The Push

by Claire McGowan

  ‘Aren’t you going to eat?’ Hazel was at her elbow, her sharp grey eyes taking in everything. ‘You need to keep your strength up, when you’re feeding.’

  ‘It’s just so hot.’ The sun had indeed come out blazing that afternoon, leaving everyone pink-faced and a bit too drunk, as they gulped down their wine to hydrate. Monica had said something about getting a jug of water, but it hadn’t appeared. You’d think that, as a breastfeeding mum herself, she’d be more attuned to that. Cathy hadn’t touched booze for three months before she got pregnant and of course not since, a whole year now, and was staying off it still because anything she drank went straight into Arthur, and besides, Hazel was always watching. Hazel who was now on her fourth beer and had taken over from Ed in the barbecuing of the meat. Aisha was picking at some peppers, and Cathy realised she likely wouldn’t be able to eat any of the pork products on offer, or drink the alcohol. She looked worried too. Her husband, Rahul, was standing at the end of the garden, grim-faced and silent, poking at his phone. She wondered what that was like, a partner who didn’t talk at you all the time. Restful, perhaps.

  ‘The baby needs his hat,’ said Hazel, turning sausages. ‘Where did you leave it?’

  ‘I’ll get it.’ An excuse to go inside, into the cool marble interior of the house, and answer her message, as she’d been itching to do. Walking in, she saw that Nina had arrived, and an irrational swoop of fear went through her. It was OK. Nina didn’t know anything, not for sure. Maybe she’d seen that Cathy was further along than she should have been, a little bigger than would be expected. But nothing could be proved. All the same, as she saw Nina go upstairs, she dived into the living room, heart hammering. She took the phone out of her pocket. We need to talk, the message read. Her sweaty fingers slipped on the screen. OK, she typed. When? Then she immediately deleted both the original message and her reply, feeling like a criminal as she covered her tracks.

  She jumped as someone came to the door, but it was only Jax, carrying her own baby. She liked Jax, with whom she’d shared many an eye-roll during group sessions. ‘Oh, hi. You OK?’

  Jax didn’t look so good, pale and exhausted after spending weeks inside on bed-rest. She must be relieved now, to have her baby safely in the world. ‘You know how it is. Have you seen Aaron? I think we might go soon.’ Cathy wasn’t surprised, after the panic about little Hadley, even though she was now safe and sound in Jax’s arms.

  ‘No, sorry. Outside, maybe?’

  ‘OK.’ Jax went out, and Cathy heard her flip-flops going across the marble floor. Alone, she scanned her phone again, already hungry for a reply.

  They’d met Dan and Rachel, his wife, at the fertility clinic where Cathy had her initial tests. They seemed to often have appointments at the same time. They shared their stories, despite knowing nothing else about each other, as you do when you’re bonded by some shared trauma.

  Dan was fine – all his tests had come back normal, better than normal, excellent. Rachel always said this with a painful little laugh. ‘Poor Dan! Stuck with me and my malfunctioning system.’ Rachel had a lot wrong with her. Cysts and fibroids and PCOS and scar tissue in her womb. Cathy winced just thinking about it, how naive she’d been to assume it was all simple when you were a male-female couple. All she and Hazel needed was some swimmers, and they were easy enough to get if you had the money. They’d ordered some from Denmark, a thousand pounds, and now they just had to do the insemination and wait to see if it worked. Cathy felt a huge amount of pressure, watched eagle-eyed by Hazel to see she was taking her vitamins and drinking her cough syrup (it was supposed to thin up her mucus), not to mention giving up booze and sugar and caffeine until she was almost climbing the walls. She was scheduled for a home insemination, which was cheaper, and was dreading it. She’d confided this to Dan, who was so nice. Such a good listener. Almost like the brother she’d never had.

  Or so she’d thought, to begin with.

  Someone had abandoned a bottle of white wine on Monica’s glass coffee table, already leaving a ring. Cathy picked it up, and swigged from the neck, the cold sharp liquid making her gasp. Booze, after a year of none. She was going to have one drink today, and Hazel could piss off. As her phone lit up, and she seized on it, running her eyes over and over the message to take it in before she had to delete it, her hands were shaking, her brain firing with dopamine and guilt and excitement.

