by Lucy Lawrie
In the week that followed, she took charge of Sophie’s care and entertainment, taking her out to the Botanic Gardens each morning, and then to a museum, gallery or soft play centre each afternoon. She cooked homemade, organic meals, played string quartets continuously, and never once switched on CBeebies.
‘She’s showing us how it’s done,’ muttered Jonathan one afternoon, peeking through the curtains as Mum marched off towards the Water of Leith with Sophie. We’d both been sent to bed with hot water bottles. (Dita had been sent to bed with a hot water bottle, too, even though there was nothing wrong with her. She’d made the mistake of mentioning a slight tickle in her throat.)
‘Well, let her,’ I said. I was getting some proper sleep, for the first time in months. And it was almost enjoyable to feel ill for a normal reason. The doctor, when I’d been to see her that morning, had been delighted to write a prescription for antibiotics for my sore throat – I think she’d thought I’d booked the appointment to discuss my dizziness again, even though the blood tests had shown up nothing.
‘It feels like we’re teenagers,’ sniggered Jonathan. ‘And she’s just flown in and discovered we’ve been attempting to look after a baby all this time.’
‘I know.’ I shook my head.
‘Unbelievable.’
‘I just can’t believe we got away with it this long.’
*
Jonathan and I were up and about again by Hogmanay, but we hadn’t made any plans to celebrate. Not that we would have wanted to venture out anyway – sheets of rain had been moving in from the north all day, wind shaking the house in rattling gusts.
In fact it was a pleasant change to have some time to ourselves. Dita was spending the night with her friends in Linlithgow, and my mother had gone to bed early with a headache. So Jonathan and I saw in the New Year together, slumped on the sofa in front of the television. We watched, glassy-eyed, as four fiddle players convulsed on a low stage and some elderly, bewildered-looking people attempted an Eightsome Reel. After the bells, Jonathan went into the kitchen to open a bottle of champagne, and I followed him in there. We drank standing up at the kitchen counter, giggling a little.
‘It doesn’t matter that we didn’t go out,’ I said. ‘It’s nice to stay in. I wouldn’t want to be standing around in Princes Street Gardens in this weather. They said on the radio that there’d been flooding. I hope Dita’s train got to Linlithgow okay.’
‘Was it Linlithgow again? God. She was there only last week. She seems to be spending more time with Norm and Barbara than she does with us.’
‘How does she know them? From some church committee back in the 1980s, wasn’t it? They must be scintillating company. Maybe they’re all up on their feet in the living room doing the Gay Gordons. Oh no, Jonathan, listen. Those wretched fireworks.’
The noise had woken Sophie; we could hear her screaming through the monitor, tinny and desperate.
When I got upstairs and lifted her she was trembling, her face hot with tears. The front of her sleeping bag was covered with purple vomit and half-digested blueberries.
‘Uh-oh,’ said Jonathan, who’d followed me into the room. ‘Here we go again. I’ll take her. You go and get the stuff.’
I went to the linen cupboard to fetch fresh bedding, then down to the kitchen to get a beaker of water for her to sip. As I stood with my finger under the tap, waiting for the water to cool, I thought about the first Hogmanay I’d spent with Jonathan. We’d gone to the big party at the Assembly Rooms. We had a photo from that night in an unsteady frame that kept falling down the back of the chest of drawers in our bedroom: Jonathan in a dinner suit, looking red-faced and a bit overwhelmed; me wearing a dark green dress that didn’t fit properly, and a brittle self-conscious expression.
The following Hogmanay, we’d queued for hours to go to the top of the Empire State Building, where Jonathan had proposed under a slate grey sky. Then in the evening, suddenly homesick, we’d got drunk in our hotel room and sung Auld Lang Syne over and over again, crying and dancing round and round in circles until we fell down.
