Eggshell Days

by Rebecca Gregson

“It’s okay. Maya?”

  The rhododendrons behind them rustled.

  “Yes?” said Maya, coming out of the woods. She was clothed but shivering and she had a bunch of yellow rhododendrons in her hand.

  Emmy fell on her. Cathal kept his hand on Maya’s back, desperate to have equal contact. He let out short bursts of relieved laughter, the remnants of a panic so intense he had thought his world might end. Emmy was repeating her daughter’s name over and over again.

  “Have you been in as well?” Maya asked Cathal through chattering teeth. “The weed makes it really hard, doesn’t it? I did a surface dive.”

  “Did you?” he tried to say. “Good girl.” He spat a mouthful of saliva and pond water into his hand.

  “You look like a weird fish,” she told him as Emmy ripped off her fleece and put it round her daughter’s shoulders. “A creature from the blue lagoon.”

  Cathal tried to suck in his cheeks. He looked like an old man with no teeth.

  “Oh,” Maya said, suddenly seeing him with entirely new eyes. “Look, Mum. I can’t do that, either.”

  * * *

  Niall saw the three of them from across the pond. He stood there, his feet on his brother’s clothes, rooted to the spot. Then Cathal saw Niall. Emmy saw Cathal see Niall. Maya saw them all see each other. The earth stopped spinning on its axis for a moment.

  “Look at these,” Maya said, thrusting the yellow flowers under Cathal’s nose. “This is proof, this is.”

  “I’ll see them later,” he said, looking toward his brother. “Go inside now with your mum and get warm. I’ve got to talk to Niall about something.”

  Maya waved across the pond at Niall.

  Cathal looked at Emmy. His eyes searched hers. He was still shivering, still in his boxers, weed still hanging from him.

  “Is that okay with you?”

  “Yes,” Emmy nodded, picking a string of blanket weed from his arm and preparing to usher Maya back to the house. “That’s okay with me.”

  18

  “Why are you taking so much stuff with you if you’re coming back?” Maya persevered accusingly. She was leaning against Niall’s bedroom door frame, noting every item he put into the three open cases on his bed. Books and music. An ashtray. A halogen desk light. He had already unplugged his computer in the library.

  “To make room for Mog and Dean and baby Nathan.”

  “Baby Nathan?” she repeated. Niall was not himself. She looked at him as if to say, Do you think I’m stupid?

  “They take up ten times more space than an adult, you know,” he said.

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Go and take a look in Jonathan and Sita’s room if you don’t believe me. You can’t move in there for nappies and powder, and vests and—”

  “That’s just them,” she interrupted impatiently. “You know what they’re like. They all have their own shampoos. And toothpaste. Asha’s even got a different toothpaste from Jay.”

  “Whereas you clean your teeth with a stick and some salt.”

  “Yeah, and I wash my hair with my own spit.”

  Niall remembered the times he had taken her out with nothing more than a spare nappy and a packet of baby wipes in his coat pocket. She ate anything, slept anywhere, still did. Just thinking about her made the hole inside him even bigger.

  “And my, how it shines.”

  Maya frowned at him. He could see that now was not an optimum time for joking, but he was doing his best to sound normal, to hide the fact that his heart had been wrenched from its casing and was hanging out on wires, like the light switch on the stairs the electrician was working on.

  Twice, Emmy had tried to touch him, to see if she could ground him somehow, but twice she had got a shock. The first time was hardly surprising. It had been too soon after the whole ghastly showdown for there to be a safe connection. He had walked back into the house from the pond like a zombie, and she had leaped out at him from the shadows of the hall, mortified at her own behavior, desperate to talk, pleading with him to trust her, to speak to her. But he hadn’t been able even to look at her. His worlds had collided, and the wreckage was still burning.

  Niall couldn’t shake off the memory of the way his brother’s naked body had juddered in time with his voice.

  “You need to know something,” Cathal had stammered, dripping onto his clothes.

