The Other Life of Charlotte Evans Read online

  The wrong answer. Fine and nice weren’t in Lissa’s vocabulary, too ordinary when she could use words like spectacular and brilliant. ‘No, you’re not. Is it me? I’m sorry. Did you feel like I left you out of things? Because I didn’t mean to. To be honest I feel a bit pulled in all directions. I’m the one with the problems but I feel like I have to tiptoe around people – my mum mainly, and Ben – just so I don’t upset anyone.’

  ‘No. I was pulling your leg. You’re entitled to privacy. We all are. Forget it.’ But the tone was wrong. Something was wrong.

  ‘So, what’s going on? How’s Ryan?’

  After that long-ago phone call and Lissa’s description of the sexy DJ, Charlotte expected her friend to gush. She didn’t. She looked sheepish. And uncharacteristically scared. ‘Dunno. He’s actually very cool and everything, but he was talking exclusivity and I’m not sure I can commit to that.’

  Situation normal then. Lissa was just being Lissa with a little dash of drama. Charlotte started to relax. ‘At some point you are allowed to ditch the single-girl tag and actually like someone enough to spend two dates with them. Is this that guy? Is he nice enough for a second chance? A third?’

  ‘I have seen him a couple of times, to be honest.’ Lissa’s hands were still trembling and now she was starting to fidget in her seat.

  ‘Ooh, you never said a word. Now who’s got the secrets?’ Charlotte tried to make it sound funny instead of mirroring the tight pain in her chest because she’d clearly been too concerned about her own life and stepped out of the loop of her friend’s.

  ‘I tried to tell you. But it didn’t seem fair to be all gung-ho about a sex life when you were going through shit. And it’s not as if… I mean… I can’t commit to dating anyone. I think… it’s… oh, it’s nothing.’ The trembling hands shot up, hit the glass, which spiralled across the table, covering Charlotte in a pretty decent chardonnay. ‘Shit. Shit. Sorry.’

  Lissa jumped up, ran to the bar, came back with a dishcloth and a fresh glass of wine, and started to dab at the drips falling from the tabletop. ‘Sorry. Clumsy. Sorry.’

  ‘I’m fine. It’s fine. Stop it. STOP IT! SIT.’ Charlotte stood, stared her friend back to sitting. Took the cloth, wiped down her own jeans and top, then sat down. She’d rarely… in fact never… had to speak to Lissa like that. She was usually so together, so very cool and collected. Whatever was bothering her was possibly not as dramatic as a breast lump or meeting a birth mother for the first time, but it was bothering Lissa, right to the core. Charlotte had had her fill of her own drama and owed it to her friend to put her own problems aside. ‘Right. Talk. What is it? There’s something wrong and you’re making me nervous.’

  Lissa shook her head. Opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it. Shrugged.

  Scary. This was so unlike her. Maybe it was as big and dramatic as finding a birth mother or a lump. What the hell could be worse than that? Charlotte’s own hand shook as she patted her friend’s. ‘Whatever it is, we’ll fix it. You’ll be fine. I promise. Whatever it is… what is it? What’s the matter? Oh my God, you’re crying? Now I am really scared.’

  A tear slid down Lissa’s cheek and she swiped it away as if it were an irritating fly. Crying didn’t happen to Lissa either. ‘I missed my period.’

  ‘Oh.’ Okay, breathe.

  ‘Yep. Oh, indeed.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything bad. Could it be stress? Do you need to take some time out? I can give you sick leave, you know that. No problem.’

  ‘No. It’s not stress… well, it probably is now I haven’t had a period. And you know me, regular as clockwork. The Pill’s been my friend for a long time but… something’s not right.’ Lissa ran her palms across her boobs the way Charlotte had for the last few weeks… but not for the same reason. Nowhere near. ‘My boobs are still tender and no period happened. You remember at the dress fitting I was all hormonal? Well, I still am. Plus, I’m starving and heaving at the same time.’

  ‘So, you think you are pregnant.’ Of course she did. There couldn’t be any other explanation. ‘I mean… you’ve had sex, right? Recently?’ Unlike me.

  ‘Yep. Ryan. A couple of times. But I am on the Pill.’

  ‘It’s not one hundred per cent safe, you know that. No condom?’

