Magpie

  ‘Cold?’ Annabelle asks sharply.

  ‘No, I’m fine. The whisky will warm me up.’

  She takes a tumbler from Jake, who passes another one to his mother. He pours himself a neat vodka and sits next to Kate on the sofa.

  ‘Drink that up,’ Annabelle says. ‘It’ll be good for the shock.’

  ‘Kate, you must have been terrified,’ Jake says. ‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t here.’

  ‘There’s no time for that now.’ Annabelle speaks with level urgency. ‘While she’s calm out there’ – she gestures towards the hallway – ‘let’s talk about next steps.’

  ‘OK,’ Jake says.

  ‘We think the best thing to do is take Marisa back to ours, don’t we, Kate?’

  Kate nods.

  ‘We can keep her calm on the journey – Chris has all the necessary tablets and whatnot – and then we can put her up in the guest cottage. She’ll be out of your home, which I think is absolutely necessary from what Kate has said.’

  Kate, realising that Jake and Annabelle are still several steps behind, brings them up to date as quickly as she can on what she found in Marisa’s room; the contents of the diary; the prescription that hasn’t ever been used.

  ‘Christ,’ Jake says. ‘She’s a fucking nutcase.’

  Annabelle draws herself up straighter, unimpressed by the swearing even in these extreme circumstances.

  ‘Well, look, you both know it took me some time to … understand what you were doing with a surrogate whom you barely knew, but we are where we are. And I’m sure, with the right medical treatment, this woman—’

  ‘Marisa,’ Kate interjects.

  ‘Yes. I’m sure that she’ll be right as rain. The main thing is we keep her safe and stable and away from you for the duration of this pregnancy. Once the baby is here, we can deal with everything else.’

  ‘She thought we were having an affair?’ Jake is incredulous. ‘She thought you were a lodger?’

  Kate touches the back of his neck, feeling the warmth of it against her palm.

  ‘Apparently so.’

  ‘How did we … I mean, how did she … how did this happen?’

  Kate shrugs. The point is not that it’s happening, she wants to shout, the point is what they do to salvage it.

  She knocks back the remainder of the whisky and puts the empty glass on the coffee table. She remembers her tooth on the hallway floor. She hasn’t even thought what to do about that yet. Should she pick it up and put it in some ice the way you’re meant to do with amputated limbs?

  Annabelle’s voice brings her back.

  ‘Listen,’ Annabelle is saying, ‘if you have to pretend you’re in a relationship with her, Jake, then so be it, quite frankly. It won’t mean anything. You can say you and she need to be apart while you sort things out with Kate. Drag it out a bit, tell her your parents are looking after her until you can be together, if necessary …’

  ‘Mum, come on. You can’t be serious.’

  Annabelle fixes him with those blue, blue eyes.

  ‘I’m deadly serious. You got yourself into this mess. You have to do whatever it takes to get yourself out of it.’

  ‘It’s hardly ethical—’

  ‘Ethical?’ She gives a short laugh. ‘You’re going to talk to me about ethics, after everything she’s put you through? This is my grandchild we’re talking about.’

  Kate, sitting quietly on the sofa, is surprised by how together she feels. Her anxiety and fear have dissipated. She sees that Annabelle is, in her own way, right. They have to do whatever is required. All of those traits in Annabelle that Kate has previously found so frustrating – her coldness to outsiders, her steely belief in the rightness of her own opinions, her clear-sighted ability to see straight through to a person’s weakest point and her borderline obsessive devotion to her son – are now coming to the fore in a positive way.

  ‘What do you think?’ Jake asks her.

  ‘I think your mother is right.’

  And Jake – good, kind, solid Jake – agrees to go along with it, as both women knew he would. For all his qualities, Jake is also weak. He is directed by stronger, prevailing winds and tacks his sail accordingly. It’s partly why Kate loves him so much. She knows he will always support her because he relies on her to tell him where to go next. He is impressed by her, still, even after all these years. Now, he needs Kate to steer the course. She knows exactly what they have to do, and so does Annabelle, and that is to protect their child at all costs.

  26

  She takes a travel case from the basement and brings it up to Marisa’s room, unzipping and placing it on the bed. Then she folds up Marisa’s clothes – baggy T-shirts, artist’s overalls, ripped jeans, the odd patterned sundress, bobbly and bleached pale by too many washes – and puts them into the cases. She is surprised by how few possessions Marisa has: they have filled a little over half of the case. She finds a stuffed toy bunny with a stitched ‘x’ for a nose on the shelves, along with two books of poetry, and she puts these in too. She packs sketchpads and pens and a box of blunted graphite pencils, but the paints and the desk will have to stay behind. She goes to the bathroom to gather up Marisa’s toiletries, which include a toothbrush and toothpaste, some Vaseline, a small pot of skin cream, hotel sample-size shampoo bottles and, at the back of the cabinet, a half-empty box of Risperidone tablets. She shoves these in too. Chris indicated earlier that he wanted to get her back onto the drugs as soon as possible.

  ‘The risks to the baby are minimal and far outweighed by the advantages,’ he said. ‘If she carries on not taking them, then there could be more serious consequences.’

