The Push

by Claire McGowan

  Kelly stood nearby, pale and panting. ‘Please, stop it! You’re hurting him, Rahul!’

  Nina was also there, exuding a calm authority. ‘Rahul, you can let him go now. He’ll leave, won’t you, Ryan?’

  ‘Fuck’s sake! Alright, I’ll go. It’s my fucking baby too, you know!’

  Rahul had not moved. He seemed not to hear them. Ryan’s face was turning white where it was pressed to the wall. ‘Rahul!’ Nina’s voice snapped. ‘Move aside.’ Finally, he appeared to come back to himself, and all the tension left his arms, and he moved away from Ryan. ‘Who has a phone?’ demanded Nina. ‘Rahul, give me yours. Watch him, but don’t touch him.’

  ‘What?’ said Rahul, in a quiet puzzled voice.

  Nina held her hand out. ‘Your phone. I know it’s in your pocket.’

  With extreme hesitation, he handed it over, unlocked it. Nina keyed in three digits.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Kelly miserably, as Ryan adjusted his collar, gasping for breath, muttering dire curses about Rahul.

  Nina held the phone to her ear. ‘Calling the police, of course.’

  ‘What? No, he didn’t mean any harm!’

  ‘I have a room full of pregnant women in there, Kelly. Including you. I can’t allow any danger to come near them.’

  Ryan had gone pale. ‘Please, missus, don’t call them. I didn’t mean nothing. Just – I had too much to drink, like, and I lost it. I’ll go. I’ll go.’

  Nina looked between them, as if deciding. ‘Ryan, you’ll have to leave right now and never come back to this group.’

  ‘He will. Won’t you, Ry?’

  ‘Fine! Jesus, I can see when I’m not welcome.’

  ‘Ry!’

  ‘Alright, I’m going!’ And he went, kicking the door as he left. Kelly started to cry. Nina took her arm and led her back down the corridor.

  ‘I should go after him . . .’

  ‘You should not. In fact, I would strongly advise you to have nothing else to do with Ryan from now on. Your baby is at risk. You must see that.’ I blinked as their voices drifted down to where I stood. Telling Kelly to leave her partner, while she was pregnant – that was a big deal for a baby-group leader to say, wasn’t it?

  Kelly said nothing, sniffling and downcast. As they approached me, Nina frowned. ‘Jax, you shouldn’t be out here. Come inside now.’

  Behind her, Rahul trailed. ‘Eh . . .’

  ‘What?’ she said, irritably. ‘We need to get started again.’

  ‘My phone . . .’

  ‘Oh.’ Nina looked down as if she’d forgotten she held it. She glanced at the screen for a moment, then handed it to him, no expression on her face. And we all went back inside the room.

  God, the days were so long. How had I never realised this? Before I’d met Aaron, I’d felt constantly busy. I dragged myself out of bed, then it was a rat race to get to work and the gym and eat well and see all my friends and have hobbies to talk about when I got round to having dates. There was never quite enough time. Now, I had so much time it was as though a giant hourglass had smashed and crushed me to the ground with sand. My mother came round sometimes, of course, bringing all the wrong things, like a mobile for the baby that would take hours to put together. The ingredients to a complicated pie, saying it would do me good to ‘nest’ a little.

  The Monday after that dramatic baby-group session, Aaron left at eight, kissing me on the forehead. ‘Promise you’ll take it easy, babe? I’ll do the cleaning when I get home.’

  Which meant I’d have to sit and look at dirty dishes all day, or suddenly realise in the daylight how much dust there was on the bookshelves round the TV. By the time I got up, washed, and dressed in a stretchy tracksuit, then arranged myself on the sofa with a cup of tea, it was barely half nine.

  I emailed my union rep, who was dealing with the outcome of the messages, and was told it was still ‘under investigation’. I hope you’re enjoying mat leave, she added rather pointedly. Probably, they felt my case was low priority, since I’d been about to take a year off anyway. I also texted the private detective, Denise, who didn’t reply.

