Happy Ever After

by C. C. MacDonald

  Anyway, all that, what he did to my dog, wasn’t enough for him. Whenever I put on Facebook about something good happening to me, when I finally got my degree, holiday pictures, he’d send me one of those snake pictures.

  I’ve tried to tell you what happened as best I can. I hope it doesn’t scare you. Writing it hasn’t been easy.

  I never knew who it was she slept with at that party. If it is your husband, you need to go to the police now. That man is sick.

  Eliza Orsdall

  PS: If the police need to contact him, the only person who might have his number is his foster mother, Julie Trent-Smith. Her email is julie_t_smith@btinternet.com

  SEVEN

  29 weeks

  ‘You must be fucking joking me,’ Naomi says into cupped hands, index fingers pressing into the corners of her eyes. It’s quarter past six in the morning and Prue is packing clothes from a pile into Charlie’s leather holdall. He’s going to Manchester. He stands above his bag, a silhouette against the grey sky that hangs above the sea in the French window behind him.

  ‘It’s been in the diary. I put it in your calendar,’ he says, unable to look at her. She walks over to the bag, eyeballing him as if trying to speak to a rebellious child while Prue continues her work below them.

  ‘There has been a snowstorm forecast for weeks. The news says there will be chaos on the roads,’ he tries to interject but she closes him down, ‘and on the trains and planes and any other way that you can get anywhere. We have a child. I am really bloody pregnant.’ He turns away towards the window and sighs. Prue looks up.

  ‘This is so predictable,’ he says.

  ‘What?’ Prue watches them as if she were at a tennis match. Naomi always swore they’d never argue in front of her. It’s like he’s done this on purpose. Telling her about some work trip weeks before and doing his due diligence with all of their shared online calendars, but then not mentioning it again until he’s packing his bags for an eight o’clock train.

  ‘Why do we have to go through this fudging rigmarole every single time? I’m back tomorrow night. She’s at nursery today and tomorrow. You’ll be fine.’ She walks over to him at the window and pretends to look at the sea. ‘Maybe I don’t want you to go because I’m scared.’

  ‘There’s two months to go. The chances of you going into labour now are so slim and then what, when the baby comes? You want me having to make this sort of trip then? Leica and JBL are competing to buy the products. Teddy can drive the prices up but I have to be there at the negotiations. This is my work.’

  ‘Your work is more important than your family?’

  ‘It’s for our family. Everything I do is for our family. To make money so our kids can have as good a life as we do, better even.’

  ‘You’re so full of shit.’

  ‘The family that you wanted, at the exact time that you wanted it, because the whole world would implode if Naomi doesn’t get exactly what she wants exactly when she wants it, regardless of how much it’s fucked up my career.’

  Naomi feels the neurons vibrating behind her eyes. She tries to focus on the sea, tries not to get angry as he wheels out the greatest hits from their back catalogue of arguments. She has to make it clear to him that he absolutely cannot leave them, that they won’t be safe. But how can she do that without telling him the truth?

  ‘What if I fell and I had to go into hospital. What am I meant to do with Prue then?’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ He turns away from her and goes over to his bag. Prue’s now taken everything out of it. ‘Will you help me put this all back, Prudy? Then we can have a quick juice.’ Bribing arsehole, Naomi thinks. ‘And then Daddy can get off to the station to go to his important work meeting that he’s doing for you and Mummy and the baby.’ He glances up at Naomi and she shakes her head, disgusted. He shoves things back into the bag, pants, shirts, a pair of New Balance trainers, picks it up and checks his travelling outfit in the mirror. Prue swings on the handle of the holdall, giggling, like packing Daddy’s bag is the most incredible thrill-ride. Naomi glances down at the mat on the floor that covers the loose floorboard where she found the baby monitor.

  ‘You’ll get stuck. You won’t be back for days. I won’t be able to cope.’ Charlie’s seething, Naomi’s anxiety, particularly when it interferes with his plans, can more or less be guaranteed to make him furious. Prue yanks the bag out of his hand now and Naomi can see a hint of venom as he grabs their daughter’s hand and throws it off. The little girl looks upset so Charlie seems to reset himself and picks her up, making faces in the mirror, holding her cheek to his.

