Happy Ever After

by C. C. MacDonald

  TWENTY-ONE

  14 May 2001

  MSN Messenger – (*)ELIZA(*)

  (*)ELIZA(*) says:

  Cathy Davies saw you hanging around behind the station on Thursday night.

  She said you looked really drunk

  Tell me you’re not doing drugs

  KARINP83 says:

  Tell me ur not a fuxking snake-in-the-grass, disloyal bitch

  (*)ELIZA(*) says:

  I didn’t say anything to anyone.

  KARINP83 says:

  EXACTLY

  U didn’t say N E THING

  Namo Twatterson and her worshippers saying those disgusting things to me and you stand beside them, pretending to laugh

  (*)ELIZA(*) says:

  I DID NOT LAUGH

  KARINP83 says:

  You think she’ll be friends with you now? You think she’ll let you and your beloved little rat dog into her perfect gang with her perfect face and her perfect happy family?

  She only likes anorexic control freaks like her

  I KNOW YOU’RE ONLINE

  (*)ELIZA(*) says:

  Have you told your parents?

  KARINP83 says:

  ‘parents’

  (*)ELIZA(*) says:

  Are you at home now?

  Karin?

  I came over and your brother said you’d not been home for a week.

  He’s really worried about you. We all are.

  Are you at home?

  KARINP83:

  not my home

  (*)ELIZA(*) says:

  Can I come round?

  I think you need to talk to someone

  I wanted to stand up to those girls, she’s so scary.

  Please can I come round?

  KARINP83:

  2 little 2 late

  (*)ELIZA(*) says:

  I didn’t KNOW you were pregnant

  KARINP83 says:

  I’m not pregnant.

  That’s how an abortion works.

  TWENTY-TWO

  12 weeks

  Eastgate is a small village six miles inland. It’s surrounded on all sides by fields full of what could be cauliflower, or maybe cabbages. There is a church, a small school and an independent hardware store that Charlie raves about. The proprietor is a real tool nerd and opened up an old belt-sander for him so he could have a proper look at the mechanism. The store is behind Naomi as she leans against the Nissan watching the sun dipping to her left, giving the fields a sinister aspect. As if, as soon as the sky darkens, the monstrous cabbages will transmogrify into triffids to swarm on the village from all sides.

  The Helter Skelter nursery stands on the other side of the road. It must have been built to be a bed and breakfast, probably in the sixties. Its front-yard car park is rammed and a snake of optimists behind the wheels of estates and SUVs clog up the road around, hoping a space will magically appear for them.

  Naomi has three nurseries left to watch. It’s inconceivable that Sean would have moved Greg somewhere that was more than a half-hour drive from his old nursery so she was confident that the list she’d drawn up was comprehensive. At the last-but-one nursery she’d bought herself a Costa coffee and a pack of doughnuts from the petrol station in homage to the stake-out cop she seems to have become. She ate all the doughnuts within the first twenty minutes. The baby loves a sweet-treat.

  Getting through the list of nurseries has been slow going as she’s had to spend two hours at each place to cover the full span of potential pick-up times, so she hasn’t been able to go every weekday. She knows that even when she’s been to every nursery it still won’t be definitive. Greg went to The Bank of Friendship two and a half days a week so she has to go to every nursery, every day of the week at both teatime and lunchtime to be certain. But she’s decided that once she’s been to all of them once, that will be it. She will take Lillian’s advice, focus on her family, forget Sean and hope her deepest fears won’t be realised.

