The Pact

by Dawn Goodwin

  Definitely time to go. She got to her feet unsteadily and swiped at her face.

  Jade was just coming out of the ensuite bathroom when Maddie went to find her. She was pulling up her jeans, fiddling with the zip as she walked.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Maddie asked.

  ‘Just left them a little present in their now not so fragrant bathroom,’ Jade said with a cunning grin.

  ‘You pooped in their toilet?’

  ‘Yip,’ she said proudly and stalked from the room.

  Maddie hurried after her, horrified, but she had to admit feeling a flare of shocked amusement. It was the idea of seeing Gemma’s face when she discovered it. Of course, Greg would get the blame for not flushing, but still, it was kind of funny.

  They both headed back downstairs to the front door, with Jade moving a picture frame out of place here and an ornament there as they went. She paused at the console table for a moment and shifted some things around as Maddie opened the front door.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ Maddie said. Jade followed her out and closed the door with a slam.

  Maddie unlocked her car and they climbed in, relief flooding over Maddie that her foray into criminality was now over. Just as she started the engine, a large shadow loomed over them and Gemma’s Range Rover pulled up beside them. Maddie’s breath hitched as she realised just how close they had come to getting caught.

  ‘Oh my God, she’s here,’ Maddie said, her pulse racing.

  ‘Fuck, that was close!’ Jade said.

  ‘Stay here.’ Maddie got back out of the car and waved at Gemma as she came over. ‘Hi, I just came to collect my car. I knocked but there was no answer.’

  ‘Ok.’ Gemma did not seem pleased to see her. She was dressed in gym gear and held a rolled-up yoga mat in her arms. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine, fine.’

  ‘You sure? You look a bit flushed.’

  ‘My friend, Jade, had the heater on in the car,’ Maddie gesticulated over her shoulder, ‘and it was a bit hot for me. Anyway, I’ll get out of your way.’

  ‘You should watch that, Maddie. It could be the menopause. You’re the right age for it,’ Gemma replied. ‘I’ll WhatsApp you my smoothie recipe later. You should try it. It’s great for women of your age – hot flushes can be quite debilitating. Or so I hear.’

  Maddie’s fists clenched at her sides.

  ‘Thanks, I’ll try it. Listen, can I come over and see Jemima sometime this week? Greg said it would be ok.’ He hadn’t, but she knew he would if she asked.

  Gemma physically bristled in front of her. ‘It’s a busy week for us with her swimming lessons and art classes and things. I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Right, well, better get off.’ Maddie waved at the back window of Gemma’s car and Jemima waved back from her car seat.

  Maddie got back in the car and started the engine. As she reversed down the driveway, Gemma was still standing in the same spot, staring after them. Jade wound down the window, leant out, flipped her middle finger at Gemma and cackled loudly.

  Maddie shrieked, ‘Jade!’ She panicked and hit the accelerator too hard, making the wheels skid and squeal in the gravel as they pulled off. ‘Oh my God! I can’t believe you did that! And shat in her toilet!’

  ‘Well, now that I’ve met her, I really can’t understand why it’s not her you would want to kill,’ Jade said.

  ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, Gemma is a giant pain in the bottom, but Greg is the one who cheated. Either one would deserve it, honestly.’

  THEN

  ‘This time will be different. I can feel it,’ Greg says to me as we leave the clinic.

  I smile and try to join him in his optimism, but I’m struggling. With every miscarriage, a little part of me dies too. Greg is always so quick to hop back in the saddle so to speak, always ready to try again. Like the baby we just lost is that easy to replace.

  He convinced me into trying IVF and the doctors are hopeful, considering that getting pregnant isn’t the problem.

  Staying pregnant is.

  I’m tired and I want to go home, crawl into bed, turn my face to the wall and stay there until the baby is full term and ready to come out.

  If there is a baby.

