by Cathy Kelly
Joe followed her in and waited slightly impatiently while Callie performed a high-speed toilette. She ran a facecloth over her face and brushed her teeth quickly, thinking of how usually she’d spend ages with her electric toothbrush and rub special moisturiser into her skin. Right now those things felt like such a waste of time. She pulled her unbrushed hair back into a ponytail and tied it up with a band she found on a windowsill. This would do.
She looked tired and drawn in the mirror, and without her base and undereye concealer, her face was blotchy, with deep shadows under her eyes.
Who would be looking at her? she thought wryly.
There was no noise from either Poppy’s or Brenda’s bedrooms, so she crept downstairs quietly, although the stairs creaked the way stairs in old houses always do. It made Callie think of her home in Ballyglen, in the old house where she had grown up. Callie had been brilliant at holding onto the banisters and swinging herself over the creaky steps if she wanted to sneak downstairs in the middle of the night – or sneak upstairs, for that matter.
In the kitchen, the other two cats blinked at her.
‘We need to go out, we need breakfast. Where have you been, slave?’ they seemed to be saying.
‘Am I going to have your voices in my head forever?’ Callie asked them and the cats stared at her serenely. ‘Right. You don’t care as long as you get out and get food, am I correct?’ she asked.
Callie let them out into the garden, boiled the kettle and poked around in the fridge for the cat food. Soon Joe and the white and grey fluffy cat were back and eating contentedly while the black cat sat on the windowsill and looked disdainfully down on her bowl as if food was for peasants.
‘On a diet, darling?’ said Callie and the black cat sniffed and looked away. ‘Fine, you can have it later.’
She made herself a cup of filtered coffee, knowing she couldn’t possibly face breakfast, and finally sat at the kitchen table, keying her phone into Brenda’s Wi-Fi. She couldn’t put it off any longer. She clicked onto the news sites and it didn’t take long to find the story in all its gory glory. There were no names mentioned, but it was a front-page story on several of the news sites – police had uncovered a multimillion-euro property fraud scheme and last night had raided two Dublin houses. No arrests had been made but the search for the people behind the scheme was ongoing.
So Rob hadn’t been found either, Callie thought as she read. At least none of the reports mentioned them by name, but that wouldn’t last long, would it? Brenda didn’t seem to think so. Brenda thought the TV cameras would be on to them at any minute, and then where would she and Poppy go? How could they hide this out? They wouldn’t have any money, nothing—
Suddenly, she thought of the jewellery Brenda had taken out of the house and felt both guilty and passionately grateful to Brenda at the same time. It was wrong to take something that perhaps had been bought with fraudulent money, but she and Poppy would need something to live on until this was all sorted out.
And it would be sorted out. Of course. Her Jason wouldn’t do this. She could not have lived with and loved this man for so many years and not known this about him. It simply wasn’t possible. She knew him, loved him. She’d have known.
Brenda was wrong – it was all a mistake.
She took her coffee into the garden where Brenda hadn’t done much except make sure the old apple trees her mother had planted hadn’t died. The grass was a tiny patch, neatly cut if a bit mossy. Jason would have gone mad had he seen it. He liked the grass in their garden to look like a lawn from a lawnmower commercial.
There was a scratchy old wooden bench outside the door and Callie sat down, looking at the houses behind. It was a long time since she’d lived in a house where there were neighbours able to look in on you. The mansion she’d left had neighbours, but you wouldn’t know it.
It was only half seven but Callie decided she’d text Evelyn. Perhaps the police had called around to her too?
Hi Evelyn, she texted, sorry to bother you so early but I don’t know if you heard what’s happened with Rob and Jason? I know it’s got to be all an awful mistake. Could you phone me back? Callie
She put the phone down, not sure what would happen, if Evelyn would get back to her. But instantly the phone began to ring. Callie grasped it up.
‘Evelyn?’ she said.
‘Oh, Callie, love,’ said Evelyn’s familiar voice, ‘you poor, poor darling. I was afraid this would happen one day.’