  “I do, don’t I? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. It’s not…”

  “You and Emmy? I don’t have a problem…”

  “Not now, not for years. Just once.”

  “Once?” Niall had begun to laugh. “Jaysus, ye bastard, I thought you were going to tell me—”

  “No, wait. Once, once is all it takes.”

  “You want to tell me you’re in love with her?”

  “No, I’m trying to tell you, I’m trying to tell you Emmy got pregnant.”

  “I know that.”

  “Not that time, another.”

  “What other time? How long ago?”

  “Well, you know how long.”

  “W’d ye feck off?” Niall had laughed hopefully, but then he suddenly knew he had to accept it. “No. Not Maya.” It wasn’t even a question.

  “I’m sorry. I would have told you years ago, except I didn’t know. It’s just come to a head in the last few weeks and…”

  But coherent thought had stopped there for both of them.

  “You must go,” Niall had told him. “You must go. Just go. You can’t be here. We can’t do this. Go on. Go.”

  Cathal had put his dry clothes back on over his wet body and driven away, sodden and still trembling, because that was the only thing he could do to make it better.

  It had been no easier to help Niall after Cathal had left. “I don’t want you near me,” he kept saying to Emmy, as if she was about to rip off her face mask and reveal an alien. “You feel like a stranger. Leave me alone. Don’t touch me.”

  “I’m sorry,” she kept saying. She wasn’t crying, so he knew she meant it.

  Maya hadn’t become a stranger, though. She was still his girl, his lovely girl, and she wasn’t prepared to take his exit lying down.

  “Mog and Dean have got their own home. It’s parked outside the door. Or haven’t you noticed?” she persisted, coming in at last and sitting on the bed.

  “But it’s a bus, Maya. A knackered old bus. And this is a bedroom, in a house, with running water and electricity.”

  “The bus has got those things.”

  “Come on, stop being difficult.”

  “I don’t want them here. I want them to go.”

  “How? Their bus has broken down. It was towed here, remember? Or are you going to push it for them?”

  I would if it meant you would stay, she wanted to tell him.

  “Well, how long are they staying, exactly?” What she meant was, How long will you be gone?

  “They’re going as soon as it’s fixed.”

  “Can’t you sleep in the bus till then? Stay. Please?”

  The understanding was only just out of her mind’s reach. Her mum seemed less stressed and yet Niall was leaving Bodinnick, Mog and Dean were taking his place and their baby both did and didn’t have something to do with it. But to make sense of it, Maya needed the missing links, the other babies, the aborted baby, the baby she used to be. Only Emmy and Niall had those. Only they really knew the nature of the thin-skinned beast that stalked the house. Everyone else was left guessing at its curious footprints and unfamiliar cry.

  “Well, I would, if this other problem hadn’t come up.”

  “What other problem? Grown-ups are always saying they have to go because of something ‘coming up.’ I think it’s just an excuse they use when they don’t want to stay somewhere. They should be more truthful.” She stared at him unforgivingly.

  Niall didn’t know how to answer. There was no point in fobbing her off, but he could hardly tell her the truth. I am going because I feel betrayed, because your mother has d
eceived me and my brother has defrauded me and I don’t know who anyone is anymore.

  He picked up a silver photo frame, a black and white picture he’d taken of her when she was two. All you could see was a chubby cheek, a strand of hair and one runny nostril.

  “You’re not taking that as well, are you? If you take that, I’ll know you’re not coming back,” she said. She felt like crying. When she’d heard about his row with Kat and that Kat had gone back to London in a huff, she’d thought, Yippee, that’s what we want. It hadn’t occurred to her for a second that he might follow her.

  “I was just looking at it,” he said, changing his mind and putting it back on the tall chest of drawers.

  “Are you going to live with Kat?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, stay with Kat?”

  “No, I’m not going to live with her or stay with her, not least because I wouldn’t be welcome. You were right. Kat and I have split up. I’ll be at my old flat.”

  “What about Chris? You said he could have it for at least three months, and it’s only been two so far.”

