‘One, two, three, four,
Rattlesnake hunters knocking at your door.
Give them meat and give them bone,
And pray that they leave you alone.’
Samantha – Now
Start with a joke, they’d told him, and so he did. It was the only joke he knew.
‘Why is a woman like a vet’s finger? Because they’re both stuck up bitches.’
The wedding speech went downhill from there. Six months later I gave birth to our daughter, and three days after that he left, moving back to his parents’ in Northampton. I never heard from him again. So for a time it was just me and Elizabeth, and now it is just me.
Her name was Elizabeth but I always called her Edie. Ee-dee, like the percussion of a heartbeat. The drum of her feet on the stairs that led to her bedroom. Ee-dee. It was a fanciful, wistful name, conjuring up images of beatniks and poetry and dappled sunlight on skin. My girl, my Edie, she was not like that. She was a dagger, a thorn, the upturned tack embedded in your heel. Never still, a loose-limbed nail-biter with thick dark hair and round eyes, permanently worried.
After Edie first went missing, I shook for days. I lay in bed, curled on my side with my knees tucked up to my chest, and I trembled so much it looked like a seizure. The doctor told me it was adrenaline, the body’s way of coping with the shock. As a kid I’d once witnessed a storm take out the power line of our house. The cable had crackled and snapped and twisted like a snake. My daddy had told me that if I touched it, I’d be barbecued meat. Lying there in my bed, the covers pooled around my feet, body jerking with shock, I felt that same frantic current pass through me.
I still have something from that time: a shopping list that I keep in a drawer. My handwriting’s a spidery crawl across the page, almost without cohesion, sliding on a downward tilt. There is nothing steady about it, and it frightens me a little. That’s why I keep it. To remind me of how bad it was, those first days after she’d gone. My hands are still shaking now.
My pregnancy was a nine-month-long dash to the toilet, me bilious and woozy, barely able to hold anything down. Try ginger, they told me in the baby group, which I attended alone. Try peppermint. Try yoga. Try going and fucking yourselves, I thought, feeling the slow burn of bile rising in my throat.
When Edie was born, I was terrified. It wasn’t the blood or the way it seemed to coat everything with its coppery odour. I wasn’t afraid of the pain either, not even when it felt as though my spine were filled with crushed glass.
I was afraid of her. The baby.
The midwife who passed her to me whispered, ‘She’s beautiful’, told me she was a perfect little girl, but I wasn’t able to see it. I was terrified of Edie; the weight of her, glossy and slick as a baby seal, coated in a waxy vernix. She opened her mouth and instead of the primal howl I had been expecting, she began to mewl like a kitten, tiny fingers clenching and unclenching, her plump face crimson and crushed-looking, irritable. I lay back on the pillows feeling hollowed out. In that moment I wished I could go back in time and undo everything, starting with Mark Hudson and his stupid promises to pull out of me, delivered with his fuggy, alcohol-laced breath. To a time before then even, to ever meeting him, to ever going to the bus stop on that rainy Tuesday, trying to hide behind my Just Seventeen magazine and risking sly peeks at him over the pages. Imagine how I feel now, looking back at myself, at the young woman in the past, this new mother, thinking that I wished I could undo it all.
Talk about a life sentence.
Frances – Now
I’m trying not to look at him, but his tears compel me. He has been on the phone for so long our food has grown cold and hardened on our plates. Outside, a car alarm starts bleating waa, waa, waa, desperate for attention. William cries silently, wiping his face with the back of his hand. I clench my fists beneath the table hard enough to leave crescent moon imprints in my palms.
‘What is it?’
‘Mum.’ His voice is heavy, like tar. ‘She’s had a fall. It sounds bad. Alex said she’s been taken to hospital. Thank God he was there.’
He’s always there. William’s younger brother, Alex. The little boy who never grew up and left home. What is he now? Thirty?
‘William, I—’
‘I’m sorry, Frances. Can we just – I need to. . .’
He stands up, runs his fingers through his dark hair. In the candlelight his features soften, eyes glittering, heavy brows drawn together. ‘Have we got any brandy?’
‘Top shelf,’ I tell him. I pick up my phone, put it down again. I’m impatient, sparking with nervous energy. My phone is an unexploded bomb.
I found you out, I want to say. Rattlesnake.
But I don’t say these things. I can hear William sobbing hoarsely in the kitchen. She’s not even dead yet! I don’t say that either. Of course not. Instead I go through and sit with him on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor and drink a brandy and carefully I tease the story out of him. We’re talking in whispers, even though the little box room above us – the one I’ve been tentatively referring to as our ‘future nursery’ since we moved in – remains resolutely empty, except for the teetering files and William’s weights in there, gathering dust. He cups his brandy in his hand, holds it close to his chest.
‘Alex found her at the bottom of the stairs. He said there was so much blood he was sure she was dead.’
‘What have the doctors said?’
‘They’re still there, running tests. God love the NHS.’ He groans. ‘Ah, Jesus. It’s so hard, Frances. She’s only in her seventies. It’s too soon for – for all this shit.’
‘I know, I know. Will you go down there, do you think?’
‘Not sure.’
He tugs at his hair, a habit I’ve seen before. My stomach curls a little. It’s a micro-gesture, and he’s unaware of it. Deceit. I’ve come to know it well.
‘You don’t have to decide yet. Get some sleep tonight if you can, speak to Alex in the morning. Things might not look so bad once you’ve got the right information.’
‘Knowledge is power.’
It certainly is, I think, venomously. Then, out loud, ‘Do you want to come to bed?’
‘Nah. I won’t sleep now. My brain’s rushing all over the place. Think I’ll get some work done. Do you mind?’
‘Of course not.’
One of the other things in the box room is William’s desk and computer, used mainly for his accountancy work and occasional game of online poker. It was the poker I was concerned about, initially. I’d discovered the slow-burning hole in our finances completely by accident, and even though he told me it was just a bad month for expenses I saw that little gesture again – one hand reaching to pull the ends of his hair – and I knew different.
After we sold our three-bedroomed house last year and moved to this one – smaller, cheaper, more comfortable – I started to put aside a little nest egg, carefully curated for ‘when the baby comes’. Once a month I add a bit more to the pot, and William does the same, so that when the day comes it’ll be one aspect we won’t need to worry about. Because that day has to be soon, right? Married two years, together for six. I’m thirty-three this year. It’s not a race, William keeps saying, we’ve still got time. Meanwhile the box room exists as an outlier, dust motes spinning in empty afternoon sunlight.