  She needs to focus on her family. ‘Daddy’ is now the first word Prue calls when she wakes up each day. When they’re all sat together in Prue’s room before her bedtime she chooses to sit on Charlie’s crossed legs with her bedtime story rather than on hers. Daddy is flavour of the month. Charlie tries to mollify her, telling her that it’s good, that with another baby on the way it’s important Prue doesn’t need her as much. But Naomi finds it upsetting, bordering on wrong. She knows that in the modern world, fathers are meant to be as involved as mothers but she doesn’t want that level of equality. When it comes to who Prue needs more, it has to be her. When she falls and grazes her knee, it has to be her mother who kisses it better. When she has a huge bust-up with some bitch of a friend when she’s older, she knows how cruel girls can be from her time at school, it should be Naomi whose counsel she seeks. When some scumbag boy is pushing Prue to do things she’s not comfortable with in the bedroom, it has to be Naomi that tells her to kick the arsehole to the kerb. She knows that her being away from home more is the reason for Prue’s shift in preference so she has to draw a line under this as soon as she can.

  The sun has gone. An excoriating light above the front porch of Helter Skelter pours down on parents with their little familiars, as they traipse out in an irregular but steady stream. She’s noticed that the mood is more buoyant on the way home. Parents look at their children, ask questions and smile at their answers. They pick them up in their arms, bounce them, tickle them, blow raspberries into their necks. Both adult and child stride through the car park like giants as opposed to the fraught shuffle of the morning drop-off. She’s seen plenty of children Greg’s age but hasn’t yet spotted his helmet of jet-black hair.

  She looks at her phone, aware of the public feeling towards adults who hang around outside nurseries. She wants to look like a mother waiting for her husband and child. If she were a man, someone probably would have called the police by now. She looks at her emails, nothing that needs action, a compulsive check of Instagram. Pictures of perfect families with perfect lives in sunny locales are not what she wants to see so she slides them back into her coat pocket. When she looks up again she sees a little boy stepping off the nursery’s porch and she breathes in, hand squeezing around her phone. His hair is obscured by a hat but she recognises this boy. He’s the right age, the same slight build and there’s something about the way he ambles forward, shoulders rocking like a tiny prizefighter before a bout, the same jaguar gait she’d seen in Sean, that tells her it’s Greg.

  Or at least it could be. At every nursery there have been one or two of these false dawns, her mind so desperate to see him that it plays tricks on her memory and creates characteristics Greg doesn’t have. She looks for Sean but he’s not there, or at least not yet. A gaggle of parents, two men and a woman, a member of staff maybe, in a burgundy tabard, follow behind the little boy. She looks above the group of adults expecting to see his huge torso encased in plaid, squeezing himself through the door, but he’s not there.

  As the boy that could be Greg heads further away from the entrance, she sees a portly man with dark hair and a beard emerging from the group of adults and walking a few steps behind him. He’s in a grey hooded sweatshirt and wears a tool-belt. Almost all the local men seem to be tradesmen. She’s been amazed at the numbers of vans branded with the contact details of builders, electricians, roofers, window cleaners that she’s seen in the many different nursery car parks she’s watched. A car swings round towards the little boy and the man skips forward to put an arm over his chest to hold him in place. They’re together. It can’t be Greg.

  Naomi turns around and leans her head on the top of the Nissan. She can feel her pulse beating against the cold metal. She’s texted him, she’s asked at the nursery. If he doesn’t want to be found, she won’t find him. How has this happened to her? It feels so cruel.

  She lifts her head and sees an old woman gazing at her as if she’s lost her mind, maybe she has. Naomi opens the car door and finds sanctuary in the Nissan. What she’s doing is ridic
ulous. She’s exhausted, she feels constantly sick, she has seven or so months to enjoy with her little girl, without a newborn demanding constant breastfeeding. She should be at home with her family.

  She starts the car and glances out of the window at the nursery and there they are, the boy and the heavy-set man. She thought they would have got into a car already but they come out of the gate and walk down the street. The boy turns his face towards Naomi, looking right at her car, and it is him. That boy is Greg. The same boy she first saw at nursery, that played driving with Prue in the café, that was there in the low light of the swimming pool, paddling faster than all the others. That boy is Greg.

