The Accidental Mother

by Rowan Coleman

  “Righty-ho,” Cal said jauntily. “Now if you don’t mind, I think I’d better get back to my real job.”

  “Is everything okay there?” Sophie asked anxiously, thinking about her real job. After all, she’d been out of the office for nearly forty-eight hours.

  “Everything is fine. Nobody misses you at all,” Cal said, specifically to irritate her. “Except possibly your new boyfriend, Jakey.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Sophie said wearily.

  “Of course he’s not, because you only like men when you’re not sure if they like you. Now Jake’s actually come out and said he wants to be in your life, you’ll get cold feet and run away and do spreadsheets or something—”

  “Cal!” Sophie interrupted impatiently. “Why are we talking about this now?”

  “Because Jake is too good to run away from.” Cal pressed on regardless. “If you want to keep him, you have to get over your fear of intimacy and stop acting like you’re a closet lesbian. Or a frigid closet lesbian.”

  “Now I think you’re taking the ‘personal’ part of PA too literally,” Sophie said.

  “I’m just saying, don’t make the mistake you made with Mr. Luscious Loss Adjuster.”

  “What mistake?” Sophie asked him. “I only ever saw him from a distance. I never even spoke to him.”

  “And that,” Cal finished matter-of-factly, “was the mistake!”

  Maria Costello arrived at ten minutes past ten that night. It was a night that had followed a day that was, Sophie’s exhausted brain reasoned, as stress-free as a day was ever likely to get as long as the children were invading her flat. This was largely because she had worked out a fairly efficient containment system, involving food and television. She drew the curtains to exclude any unwanted foray of daylight onto the TV screen, and she watched daytime television all day, with the girls sitting on either side of her, occasionally rising from the sofa to bring them another snack. Fortunately they had been so starved of TV at Mrs. Stiles’s house that they were prepared to watched anything with awe, like a couple of cave girls who had just been brought forward in time fifty thousand years or so to marvel at the modern world inventions. As for Sophie, well, she didn’t care what she watched as long as it wasn’t another one of her precious possessions being executed.

  “You are very old to have blond hair,” Bella had told Maria Costello as Sophie showed her into the blanket and clothes-strewn living room.

  The detective had wrinkled up her slightly hooked nose as she looked around the room and then down at Bella. “And you are very young to be up this late,” she said, with a slightly stern upper-class Liverpudlian accent.

  Sophie put her hand on Bella’s shoulder and drew the child a step closer to her, suddenly sensing how very small the little girl was in comparison to the rather large and rather solidly bosomed Ms. Costello. Sophie didn’t know exactly what she expected from a private dick, as Cal had begun to refer to her with a little giggle after every reference, but it hadn’t been a Day-Glo orange tan and jewelry almost as brassy as her hair.

  Maria Costello must have guessed exactly what she was thinking. “You don’t need to blend in these days, love,” she said. “I can do almost all of my work from the office.” She winked at Bella. “Mind you, I’m a master of disguise when I need to be.”

  “Who are you and what do you want from us?” Bella asked her, quoting verbatim a line she’d heard on Neighbours twice earlier in the day, once at lunchtime and once in the teatime repeat. At this point Sophie decided it was a good plan to get her back into bed. Nobody had to know anything until there was something to know.

  “Maria is here to see me, Bella. It’s just about work, nothing to do with you. Now you’ve got your glass of water, haven’t you? So you run along and get into bed, because tomorrow we’re—” Sophie stopped dead in her tracks. She had nothing planned for the girls the following day except watching TV, eating dry cereal on the sofa and chicken nuggets and chips on the kitchen floor (ketchup required extra saftey measures). “Going to be awake again,” she finished lamely.

  “Can I finish telling you the story about the flying fairy pony?” Bella asked her. She had begun this story—seemingly one she made up herself—the previous night. It was, surprisingly, quite gripping, but tempting as her offer was, now was not the time for chapter three.

  “No, let’s save it for tomorrow, okay?—so that Izzy can hear it too. Go on, off you go.”

