His Secret Family (ARC)

by Ali Mercer

  ‘I know. It’s just… I feel bad about leaving him here all on his own.’

  He put his arms around me. ‘I know.’

  Before we left, I used the hospital breast pump one of the nurses had found me to empty myself out. I asked the nurse if she would be able to give the milk to another mother who needed it, who couldn’t feed her baby. I knew the hospital had a milk bank, and it seemed so wrong for it to go to waste. But she said regretfully that she couldn’t take it. There were procedures, and tests to be done, and the milk bank was reliant on mothers who could commit to donating over a period of time.

  At the end of the day, what I could produce wasn’t enough. I tipped what was in the bottle down the sink.

  We went out to the car with the bag and drove home. All the way, I was conscious of the empty car seat in the back. I supposed that sometime later that evening I would go to bed next to the cot Mark had so carefully assembled, which Felix would never sleep in again.

  Ingrid was dressed in day clothes, but the girls were in their night things. They were all as pale as ghosts. I hugged the girls, and that was a comfort: they were so warm, so effortlessly alive, and both so big it was hard to believe I’d ever carried either of them inside me.

  Then I tried to embrace Ingrid. I put my arms around her, but even though she let me I could sense her resistance to being touched. She seemed dry and rigid as an old bone.

  She said to Mark, ‘Perhaps in time you’ll have another,’ and he just looked at her and I never heard her say that again.

  * * *

  Mark drove Ingrid back to her flat; she wanted to sleep in her own bed, she said. The girls turned in, and I got into my pyjamas and, on impulse, took one of Felix’s little babygros out of the bag and got under the covers and curled up with it in my arms. It still smelled very faintly of him.

  But then I heard a small, semi-suppressed, unhappy sound. Someone crying. Ellie, in her room.

  I got up, leaving the babygro on the pillow, and went in to her and held her till she was quiet. Then she withdrew and said, ‘I knew something bad was going to happen. What’s the point of knowing if you can’t stop it?’

  ‘You couldn’t have known, Ellie,’ I said. ‘Nobody could have done.’

  She shook her head. ‘I did know, but I didn’t know enough. I don’t want to know anything any more.’

  I tucked her up and tried to find soothing things to say, and turned off the light and left her.

  Back in the master bedroom I curled up alone in bed and listened to the quiet and to the small sound of my own breathing. My body felt heavy and numb all over; I knew I was on the edge of sleep, but I couldn’t quite let go and drift off.

  Mark came in as quietly as possible, so as not to wake me. He lay down next to me, and I stirred and shifted closer to him so that we were spooning. He put his arms around me and the memory came back to me of when we’d met at the beginning of the year, that long, leisurely lunch that had then turned into a walk followed by a drink and, finally, a reluctant parting and a promise to meet again.

  I’d cancelled a customer for him. I never did that. At least, not if I could help it.

  But I couldn’t help it. Once Mark had got back in touch, I’d been able to think of next to nothing else.

  I’d read his Facebook message over and over:

  * * *

  I walked past the hairdresser’s where you used to work the other day, but they couldn’t tell me where to find you. I hope you don’t mind me resorting to this. I just wanted to say that I hope you’re well – really well – and that if you ever wanted to, I’d love to meet.

  * * *

  And then we had met, and he’d told me that he and Paula had divorced.

  ‘Clean break,’ he said. ‘She wants me out of her life.’

  ‘Maybe in a way it’s just as well you didn’t have kids,’ I said.

  And he let out a big sigh. ‘So how are your kids? They must have changed a lot since I saw them last.’

  I showed him a picture of Ellie, and then one of Ava. My finger was trembling as I touched the screen of my phone. He must have noticed. But I think he already knew the answer, and that was what gave him the courage to ask if Ava was his.

  I didn’t even hesitate. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She is.’

  I’d imagined that conversation so many times beforehand, wondering if I’d find the courage to tell him, dreading what he might say.

