Brilliant red snaking through the blue. Colour practically hissing off the canvas. It’s something. Can’t wait to show it to his mates, to Jas. Last night, when Cassie had finally got off the phone from Patsy and her mum, he’d rung Jas. ‘Did it work out then, Cassie’s ultimatum?’ she’d asked.
‘Not sure.’
‘Guess what!’
‘What?’
‘Guess.’
‘What?’
‘OK. I’ll give you a clue. Think of the L-word.’
‘Lampshade?’ he’d guessed. ‘Linguine?’
She’d laughed. ‘No, you prat. Love.’ And she’d told him about a guy she’d met at an exhibition and how they’d clicked just like that. Jas in love. A complicated feeling had spread through him, hearing that. She’d sounded quite unlike herself. But he is glad for her. He is. He needs to move a bit, come to think of it, it’s freezing. Not just the fag making his breath come out as smoke.
He goes downstairs, shoves his feet into the boots by the door and scrunches out into the snow, sending the birds from the feeder scattering.
Cassie pulls the last few things from the rucksack. Tomorrow Patsy’s coming to stay and bringing Cat back. Then she’ll feel properly at home. And she’s got something to tell Patsy, something big. She hopes she’s got the will power to keep it to herself for one more day. She wants to tell her face to face. She tips out the empty mirror frame – must get that fixed – and something else rattles in the bottom. She reaches in. A phial of pills. She frowns. A sensation like a big cold fingertip traces down her spine. She sits on the bed, turns the phial in her. hand and watches the pills tumble. It’s like something carried out of a dream and over into the real, solid, world.
She hears Graham running down the stairs, banging out of the door. Smell of smoke, well, he will smoke when he paints and he is painting. They’ve been home forty-eight hours and she’s hardly seen him. She looks at the pills. Did she really consider –? No. No, that’s all over. She takes them into the bathroom, unscrews the lid and watches them trickle out into the toilet. They do dissolve easily, just like Larry said, a brief fizzing and then nothing, nothing but clear water, but still she flushes the toilet just to know that they have really gone. That that is over.
She goes downstairs and puts another log in the stove. It’s so cold. You will acclimatise floats to her from somewhere and she shivers. She makes a cup of peppermint tea and picks up her notebook. She’s been planning a new layout for the garden, started it on the plane. And she’s planning new sessions on composting and mulching. Work to do. She curls up on the window seat. No birds on the feeder – Graham’s scared them off.
She looks through a frame of ivy leaves at the garden, at Graham, who is staring up at something. She looks but can see nothing. Oh, she is fat with news. Not told him yet, can’t tell him till she’s told Patsy. She likes the feeling of it, like a secret sweet hidden in her cheek. She wants to suck it a bit longer.
The phone rings and she gets up to answer it, carries it back to the window seat.
‘Are you pregnant?’ Patsy says and Cassie is stung with irritation. ‘Only I woke up this morning with that feeling and it’s certainly not me.’
Cassie can hear Katie babbling. Outside, Graham is kicking scuffs of snow away from a patch of lawn. What’s he doing? She frowns.
‘Say something then!’ Patsy says.
‘Sorry, I’m a bit dopey.’
‘Jetlag.’
‘Yeah. You OK?’
Graham has brought the ladder out of the shed. He carries it on to the green oval he’s cleared.
‘More to the point –?’ Patsy waits a moment then sighs. ‘Be like that then.’
Cassie hugs her knees, the phone jammed into the crook of her neck. She watches Graham hold the ladder in both hands and tilt his head back. The streaks of paint, scarlet, orange, yellow, vivid blue on his sweater, sizzle against the snow. A streak of red in his hair. He’s got a fag pinched in the corner of his mouth and his eyes squint against the smoke, squint in concentration as he steps up on to the bottom rung.
‘You’re right, of course,’ Cassie says. ‘Did a test this morning. I am pregnant. Wanted to tell you tomorrow.’
Patsy shrieks. ‘I knew it. Fantastic. Oh that’s fantastic. And I knew.’
‘Well, you would!’
‘What does Graham say?’
Cassie swallows. ‘Haven’t exactly told him yet. Look, got to go, Pats,’ she says. ‘See you tomorrow. Don’t forget Cat.’
‘Course not! Get that champagne in the fridge. Oh Cass, I’m so glad you’re back. We were so worried. Spoken to Mum again? She was all for phoning the police you know – if you hadn’t got in touch soon –’
‘She told me. But we’re OK. We’re fine. See you tomorrow, Pats.’
Cassie puts down the phone. Now she’s told Patsy she must tell Graham. She goes upstairs to the bathroom and retrieves the pregnancy-testing kit from the bin. She looks again at the white stick: in the little plastic window, a blue ring. Positive. For definite. Should go out and tell him. Shout it up the ladder at him. But there’s a little shadow fluttering above her pleasure. Just a small cloud, smudge of doubt. ‘No,’ she says aloud. No way it could be anyone else’s, no way. She will not think that, will never, ever entertain that thought again.
Ivy leaves are crammed up against the tiny bathroom window, each one cupping a tiny frill of snow. She peers out between them. Graham has reached the top of the ladder now. He looks so small from here, hair black against the snow, sweater brilliant: her man at the top of his ladder, swaying.