  Bella eyed Maria Costello suspiciously before finally padding into the bedroom. Sophie smiled nervously at the formidable looking woman and suddenly felt quite small herself. She had expected Maria for most of the day, finally giving up on her making an appearance after 9:00 P.M. So now Sophie was not prepared. She did not have her formidable woman clothes on. She had her Snoopy jim-jams on, and they didn’t have quite the same impact.

  “Um, do you want a drink?” Sophie offered, thinking of tea, coffee, or hot chocolate.

  “Got any whiskey?” Maria asked hopefully. Sophie hadn’t got any whiskey. She had two-thirds of a bottle of Baileys that Lisa had given to her at Christmas after drinking the first third of it sitting on Sophie’s office floor weeping about some bloke who hadn’t kissed her under the mistletoe. Sophie had thought about the bottle of Baileys a lot in the last couple of days, but so far she had not succumbed to it. Now that she was not alone, it was acceptable.

  “I’ve got Baileys,” she suggested hopefully.

  “Make it a double,” Maria said, so Sophie obligingly filled two mugs halfway with the coffee-colored liquor. Of course, Sophie did have glasses that would have been more suitable, but for some reason mugs seemed far more appropriate. Private detectives always drank whiskey (or Bailey’s) from cracked mugs on the TV.

  “So.” Maria settled onto the sofa, kicking off her gold heels and tucking her feet up underneath her. “Did you know your sofa smells of—”

  “Yes,” Sophie said. “So can you find him?”

  Maria nodded and took a large mouthful of the Baileys, holding it over her tongue for a few seconds. “Let me get this straight. The guy leaves his pregnant wife in the lurch and runs off to God knows where to find himself and shag a load of tarts—am I right?” Sophie would have dropped her Baileys in surprise if she hadn’t been treasuring it so very much.

  “Well, yes,” she said. “In principle.”

  Clearly, Cal had told Maria the details of the case in his own no-nonsense style.

  Sophie quickly filled Maria in on the real situation.

  Maria’s face softened at the news, and she bit her glossed lips. “Oh, the poor little darlings,” she said gently.

  Sophie just managed not to roll her eyes and say, “Yes, yes, blah, blah, blah. And me, what about poor little me?”

  “Yes, I know,” she said briskly instead. “Terrible. And you see I can only have them temporarily, and after that they are going into care, so it is rather urgent—”

  “Why?” Maria asked.

  Sophie looked taken aback. “Well, because obviously the less time they spend in care the better,” she said, feeling that that was rather obvious.

  “No, I mean why can you only have them temporarily?” Maria asked her.

  Sophie chose her words carefully. “I’m just not a person who can…who is very good with children. It’s not fair to them.”

  Maria scrutinized her as she knocked back her mug of Baileys. “Trust me, you have to be a seriously shit person to be a worse option than some of the care homes I’ve seen. And besides, you looked like you were doing all right to me.”

  Sophie held Maria’s gaze but said nothing, choosing to skim over the issue of what kind of person she might or might not be. Maria was just one more in a long line of people who seemed to want to know exactly what made her tick.

  Sophie was tired of being scrutinized. Tired of people trying to work her out. She didn’t want to know the answers to any of these questions, so why should they? At least in this case, she was the customer, and
the customer was always right.

  Maria shrugged. “All right. You better tell me all you can about this Louis Gregory then, and I’d better track him down,” she said.

  “Are you sure you’ll be able to?” Sophie asked her. “When the police and Social Services haven’t had any luck.”

  “Amateurs, the lots of them,” Maria said, lighting up a cigarette and, seeing the look of longing in Sophie’s eyes, handing her one too. “I’ll find him, and quick too,” she said, blowing smoke out along with her words. “Don’t you worry about that, darling. I have ways.”

  After Maria had gone, Sophie sat on the sofa and stared at the blank TV screen. It was amazing, she considered, how quickly humans adjusted to unusual situations. This was only the third night the girls had been sleeping in her bed and she had been lying awake on her sofa, yet this period of quiet reflection and despair had become almost routine.

