Happy Ever After

by C. C. MacDonald

  It was after the second time she met DC Crawford, when it became clear the police weren’t going to help her, that the seeds of the idea were planted and then, after she met Eliza, she became more and more certain that killing him was the only way to end it. She thought the hardest part would be pulling the trigger. She’d only been able to practise, firing into a watermelon, twenty or so times because she had no way of refilling the gas in the airgun. She’d pictured his face on the melon. The firearms forums she read said that with an airgun, to make certain, it would have to be in the eye so she tried to harden herself to the idea of doing something so brutal, to ensure that at the key moment she wouldn’t lose her nerve. But when it came to it, it was easy. He’d just held a Stanley knife up to her daughter’s throat. He deserved it, for that and for everything he’d done to them. Perhaps, deep down, it was what he truly wanted.

  ‘Did the police say anything about your involvement?’ Naomi asks.

  ‘They said you asked them not to charge me,’ Uggy says, a hint of a challenge in her eyes. She reaches down into her bag and gets out an enormous plastic canister of water that she sucks out of. ‘They asked if we’d met outside of the nursery. To talk about the investigation. I told them that we did not.’ Naomi feels a fluttering of relief in her chest.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You say you had no choice.’ She looks Naomi straight in the eyes, devoid of emotion. Naomi nods and smiles back at her. The baby moves inside her, barrelling across her belly from left to right, liberated by the news that it could be finally over.

  BIRTH

  * * *

  ONE

  They decided to keep the sofa they inherited with the house. Charlie had it recovered by a mate of Tayo’s, he did them a deal for reupholstering the cushions of their new teal one after they were slashed, so now it’s transformed from a dirty cream colour to a sleek gun-metal grey – dark colours bear up much better under children’s grubby little hands, Naomi had read online. The floorboards have been sanded and lacquered and are now the colour of golden syrup. The house was finished just in time.

  Naomi looks down at her baby daughter, clamped to her breast, all snuffles and lip-smacking. Prue’s next to them, on the edge of the sofa, eyes glued to Moana for the umpteenth time. Naomi’s strict ten-minutes-per-day television allocation has been radically revised since the baby was born.

  Today would have been her due date but Isla came four weeks early. It wasn’t as Naomi planned, the doctors decided the baby was measuring too small so they attempted to induce her to go into labour. They induced her twice and, when the baby still hadn’t come, they booked her in for a caesarean. Naomi was furious. After everything she’d been through, giving birth would have been a walk in the park. The C-section was peculiar, watching her little baby be lifted out of her and held aloft like the opening of The Lion King before being plonked on to her chest. But most importantly she was born healthy. They had to stay in hospital for a week as a precaution because she wasn’t full term, which was difficult because Prue was playing up at home for Naomi’s mum, who had come to help out.

  Prue, still fixed on the screen, puts a hand on her mother’s thigh and Naomi’s chest swells with love. She glances outside. She wants Charlie to take a photo of this perfect moment but he’s in the back garden, struggling to put together the playhouse that they’ve told Prue that Isla brought her as a present.

  He catches her eye and she ushers him in. The baby detaches from her right breast so she flips her over on to her other one. Her tiny lips search around for the nipple, Naomi pinches it towards her mouth and she latches on. Isla’s a good eater and breastfeeding hasn’t been quite as painful as it was with Prue. The baby’s only feeding twice a night now and Charlie’s shifted his work day around so he’s been around almost all the time during the day. Naomi feels better rested now than she did throughout her whole pregnancy.

  Charlie rumbles in and settles himself on the floor in front of the sofa. He goes to nibble Prue’s ankle and she bats him off without taking her eyes off the film. He glances up at Naomi and mouths OK? and she smiles, sleepy and content. She loves the way breastfeeding makes her feel, drunk almost, a-large-glass-of-red-wine drunk with happiness. Charlie settles himself down into their Berber-style rug and an image splashes into her head. Lex Palmstrom sprawled on the floor, skin blanching as blood drips out of his head like a broken tap. She doesn’t feel a fleck of remorse.

  The CPS confirmed that she acted in self-defence. DC Crawford has even been over to meet the baby and offered her telephone numbers for victim support counselling. Naomi was being paranoid that she was ever suspected. The detective was merely doing her due diligence. No charges were brought against Uggy either as it was seen that she was under the influence of a coercive relationship. The council offered her temporary accommodation but Naomi’s arranged for her to live in the annexe in Matilda’s garden. Matilda seems to like having her around so perhaps that will become more permanent.

