He tipped his head to look at the new green leaves fluttering above him. ‘We have another month before it flowers. I know you can’t wait.’
‘True.’ I calculated. I was twenty-six weeks pregnant. In one month I would be thirty weeks. In one month I would be gone. One month seemed forever, but Maxine insisted it wasn’t, like a mother telling a child, Be patient, the journey will be over before you know it. In the meantime, I had my own part to play in preparing for my escape. This mostly meant trying to keep things as calm with Zac as I possibly could.
I wrinkled my nose. ‘Stinky tea?’ It was an old tease between me and Zac that I hated the smell of lapsang. I was using my I’m trying to be brave against all odds voice.
He put the mug down, stood, folded me into his arms, whispered into my hair, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
My mobile was a prop, held by a hand that was seemingly too distracted to realise it was there. It wasn’t difficult to make myself cry. The pregnancy hormones helped with that.
Zac’s face was frozen in horror. ‘Is it the baby?’
For him to believe I was distressed hurt him. The realisation came with a stab of guilt that made me dizzy. It should have occurred to me he would think that. It seemed too terrible a thing to do to him, despite everything.
Still, I pushed myself on. I let the phone fall from my hand onto the daisy-covered grass. ‘It’s my grandmother. The care home just called.’ Saying this made the fake tears flow harder, because I knew there would come a day when this would happen for real.
Zac did exactly what I knew he would. He picked up the phone, accidentally twisting out a dandelion as he lifted it. He checked the recent call log, saw that the care home had in fact called me a few minutes ago, and the duration was five minutes. Maxine was behind the call.
‘What did they want?’
‘She passed away early this morning. In her sleep.’
‘Died, not passed away.’ He corrected me in exactly the way I expected.
I accepted his correction. ‘She died this morning.’ Thanks to Maxine, my grandmother had already vacated the building. I felt a twinge that the lovely women who looked after her had been told this lie, too.
The small exchange was part of a private game I secretly played. I had a toy as a child. Because it was from my parents, I kept that toy long after I outgrew it. It was a large plastic ball covered in coloured shapes. The shapes were buttons. If you pushed the orange triangle, there would be a squeak. If you pushed the green square, it would sound a bell. The blue oval resulted in a moo.
Zac had buttons too, and I needed to push them sometimes, to check that the consequence was as predicted. It was like tossing a coin into the air to make sure that gravity still worked – the basic material conditions of the universe that I shared with Zac remained the same, and I must not doubt this. I must not doubt myself.
‘I’m sorry about your grandmother, Holly.’ Zac turned me around, gently sat me down in the other wicker chair, pulled his own up close, with his legs splayed partly open and mine between them, so the insides of his thighs were against the outsides of mine.
‘She’ll never meet her great granddaughter. Everyone in my family is gone.’
Under the eaves, something caught my eye. A flash of blue-black, and the red forehead and throat. It was a swallow, leaving its nest. ‘Look, Zac. Quick. Do you see it?’ I pointed. ‘It must have just arrived. The first. Something beautiful, on such a sad day.’
‘Their droppings are a health hazard. It’s dangerous for you and the baby. We should destroy any nests.’
‘I’m hardly going to lick the droppings. Anyway, they’re protected – you can’t destroy a swallow’s nest.’
‘Don’t change the subject, Holly. You’re always doing that. You don’t like it when I get grumpy but no matter how many times I tell you …’
‘Sorry,’ I said, having pushed the purple Change the Subject rectangle and satisfied myself that Zac’s response was what I anticipated. I would keep testing, to make sure I was being fair.
‘I can see what a strain this puts you under.’ My phone was still in his hand. He scrolled through my text messages. ‘“Your order has been delivered. Thank you for your business.”’ He smiled, playing at indulgence. ‘More shopping?’
I had known since that text arrived that he would find an excuse to question me about it. The shape was a red octagon, and I called it the Check the Phone Log button.