  At least she was doing something that would help the girls and help her, even if it was costing her fifty-five pounds an hour plus VAT and expenses. Once they had found Louis and brought him back to the United Kingdom, the girls would no longer be her responsibility. She would have done the right thing by Carrie and the right thing by them and the right thing all around, and she could go back to work in a nice new pair of shoes and everybody would be happy, especially Gillian. Except, of course, she’d be handing the girls over to a man they hardly knew, a man who had walked out on them without so much as a second thought.

  “My God, I love him so much!” Carrie had said the night she rang Sophie to tell her that not only was she pregnant but she was getting married too. “He just looks at me with these incredible brown eyes, and—I’m not joking—he makes my knickers fizz!”

  Sophie remembered that description exactly because fizzing knickers was not something she had ever had firsthand experience of at that point in her life and probably—if she was entirely honest—never had had since.

  “You’re sure this is love, are you, and not just plain old lust?” Sophie had asked with typical caution. “I mean, are you sure you want to marry him? You hardly know him.”

  Carrie had laughed. “Oh, Soph, how would you know the difference anyway? You’ve only ever lusted after people you can’t actually have. Besides, I know him, I know everything I need to know about him. He’s bloody gorgeous and he makes me laugh. And—I’m having his baby, I’m six weeks gone. When I told him, I was really worried that he’d just walk out on me and that would be the end of us, but he really wants us to have it, Soph. It was a risk, but I somehow knew he would. He grew up without a proper family. He really wants to give that to his children. It’s going to be wonderful. We are going to be wonderful. Trust me.”

  Sophie had trusted Carrie, because for all of her impulsiveness and recklessness, she had this incredible determination to be happy, and Sophie had never heard her sound happier than at that moment. “If you’re sure, I’m happy for you, Carrie, I really am,” Sophie said, and she’d meant it.

  “He’s a good man, Soph. Once you’ve got to know him, you’re going to really love him, I promise.”

  Except, of course, Sophie had never got to know Louis; she’d barely even met him, because he’d left his wife and kids and run away.

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Carrie?” Sophie said quietly into the half-light. “I would have been there for you, you know. Always, forever, whatever.” The three words sounded corny in the empty room, and Sophie felt the fragility of the friendship that had fallen apart without her even noticing, as if it were a spider’s web disintegrating in her hands.

  Sophie wondered where Carrie was now. Not whether or not she was in Heaven or Hell, or even reintegrating in the marine ecosystem somewhere off the Cornish coast. She wondered where Carrie was inside her, because still, three days later, she had not cried for Carrie. She had hardly had time to feel sad, but even when she did, like now, the sadness was negligible. It wasn’t as if she had blocked it out with some grave and protective outer shell. It was more like if there was any sadness inside her at all, there were so many other layers between Sophie’s rational thoughts and the core of her missing and loving Carrie that she could barely touch them.

  Sophie closed her eyes for a moment and tried hard to feel the grief. She willed herself to cry, but no tears came. Perhaps all of her feelings were muffled by layer after layer of indifferent insulation, because she could not remember the last time she had really felt anything. Except that wasn’t exactly true, Sophie admitted to herself. She could remember the last time. It was the day they’d cremated her dad.

  Sophie shook her head to clear it. She didn’t want to think about her dad now. She needed to stay focused. When all the practicalities were sorted out, that would be when she’d start to feel Carrie’s death. She knew it would.

  The edge of her bare foot touched something cold poking out from beneath the sofa. Using her toes to slide the object out, Sophie reached down and picked up a book. It was Dr. Robert’s Complete Dog Training and Care Manual. Sophie looked at the picture of a soppy red setter grinning ludicrously on the front cover and smiled. Only her mum would give her a dog manual to read for helpful child-rearing hints and tips. With nothing better to do, she flicked through the pages until she stopped at the chapter entitled “Puppy Psychology”; a subtitle that read “Puppies and Car Travel” caught her eye.

  Sophie shrugged. It was late, and she wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon. Maybe a page of two or puppy psychology would help unwind the tightly wound coil of her mind; half a mug of Baileys hadn’t worked. It was worth a go.

