by Daisy Pearce
ALSO BY DAISY PEARCE
The Silence
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Daisy Pearce
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542018920
ISBN-10: 1542018927
Cover design by Tom Sanderson
For Poppy, my North Star
CONTENTS
Start Reading
Samantha – Now
Frances – Now
Samantha – Now
Frances – Now
Samantha – Then
Frances – Now
Samantha – Then
Frances – Now
Samantha – Now
Frances – Now
Samantha – Now
Frances – Now
Samantha – Now
Frances – Now
Samantha – Now
Frances – Now
Samantha – Now
Frances – Now
Samantha – Now
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
‘One, two, three, four,
Rattlesnake hunters knocking at your door.
Give them meat and give them bone,
And pray that they leave you alone.’
Samantha – Now
Start with a joke, they’d told him, and so he did. It was the only joke he knew.
‘Why is a woman like a vet’s finger? Because they’re both stuck up bitches.’
The wedding speech went downhill from there. Six months later I gave birth to our daughter, and three days after that he left, moving back to his parents’ in Northampton. I never heard from him again. So for a time it was just me and Elizabeth, and now it is just me.
Her name was Elizabeth but I always called her Edie. Ee-dee, like the percussion of a heartbeat. The drum of her feet on the stairs that led to her bedroom. Ee-dee. It was a fanciful, wistful name, conjuring up images of beatniks and poetry and dappled sunlight on skin. My girl, my Edie, she was not like that. She was a dagger, a thorn, the upturned tack embedded in your heel. Never still, a loose-limbed nail-biter with thick dark hair and round eyes, permanently worried.
After Edie first went missing, I shook for days. I lay in bed, curled on my side with my knees tucked up to my chest, and I trembled so much it looked like a seizure. The doctor told me it was adrenaline, the body’s way of coping with the shock. As a kid I’d once witnessed a storm take out the power line of our house. The cable had crackled and snapped and twisted like a snake. My daddy had told me that if I touched it, I’d be barbecued meat. Lying there in my bed, the covers pooled around my feet, body jerking with shock, I felt that same frantic current pass through me.
I still have something from that time: a shopping list that I keep in a drawer. My handwriting’s a spidery crawl across the page, almost without cohesion, sliding on a downward tilt. There is nothing steady about it, and it frightens me a little. That’s why I keep it. To remind me of how bad it was, those first days after she’d gone. My hands are still shaking now.
My pregnancy was a nine-month-long dash to the toilet, me bilious and woozy, barely able to hold anything down. Try ginger, they told me in the baby group, which I attended alone. Try peppermint. Try yoga. Try going and fucking yourselves, I thought, feeling the slow burn of bile rising in my throat.
When Edie was born, I was terrified. It wasn’t the blood or the way it seemed to coat everything with its coppery odour. I wasn’t afraid of the pain either, not even when it felt as though my spine were filled with crushed glass.
I was afraid of her. The baby.
The midwife who passed her to me whispered, ‘She’s beautiful’, told me she was a perfect little girl, but I wasn’t able to see it. I was terrified of Edie; the weight of her, glossy and slick as a baby seal, coated in a waxy vernix. She opened her mouth and instead of the primal howl I had been expecting, she began to mewl like a kitten, tiny fingers clenching and unclenching, her plump face crimson and crushed-looking, irritable. I lay back on the pillows feeling hollowed out. In that moment I wished I could go back in time and undo everything, starting with Mark Hudson and his stupid promises to pull out of me, delivered with his fuggy, alcohol-laced breath. To a time before then even, to ever meeting him, to ever going to the bus stop on that rainy Tuesday, trying to hide behind my Just Seventeen magazine and risking sly peeks at him over the pages. Imagine how I feel now, looking back at myself, at the young woman in the past, this new mother, thinking that I wished I could undo it all.
Talk about a life sentence.
Frances – Now
I’m trying not to look at him, but his tears compel me. He has been on the phone for so long our food has grown cold and hardened on our plates. Outside, a car alarm starts bleating waa, waa, waa, desperate for attention. William cries silently, wiping his face with the back of his hand. I clench my fists beneath the table hard enough to leave crescent moon imprints in my palms.
‘What is it?’
‘Mum.’ His voice is heavy, like tar. ‘She’s had a fall. It sounds bad. Alex said she’s been taken to hospital. Thank God he was there.’
He’s always there. William’s younger brother, Alex. The little boy who never grew up and left home. What is he now? Thirty?
‘William, I—’
‘I’m sorry, Frances. Can we just – I need to. . .’
He stands up, runs his fingers through his dark hair. In the candlelight his features soften, eyes glittering, heavy brows drawn together. ‘Have we got any brandy?’
‘Top shelf,’ I tell him. I pick up my phone, put it down again. I’m impatient, sparking with nervous energy. My phone is an unexploded bomb.
I found you out, I want to say. Rattlesnake.