  Charlie’s deal has gone through, although it emerged, in the investigation into Lex Palmstrom’s activities, that he’d been stealing printouts of designs from Charlie’s office and trying to sell them to various competitors. Charlie’s convinced that it must have been him that ruined everything back when Prue was first born, he always suspected foul play, although there was nothing in Palmstrom’s ‘notes’, as the police have referred to them, about what happened with Burman VR. The police haven’t given them many details. DC Crawford showed her a few pictures of what they’d found. A screenshot they found pinned to the back of his van taken from Naomi’s friend Alli’s Facebook wall of a man-mountain Norwegian model with a blond beard with Naomi tagged in a comment saying, ‘Found your perfect man.’ A printout of the anti-pigeon poem she wrote at school and had posted on her Instagram. It seems he was following their lives online for more than a year before he moved down to Kent to follow them ‘in real life’. Naomi’s taken the whole family off social media.

  There was also a picture of his sister Karin. She was wearing an Eels T-shirt and holding a Powerpuff Girls rucksack. She was as beautiful as everyone had said.

  Charlie’s hair tickles Naomi’s bare foot. She’s not sure how he feels about what happened. He keeps apologising and seems to think it’s vital she knows that what happened between him and that girl was consensual. When the police asked Naomi about the ambiguity in Karin’s messages to Charlie she’d never been in any doubt. Charlie can get angry, like anyone, but he would never do something like that. There’ve been moments in the last few weeks where she thought about what Lex Palmstrom said, about her husband being responsible for Karin’s death, but having betrayed him in the way she has she finds it impossible to sit in any kind of moral judgement of him. She’s a grown woman, a mother, and she made the most heinous mistake, driven entirely by her own selfish desires. He was only fifteen, just a boy, a stupid, thoughtless boy.

  He believed her story about Sean, that he’d insisted on buying her a coffee, that he’d brazenly flirted with her and would have propositioned her if she hadn’t closed him down. It fit with the ‘Sali’ that he’d known. He wasn’t even angry, the events seeming to have robbed him of the ability to know which emotion to feel. If Isla were to grow up half a foot taller than her, or with white-blonde hair that people wanted to know the provenance of, she’s sure he wouldn’t suspect anything. It’s always been him that lied to her and he’d never think her capable of that sort of deception. She never would have thought it of herself either.

  She gave him one opportunity, told him, as their daughter lay sleeping in an incubator a few hours after she was born, that she would answer any questions he had about everything that happened with the person they knew as Sean Salinger then and there, but that after that, they had to move on as a family. He didn’t want to ask her anything. He said he was sorry for the hundredth time and that he too wanted to treat Isla’s birth as a chance for them to start afresh. Naomi knew how cynical it was, he was never going to ru
in that moment for them so she was robbing him of any sense of closure, but she did it for him. It’s not right to tell someone the truth if it will destroy them.

  She looks at the straight line of his shoulders that have lost their hang-dog roundness and now sit proudly on top of his body, puffed up by lots of business voices telling him how wonderful he is. Even if he did know, if they somehow knew for definite that Charlie wasn’t Isla’s father, would he leave them? She couldn’t blame him but she wonders. There’s talk of investors wanting him to set up a larger, more far-reaching design operation. Charlie chuckles at something the God character in Moana says. He had a plan for his life as well and it’s finally coming together.

  Prue tumbles into her mother and squidges her still wobbly tummy, giggling. Charlie looks round at Naomi again and they smile at each other like the happiest two people in the world. The perfect family, the one she’s always dreamt of.

  Isla stares up at Naomi, still snuffling away as she drains the last of the milk. She’s got Charlie’s eyes. That’s what everyone says, anyway.

  TWO

  www.questioning.com.au/mental-health-222830

  Q: Is Psychopathy Genetic?

  A: Dr Gina Felutti

  Yes and no. Certain genes predispose the condition and when a number of them occur in the same person they can lead to psychopathy. However, it’s not like a hereditary disease where an abnormality in one distinct gene can be passed from parent to child (e.g. cystic fibrosis).

  But this genetic predisposition for psychopathy that some may inherit, particularly if both parents carry this selection of genes, may indeed, when pushed to the edge by environmental factors such as trauma, neglect or abuse, particularly in key developmental stages in childhood or adolescence, cause a psychopathic personality to emerge and to elicit severe antisocial behaviour problems such as theft, manipulation or murder.

  However, it’s important to note that people can have many aspects of psychopathy without being full-fledged psychopaths. Like all mental abnormalities, psychopathy functions on a spectrum.

  ‘That’s bright,’ Charlie says, pulling the pillow over his face.

  ‘Sorry, my love.’ Naomi clicks her phone into blackness. She puts a finger into the sleeping Isla’s palm. Her tiny fingers close around it.

  THREE

  The kitchen looks post-apocalyptic. Naomi and the children have gone to the playgroup at Ladybird’s Landing and Charlie’s been left alone in the house for the first time in what seems like decades. He was hoping to get some emails done, Teddy called twice yesterday and he needs to follow-up, but he can’t leave the house like this. It’s fair to say he hadn’t been at all prepared for quite how little time he’d have with a toddler and a newborn.