  ‘I can’t remember the first time very well – we were pretty fresh. Okay, we were drunk. But I don’t think we used anything. Aaargh. I don’t know. Let this be a lesson, Charlie… don’t drink and sex. Things can get messy.’

  Thank God for the simplicity of married life. Although, things had become a little less simple recently. Sex hadn’t been high on the agenda and they’d fallen out of the habit. Which was no one’s fault, it was just a reaction to the stress. Things would get better.

  They would. They couldn’t start married life with a sketchy sex habit. ‘Can Ryan remember? He must know, surely?’

  Lissa’s mouth turned up at one corner. ‘I haven’t asked him. I haven’t mentioned anything because I didn’t want to encourage him. I think he likes me. A bit too much.’

  ‘Poor deluded man.’ It was a poor attempt at a joke, but it did raise a smile.

  ‘I know. He’ll get over it. But I don’t want him to know, or anyone… promise me you won’t say a word? Not even to Ben.’

  Another secret. They were coming thick and fast at the moment. ‘Of course I won’t. Don’t be silly. But it could be anything, right?’

  ‘I love your optimism. But I’d had that horrible stomach bug the week before – dodgy bloody Mammoth burgers. Maybe that did something to my Pill?’ Lissa’s head hung. She looked so fed-up Charlotte just wanted to bundle her into a hug, which was a bit difficult across the table, so she just tipped her friend’s chin up and looked her straight in the eyes.

  ‘Okay. There are so many things I should say to you right now about unprotected sex, but I love you, so I won’t. And you know all of it already. Have you done a test?’

  Lissa shook her head out of Charlotte’s fingers and smoothed down her sweatshirt, nervously running her hand across her belly. ‘No. I’m waiting.’

  ‘What for?’

  Lissa shrugged again, looking as if all her vibrancy had been sucked out of her. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Until it all goes away.’

  Like my mum. Carol. A shiver of something she couldn’t describe ran down Charlotte’s back. Cold. Mixed up.

  Be positive. ‘You can’t keep ignoring it. If you are pregnant you’ll need to make some decisions. This isn’t like you, missy. You usually meet problems head-on.’ Charlotte dipped her head to look Lissa in the eye, the cold around her washed away by a rush of affection for her friend. ‘It’ll be okay. You’ll be fine. Remember what you said before – we’re fighters.’

  More tears swam in Lissa’s eyes. ‘I don’t want a baby.’

  ‘I know.’ Charlotte’s heart squeezed.

  ‘I don’t like them.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And I don’t want to be fat.’ Lissa smiled. She looked all kinds of sad. ‘Yeah. I know. Selfish. Very, very selfish. But that’s me and I don’t want to feel bad about being me. I don’t want to grow up, Charlie. It sucks. I like doing my own thing.’

  Charlie tried to look for some more positives, but thinking of Lissa with a baby, she couldn’t find many. ‘But you’d be growing a whole new life. That’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. That whole life? That’s someone to be responsible for. To be grown-up for. I can’t even look after myself. I don’t understand children. You’ve seen me with the Toddler Tap group – I don’t know what to say to them and half the time I want to scream why the hell can’t you count to four? What’s wrong with you? I don’t have an ounce of patience and I don’t talk their language. Not even a little bit.’ Lissa took a breath that shuddered through her body. ‘And I can’t backpack round the world with a baby.’

  The barman came over and took away the empty glasses and brought two more full ones. It was a lot to drink for a Saturday aftern
oon. But they needed it after this. It had been a day full of huge emotions. They sat, not speaking, letting things sink in. The chances of Lissa ever wanting this baby were pretty slim. Charlotte had to admit this was a problem. ‘Are you thinking you might get rid of it?’

  Lissa sighed. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t know if I could. I was thinking… maybe…maybe…’ She gave Charlotte an unsure smile. ‘…Adoption.’

  ‘Oh no. No.’ Having watched Charlotte walk on eggshells over the years, known her fears and seen her manage Eileen’s emotions, how could Lissa even think adoption was an option? Charlotte gasped then realised she needed to calm down – this wasn’t her life they were talking about. ‘I mean… well, you know what I went through… all those doubts and worries.’

