‘I just wish . . .’ And then his hand went over his face and his shoulders were shaking, and I saw to my horror that he was crying. I’d never seen him cry before. It filled me with sympathy, and sadness, and a nasty dart of fear. He couldn’t fall apart on me, not now. ‘I just wish I understood. How do you keep a baby, a little boy, how do you keep him till he’s two then give him away? How do you do that? What if . . . What if I feel like that? About ours?’
‘You won’t,’ I muttered, but my voice lacked conviction. I stroked his tense shoulders, but he shied away. We knew nothing about why he’d been given up at that age, when he would almost but not quite remember his mother. Who knew what horrors had prompted it? ‘Listen, babe, maybe we shouldn’t do it yet. The whole private-detective thing. Not now anyway, with the baby coming.’
He stared at me. ‘You think I won’t like what I find.’
‘I think that’s a possibility. And . . . money’s a bit tight right now.’
He thumbed the tears from his eyes, angry. ‘Your money, you mean. You don’t want to pay for it. And why should you?’
‘That’s not what I—’
Aaron stood up, gulping down his tears. ‘I’m going out.’
‘Out where? It’s nine o’clock!’ I gaped at him.
‘Just out, OK? I’m twenty-four years old! I need to go out sometimes.’ And he was gone, slamming the door, and it was just as my mother had predicted. It was one thing being with an older woman when she was cool, did pills and went to festivals at the weekend. It was another being stuck in every night with an exhausted woman more than half your age, and a screaming baby. Maybe this was the beginning of it.
I could not allow my mother to be right. As silence fell again, I took out my phone and began to google private detectives.
Alison
The doctor did not make eye contact with them once during the appointment. He had spent several minutes writing what looked like notes on a yellow Post-it, but when he turned it round she saw he had in fact drawn a female reproductive system, with several large sperm worming their way towards it. They were each as big as the uterus, and for a moment she wondered what that would be like, and shuddered.
Tom nudged her and she realised she had drifted off. The room was so quiet and sterile, the doctor so offhand, it was hardly surprising she would need to dissociate her mind. She said, ‘So there’s something wrong with both of us. We knew that already.’ Another nudge. It was easy to get impatient at the process, having to tell the same story over and over to different people, as if they couldn’t read the notes or didn’t share them with each other, the months of waiting between each appointment, her age creeping up each time. She was constantly doing maths in her head. If this takes six months I’ll be thirty-seven. Cut-off for NHS treatment is thirty-nine. Her period had started that morning, the desperate hope she’d covered herself in evaporating, the truth settling in. It hadn’t worked this time either. It never worked.
‘Broadly speaking, yes. Your ovulation is disordered, due to polycystic ovaries, and your partner has low motility.’ As Tom had put it, his sperm were lazy bastards, and her hormones were all over the shop.
‘So . . . what can we do?’
‘We’ll get Mr Khan on some supplements, then test again in a few months. And for you I’d like to do a laparoscopy, take a look at your uterus, see if the tubes are open. If not, IVF is your best option.’
She reeled back, as if she’d been slapped in the face. She’d expected a load more steps before that, having heard IVF horror stories of hormones, bloating, marriages ripped apart. Sex lives destroyed – it was already hard trying to time things right, whether you were in the mood or not. ‘So soon?’ Not that it would be soon, it could still take months.
The doctor shrugged. ‘The odds are not great without it.’
‘So . . . there’s no hope?’
He cleared his throat. ‘There’s always a chance, of course!’
But not a good chance. Maybe like winning the EuroMillions Lottery, which nevertheless Tom insisted on playing each time, and that said everything about their relative positions on the positivity and negativity spectrum. ‘Alright.’
That was it. An appointment they’d waited months for, only to be told everything she’d already known from googling their test results. She felt a certain solidarity with NHS staff, herself being also a public servant trying to do her best in the face of crippling cuts, but would it kill them to smile? Give you some reassurance? See you at the time you’d been told to arrive? It was an hour and a half past it now, and she’d be late for her meeting with Kelly Anderson, another attendee of the party at what her colleagues were already calling the Grand Designs Murder House. Not that it was officially a murder, of course. If it was, Alison would have been part of a whole team, would have had a budget for quick forensics, the works. All the same, she had a strong feeling that each of the couples she’d met so far had been hiding something. Lying to her. A terrible accident, honest. No conflict in the group. Very supportive and helpful. Hardly knew each other, or the victim.
