‘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.
Oh my God. Oh my God. The sick helpless feeling of the dream was back, and I heard myself gasp. Aaron murmured in his sleep, throwing an arm over his face. He couldn’t see this. I didn’t even want it between us, the ugly word, the end of the spectrum of ‘jokes’ people made about us. Cradle-snatcher.
Hands shaking, I clicked on it and made it go away. Luckily, my settings meant no one would have seen it yet. Then I clicked on the profile, the stupid fake name. The icon was a single rose, colourised against a black and white background. There was no info, and the person had made no other posts. The profile was brand new. What the hell was this? Someone had it in for me, but who? I ran my mind over my life. Who had I hurt, enough that they would do this to me? I’d dated lots of guys in my single years, of course, and some of them I had probably hurt without meaning to, just as I had been hurt. All part of the contact sport known as dating, which injured more people than rugby. Would anyone come out of the woodwork after all this time, and say such terrible things? Or was it as I’d thought first, a disgruntled service user? But I had only ever done my best to help them, the troubled kids we worked with.
Before Aaron I had never dated anyone younger. Even in my teens, I’d been too much of a good girl to have any boyfriends. My mother would not have allowed it. And I worked in a charity that protected children from abuse! Of course, that didn’t mean much – I thought of the recent scandals around Oxfam and Save the Children. That couldn’t happen to us. We were too small, we wouldn’t survive. They would likely have to fire me if anything got out, wash their hands of me as thoroughly as possible to save the charity. I’d lose everything I’d built up all these years, my chance to be a CEO. And it wasn’t true. The unfairness of it made me gasp again. Who was this? Who could possibly hate me enough to do this, and when I was heavily pregnant too?
The answer came to me as if it had always been there. The name I had pushed out of my mind when making lists of who would want to hurt me. The person I had genuinely wronged, who made me feel clammy all over with guilt if ever I thought about her, which I tried not to do.
His wife.
When Aaron got up the next day, he found me dozing in the living room with the cat draped over me, body bent out of shape, eyes dry and restless. I’d spent most of the night refreshing Facebook, terrified something else would appear, although I’d updated my privacy settings to draconian levels and blocked the anonymous account. I wished I had taken a screenshot to prove it was real, apart from anything else. I would have to tell Sharon. Oh God. Of all the things.
‘You OK, babe?’ He was frowning, worried. He looked so sweet in his shirt and tie. I’d had to take him to buy a real one, show him how to knot it. ‘Did you not sleep?’
‘Bad dreams. About the stupid baby class.’
He stroked my lank hair back from my forehead. ‘Oh hey, how could you know what to do when you never learned before?’
‘Poor baby with a dummy mummy.’ I was trying to joke but my tone was as exhausted as I felt.
‘Maybe you should stay home today.’
‘No, no, I’m not on leave for another month.’ Having covered the pregnancies and child-related emergencies of work colleagues for seventeen years now, I was determined to inconvenience no one with mine. Certainly not before the baby was even born.
He cleared his throat. ‘Got some news just there now.’ He held up his phone.
‘Yeah?’ Not something else bad, please.
‘They finally found my adoption details –
I can see my birth records, if I want.’
I should have been pleased for him. But all I could feel was a weight of dread in my chest, that things had taken a wrong turn somehow, and I didn’t know how to find my way back. ‘That’s great, babe.’
‘You’ll come with me?’ He looked so vulnerable as he said it, so young.
‘Of course I will.’ I forced a smile, but I couldn’t help thinking that this was another step away from peace, towards the chaos I feared so much.
That morning at work, I was no earthly use to anyone. Dorothy had to tell me three times to answer my phone to one of our biggest donors. I could see her looking at me, thinking poor cow, the baby is eating her brain. Was that what happened? I’d read that they formed their bones from yours, leaching you out like a husk. I felt so helpless – I’d always been able to rely on myself, and now I’d have to lean on Aaron, who could barely take care of himself. I turned the messages over and over in my head, no idea what to do.