Afterwards
In the hospital lobby, Graham waits by the coffee machine for a fawn stream to fill a plastic cup. Bright out here after the subdued lighting of the birthing room. A buzzing neon tube. Green carpet stained with slops. He carries the cup outside, settles on a concrete wall, rolls himself a fag. Yeah, yeah, he will give up but if a guy can’t have a fag after – he frowns at the hundreds of fag-ends on the ground.
Smoke hot, dirty in his lungs, great hit of nicotine. Coffee tastes like shit though. A car drives past, grey growl of engine. Ordinary. A pigeon with a withered scarlet stump pegs up to him but he has nothing to give. It pecks amongst the fag-ends, gives up and flings itself upwards. Graham puts his head back and blows a ring of smoke. The sky is like lemon sorbet, a pinkish weal where a plane has been.
Wishes he could get back to work. Soon as Patsy turns up he will. Cassie won’t mind. Exhibition coming up. He runs his hand through his tangled hair, breathes in the sour whiff of fag-ends, exhaust fumes, his own sweat. Baby here now. Should he ring his dad and say, ‘Hey Grandpa’? Can he say, his son? When she’d told him she was pregnant there was a question he should have asked but didn’t. And it’s too late now. But he’d seen the flinch of irises round inky pupils as she looked straight back. They’d held the gaze a moment and she had broken it. Looked down. He’d noticed the fan of white creases where her squint lines had escaped the sun.
And now. Where are the feelings he should be feeling? They say your child’s birth is the greatest thing you ever see. But he was – will never admit it to her or anyone – repulsed by the pain, the blood, the smell, the sound of tearing flesh. No. It’s just that he’s exhausted, shagged, knackered, wiped out and nothing much is happening where his heart is. Once Larry was born, he thinks. Once I was. He looks at the palms of his hand, each line ingrained with paint, deep red and umber, two maps of a burning land.
He takes a last deep suck and drops his dog-end on the ground among the others.
Cassie sits in a side ward eating rice crispies with cold milk and white sugar. Not something she would ever usually eat, a thick frosting of crunchy white sugar on the crispy hollow grains, but at that moment, a moment of stillness, leaning back against her pillows, listening to the snap, crackle and pop, it seems like the best thing, the most perfect food ever.
She shifts on the tight soreness of her stitches. It’s getting light. Soon the re
st of the ward will wake and start its day. Other babies will be born. And hers will not be the newest any more. And elsewhere in the hospital, probably, people will die. She swallows sweet milk, puts down her spoon, listens to the crackling of her cereal. She can’t hear the breath of her baby in the plastic cot beside her but she can see the slight rise and fall of his chest. People will die, people do die and whether it is in hospital or whether it is somewhere else, it is all the same in the end. She frowns the thought away. She’s good at frowning things away, two lines have grown between her eyes, she sees in the mirror every day, with the effort of the frown.
She looks at the tiny face, head the size of a grapefruit, the flutter of a delicate nostril. She searches the features for a look of Graham but he looks like nobody, just a newborn baby. Just himself. Her heart lifts. Because whatever happened happened in the past and this is now. The past is dead and this new person, this baby boy, he is alive.
The early morning traffic starts to thicken. An ambulance stops outside. Graham gets up, walks a little in the strange light. Cassie will be cleaned up and stitched by now. In the birthing-room, her need and pain had overwhelmed his own. That’s all it was. Not that he can’t feel. He turns back. Nothing open yet so he can’t buy flowers. Doesn’t matter, Patsy will be here soon enough with lorry-loads. He goes back into the hospital, back up the stairs.
Cassie is sitting up in bed with a bowl of cereal. Beside her a transparent plastic cot. She looks done in but kind of radiant, her hair brushed back from her damp face. He bends and kisses her.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she says.
‘Just needed a, you know, moment.’
‘Yeah.’
There is an aching pause. Obvious to both of them that he hasn’t properly looked at the baby. Hasn’t held him. She searches his face and opens her mouth as if she’s got something big to say. His heart almost stops.
‘Graham –’
‘Let’s have a shooftie then,’ he says, fast.
He hears her trembly outbreath. They wait and listen to the moment pass. He bends over the cot.
‘Why don’t you pick him up?’ she says.
‘Can I?’
‘Course you bloody can!’
He lifts the baby up. Afraid to look at the face. It, he, is a soft warm minute weight in his arms.
‘He weighs – nothing.’
A tiny hand flails, baggy skin, fingers like bird claws. He lets it clutch his painty finger. Such a grip. Looks at the nails, ragged, papery sharp. He carries the baby over to the window, takes a breath and looks down into the red screwed-up secret of a face.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Bill Hamilton, Alexandra Pringle, Liz Calder and Andrew Greig for their editorial advice. This novel was completed while I was Writer in Residence at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature and the University of Gloucestershire.
About the Author
Lesley Glaister (b. 1956) is a British novelist, playwright, and teacher of writing, currently working at the University of St Andrews. Sheis a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Society of Authors. Her first novel, Honour Thy Father, was published in 1990 and received both a Somerset Maugham Award and a Betty Trask Award. Glaister became known for her darkly humorous works and has been dubbed the Queen of Domestic Gothic. Glaister was named Yorkshire Author of the Year in 1998 for her novel Easy Peasy, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award in 1998. Now You See Me was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2002. Glaister lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with her husband, author Andrew Greig.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2004 by Lesley Glaister
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9418-7
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
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LESLEY GLAISTER
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