  She fumbles for the handle of the car door and clambers out into the road. She speedwalks on her side of the street, closing the gap on Greg and the man walking next to him. Who is he? A friend picking him up? An uncle? She jogs a short stretch to get ahead of them and glances over her shoulder at the boy. She’s sure now. She saw the helmet of hair at the back poking out of his woolly hat and now she sees his skin, so pale that the contrast with his red mouth makes it look like he’s wearing lipstick. It’s him.

  The man walks at the same pace as the boy. They don’t converse. He pulls something from his pocket, car keys, and a black Transit van six or seven car lengths up from them blinks its orange indicators. They disappear from view, behind a line of vans. Without thinking, Naomi steps into the road to follow them, forcing a gargantuan silver Mercedes to stop sharp, a few metres away. The expression of the silver-haired man behind the steering wheel asks her why she’s so stupid. Naomi waves a coquettish apology to confirm her idiocy and he waves her over the road with a beneficent grin. By the time she gets to the other side, the heavy-set man has the passenger door of the black van open. Greg swings his little backpack into the bottom edge of the van a few times. The man takes the bag from him and shoves it into the footwell of the vehicle. Naomi wants to get closer but fears Greg may recognise her and, whoever this man is, she doesn’t want him telling Sean she’s here. Perhaps he already knows about her, she has no idea what Sean would have said about her to his friends, his family.

  The man squats down on to his haunches, a hand on his hip indicating some pain. Greg runs into his outstretched arms and the man lifts the little boy high above his head before pulling him into his chest. He reaches into the cab, to clear the straps of the car seat, Naomi thinks, and while he does, little Greg tickles the man under the chin. The man tickles him back and Greg convulses with laughter, snapping his chin down and burying his exposed neck into the man’s collarbone to escape the man’s wiggling fingers. His father’s fingers. Because a little boy doesn’t interact like that with a friend or an uncle. She’s never seen anything this intimate between Sean and the boy. This man is Greg’s father.

  THE SECOND TRIMESTER

  * * *

  ONE

  I watched her whole pregnancy with Prue on the Internet. Every week a new photo of her in her gym clothes, bump getting bigger. People want to show the world they’re doing life properly, living up to the conventions of their conventional upbringing, following the well-trodden path to happiness. But their version has to look better, wackier sunglasses, more joy, prettier sunsets, brighter lights. I only found them two months before they announced they were expecting a baby but that didn’t stop me from scrolling through their life together before that.

  In the early days she’d posted whole albums of the two of them and their smiling faces as they lived out their charmed life on Facebook. When they first got together, selfies in music venues clutching cans of Red Stripe, a bare stage with glinting drum kit in the background; her on his shoulders at a music festival, feathered headdress and covered in glitter; arms linked with several others on a lamp-posted street somewhere that must be London, dinner-plate pupils, a sheen of sweat. Then they got married. I spent weeks studying those couple of hundred photos, it was the most detailed account of a day in their life they’d given me, though I know someone’s wedding day isn’t exactly representative. They had it in a big tent in a field, the tag said it was in the South Downs. She was sat on hay bales, forehead pressed to her friend Lilly Sharpells, he with a bunch of laughing lads with a full range of different facial hair. The two of them, cheek-to-cheek, sandwiched between their parents. Both fathers red-faced with champagne, mums in wide-brimmed hats.

  Married life didn’t seem to tarnish their picture-perfect existence one bit. Paint-spattered dungarees in their North London flat, the flat that, when I looked it up on the land registry, I was surprised to only find her name on; dinners at restaurants with friends in well-cut suits; playing outdoor games I don’t know the names of in parks I’ve never been to, surrounded by people holding bottles of expensive-looking beer. It took me so long to find them and when I saw what sort of people they were it was so much worse than I’d expected.

