The Push

by Claire McGowan

  ‘What’s happened?’ He was holding his phone. Or no – he was holding my phone. He looked down at it, shocked. A dozen scenarios ran through my mind. Mark – Claudia – Sharon . . .

  ‘It rang. I thought I should answer.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Who’s Denise Edwards?’

  Oh God. I never had told him about her. ‘Er . . .’

  ‘A detective, right? She said she was calling with news of Georgina Partington-Smith.’ Aaron’s voice was flat. Not quite calm. Something else.

  I held out my hand for the phone. ‘I was doing it for you, OK? I’d have told you if she found something. Did she?’

  ‘She traced her to a place in Wales. Some farm, like . . . a commune or something, she said. But she doesn’t live there any more. She’s gone – no one knows where.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Aaron, I just—’

  ‘All this time getting on at me for hiding things, who’s texting me, why am I talking to Nina or Cassie – and you’re the one keeping secrets. You didn’t tell me about Mark Jarvis either, did you?’

  I stood very still. ‘How do you know that name?’

  ‘You left your laptop open on the article! I wasn’t even snooping, it was right there! I didn’t want to bring it up and upset you when you’re like this, but Christ, Jax, you were mixed up in a court case and you never told me? You basically broke a paedophile ring?’

  That wasn’t exactly the truth. That left out the real reason it had happened, my stupidity, my selfishness. ‘Aaron, give me back my phone. You shouldn’t be answering my calls.’ As if I still had some claim to the moral high ground.

  He slapped it into my hand. ‘You don’t need to worry. I’m not the one sneaking about.’ His eyes when he looked at me were bleak. ‘What happened, Jax? We used to be so good. Is it the baby, is that it?’

  I didn’t know what to say. Maybe it was the baby, revealing the fault lines between us. All the things I hadn’t told him. Our age gap, his past. My past. The fact that I had never really trusted him, not entirely, and that this was my fault, not his. He’d never given me a reason not to. Whereas I had given him plenty.

  Aaron shook his head. ‘I can’t do this, Jax.’

  ‘What?’ My heart quickened.

  ‘Come home every day, upset you like this . . . It’s not good for any of us, you or me or the baby. I’m sorry.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think I should stay somewhere else for a while. I’ll still check in of course, help you out when I can . . . or maybe your mum can stay or something . . .’

  ‘Aaron! You can’t leave me when I’m about to give birth! Are you mad?’

  ‘I’m not.’ I caught the stress on the word. Meaning I was. ‘But whatever this is, between us – it’s not good, Jax. I punched the wall. I haven’t done that since I was a kid. I can’t be here right now, that’s all. I’m afraid of what I’ll do.’

  He was putting his jacket back on again. This couldn’t be happening. ‘But where will you go?’ It was crazy. Aaron had no money, no place to stay. When I’d met him, he’d lived in a massive house share in town, and had been only too happy to relocate to my place. He couldn’t go. What would my mother say? How would I cope? Was this for good? Was I a single mum now, like I’d been afraid of?

  ‘I’ll be alright. Please. Try to rest.’

  ‘But where are you . . . ?’

  Without looking at me, he went upstairs and I heard the sound of opening drawers. Even if I could have chased after him, I was frozen on the sofa. Was this happening? He was leaving me? Even though I wasn’t supposed to move, I dragged myself to the bottom of the stairs, pathetic. ‘Aaron. Aaron, please talk to me.’ No answer. Just the sound of packing.

  After about ten minutes, the doorbell went and I was just getting up when Aaron bounded downstairs. ‘Sit down, Jax.’

  I saw who it was, who’d come to pick him up. I shouldn’t have been surprised, really. She came in. She wore yoga pants and a tight vest top, her hair piled on to her head.

  ‘Nina.’

  ‘Hello, Jax.’ Her tone was gentle, as if to an invalid or mental patient.

  Aaron said, to her rather than me, ‘Sorry. One second,’ and went upstairs again, feet thundering in his urge to be away from me.

