She’s walking on the beach near their house. It’s not the most beautiful of the seven or eight bays along this part of the coastline but it’s also not the ugliest. She doesn’t go to the beach as much as she thought she would. The idea of something is never as good as the reality, but looking out to sea this afternoon it is glorious.
She’s alone now. Alone with this secret and the sea has no answers for her. Since their appointment with Lillian she’s been treading water in quicksand, trying to convince herself that what she knows to be true is not true. If the data is to be believed, if the accepted facts about the timescale by which babies are created is correct, she is carrying the child of a man that isn’t her husband. A man she barely knows.
The wind swells and almost lifts her up. She puts her left hand over her stomach as if to stop the baby inside her getting sand in its eyes. She turns around, walking backwards into the wind and stares up at a huge sky and shouts as loud as her voice will go. Her vocal cords hurt but she pushes them further until she can hear herself through the whistling that swirls in and out of her ears. She sounds like barbed wire being dragged across a rock. Then she feels sick so she puts her hands on her knees.
A liver-coloured cocker spaniel bounds up and sniffs the ankles of her jeans. She glances round and sees that its owner, an elderly lady with a scarf over her head, is a long way away and making slow progress. Naomi squats down to the dog’s level and grabs its neck, ruffling the fur under its ears. She looks into its hazelnut eyes and something in them tells her that it’s going to be all right and for a moment she feels like it could be. Then he darts away in an expansive loop, bounding back towards his owner.
She stands up and moves towards the stone steps up to the promenade. On the upper level, the eddies of sand blow into her face so she shelters in the doorway of a beach-side café, its flat roof bordered by crumbling wood painted a cheerful baby blue. What she wants is for nothing to have changed, for them to be able to carry on and have the family that she and Charlie have planned. Perhaps it can still be like that. She scratches at a crack in one of the beams and a clump of rotten wood comes away, her fingernail stained brown by it. She looks at the hole she’s made, woodlice busy inside, exposed to the bright sunlight, they scrabble and burrow deeper into the unknowable recesses inside the sodden wood.
FOURTEEN
27 October 14:55
I need to talk to you. I’m picking
Prue up at 4:30. I’ll be in the
park afterwards. X
29 October 06:44
This is Naomi. There’s something
we need to discuss. I’ll be in the
park from 8:15 today for one hour.
1 November 16:22
If you think you’re being kind
you’re not. Vital we speak.
Can meet anytime today.
FIFTEEN
10 weeks
7 November 2017 at 16:42
Phone still broken – did he get it fixed?
not receiving texts (iCloud)
no reception
Ignoring – making it easy for me?
busy NO
too painful NO
digital detox NO
callous arsehole
hates me
loves me
Naomi looks down from the higher driving position, heat blasting from the Nissan’s vents, and watches the daily battles and delights of the nursery drop-off from the overflow car park next to the leisure centre. A little girl wearing far too few clothes for the cold marches forward in sparkling wellington boots followed by a dad struggling with an industrial-size bag of nappies. He’s going to be fuming when nursery tell him they only have room for fifty nappies per child and he’s got to take them all back to the car. Another dad, dead behind the eyes, holds his son horizontally as he clings on to his car seat like it were a cliff he was about to fall off.
Naomi has taken to spending an hour or so in the car park after she drops Prue off and then again before she picks her up. She also came both days Prue wasn’t at nursery, asking Charlie if he could take their daughter for a couple of hours while she was getting a wax one day and had to go to an event with Victoria the other. Both times he bristled, she could see how much he wanted to tell her how much of a hindrance the extra childcare would be to his work day, his work does seem to have picked up, but he managed to tell her it was fine and that he’d make the time up after she’s gone to bed.
Since he found out she was pregnant he’s been amazing. It’s agonising spending her nights too wiped out to do anything but lie on the sofa while he brings her dinner and cleans up around her. It’s almost like he knows what she’s done and he’s punishing her with his new-found virtuousness.
