‘All babies like it when I do this,’ Katty says. ‘It kept my brother quiet for ages at the hospital.’
Ruth grabs the handles of the pushchair and swivels the buggy fast so that Katty’s finger plops out. Bess cries. Ruth begins to speak but the words stopper-up in her throat. She pushes towards the door, the drinks sliding in her free hand.
‘You need to pay,’ pretty-man says.
‘Of course. Yes, I do, I know. Sorry.’ One of the cans falls to the floor as she fumbles with coins in her bag. Bess’s cry ramps up. ‘Oh God, never mind.’ She laughs, more high-pitched than she expected, placing the second drink on a pile of newspapers by the door. ‘I’ll get these later.’ The dropped can rolls to the middle of the floor. Nobody moves to pick it up. Ruth’s face holds the rictus of a smile as she heaves open the door and rushes outside.
She steers the pushchair in the direction of the doctor’s surgery, and when she’s out of sight of the shop she stops to smear antiseptic cream on Bess’s lips and cheeks. The baby screams, little pink mouth stretched into an angry O as Ruth slathers on the ointment. She wipes away the excess so Bess doesn’t swallow any, no idea if it will do any good, but something’s better than nothing, so she squeezes more from the tube to layer on Bess. Then Ruth remembers she can’t just turn up at the doctor’s as they’ll tell Giles she’s been out without permission. She heads towards home, concocting an excuse as she runs. She’ll call the surgery and tell them Katty came round the house – they’ll probably have a record of the girl’s brother’s illness and will understand it’s urgent. Ruth will insist they do a home visit, which they will because she’s high on their ‘to watch’ list. Antiretrovirals are probably what Bess needs. The buggy’s wheels skitter at speed over the rough pavement.
When she reaches home, Ruth bundles the pram into the house and leaves Bess in her seat. The little girl is crying, but she’s buckled in and safe at least, freeing up Ruth to phone the surgery. The receptionist answers. Ruth tries to explain what happened but can’t find a way to take the hysteria from her voice. ‘I just need to talk to a doctor. Please put me through. It’s an emergency.’
‘All the doctors are with patients at the moment. If it’s urgent, you need to call 999.’
Ruth has a flash of the police officer from this morning telling her no more emergency calls. Did that include a medical emergency? How many ambulances has she called since Giles has been returning to work, the paramedics nodding with a what seems to be the problem today? as they amble through her front garden.
‘Is this Mrs Woodman?’ the receptionist says. ‘Would you like me to get in touch with your husband for you?’
Giles mustn’t know she’s got herself into a state; he’ll suspect something’s amiss with her medication. He’ll want to stay home and watch her, tetchy that he can’t get on with his work, that she’s unable to be normal, that her mothering still falls way short of anything approaching satisfactory. Ruth bangs the receiver down.
On a pad she makes two columns, one with the header ‘P’ for probable, and the second with an ‘I’ for improbable. Under ‘P’ she lists, ‘Katty’s filthy hands, germs attacking Bess’s immune system, poisoning by antiseptic cream,’ but there’s no one to ask for verification, no one to advise her without raising the alarm over her own health and whipping up the inevitable blizzard of interference. Or perhaps the doctors will finally agree that it’s time to take Bess away from this useless mother who can’t seem to get through one day without falling apart. Ruth leaves the ‘I’ column blank as she lifts her baby from the buggy, taking her into the downstairs loo to wash her face at the sink. Bess howls at the water as Ruth rubs and rinses a soapy hand over her anyway. ‘I’m really sorry, sweetie. Nearly clean now.’
The tap continues to run as Ruth recalls the looks on the men’s faces in the shop when she was acting crazy. She goes to stick her hand back into the water, but the stream’s now gushing hot and she snatches her fingers away, a thought burning through her worry. She only mentioned hearing a noise last night – they were the ones who called it a scream.
3
Ruth lays Bess on her play mat on the wooden floor, checking inside the baby’s mouth for spots. There’s no room inside her immediate panic to unpick any more of what was or wasn’t said at the shop. Bess’s bottom lip quivers, and Ruth kisses the little forehead, testing the baby’s temperature with her own lips; she’s hot, but that could be because she’s been crying. Ruth leans back on her heels, attempting to slow her breath. Directly underneath where Bess lies, where her precious head touches the floor, is the dusty void of the foundations.
