Chapter 11: Showdown!

Tina reached across and took the boy’s hand and shook it, “Hello, Daniel, I’m Tina and I’m 23”.

The boy smiled. He looked like any normal child from a mixed race relationship, his skin was a little darker than Maggie or myself, but then we saw a lot of kids in the Waterfront pools the previous day with skin darker than their parents by dint of being outdoors so much this early in the summer. His hair was jet black, curly and close cropped, whereas a lot of the kids we saw had hair bleached by varying degrees in the aggressive NT sunshine. Both Maggie and I have fair hair, hers perpetually died a lighter blond. He still had the cleft in his chin and high cheek bones that reminded me of the photos of Maggie’s African lover. He was dressed in a white tee and grey shorts, no socks, and his sandies, I noticed, were on the wrong feet.

“G’day Daniel, er I’m Mark and I’m 38 years old. Do you know that your sandies are on the wrong feet?”

He looked down, “Aw, my Grandad!” he said in exasperation, already trying to pull one off without undoing the straps, “We got up late this mornin’.”

“Here. Tell you what, Sport,” I said, “how about I do one foot and you do the other?”

The kid nodded his head so hard I thought it would come off. I unbuckled the straps on one and removed it before he’d pulled the other off, and handed it to him. He grinned and took it from me while I unbuckled the stubborn sandie. Soon his sandies were back on straight and on the right feet.

“So, you were staying with your Grandad last night, right?”

“Yeah, when I do sleepovers at Grandad’s he lets me play on his iPad, but I miss my new toys. It was me birthday Boxing Day.”

“So you got prezzies on both days?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s cool,” Tina said.

“But your Mummy doesn’t let you play with your new toys?” I asked.

“She does but she won’t let me play on my new iPad no more than an hour a day, ‘cos she says it’s bad for my eyes. But there’s all my new Lego knights and the Citadel at home that I got for my birthday. She wouldn’t let me take it to Grandpa’s, cos I might lose the pieces.”

“He vos sitting in Reception all alone an’ miserable, weren’t you Daniel?” Monika said, and the boy nodded. “He vos very helpful and shows me where the toilets are, but he has just nothing there to play with. But he vos telling me about his Lego knights and I told him that I knows a Knight, a real white knight, my sister’s boyfriend. And he wanted to come meet you.”

“Yeah, I wanna meet him, are you the White Knight, Sir Mark?”

I laughed. This may not be my child, even though he carried my name and an official certificate that falsely declares he’s legally mine, but he’s a sweet kid and the circumstances of his birth are not his fault. His arrival in this world on his birthday five years before ruined my world for a long while and ended both my marriage and any feelings I ever had for his mother. No, he was a just a sweet innocent kid who deserved treating with care and careful responses that would not hurt his feelings. “Well, my girlfriend says I’m her Knight and that makes me feel good. If someone you love says nice things about you, it must be true, right?”

“Yeah, my Mum says I’m her little man an’ an’ that I’s always will be for ever an’ ever.”

“That’s right, mummies and daddies should love their children always and forever and ever.”

“I don’t have a daddy, but Mummy says he’s maybe coming home soon, today even.”

“Do you want a daddy?” Monika asked, her arms wrapped around him from behind.

“Yeah, but I dunno ‘im an’ I hope that he’ll won’t make me do no more sleepovers at Grandad’s.”

“No?” I asked, “You don’t like your Grandad?”

“Yeah, he’s OK, but he’s too old to play and roll around, ‘cept he does lets me play on his iPad.”

“So why were you left on your own in the Reception area?”

“It too dang’rous to go in the print room.”

“Very true,” l smiled, “you’re a smart Joey.”

He grinned and looked out the window. “Hey, there’s Mummy, talking to the pretty lady by that big truck.”

We all looked up. There on the deck was Maggie, my ex-, waving her arms around and gesticulating, while Bonnie was standing calmly before her with her arms folded and her back to me and the passengers in the Rover.

“This is my cue,” I said, and opened my door to get out.

“You take Daniel, Mark,” Monika commanded, “Tina and me, we’re both of us coming too.”

“Yes, Daddy,” Tina piped up with a laugh and opened her back door to get out, “don’t leave me behind. I might start playing with the controls.”

“I knew I should’ve turned the child locks on in the back doors,” I grumbled, putting my arms out for Daniel, “OK Sport, you coming with me? You could be my Squire.”