  The message: I want to see him.

  Jax – three weeks earlier

  There were no baked goods at the last group session, and I realised this was because it was my turn, and I felt bad despite all the other much worse stuff that was going on.

  ‘No Cathy today,’ said Nina, sweeping in on her usual cloud of essential oils. ‘She went into labour last night.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘The baby came early?’

  Nina didn’t answer for a moment, and I remembered – she had predicted this, hadn’t she? She’d told Cathy her baby would arrive soon. A chill went over me. How did she know these things? What could she see just by looking at me? I had been sunk in embarrassment ever since the police came a few days before. I wasn’t that type of person. What must my neighbours think of me? It was a good job I couldn’t leave the house, I’d be too ashamed to face them. Aaron and I had not discussed it, of course. It went into the big pile of things we were ignoring, swept under a carpet now so bulging we had to walk around it. He’d been violent, twice now, if I was being strictly honest. I was picking fights, pushing him away. And the baby hadn’t even arrived yet. What would we be like after? ‘Fingers crossed for her,’ I said weakly. If Cathy was already in labour, my own wasn’t far off. This was real. It was happening.

  This was the last session we’d have. Our due dates had come inexorably closer, and our bodies – me, Aisha, Monica – strained with fullness. Anita, of course, stayed the same, and sometimes I would catch her looking at my belly, a complicated expression on her face. I hoped everything would work out for them.

  Nina stood up at the end. ‘Well done, everyone. I wish you all the best with your upcoming journey, and what comes next.’ She folded her hands in a namaste gesture. That was it. We were on our own now. People were hugging, swapping contact details, Monica reminding everyone about the party in just three weeks’ time. By then, everything would have changed. We might all have babies, be parents. Nina stood at the door, seeing us out. She hugged Aisha and Anita, whispering something into their ears, encouraging comments I imagined, but not Jeremy, Rahul, or Ed. Not Monica either, and I saw her frown as Nina turned away, and felt a momentary flicker of sympathy. Aaron and I were the last to go. ‘Good luck, Jax.’ Nina’s cool eyes swept over me. Clearly, I was not getting a hug either, and I felt obscurely hurt by that.

  ‘Thanks. And thank you for the group, it’s been . . . I learned a lot.’ Enough to know I had no clue what I was doing. I didn’t really feel grateful towards her. I felt a lot of things, angry that she’d spent so much time with Aaron, talking about me behind my back, jealous of her strength and beauty and confidence, beholden for the money she’d paid him, which he needed so badly, hurt that she’d been so hard on me in the sessions. But I had been brought up by my mother, so instead of any of this I just said thank you.

  Nina just nodded, stepped forward to Aaron and enfolded him in a hug. It went on. And on. Just as I was thinking what the hell, she stepped back. ‘Thank you for all your help, Aaron. You’ve been amazing.’ She turned to me, one hand on his chest. ‘You’ve got a good one here, Jax. I hope you know that.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said mechanically. ‘We should go.’

  Aaron went out into the corridor and Nina put a hand on my arm, pulling me back. ‘Just be careful, Jax. I’ve seen this before. Young man, older woman, baby coming into the mix . . . it won’t be easy.’

  I was stunned. ‘I know it won’t be easy.’

  ‘Do you? Well. Just take care of him.’

  On the way home, I kept thinking what an odd thing that was to say. Take c
are of him. Shouldn’t he be taking care of me? As I drove, I found myself mulling over Jeremy’s question from weeks back, about why I’d not had children sooner. What would my life have been if Aaron hadn’t come along when he did? Receding a little each year from the possibility, until I could no longer see it at all? What would I have done with my time? Taken group holidays to learn painting or cooking. Cared for my mother until her death, the only child’s burden. Ended up one of those old women who sit in their flats and talk to nobody all week. A shudder ran through me at the idea. This was the trade-off – let something rip you open, your heart and mind and body and life; or die alone. Watching Aaron’s profile as he looked out of the window, I wondered if it was different for men. If the decision to have a baby was no more significant than choosing whether to get Sky Sports or not. If he might regret it, even. He was only twenty-four of course. I thought again of Nina’s hand resting on his chest, and tried to focus on more immediate worries.