When Ruth and Giles first moved in, they had to complete a damp course, and the workmen pulled up some of the ancient pine floorboards to check for leaking pipes, finding only an anaemic root of a horsetail breaking through, its tendril as broad as a finger, blindly searching for an outcrop of sun. It had shocked Ruth that underneath their feet the foundations consisted of only a hollow foot or so before a layer of concrete shored up the mud. How close they live to the earth, how little of substance props up their world. Centimetres below the footings, the soil is a mess of dead things; a molecular memory of everyone and everything that’s passed over this place, perhaps generating a kind of energetic interference that’s been wiping Ruth’s intuition, like a ship losing contact with land as it sails through the Bermuda Triangle. What if one of the highwaymen stood on the very spot where Bess now lies? What if he killed and buried someone there? Ruth scoops up her daughter and paces the room with the little girl over her shoulder.
One-handed, she powers up her computer and googles virus, infection rate, incubation period. Layer upon layer of childhood rashes pass her inspection as she falls down virtual wormholes of looser and wilder association. Her fingers grow tacky, the keypad seemingly as infected as the images it summons. She forces herself to close the laptop, palm warming on the lid. These past months, Ruth’s learnt her triggers, she has insight into her illness, and this obsessional behaviour is a red flag. Her astoundingly creative worry fuels so many potential catastrophes, though she’s yet to understand the purpose of this huge rehearsal for the unlikely. At times she almost wishes the worst would happen, then at least she could deal with a tangible problem, with the impetus to mop up her flooding adrenaline. But not Bess being ill, that would be a horror too far.
She takes Bess upstairs and manages to settle her in her cot. With the baby finally asleep, the house is quiet, and Ruth’s nerves stagger back to partway normal. She goes downstairs and splashes cold water on her face in the small downstairs toilet. Inches from her nose is a roughly patched area of wall, evidence of how she’d once tried to break through to the recess under the stairs, where she’d been convinced her sister had been bricked up. That day, months ago, she’d used the big kitchen knife to hack at the plasterboard, managing to make a hole that had opened onto a bead of darkness. ‘Tam, are you there?’ she’d whispered into the crack, willing her sister to answer. ‘I’m sorry, OK? But you should have let me tell them.’
She turns off the tap and barely dries her hands before pulling the toilet door shut behind her. Even at that brightest point of madness, a tiny part of Ruth had stood outside the main beam of her brain’s invention. She remembers glancing at her reflection in the blade of the knife, her face unrecognizable in its determination, body as well as mind almost completely out of her control, and she knew then that she couldn’t be trusted. If she could damage a wall, then if pushed, if she truly lost her sanity, what might she be capable of doing to Bess? She’d dropped the knife where it clattered on the floor, and ran to gather all the other sharp implements she could find – the rest of the kitchen knives, two corkscrews, a broken mirror, even an old fountain pen – and placed them in a tea towel before bundling them up and taking them outside, through her small back garden, across the path and past the old chicken shed on her allotment to where tall scratchy weeds met the railway fence. One by one, she threw the items onto the siding
s, where she’d never be able to reach them again, and never be able to use them to hurt Bess.
A train rumbles past in the distance and a bird screeches, startling Ruth back to the present. Her thoughts open again onto the scene at the shop, the moment having bided its time until she’s had the space to examine her unease. Is it embarrassment? It’s highly probable she misheard the man – though her darker suspicion is that he knew about the scream. In the middle distance of her front yard, shrubs and climbers planted in the spring are now spindly and bare, the world outside as dull and pedestrian as before, her wild speculation ridiculous in contrast.
Two men walk the pavement at a slow pace. They wear sportswear with stripes and ticks that mimic expensive brands. High-tech trainers, bulky and luminous, hit the pavement in sync. Ruth recognizes both of them from the car wash. They lift their heads to look through her window, past the dreamcatcher she’s hung from the latch – a present posted through her letter box after Bess was born with no card to say who it was from – to where Ruth stands in her lounge. One of them is the man who stood behind the counter, his kohl-dark eyelashes accentuating his stare. He says something to the other man, who nods. Ruth’s teeth and jaw ache.