  She was on paragraph two, wondering if you could buy worming tablets for children, when Artemis appeared from the kitchen window and strolled over. The cat took one look at the cover of the book and, Sophie could have sworn, wrinkled her pink nose in disgust before stalking out again in the general direction of the bedroom. Sophie smiled to herself; amazingly, Artemis had seemed to adjust to the girls being in there far more quickly than Sophie had. She had even caught Artemis sitting only three feet away from Bella that morning as Bella studiously attempted to draw her ear, sitting perfectly still as if she were trying to be extra helpful. Perhaps it was because all three females—Artemis, Izzy, and Bella—had something in common. They were all at least half feral.

  “Cats and dogs and kids,” Sophie muttered to herself as she settled back onto the sofa with the book. “Basically the same principle.”

  She turned to the chapter on antisocial behavior.

  Seven

  On Friday morning, Sophie was still hoping that Maria really was going to find Louis as quickly as she’d said she could and didn’t yet know that she would be deciding to keep the children much longer than the two weeks she had originally agreed to.

  The morning began with Lisa sobbing on the other end of the phone, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Sophie. But you’ve got to come in. I can’t stop her. You won’t believe what she called me—” Sophie would believe it. She believed Eve capable of doing pretty much anything, but she had to admit she hadn’t expected her to stop circling and go in for the kill quite so soon.

  “Where’s Cal? Pass me to Cal,” Sophie told Lisa, who put her through with a snuffle.

  “What’s the deal, Cal?” Sophie asked him.

  “Eve is in your office right now,” he said. “She got your leads file and your Rolodex. Somehow she’s got your PC password—” Sophie opened her mouth to holler, but hearing her sharp intake of breath, Cal cut her off before she could utter a word. “Don’t shout at me, I don’t know how she got it—because it definitely wouldn’t have been anything obvious like—oh, I don’t know—your name, would it?”

  Sophie, who did suffer from a lack of imagination when it came to passwords, in fact pretty much anything, clamped her mouth shut.

  “Anyway,” Cal continued quickly. “She says that Gillian has asked her to help you out by keeping on top of things while you are away, being all noble and saintly. I tried to stop her, but she said if
I had a problem, speak to Gillian. Well, what could I do? If Gillian says it’s okay for her to be in there, then—it’s okay, right?”

  “No, she’s using that as an excuse to raid my clients list and take credit for all of my ideas,” Sophie said matter-of-factly. She wouldn’t have done the same thing in Eve’s position, but she would have wished she had the balls and total lack of conscience to do it.

  “Probably,” Cal said. “Lisa did try to stop her going in, but she called Lisa a…let me see, oh yes, a ‘fat blubbering pointless rusty old bike,’ and Lisa started to cry, and well, you can guess the rest.” Cal paused. “I think you’d better come down,” he said.

  “I’m on my way,” Sophie said, and she hung up the phone. She looked at the girls, who had taken up their newly habitual position on the sofa in their pajamas watching a soap opera with expressions of fascinated horror.

  “Right, spit spot, come on, girls—double-quick we’re going out.” The girls’ heads jerked in her direction as if they were puppies who’d been told it was walk time.

  “Out! Out! Out!” Izzy hopped off the sofa with joy. “Oooh, good. Am I going to wear my fairy dress?”

  Sophie shook her head; the fairy dress had gone in the garbage bin and was probably even now being buried in a concrete container in the middle of the North Sea.

  “I know,” Sophie said, remembering something that the dog book had said about using distraction. “Let’s have a race. We’ll go and look in your suitcase, and whoever gets dressed the quickest wins a fabulous prize!” Both girls leaped up in anticipation, as if Sophie was about the throw a stick for them to fetch. “Ready, steady, go!” she shouted.

  And that was how, twenty-seven minutes later, the three girls emerged from the flat blinking in the daylight, one dressed in jeans and a slightly grubby pink Calvin Klein T-shirt and fleece jacket (Sophie), one dressed as a ballerina-pirate fusion complete with eye patch and musical wand and topped off with a sweater and a poncho (Izzy), and one wearing a rainbow-striped hand-knitted sweater that was at least ten sizes too big for her and fell off one shoulder to reveal the graying lace of an aged T-shirt and came down to just below her knees, where her Angelina Ballerina Wellington boots began. All topped off by a lurid pink down jacket.