  ‘Daddy’s got an app on his phone, sweetheart. It’s the weather app that film crews use. Film crews who, if they get the weather wrong, lose millions of pounds, and the app says that the storm’s not coming for three days, when I’ll be safely back home with you and Mummy.’ His eyes shift to look at Naomi in the mirror. She can’t look at him so she turns away and goes into the wardrobe. She rakes at a few of her dresses, dresses that she hasn’t got a chance of getting into for a year at least, and plunges her head into them, drinking in the smell of dust and washing powder. She has to do something. Should she tell him? Could she tell him? Is that the only way to stop him going?

  ‘If you go, something terrible is going to happen,’ she says, voice full of anguish as she walks back into the bedroom, but he’s gone. She hears the fridge door slam shut downstairs, Charlie’s shoes padding heavily on the wooden floor followed by the patter of Prue’s bare feet. The door opens.

  ‘Bye,’ he calls up the stairs to Naomi, sarcastically cheery.

  ‘Bye, Daddy,’ Prue shouts after him. The door slams. Naomi watches him walk out on to the street and along towards the train station, the clouds more and more ominous with every moment.

  They’re alone now.

  EIGHT

  Charlie’s app was wrong. Naomi knew it would be. The snow came in the evening after he left and has only just stopped, thirty-six hours later. It’s all over the country and, as always happens in England, the travel infrastructure has decided it’s the beginning of the next ice age. Charlie was meant to be back last night but instead he’s holed up in a boutique hotel in Manchester with Teddy. They’re trying to find someone to give them a lift back. He’s very confident that that will happen. He was very confident about the fucking app, she thinks.

  They’re on the beach, Prue strapped to her back in the baby carrier. She breathes through a snotty nose into her mother’s ear and names things as she sees them, ‘birdie’, ‘helicopter’, ‘man running’. It’s minus two degrees and the beach is covered in a thick layer of snow. She’s never seen snow on a beach before. It looks like a lunar landscape, the salt flats she saw in Bolivia or the aftermath of the apocalypse, the snow grey like ash against the sand. There’s no give to the ground under her and her wellingtons slide around on the frozen sand.

  Prue woke at four thirty this morning and wouldn’t go back to sleep. Naomi couldn’t be bothered to Google why this could be the case. Knowing why something’s happening doesn’t help you stop it, she’s learnt. Nursery was closed yesterday and trying to keep an obstreperous toddler entertained for a whole day inside was torture for both of them, so this morning, as soon as Naomi thought it was warm enough, she wrapped Prue up in so many layers she could barely move her limbs and dragged her out into the cold. Thankfully nursery’s open today, so she won’t have to do another twenty-four hours on her own.

  If Lex Palmstrom wanted to come for them, now would be perfect. Barely a soul on the beach, no one to hear her if she called for help. She’s so tired of trying to work out why he’s toying with them like this, she almost wants whatever it is to happen.

  Eliza’s email was shocking, frightening, but by now Naomi wasn’t surprised to hear he’d gone to such lengths. She loses her footing on an icy rock and stumbles forward, catching herself on the edge of the concrete launch.

  ‘Not worry,’ Prue says.

  ‘Not worry, darling.�
� She hears a sound over her shoulder and spins round to see a bike coming fast along the promenade. The rider, an elderly man, waves at them as he goes past. Prue says ‘Morning’ to him, far too quietly for him to hear. He’s brave, Naomi thinks. There are no buses on the roads, barely any cars. The whole town has come to a standstill. Perhaps she and Prue are safe then. If no one else can travel then maybe he’ll be stuck as well. She looks at the road above the beach, no yellow van. But after speaking to his foster mother on the phone she has no doubt that if he wanted to get to her, he would find a way. ‘Dogged,’ was the word she used.

  She has a scan at the hospital this afternoon. They wanted her to have another one around thirty weeks because of the baby’s growth rate. She’s not as worried about it as the other scans; now she can feel the baby kicking wildly and doing cartwheels inside her, far more active than Prue ever was, she somehow feels confident that the baby, despite being on the small side, is going to be fine. Perhaps she’ll get a cab to the hospital if there’s a company that have four-by-fours to get through the snow. It’s walking distance, but today she doesn’t want to take any chances.