‘Oh. That must be the towels for the baby. I think you were at the hospital when they came.’ The message was another of Maxine’s; she’d used a spoof parcel service to confirm the portable drive had been retrieved from the canister in the gorse.
Whenever I thought of that drive, and the micro SD card, I shook with rage. So I tried to push the thought away. Rage was what I couldn’t afford to show and therefore couldn’t let myself feel.
‘You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this. I can cancel my trip.’
Zac was about to depart for a medical conference in Toronto. He would be away for a week, and this made my one-month countdown until departure day more bearable. Looked at this way, I had three weeks to get through with him – not four.
‘You’ve been talking about this conference for a month. I couldn’t let you do that.’ I pressed my lips against his. ‘You taste all smoky.’
‘You hate it.’
‘Not on you.’ I straightened his wire-rimmed glasses. ‘Will you see your parents?’
‘Vancouver’s a four-hour flight in the wrong direction. So no. Not that I’d want to, even if it were five minutes away. What I do want is to be here with you.’
‘Me too you.’ Compliance was so difficult, even when it was faked. And fake compliance was dangerous, because it could feel so real I was no longer sure of the difference. I sniffled, took the napkin Zac brought out from beneath his mug, wiped my eyes, blew my nose. ‘One week isn’t long. But I’ll miss you so much.’
His face visibly relaxed. ‘Next time I’ll take you with me.’
‘How about New York? I’d love that. I’ve never been to America.’ I was thinking of Mrs Hopwell, and how sweet she seemed, despite the horrible circumstances of that call and the grief she’d suffered.
He scrunched his nose as if there were a bad smell. ‘Think of another country. Somewhere special for the three of us.’ He moved his chair so he could bend forward and press the side of his head to my bump. He sang a bit of Brahms’ Lullaby.
I laughed. ‘She liked that.’
‘We need to concentrate on the good things.’
I cupped a hand over his ear. ‘Absolutely.’
An hour later, he left for the airport, his shiny new laptop and his suitcase squeezed on the front passenger seat. I walked with the car as he slowly reversed out of the drive, then I stood in the road, in the shade of a magnolia tree that was exploding with its creamy goblet flowers. I put a hand to my mouth to blow him a goodbye kiss, waiting until the car curved round a bend and I lost sight of him before I returned to the house. I did not doubt that objects still fell when I threw them.
I had seen Zac’s name listed as a speaker for several of the sessions at the medical conference – I’d checked online in the library. Nonetheless, each day at noon UK time, which was 7 a.m. Toronto time, I used our landline to ring Zac at his hotel to say good morning. I had promised to act as his daily wake-up call. When he picked up his room telephone I knew he really was in Canada, and probably as glad to have my whereabouts confirmed with the call as I was his.
The time on my own was happy, with walks in the spring sunshine, and coffees and lunches and shopping trips and dinners with Milly, who had taken the week off work. With Zac safely out of the way, we returned easily to our previous closeness. The distance that had grown between us over the previous few months seemed to be a part of another life.
I made feeble attempts at prenatal yoga, and imagined the baby was laughing at me. Milly certainly did. The two of us watched old Audrey Hepb
urn films, eating popcorn for dinner and ice cream for dessert straight from the tub. When Milly finally saw the Mermaid of Zennor curtains, with her design repeating across the fabric, she was so touched and surprised she cried.
There was one frustration, and it was this. The owners of the house stipulated that the garage was off limits because they needed it to store their things. They even put a clause in Zac’s tenancy agreement to this effect. I wasn’t sure if Zac had managed to get in there, but I wanted to look round, just in case.
Each day, as soon as my call with Zac finished, I made a failed bid to break into the garage. My attempts went like this. Step one was to create a gap between the centre top of the door and the trim that framed it. I did this by climbing onto a ladder and inserting a wedge-shaped piece of wood a few centimetres to the right of where I wanted the gap to be. This was surprisingly quick and easy.