  ‘Still going through them really, right? That’s what today was about, underneath it all. And yeah, we’ve played the Guess Your Heritage game so many times, and to me it was a bit of daydreaming, but to you it’s not a game at all. I also know you still wonder whether Eileen thinks she made a mistake. But I can tell you, categorically, she did not.’

  But Carol might have. Charlotte thought about the café and the stilted conversation and twenty-odd years of wondering. The feeling of loss that seemed to be there more now than ever before and the burning need to know. To meet. To fit a lifetime into an hour and failing. And now, the uncertainty of how to proceed with someone she should, given the natural order of things, have a relaxed, happy relationship with.

  Sure, many adoptees had happy lives and bore no grudges at all against their birth mother, but many were left with psychological scars. Some adoptees went on to adopt or foster, having had such positive experiences they wanted to give others the chances they’d been given. But often it was a gamble.

  Was Lissa’s reaction the way Carol had reacted? Had she thought only of how much she wanted to get rid of this thing inside her? Lissa knew she might regret that, surely? And how much hurt she could cause. But, on the flipside, it could be a chance for a happier upbringing for the kid. Possibly.

  This wasn’t Charlotte’s life, none of this was about her, so she had to keep her own emotions out of it and support Lissa in whatever she chose to do. ‘Okay, so don’t make any rash decisions about anything until you know for sure either way.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that.’ Lissa straightened up, grabbed the glass by the stem and gulped like a parched man in a desert. ‘Yes. Let’s not worry about it. I’ll be fine. I’ll work it out.’

  ‘Should you be drinking that?’ Charlotte pointed to the wine glass. Half full.

  ‘What? In my condition?’ Lissa’s eyes widened as she shuddered once more. ‘Probably not. But save the lecture, Charlie. I’m on the edge here and I need this. I haven’t touched a drop since the moment I realised, until now. Believe me, that was hard. It’s all bloody hard.’

  Sitting around getting drunk wasn’t a solution. They needed to do something. A plan. Charlotte suddenly had a thought. ‘Okay. Right. Well, neither of us has the information we want and there’s an easy fix involving a little cash and a couple of needles.’

  Finally a smile broke out on Lissa’s face as she teased, ‘You want to do… drugs? You? Charlotte Evans? The just say no advocate? Isn’t the alcohol bad enough?’

  It felt good to be laughing even if it was black humour. ‘You are seriously sick, woman. No, no drugs involved. We’ll get blood tests done and get some answers. Then we can plan.’

  ‘I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You can’t hide from it for ever.’ Someone had to be the grown-up here and it clearly wasn’t going to be Lissa. Charlotte owed her friend so much for all the support she’d given her over the years, for the tight friendship they had, for never ever judging her. ‘We’ll go together to that private clinic Dr Carter told me about. No one will know us. Let’s do it. Let’s go. Then we’ll both get some answers. You want to know if you’re pregnant and I want to know about my genes.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to just ask your birth mum? That’s the plan, right?’ Typical Lissa to remember that.

  ‘And how long will that take? It took twenty-five years to find her. Who knows when we’ll get together again and whether I’ll feel like I can even ask her, anyway. That’s a very intimate conversation and we’re not ready for that yet. We only just managed a coffee and hello, how are you?’

  ‘But won’t Ben be pissed off? Didn’t you tell him you’d wait until after the wedding?’

  Ah. Yes. That.

  Charlotte sighed. Tried to make sense of the thoughts swirling in her head, weighed up her options, looked at her friend, who was in the worst state she’d been in for a while. Their friendship had spanned decades and had ebbed and flowed between the helper and the helped, and in the middle of all that there’d been fun and laughter, shared secrets, shared hopes and a multitude of tears over roles missed out on, broken bones, illnesses and break-ups. Always, always, they’d fought everything together. So, helping Lissa would be the only possible thing she could do, and finding some things out for herself was just a side effect, really.

  Besides, there were some things she could just keep to herself. She could find out the DNA information then tell Ben later, once they were married. Or never. More than likely she’d find nothing much out at all, just that she was descended from Africans and Nordics or whatever. A quarter Italian with some Asian influence from way back when. A tendency to weight-gain perhaps, because that had been a constant struggle in her professional life. High cholesterol maybe. A hodgepodge of history, like most people these days, with nothing startling or even interesting.