  Prue begins to beat her mother’s shoulders and chant, ‘Out, out, out.’ She doesn’t like to be constrained for too long. Naomi walks up the concrete launch and up the road that leads away from the beach.

  ‘Clouds,’ Prue says, pointing at the banks of snow piled on garden walls as Naomi carries her children towards nursery.

  NINE

  A skinny man in a long grey coat shovels snow out of the entrance to the Bank of Friendship. The paths around the park have been cleared and gritted but the thick snowfall seems more virginal than in the rest of town. Uggy ran ten kilometres this morning and now her right foot hurts. The beach was harder than the pavement. She stands in the doorway blocking a gaggle of eager toddlers in like a flood defence about to be overwhelmed. It’s just after lunch and the temperature’s gone up to three degrees so they’ve decided to take the kids out to build some snowmen.

  Uggy escorts them, one by one, past a patch of ice that the skinny man’s still working on. Jess and Sophie bring up the rear of the group, chatting to each other about their weekend as if the children aren’t even there. She’s sick of them, sick of all of the people she works with. She needs to get away from here.

  The boys and girls run and stumble on to the snow-covered grass, clad in their huge coats, hats, scarves and the nursery-issue yellow high-visibility vests. Two of the littler ones, Ian and Rocky, bend down on to the floor and appear to be listening to the sound of the grass cracking as other children walk on it. Jess hauls them up to their feet, trampling their blue-eyed curiosity. Elsie, such a pretty little girl, one of the trendies’ children, brushes snow off the shoulders of her embroidered coat. And Prue runs circles round a snowman that someone’s already built singing, ‘Circle, circle, circle.’

  ‘Didn’t her mum want her kept in?’ Jess asks Uggy, chewing gum.

  ‘She can’t be in the room all of the day when the other children are playing in the snow.’

  ‘Not what the mum said, though.’ Jess hates Uggy because she’s not overweight.

  ‘I asked Lisa.’ She knows that will shut Jess up and it does. She goes back over to her best friend Sophie to gossip about their foreign co-worker.

  Uggy looks over to see Prue about to bite into a stone she’s taken off the front of the snowman. Uggy runs over, almost slipping on the way, and grabs Prue’s wrist to stop her. Prue goes for another bite, so Uggy takes the stone from her and puts it in her coat pocket. Prue stamps her feet in indignation and Jess and Sophie laugh at her. The little girl smiles wide and toothy at how hilarious she must be. Uggy’s expression remains frozen.

  Holding Prue’s wrist in her narrow hand, she looks up at a copse of leafless trees about fifty metres ahead of them. They seem long-dead against a desert of snow. A man stands amongst them. A big man in a plaid shirt.

  TEN

  Edmund, as his nametag proclaims him, flings some paper towels on to Naomi’s stomach. The dark room smells musty. Naomi tries not to assume it’s the sonographer’s body odour but, looking at him again, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion. She still can’t believe it’s a man doing the scan today. There are some jobs where there shouldn’t be equality, she thinks, however sexist that might be. He barely said hello to her when she walked in, just pointed at the hospital chair for her to sit in and asked her to pull her shirt up.

  Naomi pulls the waistband of her maternity jeans down and tucks the paper towels in. The sonographer turns round and, without any preamble, squirts ice-cold gel on to her bump and uses the scanner to move it around her belly. At least they didn’t cancel the scan because of the snow, she thinks, trying to make herself feel less uncomfortable in the dark room with this stinking, rude man.

  On the screen in front of her she sees her baby. It’s more clearly human now, squashed up against the walls of its little cave. Button nose, spherical belly, stick-thin limbs. The scanner moves around as he makes his measurements, the perspective changing so she doesn’t get a clear view again for some time. She feels on edge, fingers running along the underside of the chair until she feels some ancient chewing gum and pulls her hand away. She wants to ask him how the baby is but he seems incapable of looking at her, subsumed by manic clicking on his machine. The screen shows a view as if she were looking under the baby’s legs. Naomi can’t make out a penis. She thought she might ask the sonographer to tell her the baby’s sex, thought it might make her feel more in control, but she doesn’t want to remember finding out something so monumental from such a horrible man.