But I don’t say these things. I can hear William sobbing hoarsely in the kitchen. She’s not even dead yet! I don’t say that either. Of course not. Instead I go through and sit with him on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor and drink a brandy and carefully I tease the story out of him. We’re talking in whispers, even though the little box room above us – the one I’ve been tentatively referring to as our ‘future nursery’ since we moved in – remains resolutely empty, except for the teetering files and William’s weights in there, gathering dust. He cups his brandy in his hand, holds it close to his chest.
‘Alex found her at the bottom of the stairs. He said there was so much blood he was sure she was dead.’
‘What have the doctors said?’
‘They’re still there, running tests. God love the NHS.’ He groans. ‘Ah, Jesus. It’s so hard, Frances. She’s only in her seventies. It’s too soon for – for all this shit.’
‘I know, I know. Will you go down there, do you think?’
‘Not sure.’
He tugs at his hair, a habit I’ve seen before. My stomach curls a little. It’s a micro-gesture, and he’s unaware of it. Deceit. I’ve come to know it well.
‘You don’t have to decide yet. Get some sleep tonight if you can, speak to Alex in the morning. Things might not look so bad once you’ve got the right information.’
‘Knowledge is power.’
It
certainly is, I think, venomously. Then, out loud, ‘Do you want to come to bed?’
‘Nah. I won’t sleep now. My brain’s rushing all over the place. Think I’ll get some work done. Do you mind?’
‘Of course not.’
One of the other things in the box room is William’s desk and computer, used mainly for his accountancy work and occasional game of online poker. It was the poker I was concerned about, initially. I’d discovered the slow-burning hole in our finances completely by accident, and even though he told me it was just a bad month for expenses I saw that little gesture again – one hand reaching to pull the ends of his hair – and I knew different.
After we sold our three-bedroomed house last year and moved to this one – smaller, cheaper, more comfortable – I started to put aside a little nest egg, carefully curated for ‘when the baby comes’. Once a month I add a bit more to the pot, and William does the same, so that when the day comes it’ll be one aspect we won’t need to worry about. Because that day has to be soon, right? Married two years, together for six. I’m thirty-three this year. It’s not a race, William keeps saying, we’ve still got time. Meanwhile the box room exists as an outlier, dust motes spinning in empty afternoon sunlight.
Thing is, I’ve started to notice that the nest egg is shrinking. First by a little, then a little more, and a little more. I’ve rarely checked the balance – as far as we’ve been concerned, it’s off-limits until the day my waters break and, besides, we have other money. It’s a saving, right? So, where’s it going?
Outwardly nothing has changed – mostly Will is still himself; a little dour, clumsy, shaky from too much coffee – and we’ve been talking about booking a holiday when my redundancy pay comes through, maybe to India or Thailand. But still, there’s that germ, the one that infects my whole nervous system. Something’s wrong.
The first day I went searching I hadn’t known what I was looking for, only that the sour, uneasy feeling in my stomach had got worse those last few days. His computer was switched off, the box files full of random paperwork labelled with his neat, blocky handwriting: Bills, Mortgage, Warranties. On his desk, beneath the piece of coral he uses as a paperweight, was a small stack of documents. I slid the top one aside with my finger, then the next and the next. Halfway down the pile I found something that caught my attention: a handwritten bill of sale for seven hundred and fifty pounds. The descriptor read only SSB (MM). The headed paper read Porters of Mayfair, the date written in heavy ink in the top left corner. Nineteenth of March. My eyes stung, and a pain blossomed in my stomach. I sat down in his chair, staring at the piece of paper as though I could somehow decode it. Something to do with the car, maybe? A repair? No, no. He would have told me. William told me everything. It used to drive me mad to hear the long, detailed litany of his day, particularly when I’d first left work and was bored stiff, but I wouldn’t have missed this, would I? No. I was scrupulous about our assets, particularly when we were more reliant on our savings than ever. I thought about the online poker again as I slid the bill of sale back into the stack of papers. SSB (MM).
Later that night, I curled into William on the sofa, my feet tucked beneath me, my head on his chest so that his heartbeat drummed against my cheek. He had a half-drunk bottle of beer in his hand. He smelled good, comfortable. I tilted my head up to catch his eye. He smiled down at me.
‘All right, babe?’ he said.
‘Sure,’ I told him.
And for a while, it was.
I didn’t want to know. Sealed myself in ignorance, cocooned by my defences. Easier that way. Safer.
But two weeks later my eyes rolled open as the alarm went off and I knew what was going to happen. Even as I scraped my knife against the toast and took a mouthful of too-hot tea, my head foggy and dense with tiredness, I knew. I showered and dressed and dried my hair, taking my time. I kissed William goodbye and then I sat at my laptop and listlessly browsed the job sites, one eye on the clock. When it reached nine, I took a deep breath and opened the door of the study again. The rain pattered softly against the narrow window. It felt as if it had been raining for days, a shimmering veil of grey silk. The sky was the colour of worn stone.
At the top of the receipt I’d found during my first search was a phone number and I dialled it quickly, feeling my heart pick up as a voice at the other end said, ‘Porters of Mayfair, good morning.’
