by Jenny Colgan
‘Well,’ she said finally. ‘Think about it.’
‘I’m not giving up my job to cover your maternity leave!’ said Surinder. ‘That doesn’t mean I don’t love you, so don’t twist it.’
Nina sat in the kitchen after they hung up, sighing. It had all started out so well. She remembered the day: Lennox had been up overseeing the lambing in the upper field; spring had been late and a lot of the lambs had had to show up in harsh conditions, born into lashing sidewinds and in many cases snow. She wasn’t absolutely certain of how Lennox would react. He’d been married before and she didn’t want him to think she was demanding anything – she was perfectly happy how they were. And he wouldn’t want a fuss; bells and whistles were absolutely not his style.
She was so distracted at the book van that day she tried to resell Mrs McGleachin the same Dorothy Whipple novel twice, which would have caused a minor diplomatic incident. She also gave out the wrong mock exam workbooks, likewise, and found herself scrambling What to Expect When You’re Expecting behind her back every time someone came up the steps to the little book bus, with its swinging chandelier and pale blue shelves, the beanbag corner for children and the tiny desk, which now had a contactless point of which Nina was incredibly proud (when it worked, if the Wi-Fi was blowing in the right direction) and many of the older residents of Kirrinfief denounced as witchcraft.
Finally, Nina had driven the van over the hill, checked the stew she’d left in the slow cooker that morning and greeted the weary Lennox with a soft smile and a deep kiss. ‘Book?’ she said after supper.
‘Och, Nina. I had a bit of a run-in with the coos, you know,’ he said. But then he saw her face.
‘Aye, all right, just a wee bit,’ he said, pulling Parsley the sheepdog over to sit under his arm.
Heart beating wildly, Nina took from the little recycled paper bag she’d used to keep the cover clean the book she’d chosen. It was called simply Hello and was beautifully illustrated with a series of slightly impressionistic paintings that tracked the way a baby learned to see, starting in black and white, endlessly fuzzy at the edges, and as the pages turned, coming more and more into focus and going into colour – from the motion of clouds, to the sense of a wind – until the very last page, which was a beautiful executed, very detailed picture of a baby and a mother staring each other in the eye, with just one word: ‘Hello’.
Instead of falling off to sleep as he usually did, Lennox stayed stock-still and rigid throughout as Nina’s voice quavered, turning every new page. He stared at her as if he’d never seen her before. Even Parsley stayed awake, sensing an atmosphere in the room.
When she’d finished, her hands trembling slightly, Nina closed the little board book with a determined air, casting her eyes down. There was a long pause; nothing could be heard but the ticking of the ancient clock, which still needed winding once a week, on the old wooden sideboard. Tick, tick, tick.
Nina couldn’t bear it. Slowly she glanced upwards. Lennox was staring at her with an expression of incredulity on his face.
‘You should probably tell me if you’re happy,’ said Nina quickly.
‘Oh!’ he said. And in his non-effusive way he said, ‘Well, noo.’
Nina looked anxiously at his face.
‘I know we didn’t discuss it,’ she said. ‘On the other hand, we didn’t anti-discuss it . . .’
He nodded.
‘So,’ he said.
‘This is going to have to be one of those occasions we discussed,’ said Nina, ‘where you have to do that talking thing. I mean, are you pleased? Are you happy?’
He looked at her in consternation.
‘Of course,’ he said, as if he was amazed she could possibly have thought he’d feel any differently, as indeed he was.
‘I mean, we do do it a lot,’ mumbled Nina. ‘It does kind of follow on.’
‘Thank you, yes. I am a farmer.’
She beamed up at him as he reached over for her and pulled her onto his lap, kissing her gently. His hands moved to her tummy.
‘That’s just me,’ said Nina. ‘I think it’s only a tiny pea.’
‘Well, I like this too. So. When?’
‘November? I figured nice to have a birthday in a really dull, wet month when there’s not much to do.’
He heaved a long sigh and rested his large head on her small one.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘That will be . . . that will be . . .’
Nina laughed. ‘Say something.’