  It’s all I can think about. I try and get on with my day, doing everything required of me – shopping, cooking, cleaning. I have taken a step back from the business and have employed a PA for Greg so that I can take time out to concentrate on this project. I say I have employed one, but it is Greg who insisted. She seems nice, Gemma. Undeniably pretty and she has a lot to learn, makes some silly mistakes, but she’s ambitious and she will keep Greg on his toes – and he needs that as he can be quite fickle and unfocused when it comes to the business. All grand ideas and schemes to make money, but not a practical bone in his body. That was my job – to tighten the purse strings, rein him in, burst his creative bubble when he was reaching too far towards the sun.

  But my focus is now on a different expansion of Team Lowe. I found that I couldn’t concentrate on work for very long, not really caring if someone hadn’t paid their invoice for six weeks or whether the order was going out correctly. Greg suggested I take some time off, but instead of relaxing, I find myself trawling the internet looking at nursery ideas, baby names, anything related to a child I haven’t had yet and feeling the weight of it all crushing my chest. The nursery has been redecorated after every failed pregnancy because I don’t want my child to be haunted by the ghosts of siblings past. Greg just agrees to anything I suggest, despite the cost.

  He’s good that way.

  I can feel tears pricking at my eyes as we climb into the car. I don’t want to face another disappointment. But I can’t not keep trying. The idea of the family we want consumes me.

  I don’t want to think about what will happen if I never achieve my dream – or the lengths I will go to make it happen.

  I know I will do anything.

  6

  Maddie hung her house keys on a nail behind the door when they returned to her flat.

  ‘That’s a good idea, that is,’ Jade says, pointing at the keys. ‘I can never find mine.’

  Maddie went into the kitchen to find wine, glasses and some crisps or something. The morning’s excitement had left her starving. The wine was Jade’s idea. ‘Somewhere in the world it’s five o’clock’, she’d said and Maddie could do with steadying her nerves. She still felt twitchy and nervous, like ants were crawling on her skin. She expected her phone to ring at any moment, Gemma shouting at her, accusing her, or Greg telling her how disappointed he was.

  Instead, it was Jade’s phone that chirped, but Maddie still jumped. Jade was reading the text message and smiling. ‘Ben is coming home, so there’ll be plenty of time for you to take him swimming tomorrow if you still want to,’ she said.

  ‘That’s great! You know, I’m happy to babysit any time if you need a night out with Deon or some time for yourself. You just have to ask.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks.’

  ‘You’ll have to start thinking about schools soon, won’t you? He’ll be four before you know it.’

  Jade paled. Perhaps she wasn’t as tough as she made out as the idea seemed to upset her.

  ‘You’ll miss him when he’s at school all day, I bet,’ Maddie said softly. ‘Still, it means you could get a job, which would work in your favour for the custody arrangement.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’ Maddie handed Jade a wineglass and Jade drank half in one gulp. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Let’s get Chinese – you got any money? I’m so skint at the minute.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Maddie said, the earlier nervous energy replaced by bubbling excitement at seeing Ben tomorrow.

  *

  Maddie watched as Jade poured herself another glass of sauvignon blanc. She offered the bottle to Maddie, but she waved it away. Her glass was still full, but Jade was knocking it back. She kept fiddling with a necklace at her throat, a delicate silver chain with a small lightning bolt hanging at
the nape of her throat. It was very pretty, not something she would’ve thought was Jade’s taste.

  They’d had Chinese food delivered and the empty plastic containers littered the coffee table.

  ‘That is quite a house you had,’ Jade said. ‘Your Greg does well, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He’s not mine anymore.’

  ‘Yeah, but I bet he could be if you wanted him. Sounds like he’s still very much in the picture.’

  ‘With Gemma having Jemima, that would never happen. He’s devoted to Jemima and they’re trying for another baby apparently.’

  ‘Why didn’t you have one yourself? Unexplained infertility, you said. What’s that then?’

  Maddie’s stomach lurched, as it did every time someone asked why they didn’t have a family.

