Thank you to Chalcedony Rivers for the lovely review.
I don't own this, but I do hope you enjoy.
Six Months Later...
After a long search around the various hospital corridors, a concerned nurse eventually leads him to a small private room located just off the maternity wing.
Kate looks pale when he sees her; he's also surprised to note that her unruly curls have been tamed into a sleek bob. She's got grown up hair. Actually he's not really surprised at all by her hair he's just trying desperately not to notice the fluffy bundle neatly tucked into the crook of her arm.
So that is it, that's his child.
"Alright Dan, so you managed to find us in the end."
He manages a nervous twitch of his lips. Hunched he hovers in the doorway, his forehead knotted in a tight frown.
"Claire told me you had a rough time of it."
He stops himself from finishing his own sentence.
"Yeah, well you could say that."
Kate snickers back in response.
"But you're alright, right, now?"
He shuffles inside the room, closing the door behind him.
"Well, the infection is finally gone, so they should be letting me out in the next couple of days, which is perfect timing really, because if I have to stay in here any longer I will kill."
Now that he's closer, he notes that she does in fact look a little 'stir-crazy' and frayed around the edges.
He feels unbelievably guilty, because he should have made the effort to see her before this. The call had come from Claire, he was as usual suffering the after effects from another binge, and so it had taken him a moment or two to locate the telephone, which he'd had newly reconnected after finally selling an article to a magazine.
Claire sounded characteristically pissed off, but there was something else as well, a note he hadn't heard in her voice since she'd been five or six and she'd demanded to share his bed because the old tree, which their Father had eventually felled, had been scratching against her bedroom window, Claire had been frightened. When she'd told him she was in the hospital, his thoughts had admittedly run to their parents, forgetting all about Kate and the baby.
His sister had called him to let him know that Kate was going into surgery for an emergency caesarean, and that the baby he'd spent the last six months trying, and failing miserably not to think about had been in serious foetal distress.
When the conversation had ended, he'd found himself slumped on the sofa staring into a void. The thing that had shocked him most was how he had felt, the fact that it had made him feel anything at all had been a surprise. He'd been use to feelings of inadequacy, and frustrated impotence, but the thought that he should have been there, or at least be doing something other than just sitting on his backside had twisted just as sharp as any blade into his guts.
He'd gone for a walk, no not really a walk, a grim pilgrimage. He'd pounded around the streets until the early hours of the morning, cursing the fact that it had all been happening so far away, that Kate and their baby could have been dying, or already long dead. She shouldn't have had to face all that alone, none of it had ever seemed fair, but especially not that.
His feet had led him home to find the red light flashing on the answer machine he'd inherited from the previous tenants. He'd taken a deep breath, and pushed the button.
"Sit down."
His legs give out from underneath him at the sound of her command, and he finds himself awkwardly perched on the lip of the hospital bed.
"Do you want to see her?"
He stops breathing, and feels the walls start to close in around him. The tips of his fingers are tingling, he's certain he's about to have a stroke, a panic attack, or failing that simply pass out.
His daughter's face floats under his eyes, she might as well be a snapshot of him as a newborn. He notes how pink she is.
"She's..."
He can't finish the sentence, because he doesn't know how to articulate everything that She is. The word terrifying does a quick lap of the inside of his scull.
"Has she got a name?"
He flinches first lifting his gaze back up to meet Kate's.
"Annabelle."
Annabelle.
He lets the fact that he has a daughter, and her name is Annabelle sink in. A bubble of relief floods up inside his chest. Unconsciously the baby's name has been taken up an excessive amount of space that he would usually engage in starving, and trying to overcome another bout of stifling writer's block. He knows Kate well enough to have been able to reassure himself that she would never lumber the baby with a ridiculous moniker like Lavender or Polaris, but even so he'd felt concerned enough to monitor alarming trends towards classic idiot names such as Ashley, Tyler, Brittany and most vomit inducing of all Jordan.
The more the name filters down through his consciousness, the more he likes the way it sounds. He's also reassuringly certain that no idiot in the history of idiocy has ever been dubbed an Annabelle.
"Annabelle Claire Elliot."
His eyebrow quirks skyward at the inclusion of his sister's name.
"What, don't look at me like that Dan, she was really excited, what could I do."
Kate fails to disguise her rather sheepish defence of over sentimentality.
"And anyway, it was either Claire or Polaris Lavender."
She smirks, and he hopes that Annabelle is a crier.
"Alright Annabelle,"
He nods tentatively in Annabelle's direction, afraid that his expression is a ridiculously gooey as Kate's.
He decides to start again realising that his first words to his daughter should be something bloody spectacular. Nothing comes to him.
"Hey Annabelle,"
He fears suddenly that all his future interactions with the bundle will be as strained.
"Annie."
Kate quickly takes over, her voice cutting through the gaping void of silence. Suddenly all he can think of is Annie Walker standing matronly and stoic at the bar of The Rover's Return.