  Daytime TV was rubbish. I felt too guilty, too much my mother’s daughter, to binge Netflix all day, so I tried to read something improving from last year’s Booker shortlist, but the lines seemed to blur and warp. Worsening eyesight was actually another side effect of pregnancy, but I thought this was instead more anxiety. Someone had tried to get me fired. To ruin my reputation both at work and beyond. My cat was missing, just as I most needed her soothing purr and way of half closing her eyes in drowsy tolerance of my strokes, and despite what Aaron said I couldn’t help but feel this might be connected. I’d spent the previous morning designing a missing-cat poster, hunting through my phone for a picture of her that she’d actually sat still for, no easy feat. I would need Aaron to copy them for me, take them round the lampposts of the area.

  So who could be doing all this? The only people I could think of were Mark Jarvis and his wife. I pulled my laptop towards me and balanced it on my bump, hoping that what they said about radiation wasn’t true. This time, digging deep into the internet, I found an article that showed Mark had been released three months ago, as Chris had said. Disgraced financier freed after fifteen years. The photo was grainy, showing a middle-aged man in a tracksuit holding a clear plastic bag of possessions, shielding his face from the camera. Nothing at all like the suave businessman who’d taken me out for lunch all those years ago. If only I’d said no. How different might things be now?

  I should have said no. I knew that even then, I knew by the knot of my stomach that this wasn’t right. But what else could I say? I was so new and so green and he was in charge, and he was older and handsome and well-dressed, plus I’d never been to a restaurant that nice. My mother didn’t believe in eating out, since she hardly ate anything anyway. Daddy had always promised me we’d go somewhere special for my eighteenth birthday, but then he’d died and instead my mother had given me a diet book.

  ‘I hope this is alright.’ He stood up when I approached the restaurant he’d suggested I meet him at, pulling my chair out. Boys my age did not do this kind of thing, and I blushed, almost stumbling as I walked across to him. He was in a suit that looked expensive, though I knew nothing of such things, a dark-blue tie. I noticed his cufflinks looked like solid gold. And his smell was aftershave and leather and money. I was wearing a print dress from Primark on which the hem had already dropped, and last summer’s sandals, which had left unpopped blisters on my heels. My toe polish was chipped and I was sweaty from the tube. I didn’t belong here. But he didn’t seem to care.

  The waiter came, silent as a cat. ‘Something to drink to start with?’

  Mark smiled. ‘I will if you will. A glass of fizz to celebrate your appointment?’ I knew it wasn’t right to drink at lunchtime on a work day, but again what could I say? I nodded and soon two cold glasses of champagne appeared. I’d had Cava at university but never the real thing and the taste hit me hard, rich and intoxicating. He knocked his glass against mine, ‘Cheers, Jacqueline. To an exciting career.’

  I murmured something back and glanced at my menu. It had no prices on it. I was so gauche that I wasn’t even sure if he was going to pay or not, and began silently to panic, thinking of my overdraft. Charity work did not offer high salaries. I should have known that with men like Mark, you never pay. Not with money, anyway.

  I jerked back from the laptop as a sound reached my ears. Not something I heard often, unless we had an Amazon delivery during the evening. The doorbell. Who would it be? We didn’t have anything on order – we’d agreed to scale back the online purchases, both to help local businesses and our bank accounts – but it could be a meter reader, Jehovah’s Witnesses, chuggers. Or worst of all – my mother again. None very palatable, but on the other hand if I didn’t answer it, I wouldn’t talk to a single other person until Aaron came home. I dragged myself up off the sofa, which was getting harder every day.

 
; There was a blurred shape behind the glass of the door. It hadn’t entirely occurred to me yet that I needed to be careful with this pregnancy, not just of falls and alcohol and soft cheese and prawns, but of other people too. Of those who might actually want to harm me. Nothing so far, not the emails, not the botched mailing, not the still-missing cat, had made me realise this. How stupid I was. I opened the door and saw a middle-aged woman, her face lined, her hair grey, gaunt under a vast shabby coat that nonetheless was a Burberry trench, costing around a grand new. It was Claudia Jarvis.

  Alison

  ‘How are you? Alright?’ Becky put a sympathetic hand over hers, and Alison fought the urge to pull it away. She took another large gulp of her wine, shouting over the noise of the bar. Becky, a friend from university, always wanted to meet somewhere like All Bar One, which was cheap and near the station so she could rush back to her husband and kids.