There had been some other good ones since then, although last year’s had been a bit of a washout. We’d toasted one another with cans of Sprite from a vending machine, me strapped up to a foetal monitor in a triage room at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. When we finally stepped out through sliding doors into the dawn of the New Year, worries about a low-lying placenta having been put to rest with an ultrasound scan, we hugged one another with relief then drove home, bleary-eyed, to sleep the day away.
Smiling at the memory, I took Sophie’s beaker upstairs and together we got her out of her sleeping bag and pyjamas. Jonathan pulled off his sick-covered jumper and dropped it in a pile with all the other sick-covered things. Then, after I had given Sophie a spoonful of Calpol and a sip of water, he rocked her while I stripped off the cot sheet and replaced it with the fresh one. Gradually, she stopped crying. I picked up the dirty things to take down to the washing machine, then stopped and knelt down beside them. Still rocking, he began to half-whisper, half-sing:
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?
‘Oops,’ he said, breaking off just as Sophie pulled herself upright and vomited the watery Calpol over her fresh sleeping bag.
‘Poor love. Mama’s here,’ I murmured, rubbing her back until she stopped crying. I went back to the linen cupboard to search for another sleeping bag, but couldn’t find one.
‘Let’s just take her to bed with us,’ I suggested from the doorway. ‘It’ll be easier to keep an eye on her, anyway.’
‘Okay,’ he agreed, moving to get up. Sophie’s bottom lip stretched into a line in preparation for another bout of crying. ‘Shhh-shhh now, little one,’ he whispered. ‘I’m not putting you back, you’re coming with us.’
I laid towels out on our bed in case she was sick again, and we all settled down. Sophie lay nestled in the crook of my arm, watching me solemnly until her eyelids drooped and then closed. A change came over her in sleep; her features looked soft and unformed, like those of an unborn baby photographed in the womb. She seemed for a moment like the little traveller that she was; on a private, unknowable journey to places I couldn’t follow. Watching her sleep was the richest of luxuries. There was a certain number of times that I would do it. Maybe not fixed, yet, but not infinite, either.
Jonathan had fallen asleep too, his breathing deep and steady, his arm heavy over my waist.
I couldn’t move without waking them. And in that moment I was more than just me; I was the atomic heart of this small family, its forces and energies spinning and bending around me. So I lay awake as the night crept on, listening to the distant bursts of fireworks all around the city and the sound of the rain, soft now, against the bedroom window.
23
‘Cassie!’ Jonathan called me through to the living room where I found him clicking through the programme guide on the television. ‘That Workplace Phantoms is on tonight at eleven and I think it’s your episode. “The team investigates a funeral home in Edinburgh.” There you go!’
I cursed inwardly. I had known that the episode was due to be shown tonight and had been hoping that he wouldn’t notice. I didn’t want to revisit that night – and certainly not in the company of my husband and both our mothers.
‘Hey MUM!’ he shouted. ‘PAM!’
‘Jonathan, shush,’ I said. ‘They’re upstairs fighting over Sophie. Just leave them.’
‘Let’s go up and tell them.’
Dita was sitting on the edge of the bath drying Sophie while Mum stood to the side, arms crossed, holding a second towel.
‘Here,’ said Mum, as Dita finished off with a little dab of the towel on Sophie’s button nose. ‘I’ll take her.’ She carried Sophie into the nursery, where she sat down on the rocking chair and proceeded to dry between each of Sophie’s toes. Dita took a nappy from
under the changer and stood hovering. Mum pressed her lips together and dried even more vigorously. She hadn’t forgiven Dita for whisking Sophie off to the Botanic Gardens earlier that day while she, Mum, had been occupied ironing baby clothes.
‘Cassie’s on television tonight!’ announced Jonathan. ‘Workplace Phantoms is on.’
Mum raised an eyebrow. ‘It’ll have been edited right down. I wouldn’t get your hopes up.’
Sophie woke up for the third time at quarter to eleven, raising my hopes that we might have to miss the programme. But as the opening credits rolled, Dita appeared in the doorway with Sophie, who stopped crying as soon as she saw that the television was on and gave a beaming smile. Mum tutted oh-so-softly, but for once didn’t attempt to take over.