Step two was where it invariably went wrong. I retrieved a long coat hanger made of thick wire, which I’d bent into a hook at one end and a handle at the other. I poked this rod through the gap and began fishing. What I wanted to catch was the pull rope that dangled inside. But I never did. After trying and trying, imagining the hook flailing aimlessly on the other side, I had to admit defeat once more.
On the seventh and final day of Zac’s absence I was twenty-seven-weeks pregnant and ready to try one last time with the garage. I thought about the fisherman who spent so long hunting a legendary beast he began to doubt it even existed, and that was when I finally hooked the pull rope.
I hardly drew breath as I slid the hook down the rope until it hit the knob at the rope’s end. Sweat dripped into my eyes but I didn’t dare break my grip to wipe it away. I climbed off the ladder, careful not to disturb the hanger’s position as I moved, then tugged it straight down. To my amazement, I could feel the lock release. I stepped aside, grabbed the handle, and shouted the word ‘Yeah!’ as the door lifted. I jumped up and down in triumph, forgetting for a second about my bump, then whispered, ‘Sorry, little baby.’
I left the garage door open to let in the April sunshine as I checked for cameras. I kept it open even after I discovered there were none. I needed light and air. I didn’t want that dark space to close in on me as I circled round it, taking a mental inventory of what was inside. Paint tins. A wooden work bench and tools. The carcasses of dead flies sprinkled across surfaces. If he had ever been in there, Zac would have shuddered at the dirt. In fact, that was exactly why this would be his perfect hiding place – anybody who knew him would discount it.
I lifted dust covers to see what was beneath them, tensing like a child who was frightened she would find a monster hiding inside, or a body. But all I found was an old bookcase with the wood splitting along one of the shelves, and an upholstered chair, covered in the obligatory ditsy fabric, with stuffing spilling out of the seat cushion.
There was nothing in there that could possibly belong to Zac. I rested my hands on the small of my back, tipped my head to stretch my neck, and closed my eyes. When I opened them, they were trained on a square shelf that hung from the centre of the garage ceiling, suspended by four short chains that were attached to each corner.
I grabbed the step ladder. A minute later I was examining the contents of the shelf, thankful the garage ceiling wasn’t high. It looked as if the owners had used the shelf to store their linens, which were packaged in clear plastic bags. I manoeuvred one sideways, to check if there was anything behind it.
At first, I was uncertain of what I was seeing, not comprehending what it was about the bag that made it seem familiar. It was the size of an extra-fat laptop case, and made of tan canvas that was trimmed with tan fake leather. My heart started to beat faster as I realised that this was a companion piece to Zac’s old suitcase set.
I set my feet more firmly on the ladder’s rung and pulled the bag towards me. It was heavier than I expected. The safest way I could think to get the bag down was to let it fall to the ground. Hoping nothing inside was breakable, I moved the bag as far to my right as I could, so it wouldn’t knock the ladder on descent, and tipped it over the edge.
The bag smacked the concrete floor with an explosion of dust as my stomach dropped and the ladder gave a great shake. I grabbed the shelf, which rocked on its chains but stopped me from falling. Still trembling, I climbed down, trying to catch my breath. I stood there, my back slick with the sweat of panic, then scolded myself for being pathetic and made myself move again.
I dragged the bag outside by the strap, onto the grass, and lowered myself beside it to inspect the contents. Before I did, I wiped my hands on my faded maternity jeans. When I looked down at myself, I saw that the pintucks covering the chest of my floaty white blouse were splodged with dirt, and my bare arms were streaked with it too.
The zipper went round one of the bag’s sides like a horseshoe. I lifted the flap of tan canvas and felt as if a pair of hands had grabbed my throat. I was looking at the cover of a magazine. Beneath it were a dozen more. They were from the 1990s. Photographs of women. The things that were being done to them, the marks on their skin and expressions on their faces, the poses. I started to cry, and quickly turned the magazines upside down, their covers facing the grass. Could Zac really want to look at this? Want to do this? All of the bad I ever imagined of him never conjured anything close.