  Thankfully, he wasn’t angry. Not a bit of it. He took the phone and expanded the photograph so her face filled the screen, and gazed at her for a long time. He was awestruck. Then something else kicked in: pride. He passed the phone back to me and asked me to tell him about her.

  And I did. I told him about Ava for hours. And when we met again, I told him even more. I talked about Ellie, too. Not quite so much. But he was interested in that, too. He understood that my children were part of me and I was part of them, and he wanted to look after all of us.

  And now he was lying in bed next to me with Felix’s empty cot beside us.

  I remembered what it had been like to hold Ellie and Ava after losing Felix, and I thought of my own sister and how silly and strange it was that we didn’t speak any more, or even exchange Christmas cards.

  I knew that if I asked her to come to the funeral, she would. Like a shot.

  I would have to. I had to give her the chance to do the right thing. I had to give myself the chance. There would be so much sadness, so much grief. I would need her to share it.

  Mark and I fell asleep together. I didn’t wake again until it was light, and I came to and for the first, miraculous second of the day, I didn’t know that Felix had died.

  Twenty-One

  Paula

  Something had got into Daisy. She’d always been slow to learn, but sweet – or so I told myself. But suddenly I found that a little bit harder to believe. She was changing, and in some ways, not for the better.

  There was no reason that I could understand for it. Maybe school was harder for her now that she and her peers had less time to play and more lessons? The rest of them were crazily far ahead – reading and writing and signing their names and making clay models of Tudor houses; they were a bunch of prodigies, as far as I was concerned, and it was both phenomenally impressive and depressing to see what they could do. I had learned, over the years since Daisy’s diagnosis, to try not to compare her to them. But I didn’t always succeed.

  She was my baseline. Other kids freaked me out – how quickly they learned, the things they could do, the kind of conversations they had with adults and with each other. They were virtually adults themselves. And Daisy just wasn’t. She was much more like a toddler. As to whether she’d ever catch up… I had my doubts.

  I had no idea whether she was aware of being treated differently to the others – of having her own personal teaching assistant and workstation, a chair and desk in the classroom that was set up just for her. On the whole, she was magnanimously accepting of all the extra help she benefited from. I didn’t let myself think about how she would feel about it if and when she became more self-aware, or the questions and answers that would might follow. I tried to be ruthless with my thoughts: I had discovered it was all too easy to sink into a self-obliterating cycle of despair if I started worrying about the future. The future would have to take care of itself, anyway. I had quite enough to be getting on with in the present… especially as, when Daisy got really upset, she had started taking it out on me.

  Around the time of the diagnosis, I’d been able to tell anybody who asked me that Daisy wasn’t aggressive. I saw that as a blessing; it meant she wasn’t liable to hurt other children or the staff at school, and it eased her way to being accepted, even liked. She didn’t lash out, even when she was really worked up and upset. If she was going to take out her anxiety on anyone, it was herself. She had a habit of biting her hands when she was anxious, and the autumn she moved up to primary school, the skin on her hands got so rough where she’d sunk her teeth
into it that it reminded me of elephant hide.

  But then she’s not aggressive stopped being true.

  Daisy still had an unblemished record at school where that aspect of her behaviour was concerned; she’d never attacked another child, or her teaching assistant, or a teacher. But she would sometimes attack me, and the ferocity on her face at such times left me in no doubt that she really did intend to do me harm. The moment always passed, eventually – it was a violent squall that would ride itself out in the end. But while it was happening it was a crisis, and there was nothing I could do apart from trying to limit the damage, whether to me, the house, or herself. When the mood was on her, she was a vicious little dynamo; it was surprisingly difficult to contain her, given how small she still was.

  The one thing that always made it worse was to get angry with her. I had to wait until she was calm again to try to speak to her, to describe what had happened, to tell her why it was wrong. Even then it was hard to know if any of what I said was going in… but it certainly wouldn’t have done if I had tried to talk to her while she was still in the throes of the storm. You couldn’t do that with a child who was raging. You couldn’t do it while you were raging yourself, either.

