Magpie

by Elizabeth Day

  Just sit down, Marisa wanted to say. Sit down and start being my father again.

  She glanced at the packet of cornflakes and the half-empty bottle of full-fat milk, the thumb-press indentation on the silver lid, and felt revulsion. She pushed her chair back, the table juddering.

  ‘I don’t have time,’ she said. ‘I’m late for school.’

  ‘It’s only eight fifteen,’ her father protested.

  ‘God, they work them hard these days, don’t they?’ Jackie said to no one in particular. ‘I feel sorry for you, sweetheart.’

  Marisa turned to Jackie then and smiled.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she said, the words clear and powerful, landing cleanly in the silence between them. It was the first time Marisa had ever used the F-word in front of her father. She was still so young that he probably hadn’t believed she knew it. And yet he left her in the house on her own without a babysitter while he went out for dinner with Jackie, so she clearly wasn’t that young in his eyes.

  There was a moment of shock. Jackie took a step back, stumbling against the armchair. Marisa’s father was rigid. His eyes were pinpricks of fury. She had never seen him so angry. He opened his mouth, about to say something that she already knew would be irreparable, and she ran out of the house before she could hear it, running onto the road and all the way to the bus stop where she realised she had no coat or schoolbag but that she’d just have to make do. On the bus, no one talked to her. She had, without knowing why, radiated weirdness from the moment her mother had left. It was as though she were contained by a force field of loneliness, and everyone knew that she was not worth getting to know.

  She never saw Jackie again.

  Over the years, Marisa set herself up in competition with every single girlfriend her father introduced to her. She would always win and in the end, her father stopped dating altogether. The last time she’d seen him, he had come to visit her in her flat in London, wearing a battered raincoat and a tie pockmarked with food stains. His eyebrows were wiry and overgrown. He was slight – slighter than she remembered – and, despite the food stains, looked malnourished. His eyes were rheumy and unfocused as he looked around her tiny one-bed in an ecstasy of insincere appreciation. She could smell gin on his breath. She had made him tea and he had drunk it sitting on her sofa, without taking his coat off.

  ‘Are you sure I can’t take that for you?’

  ‘Oh no no no, I don’t want to be any bother.’

  He seemed so weak and so old. She realised he would probably die quite soon and when she thought of it, she felt a pang of incipient loss. Not because his death would leave an absence in her life, but because his existence had.

  After that, she didn’t contact him again. She ignored his phone calls and his sad ‘To My Daughter’ birthday cards and he stopped trying. Then Marisa moved in with Jake and left no forwarding address.

  In her study, she watches the sun rise. The clouded sky goes nicotine yellow. Her desk turns sepia in the light. It is too bright. She takes the roll of masking tape from her desk and starts sticking strips of it across the panes of glass. Better. The central heating starts up, pipes clanking and creaking like stretched sailing ropes. The house seems noisier than it did before, as though all its internal workings have been made audible. She places her hands over her ears, trying to block out the sound. It doesn’t work. The house seems to thrum and vibrate around her. When she looks down at the paper in front of her, she sees she has covered it in black and white lines, a looping spider’s web of intricate design.

  Her belly pushes outwards over her tracksuit bottoms. She cannot remember putting these trousers on, but she thinks it was a few days ago now. She rests both her hands on her pregnant stomach, pressing lightly with her palms in a bid to feel something – anything – that will connect her to this growing profusion of cells inside her. Although she knows it’s too early, she imagines that she can feel the baby twitching jerkily inside her, sudden movements that feel like a soft internal scratching. The websites tell her officiously that ‘Baby could be sprouting hair’ and ‘Baby can use her facial muscles to grimace or smile’ and ‘Baby is about the size of a lemon or your clenched fist’.