There’s no yellow van in the car park today and after a full week and an extra day today, she is satisfied that Greg no longer attends The Bank of Friendship. She wants to ask Imogen but Naomi hasn’t seen her since she’s moved up to the ‘threes’ room’ and she’s nervous about asking the manager Lisa, who takes her safeguarding responsibilities very seriously and would take exception to searching questions being asked about one of her charges, even her former charges. In addition, when Naomi once described Lisa as an officious jobsworth to Charlie, he’d laughed at her and said he always found her very friendly. This was typical Charlie, even when he professed to being in the deepest depression with her, he always managed to be charming and winning with people he barely knows. If Lisa was sweetness and light to him, perhaps, if Naomi was asking her questions about Greg, Charlie might receive the answers. She knows that paranoia is a symptom of early pregnancy but she can’t risk him knowing anything. Not until she’s talked to Sean.
She bites into a croissant. Naomi doesn’t eat things like croissants but she hasn’t been sleeping and the body craves carbohydrates when it’s tired. A hormone called ghrelin continues to be produced when exposed to excessive light at night and it causes us to feel hungry. She’d read an article about it three nights ago on her phone, which, ironically, the piece warned against using at night-time. It said that during pregnancy the body produces more ghrelin to make sure that mum is consuming enough energy for her baby and it’s this, in combination with the nausea, that leads to the horrible feeling of being ravenous and disgusted by food at the same time. She’s read lots of other articles about hormones. About the ones that flood into the body of a pregnant woman to facilitate the miraculous process that grows a baby inside her. Progesterone, the ‘PMS’ hormone. Oxytocin, the love hormone. Cortisol, the stress hormone. Adrenalin, the hormone of fight or flight. She read about how the cocktail of all these in a pregnant woman’s body can have a drastic effect on her and her baby, a dangerous effect even.
In the last week Naomi’s made a decision. One she didn’t take lightly. She drew up a table and mapped all the different options on it and used it to evaluate, objectively, what her action plan should be. She researched the psychological damage that a marriage breakdown can have on a child and she found a thirty-year study of children that didn’t know their father. It didn’t make for pleasant reading. So her conviction that she not tell Charlie, that she carry on as if he were the baby’s father, has solidified. He would be crushed, it would destroy Prue’s childhood, her sibling would be born rudderless and, looking at it pragmatically, Naomi knows that there’s no need for any of that. There is no need to tell Charlie.
The only thing she can’t control, the only risk, is Sean. He seems like such a nice man but she doesn’t know him at all. What if they were to bump into him with the newborn? He would ask how old he or she was and he would have questions, legitimate questions. He might not make the link immediately, but what if he gets to his late forties and Greg’s mother has turned their son against him for whatever reason. He’s isolated and angry and he thinks back to the woman he slept with, who he had unprotected sex with, who just happened to have a child who was born nine months after they were together. It wasn’t even just the possibility of bumping into him
. What was she meant to do? Eliminate her and her family’s life from social media and the Internet for the next forty years because what’s to say that mid-life-crisis Sean won’t get misty-eyed one day and search for her and find pictures of the teenager that might be his and try to connect with them? She can’t take the chance. Hoping for the best isn’t in her nature.
‘Why is it you want to know?’ Uggy’s tone isn’t as aggressive as her question sounds. Prue’s marching around behind her new key worker attempting to hold a saucepan above her head while stirring it with a wooden spoon.
‘We’re having a party for Prue and wanted to invite some of her friends from nursery.’ Naomi had prepared this answer in case anyone questioned why she was asking about Greg’s whereabouts. She knew it might come across as odd. He was a little bit older than Prue and, although they had been in the same class, she was never told they were friends.
‘Prue’s birthday is soon?’
