Tennessee Waltz

"And he didn't?"

"No chance. That was Ralph's problem. He often bragged about what he was going to do before he'd got to first base," I informed them.

"But he was sweet on her?"

"Oh, yeah, but Ralph had a soft spot for any pretty woman."

"And when you finally challenged Sarah about the baby's parentage, did you tell her that Ralph had not only helped you get that DNA test done, but it had been him who had tipped you off about Sarah's so-called indiscretions."

"No. We thought it would be a good idea for Ralph to pretend he was neutral and trying to get us back together. We thought there was a chance she might admit it all to him."

"And did she?"

"Nope. Ralph said she cried a lot, but he always thought that there was something she wouldn't tell him."

"And what about what he never told you?" John's friend suddenly asked.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked, taken aback that this other guy had entered the conversation.

John Caldwell reached into his inside pocket and pulled out some papers. Slowly he unfolded and sorted through them, eventually laying two sheets on the table before me.

"You know what these are, don't you, Mo?" he asked.

"Sure do; they are DNA results. I should imagine the ones that prove I'm not the baby's father."

"Yeah, that's right. But do you know what this is?" John said, placing a further piece of paper in front of me.

I looked at it closely. It appeared to be a page from a medical report. Eventually I realised it was part of the medical I'd had when I'd got my job in town.

"How did you get hold of this?" I asked.

"Illegally, John, I can assure you. But I'd like to draw your attention to this line here. What does it say?"

"AB negative," I read out.

"And this line here, on this DNA report."

"O," I replied. "Here, someone's fucked up somewhere. My blood group can't change."

"No, it can't Mo, and that's the point. Now take a look at this piece of paper," John said, passing me yet a fourth sheet.

"What is it?" I asked.

"A blood donor's record of contributions. What group does it say the donor is?"

"O," I read from the sheet.

John Caldwell moved his thumb so that I could read the donor's name. I think my eyes almost popped out of my head. I know suddenly I was having trouble breathing.

"And just to put the icing on the cake Mo. Sarah married Ralph Bilger three months after you did your disappearing act. She'd always liked him, but she assures me that she only married him because she wanted Maureen to have a father."

"But!" was all I could manage to say.

"At the time Ralph Bilger was working in the DNA lab. Once he faked the first test, it was easy for him to intercept the other two and switch the results. The clown switched your sample for one of his own. Worked fine until he got pulled over for drink driving."

"But how," I was trying to say.

"Well, when the CSA demanded another DNA sample from you, you got shirty about it and the police were called in to take charge, remember?"

"So!"

"Well, following that little altercation, although you weren't charged with anything, your DNA profile went into the police system. But as he was working in the lab that the police use, Ralph Bilger had managed to switch the sample yet again. So when he was nicked for drink driving and Bilger's DNA sample turned up as a match in the system. But confusingly with your name on the top of the sheet; that caused someone to start asking questions. Eventually and completely by chance I got to hear about it. My department looks after security in those laboratories. Of course the name rang a bell straight away."

"Are you telling me what I think you're telling me?"

"Yes, I believe I am, Maurice. You have a daughter who needs a bone marrow transplant and we need you to allow the doctor here to take a sample to see if you are a full match."

Epilogue

It was with some trepidation that I knocked on the hotel room door. After his doctor friend had taken smear and blood samples to see if I was a good match for Maureen's bone marrow. Surprisingly it was an activity that appeared to be totally ignored by the other patrons of The Fisherman's Arms.

John Caldwell informed me that Sarah was waiting in her room in the Cliff Head Hotel. He suggested that I might want to go and see her.

"Jesus, John. She'll probably want to castrate me!"

"Yeah, well, she could react that way, but I don't think so somehow. Do you think she'd bother to come all the way down here and then sit patiently waiting in that hotel room until after I'd spoken to you if she was that angry with you? She could have stormed in here and made you look a complete arsehole by shoving that paperwork under your nose in front of all of your friends."

"But I," I began to say, but in truth I could not figure out exactly what it was that I wanted to say.

"But what? Look, you aren't the first guy in the world to have been taken by a good con artist, Maurice. Maybe you could have been more suspicious of Bilger, but he sounded pretty convincing to me in the interview room.

"You've nicked him?"

"Too bloody right I have! Interfering with police evidence to start with and we are looking for what else we can throw at him. Sarah kicked him out, of course; she's trying for an annulment.

"What? She's divorcing him?"

"No, she's trying to get the whole damned marriage annulled and the adoption squashed. Bilger was in the middle of an application to adopt Maureen. Look, Mo, Bilger's a pretty good con artist. He conned Sarah into marrying him for Maureen's sake. Got pretty annoyed when she insisted that your name stay on the birth registry as well, I'm told. That's what originally convinced me that you had to be the father of Sarah's child, no matter what those tests said. Sarah was sticking to her guns, on that one!"

"So what do I do now?" I asked no one in particular really. I think I was just voicing my thoughts.

"That depends on whether you still love Sarah, Maurice. If you do, get your arse up the Cliff Head and start eating humble pie. Believe me, Sarah still loves you even though she married Bilger. It ain't going to be easy by a long chalk, what with Maureen's leukaemia, but Sarah needs someone to lean on and it strikes me that you're the best candidate for the job."

It was sometime before the door opened just a little and two eyes that I didn't recognise appeared around the side of it.

