by Alison James
‘How are you doing, Lizzie?’ The question is redundant; she already has her answer just by looking at her. ‘Shall I make us a cuppa?’
She doesn’t really want one herself, and dreads entering Lizzie’s kitchen. But at least this way she will know that Lizzie has taken in some fluid. Like many drinkers, her self-neglect means failing to drink sufficient amounts of water, putting her kidneys at risk, in addition to her liver. She switches on the limescale-crusted kettle, and finds mugs and teabags. There’s a milk carton in the fridge, but it’s out of date by over a month. Black tea it is, then.
If Lizzie will admit she’s drinking again, then Marian can try and find her a place on one of the many oversubscribed local rehab programmes. But Lizzie, as usual, is in denial.
‘I don’t even know why you would say that,’ she whines. ‘I’m fucking sober, and that’s the God’s honest truth.’
Marian gives her client a long look. Lizzie could be an attractive young woman, she thinks. Should be. She’s still only in her twenties. But years of alcohol addiction and smoking marijuana have taken the shine from her hair, left her complexion sallow and spotty and mottled her limbs with rashes. Marian points silently to the empty vodka bottle on the floor.
‘That wasn’t me,’ Lizzie protests. ‘That was Macca. My fella. He brought his booze round here.’
Marian sighs and takes a printed flyer out of her bag. ‘There’s a new alcohol dependency programme opening up, run by a charity, quite near here. They’ve even got some residential places, which I think would be good for you. So if you’re interested, give me a call and I’ll see if I can get them to take you. But don’t leave it too long – it’s bound to fill up fast.’
Lizzie puts the flyer on the sofa without even looking at it, her eyes a blank.
‘Maybe discuss it with your sister?’
Paula Armitage is a bright and sensible girl who has been doggedly looking out for her older sister since she was a child.
There’s no reply. Marian stands up, glancing at the back of her skirt as she does so. ‘Well, you’ve got my number. Give me a call if you want to talk, and I’ll call round to check up on you soon, okay?’
In her house in Muswell Hill, Marian strips off her skirt and shirt and throws them straight into the washing machine. Not for the first time after a day at work, her primary need is to feel clean again. Only then can she begin to unwind and organise her thoughts. She takes a shower, puts on jeans and a T-shirt and goes back down to the kitchen, where she makes herself a cup of proper tea: Earl Grey in a china pot, with milk.
Once she’s seated at the table with her tea, she fishes in her handbag for the leaflet she was given at the fertility clinic earlier that day, reading through it carefully.
While our clinic prides itself on an IFV success rate of over 30%, maternal age is a factor, and in women over 40 the live birth rate drops to under 10%.
Marian reads this sentence several times as she sips her tea. Under 10%. She is forty now, almost forty-one. So her chances of success are less than one in ten. Even if their initial test results are favourable, they still have a 90 per cent likelihood of failure. But then again, they could be among the lucky ones. One thing is certain: there is no point in embarking on such an expensive and stressful course of treatment unless they believe it could work. They have to remain optimistic. Because Marian wants to have a baby of her own. She wants it more than anything.
As she clears the tea things into the dishwasher, Marian reflects – and not for the first time – that they should have started to try and conceive sooner. It’s a painful thought process, because nearly a decade ago she had wanted to press on with starting a family and Tom, who is two years her junior, had wanted to wait a while. They were thirty-three and thirty-one when they met at a conference where Tom, an architect, had been giving a talk on public sector housing. They married two years later when Marian was thirty-five. She was keen to abandon contraception straight away, but at Tom’s insistence, she delayed throwing her diaphragm into the bin until they had moved from a flat to a house. But by then she was thirty-seven, and entering the realm of reduced fertility. When they tried having scheduled, unprotected sex, nothing happened.
‘We’ll just keep trying,’ Tom had told her. ‘No need to get doctors involved; it will happen eventually.’
But it didn’t.
