Countless

by Karen Gregory

  And she could play the saxophone, like she should have been a professional jazz player, and she had a ridiculously flamboyant fashion sense, all layers and even hats. I know that makes her sound deeply weird, but it worked on Molly. She was just herself, gave exactly no craps what anyone thought. You wouldn’t have known anything was wrong with her unless you knew where to look. Her make-up was always perfect, and if she was pale – well, we all were. Her pale was the interesting rather than the yellowy grey variety.

  Molly made the list for me not that long before she died. Sometimes I wonder whether she knew what was coming. She was strange like that, even if she did take the mick out of the hippie staff – the ones who liked to waft crystals and mindfulness about along with their positive affirmations. I don’t really believe in spirits or whatever, but I swear this is true – she’d make stuff happen. In the evenings, when we played board games (seriously, we did – Scrabble being a particular favourite), if there was a dice she’d whisper the number she wanted out loud before she rolled and nine times out of ten she got what she wanted.

  Maybe it was coincidence. Probably it was. Or that thing where you only notice the stuff that proves your theory – confirmation bias, according to Google. But I’m not convinced. She had an air about her, like she wasn’t quite in this world, is all I’m saying. Plus she always, always kicked my butt at Snakes and Ladders.

  Anyway, we’d been talking one night, standing together looking out of the window at the moon, and she’d come up with the idea of a list. And I didn’t realise what she was trying to say.

  She had a heart attack and died in the bathroom with the rest of us watching as the nurses tried to revive her.

  I found the list under my pillow later the same day.

  Chapter 11

  10 WEEKS TO GO

  When I said Molly was at my shoulder the other day, I didn’t mean literally, of course. I don’t really believe in ghosts or any of that stuff. But I do sometimes get a sense of her, a faint presence, like she’s not really gone – she’s still here, watching over me. I wonder what she would have said about the baby, but I think I kind of know. She would have laughed her head off, that’s for sure.

  She also seems to have an interest in Robin, for some reason, or at least I sense her somewhere in the air when I see him. Maybe she thinks I should get to know him. We’ve bumped into each other in the hallway a couple of times and once I almost invited him in, but he looked like he was off out somewhere. He has a nice smile, I think, but he’s so quiet. I never hear anything coming from his flat, not like the sketchy bloke the other side who was playing music until the early hours again last night.

  I’ve been out today, just walking. Originally, I thought I might go to college, but my feet veered away and I kept going until I ended up not far from Dewhurst House. I stayed round the corner though, the unit just out of sight. I imagined the staff inside preparing snack, the smooth gloss of the table, each knot of grainy wood encased in a clear plastic shell.

  I take a slightly different and shorter route home, avoiding the town centre and cutting up a bike path that stretches past rows of well-kept terraces set back in one of the nicer parts of town. They have long back gardens and a Victorian air about them, with gables and bay windows. When I was little I wanted a bay window, with a window seat and curtains, so I could read books in my own little nook. I liked all the ballet series the best. Sometimes I wonder if Nia started because I wanted to be like one of those dancers. Poetry on legs, floating. An artist, not a normal person. Maybe that’s why I don’t trust books any more, at least the ones I used to like. Or maybe it’s all just another big skinny excuse.

  I keep looking at the houses as I pass, and notice one has a cute little home-made stall out the front with a sign that looks like it’s been done by a young child. Vejetables 20p, it reads in felt tip over a table stacked with twisted carrots and muddy potatoes.

  I stop and look in my purse. I’ve got just under a quid in change so I grab a bunch of carrots and three potatoes and put the money in the butterfly money box.

  There’s a box of eggs too, but I don’t know how much they are. I wonder if they’ve got chickens in their back garden.

  A woman comes out of the house and smiles at me.

  ‘Do you want to take these too?’ she says, pointing at the eggs. ‘We have more than we know what to do with.’

  ‘I’m out of change,’ I say with an apologetic smile.

  I swing my rucksack on. The straps are digging in a bit and I shift, trying to get it comfy. The bag pulls at my hoodie, stretching it tight over my stomach.