There was a long pause as he held her tighter.
‘Perfect,’ he said eventually, very quietly. ‘That will be perfect.’
And they had stayed like that for a very long time.
So, that was fine. Everything else – not so much.
Chapter Three
Zoe called Jaz. She hadn’t seen him in weeks.
She wondered, as she often did, how on earth she’d ended up in this situation. How anyone ended up anywhere, she thought.
Oh Jaz. Superstar DJ, here we go. From Birmingham originally, he’d always seemed so much younger than his current twenty-eight years.
He and Zoe had never lived together; she’d never met his family – at which point Zoe knows you will be thinking, ‘You absolute idiot, why on earth did you get knocked up?’ which, let me tell you, is pretty much what her own mum and all her friends said, only in even sharper tones than that.
In a defence that now feels weaker than her bank balance, he was – is – incredibly attractive, with eyelashes that curl nearly up to his hairline, broad shoulders, long legs . . . Zoe tried. She really did. So did Jaz, for a bit. But being tied down with a child wasn’t, he said sincerely, his style, babe.
They rented a hideous bedsit in Wembley and Zoe painted it up as best as she could, even though the wallpaper curled and the hallway smelled of horrible cooking and she couldn’t get the buggy past other people’s bikes.
Zoe took as little maternity leave as she could get away with (ironically, she works at a really posh nursery – far, far too posh for her to be able to send her own kid there), and Jaz tried to buckle down, took a job in an office and then Hari came along (in a quiet, straightforward kind of a way according to the midwife and, according to Zoe, in a rather traumatic and extraordinary kind of way).
For a short time, they both forgot about the other stuff, and revelled in the beauty of him; how glorious, how perfect he was – his tiny pink fingernails, his father’s eyelashes, his sleepy eyes and pouting lips. He was a quiet baby – easy-going; beloved, utterly – and their friends, who were still all young and out clubbing and going to festivals all the time, popped in and brought presents they had nowhere to put and made a huge fuss of them and Zoe’s mum visited from Spain and was slightly tearful in a proper EastEnders way about everything and for a while, just for a while, Zoe thought everything might be okay.
And then Jaz decided he maybe would go out for a pint or two with the lads, get a bit of DJ practice in, and then he would wake up late for work, and then he wouldn’t want to have to deal with Hari occasionally, of course; he was pretty damn cute but the thing about babies, Zoe had realised, is that they’re there all the time, every second, and if you stop watching them for even a millisecond they’ll probably choke to death or something.
So to stop the fights, Jaz stopped coming home, really, more and more, and it was such a hot summer that year. And there was no outdoor space, nowhere to go and Zoe was staring at all four walls of the bedsit every day, feeling like that woman in the film who was imprisoned in a room.
Except Zoe wasn’t imprisoned by anything other than the fact that she didn’t have any money to do anything except work and sit; nothing at all. In that London cycle of awfulness, she went back to her job at a very posh amazing nursery, which had organic food and Kumon maths for its privileged children, but only because she left Hari at a really basic childminders’, where she thought they just turned the telly on.
And if she asked Jaz about the future, he would imm
ediately provoke a huge fight and storm off and not come back for days and Zoe would feed Hari the cheapest mushed-up food she could manage and sit in her one room and wonder what on earth had happened to her, Zoe O’Connell, twenty-eight, promising early years professional, who had been considering doing her masters and even running her own nursery one day. And here she was. Stuck. With Weetabix in her hair and a child who had something wrong with him and now, after two jaunts on a bus to a hospital the other side of town where she’d been told just to basically get on with it by herself, she’d come home to a rent ‘reappraisal’.
She’d known. She’d seen it coming. A new organic coffee shop on the corner. A fishmonger. Rumours of a Waitrose. For most of her neighbours, good news. For her, ominous sounds of change. Her landlord, wanting her out and some nice rich young professionals moving in. Indeed, the greengrocers had strung up some white fairy lights outside the shop and painted the place a pale green; the hardware store had remarketed itself as ‘vintage’. There were rumours of a Banksy (Zoe wanted to kill him). The grey Farrow and Ball painted fingers of gentrification had stretched out. And now they had come for her.