  “I’ll stay in the spare room.”

  “Stay in the spare room here.”

  “I can’t, my darling.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just can’t.”

  His hand faltered over his Roberts Radio with the duck-egg-blue leather finish Kat had given him for his birthday. It had cost her a hundred ridiculous quid. “Do you want this in your room?”

  “It’s okay, thanks. Leave it here for the baby.”

  “Good idea. It’s the right color, anyway.”

  He carried on packing and she carried on watching him.

  Eventually, she spoke. “Niall?”

  “Maya.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “You can always ask me anything,” he told her, feeling a shit for knowing he wouldn’t always answer her honestly.

  “If they wanted to name the baby after Jonathan, don’t you think they should have called him Jo instead?”

  Shit, he thought, winded by how much he loved her. I think I can live without Cathal and Emmy and Kat, but how the hell am I going to live without her?

  * * *

  Downstairs, Emmy held Nathan against her shoulder and walked rhythmically round and round the kitchen. She was singing a song, making it up as she went along, about sleeping and hope and riding life’s storms. In a literary sense, it was rubbish.

  But Nathan’s birth had come to them all like a very small drop of extra-virgin oil on deeply troubled water, and that made no sense, either. The arrival of a new baby should wreak havoc in an already turbulent house, but somehow it had simplified it. He cried when he was hungry, and he slept when he was tired. He was showing them the secret of truly simple living. Perhaps Toby had sent him. Perhaps Toby had sent them all here, to burst her bubble, to set her free.

  Emmy’s bubble had finally burst, at the pond side. It had been such a precarious one, way too big for its own health, and it had wobbled and shaken and come so perilously close to so many sharp edges so often before that she’d always known it was going to burst one day. And now that it had, she felt released. As if it had been her prison rather than her sanctuary.

  She had been bad. Worse than useless. Her breakdown—because that’s what it felt like—had stretched the elasticity of friendship to the limit. It hadn’t snapped it, but that was no thanks to her. That was down to Sita and Jonathan, Niall and Maya. It wouldn’t happen again. She would make it her life’s work not to let it.

  Her free hand picked up one of the half-full packets of cigarettes that she had scattered around the house and her foot pressed the pedal on the trash can. As she threw it in, she took a lungful of the new air blowing through the kitchen and it tasted of reconciliation and acceptance. She could actually taste the calm after the storm.

  Cathal’s exit had been terrible, but at least it had brought a form of closure with it. The last she had seen of him was when she had picked the blanket weed off his arm, but that simple gesture and his simple question—“Is that okay with you?”—were a resolution of sorts, a good enough beginning and a fair enough end. She knew he had given control back to her. On her phone was one text message she had yet to delete which just said, THANK YOU.

  Niall’s departure was going to be even worse but, in the wake of everything that had already passed, it was nothing she couldn’t cope with. They would sort it, somehow, sometime. It was a new experience to feel wrung out but not devastated. Eleven years of keeping a secret had come to an end, and she felt overwhelming relief peeping through the sadness.

  It was good, too, being left with the baby. She felt endorsed by being considered suitable, by being viewed as the hands of experience, by enjoying the bestowal of someone’s confidence.

  Mog had wanted to wake Nathan and take him with her to go and get some cloth nappies and a feeding bra, but the only baby seat was in Sita’s car and Sita was at work. Besides, it had been raining.

  “He’ll stay asleep till you get back,” Emmy had promised. “He’s just had a bucketful of milk. You’ll be with him again in twenty minutes. It won’t matter, I promise.”

  She’d made Nathan’s tiny paw wave at Mog through the window as Jonathan’s car pulled off. Don’t worry, she’d mouthed.

  Six days old. Warm and soft. Breathing and helpless. His own complete little independent soul. When she’d held Maya like this, she’d felt almost swamped by responsibility. She used to believe that every ounce of Maya’s happiness, her character, her safety, her success, all of it depended on her own maternal strength. She used to think that Maya would become whatever she, Emmy, made her. It was a belief that both terrified and empowered her, but now, holding Nathan, she could see that she had been wrong. Maya was herself, the sum of nobody’s parts. In the long run, it wouldn’t matter too much who her parents had or hadn’t been.