“Yeah, ev’ry Knight need a Squire!” He grinned broadly and scrambled from Monika’s lap across the driver’s seat into my arms. I hoisted him up, he was surprisingly light, but then my experience of carrying children of his or any age was zero. I think Tina last night was the closest experience I had had and she’d been a dead weight most of the way back to the flat.

I turned to Monika as we strode through the gates towards the dock, “You realise that carrying Daniel is going to cramp my style,” I whispered.

“Of course, and it gives us a tiny advantage over Maggie, because you will be holding onto her precious child,” she whispered.

“It doesn’t sound as though she cares about him much, if she’s going out and leaving him with George,” I quietly hissed back. Daniel was apparently oblivious to our conversation, swishing his hand around like he was holding a sword, like the knight he clearly aspired to be.

As soon as we mounted the steps, Maggie spotted me leading the way towards them and carrying her son Daniel.

She screamed, “Mark! Oh, thank God, you’re alive!”

She quickly closed the gap towards me with her arms outstretched for us both. Daniel, automatically did the same in response to his mother. However, I held onto the child with one hand and held up my other one to stop her progress.

“Hold on, Maggie. I don’t want you near me or touching me!” The anger in my voice was apparent, but Daniel seemed to still be in ‘knight and squire’ mode and also held up a hand to stop his Mum.

“But, but, you’re my husband, I’ve been looking for you all these years in the hope that you will return to me with your mental state restored ... and now you have come back to me ... and you have found and are holding our sweet baby.”

“This is no sweet baby, you’re my Squire, right, Daniel?”

“Yeah, Mummy, we have your castle under siege, surrender as our prisoners or we’ll cut you all up in little pieces!” Daniel said as he waved his arm around in alternate slashes, parries and stabs, with an imaginary shield in the other arm fending off any threatening slashes from an unseen enemy.

I reflected only momentarily on some of the little pleasures of parenthood that I had missed out on, the denial of which only strengthened my resolve against the boy’s mother.

“Daniel is not our baby!” I hissed. “We are only here today to drop off this load of paper. If you do not accept that and start to unload us immediately and with reasonable haste, we will take it all away and the new company can deliver the paper on the second of January at the earliest but that would be completely out of my control. Our divorce papers should come to you from the courts early next week.”

“No!” cried Maggie, I don’t want a divorce. You’re my husband and I want you back, Daniel and I both want you back as husband and father.”

At the same time another cry of “No!” came from the back of the workmen gathered around to watch the spectacle, “We’ll run out of paper by Monday. We need that newsprint offloaded now,” the strident, disembodied voice continued.

Through the crowd of intrigued newspaper workers, congregating on the dock from every department, from warehouse back to editorial, came the angry George Stone, owner and editor, red of face and, judging by his gut, even more of a salad dodger than he was when I last saw him in the maternity waiting area.

“You get that bloody truck unloaded now, Alan,” Stone directed his warehouse supervisor, “and be quick about it. We wanted to get Margaret and this bloody wastrel bastard together to try and settle their differences and that’s what we’ve done, so get that bloody forklift driver in here and shifting these bloody reels, now!”

“G’day George,” I said to him, as calm as you like, “doesn’t sound as though you’ve changed very much in five years.”

“I daresay you’re still as bloody useless a bastard as you ever were, Cornwall. I’m surprised you’re still not on walkabout with your beard grown down to your knees. You may have a new sheila hanging around your bloody neck, but she’ll soon disappear once she finds out what a completely useless bloody article you are at keeping your woman satisfied, either financially or in the bed department.”

“Daddy, shut it, we’re trying to come to a resolution here between my husband Mark and I.” Maggie turned and addressed me from where she stood, about two metres away. “Mark, we need to get back together so we bring up our beautiful baby boy. He needs his father as a perfect example for him to look up to. Maybe we could even work on making a baby sister for Daniel. I know you were reported in the news to have had some sort of a fling with this ... this celebrity whore! ... but that’s never going to last. I really care about you, about us, and I forgive you, I forgive you for everything. Let us make a new start again, Mark.”

“Hang on a minute there, soon-to-be-Mrs Cornwall,” Bonnie came up and stood next to Maggie’s shoulder, towering over her by a couple of inches even though she was in flat-heeled runners, while Maggie was in high-heeled sandals.

Seeing them next to each other forced me to make comparisons. Bonnie wore her perfectly functional trackies and hi-viz top, in which she looked absolutely fabulous. Maggie was attempting a smart casual look with a cream blouse and sky blue pencil skirt, but both garments were slightly too tight on her, ending three centimetres above the knee. I got the impression that she looked as though she had dressed in the dark. It made her look cheap and tawdry compared to Bonnie’s chic.