They stood in the rain for a moment outside the hospital, as Tom looked for the car keys in his rucksack. Inside the car it was fuggy, stale from his breakfast cheese pasty.
‘Shit,’ he said, staring out the windscreen. ‘That was brutal.’
‘Well. We knew it wouldn’t be good.’
‘I know. He just seemed so . . . hopeless about the whole thing.’
‘Yeah.’ She could almost feel it around them, like a fog, but one with muscles, pushing them apart. The questions, the wondering. Is it you? Is it me? At least it was both of them. Was that good? Or just more problems to overcome? She didn’t know.
He started the car. It didn’t matter that they’d just had devastating news, they still had jobs to go to. Someone was still dead, smashed all over a five-grand rockery. ‘You’ll be alright? Around all those mad mums?’
‘I’ll have to be.’ Maybe it would add an extra edge to her questioning. Stop her being softened by their bewildered sleep-deprived eyes, their traumatised bodies and the tiny helpless lives they held in their arms. Because even if no one else believed her, Alison was sure of it – one of them had helped the deceased over the glass edge of the balcony, to her death below.
Tom drove her all the way to the station, though he’d be late for his own meeting on the fraud case. ‘I need to take care of you.’
She missed working with him, a side effect of having him in her bed instead. Diana was good, but she was a bit too chillily efficient. Every form filed on time, no hunches entertained. No pasties eaten in the car, not that this was a bad thing. ‘Can you get rid of that?’ she said, stepping from his Focus, indicating the greasy paper bag. ‘The whole car stinks like Greggs.’
‘And that’s bad because . . . ?’
‘Please. It makes me feel sick.’
‘Alright.’ He threw her a worried look out the window. ‘You’re really OK?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ She set her shoulders, walked to the door. Nothing was any different, she told herself. She would do her job like it was any other day.
Jax – eight weeks earlier
My mother was watching Aaron closely. ‘Would you like a teaspoon, dear?’
Aaron looked up at me, panicked. His method was usually to drink the tea with the bag still in it, getting it as strong as possible. A legacy perhaps of a lifetime eking out the cheapest products there were. He reused the bags too, something that sent my mother into paroxysms. I think we can stretch to another, Aaron! ‘Um . . . sure.’
She jumped up, and he was passed a silver spoon, tiny in his large hands. ‘Umm . . .’ There was nowhere to put the bag now. ‘Do you have a plate maybe or . . .’
My mother refused to understand for a long moment. ‘Oh! Well, why don’t I just take it?’ She stood there with a rubber-gloved hand outstretched, waiting for the bag. Defeated, Aaron plopped it on, like a dead frog, and she spirited it away like toxic waste. Mum only drank coffee, as she rem
inded us constantly, making a big fuss of finding an old box of teabags in the cupboard when we went round. I, pregnant, was not allowed caffeine at all and instead had to have no-sugar lemon squash. It made me realise how unbearable my mother was without the narcotics of wine or gin or at least caffeine and sugar. I reached for a piece of the Victoria sponge she’d baked that morning after her power walk, and she raised her eyebrows. ‘Ought you to, darling? You don’t want to gain more weight. I was on a strict diet before you came.’
I resolved never to mention to the baby what I’d gone through for him or her. Not the scans, not the vomiting every day for weeks, not the look on Sharon’s face when I told her I needed a year off, not the tears and agony that awaited me. Not nine months of no booze, cheese, chorizo, or even tea.
Aaron and I had been on our best behaviour with each other since the night he’d stormed out and not come back until gone midnight, reeking of beer. The next day he’d been tearfully apologetic. How could I shout at you like that, when you’re pregnant? I’m so sorry, babe. I hadn’t brought it up since, but the worry was there. He was off-kilter and so was I. Nina’s comment about our ages had lodged in my head, a small splinter, not to mention my mother’s many digs over the years. I had brought him today in a show of solidarity, a tableau I was acting to show how fine we were. For Mum. For myself, too.
