CHAPTER EIGHT - ALEC
“I’m pregnant.”
Fokken perfect. Just fokken perfect, man. That’s exactly what I fokken need right now. I know precisely how to deal with Death. But new life? Eish, man. And that this is happening now, just when Christine…
“Where are you going?” Eliza asks.
“Out,” I tell her, shrugging on my jacket. The rain has finally stopped.
She smirks at me in a way that I have seen her smirk before. It’s a manner that suggests she thinks she knows me better than I know myself. “How novel and very non-communicatively masculine of you,” she says, with a not insignificant amount of condescension.
I spin to face her. “Is there something you need from me that I’m not giving you right now?”
“My God. Alec van den Berg. If someone walked in on us and didn’t know better, they might think we’re in a… oh, shit, what’s the word? Ah, that’s right… a relationship.”
“What do you want?” I yell. Which I do not mean to do. She doesn’t cower or retreat. Her smile just widens. She walks toward me, slowly, as she speaks.
“You were the one who summoned me here. Do you remember that? You called me here to tend to you while you healed. And hid.”
“I’m not fokken hiding.”
“You’re not? Oh. Well, you see, I assumed that once your wounds closed and your ribs mended themselves and all that, you’d be back off into the world. But you’re not. You’re still here with me. Which, you’ll pardon my confusion, feels like hiding.”
She’s almost to where I’m standing now. I wonder if she thinks I’m going to cower or retreat, myself. She can’t possibly. She knows me too well. But lest there be any confusion, I step in toward her now, closing off almost all the space between us.
“You don’t think it’s probably just,” I begin, “that I’m still here because I like being able to fuck someone in the ass whenever I feel like it? Without having to give a shit about what they want? Because that’s what this is for me. And when seen through that prism, I’d be a daft fokker to leave until I grow bored. And I ain’t. Fokken. Bored. Yet.”
I stare down into her eyes, unblinking. She returns my stare, equally unflinching. This is the point where most others might turn and run, or slap my face, or scream at me, or any other of a dozen clichéd responses, but she is not most others.
So I grab her by the cheeks with one hand and force my lips onto hers. She doesn’t resist, just kisses me back, grabbing my balls as she does. With my other hand, I reach around and find her ass. She’s now wearing a light Spring dress and as my hand gathers the fabric into a bundle, I discover that she’s not wearing underwear. My palm curves in between her legs and my middle finger slips inside her. She gasps, grabs my crotch tighter, and bites my lip.
Spinning her around, I lift her dress, slap her ass—hard—and throw her forward where she collapses at the waist over the Roman arm of the seventeenth-century tufted sofa. And it is at that moment that I stop. Stop everything. Stop moving toward her, stop feeling, stop breathing, stop everything.
Seeing her belly hit the grand, puffy arm of the chaise, I can’t prevent my mind from landing on this new knowledge I have been given. There is a child growing inside her.
“How do you fokken know it’s mine?”
“Well, luv, I’m no midwife, but you’re the only person who’s come inside me in the last six months.”
“How long have you known?”
“Does it matter?”
“Why didn’t you tell me right away?”
“Is that a real question?”
She’s right, of course. I know why.
God fokken damn everyone and everything straight to Hell.
But, shit. Maybe God already has. And we’re all already there.
She looks back at me over her shoulder. “What’s happened? Why did you stop? You didn’t suddenly find yourself bored, did you, pet?” She stands up, flattening her dress down. She faces me. “You know, Alec, it’s not as if I expected you to pop a bottle of champagne and hand out cigars to all your mates…” She pauses. “Come to think of it, you don’t really have any mates to hand cigars to, do you?” She sighs. Her shoulders rise and fall. “But I thought you might at least show something resembling, oh, I don’t know, civility.”
“How am I not being civil?”
“I don’t know how they do things in Joburg, luv, but in Kensington, we don’t imply that the mothers of our children are just there to be fucked in the arse until we tire of fucking them.”
“Yeah, well, you ain’t from Kensington, are you now?”
“It may not be where I’m from, babe. But it’s where I’m at. And I got there by learning to do for myself. Not because I was fucking born into it with a silver bleeding spoon in my mouth. So maybe you’d rather save the ‘crazy Alec doesn’t care about anything’ routine for someone who doesn’t know all your bullshit quite so well.”
I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know why she’s pushing my buttons. I don’t know why I’m still standing here, letting her. I should be gone. Off finding Christine and tending to her. Making up for… everything. And Danny. Fok, man. I miss Danny. It’s moments like this, when I find myself alone with a woman, that I miss Danny the most.
I have all the fokken money a person could want. All the power in the goddamn universe, man, and yet here I find myself. Feeling completely untethered and adrift about what to do next. So I ask a modified version of a previously asked question. “What is it that you want from me?”
She steps back. Away. And sits on the puffy, Roman arm. “Why don’t you ask what you actually want to know?”
“I thought I was.”
“What you actually want to know is… do I expect anything from you? Money. Time. Attention. For you to be a bloody father to this kid.”