I explained, in a voice that was running just a fraction too fast, that I was trying to do my tax return and had discovered a receipt among a pile of others, although I couldn’t for the life of me remember what the item I’d purchased was and would she be able to help me, please?
There was a pause and then the voice answered, ‘I’ll try.’
‘It just says “SSB” with “MM” in brackets. The price was seven hundred and fifty pounds.’
‘It’s a bag,’ she said almost immediately. ‘Sequin Shoulder Bag by Miu Miu. Your husband paid cash.’ There was a silence and then her voice came again. ‘Are you still there?’
‘I’m still here. Thank you, you’ve been very helpful.’
That evening Will called me. It was nearly seven o’clock, and I’d offered to pick him up from the station because the rain had grown heavy, sluicing against the windows in gusts. His commute, uncomfortable and expensive and nearly two hours long, had been part of his reluctance to move house when I’d first started pressing him about it. He’d told me he didn’t want to live in suburbia and I’d told him Swindon wasn’t suburbia, and he’d said did I know that an anagram of ‘Swindon’ was ‘disown’ and that maybe he’d disown me if I kept on about it, and that had made me laugh and then everything had been good again.
‘Babe, I’m going to be late home.’
A coldness, spreading in my chest. In the background I could hear the faint rumble of conversation and music, a pub perhaps.
‘Why?’
‘Huh? Sorry, it’s so noisy in here. I’m in the pub, the one by Paddington, you know? I came for a drink with Matt and Olly and I’ve only just seen the time. I’m only staying for one more, though.’
Silence. I let it float, like dark clouds.
‘Babe? Frances? You mad at me? It’s only a couple of pints.’
‘No, it’s not. It’s not that. Who did you say you were with?’
The noise faded a little. Perhaps he’d moved outside. I could picture him with his overcoat unbuttoned and the phone pressed against his ear, stubble shading his jaw. Maybe he was playing with his hair, tugging at it the way he does when he’s lying. My hand gripped the phone tighter.
‘Matt and Olly.’
‘Which Matt?’
‘The one from – sorry, mate – I’m in someone’s way. The one who used to live by us.’
‘The courier?’
‘No, the other one. The Arsenal supporter. Are you okay? You sound weird.’
‘Put him on.’
Silence. My heart quickened.
‘What?’
‘Matt. Put him on the phone to me. I want to say hi.’
Will laughed uneasily. ‘You barely know him, Frances.’
‘Just do it, would you?’
He sighed; the line bristled with static. I waited, holding my phone so tightly that my knuckles were turning white. I had forgotten how to breathe. There was some rustling, and then a surprised voice, male, cheerful-sounding.
‘Frances? Long time no speak! How are you?’
‘Matt?’
‘Yeah! From Turnham Road. I bumped into Will as I was heading to Paddington. You all right, yeah? You staying dry? It’s miserable up here. Hang on, hang on, he wants the phone back – we promise we won’t keep him out too late!’
William’s voice sounded heavier when he took back his phone and asked me again if everything really was all right.
‘You need to be working,’ he told me. ‘All this time at home alone, it’s not good for you.’
By the time I hung up, tears were building behind my eyes and I blinked them awa
y before they could spill, annoyed at myself. If William was having an affair, you would know, I told myself sternly, opening a bottle of wine. Besides, when would he find the time? He’s on a train for four hours a day and in an all-male office the rest of the time.
One of a team of only three, Will’s computer consultancy business had nearly been called The Three Amigos before I pointed out that there were copyright laws against that sort of thing. They’d settled on Three Squares because, as they told me, they were the most boring nerds they knew. Straight down the line. Dependable. Prosaic to the point of banality. It was one of the things I’d loved about William the most, in the beginning. My polar star, guiding me away from the wreckage of my twenties, sane and modest and easy to read, so unlike the other men and women I’d had relationships with.
Not long after we’d first got together I’d gone out alone one night and ended up drinking in a basement bar in Camberwell before finding myself at a party in Vauxhall in the early hours. Some woman had pressed a pill on to my tongue and I’d swallowed it without thinking, washing it down with warm cider and a kiss that smeared my lipstick. ‘I don’t normally take MDMA,’ I’d told her, and she’d smiled and said, ‘It isn’t MDMA, sweetie.’
For the next three hours my body had turned to liquid, something hot and molten beneath the strobing lights. Shadows swam at me, and I kept finding myself in the same spot where I’d begun, sitting on gritty concrete behind a speaker which rattled my poor prone body with each beat. I don’t remember doing it, but somehow I’d called William and he’d driven to collect me with only the vaguest of directions, searching the Vauxhall arches for me with his sweater on over a pair of cotton pyjamas as people around him ground their teeth to powder, eyes rolling, sweat sour and ripe. He’d taken me back to his house even though I’d vomited down my front and my legs wouldn’t work, and he’d had to put an arm around my waist to guide me. He’d put me to bed in his spare room, crisp cotton sheets with the creases still in from the packaging and a bowl beside the bed. I’d slept for nine hours straight, only waking up once to see him putting a cup of tea next to me, brushing stray hairs from my face.