough not to say it. ‘It was a tiny village and that kind of thing didn’t go on there – she was the only addict most of them knew and they were horrified by her. Thing was, so was I. If she showed up at school, it was to embarrass me, or scream at another parent, or to cry because another man had fucked her over. I was terrified every day of my life with her and when she died…’
She felt her voice begin to crack, and cleared her throat, refusing to shed another tear for the hell they’d gone through. She tried to start again. ‘I’ve never said this aloud to anyone before, but when she died, all I could think about was that I wouldn’t be scared any more. I was relieved that she was gone. And I know that makes me the worst person in the world, but it’s true.’
‘It doesn’t,’ he said, softly. ‘All it makes you is a scared little girl who wanted the pain to stop.’
‘Maybe.’ She couldn’t quite give herself that grace. All she could do was look forward. ‘That’s why I’m going to be different. I can’t bring a baby into this life here – me out every night and clubbing until dawn. It deserves better. That’s why I need to go back to Ireland. I’ve given the tenants in my gran’s house notice, so that I can go home, get a normal job, be a normal mum, with a normal life, and I can break the cycle. Sure, there’ll be the older ones in the village who’ll judge me for being a single mother – they’re the ones who’ll be praying for my soul on a Sunday while turning their noses up at me in the street every other day – but I couldn’t care less. All that matters is that I’m going to take care of this child so well and love it so much. I’ll protect it from all the shit I’ve dealt with, and it’ll never know that kind of pain. My kid will never see what I’ve seen, I promise you, and I’m going to make sure nothing bad every happens to it.’
‘You won’t miss singing? That’s a pretty big love to give up.’
‘I will. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, but I’m going to have another kind of love to take its place.’
He pushed himself up on one elbow, so he was facing her. ‘Lisa Dixon, in case I forget to tell you,’ he began, and she could hear the emotion in his voice too, even when he added, ‘Or, you know, you do a runner like my girlfriend…’ That made her smile. ‘You’re a pretty fucking incredible human being.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m not. But I’m going to try.’
There had been something freeing in sharing all this with him, but predictably, the self-consciousness, insecurities and habits of a lifetime were beginning to make her chest flutter, so she diverted the focus back on to him. One painfully brutal revelation was more than enough for one night. ‘Anyway, that’s my sad story over and now you know. So let’s talk about your fuck-up of a life,’ she teased him, switching the mood. ‘What are you going to do next?’
Lisa wasn’t sure how long after that she fell asleep. All she knew was that when she woke up, the bedside lamp was still on, Nate was sleeping soundly on the end of the bed… and an excruciating pain was stretching across her stomach, twisting it with such violent fury that she gasped and buckled over where she lay.
‘Nate! Nate!’ she sobbed, pain taking her breath away. ‘Nate, please wake up. Help me. Help me! There’s something wrong with the baby.’