  She swallowed. ‘We tried. I was pregnant a number of times, miscarried every time. Then we tried IVF, did the whole sex on demand thing, temperatures, ovulation charts, all of it. It became a bit like a business transaction. Greg and I were always so into each other, but after a while it was like my body was failing us and sex was just a means to an end.’ She swigged on the wine. ‘With every miscarriage, a part of me died too, until there was very little left. But we kept trying.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jade said, unexpectedly putting a hand on Maddie’s knee. It was hot and heavy, not the least bit comforting, but Maddie let her leave it there.

  ‘It was shit. Harder for me than Greg. I think it’s easier for men to move on from these things because it’s not their body. Not that he wasn’t understanding or didn’t grieve because he did – but he had work, friends, a life away from it all, while being pregnant and having a child was my sole purpose and I was so single-minded about it that everything else became unimportant. I didn’t see friends. I stopped talking to Greg. It was no wonder he turned to Gemma really.’

  ‘Er, hang on! There’s no excuse for him turning his back on you to shack up with that boobed bitch. If anything, he should have been more understanding and stuck by you!’

  ‘I suppose everyone grieves in different ways though. I shut myself off. I was like a ghost and he was lonely. I don’t blame him and I wish it could’ve been different, but it’s selfish of me to expect him to put his dream of a family aside because I’ve got a faulty body.’

  ‘Wow, you really are something, you know that?’ Jade said with sudden venom and Maddie recoiled at her aggressive change of tone.

  ‘Tell me what you really think,’ Maddie said, diluting the criticism with more gulps of wine.

  ‘I am, because you’re making him out to be a saint! He should’ve stood by you, no matter what, not hopped into someone else’s bed at the first sign of trouble. For better or worse and all that!’

  ‘It wasn’t the first sign, as you put it. This all went on for years.’ Maddie was starting to get angry at Jade – for meddling, for telling her things she already knew but didn’t want to hear. But she couldn’t be angry at Greg, mostly because she didn’t feel much other than sadness when she thought about her marriage. The whole experience of it was cloaked in a thin, grimy layer of disappointment like a lingering bitter aftertaste from a pill. There had been so much promise that it had left a gaping hole when it all collapsed in on itself. All of it had engulfed Maddie for so long that she felt hollow. It took a moment to fall apart, but a lifetime to pick yourself up from it.

  ‘Let’s talk about something else,’ Maddie said. ‘This is a really tough subject for me.’ She drained her glass and refilled it straight away.

  ‘No! You need to start standing up for yourself, fighting back! He shouldn’t get away with it, Mads. They should both pay. Make them realise that we are not doormats for men to wipe their feet on.’ Her voice was brittle.

  Maddie knew she was right, but there wasn’t much fight in her. She was trying to be more independent and taking baby steps away from Greg, but he kept drawing her in and a part of her still wanted him to.

  ‘It’s funny, I never thought I would end up getting divorced from Greg. When I married him, it was very much till death do us part.’

  ‘You said it – till death do you part. We can make that happen. We can make them pay without putting ourselves in the frame.’ Jade’s eyes narrowed dangerously.

  Maddie sighed. ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about.’ She leant forward and Maddie could feel spittle from her lips land on her face. ‘We’re going to get revenge on Greg and Mark. We agreed. You can’t back out now.’ Her face was a mask of bitterness.

  ‘We didn’t agree on anything.’

  ‘We did! We talked about it! We said that I’d kill yours and you’d kill mine.’

  Maddie laughed then.

  ‘Oh God, Jade, I thought you were serious then! You really had me!’

  But Jade wasn’t laughing. ‘I am serious. I need Mark out of the picture before he goes for custody and you need payback – or at least to get your hands on that house again.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ But Jade’s face was deadly serious. ‘Seriously, this isn’t funny anymore. It’s twisted. Let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘No, I want to talk about this.’ Jade got to her feet, the wine in her glass sloshing over the rim onto the carpet. ‘Don’t you dare back out now! I’ve already started making plans on how to get Greg out of the picture for you.’