  Because when we were in the middle of it, it was difficult – sometimes almost impossible – to contain my own fury.

  It’s peculiarly enraging to have your small child launch herself at you, hellbent on clawing your face or yanking clumps of your hair out or ripping your favourite top that, as bad luck would have it, you just happened to have risked putting on that day. After all, it wasn’t as if I had all that many nice clothes – on the whole, after Daisy had been diagnosed and Mark had left me, I hadn’t bothered much with all of that. And it wasn’t as if I had masses of hair to start with, and my face, which was mostly grey with fatigue and puffy from comfort eating, really didn’t need the bonus downer of being adorned with scratches. Luckily I was still working from home, copy-editing and proofreading, so it didn’t matter how rough I looked from a professional, income-making point of view. And it wasn’t as if I was likely to go out on any hot dates any time soon.

  The last thing I needed was some man complicating my life, and anyway, who’d want to take on a woman whose autistic daughter refused to be put to bed by anybody else, and still woke up every night and came in to her to share her bed?

  I was resigned: my sex life was over. I had nothing to offer anyone, anyway. I had no reserves to draw on; everything was in play.

  There was just no way it could be worth it. There were things I needed – sleep, food, money, the house not to fall down around my ears – and things I could very well do without, and sex and romance was definitely in the ‘maybe in the next life’ category. Daisy was challenging me to the max; some days, I felt stretched by her to the point where I’d never be able to go back to being someone who could live a normal life.

  Looking after Daisy was so exhausting, and so demanding, that I didn’t spare much thought for Mark. But when I did, I loathed him. My feelings hadn’t faded at all. I still longed to prove myself to him somehow… to show him his daughter in a way that would make him sit up and take notice and be sorry. But at the same time, it seemed very unlikely that I would ever be able to. It was just a fantasy. Chances were I would never see him again.

  But then I heard something about him that made me think again about my daydreams of making him repent.

  It didn’t cure me entirely. I was still angry. After all, I couldn’t be angry with Daisy, and all that emotion had to go somewhere. But still, it forced me to set my feelings aside. The desire for justice for my daughter remained, but it was dormant. Even I, with all my capacity for rage, couldn’t long for vengeance on someone who had suffered so much, and who’d gone through a loss that I shied away from imagining.

  * * *

  On the day I found out about Felix Daisy had just blown up at me outside the supermarket in Kettlebridge.

  Sometimes I could get away with popping into the shop with her, and sometimes I really couldn’t, and it was impossible to predict with any reliability whether it was going to be a good day to make the attempt or not. I did as much of my shopping online as possible, but sometimes things ran out, and on that particular day I’d had to pay a cheque into the bank – also potentially tricky, though the self-service machine was a lifesaver – and then I’d tried for the supermarket as well. It was stupidly busy – the next day was Christmas Eve – and Daisy kicked off even before we got inside. The only way to calm her down was to give up, take her back to the car and get out of there.

  Back home, I got Daisy settled with her iPad and dabbed antiseptic cream onto the scratches on my neck. My heart rate had just about returned to normal when the doorbell rang. I stomped off to answer it, prepared to be exasperated, and had to quickly adjust and put on my nice-person face when I saw who it was at the door.

  It was my friend Elspeth, whose daughter Lydia had been at pre-school with Daisy and had ended up in the same class as her at primary school. The girls weren’t exactly friends – Daisy didn’t have any friends – but it was as close as Daisy got. Lydia tolerated Daisy, though she also seemed puzzled by her, and spoke to her slowly and patiently, as if she was a much younger child.

  Back in the pre-school days, I had once turned up to collect Daisy to find her curled up on the carpet, sound asleep, while a group of little girls played tea-parties with plastic cups around her. One of them had covered her with a dolls’ blanket; Amy had told me that it was Lydia. Elspeth was kind too: she invited us round for playdates even though Lydia couldn’t really play with Daisy, and had obviously been warned not to expect to.