  Although I knew the group was a source of tension, I didn’t really pay enough attention to it. I was too worried about my mysterious ill-wisher, the oncoming birth, and about me and Aaron. I thought the group people were just minor annoyances, their eccentricities good for dinner-party chat if I ever went to one of those again, or perhaps even with future Mum-friends (Cathy, Aisha maybe). As I left that day, I wasn’t sure if I would ever see any of them again. Nina included.

  Alison

  Every public-sector receptionist she’d ever met was exactly the same. A woman, and determined to keep you from finding out information as though their life depended on it, whether that was the availability of a single doctor’s appointment, or the details of who had hired the community hall for the baby group, as this one from the council was trying to do. ‘I’m sorry, but I really am too busy for this. And data protection . . .’

  ‘You realise she is dead, yes? Killed? Not coming back? Data protection doesn’t apply here.’

  A huge sigh ruffled Alison’s hair, which today she had worn down, freshly washed, shamed by Diana’s shiny mane. ‘I’ll have a look.’

  ‘That’s so kind of you.’

  There was a silence, filled with the sound of clacking. ‘Da Souza, you said?’

  ‘Yes.’ Alison spelled it.

  ‘I don’t have any more information than that. The hall was hired by a Nina da Souza, yes, for eight weeks every Saturday afternoon. That’s all.’

  ‘You didn’t take a copy of her ID, or what about bank details?’ This was her last-ditch attempt to find Nina’s address, since no one else seemed to have any record of her. She must have lived somewhere. What kind of person had no wallet, no phone, no ID of any kind?

  ‘Why would we do that? And she took the money directly from the participants – in cash, I believe. Paid us cash too.’

  Alison couldn’t believe this. This woman had been running a baby group without bank details, without anyone checking her identity? ‘You must have had her DBS checked?’

  The receptionist hated Alison, it was clear. ‘We’re not required to, since it was a private group. She just hired the hall. Anyone can do that.’

  ‘You had someone working with pregnant women and babies, who isn’t DBS checked?’ Had they learned nothing, after Soham?

  The woman scowled. ‘No babies. It stopped before they were born. And it’s private, like I keep saying, so we aren’t liable.’

  Alison gave a gusty sigh back. They glared at each other over the desk, public servant to public servant. Several people had gathered behind her in the council offices, clutching letters. ‘Can I at least see the booking form for the hall?’

  A few more begrudging clicks pulled up a copy of Nina’s signature, scrawled on to some scanned sheets of paper. A mobile-phone number, which they already knew had been pay as you go and disconnected. How could a woman leave so little trace on the world? Then Alison spotted one thing – in the address section of the form, something had been scrawled. A postcode only five minutes from the hall. At last, an address! They could search her home and surely find out something about this mysterious dead woman.

  ‘Will that be all, officer? I hate to keep all these taxpayers waiting.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’ That was a lie.

  Stepping out into the sunshine, she thought again how strange this all was. A woman with no friends, no family, no ties to the world at all. Nothing. If Alison hadn’t seen the body herself, the blood spreading out over the rocks, the eyes wide open and staring at the sky, she would have wondered if this woman ever existed at all.

  She went to ring Diana, and saw in one of those enjoyable coincidences that Diana was at that precise moment calling her. ‘You must be psychic. Guess whose address I finally found?’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘Yup. It was on the form the whole time, they just couldn’t be bothered to look properly. I’ll text you it, meet me there?’

  ‘Sure thing. Alison, we finally have something! Fucking result!’ She was surprised to hear Diana swearing – really, she’d completely misinterpreted the woman.

  ‘Let’s hope so, anyway.’ As she walked to her car, her steps were heavy with tiredness, with the heat. She just wanted to stand under a cold shower and then eat three Magnums with her feet in an ice bucket. But Diana was right, they finally had something. A clue, in the middle of all this baffling nothing.

  Jax – three weeks earlier

  Try to keep life stress-free as you approach birth, to ensure baby is born into a welcoming and serene environment.