‘Aaron, tell Mum how the job’s going.’
He looked like a rabbit caught in headlights. ‘Um, yeah, it’s OK.’
‘Any word of promotion?’ trilled my mother.
‘Not yet. You have to, like, be there a year or so.’
I saw her mouth pucker at his syntax. ‘That’s a shame. The money would be useful, wouldn’t it, with the baby. Given that Jacqueline won’t be on her full salary for some time.’ She had picked up on the fact that there was something strange about my early mat leave, though I’d done my best to explain it away. She always knew, somehow, when I wanted to hide things.
‘Yeah. No, yeah, it would be.’ We lapsed into silence. I saw that Aaron’s teabag had left a drip on the marble floor, which no doubt she would later find and store away to bring up some time. Don’t splash it all over the place like last time, dear!
I wished we hadn’t come. I needed to be on top of my game to handle my mother, and all this, Aaron’s mysterious mother, our fight, Mark being out of prison, the messages, the pregnancy, even poor missing Minou, who still had not come home, it was making me weak. I no longer had the strength.
Telling my mother about Aaron was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do. Our relationship, never easy, had been in tatters since I’d called my wedding off, followed by eight years of being single. Every time we met, she would bring up her friends from book club who had grandkids, sighing, ‘Oh, I suppose that will never happen for me.’ For her! As if that was the only purpose of my body, and indeed of me.
That day, we’d had the usual ritual of cake and tea, her not eating anything, urging it on me then keeping careful note of what I had so as to bring it up later. ‘Mum,’ I said, as nervous as a teenager, when she started her usual round of Which Grandkid. ‘I’ve actually met someone.’
She stopped at the sink, rubber gloves clasped. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Someone nice?’
‘Well, I think he’s nice. Very nice in fact.’ No one had ever been as nice to me as Aaron was, something that made me sad. Why had I put up with such treatment? Even dull Chris wasn’t nice as such, just too boring to be horrible in an imaginative way. Even he had put me down, joined in with my mother’s jibes about my weight and my underpaid career.
‘Good job?’
‘Well, he’s sort of in the food industry right now.’
She frowned, then brightened. ‘He owns a restaurant?’
‘Not . . . exactly.’ I sighed. There was no point unless I told the truth. She would find out soon, after all. Aaron was not going anywhere. ‘He works in a bar.’
‘What?’
‘He’s young. Twenty-four.’
‘What?’
I ploughed on. ‘He’s a care-leaver. In foster care for years. He’s done really well for himself, in fact.’
The news was so shocking that Mum actually sat down. ‘Jacqueline, what’s the matter with you? I wanted you to meet someone nice, with prospects, a good job! Someone who can take care of you, give you babies! I know you want babies, darling, and time’s ticking on, it might already be too late, and here you are wasting your time with some toy-boy barman?’
I’d drained my tea, the last drop I would be allowed in her house for some time. ‘Well, that’s the thing, Mum. He can give me babies.’
‘What? ’
‘I’m pregnant. You’re going to be a granny!’
It was the one time in my life I’d ever seen my mother speechless, and to be honest it was almost worth the weeks of tantrums that followed, just for that.
Minou had not come back from wherever she was, and the house was quiet without her. I wanted to put posters out around the neighbourhood, but I could hardly walk the length of a street and Aaron obviously felt I was overreacting. ‘She’s just gone off hunting. She’ll be back.’ I wasn’t so sure, and I missed her warm self-satisfied purr, the silky drape of her over my lap. On top of that, Sharon was dodging my calls about the investigation into the messages, and I was afraid she’d take this chance to manoeuvre me out forever. She’d always thought I was after her job. There had been no more Facebook messages, but still I felt wary, on high alert, jerking awake in my sleep, getting up for a glass of water and wandering through the house, the time and myself out of joint. From time to time I googled Mark, but there was nothing more online about him. The world had moved on, forgotten all about his case. But I hadn’t.
