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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