Bonnie continued, “Mark is a much better man than you have deserved through your abuse of his kind, trusting and noble nature. If you had opened your eyes and recognised the wonderful person who worshipped you at one time, you would have thanked your lucky stars and stuck by him. If Mark loves me half as much as he did you, continues to respect and cherish me throughout the rest of my fulfilled days, I will be happy and satisfied with him forever. As for your son, beautiful boy though he clearly is, how you can have the gall to refer to him as Mark’s son? That is so clearly a falsehood. Why did you not just come clean and admit you had a brief affair or you were overcome by the moment, or you were violently forced to have sex outside the marriage? If you had been honest at the outset, with whatever the circumstances of your pregnancy, a husband who was primed and aware of the possible origin of the baby, the outcome for your marriage could have been so different.”

“Daniel is Mark’s son!” Maggie insisted, although her argument looked increasingly desperate. “We have irrefutable DNA evidence. I know Daniel looks a little dark, but Daddy has checked through the family history and we have found that our first ancestor in Australia did marry an aboriginal girl and we are all descended from her and carry her genes, which vary in their intensity in her descendants. I have never been unfaithful to Mark, even during these last long five years without him. Since Mark stormed out of the delivery room, and abandoned me and his first-born child, I have been completely faithful to him.”

Monika snorted behind me and, with her lawyer’s voice on, added, “You must be crazy, bitch, anyvone can see that this is not Mark’s son. Besides, ve have tested the samples he q-tipped off you and the baby at birth, plus his own samples and there is zero percent match to Mark as father. And ethnically speaking, the DNA evidence proved beyond doubt that he has no Aboriginal traces, he is ethnically much more African than Australasian. Vant to see the results, slut?”

I swallowed hard. There was no DNA evidence, I had just blindly left the delivery room with my whole world falling around my ears; evidence enough was in front of my eyes, with the certainty of a photographer’s eye, which had seen me process dozens of photos of Daniel’s father and my wife together. Monika was calling her bluff.

Maggie turned to her father and wailed, “See, I told you the DNA scam would fail, Mark is nowhere near as stupid as you think he is. What am I going to hold on to him with now?”

Monika leaned into me and whispered, “Vell, I didn’t think that bluff vould come off!”

I tried to contain my smile.

“Mark,” George wheedled, “can we come to some arrangement, where you could return to the family fold? I am willing to forgive and forget your abandonment, especially as Margaret is prepared to take you back. I’ll even offer you a job, a better one than you’ve got now, I bet.”

“No way am I coming back,” I said directly to Maggie, ignoring George. I surprised myself that I was so calm and able to speak without a trace of rancour, “that particular ship has long sailed, but I no longer feel the pain that once filled my heart in my disappointment in you.”

“But you love me, Mark, you’ve always loved me,” Maggie insisted, “we can still live together and let that love grow once more between us. I know that I love you now more than ever.”

“I don’t love you, Maggie, and nor do I hate you. I feel nothing at all for you, in fact. I can never live with you, I won’t be satisfied with a loveless marriage. Been there, done that and felt all the worse for the experience. But I do forgive you your transgressions, it’s all water under the bridge. I know that I will soon forget you. However, your son is an absolute delight, Maggie, so you will not be alone—”

“No, she’s not alone, Mark,” Monika said, “that much is obvious.” Another whisper to me, a hand over her mouth, “This time I not bluff.”

“What do you mean?” Maggie asked, turning to Monika and Tina standing to my left, “Daniel and I live alone in the house that Mark and I bought seventeen years ago, nor have I had a boyfriend since my husband selfishly and cruelly abandoned me while I was helpless in the middle of the birth of our child to stop him.”

“Nossers!” Monika snorted, “I saw you come into work this morning, in your slinky short black cocktail dress and carrying your high heels from the car, no stockings and messed up hair, and,” she looked around and pointed at the young man with the camera around his neck who had tried to take photos earlier, “it vas he who brought you here in his banged up old car.”

The young man pointed out by Monika looked mortified, surrounded by colleagues who looked at him, accusing him with their shocked eyes, of sleeping with the boss’s married daughter.

“Er, she wasn’t with me last night,” Mervyn the photographer stuttered, “she’s my boss an’ she just rang me on me way into work and ordered me to pick her up from the Argus Apartments.”