  She clenches her fist, placing it underneath her navel, and leaves it there, her knuckles white against her skin. The size of a fist. She imagines drawing back her arm, slick as an archer, and unleashing her fist into Kate’s face. She imagines Kate’s look of shock, the way she would raise her hands to her nose as a thin stream of blood trickled slowly out of one nostril. She imagines Kate’s fear as she turned away. She imagines punching her again in the back of the head, this time with such force that Kate would fall to the ground. She imagines looking at her from above, watching Kate whimper on the floorboards and then she imagines her vanishing – her entire body disappearing, as if the elastic of time had snapped and broken and she had fallen through the gap.

  On her phone, she scrolls through pregnancy development websites.

  ‘Baby’s intestines are producing meconium, which is the waste that will make up her first bowel movement after birth.’

  ‘At week fourteen, fully developed genitals make their grand entrance.’

  She visualises a miniature penis and vulva arriving at some glitzy black-tie ball, walking effortfully down a red and gold staircase to the elegant strains of a string quartet.

  ‘Wash your hands often – and carry liquid sanitiser for times when a sink’s not handy – don’t share drinks or food or toothbrushes and avoid sick people like the plague. It’s OK to banish a sick spouse to the couch.’

  A spouse. She doesn’t have a spouse. She has Jake, in whose house she lives, who is having an affair with their lodger while Marisa is almost four months pregnant with their child. The precariousness of her situation hits her. She wants to throw up. She thinks she should be crying, but in the place where there should have been emotion, there is instead a hole: a blackness through which she is cut loose and falling.

  ‘As many first-trimester pregnancy woes wane, you’re most likely feeling a bit peppier and a lot more human. More good news on the horizon: less morning sickness and fewer trips to the toilet to pee.’

  She doesn’t know what to do about it. And yet. She must do something.

  Hours pass. Later, in the kitchen, she makes herself a herbal tea, coffee having been designated by the pregnancy websites as one of the endless dangerous substances she must now ingest with extreme caution. She leaves the teabag to stew and presses it against the back of the teaspoon. She sits at the table and stares out at the garden. The grass is wet from morning rainfall and the shimmer of a spider’s web spans the corner of the glass door. Marisa watches as the silver threading refracts the watery light.

  So much effort to build a home, she thinks. Her head feels heavy. She drops it down towards her chest, massaging the back of her neck with her hand. As she does so, her eye catches on a flat grey square on the seat of one of the kitchen chairs. It has been pushed under the table and she wouldn’t have noticed it without lowering her sightline. It is Jake’s laptop. He normally takes it to work but he’s clearly forgotten today.

  She reaches into the pocket of her dressing gown for her phone. But then, just before she calls him, she changes her mind. She lifts the laptop onto the table, its edges sleek, the surface slightly granular to the touch. She flips open the computer. She knows Jake’s password. She watched him once, typing it into the keyboard as she was standing behind him, pretending to busy herself with the washing-up.

  She taps it in: ‘143Richborne’. It is their address. Maybe it still means something to him – this house, their home, their baby, her?

  The screen fires up and a picture of a Renaissance painting flashes into place. A rosy-cheeked Virgin Mary, with long golden hair twisting around her collarbone, and a fleshy baby Jesus, placed against an Italianate landscape. He has a thing for devotional art.

  Mari
sa is not sure what she’s looking for. She tells herself she’s logged on because she wants to check the news. Having been so insulated over the last few months, so distracted by her necessary involvement in establishing their own joint life, she has lost track of what is happening in the outside world.

  But before she has a chance to visit the BBC website, an alert pops up in the right-hand corner of the screen. She sees Kate’s name flash up, black sans serif font against a grey rectangle.

  ‘Did you see her this morning?’

  It takes a beat for Marisa to understand. But then she works it out. The laptop is connecting to Jake’s text messages, and she is witnessing his communications in real time. At the bottom of the screen is an icon consisting of two overlapping speech bubbles, one blue, the other white and containing ellipses. There is a red circle with the figure ‘1’ pulsing like an eye above the larger one.

  Unread message.

  Marisa clicks on the speech bubbles and there they are: text after text from Kate to Jake and Jake to Kate.