  I spat, ‘You’re taking him to yours, is that it? How is that appropriate?’

  Nina twirled keys. ‘I heard about a sublet available, that’s all.’

  ‘Why are you doing all this? You don’t even know him!’

  ‘I just want to help. It’s a stressful time for all of you, and Aaron – he didn’t have the easiest start in life.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that?’ Who was this woman, this stranger, coming into our lives? Under my rage, I felt a terrible helplessness. He was going, with her, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.

  She said nothing. Aaron came down carrying a leather holdall – another gift from me. He said, ‘Please look after yourself. I’ll call you later and we’ll . . . we can figure something out.’

  ‘You can’t leave me.’ I still hadn’t taken it in. ‘I can hardly move!’

  ‘Your mum can come. I’ll call her if you like?’

  ‘Don’t you dare. Just go. I don’t care what you do.’ I turned my face to the wall so I didn’t see them leave, just heard the door close and footsteps walk away. When they’d gone, I couldn’t believe how silent the house was. Just me, and the tick of the clock, and the gentle movements of the baby inside me.

  The day of – Aisha

  2.59 p.m.

  What was on Rahul’s phone? She had been wondering this for some time now. Why did it get so much of his attention, pulling his eyes from her and from the baby, clutched in his hand so the screen was sweaty and smeared? Once or twice he had left it in the room with her, and she’d seen how quickly he reversed, dived back in and scooped it up. She’d seen how he tensed if she idly picked it up to dust underneath or clear space for a cup of tea. In fact, she had noticed all this even before Nina said what she had at the last group session, whispering into Aisha’s ear as she hugged her. Check his phone.

  So yes. He was hiding something. The question was – the obvious or not? It wouldn’t be unheard of in these situations. Rahul was good-looking, of course he had probably been tangled up with someone less suitable before he met her. White, maybe, though that might not be a huge problem. Jewish, possibly, based on where he’d been living. That might cause issues with his family. Maybe even married, or older, or uneducated – someone that, for whatever reason, he was not able or not brave enough to be with. Aisha could have accepted that; after all, she was under no illusions that they’d fallen in love. They’d just made a sensible choice, for their lives and their future, and here was the proof of it, a lovely little boy, strong and alert.

  After Monica forced them to take the group picture of the babies, Rahul had left his phone on the table. It must have been the commotion about Kelly that made him forget it, the need for the men to surge forward and protect the women, the children. Something primal. She stood there, jiggling the baby. Then she put out a finger, noticing how dry and ragged her hands were from endless nappy-changing, and touched the cloudy dark screen. Like an evil mirror in a fairy tale. It lit up, a passcode. Of course she didn’t know it and guessing could only lead to trouble. There was nothing she could do.

  But as she stood there, vaguely listening to the hubbub of voices around her, something flashed on to the screen. A text from an unknown number. It said, You have till the end of today. Then I’m telling her.

  ‘Ais?’ She looked up; Rahul was coming across the garden to her. The message had disappeared already, so quickly she might almost have believed she’d imagined it.

  ‘Everything OK?’ She tried to seem normal.

  ‘Yeah, it’s just . . . oh.’ He’d seen that she had his phone. For a moment she was embarrassed for him, his
face so white and sick.

  ‘You left this.’ She passed it to him, and watched the colour gradually return to his face. He thought she didn’t know. Maybe that was the most disappointing thing – that her husband, the father of her child, thought she was so stupid she hadn’t noticed things were terribly, terribly wrong. Suddenly, Aisha couldn’t stand it any more. ‘Tell me what’s going on?’ she blurted.

  His face paled again. ‘What?’

  ‘You know what. The phone. The messages – I saw the last one, it came up.’ She shifted the baby, their baby – the one she’d made with this stranger – on her front. ‘Is it another woman? I’d just rather know. It makes sense in a way – we rushed into this. What is she, married?’

  Carefully, he put the phone down on the table, its bottomless black surface between them. ‘It’s not another woman.’