“Yeah, all right. So. Do you?” She cocks her head to the left and then the right. Says nothing. “Because I can’t,” I say.
“I know.”
“Do you?” I ask. She nods. “Do you know why?” She nods again. “Tell me.”
“Alec—”
“Fokken tell me!”
She draws in a long breath, tilts her head back, closes her eyes. She relaxes her neck and shoulders again, lowers her head, opens her eyes to look at me, and says, “Because… I don’t fit.”
“Fit? Fok does that mean? Don’t fit?”
“Into the geometry of your life, my sweet.”
She stands and rounds the sofa to sit on it properly. She tosses aside a throw pillow and plops down onto the plush cushions of the settee. I wince as she does it. It’s goddamn insane, man, but now that I know she’s carrying a baby, everything she does physically causes me to feel a pang of anxiety. Because little babies growing inside their mother’s tummies are fragile things. I don’t know that I ever considered it much. Before. I’ve never been much of one to think about when life begins or what’s right and what’s wrong or any of that kak.
To my mind, we’re all just a bunch of cells and blood vessels and bones and that. In that regard, I don’t think anyone is anymore special that anyone else or that anyone has a right to life or a right to death any more than anyone else. We all begin and we all end. That’s the only thing that’s certain. How long one cheats the inevitability of their end is what makes someone who they are. Or, at least, that’s how I see it.
Probably why it shocked me so, back when my mother and father were killed. My father always struck me as the type of oke who would live forever.
But my point is, I ain’t precious about life. I haven’t taken as many lives as some, but I’ve taken enough to have become inured to the idea that it matters all that much. But this… this is a baby inside a person I’ve also been inside of and that baby is partially mine. And that… that is a different matter altogether.
“What do you mean ‘the geometry of my life?’ Fok are you talking about, man?”
She doesn’t look at me. She just stares ahead at the giant tapestry hanging on the wall in front of her. As if she’s studying it. It’s a battle of some kind. Some long-dead British king leading troops to their slaughter, it looks like. Has always seemed to me that the English are strangely keen to document battles they have lost.
“That piece on your back…”
“What piece?”
“The tattoo.”
“What about it?”
“It only has three sides.”
“Yeah. It’s a fokken triangle. That’s what a fokken triangle is.”
She turns her head to me. “But that’s not all it is. It’s you. It’s Danny. It’s Christine. There’s no room for anyone else. That’s what I mean, my dear.”
I stare at her. My chest heaves. I feel hot suddenly. “So what are you saying? You want me to add a fokken line to it? Change the dimensions somehow?”
“No,” she says, slowly, as if she’s debating it with herself but still stands by the answer. “No… that’s not what I’m saying at all. Honestly, I don’t think I’d actually like it much if I was drawn into your pattern. Fuckin’ hell, mate, I know my brothers would lose their blinking Chinese blinds.” She means ‘minds.’ And although the natural dialect that slips out is authentic, the Cockney rhyming slang is just as much affected as the posh, Queen’s English that she uses the rest of the time.
I sometimes think that she’s been playing a character for so long, she occasionally has to fumble around trying to find the real her.
I find it challenging that I am compelled to ask the question a third time: “So, then, what is it? That you want?”
She shrugs. It makes her look impish and younger than she is. “I dunno, luv. I suppose, what with us being here for as long as we seem to be stashed away, you should just be aware. In the event that I, you know, start to give birth or anything.”
“Stop being so goddamn clever!” I bellow.
She breathes out. Closes her eyes. “I’m sorry. Truly, I am. I’m just taking the piss.” She stands and walks to me again. Carefully this time. “Look, Alec, I just thought you should know. I don’t expect anything from you. All right? I really don’t. I don’t even plan to tell the boys it’s yours.”
“Your brothers?”
She nods. “They’ll want to kill you. But then you’ll likely wind up killing them because you have endless resources and a private army and all that tosh”—she rolls her eyes—“and that would be terribly sad for everyone. So, I figure, best to just avoid the whole thing altogether.”
I can feel my brow furrow as I stare at her. “So you’re definitely going to have it?”
“I am. I’ve decided. And truth be told… that’s why I’m only just telling you now.”
“There was a point where you were considering not having it?”
She nods. “But then I thought”—she reaches up and strokes my cheek—“God forbid you should ever find out that happened. God forbid. Because who knows what daft fucking thing you might go and do then? Fragile as you are.”
I grab her wrist and pull her hand from my face. “Don’t you suggest that this is some grand act of generosity on your part.”
“All right. Fine, Alec. I won’t. Maybe… maybe it’s just that I want to have a baby.” She bows her head slightly and casts her eyes upward, looking at me intensely. “And maybe the real reason I debated saying anything is because I would never, in a million bloody years, luv, want that baby to be raised by you.”
I can feel myself expanding. I can feel time slowing and the air getting thick. I can feel my fists balling. And so, before I can feel anything else…
I wrap my coat around me, turn on my heels, and walk out the door.