‘Afraid what would happen?’ said Callie.
‘That they’d get caught.’
‘Doing what?’ whispered Callie.
‘Doing whatever it was that they were doing because it couldn’t be legitimate.’
There was a long pause. Callie watched the black cat meander past and then leap onto the trunk of one of the old apple trees and speed up in a vain attempt to catch a bird.
‘Honey,’ said Evelyn, her voice soft, ‘I always suspected and surely you must have too?’
Callie said nothing for a moment. This was not the conversation she wanted. She wanted Evelyn to tell her that people in finance sometimes made vast sums of money and governments wanted to know why. That it was going to be fine.
That Jason was a good man, a good husband. Just because Rob had been a bastard to Evelyn didn’t mean Jason was the same.
‘Where are you?’ Evelyn asked.
‘We’re here with Brenda,’ she said in a high, stilted voice she didn’t recognise as her own.
‘Great,’ Evelyn replied. ‘Brenda will know what to do.’
Callie realised that her hands were shaking. She’d spilled her coffee on her jeans and had barely noticed.
‘Callie, I know you don’t what to have this conversation, but whatever they were doing, they’ve been caught. You’re the one left behind. They’ve left the country.’
‘What?’ Callie knew she’d spoken so loudly that even Poppy, who could sleep the teenage sleep of the dead, must have heard her. ‘How do you know? Have you heard from Rob?’
‘He phoned the kids last night to talk to them,’ Evelyn said. ‘The babysitter was there, I was still in the taxi coming home from your party. Apparently he said that he, Anka and the baby were going away for a little while and not to worry, everything was going to be OK and not to listen to anything that was in the papers. He said it was going to be fine.’
‘Anka went too?’ said Callie, disbelieving.
‘Yes. He and Jason obviously knew something was up and they got out quickly. Nobody better than Rob for making a quick getaway,’ she added with a hint of bitterness.
‘Did he say that Jason was going too?’ Callie was distraught. No way would Jason leave her and Poppy to face this mess alone, no way.
‘He told the boys they were flying out last night. Said something about a trip on your boat and not to worry.’
The damn boat. The Maribou Princess. Jason had organised some sort of insane timeshare on a luxury yacht. Callie had only been once: she’d felt seasick the whole time. But Jason adored it. If Rob and Anka were going to the Maribou Princess, Jason was going too. It was his baby.
‘So Rob brought Anka and the baby, and it looks as if Jason went too.’ Evelyn’s voice was gentle.
‘Jason left us behind,’ said Callie mechanically. ‘Poppy and me.’
‘I’ll come right over now . . .’ began Evelyn, but Callie had stopped listening.
She’d had a flu once that had made her feel incredibly lightheaded, so light-headed she could barely think straight, and she had perfect recall of that now: the feeling that nothing was what it appeared to be.
‘He must have known what would happen,’ she said suddenly. ‘Last night, probably shortly after you left, the police made everyone leave the party, searched my house and I had to leave with just some of my stuff. Our bank accounts are frozen and Brenda said we better not t
ake much, just in case. They’re probably still there, searching. I’m wearing old jeans, an ancient sweatshirt and I have about fifty euros in my purse. I was told I shouldn’t leave the country and my husband is gone. There’s been not a word from him. His mobile phone is out of service – I’ve phoned about thirty times! It’s like he has disappeared off the face of the earth and . . .’ She paused. This was worst of all. ‘He left us, while Rob took Anka.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ said Evelyn, ‘really sorry, Callie.’
‘This is actually happening, isn’t it?’ said Callie and started to cry. ‘I just don’t believe he could do this to us.’
‘I would never have believed he could have done that to you either,’ said Evelyn sadly. ‘Jason loves you, he loves Poppy.’
‘Loves us?’ questioned Callie angrily. ‘Are you sure you don’t mean loved us, because whatever is going on, he could have stuck around and we could have got through it together. But he’s gone. And bloody Rob brought Anka and the baby, while Jason just left me and Poppy here to suffer on our own.’