  The first thing she notices is the number of kisses. Jake never signs off affectionately in the texts he sends her – it is, she has thought, one of his quirks. He is business-like because he has to be, because he has so many other demands on his time at work. This is what she has told herself.

  But she has been wrong. When he texts Kate, his messages are festooned with lines of Xs, as if his finger has slipped, as if he is composing nonsense poetry. The lines are so dense it is almost as if he is redacting paragraph after paragraph of a top-secret document.

  There are hundreds of messages. She scrolls back and back and back to see where they start, but the screen keeps offering to ‘load more’. Her heart collapses in on itself. Her chest empties.

  ‘I love you,’ Kate wrote on 2 June. That would have been a few weeks after she moved in, Marisa calculates. But the messages go back far longer. They already knew each other. This whole thing – pretending she was a tenant; telling Marisa they could no longer afford the rent without outside help – has been a sham. She has been set up. Jake has exploited her unquestioning love for him to move his mistress in. How could she have been so stupid?

  Her throat fills with a metallic taste. She swallows, then gags. She hasn’t eaten for hours, maybe even days, who knows, who fucking cares? The dry heave of her stomach does not release anything. She covers her mouth with her hand, keeping it all in, tamping down the fear like coffee grounds in a filter.

  ‘Baby I can’t stop thinking about you,’ Jake had written on 15 July. ‘Wear that lingerie tonight.’ He’d signed off with a winking face and an aubergine emoji.

  ‘Haha OK but what about Marisa?’

  ‘We’ll find a way.’ Another winking face emoji.

  ‘Just want to make sure she’s OK.’

  ‘She’s fine,’ Jake had typed. ‘Trust me. We don’t need to worry.’

  It was so cliched, that was the worst part. She had thought more of Jake. She had believed him to be different: honest, plain-spoken, straightforward. Not passionate, but dependable. It turns out that she doesn’t know Jake at all, this man she is supposedly in love with. It turns out he is an overgrown adolescent schoolboy in the throes of illicit passion and that he communicates with crude sexual innuendo and emojis. It turns out he has been patronising Marisa, in the foulest way possible. He has been treating her like a fool because she has been acting like one, blinkered and uncomprehending, as he continues shagging their lodger. All this time, Marisa has thought he was buttoned-up and emotionally distant but undeniably in love with her – she is pregnant with his child! It’s everything he said he wanted. But now there is a clattering realisation that his detachment is not a sign of steadiness or integrity; it’s because he has been deceiving her for months. Maybe even from the moment they met.

  What was the point of it? To show that it can be done? To use her as a brood mare while he gets his kicks elsewhere? Perhaps he is a psychopath – she read a book about them once and knows that one of the signifying factors is a lack of empathy and glib, superficial charm. That’s Jake. She believed he was so deep. But he is a hologram of a person. A fake. A fraud. A phoney who doesn’t care who he hurts.

  Her wrist is aching. When she looks down, she sees she has been scratching at it with the fingernails of her other hand and has drawn blood. Automatically, she stands and goes to the cupboard underneath the sink where there is a box of tissues. She presses a tissue to her wrist. Red-brown dots appear through the white. At the sight of her own blood, Marisa feels a pure, violent rage. In front of her is a fruit bowl containing four lemons, the ceramic painted and intricately patterned. It was brought back from one of Jake’s backpacking trips to Morocco as a student and she knows he adores it because it makes him feel young.

  Without thinking, she lifts the bowl and throws it towards the opposite wall. The lemons fly out and bounce on the floor. The ceramic slams and breaks, making a noise like a scream but then she realises the scream is coming from her. She is shouting, but there are no words. She screams, clutching her distended belly, feeling the imagined weight of her pregnancy against her hands, and then she screams again, until her throat is ragged with the effort of it, until all she can hear is the ringing of her grief in her own ears. Grief for the love she so foolishly believed in. Grief for the child she is carrying who will not now be born into the embrace of two loving parents. Grief for her own ridiculousness in believing she was worthy of Jake’s love, in believing any of it. She understands it now – the lesson that life has been trying to teach her. It is that she will never be enough. The world is laughing at her for thinking, however briefly, that she might be.