  A man? That would require some . . . adjustments in her thoughts, but at least it would explain things.

  He saw what she was thinking. ‘It’s not anything like that. It’s . . . I have some . . . money problems.’

  Her first thought was relief. Didn’t everyone have some money problems? But then more fear arrived – how bad would it have to be, to make him like this? ‘And?’

  ‘I owe some money. To some people.’

  ‘Bad people.’

  ‘Quite bad, yes.’

  ‘Why?’ She couldn’t think what he’d need it for; their parents had paid for the wedding. ‘The house?’

  ‘No. But . . . it’s mortgaged more than you know.’

  Vaguely, she was aware of something going on up at the house. Figures on the balcony. She didn’t look to see who.

  ‘Just tell me why,’ she said, shifting Hari in his sling. She’d move back in with her parents, if they were destitute. ‘I need to know what I’m dealing with.’

  ‘Gambling,’ he said, surprisingly calm. ‘I gamble. Online. Poker mostly.’

  Of course. When he said it, it was as if she’d always known. ‘And . . . you’re not very good at it?’

  He looked startled, as if he hadn’t considered this. ‘Sometimes I am. At the start. I won a lot. But then . . .’

  She sighed. Everyone knew that was how gambling worked – how stupid was he, this man she’d married? She’d seen enough films about it. ‘How much do you owe?’ Was it just him, or was she liable for his debts?

  He told her the sum. Aisha swayed on her feet for a moment, thinking – the house, the car, we’ll lose it all – then made herself speak. ‘First thing tomorrow we’ll go to our parents and tell them. Work out what to do.’

  ‘Oh . . . alright.’

  ‘These men, do they know where we live?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will they come to the house, if you owe them money?’

  ‘It hasn’t come to that.’

  But it would. She could have been in danger, her and Hari, over a stupid debt, and he’d never have told her. What a stupid cowardly man. ‘If you pay them, will they go away?’

  ‘I . . . I mean, probably.’

  ‘So. We’ll pay them. That’s the first thing to do.’ Assuming he could stop running up more debts.

  ‘And then?’

  She didn’t even know. Could someone be fixed, with a problem like that? But before she could answer, she heard a scream.

  Jax – two weeks earlier

  It’s hard to live permanently in a state of medical emergency. I’d always been so healthy, so strong, that it was difficult to believe the doctor when he said I had to lie flat on my back for at least twenty-three hours a day, or else I’d haemorrhage. Apart from the first short, shocking bleed, I felt fine. Or not fine – bored out of my mind. Lonely, sad, scared. But not sick. Would it really matter if I got up, did a few things? Perhaps it was my mother’s recent visit, reminding me that I was slacking. She’d rearranged all the cupboards, decanting the cereals and pulses into Tupperware and throwing away the boxes (she didn’t believe in recycling), and cleaned out each of the shelves and lined them with greaseproof cloth she bought from Lakeland. I would never be able to find anything, and Mum did not approve of the contents of my cupboards: ‘Whose is this sugary cereal? Not for the baby, I hope?’

  So I had to explain that no, the cereal with the cartoon bird on the front belonged to my child’s father. Had belonged? Aaron was gone, that was for sure. He was diligent about checking in, visiting every day after work, but wouldn’t discuss when he was coming back. I was alone, and days off giving birth. I hadn’t told Mum he was actually gone and luckily she hadn’t noticed his things weren’t there. Probably because she preferred not to think about him at all if possible.

