When Megan left the surgery, a young man stepped into her path.
He was big and good-looking, in a bashed-in, careless kind of way, and at first she thought he was one of those charity muggers – chuggers, they called them – who increasingly ambushed you with their clipboards, stepping over the homeless to assault you with their good causes and direct debit forms. She tried to swerve past him, but he moved quickly to intercept her. She shot him her look of cold magisterial fury, usually reserved for patients refusing to take their prescribed medication.
‘Megan?’
And then all at once she realised that it was him. The man from the party. The father of her child.
‘Oh – hello, Kurt.’
‘It’s Kirk.’
‘Of course.’
‘It’s great to see you, Megan.’ A lovely accent. Full of wide-open spaces and healthy living and Christmas on the beach. ‘You look fantastic.’
‘Thank you.’ She gave him a quick smile. He was a nice guy, and she had liked him a lot, and she had no regrets – apart from the fact that a doctor who spent her days lecturing teenage mums about contraception should probably never leave her own family planning to the fates. But there was no time left for anything more.
‘Nice bumping into you, Kirk. But I really must be –’
‘I had to see you,’ he said, and at last she understood that this man had actually been waiting for her.
Megan’s head reeled with the insanity of the situation. Here she was carrying his baby inside her and here he was angling for a second date.
She didn’t know him. And he didn’t know her. Yet even in the cold light of Hackney, without one too many Asahi Super Drys inside her, Megan could recall very clearly how they had ended up in bed, on a pile of coats dumped by the guests. He was tall, athletic but with a kind of genial innocence about him. His children will be beautiful, Megan reflected, and the unbidden thought made her feel like weeping.
‘I thought you were going back to Sydney.’
‘I am. I will be. But I wanted to see you before I go.’
She had to be strong. He might be making beautiful babies one day, but they would not be with her.
‘Why’s that then?’
‘Because, well – I like you. It was terrific, wasn’t it? It was great, wasn’t it?’
‘It was okay.’
‘It was unbelievable!’ He grinned, shook his head. ‘I don’t usually do that kind of thing.’
‘I am sure your girlfriend is delighted about that.’
He had let slip the girlfriend early on in their conversation, but she had been quietly forgotten when he started reading Megan’s signals, cottoning on that – maybe – she was interested. Now he had the decency to blush. He did that quite a bit for such a good-looking man.
‘I just wanted to say goodbye. That’s all. And say that I hope we see each other again.’
‘How old are you, Kirk?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘I’m twenty-eight. I’m a doctor. Remind me what you do again?’
‘I teach.’
‘What subject?’
‘Scuba diving.’
‘Right – so you’re a young scuba diving instructor living in Sydney, and I’m an elderly GP practising in London.’
‘You’re not so old.’
‘I just – I really don’t see how anything can come of it, do you?’
He hung his head, and Megan had to fight back the urge to take him in her arms, taste some more of those good kisses, and tell him the truth.
‘Just wanted to see you. That’s all. I don’t usually do things like that. Get pissed and fall into bed with a complete stranger.’
‘Could you speak up a bit? I think one of the old ladies at the bus stop across the road didn’t hear you.’
Kirk hung his cropped blond head, knowing at last that coming here had been a bad idea.
‘Take this,’ he said, handing her a scrap of paper with a scrawled telephone number. It looked like long distance. Very long distance.
‘If you ever need me. Or, you know, come to Australia.’
‘Thanks.’
‘As I said – I just like you.’
‘Yeah, well. I like you too.’
‘Well – like the song says – I guess I’ll see you next lifetime.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘See you next lifetime, Kirk.’
As soon as she had disappeared around the corner, she began ripping the telephone number into tiny pieces, her eyes blurring with tears.
Young, dumb and full of come, she thought. On his way home to his girlfriend and their beautiful babies without me ever telling him, without ever knowing, without ever being asked to carry his share of the load. And he was right – it had been fun while it lasted.
But he should consider himself lucky. She didn’t want a family with this man.
She had a family already.
In some other family, they might have drifted apart by now. In their late twenties and thirties, other sisters might have found the demands of work and home life closing in on them, clamouring for attention, taking up all their time. In some other family, men and jobs might have got in the way.
But although Jessica had her husband, her house and her dreams in one of the leafier parts of town, and while Megan and Cat had their demanding jobs at either end of the city, they clung to each other now as they had clung to each other as children, growing up in a home where the mother was absent.
They didn’t talk about it. But when Cat had first started with Rory, he had been surprised to discover that, no matter what was happening in their lives, the sisters spoke on the phone every day and tried to meet for breakfast once a week. ‘That’s unusually close, isn’t it?’ he said, with that gentle, querulous Rory-smile on his face. But of course to Cat – and to Megan, and to Jessica – it seemed perfectly normal.
This is what Cat thought about it – nobody loves their family more than someone from a broken home.
They always tried to meet in a restaurant that was equidistant from their lives.
When Megan was at the Imperial College med school, and Jessica was living in Little Venice with Paulo, they had met in Soho, in the shabby opulence of Cat’s private club, where the members were as frayed as the carpets.
Now that Megan was working in Hackney, and Jessica was up in Highgate, the axis had moved east, to a restaurant next to the meat market in Smithfield. Cat’s suggestion. It was a place where young foreign waiters dressed in black served traditional British fare such as bacon butties, porridge and fried breakfasts as if they were exotic delicacies, and every hot drink came in a mug, rather than a cup and saucer. Everything was authentically working class, apart from the sky-high prices.
Cat was the first to arrive, and through the huge windows of the restaurant she saw white-coated porters who had worked all through the night hauling massive slabs of fresh meat onto the waiting vans.
Jessica turned up next, and together they watched the porters of Smithfield at their work.
‘In ten years this will probably all be gone,’ Cat said. ‘All pushed out to the suburbs, and Smithfield