The letter sat on the hallway table. How something so innocuous could look so malevolent Zoe didn’t understand, but she felt afraid even to touch it.
There was no way Zoe could pay it. No way at all. And Universal Credit wasn’t going to be much use. If Jaz couldn’t pay it, Zoe realised, staring at the paper, she could declare themselves homeless and throw herself on the mercy of Brent Council, which was a horrifying prospect, and who knew where they’d end up. She couldn’t. She couldn’t be homeless. This was ridiculous. Absurd.
Or go to Spain, live in her mum’s tiny one bedroom, find a bar job . . . there were plenty of bar jobs. But to move to another country . . . Her son couldn’t say a word in this language.
Zoe found she was panicking, her heart racing, even as Hari went searching for their old cracked tablet and picked it up.
What could she do? Her hand was shaking. There were plenty of live-in nanny placements, but not one of them would have another child along. None of the day jobs she could find would pay enough. She stifled a sob and called Jaz, or rather WhatsApped him as he never ever answered the phone if he could see it was from her, and insisted that they meet.
Chapter Four
Of course Jaz was late. Of course he was. After it took a million texts to even get him to agree to a time. Zoe had tried saying to him once, what if Hari was in trouble? What if they were at the hospital? and he’d done the usual thing he did of simply shutting her down, shrugging and saying, ‘Don’t worry – just text me, babe.’
Zoe looked at the board in the café. It was an expensive café, filled with thin blonde mummies and tall handsome daddies carrying their toddlers on their shoulders, buying lavish trays full of expensive cakes and coffees as if the money meant nothing to them, meeting up with groups of friends and Labradors and frisbees.
She perched with Hari on her knee on the end of a big table, not buying anything. More and more people were joining a huge gang of people called things like Fizz and Charlie and Ollie and Fifi and carrying kites and balls and picnic hampers and cool boxes and talking about what a glorious day it was, as the two of them shrank further back into the corner, apologetically taking up the space. She finally bought a cup of tea, the cheapest thing she could think of, and received martyred looks from the skinny blondes parking their expensive buggies up against her stool legs. She concentrated hard on the new Michael Lewis book the library had kept for her. Books: the one thing that had never let her down. ‘All that book-learning!’ her mum would say occasionally when she’d had a few, which was fairly often. ‘You’d think you wouldn’t have ended up knocked up like you did!’ And, ‘Oh, darling, you know I’m only messing with you.’
Jaz eventually slouched in. He seemed, Zoe couldn’t help noticing, to be getting younger. A T-shirt over shorts made him look like an oversized toddler; his over-groomed beard looked a little teenage. Zoe felt she was just getting older every day, the world piling up on her shoulders.
He was still handsome, of course, still had that lovely, weakening smile.
At the sight of him, Hari’s mouth turned into an ‘O’ of delight and he struggled to get down.
‘Say “please”!’ said one of the blonde mothers to him brightly as if in jest, but in fact deadly serious, and Zoe sighed, but didn’t want to get into it at that particular time so instead just put Hari on the ground – feeling them judge her – as he dashed over to see his father whom he adored with every fibre of his tiny being.
‘Bro!’ said Jaz, pulling him up and swinging him around.
Zoe wished he wouldn’t call him that – they weren’t bros; it didn’t help – but Jaz called everyone that and it was practically a nervous tic.
‘What have you got to say to me today?’
Hari said nothing, of course, but beamed down on his father from where he was being held above Jaz’s head, those pure beams of love that made Zoe swear, because she was tied to Jaz for ever – and had to be civil about him too – to stop that beam of love ever from flickering or going out. Once Zoe had thought she loved him herself. That was more or less before he was up for making her homeless.
‘How’s it going?’ he said casually. Zoe was now aware they were the centre of attention for practically the entire café. Jaz never minded lots of eyes on him.
