The Push

by Claire McGowan

  ‘Maybe.’ Diana’s voice echoed vaguely from the cupboard she was looking in. ‘Why?’

  ‘Dunno. Maybe she was lying about her age, or she wanted to seem younger for some particular reason.’

  ‘Hardly unusual.’

  Alison had never lied about her age, except to seem older when underage drinking, and felt it was a point of pride. But as it approached – forty – she wondered would she change her mind about that, as she quietly had about Botox; not that she’d had any yet, too expensive. In a sexist, ageist world, was it wrong to give yourself a leg-up? Oh God, she sounded like Carrie Bradshaw. ‘Anything in there?’ A door shut.

  ‘Rabbit food and beans, essentially.’

  ‘The pathologist said he’d never seen anyone with better muscle tone or less fat.’

  Alison wondered what they’d find on her if she died. An empty, scarred womb. Visceral fat around her belly and thighs. The ill-advised tattoo she’d been hiding from her mother since she was eighteen. Bodies said so much, and yet all Nina’s had told them was she was older than she’d seemed, and that she’d once given birth. She wondered about that. Where was the child? If they were grown up, wouldn’t they have seen their mother’s death on the news, come forward? ‘No one knew anything about a kid?’

  ‘No, but she might not have told them. Boundaries or whatever.’

  ‘Mm. Is there really nothing else here?’ Alison turned in a circle, looking round the small flat.

  ‘Nothing. Here’s another thing – there’s no ID anywhere. No passport, no driving licence. No birth cert.’

  That wasn’t as unusual as you’d think in a country with no ID-card requirement, but surely someone like Nina, who everyone described as urbane and knowledgeable, would have at least had a passport. ‘Nothing at all? Library card, Blockbuster Video?’

  ‘What’s that? Just kidding. No, she had no wallet on her that day, and her bag only had keys for this place and some bits of make-up, Monica’s address on a piece of paper. Just an old burner-type phone, unregistered as you know.’ It was so strange. Nowadays you had to actually work quite hard to be so off-grid. Question was, why would she?

  Alison and Diana looked around the tiny space. The bedroom only had space for the wardrobe, bed, and a nightstand. The drawers of that lay open, empty. No laptop. No iPad, not so much as an MP3 player. ‘Internet cafe?’ Alison tried.

  ‘What was she, living in the nineties?’

  ‘Maybe she’s one of those hippy off-gridders.’

  ‘But still. Try doing anything now without a smartphone or computer. And how did she get a job, if she had no ID? Thought everyone had to show passports now in this dystopian nightmare we call home.’

  ‘She was freelance.’ Alison ran her eyes around the room, searching for something, any clue to this woman’s life.

  ‘Still. DBS checks, that sort of thing? This baby group can’t have been her only income?’

  Alison had no answer to that. She had never known so little about a victim.

  They stood in the empty flat, dust motes hanging in the air, the fridge full of food that was spoiling, the woman who had bought it never coming back to this small and impersonal space without so much as a cushion. It felt like a furnished apartment, albeit a nasty one. Like the places they put care-leavers or recent offenders.

  Diana sighed, batting at an open door. ‘I mean, I don’t have a lot of stuff, but this – this is pathological, isn’t it? She’d no family, no friends even that we could find. The group are the only people we’ve found who even knew her. Someone with as few ties as possible, like she could leave in the middle of the night.’

  Or like someone with things to hide.

  ‘We should try the neighbours. There’s nothing here.’

  But Alison couldn’t leave it. She knew she’d have to face Colette otherwise, with her total lack of evidence. ‘One more search. Look behind everything, under the furniture.’ And sure enough, she had her gloved hands underneath the fridge when she heard a yelp from the bedroom.

  ‘I found something!’ Diana sounded excited, so it must be big. ‘Hidden down the back of a drawer. Between it and the frame.’

  Alison’s heart did a victory lap as she got to her feet. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Come see.’

  They met in the living room. Diana was holding out a photograph, slightly dog-eared. Alison peered at it. ‘A baby?’

  ‘I reckon it’s a picture from the nineties, based on the photo stock. Got a sticker from a chemist on the back.’