  ‘When are you due?’ the woman asks.

  ‘May sixteenth,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, lovely. Boy or girl?’

  ‘Girl,’ I find myself saying, though I don’t have any positive confirmation of this. At the last growth scan the sonographer asked if I wanted to know and I said yes, but the baby wasn’t cooperating. Still, I think she’s a she. I know she’s a she, somehow.

  The woman smiles. ‘Girls are the best. A handful, mind, once they get to school. The cliques! You forget what it’s like at that age.’

  I wonder what she’d say if I mentioned I’ll never see the baby go to school, or have to deal with ironing uniforms and wonky spelling. Apart from my own spelling, that is. I content myself with a polite smile.

  ‘Have you thought of any names?’ the woman asks.

  ‘Not yet.’ The new parents will probably change it anyway. But the woman’s face is so expectant, I say, ‘I thought maybe Molly.’ I can almost hear Molly at my shoulder laughing and saying, ‘No way! Why would you want to saddle a poor child with that name?’

  ‘That’s a beautiful name,’ the woman says.

  A shout floats out from the house.

  ‘That’s one of mine,’ the woman says. ‘Take care.’ She turns to go, then moves back and hands me the box of eggs. ‘No charge. I’ll slip another pound in, in case Kayleigh notices. She can’t write wonderfully yet, but she can most certainly count. They’re freshly laid today. You look like you need feeding up.’

  I take the eggs, though it’s been an age since I’ve had one and they are not on the meal plan.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  I carry them carefully all the way home – there’s no room for them in the rucksack – and set them on the floor while I look for my key, which I finally locate after emptying most of the contents of the rucksack on the floor.

  ‘Need a hand with that?’ Robin has appeared from nowhere up the corridor and I jump back, nearly squashing the eggs in the process. Which would solve one dilemma, because I’m not sure I can eat them.

  He stoops to pick up the bunch of carrots while I get the door open, then goes back before I can stop him for the rest of my stuff.

  ‘Where do you want these?’ He’s holding the eggs.

  ‘Anywhere’s fine,’ I say. ‘Some woman just gave them to me. Turns out there’s perks to being pregnant after all. I don’t know what to do with them.’

  ‘Omelette?’ Robin says after a long pause. I must look blank because he adds, ‘You do know how to cook one, don’t you?’

  ‘Why, do you?’

  ‘Well, Google does. How hard can it be, anyway?’ He gets out his phone.

  I really don’t know where to start with that. How do I explain exactly how hard eggs are, in my world?

  Robin scrolls through a few pages, then puts the phone down.

  ‘Right, here we go,’ he says, giving me this confident look. He’s totally faking it. He actually starts rolling his sleeves up. It’s sweet. ‘Where’s your frying pan?’

  ‘I don’t have one,’ I say. It’s not like I’m going to be frying anything any time soon.

  ‘That’s all right, I’ve got one.’ He consults his phone again. ‘Butter? Herbs?’

  I shake my head. ‘I’ve got salt.’ I nod to the side where a big bag of table salt that split when I opened it is sitting in one of the two bowls I own.

&nbs
p; ‘Wait there.’

  Robin goes out with his phone and comes back carrying an armful of stuff which I eye warily. It looks like an awful lot of ingredients for an omelette. Plus it’s not on the meal plan.

  ‘I got all this from work,’ he says. ‘I didn’t really know what to do with it, but now I do. It’s time for Operation Omelette.’

  He stands to attention and out of nowhere a tiny laugh escapes through my lips and floats off towards Nia on the ceiling. Nia is not impressed.

  ‘You should sit down. Should you be walking about with that giant rucksack anyway?’

  ‘Sorry, what year are we in? Cos for a second I thought it was 1950,’ I say, but I do sit down.

  I hate to admit it, but I am tired. Maybe I walked too far today, and that’s a sentence I never thought I’d think.

  Robin mutters to himself, bending his head over his phone. I close my eyes and open them again when I hear the sound of an egg hitting the floor, closely followed by a hiss and the smell of burning butter.

  ‘Damn,’ Robin says.