  ‘I’m fine! I said I wasn’t going to go mad over it!’ It was true she had said that, back when they were casually trying to get pregnant, just seeing what happened, a lie that so many people tell themselves. Within six months she was charting, taking her temperature every morning and typing it into an app, and diarising sex several weeks ahead, whether they felt like it or not. Within a year she was putting her legs in the air afterwards, gulping down bitter-tasting cough syrup, badgering Tom into vitamins and supplements that cost a fortune. Haunting the fertility forums, looking for miracle stories. Hoping. Paying £60 an hour for a woman to stick her full of needles and rub her feet. Despairing.

  It ate away at you. She had said she wouldn’t do IVF, didn’t want to put herself through the injections and heartache and invasive tests, but that was when she still hoped it might happen the old-fashioned way. When it came down to it, it was very hard not to try just one more thing. She knew that was how couples waded deeper into debt, letting more and more strange things be done to their bodies. Look at Anita and Jeremy Matheson-Coulter, wiped out on the promise of a baby from America that was maybe never coming.

  It had already taken its toll on her and Tom. On their sex life, on their sense of fun, on their relationship. And it had given nothing in return. She forced a smile. ‘How are the little ones?’ Becky had three now. Five, three, and less than one. Popping them out, getting pregnant every time her husband looked at her sideways, it seemed. How Alison envied that, to become pregnant easily, because you had sex when you felt like it, a baby born from desire and love, rather than careful counting and joyless thrusting, or inside a laboratory. She told herself it didn’t matter, but she knew it did, to her at least.

  Becky was telling a long story about a woman at work who had it in for her because she’d had to leave early three times the previous week. ‘I mean, what was I meant to do, Maeve had a cold and then Finn got croup, and Hamish threw up in nursery and they won’t keep them there if they’re sick.’ She only worked three days as it was, having once been head of her department in a large secondary school. So many of Alison’s female friends had experienced the same. None of the men. Most of them didn’t even take the shared parental leave they were entitled to, too worried about their careers, as if women hadn’t had to deal with that for decades.

  She sighed. ‘And she complained about you, are you sure?’

  ‘Well, someone did. The head gave me a right dressing-down, and Anna’s always giving me the evils when I come in late or I leave marking at home because the kids are tearing the place apart. It’s OK for her, she’s not even married, just does what she likes.’ Tears were glinting in Becky’s eyes. ‘It’s so hard, Alison, honest, you have no idea.’

  ‘You’re right. No idea at all.’ She could see her friend was upset, but her sympathy also went to this unknown Anna, having to pick up the slack yet getting paid the same, just because she was childless.

  ‘Oh.’ Becky looked stricken. ‘I’m so sorry, love, I didn’t mean it that way.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘No, it’s not, I’ve gone and put my foot in it now . . .’ Which was worse – tactless friends complaining about their kids, or trying to make up for it with solicitous concern, as if Alison was that stereotype, a crazy infertile woman, desperate to snatch your baby from its pram? She didn’t want anyone’s random baby, that was the point. She wanted her own, her and Tom’s. Why was that so hard?

  ‘Never mind,’ she said, sick of the conversation. ‘Shall we get another bottle?’

  Becky looked at her pointedly. ‘Is that a good idea, love? I stopped drinking for six months before I fell pregnant with Hamish.’

  Alison counted to ten. It didn’t help. ‘You know what, you’re right. I might just call it a night.’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Got a big case on at the moment.’ That was true, anyway.

  ‘Because of what I said? Al, I didn’t mean it, I’m just venting. Am I not allowed to talk about my kids, is that it? Just in case it upsets you?’ Becky’s face was flushed. She was angry-sad, a lightweight now who was drunk on the two glasses of Merlot she’d had. Alison couldn’t be bothered. She had no issue with pregnant women, with mothers, and yet the world seemed determined to pit her against them.

  ‘It’s fine.’ She hugged Becky, trying to smooth over the bad feeling. ‘I’ll see you soon, OK?’

  ‘Assuming I can get a babysitter again,’ said Becky stiffly.

