‘Hi, Mrs Culver,’ I say. ‘The boys. The twins. Oscar and Noah.’ Her expression tells me that she vaguely remembers me from this morning though her child-worn brain is probably yelling that it was a thousand years ago since we shook hands in the brightly-decorated classroom.
Mrs Culver scans the line-up. ‘I counted them all,’ she says. ‘Lilly, do you know where the twins have gone?’ Then she turns to me, ignoring what Lilly says. ‘Probably making water bombs in the boys’ loo.’
‘I think that Lilly knows . . .’ I look at the little girl. She’s trying to say something.
‘Speak up, Lilly,’ Mrs Culver snaps.
Lilly points inside the single-storey school building. I wink at her and grin. It will buy me points when we finally meet. I head off inside, leaving Mrs Culver to hand over the rest of the children to their parents.
Inside, it’s dark and cool and smells of powder paint, school lunches and farts. The wooden floors kick up an evocative scent as I stalk the corridors. Through glass squares in the classroom doors I see older children still gathering their belongings. There’ll be a stampede very soon. At the end of the corridor is a door with a sign on saying After School Club. A few kids have just gone in.
‘Oh, boys, you scared me half to death,’ I say, once inside.
The teacher, a man in his fifties, glances up from the work piled on his desk. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’ve come to pick up Oscar and Noah. I’m their new nanny. Come on, lads,’ I say. I need to get out of here. It’s stifling and airless, the oxygen having been sucked up by three hundred greedy kids.
The teacher takes off his glasses. ‘First I’ve heard of it. The boys always come to after-school club. Their mother fetches them at six.’
‘Not now she doesn’t,’ I say too brusquely and immediately turn him against me. ‘Look, I’m Zoe Harper. Claudia Morgan-Brown introduced me to Mrs Culver this morning and let her know the new situation.’
‘There are forms,’ the man says unhelpfully. ‘You’ll need to see the secretary.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Gone home,’ he says. ‘But the forms need to be signed by the parent so you won’t be able to take the boys today. Not without a form.’
‘Oh for heaven’s—’ Keep calm. ‘Oscar, Noah, will you please tell your teacher who I am?’
The boys just stare at me. They are pulling apart dried-up Playdoh and scattering it on the floor. You’d think he’d want to be rid of them.
‘Please?’ I beg. ‘You don’t understand. If I can’t pick up the boys, well, it just doesn’t look good on my first day at work.’ My arms dangle limply by my side. What they’d really like to do is hit the stupid old man.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Not my problem. I’ll have to ask you to leave now.’
In a flash of desperation, I march up to the boys and grab each of them by the hand. Without a word, they obediently follow me as I tug on their arms. Good lads! I think, inwardly cheering them for not making a fuss as we run out. Behind me, the teacher’s making one though.
Stop! Thief! Kidnap!
I hear him stumbling between chairs as he attempts a chase, but he’s too old to catch us. He yells for his assistant and phones for help as I charge off with Noah and Oscar.
As we head for the park, I have to remind myself that it’s not the done thing, stealing other people’s children.
*
We’re laughing about it later, of course, and she’s totally on my side.
‘Stupid secretary. I wrote her a letter. Sent her an email. Told her to circulate it to the staff. Even spoke to Mrs Culver before you started. And we met her this morning. God.’ Claudia has just got home from work. Dumped her keys, bag and shoes in the hallway. ‘Anyone would think you’d kidnapped them.’
I did.
‘That’s what some crusty old man said when I strode right out of there with them,’ I said with a wry laugh.
‘They phoned me immediately. I guess we can’t blame them for doing their job.’ And Claudia laughs – a beautiful laugh with white teeth and her head tipped back. Her neck is very pretty.
*
Later, in my bedroom, with the boys bathed and read to and tucked up in their own beds exhausted and happy with minty breath, I boot up my laptop. Speedily, I type an email and click send.
Then I set to unpacking the rest of my belongings. T-shirts and tops in one drawer, undies in another, all rather messily arranged. I think about the onerous task of packing it all up again every Friday evening. It seems ridiculous. Claudia wants me gone at weekends – I can understand they need their family time – but, in all honesty, I can’t afford to do that. She is so close to her due date.