I had to tell Sharon. But I was afraid. I told myself I’d wait till the mailing was over and done with. It would have gone out that morning, so donations should start coming in later today.
After lunch – I forced myself to eat a salad from Tupperware at my desk, which was wilting in the heat of the plastic – Sharon called me in. It was when she liked to strike, to catch people at their lowest ebb. She had my mother’s instinct for that. I resented everything about the process, having to drag my lumbering self to Sharon’s office, the fact that she didn’t ask me to sit down right away so I stood there as she peered over her glasses and typed two-fingered at her computer.
‘Jax.’
‘You wanted to see me?’
‘I thought we ought to have a little chat.’ The words little chat were so innocuous. They should mean a cosy catch-up over tea and cake, but in a work context they meant, you are in serious trouble.
My breath hitched. ‘I need to sit down, Sharon.’
Her eyes flicked to me. ‘Of course.’
We adjourned to the softer chairs to the side of her desk. The coffee table was marked with rings and stacked with copies of our in-house magazine, Protect. A simple word that packed an emotional punch. There were things I wanted to protect. My child. My relationship. My job. Lately it felt like everything was at risk. As I lowered myself into the chair, I realised I wouldn’t be able to get out again without help. ‘What is it?’ My heart was pounding, and I felt as nauseated as I had at the start of my pregnancy.
She smoothed out her skirt. Sharon was very much of the Birkenstocks and tie-dye school of charity CEOs, but that didn’t mean she was soft. ‘The mailing went out as planned?’
‘I believe so, yes.’
Sharon slid two pieces of paper across the table to me. One was an envelope, with her own name on it – she liked to be part of the mailing, to check it was all up to scratch. The other was the letter that went inside it. ‘Can you look at that for me, please?’
I leaned over, with difficulty. It looked fine to me. I opened my mouth to say so, then I saw it. The name on the letter was not the same as on the envelope.
A flush of dread rinsed through me. How – what . . . ?
The names had been transposed. ‘Is it . . . ?’
‘It’s every one, yes. I already spoke to the printer.’
This was a disaster. Every single mail-out had been addressed to the wrong person. In theory people might still open the letter and donate, but our supporters were old-fashioned and easily riled. A slip-up like this could cost us thousands. ‘I . . . don’t know how this happened.’
‘You signed it off with the printer. They showed me your signature on the proofs and the mailing list. You didn’t notice the columns were off?’
‘I . . .’ A long moment went by. My first instinct was that this wasn’t my fault, it couldn’t be. I had been doing mail-outs for years. I would never make such a stupid mistake. But was that true? Was the pregnancy indeed addling my brain?
‘There’s another problem too.’
My stomach dropped, and suddenly I hated her for drawing it out, for the arbitrary power the structure of work gave her over me. What was to stop me standing up, saying screw you, Sharon, and no one’s worn Birkenstocks since the eighties? Security, that was what. Status. The fact that my partner still qualified for youth training schemes. ‘Oh?’
‘This was in the post this morning.’ She slid something over the coffee table to me, and I saw it was a plain notecard with some square writing on it. Did you know that your head of fundraising, Jax Culville, likes young boys? Do you really think you should be employing someone like that? The neatness of the writing added to the chill it gave me. This wasn’t some mad person. And now they were calling me Jax.
Sharon went on, ‘Dorothy tells me there was an email too.’ Damn you, Dorothy, have you no loyalty? ‘You’re supposed to report things like that to me, aren’t you?’
‘Um . . . it made no sense. It was like a spam thing, I thought.’
‘This is pretty clear, I would say.’ She tapped the card with one ragged fingernail.
My head hurt. ‘Sharon, what can I say? This is clearly rubbish.’
‘Your partner is younger than you, isn’t he?’
‘He’s twenty-four.’
‘And you met him . . . ?’
I stared at her. ‘Two years ago. Do you need help with the maths?’ Oh dear. I had just been very rude to my boss, and worse, I got the impression I’d played right into her hands. She sat back.
‘You know we have to investigate any allegations made.’