  I shouldn’t be here still. I should have left. I did what I came to do as soon as I got here. I don’t usually spend long in the house. In and out the front door that’s always left on the latch by the builders. I’ve had a key cut, they leave a spare in a bowl on the hall table, but haven’t had to use it much. He’s upstairs in his study. He doesn’t come down much during the day and if he does he never goes in his bedroom. He doesn’t talk to the builders. Doesn’t consider them to be worth his valuable time.

  I’ve found something in their bedroom that won’t let me leave. The picture that got me here, that started me down this path, the thing that sparked the idea that burrowed into my head like some sort of insect telling me what I had to do, is here, printed out, enclosed in Perspex, up on the mantelpiece. They’ve got a mantelpiece in their bedroom. Sometimes when I have doubts about what I’m doing, things like them having a mantelpiece in their fucking bedroom give me a little kick up the arse. They’re so entitled. But what they think they’re entitled to and what I do are on different sides of the map.

  The picture shows Naomi in a hospital gown with newborn Prue clamped to her left breast. The husband stands to their left, the chunky hospital bed putting him a few feet behind them. They’re all smiling. Not Prue obviously. She looks so tiny. Naomi’s eyes are droopy, warm and lazy, like she’s on drugs. She probably was. I’ve not heard them talk much about her labour, how long it lasted, whether she was in pain. A silver canister of some gas is on his right-hand side. The first time I saw the image, near two years ago on her Instagram, I didn’t notice the scratches on the gas bottle. Or maybe I did, because it reminded me of the last scene of Jaws, the scuba tank in the shark’s teeth. The sheriff shooting it and the animal exploding. Maybe if the gas bottle hadn’t been in the picture I wouldn’t be here now in their bedroom. If I hadn’t thought of Sheriff Brody on the mast of the Orca, his relief at having overcome the monster haunting him, then the anger I felt in my chest when I saw those faces beaming at their baby, their perfect new baby, might have fizzled out as it did with all the other photos of them I’d looked at. I like Jaws. I’ve watched it at least a hundred times. The last place they put me, when I was a kid that is, only had two videos. Jaws and Terminator 2.

  A car parks on the street outside the house. I pick up the Perspex box with the photo in it and plant a kiss on Naomi’s neck, or as close as I can, before putting it back on the mantelpiece, about half a foot to the right of where I picked it up from, just to see if they’ll notice I’ve been amongst their things. I look at it again and see my lip-balm’s left a mark on the clear plastic. The bottom lip is clearly defined but the hair of my moustache has smudged the top lip so the shape will be misconstrued as a mark left by sticky fingers. My lips cover her chin, her neck, her chest and Prue fits into the bottom left-hand corner of my mouth. They won’t notice it’s moved. They never do.

  At the big window at the far end of their bedroom, I watch her getting out of the Nissan wearing a fitted jacket over T-shirt and jeans. She always looks well put together, not like the other mums at nursery. She has this running joke on her Instagram she’s done since P
rue was born where she posts a picture of herself in one of these expensive jackets or summer dresses with baby-sick or some puréed vegetables all over it, her with a sarcastic thumbs-up for the camera. It used to piss me off, showing off her fancy clothes, but I started to look forward to these pictures more than the others. Seeing her smile even though something she loved was ruined. She squirms across the back seat to get Prue and, from the way her legs are thrashing around, you can tell she’s struggling with the car seat. I could go and help her, take her leather handbag, lock the car for her, open the door and let her in.

  As she knocks the gate of the front garden open with her hip, Prue jiggling in her arms, her movements are heavier than usual, like she’s hurting. I should have left the house when I heard the car.

  The key rattles into the front door. The swish of the rubber draught excluder on the doormat. One of the builders laughs at something. I pad across the room towards the door, the hundred-year-old floorboards creaking under my work boots – she hates it when floorboards creak, especially at night. I’ve stayed the night once or twice, though I’ve not had the balls to come into this room when they’re sleeping in here, not yet. I don’t know if I’d be able to control myself. I have to stay in control or else everything I’ve done will be for nothing.