I grab my laptop and make some notes. When I write ‘due date’, my finger hits the wrong key and it comes out as ‘die date’. I nibble on a broken nail. Eventually, with my computer balanced on my knee, I fall asleep fully dressed.
*
I wake later with a stiff neck. The clock beside the bed blinks two-twenty a.m. I stretch and straighten and slip out of my clothes. Completely naked, I stare at my body in the full-length mirror. I am all skin and bones. My empty hips jut out and my flat, almost concave tummy would be the envy of most women. I can’t even begin to imagine myself pregnant.
6
RUSS GOODALL WAS a skinny, nervous man. If he were a dog, Lorraine thought, he’d be a greyhound. Just being in the same room as him made her nervous, and that didn’t happen very often. She’d learnt, over the years – and especially recently – to emit a calmness and serenity that even Adam couldn’t upset. Not even his early mornings and ten-mile runs or the way he counted out exactly the right number of prunes and weighed muesli for breakfast, his obsession with drinking exactly eight bottles of mineral water daily as well as the routine thirty minutes of meditation (he’d even been known to do this at crime scenes) wavered her solid centre of gravity. But Russ Goodall, for all his puny frame and wispy orange hair, had her teetering in his skittish aura.
‘You sent her a good luck card.’ Lorraine was hedging her bets. Russ wasn’t such an uncommon name but unusual enough for it to be odd for Sally-Ann to have known two of them.
‘I told you, I don’t know anyone called Sally-Ann.’
‘You were named as next of kin in her pregnancy notes. Willow Park Medical Centre confirmed that you are the Russ Goodall Sally-Ann wrote in her file. You are also a patient at the surgery.’
‘They shouldn’t have. That’s a breach of confidentiality.’
‘Not when I have a court order it’s not.’ Lorraine was trying to breathe in the shallowest way she could without actually fainting. The room stank – a nauseating mix of body odour, rancid fat from a dirty frying pan on a single gas burner stove, and cigarette smoke. Sally-Ann’s parents must have been delighted when she brought him home for the first time. But oddly, the bedroom where Russ lived on the top floor of a large student-type house (even though he’d said he wasn’t a student) was incredibly neat. Just a million miles from clean.
‘Do you mind if I open a window?’ she asked. Russ shrugged and watched the detective struggle with the sash opening. Eventually it gave in to her determined shovings and slid up. Lorraine leant out and sucked in a lungful of fresh air. ‘So it’s easier for all of us if you just admit to knowing Sally-Ann. Then you can help me with what I need to know.’ She peered at the rubbish strewn on the flat roof below. Had Goodall chucked it there?
‘Why?’ he said. He lit a cigarette. He was sitting stiff and straight on the bed with his skinny and fragile-looking legs pinned together at the knees. His neck and shoulders shook, making his head tremble and bob like an ugly sweaty bloom. ‘What’s up?’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Lorraine turned towards him. She’d assumed he knew. ‘Sally-Ann is dead.’
*
‘That’s when he started crying. Full on. The works.’ Lorraine bit into a sausage roll and Adam picked bits out of his shop-bought lentil and bean salad as if it were
radioactive. He usually made his own. ‘How can you eat that shit?’
‘Surely that’s what I should be asking you?’ he said.
They’d stopped at a bench. The morning’s skim of ice had dissolved in the sun that had eventually broken through the clouds. It was freezing – too cold to be eating lunch outside – but they wanted the fresh air, the space, somewhere neutral to discuss the case. Twenty-four hours since the discovery and they were no further forward. Along with the team, each of them had been back to the scene several times, interviewed the neighbours, taken statements. And Lorraine could still smell the stink of Russ Goodall’s disgusting room in the fibres of her coat. She made a mental note to pick up some Febreze on the way home.
‘Anyway, after he’d calmed down, he agreed to help us. Thing is, no one could have faked the reaction he had when I told him the news. I genuinely believe he was clueless about her death.’