Her mobile bursts into life. She yelps as the phone skitters in a vibrating circle on the table. The display flashes up No Caller ID. She reaches for the handset, but the ring cuts out before she gets to it. Outside, one of the men puts something in his pocket. She cranes her neck as they pass, wondering if it’s possible to make out the shape of a phone in his trousers, but only his bunched knuckles show through the fabric. The two disappear from view.
Ruth makes a fist and thumps it against her forehead. Enough of this. Paranoia is sneaking up on her and she knows only too well from past experience that if she gives it enough room it will come inside and make a home; the man was most likely warming his hand in his pocket, and how would either of them know her number anyway? She wakes up her mobile to check the display. There’s no message, the call probably telesales or international from her dad.
The light’s been left on in the toilet and an arc of yellow shines under the door, making a still life of the toys scattered on the floor, their shadows elongated, the tableau almost comical. She opens her camera app and takes a couple of shots, then snaps a picture of the chaotic table: laptop surrounded by breakfast plates, garden out of focus in the background. The winter day is grey with cold, perfectly summing up her mood, but inside she brightens a little, as if by capturing the worst of her surroundings on her phone she no longer has to give her issues the same attention. She circles the room with a growing energy, taking more pictures of the clutter and mess, the photo frame elevating the banal and transforming the domestic into scenes of beauty, encouraging her to believe she matters even though she has no online presence and no one to be her witness; she lives unobserved, uncelebrated, invisible, apart from this. One day she’ll reflect on these photos as a difficult time she passed through, nothing more insidious than that, though that future version of herself seems impossibly distant. And because the past is equally remote, inspiring only a kind of grief for the endless freedom Ruth had before Bess and might never experience again, it means that being present, here in this moment, is her only mooring. The sun comes out from behind a cloud and the light shifts from blue to golden.
Ruth pulls up her last dialled numbers and clicks on Sandra’s name, chancing that Sandra’s earlier wave when Ruth was on her doorstep was a positive sign. The phone rings only once before Sandra answers.
‘Ruth!’ Sandra’s voice is high and girly with that breathy sexiness Ruth imagines men go nuts for. ‘I was just thinking about you.’
Sandra’s lost the vagueness of recent weeks, and Ruth’s fears of being frozen out for some mystery infraction seem to be unfounded. She exhales in relief.
Sandra breaks the pause. ‘You OK, honey?’
Ruth dissects the pretence she’s about to set up, the prospect of feigning ease after her morning of stress, deciding instead that what she really needs is to confide. ‘Oh, I’ve been in a right state.’ Her voice shakes with relief. ‘Things have been really getting on top.’
‘Oh no, poor you. What’s happened?’
‘Nothing really, just nonsense. Bad dreams probably.’ She stops herself there, unwilling to go full tilt just yet.
‘Nightmares?’
‘More than likely, didn’t seem like it at the time, though. Got myself in a bit of a tight spot with the police too, but then you saw them here this morning.’
Sandra laughs. ‘You been stealing make-up from Boots again?’
Ruth giggles. It feels good. ‘I wish it was that simple.’ She runs a hand through her unwashed hair and switches the phone to the other ear. ‘I’ve been getting myself in knots.’ She hears Sandra inhale sharply – Sandra, her one and only friend – and Ruth leaps in to reassure. ‘Not like when Bess was tiny, nothing as bad as that. Just worrying about anything and everything. You know how it can get.’ Although she doubts Sandra does. ‘Please don’t tell Giles, though, he’ll freak. I’ve got a handle on it now.’
‘Don’t worry, honey.’ In the background, Sandra’s house is perfectly quiet and Ruth thinks about the hoops her friend must have had to jump through today to make her home immaculate and keep up her baby’s routine, and whether that silence implies sanctuary or sterility. Sandra continues with a small sigh. ‘I know how aggy blokes can get.’
‘Who, Liam?’ Sandra sometimes jokes to Ruth about certain rules she has at home, like once when Liam didn’t get back when he said he would, she simply threw his food, plate and all, in the bin. She hints that he likes the boundaries, that it makes him attentive. Ruth worries about raising the inconsistency now for fear of offending her friend – it’s not the first time Sandra’s given out mixed messages – but she wants to check with Sandra that everything’s OK at home. ‘I thought you said he only gets in a strop with other people and not you?’
