‘Oh dear, you look exhausted. Arthur giving you a bad time? Isabella sleeps right through, it’s amazing! We’re so lucky.’ Monica didn’t look tired at all. Her skin was radiant, eyes clear, and she wore a white sundress. White! At a party for babies! At a barbecue, with ketchup on every surface! Cathy drank it in, humbled, knowing she could never be as perfect.
Monica had just said, ‘I think that’s everyone now, you’re the last but you’ve made it eventually,’ when the doorbell rang. She frowned. ‘I don’t know who that can be.’
Cathy peered into the sunlit hallway, through the sunburst windows on either side of the door. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, dismayed. ‘It’s Kelly.’
‘Kelly?’
‘Did you invite her?’ said Hazel, coming back in from the garden, a beer already in hand.
‘No, well, I mean not specifically, I just sent a reminder to the email group.’
‘You didn’t take her off the list?’ Hazel’s tone was judgemental.
Monica answered, snippily, ‘Well, no, I don’t have the time to trawl through taking people off willy-nilly, do I.’
‘Oh my God. Has she been getting all our messages about the births?’ Cathy winced. Kelly had, understandably, gone quiet since the terrible news about her baby. The little boy had died inside her, his heart stopped. Cathy couldn’t bear to think of it, literally couldn’t bear it. Her stomach would clench and her palms sweat and her breath narrow. How could you survive such a thing, carrying a baby inside you for months only to lose it anyway? Kelly would’ve had to give birth to the poor little thing, this far along. And she was so young, just twenty-two.
Monica rolled her eyes. ‘She hasn’t brought that awful Ryan, I hope.’
‘No, it’s just her.’ Oh yes, Ryan. Cathy still had horrible flashbacks to that day at group, the violence suddenly exploding in their midst, the fear of realising she could not protect herself if something happened, could not protect her baby. She didn’t imagine Ryan would be around much longer, if he hadn’t already gone. Poor Kelly.
Hazel and Monica just stood there. Hazel took another gulp of her beer. Cathy said, ‘Well, shall I let her in?’
Monica pursed her lips. ‘I suppose we’ll have to. I do hope there’ll be enough salad.’
Salad! Bloody salad. She wished she didn’t admire Monica despite her awfulness, didn’t long for her approval. Imagine being that sure of yourself. Cathy moved to the door. Through the glass, Kelly was tiny and hunched. When the door opened, there she was. Cathy tried not to react to how awful she looked – bruised dark eyes, green-grey skin, shivering despite the heat. She wore a denim jacket and tracksuit bottoms. ‘Oh, Kel. I’m so sorry,’ she said, feeling the inadequacy of the words.
‘Is it OK I’m here? I just wanted . . . I wanted to see them. The babies.’
Cathy realised she should have gone to visit her. Never mind that they barely knew each other, they were in the trenches together, and this could have happened to any of them. ‘Oh, you poor thing.’ She stepped forward to hug her, bring her in, but Kelly flinched away. Cathy realised she had Arthur against her in the sling. She was so used to it now that he felt like part of her body. Kelly stared at him. Hungry. Like the way a starving dog eyes a treat.
Cathy might have done something, maybe, with that revelation, something that could have stopped what happened next. But as Kelly stepped into the hall, arms folded around herself, Cathy’s phone vibrated where she kept it tucked into the sling. Hazel would object if she knew, would say the radiation was bad for Arthur, even though there was no evidence of that, but Cathy was too afraid to let it out of her sight. And sure enough, it was him. Dan. Please. We need to talk. Heart stuttering, she tucked it away again, and followed Kelly back into the kitchen. She wasn’t going to answer the message, of course. It was hopeless, dangerous, stupid. But all the same she found she was already crafting a response in her head.
Jax – nine weeks earlier
That night, after the CPR class, I was shaken awake by a dream so vivid I felt like someone was holding me down in the bed. I woke up gasping, terrified. There was a baby, and it had turned blue, and I was calling an ambulance but it wasn’t coming, my phone didn’t have reception and I couldn’t make my fingers work the buttons, and the baby was floppy, and I rubbed its chest but I couldn’t make contact somehow, and it was dying, the baby was dying and it was my fault.
I sat up in bed in the dark, pulling the dream’s remnants from me like cobwebs. Beside me, Aaron breathed peacefully. He had slept in such awful places over the years, rooms full of screaming kids, under the stairs, even outside in the garden a few times when a foster dad was trying to punish him, that his rest was rarely disturbed. A coffee-flavoured chocolate could keep me up till 3 a.m.
I went for my phone, knowing that I shouldn’t be charging it in the bedroom, that it disrupted my sleep and possibly would harm the baby. Since I was already being bad, I let myself slip into old dangerous habits. I had a look at Chris’s page, happy with his wife and two adorable girls, and I wondered if I should have stayed with him after all, if that four-bedroom house and those holidays to Mauritius could have been mine. Stupid. I hadn’t been happy with him, that was why I’d left. Aaron, for all his youth and poverty, loved me in a way Chris never had. He saw me. He listened.
Then, slipping even further into bad habits, I searched for him. He wasn’t on Facebook – it had all happened just before it became widespread – but he had the remnants of an old profile on Bebo. That, in itself, should have been a warning sign. Of course, we weren’t friends online, never had been anything like that, but a certain amount was public, and it hadn’t been taken down. I wondered if he could access social media where he was. Most likely not. Surely not, even in this supposedly lax country. He posed in black and white up a mountain, his back to the camera, his face half turned. I hated that I still knew how to find it so easily, that his name flowed from my fingertips. If I’d never met him, how different would my life have been? Would I have settled down earlier, had this baby years ago? Even clicking on this old profile made me jumpy, as if it might draw him back into my life. He couldn’t know I’d been looking at it, could he?
It was dangerous, being awake while your partner slept peacefully. You started to feel alone. You started to feel they could never understand you, in your troubled insomnia. I would need to pee in a second too, but the room was cold and I put off getting up. I let things rattle around my head like peas. Nina’s contemptuous look when I didn’t save the fake baby. The weird email at work. My mother, just waiting for me to mess up. And I was facing a deadline that would not move – in seven weeks or thereabouts, I would go into labour. And I was terrified, both of that and what came after. How would my almost-forty body recover from the birth? Would Aaron ever fancy me again?
He never did. He just wants your money.
I didn’t even have that much money, just this small house that I’d bought with my father’s legacy. I shut down the stupid voice and clicked idly on to Facebook again. I saw a red mark, meaning I’d had a notification since I last looked two seconds ago. An account called ‘Ann Onymous’ had posted on my timeline. Big screaming capital letters. JAX CULVILLE IS A PAEDOPHILE.