  But deep down in her heart she knew going for the test right now was taking a step in the wrong direction as far as relations with her boyfriend were concerned, and that she was simply justifying it with altruism. There were more secrets now. Ones she kept from her mum. One from her best friend. And now one from her fiancé. Was there no end to it?

  If Ben knew she was even thinking of this he’d tell her to wait. To save money. To focus on the wedding. To not worry about things she couldn’t change and that she was perfect regardless of any haematology result.

  But she didn’t want to wait. She wanted to know who she was. More so now she’d met the woman who’d given her away. ‘Ben thinks I’m spending way too much time thinking about all this. He wasn’t keen on me finding Carol, so he definitely won’t be keen on me getting a test. But what he doesn’t know won’t kill him, right?’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Earth to Charlotte… Hey… are you listening? This is your kind of subject. You should ace this question. TV and films is what you’re usually good at.’ Niamh nudged Charlotte from a reverie she hadn’t realised she’d been in. The sharp dig in her ribs made her blink her mind away from the appointment tomorrow that Lissa had made for them both and brought her back to…

  The pub quiz.

  God. Seemed most of the time these days she was hardly aware of her surroundings. The last few weeks had been a fog and even she had to admit it was starting to affect her life a little more than she’d anticipated. Like right now, when she was supposed to be on their weekly night out with friends and family, her head was somewhere else, wondering. Was Lissa pregnant? What would she do? What would be in Charlotte’s own DNA? What would she find?

  Should she tell Ben what she was going to do?

  No. Because he’d probably try to talk her out of it. And because Lissa had asked her to keep the missed period a secret.

  All around her there was hushed chatter as huddled groups debated the answer to a question she hadn’t heard. Her team’s eyes were all directed at her in frustration, including Ben’s.

  Hot damn, he had an idea where her mind had been and he didn’t seem very happy. He was right; the last thing they needed before a wedding was a family feud – between the bride and groom. She shook her head and determined to focus. ‘Oh God. Sorry. What’s the question again?’

  Niamh sighed thea
trically and whispered across the table, loudly. ‘What was the name of the dance group on Top of the Pops between 1976 and 1981? Gee, I wish Eileen was here – she’d know. She was a little goer, that one, in her youth.’

  Charlotte laughed. That was so far from the truth, except for playing truant that one day. And thank God she had, because otherwise Charlotte wouldn’t have had those parents, and who knew where she’d have ended up. ‘Well, I don’t have a clue. I wasn’t even born in 1981.’

  ‘Me neither, but you know dance-y things. Surely? I mean, if it was a medical question I’m sure Senior Staff Nurse Sonja would know the answer.’ Niamh’s frown hadn’t gone away and Charlotte suspected it had less to do with Charlotte’s birth year and more to do with the fact she’d gone temporarily mentally AWOL.

  Ben leaned back in his chair and stretched his lovely long legs under the table, hands clasped behind his head, a smug look washing over his face. ‘I know.’

  ‘You know something about a dance group from the Dark Ages?’ This was news.

  His hand crept onto her thigh and squeezed. The tension left his eyes as he smiled. ‘Yep. I’m eight years older than you… let’s just say I was an early starter when it came to appreciation of the female form.’

  ‘Ha! You mean, you fancied half of them… whoever they were. Well, tell us then, quick, before the next question.’

  He leaned in across the sticky, beer-stained table. ‘Legs and Co. Or… actually, no… was it Pan’s People? No, it was Legs and Co. Definitely.’

  ‘Okay, clever breeches.’ Niamh didn’t look convinced but wrote down the name anyway. ‘Hush now for the next question. And concentrate. Yes, you, Charlotte – I’m looking at you.’

  ‘Aye aye, Captain.’ Suitably admonished, Charlotte sat up straight and focused, looking round at the group of six in her team. Ben and his two sisters. Niamh’s husband, Dermot. Sonja’s girlfriend, Jaz. The Murphy clan, all with their dark eyes and pale complexions. The ease with which they finished each other’s sentences. The closeness they’d always had – first growing up in Ireland, then each in turn moving to London, sleeping on each other’s couches, making friends with their sibling’s friends until there was a rent-a-crowd on most nights out. They’d welcomed her into the group and she’d immediately felt at ease, but always an outsider because… well, because she wasn’t one of them. Even when she became a Murphy she wouldn’t exactly be one, just wearing a borrowed name.