  ‘Need a hand?’

  ‘No, you rest,’ he says, doing his best to channel Mr Confident, although he looks a tad wild-eyed.

  There’s that tiny smile fighting to get out again, so I shut my eyes and let him get on with it.

  Before I know it, Robin is waking me with a gentle press of his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Dinner is served,’ he says. ‘Oh, and you snore.’

  ‘I so do not!’

  He gives me a smirk, then says, ‘Voilà!’ and sweeps his hand towards the table, which has two plates on it. He looks very, very pleased with himself.

  I sit in front of an omelette made with what appears to be twenty eggs. And red and green stuff. Robin’s omelette looks a little singed, but all in all I have to admit with a sinking heart that it’s probably edible.

  ‘What’s in it?’ I say, narrowing my eyes at the plate, like it might jump up and peck me.

  ‘Eggs, butter, tomatoes, basil, cheese. My blood, sweat and tears. OK, I made up the last part.’ He shoves a big forkful into his mouth and chews. ‘Lovely, if I do say so myself.’

  I stare at my plate. I’m telling myself it doesn’t matter if it isn’t in the meal plan, that this was a nice thing for Robin to do, and anyway Nia and I are On A Break (we watched a lot of ancient Friends reruns on the unit; Laurel was a bit obsessed though we all knew it was because of the way Monica kept getting skinnier and skinnier), but none of this is helping me to actually move my hands. My heartbeat has sped up and the baby seems to sense it because she starts partying, kicking the hell out of my stomach just above my hip bone. It really hurts.

  ‘Oof,’ I say. I put my hand there and feel a tiny, sharp lump. I think it might be a foot. The room swoops for a moment.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Robin gets up and comes over.

  ‘Yeah,’ I get out. ‘It’s kicking, is all.’

  I’ve taken off the hoodie and my vest top is stretched tight over my bump. He looks down and we both see the bump move.

  ‘Ohmigod,’ I say. It’s like the scene out of Alien. Any minute now something is going to burst out of a hole in my side and scuttle off. I can almost see Nia, like dark smoke on the ceiling, recoil.

  Then Robin says, ‘Can I?’ and – before I can say, ‘Can you what?’ – he places a hand really gently on my stomach.

  The baby goes still.

  I go still.

  Then it moves again and he grins.

  ‘Wow! I felt that. You’ve got a strong one in there, I reckon.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say faintly.

  Robin goes back to his seat and picks up his fork again. The baby twists inside me, like she’s telling me to hurry up and eat already and it’s this thought, that perhaps what the baby really, really needs right now is eggs and tomato and basil and whatever else it was, that makes me pick up my own fork and push a tiny mouthful past my lips.

  It’s really nice. No, that’s a lie. It’s amazing. I take another bite and suddenly this hunger takes over me and I start to shovel it in. The plateful is gone in three minutes flat and I take a long drink.

  Robin finishes his up, but – wisely, I think – doesn’t comment on how fast I got through mine.

  What’s going on?

  I remember Molly, when she was on the rampage, grabbing food and forcing it down without pausing to chew or even breathe, the panicked look on her face and the relief when she’d finished and got rid of it. My stomach feels hard and swollen, uncomfortable.

  Did I just binge? Was that what it was? I’ve never done it before. Been sick, sure, but never because of a binge. And I was always really proud of that. Secretly, when the others talked about it in tortured whispers, I’d stay smugly quiet, secure in my control. Unwavering. Nia was never like that for me, until now.

  Felicity’s face pops into my head and I know what she’d say: that eating a normal plate of food does not equal bingeing. Still, the strongest urge to run to the bathroom and get rid of it all washes over me, but then something else happens: another urge fights back. For a while, two impulses battle in my head, Nia and … who? Nia’s been part of me for so long; we’ve always wanted the same things. So who is arguing back? Who’s been arguing back all these weeks? My head feels like it’s going to burst, and in desperation I look at Robin, who reaches one hand across the table, as if to take hold of mine, then thinks better of it.

  ‘Talk to me,’ I say. ‘I need a distraction.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anything. Please, just anything.’ I whisper the last part.