  She scrutinised it. It showed a young woman, in her teens perhaps, dressed in leggings and DM boots (classic nineties look, enjoying a revival right about now). She was smiling, pressing a baby close to her face. A little boy from the clothes he wore, just a few months old. ‘Is that her? In her teens?’ She peered at it, but she’d never seen Nina alive. It could be her. This could be her child.

  ‘I think so, yeah.’

  ‘So she did have a baby, and had him young. He’d be grown-up now, I suppose.’ Alison flipped the photo over, noticing the sticker from the developing lab. A local one, by the looks of it. Maybe they’d still have records.

  As Alison knocked on the door downstairs, it opened a crack, and a pair of owlish glasses peered out. ‘You the police?’ said a woman’s voice, harsh and complaining.

  ‘Yes. Are you . . .’ Alison checked her notebook. ‘Ms Conway?’ The downstairs neighbour.

  ‘Mrs Conway, please,’ she sniffed. Alison heard a mewing sound, and a cat emerged, winding round her legs. A pretty one, with grey striped fur and little white socks. Mrs Conway – Celia, Alison knew from her notes – picked the cat up and let it twine round her neck like a stole. ‘Oh Bootsy, who’s a bad girl, you aren’t allowed out!’

  ‘Nice cat,’ said Alison, who didn’t really trust them.

  ‘She came to me just last week. Mewling around the door upstairs, she was, starving, poor thing.’

  Alison’s ears pricked up. ‘You mean she might belong to the lady upstairs – Ms da Souza?’

  ‘If that’s what she calls herself. I don’t think she’d even had a cat before – never saw her bring back cat litter, or proper food! No wonder she came to me. That’s right, that’s right, baby.’ The cat was now licking the woman’s face, while fixing Alison with an evil green gaze.

  Alison was trying to think. There’d been no trace of a cat upstairs, no tell-tale hairs or smell of unchanged litter tray.

  ‘She even locked her in the shed outside half the day, poor baby.’ With no trace of irony, the woman said, ‘I think they should bring back hanging for people who hurt animals.’

  ‘You know she’s dead, your neighbour?’

  If she was expecting an expression of sympathy, none came. ‘Oh well, got what she deserved, didn’t she?’ The woman tickled Bootsy under the chin.

  ‘How long had she been upstairs?’

  ‘Three months or so. Not that she was there much – out at all hours, she was, very strange.’

  ‘And did she have any visitors during that time?’

  A pained sigh at having to help them. ‘Just that boy, the odd time.’

  Alison’s radar went off. ‘Who was that?’

  ‘How should I know? Some lad, twenty-something, I think he was mixed, you know. Tall. In a suit, so he wasn’t doing DIY or anything like that.’

  Interesting. A young mixed-race man had been at Nina’s flat. ‘How many times was he here?’

  ‘Maybe three or four, I reckon. I did wonder what they were up to up there.’ She raised her tufty eyebrows significantly.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Conway, you’ve been very helpful.’ As the door closed, trapping off another mewl from the cat, Alison did wonder if they ever got her sarcasm at moments like this. Most likely not, but it was the only weapon she had.

  She went to join Diana, who was by the car, on her phone. ‘Any luck?’

  ‘Nobody home in 3b or 3a. You?’

  She told her about Celia, an archetypal cat lady if ev
er there was one. Diana frowned. ‘Aaron Cole?’

  ‘Sounds like him, doesn’t it? Why did he not mention it when we interviewed him?’

  ‘You would, wouldn’t you, if you’d been round to a dead person’s flat. In case there’s DNA or whatever.’

  ‘A sensible person would.’ A person with nothing to hide. Finally, some leads. As they drove off she tried to work out what had bothered her so much about that cat, but couldn’t grasp it.