  I almost snarled at the pamphlet Nina had passed out in the last session. Some chance of me creating a stress-free environment. Here was my situation, one week off my scheduled Caesarean. I was on bed-rest, my placenta likely to rupture at any minute. At the slightest hint of bleeding I would be carted off to hospital, there to stay until the baby arrived, at which point either one or both of us might die. I was hardly speaking to my partner, who went to work and came home, leaving me alone during dull daylight hours, while I dozed and moped and was barely awake except in the middle of the night, seized by terror. Aaron had moved into the spare room to ‘give me space’. I was possibly going to be suspended from work, my cat was still missing, my car had been damaged, and someone was doing these things to me, I was sure. Someone had sent these messages – I’d deleted that Facebook post myself. Hadn’t I? Of course I had. It was just hard to think straight, cooped up like this.

  Worst of all, I felt myself changing. I had never been jealous in relationships – on the contrary, I was the one more likely to chafe against the edges of commitment. But now I couldn’t stop. Aaron’s phone buzzed one morning as he got dressed, and before he’d lifted it from the bedside table I’d seen who was texting – Cassie. The blonde girl from his work, the one who’d put the picture of me on Facebook. ‘Why’s she texting?’ I hated the sound of my voice.

  ‘Just giving me a heads-up. Area manager’s in today, I better run.’

  ‘Sure that’s all?’ And Aaron would give me his bewildered blue-eyed gaze, and I’d feel worse than ever, an angry jealous old woman, and delusional to boot.

  Because Aaron was right. A fox could have smashed the milk bottles. My car could just have broken down or been tampered with by the neighbourhood kids I was always chastising for hitting it with footballs. It was very possible no one had been in the house that day, that I just wasn’t used to its daytime sounds. And the open door of the cabinet? Aaron could have done that. If that was true, if there was no one malicious, had I imagined the Facebook post? But no, Dorothy and Sharon had seen messages too. Then had the complaint been genuine – someone really thought I was not appropriate with the kids? I wracked my brains to remember. A young boy, fourteen maybe, weeping in my office as he recounted his abuse in care, while I recorded him for a fundraising video. I had put my arm around his shoulders, hadn’t I, without thinking? Had someone walked past, Dorothy or Sharon or someone else? I believed now it was nothing to do with the
Jarvises – Mark did not have the means to contact me and she didn’t have the malice, even though I had in fact ruined her life, not that I’d meant to. That was the worst thought that came to me on those endless, dull days – I did not deserve this baby. I did not know how to be a good mother, since I’d never witnessed one in action. I was going to fail.

  One day, one of those other days without end or beginning, I lost it entirely. Aaron was late home. I’d been watching the clock tick past six, up to seven, and after. When had I become the kind of woman who watched clocks? In the past I was usually home after him, often felt guilty about taking work back with me, lying awake finessing presentations and pitches. When he came in, at almost twenty past seven, I was waiting on the sofa. I must have looked a sight, huge in my unwashed dressing gown and unbrushed hair, face like thunder. ‘Where were you?’

  He stopped, midway through taking his jacket off. I had bought it for him. He never bought himself anything new, even if he could afford it, even if his old ones were full of holes. ‘Work, babe.’

  ‘Till this hour?’

  ‘It’s getting to quarter-end. Busy time.’

  That sounded reasonable, so I changed tack, spoiling for a fight. ‘I suppose Cassie was working late too.’

  ‘We all were.’ He placed his jacket on the sofa, instead of hanging it up like I’d asked him to hundreds of times. ‘What’ll we have for dinner?’

  ‘How should I know? I’ve been stuck here all day. I can hardly even go to the loo unless you help me.’

  ‘Well, I’m here now.’ Aaron hefted me up the stairs, practically grunting with the effort. As I shut the bathroom door, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. An angry, dishevelled mess of a woman. What must it be like to come home to this? Especially when there was Nina, so slim and glamorous, and Cassie at his office, so pert and young. I had to stop this. I had no evidence at all that Aaron even looked at other women in that way. I took a deep breath and went out, determined yet again to stop sniping, be nice, suggest we order a takeaway. But when I bum-shuffled back down to the living room, Aaron was standing there, all the colour drained from his face.