Home > The Push

The Push
Author: Claire McGowan


Prologue

The babies all look the same. They lie in a circle on a patterned rug, heads in, legs fanning out like a star. They will grow up to be so different; some rich some poor, some happy some sad, some hearty some sickly. Their lives will be determined by the jobs of their parents, the street where they live, their skin colour, their gender. But for now they are the same, despite the different skin tones and disparity in the cost of their clothes. Chubby blank canvasses, for the world to stamp its print on.

It is Monica’s idea to take the picture, of course. Her clamouring Instagram followers need to be fed. She calls it a flat lay, only with children instead of books and cups of coffee and flowers. Some of the group don’t want their babies in the shot – Hazel raises an objection, we didn’t want his picture online yet, and Aaron surprises everyone with his dislike of social media, and at his age too! But Monica rides roughshod over them all, and so the babies in their blue and pink and yellow are arranged and the shot is taken, and Instagrammed and Facebooked and hashtagged, out there forever in the world, the children at two weeks old appearing in more digital impressions than recent ancestors would have in their lifetimes.

The picture was taken at 2.35 p.m., the timestamp helpfully showed. The police would later have the task of trawling through every image taken that day, which was a lot. By 3.02 p.m., the murder had taken place, though of course it would be some time before they could even prove that’s what it was.

 

 

Alison

‘There were twelve adults here?’ said Alison to the PC guarding the crime scene. It was a boiling-hot day, just her luck to catch on-call duty during a heatwave. She’d grumbled about it as she headed to the car from her flat, her skin a slick of suncream and the sky denim-blue, but part of her was pleased, despite the sweat pooling behind her knees. This was a big one. A death at a barbecue in this suburban corner of South-east London. A fall from a high, glass-sided balcony. A multi-million-pound house with blood spatter all over the rockery, and a dozen suspects screaming and complaining and having hysterics at various locations in the house and garden. Not to mention the babies.

The babies. Alison was trying hard not to look at them, but they made themselves known, howling little bundles of pure need. She counted four dotted around the house, held tightly in arms. Some kind of antenatal group reunion. There’d been six couples in the group, she had gathered. Shouldn’t there have been six babies for six couples? She made a mental note to find out. She could hardly take witness statements from the babies, however, which was a shame, as she wasn’t getting much sense out of the adults either.

If you counted the teenager, thirteen adults had been here for the barbecue. Alison’s mam, a Catholic from Cork, would consider that unlucky – one year at Christmas Alison’s brother Liam had been made to eat his dinner in the kitchen, to avoid having thirteen at the table. And it was true it hadn’t ended well here. Someone was dead, on a Saturday afternoon in June, a perfect sunny day, at a barbecue, a reunion of a baby group. It should have been a happy event. Alison didn’t often get called out to houses like this.

The house was massive – five bedrooms – ultra-modern with marble and glass everywhere. The back garden was overhung by the balcony, which looked on to a collection of rocks and plants tumbling down a hill to the lawn, which in turn backed on to a park and even had a gate leading out to it. Bright green grass. Hot blue sky. A smell of recently cooked meat, and clumps of people standing about wild-eyed and shocked. Alison was doing sums in her head – a million quid at least, for the size, for the location. Most likely more.

She took a breath. What do I do with this? It was overwhelming for a moment, all these hysterical people who couldn’t seem to answer a straight question, many of them crying, babies grousing, the heat, the dead body on the rocks. Then sudden cloud drifted over the garden, and instantly it changed everything, the flowers now less jewelled, the food less appetising, the people paler and more shocked. Even the dead body, crumpled on the rocks, suddenly looked smaller. More manageable. The blood less scarlet. As the heat dissipated from her head, Alison felt more in charge. She straightened up, adjusted her sweaty polyester suit. ‘Right,’ she said, to the constable guarding the body, who looked very young and unsure indeed. ‘Who owns this place? I’ll speak to them first.’

 

 

Jax – ten weeks earlier

I used to be proud of my body. I wasn’t obsessive about it, I still ate cake and roast dinners, and lay on the sofa on Sunday afternoons watching old Poirot re-runs and posting M&M’s into my mouth. But it was reliable. I rarely got sick, I could hike up Munros and swim across lakes and survive an advanced spin class with Leslie, who’d made more people cry than Toy Story 3. That was before.

But since getting pregnant, I seemed to have lost control of it. It would arbitrarily start to leak or weep or flush red or demand to pee, despite being literally on the way out of the loo. Maybe it was overwhelmed coping with what my GP called ‘a geriatric first-time pregnancy’. I didn’t feel geriatric. Before this, I still wore miniskirts and went to festivals. Until meeting Aaron I had stayed up all night at least once a month. I got IDed in Sainsbury’s often enough to carry my driving licence in my wallet. But despite all these things, despite the years I’d held time at bay, I really was thirty-eight, and my body was showing me this by slowly crumbling around me with each new day of my pregnancy.

The morning of the first group meeting, Aaron found me on the bathroom floor, weeping. ‘What’s happened now?’ He hunkered down beside me.

I hiccupped. ‘Can’t get my shoes on.’ I had overbalanced and almost fallen trying to tie the laces.

‘Come here, I’ll help you.’ He was so good. He’d grown up helping foster siblings, younger kids in the care homes, and now me, his geriatric pregnant girlfriend. ‘Babe, it’s OK.’ I let him prop me on the side of the bath, not as easy as it used to be when I wasn’t enormous.

‘Do we have to go?’ I bleated, pathetically, as he eased my feet into my Converse.

‘We’ve paid for it now. And it’ll be good, come on. Meet other people in the same boat, yeah?’ It was true we had paid for it, and money was tight at the moment. The flyer had come through the door one day, a stock photo of happy pregnant ladies and their partners, standing around some medicine balls. Antenatal group. Meet other new parents and learn what to do! That sounded good to me. I had no idea what to do. But all the same, now it was time, I felt afraid. Nervous, in some way I didn’t understand. Like I was about to take a test, one I hadn’t studied for and wasn’t at all sure I would pass.

Aaron had a way about him, gentle but steadfast, that could get me to do almost anything. Soon I had my shoes on and was in the car heading to the community centre where the antenatal group was held.

 

I’d never liked groups. Even at school I was the rebel who’d refuse to join in with the shared Home Economics project, making a pair of curtains or whatever (why?). My mother had always despaired of that. Changing my name from the decorous Jacqueline to the ladette Jax. Running out on my wedding to my ex, rich and terminally dull Chris, and then getting pregnant at thirty-eight with a guy fourteen years my junior. But I didn’t care. Offending my mother meant I was on the right track, that I’d escaped my middle-class fate of listening to The Archers and getting really into gardening.

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