By the time they were referred to an infertility specialist, Marian was several months past her fortieth birthday. She was, in theory, still eligible for a single NHS-funded cycle of IVF, but with a six-month waiting list for the treatment, the Glynns were advised to cut their losses and pursue private treatment rather than delay further. And even with a choice of private clinics in North London, a wait of several weeks to be seen was still the norm. A large number of middle-class women were leaving child-rearing until later life, and many of them were paying the price for that delay.
Marian puts the leaflet back in her bag and makes a start on peeling potatoes and setting them to boil. They’ll have cottage pie, she has decided; it’s easy to make and one of Tom’s favourites, especially if he can wash it down with a glass of full-bodied red. Once the potatoes are cooking, she calls Tom’s mobile, but there’s no reply. She chops celery and carrot, then tries calling again, but once more her call goes to voicemail. A few seconds later, a text arrives.
Sorry, work emergency. Should be back in an hour x
What sort of emergency can an architect experience outside office hours? Marian wonders, irritably. A building collapsing? A disastrous choice of window material? She wants to text and ask him exactly that, but she knows that she won’t. It’s not in her nature to rock the boat. It never has been. She’s never really done anything egregious in her life. In contrast to the disordered and chaotic home lives of her clients, her own upbringing was conventional and deeply dull. There was no abuse and no broken home. No excitement either. No dramatic highs or desperate lows. Her father was a provincial bank manager and her mother a housewife, and she and her younger sister were raised in a comfortable semi-detached in Esher.
At her girls’ grammar school, Marian had been bright but unambitious. She liked to produce good work and please her teachers, but there was little originality, or spark. She enjoyed art, but knew she was not sufficiently gifted to go to art school, so assumed she would end up working in an office somewhere, until such time as marriage and motherhood released her. It was the school careers officer who suggested she consider social work, and she took hold of the suggestion even though she didn’t really know what social work entailed. It sounded like something worthwhile, worthy even, but the early idealism acquired while taking her degree at York University and during her subsequent training quickly evaporated when she started work.
Marian likes doing things well and, as she began her career, she hoped to be efficient in her job, even if she lacked genuine passion. But her working days are about constantly letting people down and never fully meeting the needs of her clients. A good day is simply one where no overt disaster occurs.
It’s not forever, she tells herself frequently. Tom has said it too. The unspoken assumption has remained that when they become parents she will give up work, exchanging tramping around council estates and municipal buildings for the cosy world of NCT coffee mornings and play dates. But here they are on the cusp of middle age, and that day has still not arrived. They can afford to live on Tom’s salary whether she becomes pregnant or not, but if she gave up her job now, what would she do all day? For Marian there is no alternative calling apart from motherhood. That is what she wants; what she has always assumed she’ll have.
A search of the weekly veg box turns out a single, wizened onion, which Marian starts to chop, punctuating the task with swigs from the large glass of red wine she has poured. She sautés the vegetables and meat, mashes the potatoes and assembles the pie, and as she is sliding it under the grill, Tom’s key clicks in the lock.
‘All right?’ he says, coming into the room and sla
pping a copy of the Evening Standard down on the kitchen island. His overcoat is streaked with rain, and he pushes his damp hair back off his forehead. It’s still as dark as it ever was, and apart from a few lines in the corners of his eyes, and a slight softening of his jawline, he hasn’t aged. He’s still a handsome man. Whereas she has aged, Marian knows. Her hips have spread, her brown hair has become frizzy and streaked with grey, and her eyelids droop a little at the corners.
She pours Tom a glass of wine and hands it to him. ‘What happened at work?’
‘Oh… something and nothing.’ He rubs a hand through his hair again. ‘Not my job actually; one of Vanessa Rowley’s… her client was freaking out about the poured concrete in their skyscraper not being up to standard. It’s an engineering problem really, but we got dragged into it.’ He smiles at his wife, touching her arm briefly. ‘How about you? How did you get on at the clinic?’
Marian passes him the leaflet and he reads it, his face betraying no emotion other than mild exasperation. ‘Bloody hell – look at the prices!’
‘We need to get ourselves booked in for the preliminary tests,’ Marian says, taking knives and forks from a drawer. ‘What’s your diary looking like for the next few days?’