  ‘What?’ Maddie’s heart was thudding. Maybe she wasn’t hearing her properly. Maybe she was drunk already.

  Jade loomed over her, her jabbing finger pointing and sharp. ‘You will not back out, Maddie! You have to help me. And one good turn deserves another. I don’t care who goes first—’

  ‘Woah! That’s enough! I want you to leave.’ Maddie was on her feet too, the two of them eye to eye.

  Jade recoiled. ‘What?’

  ‘I said, get out. You’ve had too much to drink and this conversation is over. It’s not funny anymore.’

  Jade stared hard at Maddie with eyes like ball bearings. A cold sweat filmed Maddie’s skin and for a second she thought Jade was going to lash out at her. She flinched as Jade lunged, but she was just reaching for her bag.

  Jade stormed out, slamming the door hard behind her, making the keys on the nail swing like a pendulum.

  Only then did Maddie exhale.

  *

  Maddie sat propped up in bed, sipping on tea and thinking about her conversation the night before with Jade. The morning sun was weak behind the curtains, but she felt safer in the gloom, less exposed. She couldn’t believe Jade was anywhere near serious. She must’ve just had too much wine and got carried away. We’ve all wanted to kill someone at some point when the anger and hurt took over. It had been a funny day by all accounts, what with breaking into Gemma’s house and everything.

  She was worried Jade would’ve changed her mind about Maddie taking Ben for a swim. She’d been so angry and volatile yesterday. This thing with Mark was clearly stressing her out and she wasn’t thinking rationally about it anymore. Maddie could sympathise – she’d had moments of irrationality herself over the years when desperation overwhelmed common sense. She needed to be patient with Jade, help her to see that she had options.

  She sent her a text to see if her play date with Ben was still on, but got no reply.

  She eventually got up and started doing some laundry, but was feeling restless and fidgety, so got dressed for a run. Something she hadn’t done in a long time, but she had an urge to feel her feet pounding the pavement, her lungs bursting and her muscles stretching.

  She managed half an hour before she realised that her fitness had nosedived. She let herself back into the building just as Mrs Aitkens shuffled from her house to check her post box in the entrance hall.

  ‘Hi, Mrs Aitkens. How are you?’ Maddie said, still out of breath.

  Mrs Aitkens looked her up and down. ‘Exercise will kill you,’ she said and shuffled back indoors.

  Maddie shook her head with a smile and pulled her key from
the zip pocket on her running leggings. Then she noticed the white box sitting at the foot of her door like a present. It looked like a bakery box. She opened it and there was a huge cupcake inside. Red velvet, Maddie’s favourite.

  At first, she thought it was from Greg because he knew she loved red velvet cake. Then she saw the torn piece of paper inside with one word scribbled in biro:

  Sorry.

  She opened the door and carried the box inside, feeling conflicted. Should she go and knock on Jade’s door? Talk it over with her and tell her she was the one who was sorry for telling her to leave so harshly? For not being patient and understanding what she was going through? She hated knowing someone was upset because of her. And Ben would be home. She needed to see him. She didn’t want anything to jeopardise her chance at spending some time alone with him.

  She decided to go upstairs before she showered. She took the stairs two at a time, her pulse still elevated from the run. She knocked loudly, but there was no answer.

  Luke poked his head out of his door instead. ‘She’s not in,’ he said unhelpfully.

  ‘Right, ok.’

  ‘You ok?’

  ‘Yeah, just been for a run, need to shower.’

  He nodded at her. ‘Never been my thing, exercise, but each to their own.’

  Maddie smiled and turned to head back downstairs.

  ‘Hey, if you fancy a beer sometime… not a date or anything, just it’d be good to… talk.’ He scratched his head, looking awkward. ‘Well, if you fancy it, I’m here most of the time.’ He nodded at her again and retreated back indoors.

  Baffled at the offer, Maddie headed back downstairs.