Baby Be Mine

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.
    ‘You didn’t drive them,’ I remark. ‘You were too trolleyed at the time. Slow down!’ I cry.
    ‘Wicked.’ He chuckles as he takes another corner at breakneck speed. ‘God, I miss this.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Driving around these country lanes. I bloody love it up north.’
    We’re in the Yorkshire Dales, almost at our destination. We’re going to the house where I took Johnny over two and a half years ago – that time when I forced him to go cold turkey. It’s private, secluded and familiar. It’s perfect.
    ‘It looks different to how I remember it,’ he muses a while later, as we reach the cottage at the end of a long dirt track.
    ‘It was the middle of winter then. This is more how I remember it from my childhood.’ I came here with my parents once after my sister had left for university. I was only about ten.
    I look up at the grey-stone two-storey cottage. It’s surrounded by a drystone wall and there’s a green, grassy hill sloping away behind the house. I remember coming out of the cottage one day – the morning after I’d slept with Johnny – to see him sitting at the top, strumming his guitar. That was when he wrote my song. Butterflies swarm through me.
    Johnny retrieves our bags from the boot while I get Barney out of his car seat.
    ‘We’d better make sure we keep the doors closed,’ I say, trying to act normal. ‘We wouldn’t want him falling in that stream in the garden.’
    ‘No,’ Johnny agrees, slamming the boot shut and meeting my eyes over the roof of the car. I force myself to look at my son and smile, trying to ignore the shivery feeling inside.
    Barney and I take the front room facing the track, while Johnny takes the room looking up at the hill. It’s the same way it was two and a half years ago, and there’s no need to change things. We’ve brought our own travel cot so I assemble it while Johnny entertains Barney, and then I trot downstairs to an empty house. I go out through the back door in search of my boys, and then jolt to a stop when I realise I’ve just called them ‘my boys’, like I used to with Christian.
    I take a deep breath and continue on my search. I find them in the garden. The last time we were here it was leafless and muddy. Now the trees are full of leaves which are just starting to turn and it’s beautiful. There’s heather in the garden in gorgeous pinky-purple bloom, and elsewhere pretty white flowers break up the greenery. I inhale deeply and feel at peace for a brief moment. Then I think of Christian again.
    Last week, I had what I thought was a brainwave. I’d totally forgotten that we had a landline in Cucugnan because we hardly ever used it. I found the number in my contacts and called it, feeling both hopeful and fearful. A man answered, and it wasn’t Christian.
    ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, perturbed.
    ‘Who’s this?’ he replied.
    It suddenly dawned on me. ‘Is that you, Jed?’
    ‘Meg?’
    ‘Hi.’ Jed is the friend we rented the house from. ‘Is Christian there?’
    ‘No.’ Jed sounded confused. ‘He went back to the UK. I thought you knew.’
    ‘No.’ My head felt fuzzy.
    ‘Yeah. And I’m, you know, just having a break from all the madness back home before my September rental comes in,’ he explained casually, but I wasn’t really