  Naomi’s up and about now after having been sofa-bound while recovering from the C-section but Charlie is still dealing with the capricious Prue almost full time while Naomi focuses on Isla. It’s made him realise how much Naomi did for Prue that he never really noticed, washing, sorting her clothes, buying whichever food she’s decided she’ll eat each week. There are times when Charlie thinks about what would have happened if he’d lost them, Naomi and Isla. He doesn’t know how Prue and he would have struggled on. There are moments, when he looks at his wife staring into his infant daughter’s eyes, where he can understand how that man, his friend Sali, Lex Palmstrom, could become so twisted by losing everything he loved in the world. Charlie doesn’t feel as much rage towards him as he should.

  He starts washing up the stack of crusty plastic bowls that have built up in and around the sink. He thinks about Karin. He liked her, all the boys at his school did. He should have been nicer to her after they were together but there were older boys that would have resented him for sleeping with her so he kept his head down. When she told him she was pregnant, of course he should have helped her, but the lads he hung around with would have ripped him to shreds over it. And he was right, when the rumour got out about her getting pregnant, the hunt for the baby’s father consumed the whole school. Charlie could see how disastrous for him it would be if people found out the truth so when the spotlight threatened to land on him he did something he shouldn’t have done. He told someone in another year, a boy whose social status meant they were bound to claim it as their own hot gossip, that Karin had had an abortion. The scandal spread like a pandemic and no one cared about who the father was any more.

  When he heard she’d killed herself it all felt too big, too grown-up, to come to terms with, he was taking GCSEs early and going to football trials at professional clubs, he didn’t have the capacity to deal with something so tragic. In truth, until Lex came into their lives, he’d never even considered that he might have been in some way responsible for her death.

  He scrubs grains of dried-on Weetabix as hard as he can with a scourer but they refuse to budge. He reaches for wire wool and begins scraping the plastic. He should start designing kids’ products, it’s a huge market, very lucrative. There’s no use looking back. You can’t change the past.

  There’s a knock at the door. Naomi must have ordered another baby-gizmo that they don’t need. He opens the door and there’s a well-dressed, middle-aged man standing there. He holds a cardboard parcel out in front of him but he doesn’t look like a deliveryman.

  ‘Charles Fallon?’ he says. Charlie nods and the man thrusts the box towards him. Charlie takes it and looks at the street to see if there’s a delivery van, a brand name he might recognise. An old Jag purrs on the pavement, the sea angry with foam behind it.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says to the man, who does a little nod, turns and heads back towards his car. Charlie closes the door and walks back towards the kitchen. He shifts a chopping board, strewn with the empty husks of an avocado, into the sink and puts the box down on the kitchen island. He studies the postmark:

  Wilberforce & Kay Solicitors

  11 Upper Brook Street

  Ipswich

  IP1 3GT

  Charlie takes up a buttery knife, cuts the tape and opens the parcel. A note on the same firm’s headed paper:

  To Mr Charles T. Fallon,

  Enclosed is a bequest from the estate of Mr Alexander Palmstrom.

  Yours sincerely,

  R. G.Wilberforce

  Charlie holds the note up against the light and realises his hands are shaking. He looks into the parcel and pulls out a smaller box, wrapped in expensive-looking black tissue paper and sealed with a gold sticker. He puts it back in the parcel. The man was a psychopath who wanted to ruin his life. Whatever is in that box is going to damage his family irreparably. Charlie takes the parcel out to the front garden, opens the wheelie bin and drops it in inside.

  Back in the house he returns to the washing-up. He scrubs at the pink bowl, still ingrained with fragments of cereal, scrubs it until the metal starts to take divots out of the bottom before putting it on the drying rack. A pigeon lands on top of the playhouse in the garden and looks straight at him.

  He flicks the bubbles off his hand and almost runs back out to the front garden. He flips open the lid of the bin, retrieves the parcel, goes back inside and puts it on the kitchen island. He rips the tissue paper off the small package and stares at the label.

  Home DNA Paternity Test Kit

  99% accurate.

  The key turns in the front door. The sound of Prue busying into the hall, Isla whimpering.

  ‘I forgot the baby-bag,’ Naomi calls down the hallway. He hears her grabbing together various things, calling Prue to follow her and leaving the house, the lock clicking behind her.

  Charlie places the DNA test back in the parcel and closes the lid.

  VINTAGE – home to the world’s greatest authors and books. Where new writers are discovered, bestselling books are found and yesterday’s classics revived for a new generation of readers.

  Our authors represent the very best in creativity and quality and have won the most prestigious prizes the book world has to offer including the Man Booker, the Samuel Johnson and
the Nobel.

  Born in New York in 1974, and arriving in London in 1990, VINTAGE publishes beautiful books with the very best design for people who love to read.

  @vintagebooks

  penguin.co.uk/vintage

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  VINTAGE

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  Harvill Secker is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Copyright © Chris MacDonald 2020

  Cover design by Dan Mogford. Cover photograph © Getty Images