  Whatever it was anyway, something compelled me to get up from the sofa that day, and finally go outside, turn my face up to the sky. I felt like a cave dweller at the end of winter, cramped and stale and pale. Outside was a cool but beautiful day, a slight haze of light over South London. Daringly bipedal, I opened the patio doors and stepped into the small garden I’d once nurtured so proudly, with visions of growing tomatoes and cucumbers, pressing them on friends when they came to visit. I grow them myself you know. Such a glut this year! As it was, I had a few straggly herb bushes and some wild rambling roses, plus a bird feeder. I’d noticed there weren’t so many fluttering round my window of late, keeping me awake at 4 a.m., and I wanted to see why. As I shuffled across the patio in my slippers, I did. The wire feeder had been wrenched apart, the nuts I’d put into it two weeks ago scattered over the ground, no doubt by predatory squirrels. I’d had the feeder since I was twelve – my dad had made it for me in his shed not long before he died – and now it was ruined. I stooped to pick it up from the ground, then realised I couldn’t. Worse – as I bent I saw a dead bird under the feeder, its feet curled up and black eyes dull. What would have done this – a cat? Minou was so good about not killing things; perhaps in her absence something else had colonised the space. Or a fox again? They couldn’t climb though, could they? I would have liked to bury the poor thing, but I couldn’t bend and anyway it probably wasn’t a good idea to touch a dead bird. I’d have to ask Aaron, if he ever came round again. I’d have to sort that out too, somehow, persuade him to come home – we couldn’t go into labour not getting on. I had to make him see how crazy this was. I sighed, thinking how this time dragged, this waiting, having to follow my body’s timetable and not that of work, social life, London.

  Then I straightened up and something pinged inside me and a cramp rolled through me and I must have cried out in the empty garden, because Mrs Johnson next door heard me and called the ambulance, otherwise I don’t know what would have happened to me, but I tilted slightly and was aware that something had loosened and broken, and that there was red on the patio tiles, that I was bleeding. I don’t remember anything after that.

  Alison

  They said that, after a while, you stopped noticing the smell of your own house. Alison, who was her mother’s daughter, did not like the sound of that. What if it stank and she’d just stopped noticing? What she had noticed over the years, however, was that the homes of dead people had a certain smell. Unloved, empty. Stale, no matter how clean. She’d been in plenty that were horrific, hoarders dying under piles of rotting newspaper, or old people who’d stopped being able to clean their home or themselves, and simply sat down to die, sometimes not found for weeks. Suicide victims. Nasty murders.

  Nina da Souza’s flat wasn’t like that. It just smelled empty, unloved somehow, after almost a week unoccupied, since the resident had gone out one Saturday afternoon and not come back. Dust and stale air. ‘This all her stuff?’ said Diana, standing in the middle of the near-empty living room in her blue gloves. ‘It’s been cleaned out?’

  ‘Don’t think so. She must have just been minimalist.’ Alison’s mother had briefly got into Marie Kondo, and given away the accumulated family junk of two decades, only to buy it all back again when she came to her senses. Alison still had some boxes crammed into cupboards in her flat.


  ‘Even so, this is extreme.’ Diana was right – the place barely looked lived in. There were no pictures on the neutral cream walls, no ornaments or books or CDs on the shelving unit, a basic one from Ikea. A television on another basic unit, some clothes in the wardrobe, toiletries in the bathroom. That was it. ‘How long had she been here?’

  ‘Landlord said not long, a few months. He didn’t know where she was before that – he seems the kind who wouldn’t bother checking the references too closely.’ Alison had got the impression Nina was paying over the odds for this place, little bigger than a studio in a shifty part of town. All the same, it was spotless. Some dust had settled on the TV in the days since its owner had been dead. She wanted to wipe it away, a gesture from one obsessive cleaner to another.

  Diana was in the kitchen, opening the fridge, which let out a sour smell. Nina had been expecting to return, of course. No one expected to fall over the balcony of a show home and on to a rockery. It was a ridiculous way to die that happened all too often, a momentary slip, a foolish act of bravado. Lads on Spanish balconies was the common occurrence, or teenagers at cliffs, the shared element in all those cases being drink and/or drugs. But Nina hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol at the party, the toxicology report proved that. She had eaten only a small quantity of salad leaves that day, which explained how she could be so slim and toned at the age of thirty-eight. They only knew her exact age because she’d given the landlord her date of birth (assuming it was real). That reminded Alison of something. ‘Did you get the impression they all thought she was younger than she was?’