‘Shall we take a walk?’ she said, not wanting to broadcast her predicament to this entire, nuclear, coupled-up, well-off, Boden-smug, mummy-yoga, basement-conversion, minibreak crowd she would kind of like to have hated but instead was desperately jealous of.
‘Let me just grab a coffee, babe . . . Want anything?’
Out of habit, Zoe shook her head, then watched him spend £9.75 on one vast latte and a huge muffin each for himself and Hari, who stared at it as if wondering if he could eat something so large (he did, and he and Zoe both regretted it later).
At last they escaped the atmosphere of the coffee shop and managed to kick their way through the long grass – past the lazily reading and snogging young people, alone or in groups, with endless leisure time to lie out in a park, letting the sunny day take them – towards the duck pond.
Hari meandered aimlessly, muffin smearing every centimetre of his body so consistently Zoe didn’t think she had to apply any sun cream, which was a relief because that stuff cost a fortune.
‘What’s up?’ said Jaz finally; defensively.
‘Rent,’ said Zoe simply.
Jaz nodded. ‘Yeah but, babe . . .’ he whined. ‘I lost my job.’
He put out both of his hands in a what you gonna do? stance. Zoe didn’t ask him why. She’d seen him when he’d stayed at the flat. Lying in late. Calling in sick when he couldn’t be bothered going in. Complaining about his bosses wanting him to occasionally do a bit of actual work.
‘They’re going to put the rent up,’ she said decisively.
Jaz sighed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t do it. I just don’t have the money.’
Zoe had thought about it. He could do it. He could get the money. If he told his parents, surely they would help him. They were doing well in Birmingham; they had enough to finance his car. Surely if they knew they had a grandchild . . . they might be shocked at first, but they’d come round . . .
Jaz’s mouth went into that thin line it did whenever she mentioned his parents. Under no circumstances. None.
‘It’s just for a year,’ Zoe said desperately. ‘Then he’ll be at school and I can increase my hours and it’ll be fine.’
‘Can’t you go to your mum’s?’
‘In Spain?’
At least he had the grace to look embarrassed.
‘Hey!’ There came a posh voice. One of the annoying perfect dads from the café in pressed chinos and a rugby shirt and immaculate hair. ‘Is that your lad there?’
They both turned, and there he was, teetering right on the edge o
f the sloping side of the pond as a huge vicious-looking duck advanced on his muffin.
And as usual, he wasn’t making a sound.
‘HARI!’ they both screamed.
The child turned around just as the duck grabbed at the muffin and unbalanced him. In a flash, Jaz was there, scooping him up, burying the boy’s head in his flashy jacket, muffin smears and all.
‘You’re all right, little man,’ he hummed, as the boy’s eyes brimmed with silent tears that fell, staining Jaz’s designer shirt as he clasped him tight. ‘You’re all right. You’re all right, my little man. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.’
But he didn’t. This, thought Zoe viciously, as she turned to head for home. Inconsistent father. Shitty childcare. No money. A developmental disorder. Nothing to do and nowhere to go that isn’t sitting in the flat or the library (the kind librarian, incidentally, had been the first to ask if she was worried that Hari wasn’t talking).
And now, they were totally stuffed.
Chapter Five
Surinder knew there was something wrong by the way Jaz turned his key in the door after texting her he was coming up to Brum, which was unusual enough in itself.
But she was his sister. She loved him. She knew he didn’t have it easy: their two big brothers were both ophthalmologists; she was running an import/export business; Jaz had never quite found his way. Their father had been making a good living by the time he’d come along, and Surinder privately thought he’d been spoiled – cars bought for him, designer clothing. Her parents had worked so hard their entire lives; she knew they enjoyed indulging their handsome baby. But in some ways, it had kept him a baby.
And now, to her utter astonishment, he was sitting at her kitchen table telling her he had a baby.
Not even a baby: a four-year-old. With a white woman in London.
He was slumped at the table. The whole room was now sleek and modernist, with a kitchen island and a pastel-coloured expensive food mixer Surinder never ever used. Sometimes she missed the great piles of books that used to drown every surface when Nina was still living there.