  ‘Such as?’ Jake asked.

  ‘Maternal suicide.’

  She shuts the case and wheels it out of the room. Jake comes from downstairs to help her carry it outside. She keeps hold of the diary and of an address book she has found in the top drawer of Marisa’s bedside table.

  Jake’s parents have driven down in the battered old Volvo estate rather than the niftier Vauxhall Corsa (‘the runabout’, Annabelle calls it) and Kate is grateful for their foresight as she and Jake pack the cases into the boot. They have decided that Jake will travel in the back with Marisa, who will be able to stretch out and rest her head on his knees. Kate puts a tartan blanket and a flask of water in the footwell on the passenger side.

  She kisses Jake briefly on the lips in the street and he holds her tightly. It is now almost 1 a.m. and the rest of the road is in darkness, apart from a single light in an open window in the block of flats opposite. There is a smell of weed in the air, and the low bass thrum of some indistinguishable music.

  The two of them return to the house, where Annabelle and Chris and Marisa are waiting. Kate passes them in the hallway, making grateful eye contact with Chris who nods, and then she goes upstairs to look on from the first-floor landing.

  Chris has given Marisa the second dose of lorazepam and she is pliant and willing and child-like.

  ‘We’re going to take you to my parents’,’ Jake tells her, ‘to give you a bit of a rest while I sort things out with Kate.’

  Marisa looks up at him and smiles.

  ‘All right,’ she says.

  Jake leads her gently outside by the arm, with his parents following. Kate keeps thinking of something, at the edge of her consciousness; a memory that she doesn’t yet want to give in to. She keeps it at bay until the front door closes and she hears the Volvo engine start up and then fade into the distance and when she knows they have gone, the memory comes to her. It is a scene from a black and white film she watched at university, the Elia Kazan adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire where Vivien Leigh, playing the doomed Southern belle, Blanche DuBois, looks up with shining eyes at the dark-suited doctor as he removes his hat and says, ‘Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’

 
The house feels big and silent without any people in it. Kate’s head is aching and she realises she is very tired. She didn’t think it would be possible to feel like this with so much adrenalin coursing through her body, and yet she is seized by an exhaustion so complete that the only thing she can do is stumble to their bedroom, roll onto the duvet cover and close her eyes. She lies there fully clothed, her shoes still on from when she walked through the door when she got back from work. Funny to think how that was just a few hours ago, she thinks as she drops into sleep, and that this was all it took for life to warp and snap into chaos.

  When she wakes, it is early morning and she can hear the clattering sound of the rubbish collection vans outside. She slams upright, heart skipping and beating against her ribcage. Her mouth is throbbing. She takes two paracetamol from the bedside table and gulps them down. She can live without a tooth for now, she tells herself. It wasn’t one from the front. You couldn’t really notice it when she talked.

  She grabs her phone and sees several missed calls from Jake, followed by a series of text messages telling her they had arrived in Gloucestershire and all was calm but where was she, he was worried about her, please ring when she can.

  She calls him and he answers immediately.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he says.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m so sorry. I fell asleep.’

  She can hear him exhale on the other end of the line.

  ‘Thank God. I was so worried about you. I was going to drive back down there but Mum told me not to. She said you would have gone to bed.’

  ‘I’m glad you listened. I’m so sorry,’ she says again. ‘How are you? How is everything?’

  She hears Jake moving around, pacing the floor and she imagines him in the Sturridge family sitting room where she first met his parents, with the overstuffed sofas and the silver-framed photographs of christenings and graduations.

  ‘It’s under control,’ he says. ‘I feel weird about it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, it feels like we’re exploiting her. We’re kind of … lying to her, aren’t we?’

  Kate pinches the bridge of her nose.

  ‘Not as much as she’s lied to us,’ she says, trying to keep her voice calm. ‘It’s only until she’s more stable, anyway.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. Sorry. I know you’re right. She’s in the cottage, safely installed. The drive up was fine. She slept most of the way.’

  ‘How’s she been with your parents?’

  ‘Um. I’m not sure she’s registering who they are, to be honest. I’ve just let her think what she wants to think, said I’m coming back to London in a bit to talk things through with you.’

  ‘Good,’ Kate says. ‘But stay there as long as you need, won’t you?’

  ‘It shouldn’t take more than a day or so,’ he says.

  ‘Does everything seem OK with the baby?’

  Her voice cracks on this last word.

  ‘Yes,’ Jake replies firmly. ‘Dad says there’s nothing to worry about, so you mustn’t worry either, OK? Everything is going to be fine. More than fine.’

  She allows herself to be pacified, even though she knows he can’t be certain either way. In their bedroom, Kate opens the curtains with one hand, holding her phone with the other. The window is still open in the flat opposite, and there is a young man sitting there, leaning onto the sill to smoke a spliff. He catches her eye and gives a lazy grin. She smiles back, shakily. What if he saw or heard something, she thinks, what will happen then?

  She doesn’t say any of this to Jake. Instead she tells him she’s going to have a shower and start sorting things out, although which ‘things’, exactly, she doesn’t specify. They exchange I love yous and she promises to call him later. She hangs up.