She looked up and realised that Brenda was standing in the kitchen and had overheard every word.
‘I’ve got to go, Evelyn,’ Callie said. ‘Thank you. I’ll keep in touch.’ She looked at Brenda.
‘Hold on. Don’t hang up yet. Tell her you’ll probably need a different phone,’ said Brenda, in the same matter-of-fact tone she was using all the time now, ‘because people will get that phone number from somewhere so you’ll need to get rid of it.’
Last night Callie would have protested, but this morning she just nodded. Brenda had become the person who understood this new world, the person Callie could rely on.
‘Ev, I’ll text you my new number when I get it and don’t give it to anyone.’
‘Fine,’ said Evelyn. ‘I’m here for you, for you and Poppy, but I don’t know what I can do.’
‘Be grateful you got a lump sum,’ said Callie bitterly. ‘Seeing as how Jason, Rob and Anka all got magically out of it because they knew what was coming, you’re going to need it, Ev.’
She hung up and looked at Brenda.
‘Have you seen the news?’ Brenda said.
Callie nodded. ‘He left us behind, Brenda.’
‘I heard,’ she said, going to the kettle. ‘I made a few calls last night. We have a lawyer you can talk to. Today, preferably. He’ll want money up front.’
‘Ha!’ Callie said shakily. ‘Does he take frozen plastic?’
‘Unlikely,’ Brenda said. ‘You’ll need money.’
Callie looked down at her hands and realised they were shaking. She had to sit down or she would collapse. Taking a chair at the table, she said: ‘Last night, I was thinking that it was wrong to have taken the jewellery if it truly was part of some awful white-collar fraud. I don’t steal – I’ve never stolen anything in my life – but right now I don’t care. I need to take care of Poppy, we need somewhere to live and we need some money to live on.’
‘That’s what I was thinking,’ said Brenda. ‘Real-world scenario versus pink fluffy unicorn world.’
Callie laid her forehead wearily on the table and spoke: ‘Brenda, if Jason’s been ripping people off for years, I’ve been living on stolen money. I am a – what do you call it?’
‘Accessory to the fact,’ said Brenda. ‘You’ve been watching too many TV detective shows. You were the nice person caught up in all of this with Shitface and his pal, Other Shitface. Not an accessory to anything.’
‘That’s almost worse, though.’ Callie raised her head. ‘I was too stupid to see what was going on. How could I not have known? That’s what I keep asking myself – why didn’t I see what was obviously under my nose?’
Sam
At least, thought Sam, cleaning up another nappy, the black faeces that had frightened the hell out of her had stopped. It was meconium, the nurses had explained to her in hospital when she’d stared aghast at the black liquid coming out of her exquisite little baby’s bottom. ‘This can’t be normal,’ she’d cried, fearing there was something wrong with India.
‘It’s perfectly normal,’ said the nurse talking to her, an old hand at explaining this sort of thing to new, terrified mothers. ‘Meconium is the early excreta and nothing to worry about, although it looks a little bit frightening. Soon the baby’s stools should be a more normal colour.’
Sam wanted this confirmed once more. In fact, she’d really have liked a notebook where she could write all this down and then have it typed up in triplicate and stuck around the house, because she needed to know that whatever her baby was doing was normal.
Plus she was beyond irritated with Ted, who seemed more upset at the scent of India’s tiny nappies – why was he so upset about that? How dare he get upset about it when she was the one in the hospital dealing with the impossible task of taking care of their tiny child, of worrying full-time.
The next difficult step in taking care of the baby was the feeding, or latching on as the nurses called it. ‘Latching on’ was such an innocuous phrase, sort of like hanging a picture frame onto a wall. At no point did the words latching on imply getting a small, bewildered, hungry and increasingly cross baby to attach itself to a nipple that was already painful and then make said baby suck.
That first day, when the lactation nurse had been off and India had had a bottle, had made Sam terrified she’d mess up breastfeeding again. The more terrified she was, the more India sensed it, cried and refused to feed. Sam’s breasts ached. India wailed with misery and Sam’s breasts ached even more at her child’s cries.