  So he talks. He tells me about his job at Aldi, how he’s applying for everything going that might vaguely pay the bills and doesn’t involve endless shelf-stacking. About how he’s fed up with ready meals and toast and how he’s going to learn to cook. Gradually, the panicky feelings begin to die down and I can focus on what he says.

  He stops and looks more closely at me. ‘You back with me now?’

  I nod. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not really used to … I usually stick to the meal plan.’

  ‘I saw,’ he says, and I follow his gaze to the kitchenette, where a colour-coded chart is pinned to the wall, an open notebook underneath it listing everything I eat and drink, calorie content, weight in the morning, mid-morning, after lunch, after dinner, at bedtime.

  Suddenly, I take in the flat through his eyes. The absence of anything on the walls, the bare floors. The lack of soul. And I feel shame in every single part of my body, right down to my toes.

  It’s not a comfortable feeling – understatement of the year – and I shift about, as though I can shake it off if I move fast enough.

  ‘How come you planted the flowers?’ I say, because it’s better to say something than sit here feeling like this.

  ‘My grammy loves gardening. My parents were out working a lot when I was little and Grammy – she’s my dad’s mum – she used to look after me and my sister. She’d make us do the weeding, water the plants, pot them up, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a sister. Older or younger?’

  ‘Younger. She’s finishing her GCSEs.’

  I remember there were two little girls in the pictures on his wall.

  ‘Just the one sister?’ I say.

  ‘What about you? Any brothers or sisters?’ he says quickly.

  I remember what he said about leaving before his parents could kick him out. I guess he doesn’t want to talk about it, which is fine by me. I should know better than most about having stuff you’d rather not say out loud.

  Instead, I think about Tammy, and an image comes to me, hazy like it’s reaching through layers of dirty glass: Mum, holding this tiny bundle, smiling down at it; and weaker still, this twisted feeling, all wrong and bitter and shameful.

  Today seems to be the day for feelings, like I’m on a fairground ride except there’s no one to press a button and make it stop. Traces of omelette and tomato still linger in my nostrils and at
the back of my tongue and again I fight the urge to run and dispose of it.

  ‘Yes, one little sister. Tammy. Or Tamara, as Mum insists we call her.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘Gifted and Talented,’ I say, my voice short.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Well, I guess after me, Mum and Dad deserved a better version.’ I try and laugh, but it’s not my most successful attempt.

  ‘Wow. That’s harsh.’

  I pull off a shrug. ‘It’s true. I’m not exactly winning Daughter of the Year any time soon.’

  ‘But Tammy is?’

  ‘I s’pose so. I haven’t seen her for a while. Mum is worried I might be A Corrupting Influence.’

  ‘She told you that?’

  ‘Good as.’ I sigh. ‘The thing about Tammy is, she was always the golden one. I think she just came out right, you know? When she started school …’ I stop to remember. ‘Tammy started Infants a few years after me and right from the beginning she was just amazing. She could already read and write and she was good at everything. Literally everything. She was put straight into a Year One class – I remember Mum going on and on about how Gifted she was even before she got put in the official Gifted and Talented scheme thing. She always found it so easy to make friends; there would always be party-bag stuff, you know, like those crappy plastic maze games, all over the house from all the birthdays she’d been to.’ Unlike me, I don’t add, seeing as I don’t want to seem like a complete sad case. I had friends, obviously – well, Sal and Natalie – but not like Tammy. I look up at Robin and add the kicker. ‘And she was Mary in the nativity play and sang a solo. I remember watching her in the audience. There’s still a framed picture of her up on stage in her little blue scarf.’

  Robin is smiling. ‘What were you?’

  ‘A sheep, obviously.’

  He starts to laugh and I manage to smile too, but then my grin fades.

  ‘Anyway, the awesomeness continues and Mum doesn’t want me upsetting her. Let’s just say they weren’t too happy they had to cart Tammy in for Family Therapy at the unit last time I was an inpatient. I told Felicity – she’s my key worker – it was a bad idea.’