  Kate doesn’t take a shower. She is still surfing the wave of jittery energy from the night before. She takes Marisa’s diary and the address book down to the kitchen where she brews strong coffee and forces herself to eat a slice of toast. She hasn’t eaten since yesterday lunchtime, she realises. She sits at the table, looking out at the garden and the tower beyond it. The sun is low in the sky, partially blotted out by a tall magnolia tree. Along the top of one wall, she spots a magpie and automatically raises her hand to salute it, just as her mother taught her she should in order to ward off evil spirits and bad luck. Then another magpie jumps up to join it, then another and another until there are four of the birds lined up next to each other on the wall. Their feathers glitter, white and black. One of them tips its beak into a shallow puddle of water that has gathered between the bricks. She has never seen four magpies lined up like this, on parade. She salutes the final three. What was that old folk rhyme? One for sorrow, two for joy … She can’t remember how the rest of it goes, so she Googles on her phone.

  ‘Three for a girl, four for a boy,’ she says out loud into the empty kitchen. ‘Huh.’

  A motorbike engine starts up somewhere beyond the wall and the mechanical scratch of it sends the magpies flying into the skies. She watches them go, darting into the air in a straight, disciplined line, and then she gets to work.

  She flicks through the address book. She looks first for any family members, but there are no listings for the Grover surname and no one recorded as ‘Mum’, ‘Dad’ or Anna, her sister. The book, which is covered in thin fabric patterned with cherries, proves to be scarce on useful information. Marisa has used it mostly for doodles – intricate curlicues and looping flower petals and hieroglyphic eyes all folded in on each other so that the page becomes more ink than paper. But there are a few names dotted about, here and there. Kate checks her watch. It’s a little after 8 a.m. It is not a particularly friendly time of day to call a stranger, but it’s not so unreasonable as to be actively rude.

  She takes out her phone and dials the first number, attached to the name ‘Rosie Hodge’. After three rings, a woman answers.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Oh, hi there. Sorry to disturb you so early.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’ve been up since five with the kids. What do you want?’

  ‘I was calling about Marisa Grover,’ Kate says and then she leaves a silence, waiting for the other woman to fill it.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Marisa Grover. I understand you might know her. Your name is in her address book, you see.’

  ‘Can I ask what this is about?’

  ‘Um. Yes. Marisa’s been living with us and has been taken ill. Nothing serious, but I wanted to let her friends and family know in case they—’

  ‘Marisa Grover,’ the woman says, turning the name over. ‘Wait a minute, do you mean the Telling Tales lady?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Ah, right. Well yeah, I’ve commissioned her to do a few books for my kids over the years. She’s very talented. Did you say she’s ill?’

  ‘Yes, but nothing serious,’ Kate repeats. ‘I’ve been asked to contact her clients and inform them there might be a delay in, erm, their books arriving.’

  ‘Oh, OK, thanks. I wasn’t waiting on anything from her.’

  Kate hears a child squealing on the other end of the line.

  ‘Shush,’ Rosie says. ‘I’m coming now. You’ll get your breakfast soon enough. Just calm down.’ To Kate she adds: ‘Hope she gets better soon. Thanks for calling.’

  ‘No problem.’

  In this way, Kate methodically works her way through Marisa’s contacts. They are mostly former clients. A couple don’t know who she’s talking about. One is a school friend who hasn’t heard from Marisa ‘for absolute yonks’. A few more don’t answer. Two go straight to voicemail. On the twelfth call, she dials a number for a woman listed as Jas.

  ‘Yo.’

  ‘Hi there, sorry to bother you so early,’ Kate starts, easing into the now-familiar patter. ‘I was calling about Marisa Grover.’

  �
�Ris? Wow. I wasn’t expecting that. Is she OK?’

  ‘Yes, she is, she is,’ Kate says. ‘She’s been living with me these past few months and she’s been taken slightly unwell and I wanted to reach out to her friends and family to let them know.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘Are you a friend or …?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m a friend. We were really close until a few months ago. Probably around the time she moved in with you. But hey, that’s Marisa for you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She gets deep and then she gets out. Hang on a sec, will you?’ Jas goes to turn down music playing in the background. ‘That’s better. Wait, I thought she moved in with that guy she was dating? Was it a house-share or something? I thought they got their own place?’

  Kate stays very still, as if any movement will disrupt the flow of what Jas is saying.

  ‘What was his name? It began with a J – I remember because, you know, mine does too so yeah, I remembered that. Jake, that was it!’

  ‘She did move in with Jake,’ Kate says.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘But she wasn’t dating Jake. I’m Jake’s girlfriend. Marisa was our surrogate. That’s why she came to live with us. She’s carrying our baby.’

  Jas goes quiet.

  ‘I know it’s a lot to take in, but I’d really like to talk to you properly if I could. You see, something’s happened and it would be helpful to know something of Marisa’s recent medical history … her mental health, I mean.’

  On the other end of the line, Kate can hear the woman give a low whistle.

  ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘I’m Kate.’

  ‘OK, Kate. I’ll meet you. In a public place because, let’s be real, I don’t know who you are or if you are who you say you are, but if this is kosher then, yeah, there is some stuff you should probably know about Marisa.’