  What about your husband? Alison wanted to scream. Carl didn’t help out at all, she knew that; he worked till nine every night then took the train down to where they lived in Surrey. But that was Becky’s choice. Wasn’t it? Everyone made their choice, and they shouldn’t complain about it after.

  She wanted another drink though, and Tom was working late on the petrol fraud case. Overtime, to help pay for what could well be a failed IVF cycle. On impulse, she took out her phone and texted Diana Mendes. I’m in town and I need some wine. Would you like to join me?

  Failing that, she was going to go to a bar and drink by herself. Might as well fulfil the childless-woman stereotypes while enjoying a good Chablis, after all.

  The day of – Jax

  2.15 p.m.

  So this was it then. Motherhood. I wasn’t sure if I felt different on some elemental level, or if it was just physical pain and sleep deprivation. I’d only experienced anything like it on long-haul flights, crazed with jet lag and discomfort, but at least that had been one night only. This had so far been two weeks and counting. At nights I walked the floor, no longer sure what time it was or even what day it was. I’d lived so much of my life out of the moment, I realised. Plugged into my work, or a podcast, or a book, or a TV show or play. Now I was forced to be in every bloody howling minute of it. I hadn’t had a proper shower in three days – that morning Aaron had held the baby outside the door while I frantically soaped my hair, which hadn’t been rinsed properly and was flat and lifeless. Hadley had screamed the whole time, desperate sobs as if she’d been abandoned down a well. Aaron had no idea what to do with her. He looked like a teenage babysitter, equally uncomfortable. I hadn’t read a line of a book, or watched more than five minutes of TV, or gone to the loo without agony either. Two weeks. It turned out that was a long time to live every single awful moment of your life.

  And that wasn’t counting the way things were with me and Aaron. I hadn’t wanted to come to the barbecue today. I’d woken up – or rather, floated out of the half-doze which was all Hadley ever allowed me to have – with a sense that something bad was going to happen. ‘What could happen?’ Aaron had said. As if nothing bad had happened already, as if bad things hadn’t been happening for months now. But he didn’t believe me, did he? And that was the root of the problem.

  ‘I don’t know. Something.’ But it was hard to tell if it was unusual dread or just the everyday kind, the sort I’d grown used to since being pregnant. Of another day without any sleep. Of not being able to sit down and eat a meal, or go to the loo, without the plaintive fox wail of the baby starting up.

  ‘It’ll be fine. Com
e on.’ Aaron had even laid out clothes for me, a heartbreakingly poor choice of short shorts and a T-shirt I only wore to the gym. I’d been moved enough by that to get up, shower half-heartedly – my legs had not been shaved in months – and put on something more suitable, a long floral dress that made me feel like a three-piece suite. And we had driven to Monica’s to play happy families, to put on a show, ignoring what was really going on.

  Now I was in the kitchen at Monica’s, dazedly floating in the cross-currents of conversation about nurseries. Monica seemed to feel a Montessori approach was ‘dangerously lax’, that your child would never get into a good school if you sent them there, and Cathy disagreed, her baby hoisted on her front, quiet and milk-drowsed. Hadley never seemed to get enough to eat, and I was wondering if I should stop, give up on breastfeeding altogether. I imagined what they’d all say if I was to announce that now. If they’d run me out of the place for being a bad mother. A failure at what the rest seemed to do as naturally as breathing. Monica, who’d clearly had a manicure and blow-dry, looked unbelievably slim and toned in a strappy white dress. A white dress! I wouldn’t have worn that even before I got pregnant, not at my age. Not to a barbecue.

  Monica was a sickener, she really was. Everything was so immaculate, the tableware sparkling, the lights hung up in the garden, the spread of salads and meat. Outside, Hazel had taken command of the barbecue, and Anita hovered by the food table, looking uncomfortable with Rahul, who I didn’t think had spoken one word so far. An odd trio, with nothing to say to each other, clearly. I was dying to talk to someone about Anita’s baby, how it hadn’t arrived yet and what that might mean, but of my allies in the group, Cathy was busy arguing the toss with Monica about nursery education, and Aisha was . . . oh, there she was. She came into the room, smoothing down her long-sleeved top, having clearly just fed her own baby, who was drowsing in her arms. She looked troubled, biting her lip. I said, ‘Did you see Aaron up there?’