Since I had nothing else to do all day, I had put out feelers to several private detectives I’d found on Google, and eventually settled on a woman, feeling she might understand the situation better. Her name was Denise Edwards, a retired detective with a forty-a-day voice who seemed entirely unperturbed by my request. Apparently tracing birth parents was a PI’s bread and butter, which seemed sad. ‘I can do that for you, yes my love. When was the last contact with her?’
‘He went into care in I guess, 1997? When he was two.’
I heard her writing it down. ‘Was there any further contact with the mother?’
‘None. It was a closed order.’ If she hadn’t left her details with the adoption people, this Georgina, did that mean she wouldn’t want to talk to him? I wouldn’t tell him about Denise until I had good news, if I ever did have it. ‘Does that make it harder?’
She coughed, a smoker’s hack. ‘Can do. Don’t you worry, darling, most people are easy enough to find. Facebook and that, it’s a gift you know.’
I was about to finish the call, but then I blurted out: ‘Actually, Denise, could you trace someone else for me too?’
‘Of course. Another birth parent? The dad?’
I hadn’t even thought of trying to find Aaron’s dad – the lack of a name on the birth certificate seemed to make that impossible.
‘Er, no . . . just someone I lost touch with, and can’t find online. A friend.’
Her voice betrayed no judgement, so maybe this was something people asked for all the time. ‘And what are they called, my love?’
‘Claudia Jarvis.’ I was too afraid to look for her husband, was the truth. I waited for a reaction. But Denise seemed not to know the name, or if she did, was too discreet to mention it.
Alison
Kelly Anderson’s flat was a sad place. Not just the shabbiness, or the smell of chips and cigarettes, the peeling MDF furniture and the pictures torn from magazines and Blu-Tacked to the walls. There was also actual sadness here, seeping out from the cheap foam sofa, and from every pore of Kelly, who sat on an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair while Alison and Diana had the two-seater. She noticed the furniture was pointing at a TV stand, but there was no TV on it, just a squar
e of dirt where one had clearly sat until recently. ‘First of all, I’m so sorry for your loss, Kelly.’
Kelly ran a hand through her lank hair. She wore a baggy hoody and tracksuit bottoms, and underneath was stick-thin except for her slightly swollen stomach, an echo of the child that had until recently been in there. ‘Oh. Thanks. One of those things, isn’t it.’
Alison felt an urge to share her own pain, bond over it somehow, the sisterhood of women to whom babies did not come easily, but it wouldn’t have been professional. ‘Well, I’m sorry. I gather you went to the barbecue anyway?’
She scowled. ‘Why shouldn’t I? I was part of the group, wasn’t I?’
‘Of course. I suppose I thought it might be . . . upsetting for you?’
She said nothing for a moment, looked off to the side at a space on the carpet where a piece of furniture had recently been, a bookcase or something like that. ‘Can’t go through my entire life avoiding babies, can I?’
‘No, no, of course not.’ Alison nodded to Diana to take over, with her cool indifference to motherhood. Her own sympathy for this girl, her identification with her as a fellow sufferer from lack-of-baby disease, was going to cloud her judgement, she could tell. Diana’s tone was firmer.
‘How well did you know the deceased?’
Kelly fiddled with some chipped polish on her nails. ‘Not that well. I stopped going to the group, like, when I . . . when I lost the baby.’
‘Of course. You didn’t notice any conflict, anyone who didn’t get on with her?’
She shrugged. ‘Dunno. She seemed nice. Wasn’t it just an accident? Thought she just, like, fell.’
Diana did not look at Alison. ‘Possibly. What can you tell us about that day, Kelly?’
Kelly grew more lively as she spoke about other people in the group. Her pale face was animated, some colour in it. ‘Monica has a well-fancy house. It was all, you know, stuff from Waitrose, twelve-quid bottles of wine, that cheese that squeaks when you eat it. Everyone was there from the group. Jax and her fella – he’s almost my age, he is – Anita, she’s sweet, Jeremy, bit of a posho, Ed, City wanker, Aisha, I like her too, she sent me the sweetest card when I . . . after I came out of hospital. Her guy I don’t know so well, he doesn’t say much. Cathy’s nice too. Hazel, not so much, bit of a bossy boots. Oh, and we found out Monica had this other kid she never mentioned, like fifteen or something.’
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