  ‘You fucking cunt!’ she screams, drawing out the vowels of the final bleak syllable so that it becomes a caterwauling echo of the original sound. She doesn’t know, when she screams it, whether the word refers to her or to Jake or to Kate.

  Marisa leaves the shards of the fruit bowl scattered on the black floor. She remembers the first time she saw this kitchen and how impressed she was by the largeness of it. She was cowed by its grown-up beauty: the sleek surfaces, the matt-painted floorboards, the dishwasher that you knocked on twice, sharply, to open the door. Now it looks unreal, like a bad dream. The room is taunting her. The walls are closing in on her fevered thoughts, squashing them into a tiny, painful cube. A sharp bolting headache grips her temples. The cookery books, stacked neatly on shelves by the cooker, are spilling out their distaste for her. The wine glasses in the cupboard, bulbous and sparkling, are clinking their congratulations for having tricked her. And outside, the tall council estate stairwell is looming ever larger, blotting out the slivers of her internal light – those popping pixellations of hope studded against the darkness of her mind, each one extinguishing itself as the blackness leaks into her thoughts. Who was she to have hope? Who was she to believe that life was on her side?

  She exhales, unclenches her fists and counts to ten.

  ‘When I get angry or upset or I think no one is listening to me, I count to ten,’ her mother once told her. Marisa, who must have been five or six, was lying on her bed, breathing heavily with hot cheeks. ‘Try it, darling.’

  She imagines her mother now as she counts – six, seven, eight – and as she pictures her face, undimmed by age in her memory, she becomes calmer.

  She returns to the laptop open on the table. Her fury has been replaced by disconnection. Her actions are now governed by a shocked coolness, and she finds she can examine the texts more dispassionately, almost as objects of historic curiosity.

  ‘Did you see her this morning?’

  Kate’s last text, hanging in the ether. And then: three dots, appearing one after the other in quick succession. Jake is typing.

  ‘No. She was in her room. Didn’t want to disturb. x’

  Even when he’s being unfaithful, Jake is particular about his full stops and grammatical sensibility.

>   Then: three more dots, shimmying across the screen like a caterpillar. Jake is typing.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Jake texts. ‘It’s all going to be fine. And soon we’ll be a proper family. Love you xxxxx’

  She feels sick. So this isn’t just a fling. Clearly Jake and Kate are planning for the future as a ‘proper family’. But how, exactly? She’s the one pregnant with his child … unless … no … the thought was too vicious. They couldn’t be thinking … could they …?

  ‘Can’t wait,’ Kate replies. ‘Love you too x’

  Unless … they were planning to wait until Marisa had given birth and then get rid of her? They wouldn’t. It would be too cruel. After everything she has told Jake about feeling abandoned by her own mother, the idea that he could willingly enact the same on their unborn child makes her want to rip off his scalp. What a callous fucking bastard.

  Think. She has to think. Think, Marisa. Think, think, think.

  But again and again, she keeps being drawn back to the text messages.

  5 July

  JAKE: ‘You’re amazing and I love you. Whatever happens, please remember that.’

  Reading his words, her heart seems to start pumping and squeezing in the pit of her stomach.

  20 August

  KATE: ‘Going to be late tonight. Don’t wait up.’

  The casual proprietorship is what strikes Marisa. The idea that he’d be waiting up so that – what? – they could have a quickie on the downstairs sofa while she was sound asleep upstairs?

  12 September

  KATE: ‘Worried about Marisa. She seems edgy.’

  JAKE: ‘It’s all under control. You worry too much. xxxxx’

  KATE: ‘OK’

  15 October

  KATE: ‘Jesus, Jake. She just turned up at my work.’