  “As long as you all find a loving connection,” she said to the white hump breathing into her neck, thinking it felt as if most of the last ten years had happened in the last ten days. Thank God that the choices she had made for Maya seemed to have had such little overall effect. There was no consistency, and yet Maya was entirely constant.

  But it wasn’t Maya who needed help, it was Niall. She kept seeing his ashen face, his body pole-axed in the hall. He had been motionless, as if someone had filled his boots with concrete, trapped him in a force field that she couldn’t penetrate, one that he couldn’t escape from, either.

  The baby lurched in sleep, his tiny hands flying open, as if to catch a passing branch as he fell.

  “Ch, ch, ch, ch,” Emmy whispered but his eyes were already closed again.

  Here was Nathan, dragged into the big wide world by naïveté and carelessness, already managing to be himself. His own sweet, pink-faced postnatal mother was somewhere else, letting out the invisible umbilical cord to an unimaginable length, painfully aware that every minute that passed was another minute away from her baby. But Nathan slept and dribbled against the ribbed cotton of an unfamiliar sweater, oblivious. The dark shriveled stump of his cord would soon fall off and reveal a perfect knot. He fed himself now.

  “No one owns you, do they?” Emmy said to the crown of dark hair. “You own yourself.” Her palm practically covered the baby’s back, and she kept it firmly against the white ribbon-edged fleece of his tiny jacket, pressing him to her.

  From behind, Niall could only see a rumpled forehead and two confused eyes peeping above the parapet of Emmy’s shoulder. She had lost weight. Her checked drawstring trousers fell over her bottom more loosely than they had two months ago. Her hair was longer, tied in a simple ponytail. From the back, she looked twenty-one again.

  He’d thought he was ready to leave, but seeing her like that, imagining she was holding their long-gone baby, he realized he wasn’t. He realized he probably never would be. But he also knew he had no choice.

  Supposing their own little fusion had made it farther than an e
mbryo after all, supposing it hadn’t been pulled away from its life-support system, picked like a flower still in bud, and chucked on the ground to die. Supposing they had got it right as Mog and Dean had, allowed it to stay in place, attached to the placenta, feeding and sucking and growing all its bits in the right places until it was ready to come out. And supposing it had come out in its own time, when it was ready, and no one in a green coat and a mask had dragged it out with sterile implements, or left it in a steel tray to wither and cease. What then?

  He wanted to believe that the little ghost that floated somewhere at the back of their lives was not after all a ghost, but a human child that had once worn nappies and screamed and kept them both awake at night and was now a teenager, stropping around, putting its big feet all over the furniture, nicking beers from the fridge.

  He also wanted to believe that Maya wasn’t the product of a lazy shag between his ex-girlfriend and his greedy brother, that she was his, that she had been planned and wanted and conceived in excitement and anticipation and lust and love while their three-year-old, the little knitted slug that he had just seen in flashback on his mother’s shoulder, slept in his cot.

  Niall wondered if he was going stark raving mad.

  “Hi,” Emmy said softly. She’d sensed him behind her a while ago.

  He raised his eyebrows in reply. His teeth were clenched behind his tight lips. He wanted to hold her, just once more, to feel a newborn baby between them.

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t go.” She started to move toward him and felt a shot of pain as he backed off.

  “I have to.”

  “Why don’t you stay for Mog and Dean’s send-off? They’ll be gone soon. They really want you to.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Please?”

  He was silent.

  “We should talk about it,” Emmy said. “It could be a beginning.”

  “It’s an end, Emmy.”

  Her hand left Nathan’s sleep-suited feet and reached for his arm. He could smell the baby on it.

  “Please don’t say that.”

  “I will. I’m not going to say what I think you want to hear anymore. It’s not good for anyone.”