‘Er, no.’ Does Uggy know Prue’s birthday? ‘We don’t know many people in the area and wanted to try to, you know, meet some other parents with children Prue’s age.’ Uggy crosses her arms. This is the longest conversation they’ve ever had. She’s always been curt and to the point, ‘Prue slept well’, ‘Prue ate well today’, ‘we went to the park this morning’, but with little detail and nothing that would prompt a conversation. She’s not unattractive but she’s all hard edges, not a natural fit for a career looking after children, Naomi would have thought, but Prue loves her. At home she often intones her name, ‘Oooggy’ she calls her, and when she’s dropped off in the morning she goes to her more willingly than she used to with the more obviously maternal Imogen. Uggy looks at Naomi with suspicion, more like a battle-hardened policeman to a suspect than a nursery nurse to a parent. Naomi’s almost tempted to call out her hostile attitude but remembers that she needs her help.
‘We met Greg in the park and they played for a while and got on really well.’ Something flickers in Uggy’s expression but before Naomi can work out what it was, Prue is between them, reaching her arms up and demanding to be carried. Naomi lifts her into her arms and, shielded by her daughter, studies the woman opposite her. She’s always found it easy to read people, to read the way their bodies and their faces betray their lies, but, perhaps it’s in her national character, she finds Uggy completely inscrutable. Her head went somewhere else when Naomi mentioned meeting Greg in the park but what was it, was it to do with Greg’s parents? Is his mum a nightmare? Is she sexy? Uggy could be that way inclined. Or is it Sean? Naomi always suspected that his attractiveness must be a talking point everywhere he goes. When he told her he worked on building sites she imagined him being called ‘pretty boy’ or ‘dreamboat’ and suffering daily because of his good looks. It’s the ridiculous thing about British ‘banter’, she thinks, any positive attribute or talent a person possesses becomes a stick with which other people beat them and creates a deep-seated guilt about whatever it is they have or are good at. Naomi had it at school.
‘Greg’s parents took him out of nursery a few weeks ago.’
‘Were you his key worker?’ Before Uggy can answer, a blancmange of a girl covered in green paint cries out and she turns round to attend to her. Prue flips her weight towards the door and it prompts a bubble of nausea in Naomi’s throat. Her daughter’s impatient to get out into the real world, away from the stink of shepherd’s pie that seems to linger in the room regardless of what they’ve had for lunch, but Naomi needs to know more.
‘Did he move to a different nursery?’
‘Um,’ Uggy’s cheeks stipple with blush, ‘I can’t remember. Maybe.’
‘Do you know why he left?’ Uggy faces Naomi now. The shiftiness from before is gone and, cradling the blancmange in her arms, she’s almost defiant.
‘People leave and come back or they stop for a month or two here or there all of the time. Nursery is not so cheap for some people.’ She leans on the ‘some’ just enough to make the point to Naomi that she has her pegged as one of the ‘down-from-Londoners’ who assume everyone is as wealthy as they are.
Indignant rage mingles with the nausea in Naomi’s stomach like lemon juice in milk and she wants to ask Uggy where she gets off being so rude to her customers. The thought shoots into her head that a British girl wouldn’t dare use that tone but when Prue extends her clenched fist to Uggy for a fist-pump that makes her daughter erupt into giggles, Naomi feels ashamed of herself for thinking it.
‘Well, if Greg’s parents come by, or you bump into them, if you could give them my number.’
‘You can talk to Lisa in reception.’
‘Say bye-bye, Prue.’
‘Bye, Prooodence.’ Uggy’s head wobbles as she over-enunciates the ‘ooo’ sound, making Naomi feel over-protective of her daughter’s name.
‘Ba-bye, Ooooogy,’ Prue says, reaching an arm towards her as Naomi whisks her out of the room into reception. Lisa opens the door for them with her Aspartame fake smile and eyes so creased you can’t tell if they’re there.
In the park, Prue chases brown-paper leaves that swirl in gusts of wind under the huge sycamore that looms over the nursery. Naomi glances back in through the French door of the baby-room and sees Lisa asking Uggy about something with a stern look on her face. One of the others, Sophie, looks on guiltily, alternating between listening in and pretending not to. It can’t be about Greg; Uggy didn’t give her any information at all, didn’t break any of the nursery’s precious safeguarding doctrine. But Lisa’s having stern words with her about something. Prue puts a clump of leaves in Naomi’s jacket pocket before running away as if it were an incendiary device. Uggy looks at the floor, swaying the little blancmange-child in her arms.