Adam raised his eyebrows with the plastic fork halfway to his mouth. ‘I’ll pretend you didn’t make that assumption,’ he said, and carried on eating.
‘His reaction was very genuine. He said he was the father of Sally-Ann’s baby and he agreed to give a DNA sample.’
‘But they weren’t living together.’ A statement rather than a question from Adam.
‘No. Neighbours say he visited Sally-Ann often.’ Lorraine brushed flakes of pastry off her trousers. ‘Apparently Sally-Ann’s parents were totally against their relationship and didn’t know that Goodall was the father of their daughter’s baby. Trust me, Adam, if one of our girls brought someone like him home, you’d have him taken out.’
‘You’re assuming too much again. Wait for the DNA test results before we label him as the father. Anyway, we don’t know who the real target was yet. Mother or baby.’
‘Or both,’ Lorraine added, devouring the last of her lunch. ‘And why wouldn’t he be the father? Sally-Ann had put as much in her medical notes.’
‘She’d crossed another name out before she wrote Goodall’s name in the file.’
‘Sally-Ann crossed it out?’ Lorraine said. ‘Now who’s making assumptions?’
Adam tossed the plastic container of supermarket salad into a nearby bin. He hadn’t finished it.
7
‘HOW WAS THE antenatal class?’ James asks. Annoyingly, he’s sipping on a glass of wine.
‘Fine. You should have come along.’ I say it too snappily and instantly regret it. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Anyway, don’t feel bad. There were only two other fathers there.’
With James having been at sea for most of my pregnancy, getting involved at this late stage would only highlight the fact that, unless I go into labour in the next few days, he’s not going to be around to see the birth of our daughter. We agreed that – or rather I agreed that – going it alone in terms of appointments and classes would make it easier all round. But I can’t say that I don’t miss the thought of him stroking my head while I lie supine on my mat, cushion under the small of my back and another under my knees, or massaging my shoulders while I practise my breathing techniques.
‘I came to your initial appointment. What more do you want?’ He says it with a wry smile, one that lifts one side of his mouth and not the other; one that adds little wrinkles around his eyes and makes me chuckle back.
‘That was big of you.’ I remember marching into the doctor’s office proudly clutching the plastic wand with the blue line that confirmed my newly discovered state – the beginning of the rest of our lives. ‘Though nothing much happened, did it? It wasn’t exactly hard for you to sit there.’ I must stop now, before I get upset. I have to block out of my mind the thought of doing all this alone. I knew what I was taking on when I married James – a full-on Naval career and two little boys. Instant family, instant lifestyle change. ‘You should try carrying this around.’ Hand goes to bump.
‘I carried your pregnancy folder when we left,’ James suggests but realises he’s taking the joke too far. ‘Why don’t you show me what strange yoga positions you learnt today, while the boys are busy?’ He winks at me and I know what he’s after.
‘James!’ I say, shocked. ‘Zoe’s upstairs and the twins could come in at any time.’
‘Would it hurt so much if I, you know, just leant you over . . .’ He takes me ever so lightly by the waist – or rather where my waist used to be – and guides me to the kitchen worktop. He leans me forward so I have to support myself with my palms on the wood. From behind, he puts his hands lightly on my legs and works them a little way up my dress. It feels good.
‘Stop it,’ I giggle. I bat his hands away. ‘Someone’s bound to come in.’
‘I could just . . .’ I hear him unzip. ‘Just . . . like this. It’d be over so quick.’
I know he’s right about that. It’s been ages. I turn and kiss him deeply. My belly is pressed between us and it feels so odd to have it wedged between us at such an intimate moment. I turn round again, my bump hanging low as I lean forward.
‘Quick then,’ I say, praying everything will be all right, praying I’m not going to blow everything I’ve ever wanted with one foolish act.
*
Zoe is already in the kitchen when I come downstairs the next morning. I’m running late for work. The boys are in their school uniforms eating scrambled eggs on toast. They have orange juice and a banana set beside them. I feel oddly expendable at the sight of this simple scene. How will I feel when I hand over my baby each morning when my maternity leave runs out?
‘I’m impressed,’ I say.
Zoe turns from the sink. She is silhouetted by the morning sun streaming through the window.