‘It’s not an allegation! It’s just . . . some crazy person, mouthing off. They don’t even say what they mean, who these boys are I’m supposed to have . . .’ I couldn’t finish the sentence, I was so suddenly afraid. The situation seemed to be slipping through my hands.
‘Can you think of anyone who would have a grudge against you?’
‘No,’ I said, but that was a lie. I could. But would she really do this? I didn’t know enough about her to say for sure, the woman whose life I had ruined.
‘I think we better look into this. Keep everything above board.’
‘Good.’ My voice shook. ‘I welcome the chance to clear my name.’
‘Of course, you can’t be in work while that goes on.’
A pause. Checkmate. ‘But . . . we have the big donor gala next week.’
‘We can manage.’ It was the keynote event of the year. A dinner for all our donors, a hundred quid a ticket, an auction and raffle and lots of other ways to raise funds. Our target for the evening was thirty grand, and I had planned every moment of it. Sharon was earnest and cared about the cause, but our rich donors wouldn’t take too well to her aggressively recycled frocks.
‘You really think so?’
‘I don’t see we have much choice. Why don’t you start your maternity leave early?’ She cast a pointed look at my belly.
Oh, really Sharon, fuck you. I got up, steadying myself against the back of the chair. ‘I’ll go now then, if that’s how you feel.’ Screw them. I’d do some shopping, have a rest, watch telly. But something was nagging me. ‘Will I still get paid?’ I hated having to ask. I’d have loved to be able to march out, Bridget Jones style, and tell Sharon what I really thought of her. But I had a family to support now.
She nodded. ‘You’ll get your maternity pay as planned, just earlier.’ That meant an extra month of full pay I would have to do without. And I couldn’t rely on Aaron to make up the difference. ‘We’ll speak soon, Jax.’ I got the feeling she was really enjoying this.
The house was quiet in the daytime, and time felt all wrong, like I’d slept in or had an unexpected sick day. Minou greeted me disdainfully, making it clear the sofa was her domain during the day. I put down my bag and jacket and wandered disconsolately through the rooms. Aaron was at his own office, where he was the most junior person, the one who did the photocopying and coffee runs. I let the thought cross my mind – how it would feel to
be with an older man, one who was a CEO, perhaps, who would say things like you know you don’t need to work, darling or just quit, that Sharon’s a cow and you’re too good for that place. Hair just touched with silver, credit card glazed in gold. The kind of man who would buy me lingerie and take me on unexpected mini-breaks.
I hadn’t told Aaron I was home from work. I needed to explain it first, find a possible reason for what was going on. The printers had been in touch, very apologetic but keen to point out I’d signed off the mailing list spreadsheet. Clearly, the address and name columns had been transposed by one cell. A tiny change, and easy to do, but catastrophic. Had it been that way when I checked it? I was sure it couldn’t have. But not sure enough. Was this my mistake? Or was it the same as the messages – someone else’s revenge? I had lied to Sharon, because in fact I had a good idea who might be behind this. Who might want to ruin my life.
I had met Mark Jarvis in my first proper job, at a very large children’s charity, the kind that’s synonymous with do-gooding. Its image is brave toddlers with shaved heads from cancer, scared teenagers with bruised eyes. They are crusaders, saviours. They will do a lot to preserve that image.
Mark was on the board, an ex-City hedge-fund manager who was richer than I could ever dream of. At the time I was twenty-three, living in a house share in Camden with four other girls. The mould in the one shower looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. Mark liked to come into the office once a week or so, to have a meeting with our then CEO, sign documents, that kind of thing. I remember when he spotted me. He was crossing the floor of the open-plan office, striding with the wide gait of a man who is busy, who has many calls on his time. His day job, which he’d wound down after already making more money than he knew what to do with. His wife, who had her own charity work, plus her busy Botox schedule. His gym routine, his season tickets to rugby and football, a man of the people despite his wealth. Expensive suit worn without a tie. Receding hair well-cut enough that it didn’t matter. He was forty-four years old. He came to my desk. ‘Hello! You must be new.’
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