by Tina Seskis
9
PAUL
It had been a difficult run-up to the wedding, most definitely exacerbated by the best man’s ill-conceived stag do (it now being a strictly taboo subject, even though Paul had sworn blind to Christie that he’d cancelled the stripper), but in Paul’s opinion it had begun even before that. Christie had always been pretty easy-going with him – and then one day she wasn’t. He still thought it was something to do with her sister, as Christie’s change of attitude had definitely coincided with the day she and Alice had gone to the fair together. But whatever the reason, suddenly Christie had started asking Paul where he was going, and with whom, and what time he’d be back, and although he knew she’d been betrayed by an old boyfriend before, that was all way back in the past for one, and for another it hadn’t sodding well been him. Secretly, it riled Paul that it felt like Christie didn’t trust him either now, was almost trying to trip him up. But the wedding itself had passed seamlessly enough, apart from his father’s usual cantankerousness. And fortunately the honeymoon in Crete (miraculously organised by him!) had proved such a triumph that Paul had even thought he’d got the old Christie back. Until her bombshell, of course. He still could hardly believe it.
And so now here they were, barely nine months later, and things between them were fragile again. But maybe all women were hard work when they were pregnant, Paul thought. Perhaps it was simply the hormones. He sighed as he reached their street, expertly reversed into a parking space opposite, braced himself for going inside. He never quite knew what he was going to get when he got home, and it made him constantly on red alert for an attack. It might not be anyone’s fault, but it was exhausting.
As Paul entered the hallway the air smelled warm and moist and vaguely animalistic. He wondered what on earth she was making for tea, as it didn’t smell very appetising. He’d definitely have to pretend to enjoy it, though. He couldn’t risk any jokes, the way she was at the moment.
‘Hi, love,’ he called, determinedly cheerful, as he pushed open the kitchen door.
‘You’re late,’ she said. There was a set to her jaw that Paul didn’t like the look of.
‘Sorry,’ he said airily, kissing the top of her head. ‘Traffic.’
Christie didn’t answer. It seemed he’d done something to upset her again, although she’d sounded fine when he’d rung her thirty-eight minutes before to say he was just leaving. God knows what it was this time.
And then Christie’s eyes lit up and she gave him a flash of that beautiful smile, and it was one of those moments he would always remember. He felt his shoulders relax, for just a second – and then her face clenched again, and a muscle started to pulse in her forehead. A lock of wavy hair had fallen down over one eye, and her face was full and rosy, and it was odd how sexy he still found her at nine months pregnant, especially when she was fired up, like now. It confused him.
Without warning Christie doubled over next to the sink and started keening, her long hair hanging down in heavy skeins, reaching almost to the quarry floor tiles. As her hand gripped the draining board, the veins were leaping out of her skin, as if there were too much life in there, as if something had to give. Her bump looked unfathomably enormous. What the hell, Paul thought. What the fuck was she doing?
At last Christie straightened up. She smiled, completely calm now, and even through his confusion he thought how much he’d always loved the way the left side of her mouth curled up ever so slightly more than the right.
‘Paul,’ she said, ‘my waters have broken. We need to get to the hospital.’
10
ELEANOR
Despite Lizzie proving to be the most easy-going boss anyone could hope for, Eleanor remained less certain of what Oliver thought of her. She’d never dared take a nap in the afternoon again, or at least not without setting her alarm first, and she made sure she’d always prepared tea well before picking up the twins. But Oliver made Eleanor nervous now, and she cursed the fact that the one time he’d been home early, her custody of his children had appeared so shambolic.
Fortunately, it seemed that Oliver hadn’t felt the need to say anything to his wife, and Lizzie remained as friendly to Eleanor as ever. In fact, the two women had grown close enough for Eleanor to have fallen into the habit of helping Lizzie with the bath and bedtime routine, even if she was officially off duty by then. She didn’t mind though, as it was easier with the two of them and, if Oliver was working late, she and Lizzie would sometimes sit down and have a drink together afterwards, and it was a relief for Eleanor to have someone to talk to. To have someone looking out for her.
It seemed like the skies had been grey in London for forever, but this evening was sunny, and mild enough for Lizzie and Eleanor to be sitting outside for once. Lizzie was smoking, which she tried to hide from Oliver, although Eleanor was pretty sure he must know, because she could always spot the smell a mile off herself. A bottle of wine was plonked on a side table next to them, and the garden was in a delirious state of spring growth, with purple tulips having sprung up seemingly overnight, along with the weeds. The sharp straight line between the light and dark green of the grass, where the sun was moving ever closer to being swallowed up by the house, was edging towards them slowly, inevitably. But for now the air still had a warmth to it, and it made Eleanor feel glad that, if she’d had to end up anywhere, she’d ended up here. She’d landed on her feet, that was for sure. She dreaded to think what might have happened if Lizzie hadn’t hired her – if she’d run out of cash while still holed up in King’s Cross. Even now, the thought made her blanch.
‘So, Eleanor,’ Lizzie was saying, as she took a large gulp of wine. Her eyes sparked with easy curiosity. ‘You never did tell me. What happened with the boy?’
‘What boy?’