There was one magazine in the pile that didn’t make me physically sick, which had somehow got mixed in. A special issue of a political magazine from June 2013 with a photograph of Edward Snowden on the front. The odd one out didn’t surprise me, given how interested Zac was in surveillance culture and data theft and the threat to individual privacy that algorithms posed.
It took me several minutes before I was calm enough to continue examining the bag’s contents. At the bottom was a black cloth, folded into a parcel, with lumps and bumps inside. I unwrapped the cloth and let the things inside it roll onto the grass. A blindfold, a gag, and several coils of rope that seemed to come right out of the world of those magazines. They were not the flimsy toys of a high street lingerie shop. I rested my mouth and nose against my fist. Could he have used them on Jane? I shook my head, no. He wasn’t stupid – he wouldn’t keep the evidence, however well-hidden, if he had done something terrible with it.
Still, I needed to send those things to Maxine for testing. I calculated the risk of Zac discovering they were missing before I’d got away. It was small. In three weeks I’d be gone. Three weeks was soon. I could get through three little weeks. People did much harder things than that.
I stuffed the magazines and other things in Zac’s old bag, trying not to look at them as I did. I couldn’t possibly lift the bag onto that shelf. The risk to me and the baby was too great. Instead, I dragged it to our recycling bin, which was due to be collected tomorrow, wrestled it in, and covered it with old newspapers. I’d get a message to Maxine that the bag was there and trust her to take care of it.
I triple-checked that everything was in its place in the garage, then closed the door. Maybe, I thought, despite the seriousness of the objects, they were from a phase when Zac was into that, and he put them away because he knew that I was not. But I also knew how interested he was in pornography, with his secret films. Those magazines were on that same spectrum, but more extreme than anything I’d imagined.
I was so absorbed in puzzling all this out that I didn’t hear the rumble of the car’s engine until it was nearly at the end of the long drive to the house. Though I’d phoned Zac in Canada only two hours earlier, I still thought of the young wife in ‘Bluebeard’, terrified that her husband would come for her with his knife before her brothers reached her. What I saw was Milly, her face lit and smiling, so that despite everything, I could feel my own face lighting up too.
Now The Doors With No Knobs
Two years later
* * *
London, Monday, 8 April 2019
I’m back from Cheltenham by 11 a.m. but I don’t go into my flat. I leave the car on my stree
t and walk quickly to the station. Forty-five minutes later, I am sitting on the train to London, trying to make myself relax in the hope that if I do then the identity of the man Jane met will come to me. I close my eyes, but open them with a jerk when my telephone vibrates.
It is the hospital’s number, so it will almost certainly be Trudy on the other end of the line. She pretty much runs Paediatric Outpatients. I nearly ignore the call, given that the train is ten minutes outside of Paddington and I have slept nearly the entire journey away, but something makes me answer.
Trudy launches straight in. ‘Sorry to bother you – I know you’ve taken today as sick-leave – Are you feeling better? – I hope you’re resting. Is that – Is someone on a loudspeaker? – Are you on a train, Helen?’
‘I’m on my way to a clinic in Wimpole Street. Trying some stuff to boost my immune system. I get too many colds.’ The lies come easily.
‘Really,’ Trudy says, meaning, Do you really think I’m an idiot? ‘Will you be in work tomorrow?’ She is asking this despite knowing very well that I don’t work on Tuesdays.
‘I don’t work on Tuesdays,’ I say, with extra sweetness.
‘Wednesday, then?’
‘If I’m better. Sorry, Trudy – my train’s about to pull in.’
Trudy gets to the point. ‘You know that little girl with Waardenburg syndrome, Alice Wilmot …’
My heart is thumping. ‘Yes.’
‘Her mum’s trying to reach you. She sounded pretty upset.’
‘Oh.’ I inhale. ‘Did she say what was wrong?’
‘Only that she’s having some sort of family emergency. Not the child, the mother. I explained I couldn’t give her your number, but I promised to pass the message on.’
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