  Jax – two weeks earlier

  If I’d thought being on home bed-rest was bad, hospital was a hundred times worse. There was rest in the physical sense that I couldn’t leave my bed, this time not even to go to the loo by myself, but it was impossible to sleep with the shouting and running feet and bright lights and the other women on their phones all night long. It was a ward of misery, and we swapped tales in the pockets of time when the nurses and doctors weren’t moving around us, handling our bodies like machinery they operated. Burst ovarian cysts. Miscarriage. And me – placental abruption. I couldn’t quite find out what was wrong with me. I wasn’t in labour, not yet, but the longer the placenta wasn’t functioning the more danger to the baby. Doctors and nurses came and went, and I told them the same things each time. No, I didn’t smoke. Yes, this was my first baby. Yes, I was a first-time mother, yes, I was thirty-eight years old. I don’t know why they make you repeat these details so often in hospital, to everyone who comes to see you. Perhaps because it’s so easy to lose yourself, your clothes taken away and replaced by soft, well-washed rags, your bag God knows where. Your identity softened by drugs, your free will gone, handed up to the people who wheel you here and there and take your pulse and put needles in you.

  Aaron arrived what seemed like hours later – I couldn’t see a window so I didn’t know what time of day it was. He looked very young, like a teenager on work experience. His tie was off and rolled up in his pocket; he smelled of sweat and Lynx. I had to buy him some decent aftershave. But was that even my role now? Where did we stand with each other? ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been waiting for ages to see you, no one would tell me what was going on.’

  I rested my arms on my bump, as if I could keep the baby inside that way. ‘Well, I ruptured.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Dunno. I think they’re trying to work it out.’ I looked him over, as if I hadn’t seen him in weeks. A young man, with a boy’s thinness and sharp, edgy movements. Cheap shirt and tie. How could this be the father of my child? I suddenly imagined the worst, if I lost the baby after all this. Would he leave me for good? I didn’t know how we could pick up from where we were now. Suddenly, it was too much, the thought of him hovering over me, only to leave if the worst happened. The baby was the only thing tying him to me now. He’d made that clear by walking out. ‘You should go home,’ I said, making my voice cold.

  His face fell. ‘What? Do you not . . . ?’

  ‘I’m alright. There’s nothing you can do for me right now. They’ll call you if anything happens, I’m sure.’

  ‘But you’ll need stuff, won’t you?’ He hadn’t thought to bring anything. Would someone older have known I needed nightclothes, toiletries?

  ‘Mum’s getting me things.’ I was prepared for frilly nightgowns that did right up to the neck.

  ‘Alright.’ He looked miserable. ‘You really just want me to go?’

  ‘No sense in both of us being here.’ I was being cruel, but I was just so tired. I didn’t have it in me to care for myself and the baby and him as well.

  Aaron lingered a while longer, his cheap clothes rustling, and then he turned and went away.

  I had no sense of time in there. People came, introduced themselves as the nurse or the nurse practitioner or the surgeon or the anaesthetist. A variety of accents and coloured scrubs. Someone started coughing in a curtained bed opposite and didn’t stop, and there was a vague flurry of rushing feet and a woman was wheeled away. I found I couldn’t care much. The clock on the wall ticked around and still I lay there. My mother came, bringing home-decoration magazines and some huge pyjamas. She didn’t ask where Aaron was, and I didn’t tell her. I had not been allowed to eat or drink in case I needed surgery, but when the clock said eight, someone came and told me it wouldn’t be today. They offered me what they said was food and I opted for plain toast and tea and it tasted amazing after a day of fasting. The women on the ward were nearly all pregnant too, and husbands came and went, and other children too, and sometimes you could see other women, the not-pregnant ones, flinch at the sound of the high voices and pattering feet, and I could only guess at why, what horrors they’d been told were happening inside them. My baby was apparently still alive. The heart monitors showed it was clinging on, although as the placenta died it would begin to struggle. I waited. Eventually, though the lights were never turned off, I must have slept.

  Someone was there. I woke with a start sometime in the night and found I couldn’t move. My arms and legs were weighed down and my eyes seemed too heavy to lift. A dark figure stood over me and I couldn’t see. I tried to cry out – help. Nothing came out. The figure reached out their hands and put them on my belly, and I tried to wriggle away but I couldn’t. I was aware how vulnerable I was, the catheter in my hand, the wires and monitors I was linked to. Why was this happening? Had I been given something, or were the blankets too tight? I couldn’t seem to figure it out. My eyes closed again, as if of their own accord, and everything was gone.

  When I woke up it seemed to be morning, judging by the bustle and terrible noise and searing light. I lifted an arm experimentally, and it seemed fine. A nurse was dispensing little packets of cornflakes and tea from a big metal pot. There was something comforting about it, the simplicity, and I wondered if I could have some. ‘Was something wrong with me last night?’ I asked. My voice was croaky in my dry throat. ‘I woke up and couldn’t move.’