All eyes turned to Maggie. She looked to her father for answers.

“Don’t look at me, poppet,” Stone said, “you asked me to look after your sprog so you could go out last night and that’s what I did.”

“Yes,” Monika added, “I saw your driver drop Mr Stone and young Daniel off as I approached the Reception, and through the window I saw you leave him with the Receptionist, and go through to the factory. Just as I was about to go in, the young man with the camera here raced into the car park in his ratty car and dropped Mrs Cornwall off at the entrance before parking. She rudely pushed past me, in a hurry to get inside. She was empty handed, no bag. I heard her call out to the Receptionist, ‘You’re about my size, come with me, I need your clothes’, and they disappeared up the stairs to the offices, leaving Daniel on his own in Reception.”

“So, it looks like you didn’t go home at all, Mrs. Cornwall, not last night or early this morning,” Bonnie pointed out, her arms folded across her chest, her tone like a mother admonishing an errant child. “Looks like our early arrival upset your plans for the weekend.”

Maggie looked around, now everyone was looking at her for answers. She held up her hands in surrender. “All right, all right, I did go out last night. I had a little too much to drink and I checked in at the Argus rather than drive home. I hadn’t planned on drinking too much but I was anxious about meeting Mark today after such a long absence without any contact.”

“So you didn’t have a change of clothes with you,” I said, not a question, just a statement of fact. She nodded. “And you went out drinking ... alone?”

“Er, yes ... er, no, I met up with some girlfriends, it was Friday night—”

“And you always go out Friday night?” I asked, remembering Daniel saying he had lots of sleepovers at his Grandad’s.

“Yes, sometimes, not always.”

“Even though you ver expecting to see your ex-husband early in the morning and, by your own admission, vanted to make a good impression on him and try to persuade him to returned your home?” Monika added. She was certainly in cross examination mode.

“Our home ... I was nervous and—”

“And last night you panicked when you saw Mark at Cheong’s club, vhere you ver dancing with your lover—”

“He is not my lover!”

“Who is he then?” Monika stabbed, “tell me about the tall, blond guy with the moustache and the stubble beard?”

“W-What?”

“If you don’t know who he is, I do,” Monika continued with a smirk.

“He’s a friend, just a friend ... wait! How?” Maggie asked, “How do you know who he is?”

“I’m an international managing agent, I handle models and sports personalities mainly, booking their events and all the logistics involved, oversee contracts and ensure agreed payment are received on time and bills, insurances, taxes and investments are calculated, set aside, and commitments met.”

“You’re Oscar’s agent?”

“No, I’m not. Fortunately, I might add, I’m not. He’s handsome, I grant you, but flaky, personally.”

“Flaky?”

“Unreliable, won’t listen to advice because Oscar thinks he knows best, and look where that’s got him. I saw him dancing at the club with a woman, with his hands all over her ass, and that woman clearly wasn’t his wife. I didn’t know that woman was you until I saw you being dropped off this morning in the same dress you were wearing and I wondered where the photographer here fitted into the picture and what happened to Oscar. Having a lie-in in his rooms at the Argus Apartments is he?”

“Damn you! All I want is Mark back in my life,” Maggie turned to me. “I need you, and Daniel needs a father figure, and I’m sure I still have time for another child. This one would be all ours.”

“Who is this Oscar?” Tina asked Monika in a loud stage whisper.

“Oscar was a golfer working the European circuit five or six years back,” Monika whispered back, “He was playing OK, winning minor tournaments and on the edge of Ryder Cup selection. He wanted to switch to the American circuit where the earnings were higher and asked me to be his agent. I told him that he didn’t quite have the game for it and he was better off where he was. I said that I might consider taking him on, get him better coaches, experience competing against Americans in the European Ryder Cup team, and get better known in the States to improve the number of invitations to local events. He didn’t like me saying that he needed to get his game up and ready to switch to the US in a couple of years. But, no, he knew better and wanted to switch immediately. He flopped in the States, as everyone knew he would. Seems he’s just doing the South East Asia circuit now. He was married at the time but had a reputation on the circuit, I don’t know if he is still married or not.”

Everyone was listening to Monika and a couple of the workers nodded in agreement with Monika’s last comment.

“Enough about Oscar,” snapped Maggie, “he’s old news, former arm candy, an escort to galas, balls, that’s all. I er just bumped into him at Cheng’s night club. We’re done anyway. I just want Mark back.”