‘Not now, okay? I haven’t even got my coat off. Let me go and change out of this wet shirt, too.’
Before Marian can speak, he’s headed back into the hall. ‘We can talk about it later,’ he says, without turning to look at her.
20
Paula
Paula Armitage jumps down from the bus platform and starts the fifteen-minute trudge along Green Lanes to the block of flats where she lives.
Other pupils from Turnbull Comprehensive take the same route, and there’s usually a gaggle of boys from her own year. They’re a pain, and Paula ignores them, or tries to.
‘Oi, Paul!’ Jason Shepherd shouts. ‘Paul!’
He’s not shortening her name as a sign of affection or familiarity. It’s because the Year 11 in-joke is that she looks like a boy. Her light brown, stubbornly wavy hair is cut short and stands up in wayward fronds. She has freckles, and a gap in her front teeth, and her body is strong and stocky and devoid of curves. She shrugs her backpack higher on her shoulders, dips her head and ignores the taunts, but this seems to annoy them. They don’t like being ignored. They want her to show how upset she is, or how angry, or to come up with a smart remark.
‘Here, Paul, I’ve got something for you!’
Instinctively, Paula glances behind her, to see a fat, ginger boy called Shane Creswell hurl an empty drink can in her direction.
‘What the fuck do you lot think you’re doing?’ A car pulls up at the kerb, and a window is rolled down. Paula already knows whose car it is. It belongs to Johnny Shepherd: Jason’s older brother. ‘Pack it in, you lot. Leave her alone.’
‘Or what?’ sneers Adil Kumar. He’s the brains in the group, although that bar is set low.
‘Or you’ll have me to deal with. All right?’
When there’s no response, Johnny repeats, ‘I said – all right?’
One of them mumbles something, then Adil says, ‘Fuck this, I’m going to the chippy,’ and the group slinks off in the opposite direction.
Johnny rests his right forearm on the sill of the open window as he lights a cigarette. ‘You okay, kiddo?’ he asks Paula, through a little cloud of smoke.
‘Fine,’ she mumbles. She can’t look him in the eye, but she does look at his broad, muscled forearm resting on the car door frame. It’s tanned, even though it’s only April, and lightly dusted with golden hair.
‘Good stuff.’ He throws the car into gear and pulls out into the traffic, but not before turning his head and winking at her.
Johnny Shepherd winked at me. Paula embraces this little nugget of joy in what has otherwise been a drab day. Johnny left school ages ago, so he must be well over twenty. He looks like someone you’d see on TV, and has a glamorous girlfriend called Karen who works on one of the make-up counters in Selfridges. Paula sees her at the bus stop sometimes, and envies her porcelain-smooth skin and glossy, dark curls. She envies Karen being able to kiss Johnny Shepherd. And sleep with him. Imagine that. Her cheeks grow warm at the thought.
She’ll think about that later, but first she has stuff to do. She puts her key in the door to the flat – it turns reluctantly. Her mother won’t be back from her job as a supermarket supervisor for around three hours, so there’s plenty of time for Paula to make a start on supper, as she’s expected to do. But if she’s to go out and come back again without her mother knowing about it, she needs to get to work quickly. She sits on a tall stool in the flat’s tiny kitchen and sets about peeling and chopping onions and peppers.
It’s been five years since her parents separated, and she’s used to it just being her and Mum at home now. Her father lives in Totteridge with his new partner, and she sees him every few weeks or so, along with other relatives from that side of the family: her paternal grandmother, her Uncle Alan and Aunt Shirley and sundry cousins. Her older brother, Steve, works in Dubai and Lizzie… well, Lizzie hasn’t lived at home for many years. Because of the age gap between them, she barely remembers a time when they were both under the same roof.
Paula works swiftly and efficiently, piling up the prepared vegetables on the chopping board and rinsing rice through a sieve to cook later. Her mother has worked full-time since her parents separated, and Paula has been fending for herself after school for years. It’s made her self-sufficient and a competent cook, even if she is sometimes a little lonely. Her mother texts her to ask if everything is okay, and she replies that it is.