  The screen shows a close-up of the baby’s head. A side-profile of its brain, large in its skull. Its personality, its prejudices, its intelligence, its abilities, so much of what will shape its whole life wrapped into this tiny blob of organic matter. Half of it comes from her.

  ‘Very small baby,’ he says.

  ‘How small?’

  ‘You’re twenty-nine weeks and six days and you’re measuring at about twenty-six weeks.’

  ‘And what’s that in an actual weight?’ Naomi asks, trying to temper her disdain for the man’s disinterested tone.

  ‘Two and a quarter pounds. At full term, thirty-seven weeks, the baby will be at best six pounds.’

  ‘But there’s still lots of time to grow.’ He takes the scanner away from her belly and retreats further into his screen.

  ‘I’m going to make a note of all this and we can refer it to your midwife. There’s information on the NHS website.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Naomi wipes the gel off her belly and pulls herself up on the chair. ‘You know how it works. I’m asking you, now, while I am actually in a room with a human being who works at the hospital. What does this mean?’ The man takes her anger in his stride. He doesn’t turn to her but she can see how heavy his eyelids are, he looks like he hasn’t slept for years.

  ‘If it’s under six pounds at full term the doctors will induce you because it’s possible the—’ Naomi’s phone buzzes loudly, stopping the man momentarily. ‘It’s possible the placenta is not functioning properly and that could be a risk for the baby.’ He stands up and goes to the back of the room where the printer has just clunked into life.

  Naomi pulls her top over her bump and fishes into her pocket for her phone. When she sees the screen she sits bolt upright.

  A message from ‘Sean’. She gets down off the seat and walks out of the dark room into the strip-lit corridor. She clicks on to the message. It’s a video. The sound of wind. Prue picking up piles of snow and moving them into a big mound to make a snowman. His voice from behind the camera. His Yorkshire accent, fake of course, she now realises.

  ‘Wave to Mummy, Prue,’ it says, void of feeling. Prue looks round, face red with the cold, but smiling, before she pats snow in her attempt to make a snowman. Then the video ends. Naomi stumbles over to the far side of the waiting room and collapses down into a plastic chair. The sonographer comes out
into the corridor and thrusts her pregnancy notes at her. She must have turned white because even he seems concerned.

  ‘Do you need me to get you a midwife?’ She smiles at him, eyes manic.

  ‘No, no thanks.’ The man disappears back into his darkened room. She gets another text:

  Charlie asked me to pick Prue up.

  He’s got low battery. He said if you call his phone, if you contact him, it will die.

  Naomi stares at a poster that lists all the benefits of holding your newborn baby against your bare skin and sends a reply.

  Bring her home.

  I’ll give you what you want.

  ELEVEN

  Charlie looks over the dashboard of the Land Rover at the motorway, a mass of hazard lights and dirty snow. Teddy’s asleep in the palatial back seat leaving Charlie in the passenger seat next to ‘Big Phil’, the foreman of the factory that’s signed on to start building their products, who’s giving them a lift back to London. Phil is a huge Manchester United fan and since Teddy offered up Charlie as a football guy, he’s spent the whole journey telling Charlie his views on Jose Mourinho and how he’s destroying the history of his club. When he’d exhausted and re-exhausted that topic, he insisted on them working out their greatest combined Manchester United teams for each decade together. Big Phil contributed a lot more than Charlie to this particular car-game. The roads aren’t half as precarious as the news reports said they’d be, but the journey to the outskirts of London has still taken them the best part of seven hours.

  Charlie texted Naomi when they left, early this morning, to tell her that they were getting a lift, but was non-committal as to whether he’d be back this evening. Teddy has offered the spare room in his Clerkenwell penthouse if the trains to Kent are all suspended. Charlie feels terrible for missing the scan today and she hasn’t texted him about it so his assumption is that whenever he gets home, despite having busted a gut to make the journey, she’s going to be furious with him. He desperately wants to see her, and Prue. He’s missed them. Far more than he usually does when he’s had to go away.