"This is Dan,"
She addresses their daughter with a soft cooing lilt.
"...he's your..."
"DAN. I'm your Dan."
He jumps in quickly to finish Kate's sentence. It's not that he doesn't want to be singled out as Annabelle's Father, it's just that he doesn't want to be introduced to her like this, he's got holes in his clothes, the sole on his left battered trainer has been threatening to slip loose for weeks, and he hasn't shaved. He should have at least shaved.
Kate doesn't bother to correct him.
"You can hold her if you want."
He shakes his head, because his finger nails are dirty, and five minutes before he entered the hospital he'd just finished his fifth cigarette of the morning.
Immediately Annabelle suddenly explodes into howling, proper ear-splitting baby wails. He's gripped with the fear that the tears have sprung from him, and his apparent rejection of her. His face obviously betrays his inner turmoil.
"It's alright Dan, she's just hungry."
Kate never one to stand on ceremony worked her left breast out from under the constraints of her t-shirt, and Annabelle begins to nosily feed. His mouth feels as dry as a sandpit.
"Wow..."
He makes a laboured attempt at swallowing.
"You just got your tit right, out there."
"Oh sorry, did you want to do it?"
Kate laughs, her giggles giving away to soft humming.
He listens to her for a few moments before breaking off, and asking "Why are you humming the theme to The Third Man?"
"It was the only tune I could remember all the way through, I think she likes it now, anyway."
The bridge of Kate's nose wrinkles, and without considering anything for a second he leans across planting the briefest of kisses on the tip.
He feels her eyes pressing into him, those green orbs un-blinking, un-flinching.
"Dan."
He quickly moves back, his cheeks are glowing he can feel the heat.
"Dan."
Kate is trying her hardest to anchor him, to commutate with him, but his eyes are everywhere else.
He can't do this, he doesn't need to look at her to know what she's asking. He loathes how much he wants to, the temptation of how easy it might all be if he just answered her silent question with a simple yes...I really, really do. He's under no illusions of what a self-centred, selfish shit he is, but even he couldn't do that to Kate or Annabelle, he could never inflict himself permanently on them.
He forgot.
And then he remembers.
He remembers suddenly the small black velvet box the one, which has been uncomfortably jabbing into him through the fabric of his jeans pocket since he sat down. The box that his Mother forced him to bring with him, all the while telling him what a pretty girl Kate was, how much she had always liked her, and that he should make an honest woman out of Kate before she'd had a chance to wriggle out of the keep net with her only Grandchild.
"Girls like that one, don't come along all the time, and they especially don't for boys like you, Daniel."
Had been his Mum's exact sentence, for once he didn't think to correct her.
Unceremoniously he pulls the box out, and deposits it on the sheet next to her, and waits.
"Are you asking me to marry you?"
"NO!"
He winces at the apparent harshness of his reply, he can only imagine what this must look like from the outside looking in.
"No. I wanted to bring you something for the...for Annabelle, I wasn't sure what financial situation you're going to be in, and I want to provide something."
Kate seems mesmerized by the object, she stares at it as if it was some sort of deadly weapon, a threat to the normality she has managed to claw from the jaws of dysfunction.
"It's beautiful."
Her voice is sad, and after she's spoken there are no other words, the world is suddenly devoid of syntax and the only sounds that exist are made up of breathing, and Annabelle's soft, wet repetitive suck.
"It was my Gran's engagement ring,"
He speaks feeling the desperate need to fill the sudden void of space with something other than just his own continual existence.
"...it was meant for my Mum, but she's never liked it. I think those are real diamonds, although they could just be doing good impressions."
Kate tilts her head to one side as she quietly contemplates him.
"I got you something as well."
She motions awkwardly in the direction of the small white plastic bedside table next to her. It takes him a few moments to react, but when he does eventually open the cupboard nestled inside the cyclically severe piece of furniture he finds a rather crumpled up carrier bag.
"I like the wrapping."
"It's a mobile phone."
Kate quickly informs him, spoiling any hit of surprise that the large lump of alien technology he is holding limply in his hand could be comprised of anything other than a mobile phone.
"Just keep it charged, I'll call you if I need you."
The resigned tone of her exhale gets lost somewhere amidst one wide yawn, and then another.
"I should go."
He says to the as yet still unopened carrier bag, before climbing back off the edge of the hospital bed.
Part of him, the part that is always so unsatisfied with the measly portions he feels life has served him wants to just leave, but the other part, the bit he hardly ever listens to anymore can't resist another glance over his shoulder at Annabelle, his daughter.
"You are going to come back aren't you? You need to say a better good bye that that, Daniel."
Clutching the plastic handles of the bag, he swiftly pulls out a packet of cigarettes from the hole ridden back pocket of his jeans.
"Yeah, I'm just going out for a fag."
He shakes the half empty packet as if to demonstrate his intent, and Kate chortles.
It's only half a lie, because as he hot foots it across the car park making his escape from the place as fast as possible he is puffing on a fag.