I was a little alarmed when, interspersed with shots of the Victorian house silhouetted against the darkening sky, the camera panned on to Malkie and me, arriving in his car.
‘Cassie! It’s you!’ cried Dita.
But thankfully, the film quickly cut to the goings-on inside the house. I had to admit, it was cleverly done. A narrative had been constructed around the flimsiest of events – a sudden draught prompting everyone to put their coats on, an unexplained blob of light caught on one of the night vision cameras. The failing of the night vision camera was a climactic point in itself. But just before the second advert break, the voice-over cut in: ‘Coming up in part three, events in the funeral home take an unexpected turn.’
‘Huh?’ I said, as the adverts came on and Mum got up to go and make tea. ‘I wonder what that’s all about? I didn’t think they’d got much in the way of evidence. Maybe they made something up.’
The first ten minutes of the next part lulled me into a false sense of security. Sophie was drawing all eyes in the room anyway, playing peekaboo. She only covered one eye when she was hiding behind her hands, keeping the other wide open so she could monitor the reactions of her audience.
I almost missed the voice-over moving in for the kill: ‘But then Cassie, the Braid Hills lawyer, shares a shocking revelation.’
And there I was, standing in the little room off the reception area, talking to Elliot.
‘Is there a child on the premises? Have any of the investigators brought a child?’
Of course, I realised with a slam. Cameras had been left in all the hotspots. One of the grievance statements had even mentioned the room behind the reception area, saying the lights used to go on and off in there.
I watched myself on film, stooped over with urgency and tension as I spoke to Elliot, worrying at the bracelet around my left wrist.
The next shot showed Elliot heading for the meeting room to check it as I’d asked, brushing aside the ghost investigators, claiming that he had to check something unrelated to the filming. The camera didn’t follow him along the corridor, but showed him, in silhouette, entering the meeting room, then coming out again a minute later. Then it panned on to his face as he approached the reception area again, focusing on the beads of sweat that had appeared on his brow.
Dita transferred Sophie to Mum, and came over to sit beside me on the sofa.
‘Cassie?’ She put a hand on my knee. ‘What did you see?’
I gave a halting description of what had happened, as the film moved on to some supposedly meaningful readings on the EMF meters. But then, horror of horrors, a wash of lurid green filled the screen. Something was being filmed in the car park, something caught by the night vision camera.
Dita must have seen my face. She pulled up close beside me and put a firm arm around my shoulders.
The shot moved closer in . . . closer in on Malkie and me, caught in the moment of our embrace. Caught with our bodies held seamlessly against one another; cheek to shoulder, chest to chest, hip to hip. Glowing green, white-hot and dangerous.
The voice-over stepped in with a helpful observation: ‘Emotions run high for the Braid Hills lawyers as the vigil draws to a close.’
Mum gasped. ‘Cassie! That’s not you?’
Dita tightened her grip around me.
Jonathan left the room.
*
After giving him a while to cool down, I went to look for him and found him in the kitchen going through Sophie’s changing bag. He had taken out a couple of yellow-crusted bibs and a scrunched-up empty milk carton, and was adding fresh nappies and an extra change of clothes. We were supposed to be going on a trip to Hopetoun House with the Babycraft crew the next day. It was reassuring to see that he was still making preparations, with the inherent suggestion that things were, in some ways at least, to go on as normal.
‘Jonathan? I’m really sorry about the programme. I’m sorry you had to see that.’
‘I know, I know – you did tell me at the time. So I’ve no reason to complain, is that it?’
‘I’m not saying that. I’m just saying I had no idea they were filming any of that stuff.’
‘Grow up, Cassie,’ said Jonathan lightly. ‘It’s entertainment. A gibbering idiot of a lawyer will be perfect, as far as they’re concerned, to make up for the fact that they didn’t see any ghosts.’
