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If Jenny had been with her she would not have got pregnant, but then there would have been no Adam and that was inconceivable.
She and Jenny could have met on a train to Birmingham when Tom was alive. What would have happened then? Would Tom have acknowledged his son?
Why was she thinking like this? What was the point? The point was the pretence was over. That private part of her life that she hugged so secretly to her had ended that afternoon as she watched Adam pulling Jenny, crazed with grief, from the water.
Adam had been difficult to get to bed. Disturbed and shaken, he had wanted answers and Ruth needed this night to herself before she could give him any. She drank the brandy, let it burn down her throat.
She remembered the heavy feel of the coats on top of them. The excitement of him wanting her and her own overpowering need and desire. She remembered the painful, stinging feel of him entering her; the heady wonder of another body glued warmly to hers and the thrill of his gasp as he climaxed. She felt again the poignant musky smell of sex, the hot rush of semen glutinous and foreign between her thighs…
She had trusted absolutely that the boy who had taken her virginity and shared that tremulous, intimate moment would find out where she lived and call her. Naively, she never doubted it.
He had said, God! What a beautiful girl you are. He had held her body tight to his. No one had ever held her that close, hot skin to hot skin. The foreign but comforting warmth of a male body pressed to hers. Someone touching her. She was unused to touch, new to tenderness, but here was someone of her very own, loving her.
He had taken her face in his hands so gently afterwards and kissed her forehead. ‘I will never forget this evening,’ he had whispered. ‘I’ve got to go now or I’ll miss my lift back to Plymouth, but I’ll call you!’
Ruth had relived that evening a million times while she waited day after day, week after week for a phone call that never came. By the time she finally made herself accept the dreadful truth, that he was not going to call her, that she had been a one-night stand, a ‘wham bam, thank you, ma’am’, she had missed her first period.
It was almost impossible to believe or accept his rejection. How could it have meant nothing to him? What had been an earth-moving moment for her had been a quick fuck for that unknown boy.
Some of the powerlessness and panic of that unbalanced period of her life crept over Ruth now. Terror had made her insentient. With hormones screaming round her thin body she had become uncharacteristically passive. Her parents were able to inflict wounds on a heart already broken. Desolate, Ruth had had no more resources to draw on.
The look James Brown had given her over Adam’s head had made her heart jump and her legs go weak. It had brought with it the bitter taste and memory of her beginnings and that dark place of shame that she had resolutely turned her back on.
In its place she had built false memory in order to live with hope, however frail. She had distorted her encounter with Tom into something fantastical and acceptable in order to live with herself. She had changed and enlarged the evening so many times that the truth had been eclipsed from the moment of Adam’s birth.
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