She doesn’t mention that she’s going out to see her sister. She’s not supposed to see her any more. The Armitage family have decided, unanimously, that Lizzie can only be a bad influence on her younger sister. Nobody visits Lizzie. Nobody even talks about Lizzie. It’s been that way for several years now.
Once she has changed out of her school uniform and into jeans and a sweatshirt, Paula stuffs supplies into her bag – cat food, a few teabags and some biscuits: nothing that will be missed – and trudges back to the main road. The traffic is so heavy that it will be quicker to walk rather than sit on a slow-moving bus, so she continues on foot, up Westbury Avenue and towards Tottenham, where Lizzie lives in a run-down housing association flat.
Her sister seems pleased to see her, which Paula knows from experience means she can’t be all that drunk. If she’s hammered, she’s barely aware of her surroundings, let alone able to acknowledge a visitor.
And Lizzie’s out of bed and dressed, which isn’t always the case. In fact, there’s something different about her today: something intense and yet calm. She hugs her younger sister, then sits down again on the grimy couch while Paula feeds the cat and puts away the tea and biscuits she has brought. Outside, a blue-grey sky is studded with clouds, fast-moving in the April breeze, but the dark brown living room curtains are drawn, making the flat seem even pokier than it already is.
‘You need to get some fresh air in here,’ Paula says briskly, yanking at the tatty curtains and forcing the window open a crack. ‘It’s a lovely day outside.’ She switches on the kettle and pulls out the rubber gloves she has brought with her, setting about cleaning up the worst of the mess in the kitchen. Then she makes tea and puts biscuits on one of the plates she has just washed.
‘Here,’ she says, holding them out in Lizzie’s direction. ‘Take these and I’ll grab the mugs.’
Lizzie stands and reaches across the coffee table to take the plate, and the stretching motion makes her loose T-shirt ride up. Paula stares, her lower jaw dropping in a silent ‘Oh’ of surprise and shock.
‘Lizzie!’ she breathes. ‘Is that…?’
Lizzie takes the biscuits and sits down again abruptly as though nothing has happened. But Paula, whose mother says she has a stubborn streak a mile wide, won’t be deterred. She pulls her older sister to her feet and yanks up her top, confirming that she didn�
��t just imagine the change in her shape.
‘You mustn’t tell anyone, Paul.’ Lizzie’s hands instinctively fall to her swollen abdomen. ‘And I mean fucking anyone. If they know I’m pregnant, social services’ll take the baby away as soon as it’s born.’
‘But Lizzie—’
‘You’ve got to promise me!’
‘Okay,’ Paula says calmly. Lizzie is getting agitated, and the more agitated she is, the more likely she is to turn to drink. ‘I won’t say anything. Who would I tell anyway, apart from Mum? But what are you going to do? If you go to the hospital to have it, people will know.’
‘I’ll have a home birth,’ says Lizzie, breaking off a corner of a biscuit. ‘It’s much more natural that way, anyway. And then I’ll just look after it. Having a baby will keep me off the booze, you’ll see.’
Paula doubts this. And while she doesn’t know much about pregnancy, she can tell that Lizzie must be quite far along for it to show so much on her tiny, thin frame. She wonders why she never noticed before, but then realises that the last couple of times she visited Lizzie was in bed, her body covered with her grubby duvet, and before that it had been winter and Lizzie, who is always cold, was shrouded in thick layers.
Lizzie sips her tea, then setting her mug down carefully, asks: ‘She’s awake now… want to feel her?’
She reaches for Paula’s hand and lays it flat against the tight mound of flesh, its skin stretched taut. Paula feels a strange shifting sensation under her fingers, then the prod of something hard, something alive. Her eyes widen in amazement.
‘It’s kicking!’
‘She’s kicking,’ Lizzie corrects her.
‘How do you know it’s a girl if you haven’t been for a scan?’
‘I just know,’ Lizzie says dreamily, an intense expression lighting up her thin face and returning some of the beauty that the drink has eroded. ‘I just know she’s a girl. But you mustn’t tell anyone about her: she’s our secret.’