  She was busy, bustling about. ‘Sometimes people have bad dreams in here.’

  ‘I don’t think it was a dream.’ But maybe it was. I didn’t even know what drugs I’d been given; I could easily have been hallucinating, though I felt fine now. ‘Was someone standing over me? Touching me?’

  ‘Night nurse doing the rounds, most likely.’

  But it didn’t feel like that. Would a nurse not have spoken to me? Would I have felt such dread? I was so vulnerable here, where anyone could walk in and get to me. But I didn’t know how to explain this without sounding paranoid.

  Alison

  ‘Look at these houses. Mansions! Where do they get the money?’

  ‘Banking. Law.’ Jobs that a lot of people in the police could do as well, since they were certainly smart enough, but which paid up to a hundred times what Alison earned in a year. She felt her socialist hackles rising as they drove through the small town of Wilmer’s Wood, in Buckinghamshire. On the high street was a Boden, a Waitrose, a branch of De Beers. Not a fried-chicken shop in sight. The chemist that had developed the photo was still there, unbelievably, and had been easily able to identify the family in it: ‘Very good customers over the years’. Finally, they were getting somewhere, and not a moment too soon: she’d have to report back to Colette by the end of the day.

  ‘Is this it?’ She was driving up to a large house surrounded by high brick walls, the gateposts topped by crouching lions. ‘What number is it?’

  Diana consulted her phone. ‘No number. It’s called “The Ridings”. What the hell?’

  ‘It’s another world here, comrade. Press the button there.’

  She pulled into the driveway and Diana leaned out into the light drizzle and buzzed it. After a few moments the gates swung back without a sound and let them in. The car crunched on the gravel as she pulled up beside a Mazda and a BMW. The front door was open, and a woman of about seventy stood there holding a small dog with big ears. A chihuahua? It was panting hard, staring at her with beady eyes. The woman was wearing cream slacks and a cream jumper and a lot of jewellery. ‘Are you the police? I expected you some tim
e ago.’

  ‘Traffic,’ said Diana as they clattered into the marble entryway.

  ‘Shoes please,’ said the woman – Elaine Bracknell – and they obliged, throwing small glances at each other. They’d bitch about this on the way home, Alison knew, and looked forward to it. It wasn’t a nice house, despite its opulence. Chilly marble floors and cream carpets, stiff-looking sofa, lots of ugly vases with huge twig-like arrangements in them. The air felt cold. ‘I imagine you’d like a coffee or something.’

  Just to be annoying, Alison gave a complicated order involving one and a half sugars and non-dairy milk, which was of course available. Diana asked for water. When they were sitting down in the cream wasteland of the lounge, Alison regretted having such a potentially staining drink. She set it down carefully on a coaster on the side table (also cream). Elaine and the dog were opposite. Her hands were bony, weighed down by rings. ‘So. This is about Georgina, is it?’

  ‘She was going by Nina, we believe.’

  ‘Her name is Georgina. Was.’

  ‘We’re very sorry for your loss,’ said Diana, though not as sympathetically as she might have. ‘When did you last see your daughter?’

  ‘Not for twenty years. She was very wild you see. Even then. I believe she was overseas, up to all manner of things. It’s very difficult, but that’s how it was.’ Mrs Bracknell, formerly Mrs Partington-Smith – mother of Nina da Souza, as she was calling herself – seemed more upset at her daughter’s behaviour than the fact that she was dead, pushed from a balcony.

  ‘Do you know where the da Souza came from, by any chance? Is it just made up?’

  ‘Some marriage I assume. She was in Brazil for a time. That sounds Brazilian.’ Her mouth twisted.

  ‘And were there any children that you know of? That is, any other children?’

  Further twisting. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘And the boy – can you tell us more about him?’

  ‘If I must.’ She set down her own cup of coffee with a sharp ting and a sigh. ‘We called him Edward at first, after Georgina’s grandfather. Of course, it wasn’t ideal, a pregnancy at fourteen – but at first we thought we could manage. David – my late husband – he was keen on the idea of a grandson. Take over the family business and so on.’