‘How is this so hard?’ Sam had said tearfully twenty minutes after her fifth attempt at feeding, when India had just cried harder, pitiful little wails that broke Sam’s heart. The inner voice screamed at her: bad mother!
‘It can take a while,’ said the lactation nurse. ‘Not everyone finds it easy at first, but keep trying, you’ll do it.’
They gave India a little bit of milk that Sam had laboriously expressed earlier from a machine that sounded like it was pumping oil from eight thousand feet beneath the earth.
‘I know you are going to manage this when you go home tomorrow,’ said the lactation nurse, beaming with encouragement, and she left Sam with a sheaf of papers about the right way to do it.
Finally, India slept in her little bassinet, Ted was gone and the ward was mercifully quiet because all the visitors had been sent home by the ringing of a bell.
There was snoring in some corners where exhausted women tried to sleep. There were little murmuring baby noises, the odd small whimper and, sometimes, full-blown baby wailing. And all the while, Sam looked at beautiful India with that precious little face, the fluffed-up dark hair. She looked so like Ted with those huge eyes and all Sam could think was that she had failed her baby because she hadn’t been able to feed her.
The woman next door, Larissa, who was on her third child, had juggled her baby onto enormous bosoms and the baby had grappled on like a mountaineer grabbing a crampon expertly.
‘It’s very easy,’ said Larissa, in a relaxed tone that Sam envied from the bottom of her heart. ‘I don’t know what you need all them bits of paper for. Come here, I’ll show you,’ she said, when Sam had been lying in bed on the verge of tears, still failing to get India to latch on.
‘No, no, I’ll try later,’ Sam had said.
The nurse passed by again and, seeing Sam’s devastated face, said: ‘It can be a little stressful if you have people beside you who are doing it so easily, and remember, Larissa has had two more babies. She’s used to this now, it’s all new to you and it’s new to India.’
‘But it’s new to Larissa’s baby too and he seems to know how,’ said Sam tremulously. ‘India doesn’t know how and that’s all my fault, because if I knew, then India would know and I would be able to transfer that information to her and . . .’
‘She�
�s not a computer,’ the nurse said kindly. ‘Now get a bit of rest and it will look easier the next time.’
The next time was two o’clock in the morning and Sam did not feel as if it was any easier. She was zombified with tiredness, woken from an uneasy sleep and desperately trying to get India’s tiny little mouth to attach onto her nipple. Another nurse tried to help her, holding Sam’s breast and squashing it up into India’s little mouth, trying to squeeze milk out and get India to suck. But it was no good.
‘Why am I such a failure at this?’ said Sam, giving up and bursting into tears.
‘You’re not a failure at all,’ said the nurse. ‘I’ll get the pump.’
The breast pump, nicknamed Daisy by Larissa next door, made enough noise to wake the dead, but miraculously none of the other women or babies on the ward stirred. It hurt, too. Sam had thought that the whole breastfeeding business was such an earth-mother thing to do that it wouldn’t feel uncomfortable in the slightest and yet letting the pump remove the milk from painfully engorged breasts was agony.
‘You might have a touch of mastitis there,’ said the nurse kindly.
‘Mastitis?’ said Sam, ‘I thought cows got that?’
‘We’re mammals too,’ the nurse said wryly.
When she’d expressed enough milk via Daisy, she managed to feed little India from a bottle and at least there was the pleasure of watching her baby drink her milk even if it hadn’t come straight from the breast. Where were all her visions of perfect motherhood now?
She’d thought of the ideas she’d had of lying on her hospital bed and her darling baby snuggled up beside her attached to a breast, happy and serene like an Old Masters’ painting of motherhood. It was nothing like that. It was messy and sore and she felt she was doing everything wrong. What was gloriously joyful about that? The only perfect thing was India herself, who was the most exquisitely beautiful creature to have emerged into the world. Despite years of yearning for this very time, Sam’s primary emotion was fear.