Sandra is silent on the other end of the phone and Ruth imagines her friend momentarily levitating out of the contradiction before she cuts back in. ‘Let’s not spoil the day by talking about him, eh?’ Sandra speaks fast, with no space for Ruth to question even if she wanted. ‘Why don’t we pop to Brent Cross? You fancy it? We can have a coffee and you can tell me what’s been worrying you. Sound good?’
One day, Ruth will press for more understanding of Sandra’s set-up with Liam – it seems to be as much about complaining as complying – but for now, what she really needs is to leave the house. ‘Sounds great.’
‘I’ll drive up to yours in about ten minutes. Do you want to let Giles know or shall I?’
‘You do it. It’ll come better from you.’
Sandra’s been vetted by Ruth’s team, she’s a go-to friend who’s trusted with Ruth, with emergency numbers to contact if Ruth gets in a fix. She even has a set of keys in case she should need to get into Ruth’s house, although she’s never used them. Sometimes, Sandra gives Ruth a conspiratorial wink if Ruth wants a little longer out of the house or confesses to slightly wonky thinking. ‘Don’t worry, hun,’ Sandra says. ‘I won’t tell anyone unless I think you’re in danger.’ Sandra being on-call means that the two of them can go out. Ruth’s not driven for so long she doesn’t trust herself behind the wheel, and her and Giles’s vaguely vintage Saab idles outside the house. Giles has talked about giving it up altogether. ‘Who really needs a car in London?’ he said. ‘The amount it costs to tax and insure hardly makes up for the use we get out of it.’ ‘But what about when I’m back to normal?’ Ruth replied. ‘What if I need to get away?’ Giles’s raised eyebrows posed the question he didn’t need to speak aloud: From what do you need to escape?
When Sandra arrives it’s with her usual bundle of goodies for Ruth. Sometimes, it’s cast-offs from her house or wardrobe, other times, a small gift she thinks Ruth might like.
‘I couldn’t resist,’ Sandra says, handing over a branded paper bag.
‘Oh wow, tha
nks!’ Ruth takes the roped handles and peers inside. It’s a small Clarins moisturizer and cleansing set. The whole while Ruth had been anxious her friend didn’t want to see her any more and Sandra must have been thinking of her all along. ‘Just what I needed.’ She absent-mindedly touches her face, worrying if this is a little nudge from Sandra for her to make more effort.
‘It’s a pleasure, honey. I remember what it was like to scrimp and save, and you deserve a treat.’
‘It’s really kind of you.’ Ruth puts the bag on the dining table and picks out a couple of the bottles, her pleasure at receiving the gift marred by guilt at never being able to reciprocate, or the sense that she needs to pay Sandra back in some other way, with loyalty perhaps, or compliance. The creams are small enough to have been a freebie Sandra received when buying something bigger, but still, she could have kept them for herself and Ruth’s grateful.
‘That’s what best friends are for,’ Sandra says, already making her way out of the door to the car, missing the surprise on Ruth’s face.
Ruth would never dare admit out loud how precious Sandra’s friendship is in case the feelings weren’t mutual, ashamed too that she needs Sandra more than vice versa; she always assumed Sandra hadn’t introduced her to any of her other friends because she wasn’t up to their standard, but perhaps a group of mates isn’t Sandra’s style after all. Nevertheless, this current elevation to best-friend status is both flattering and a little unnerving. Ruth has much to live up to.
She glances inside the bag one more time before leaving the house, anticipating trying out the new creams when she comes home later, promising to take more care of her appearance, like Sandra does.
Two wheels of the Range Rover are parked up on the pavement. The car is wide and stakes a bigger claim on the road than the other vehicles nearby. Ruth loads Bess’s car seat next to Sandra’s son, Ian. The little boy is plump and rosy-cheeked compared to Bess, and he nonsense-chatters from his own seat. Bess responds with squawks and her legs jiggle a dance. Ruth strokes her daughter’s happy cheek, holding back the tears, not wanting to spoil things with Sandra by letting everything out too soon.
The Hidden Girls Page 4