‘Looks chilly out,’ I add, noticing the heavy frost.
There’s a silence that I find awkward although Zoe doesn’t seem to. She goes about her business, swilling dishes and drying them up. The boys chatter together and there’s none of the usual shoving and bickering or refusing to eat unless it’s brightly-coloured sugary cereal. Are they acting like this to show me up, because even though they love me, they know I’m not their real mother?
Let’s be good for Zoe and horrid for her . . .
Their imaginary whispers make me shudder. Of course not, I think shamefully.
‘What time will you be home tonight?’ Zoe asks. She hangs the tea towel on the silver rail of the Aga.
‘We have a dishwasher for all that, you know,’ I say with a smile. She shrugs. ‘About six-thirty.’ And my paranoid mind is wondering why she wants to know. Is it so she can release the twins from their locked rooms? Evict the man she’s been having sex with all afternoon? Know when to stop rifling through my belongings or wake up from a long nap?
Oh, for God’s sake! I tell myself. It’s hormonal havoc this morning.
‘After I drop Oscar and Noah at school, I was going to go to the organic shop and buy some vegetables to make soup,’ Zoe tells me. ‘Would you and James like some for your supper as well?’
‘Thank you,’ I say, supposing it will be served with homemade bread, too. ‘Sounds delicious, but I’m not sure the boys will . . .’ I glance at them. They’re scraping their plates. ‘Well, we can try, can’t we?’ I try to sound jovial. The thing is, I bet Oscar and Noah will go mad for Zoe’s homemade soup. Before I know it, she’ll have them growing their own veg and making it themselves.
The drive to work gives me time to think. Sitting in traffic, my selfishness hits me head on. It’s what I wanted, isn’t it? The perfect family life. Aren’t I living my childhood dream? I have a husband who loves me, two sons who have accepted me as their mother, I have a good career and soon I’ll have a little baby girl of my own. My house is straight from Beautiful Homes magazine and I even have a nanny who, after only one day, is proving invaluable. I’m certainly going to need her on my team if life is to resemble anything like the way it’s been these last few years.
Who’d have thought, when I made that visit to two poor motherless boys, I’d end up marrying their father? I can’t help believing it was all me
ant to be, as if someone had scripted my life.
Mark is the only one in the office when I arrive, even though I’m a bit late. As team leader I have five staff to manage as well as other agency workers and development and protection teams with which to liaise. As soon as I step into the building, any thoughts of self-doubt or self-pity are swept away by the torrents of need beckoning to me from dozens of at-risk children all neatly contained in stacks of files. I wonder how far they would go to become part of my life, to become my child, my loved one. It’s something I think about most days. I dispel the guilt as I hang up my coat. It’s an impossible thought. I couldn’t take them all.
‘Morning,’ Mark says without looking up. It’s all open plan here but we have our own areas – not cubes as such because I believe in seeing the faces of my co-workers as we bicker and banter back and forth about cases and reality TV and where we’re going on holiday. I get a flutter in my belly as I imagine our next family trip. By summer, my little baby girl will be about eight months old.
‘Morning,’ I say. It comes out glumly. ‘Where’s Tina?’
‘Her child-minder’s sick. She’s had to take a detour via her mother’s house so she’ll be late.’ Mark doesn’t sound sympathetic. He has no children and isn’t likely to have a family any time soon. He’s been single as long as I’ve known him.
‘That’s annoying. She was going to come with me to the Lowes’ place this morning.’
‘You’ll have to put up with me again then.’ Mark drains his coffee mug. He drinks about ten cups a day. ‘Can’t have you going there alone. Not in your condition.’ Now that Christine Lowe has come home from hospital with her baby, our visits to her will be daily. In the past, she’s lashed out.
The first time I met her was soon after she’d had her second child. Within a week of her giving birth, we were rushing through the paperwork to take both children from her. Little boy, if I remember, and a two-year-old girl. Sweet baby with a mass of dark hair and purple welts across his legs. His sister was similarly decorated. That was about thirteen years ago. Since then she’s had one every couple of years and we’ve taken them all away from her.
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