SIXTEEN
He’s stuck in the middle of the pitch and Ollyphant, so called because he’s a big boy, is shoving a sharp forearm into his back. Their first game of November has been delayed for ten minutes by a huge hailstorm and the AstroTurf looks like someone has unpacked a huge parcel of polystyrene balls on to it. They play in an enclosed cage in the same park as Prue’s nursery. With the floodlights, the high walls of steel and the clouds of breath from toiling men, it feels dystopian.
Charlie protects the ball, waiting for someone to run past. Tayo sprints round him in a wide circle offering an option to his right. The big man behind slices his foot around Charlie’s shin to try to get the ball. Charlie feints round him the other way. He looks up and straightens an arm to tell the opposing team he’s going to pick out Tayo’s run but it’s a dummy. He dinks the ball under his standing leg to take it away from two onrushing defenders. The space opens up in front of him and he spurs forward towards the goal, he can hear the panting of the unfit opposition players, straining to make up the ground to him, cigarette-phlegm hacking in their throats. The goalkeeper hurls himself forward and goes to ground, spreading his body wide and Charlie, adrenalin making him feel like a god, lifts the ball lightly over the keeper’s legs and hurdles himself over his prostrate body. The goal gapes in front of him, time swells somehow and there’s no one else there. He’s always had this feeling playing football. He sees pictures of what to do next in every moment. It feels so logical, as your opponent tries to close down one angle, you recalibrate and pry open another. There’s a truth in space, of motion in space, that his mind has always found beautiful. The body is a machine that, for him, with this level of opposition, does as it’s told, so the possibilities are endless. He picks his spot in the half-height goal and is about to roll it towards the bottom left-hand corner when— Thunk. Everything goes black.
‘How many fingers?’ Sali holds three fingers far too close to Charlie’s face. Charlie bats them away, laughing. They’re in the row of portacabins next to the four football cages that serve as changing rooms.
‘You seriously not gonna let me buy you a beer to say sorry?’ Sali says, back at the mirror, running a hand through his hair.
‘All the greats have to put up with being scythed down by absolute donke
ys,’ Charlie says without looking up. Sali grins and nods his agreement. Most of the other lads are changed now. There’s not much of a take-up for the pub tonight. Tayo had to leave early to go and host some minidisc night above a yoga studio. He made the mistake of inviting everyone along and was laughed out of the changing room. Charlie’s doing everything slower than usual, his ribcage buzzes with pain and he’s got a pounding headache.
‘Sure I can’t tempt you?’ Sali says, rolling down a fresh section of old-fashioned cloth-towel dispenser and wiping his face on it. ‘Otherwise it’s me stuck with the Ollyphant hearing about how they need to “hurry up with that facking Brexit” as he gets a boner over the Polish barmaid with the nose-stud.’
‘Really can’t tonight, mate.’ Charlie sits down and pulls socks on, trying to avoid the puddles on the changing-room floor.
‘Date night with the missis?’ Sali asks and Charlie half-laughs, an edge of bitterness. ‘Oh right. Short-term tenancy in the doghouse.’
‘I said I’d get back.’
‘She OK?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Charlie puts his elbows on his knees and supports his head in his hands. Looking down at his shoes and socks for so long has given him a head-rush. ‘It’s a big old house we’ve bought and it’s really creaky with this weather and, I don’t know, she’s not sleeping so she’s pretty much always fuming.’
‘Time of the month?’ Charlie smiles off his question. Sali sits down next to him, leans back against the coat-hooks and wrinkles his nose, aware he’s been a bit crude. Charlie wants to tell him that they’re expecting but they haven’t had their twelve-week scan yet and it’s bad luck. And Sali the stud probably isn’t the best person to get pregnancy man-sympathy from. ‘That why you ducked out of the SM league?’ Sali asks, picking bits of mud off his trainers. SM is what dedicated players call Soccer Manager.
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