A gibbering idiot. That’s what I’d looked like, going to Elliot with my concerns. That’s the kind of lawyer I’d been – the kind of person I’d been – since becoming a mother.
‘Sorry,’ I said again, turning to leave the room. If I was going to break down, I didn’t want to do it in front of him.
‘Cassie.’
There was something urgent in his voice. He was pulling something out of the bag. A slip of white paper. He looked at it and gave a deep throaty groan.
‘Oh for FUCK’s sake, Cassie, what’s going on?’
He handed it to me.
Tell Jonathan, or I will. I have a right to see my own child.
A rush of blood fizzed through my head.
‘Jonathan, I have no idea.’
‘Still saying that this is Bobby Spencer, are you?’
‘I don’t think so. No, it can’t be. I have no idea who it is.’
‘You have no idea,’ he repeated, under his breath.
‘Jonathan, you can’t believe for a second that—’ I broke off in shock when I looked up at him. He was shaking, his face contorted with distress. In a sudden flash, he was that keening, dark shape again, the one who’d wept over Sophie’s cot in the middle of the night.
With a deep breath, I took hold of myself.
‘Now come on, Jonathan. You can’t believe that this is true. It’s some nutter, that’s all. Hey, come here. Don’t be upset.’
I made a move towards him but he stepped back sharply. Then, with a single broad sweep he knocked the changing bag, and all its contents, off the table onto the floor. He didn’t even look at me as he turned and left the room, slamming the door behind him.
24
When I emerged from the bathroom after my shower the next morning, Jonathan was on his knees searching through the chest of drawers. For a horrible moment, I thought he might be packing up his things; leaving.
‘A-are you looking for something?’
‘I’m looking for those swimming trunks.’
I gave an awkward laugh. ‘The ones you got for the birthing pool? Why?’
‘That was Jody on the phone. Apparently Hopetoun House is closed for the winter, so we’re all going swimming instead.’
‘You don’t need to come,’ I said immediately. ‘I’ll take Sophie. I’ll say you’re . . . still getting over the flu.’
‘I’ve told her we’ll go,’ said Jonathan, his voice flat and calm. ‘So we’ll go.’
‘But—’
‘But nothing.’
Great. What could be better than an afternoon with the Babycraft crew, sporting a pre-pregnancy swimming costume two sizes too small, and pretending that my husband wasn’t (a) irrationally afraid of swimming pools, and (b) in all likelihood, considering divorce after the events of last night.
In the car, I tried to get through to him.
‘We need to talk
about the note, Jonathan.’
A deep sigh, and an unnecessarily sharp jerk of the gearstick.
‘We should tell the police about it.’
‘Yes – you should.’
‘This stuff about Sophie being . . . you know . . . his child. He’s obviously delusional.’
Silence.
‘He is delusional, Jonathan.’
‘Yes – you said.’
*
‘Sooo pleased you could make it,’ said Jody, as we met her, Tom and Vichard emerging from the disinfectant footbath. ‘Shona and Paul aren’t coming, by the way. Apparently Shona has to prepare for a case, and Paul has a phobia of the water.’
I shot a glance at Jonathan, shivering in his trunks. He looked away.
‘This is actually Sophie’s first time swimming,’ I said, pulling her close against me. I could feel the warmth of her compact little body through the fabric of her swimsuit – a Fifi and the Flowertots one with a frilly skirt over the hips.
‘Is it really?’ said Molly, emerging from the footbath now, followed by Dave, who was carrying Cameron. ‘How fabulous.’
I turned to Jonathan, anxious to make this as easy as possible for him. ‘Shall we start off in the toddlers’ pool over—’
There was a movement in my peripheral vision and I turned to see Cameron drop like a stone under the surface of the water.
‘Oh my God!’ I thrust Sophie at Jonathan, preparing to jump in after him, but Molly had already plopped into the water.
‘Hey,’ said Dave. ‘It’s cool, don’t worry. Cam likes swimming under water. He’s been doing Fishy Fun classes since he was six weeks old.’