"Maurice?" the woman asked.

"Yes," I affirmed.

"Wait in the lounge, Sarah will come down. Maureen's just got to sleep; we could do without you two waking her up."

Then the door closed again.

I walked back along the corridor but didn't enter the lift. The lounge, I thought, was a little too public for Sarah and my first meeting. So I sat myself on one of the chairs by the lift's entrance.

Maybe five minutes later I heard a room door open and close, then almost immediately Sarah walked into the lift area. She stopped the instant she saw me sitting there and stood staring at me.

Sarah was as beautiful as she had always been, although her eyes looked somewhat sunken, most probably with worry about Maureen's health.

I got up, trying to think what to say to her as I did so. All I managed to come up with were the three words, "I'm sorry, Sarah!"

In the time I took to say them, Sarah closed the gap between us, threw her arms around my neck and began sobbing pitifully on my shoulder.

"It's me who should be sorry. I betrayed you when I married him," she sobbed out.

I suppose I took Sarah's statement as a 'get out of jail free card.'

"He conned the pair of us, Sarah. You can't blame yourself for anything that happened." Luckily I managed not to add "and neither can I blame myself."

I have no idea how long we stood there, just holding one another. It was only when the lift arrived and John Caldwell got out of it that time appeared to mean anything at all.

"The Lounge bar is pretty empty. Why don't you two go down there and talk?" John suggested. "Or you can have the key to our room."

I discovered later the 'our' he was referring to was his wife, whose eyes had appeared around Sarah's bedroom door.

Sarah and I entered the lift with our arms around each other's waists. Not something I did consciously, something that seemed to happen automatically, just as if we hadn't been apart for nearly five years.

We found a quiet corner of the lounge, where we sat and talked. Not about ourselves; about Maureen, her illness and what the doctors thought they could do about it.

We must have talked for an hour or so before John put in another appearance. During that time Sarah mentioned Ralph just a couple of times. Once to say that she thought that he genuinely cared for Maureen and that he'd gone very quiet for some time when bone marrow transplants were first mentioned. Sarah had gotten the feeling that he'd wanted to say something when they'd been told that a near relative was the best chance of a match.

The day John had finally turned up at the house to challenge Ralph, he'd come straight out and admitted what he'd done. The big question was would he have done so if John hadn't found out about the switched DNA samples. The question crossed our minds that the drink-driving episode could have been staged on Ralph's part; it would have saved him having to admit his deceit outright to Sarah. But how could he be sure the police would have spotted the deception.

Anyway John had arrived to inform us that my presence was being demanded in Sarah and Maureen's room.

I gently tapped on the door; John's wife opened it and gestured for me to enter. She must have left as I did so; I walked in to see a very pretty little girl sitting up in one of the beds.

"Hello, daddy!" Maureen said, as the door closed behind me.

That took me by surprise. Sarah had obviously told her they were coming down to the coast to find her father. But for Maureen to immediately refer to me as daddy took me completely off guard.

"Hello, young lady. How are you feeling?" I answered, probably a little formally.

"Come and sit here on my bed please, daddy," the child said.

That word daddy again, I can tell you it really pulled at the old heartstrings. I sat on the bed wondering just how I'd walked away from the precocious and beautiful young child in the first place.

In a manner remarkably like her mother had done to me so many times over the years, Maureen's arms snaked around my neck and she snuggled against my chest.

"Are you coming home with mummy and me, daddy?" she asked.

"Well, I hope your mother and I can settle our differences and we can get back together, Maureen. But life can't always go as we would wish."

Look, damn it, I had little or no experience of young children. I can't help how I spoke to the child that first night.

"Oh, please, daddy! Mummy loves you so much," she replied.

"Maureen how do you know what your mother feels towards me. After all, I walked out and deserted the two of you," I tried to explain.

"You were tricked, by Ralph. Mummy and Uncle John told me all about it. And mummy has always loved you." Maureen extracted herself from my arms long enough to reach for a picture that was beside the bed. "Look, mother has one of these beside her bed as well; she's always had it there even when he was in the house. That's how I knew who you were."

The picture Maureen handed me was of Sarah and me together at Uni. I could remember the picture but couldn't recall when it was taken.

"Mummy always told me that my daddy was in the photograph, Ralph was her husband. Well, Ralph's gone now so you can come back and be mummy's husband, can't you?"

Okay, what do you say to that? A child's logic is very simple. Anyway that isn't exactly how things worked out. Sarah and Maureen came to live with me eventually. There were some issues but they appeared to sort themselves out remarkably quickly. At the time Sarah and I were too busy worrying about Maureen.

Anyway later that same evening when Sarah climbed into my bed with me, I do believe most of the important issues solved themselves straight away. God, Sarah nearly killed me with love that night, but that's a story for somewhere else, not here.

For those of you wondering, I wasn't a good enough match for Maureen's bone marrow transplant. But my sister's fifteen-year-old daughter was.

Maureen is giving birth to her first child herself in a couple of weeks. Let's hope none of her children have the same problems with their family as she had in her childhood.

Sarah and me? Well, it was her who insisted that I get around to writing this lot down, as a warning to others. Evidence of any kind, is only as good as the people whose hands it passes through. So make sure that you can trust anyone who comes into contact with any that you rely on.

Life goes on.