Crustaceans by Andrew Cowan Page A

I returned from walking her home; big for her age. He seemed to approve, but Susan was regularly taunted in school for her size, for her breasts, and when I think of her now I see the dark crease of her frown and the way she tucked her mouth at the corners, annoyed and defensive. I cannot picture her smiling.
    We were together for almost a year, and it was shortly after my sixteenth birthday – old enough now, said one of my cards, to get married, have sex and start smoking – that she told me she thought she was pregnant. Within a few days we would learn that she wasn’t – she’d got her dates wrong – and soon after that we’d agree to stop seeing each other. But her tears that first evening had made it seem certain; she was a week overdue and she’d been sick in the night. My dad’ll kill me, she said bleakly, sitting up in my bedroom. He’ll be livid; he’ll make us get married, I just know it. My own father’s response, I guessed, would be more scornful, dismissive – the problem would be mine alone to sort out – and wary of approaching him, I skipped school the next morning and caught a bus to see my aunt Rene, his sister, who lived then in a new town some miles from ours.
    It wasn’t the best time to call. As I came through the door my feet squelched on the carpet. A length of bright copper piping sloped down the staircase, bits of plaster littered the floor, and there was dust in the air, a large hole in the ceiling. My aunt and uncle were shouting upstairs. In the curtained gloom of the living room I found my cousin Colin sprawled out on the sofa, reading a comic. What’s going on? I asked him. Nothing, he shrugged. Why aren’t you at school? I said. Suspended, he told me, and switched on the television. I sat down in an armchair and waited, and when at last my uncle descended the stairs, still shouting, and slammed the front door behind him, my cousin turned towards me and said, He’s got another woman, dirty bastard. He was grinning, and I nodded, attempted a smile. A few moments later I heard Rene’s footsteps and followed her through to the kitchen.
    It had always been my aunt’s manner to talk to me as if I was older, more of a friend than a nephew, and on the long journey over I’d rehearsed in my mind what I would say to her and how she’d respond. We’d be alone in the house, sitting in the quiet of her dining room, and I would admit to having no strong feelings for Susan, secretly to liking other girls more, and she would agree that we’d been foolish, we’d made a mistake, but to get married now would be a worse mistake still. A child, she would say, deserved parents who loved one another, and we were anyway too young, even at sixteen, to take on such a burden, not much more than children ourselves. There’d be concern and sympathy, wry smiles, and finally she would offer to speak to my father, perhaps even arrange to visit Susan’s parents. Leave it with me, she would say; I’ll see what I can do.
    Instead of which she was furious. Her face tight and pale, she began stuffing some bedsheets into the washing-machine, but the bundle was too large, it wouldn’t go in, and exasperated she gave up; she turned and suddenly shouted, You idiot, Paul! You total bloody idiot, what were you thinking of? I wasn’t, I said lamely; it just happened. No, Paul, she snapped; it doesn’t just happen, it never just happens – it’s the same bloody story, isn’t it? It’s your mum and dad all over again, the same bloody story. I stared at her, I said nothing, and shaking her head, perhaps realising then what she’d told me, my aunt gestured to the mess in the hallway, to the sheets on the floor, and wearily said, I’m sorry, Paul, it’s been a bad day for me, I shouldn’t have shouted. What story? I asked her. Never mind, she replied. There isn’t a story; I just lost