  Elspeth was also helpful in practical ways. She had grown up in Kettlebridge and had lots of family there, and if I ever needed a mechanic, a plumber, a carpenter or an electrician, Elspeth knew someone who knew someone who could help. She knew as much about what went on in the town as anybody, especially as she had a part-time job booking out the civic buildings for weddings and other occasions.

  She took in the scratches on my neck and said, ‘Is it a bad time?’

  It had been such an awful morning, I’d completely forgotten. She’d messaged me earlier to ask if I had a heater she could borrow, as her boiler had broken down.

  ‘No, you’re fine, it just slipped my mind. I’ll go and get it. Come on in.’

  ‘If that’s OK. I won’t stay long,’ Elspeth said, and stepped in.

  I went into Mark’s old study to get the heater. I hadn’t got round to redecorating, and it still looked pretty much the same as it had done when he’d used it as a bolthole from family life, though it was a bit more untidy. It was chilly, too; it had a tiny radiator that didn’t really work, and was the one room in the house that never seemed to get warm.

  It sounded like Daisy was still absorbed by the iPad; I could hear the commentary on a YouTube video she’d watched over and over again, which showed various washing machines in action. It was extraordinary what people made videos of, but if it kept Daisy happy for a bit I wasn’t complaining. I might even be able to have a bit of a chat with Elspeth, who somehow had a knack for making me feel a bit more normal. As if I was as content as a proper mother should be, rather than spinning between stress and bitterness.

  I grabbed the heater and went back to the hall to hand it over. ‘Such a pain when the central heating goes,’ I said. ‘Always seems to happen just before Christmas. Hope you’re not too frozen.’

  ‘Oh, we’re all right. Should be fixed tomorrow, with any luck. I can bring this back then, if that’s all right?’

  ‘No rush. Only if it’s convenient for you. Do you have people coming round?’ I would have been amazed if she didn’t, given how much family she had living nearby.

  ‘Yeah, but it won’t do me any harm to pop out for half an hour, to be honest. Probably keep me sane. You?’

  ‘My mother’s moved to Australia so she can cohabit with her sheep-shearing boyfriend, so no.’

  ‘Re
ally? Wow. Is that… is that a good move, do you think?’

  ‘Oh, she’s over the moon about it. Almost insultingly so, given that she’s moving to the other side of the world from us. But hey, who can blame her? She’s gone to find the sun. Even if it only lasts the winter, at least she’ll have had that.’

  My scratches were stinging, and I instinctively felt for them and then stopped, so as not to bring attention to them. ‘Sorry if I seem a bit cranky,’ I said. ‘Daisy hasn’t had a very good morning. She’s a bit on edge. She’s not coping very well with Christmas. It’s too much change.’

  ‘I guess we all feel like that sometimes.’

  Elspeth was looking at me sympathetically, but also as if she was speculating about something, as if I wasn’t quite behaving the way she might have anticipated. She hesitated, and I half expected her to say she should go, but instead she carried on standing there with the heater in her arms. Her cheeks, which were an enviably healthy pink, became a little redder, as if she was contemplating saying something profoundly uncomfortable.

  ‘Paula… I hope you won’t mind me asking this, and I know it’s a really sensitive subject… but have you heard anything from your ex?’

  ‘Mark? No, I don’t think he’s about to come down the chimney any time soon. Why?’

  Elspeth grimaced. ‘Ah. I thought you might not know.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Do you remember what we talked about in the café that time? About the baby?’

  ‘What, about the baby? You mean when I shocked everybody with a torrent of foul, abusive language? Yeah, I remember.’

  A few months before, I’d been with Elspeth when I vented my fury over Ingrid’s letter, and the whole of Lily’s Tea Room had heard me. We’d gone there at Elspeth’s suggestion after school drop-off, and we’d got chatting about our families and it had turned out that Roger, Elspeth’s husband, was responsible for maintenance for the building where Ingrid lived, and had endured a couple of run-ins with her.