‘You know exactly what boy. The one you said brought you here.’
‘Ohhh.’ Eleanor paused. It was strange. The question was like a pin being stuck into a giant bubble, popping it, splattering the remains of her new truth in messy, abstract patterns. Reality felt unmanageable suddenly. She’d loved him.
Eleanor’s eyes smarted as she shifted on the garden bench, which felt mouldy and damp, as if it needed a hot blast of summer sun to fully dry out. How to explain it? Where to start? How honest to be?
Eleanor found herself tracking back to her old life in Maine, where she’d once been a typical young girl, allegedly living the white-picket-fenced American Dream. True, her mom had been away working lots and her father had lived in New York for as long as she could remember, but heaps of her friends’ parents had gotten divorced too. Even back then though, she’d felt vaguely disconnected from the real world – not an unhappy kid, exactly, just one not yet awake to her emotions . . .
And then boom. Puberty had hit, and when those scary, dangerous feelings had finally threatened to surface, Eleanor had found partying and fuzzy-headedness a pretty effective foil to them. Even now, the memories were mortifying.
When Eleanor looked up to see Lizzie watching her expectantly, with her face cocked to one side, like an inquisitive puppy, she felt an involuntary wash of panic. She forced herself to try to relax again. It was OK. Lizzie didn’t know about her past – she was just being curious, and it’s not as though Eleanor had done anything that bad. All she’d done was go a little off the rails for a while, as did lots of teenagers – but seeing as she was minding Lizzie’s kids, she didn’t like to mention that fact and risk spoiling everything. She felt safe with Lizzie and the twins, perhaps safer than she’d felt with anyone. Even with Rufus, she’d felt too dizzy and overfilled with passion, and then ultimately wholly rejected, to ever have time to feel anything as prosaic as safe. She still wasn’t sure what to say. She took another sip of her wine.
‘The boy?’ said Lizzie, gently. ‘What was his name?’
‘Rufus.’
‘Oh.’ Lizzie sounded surprised. ‘How very English. And how did you meet him?’
Eleanor paused. ‘While working at summer camp,’ she said. ‘We w
ere both camp leaders.’
‘Oh, that’s so sweet,’ said Lizzie. As she smiled, the dimples in her cheeks and the fine tendrils of dark hair falling around her face made her appear younger, almost like a teenager. A winsome, innocent teenager who had grown up safely in the bosom of a proper, non-dysfunctional family. The older woman’s apparent lack of worldliness was endearing in a way.
‘I would have loved to have gone to summer camp,’ Lizzie continued. ‘Like Sandy and Danny in Grease.’
Eleanor laughed. ‘Yeah, something like that,’ she said. It still felt painful to remember that time, despite the memories having transmuted now into a sweet, masochistic kind of ache, full of poignancy and lost hope. And at least meeting Rufus and falling in love had led to the opening up of herself in ways she hadn’t thought possible, unaware before then that you could feel so breathy and passionate and wild and vivid, just through the very act of being alive. Even in the long agonising months apart from Rufus, she hadn’t been tempted to take drugs, as she’d once done to dull pain. Who needed drugs when you could have love? It was a ride wilder than any other. Love would conquer all.
What a joke. Eleanor took a breath of dense London air, which had a quite different noxious tinge to that of New York, and continued her story.
‘So Rufus and I fell in love, and he begged me to come to England, and so I did, but when I got here everything felt different somehow . . . and it sort of went from bad to worse . . . and then he told me that he’d made a huge mistake.’ Her pace quickened. ‘He said that his old girlfriend had been in touch and that, after a few weeks with me, he realised that he didn’t love me after all, and that he wanted to be with her. And so I left . . .’ Eleanor tailed off. What else was there to say?
‘Well, he’s a fool,’ said Lizzie. Her tone had a note of something unspecified in it, and Eleanor thought it might be regret. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s OK.’ Eleanor laughed. ‘Character-building. Isn’t that what they call it?’
‘So why didn’t you just go home?’
Eleanor didn’t answer.
‘They don’t know, do they?’
‘What?’
‘Your family. They still don’t know that you’re not with him?’
Eleanor hesitated. It didn’t feel right to lie to Lizzie.
‘I’m going to tell them,’ she said. ‘But I wanted to make sure this job worked out first. I want them to feel proud of me . . .’
‘Eleanor.’ Lizzie reached across and put her hand on Eleanor’s arm, and her touch was warm and alive, energising as well as comforting. ‘What you’ve done is amazing. Remember that. And this job has already worked out – you’re great with the twins. Of course your family will be proud of you.’
Before Eleanor had time to reply, a loud, elongated wail started tail-twisting its way down the garden, and even from here they could hear it ramping up every second. Barney. Lizzie stood up. ‘I’ll go,’ she said. As she looked down at the younger girl, the light was behind her, so Eleanor couldn’t quite work out her expression. ‘You stay here and finish your drink.’
A few hours later Eleanor was woken up by the sound of Lizzie and Oliver downstairs, arguing. It seemed he’d been late home, again, and Lizzie, in her wine-fuelled state, wasn’t happy about it. Eleanor assumed it was normal to witness rows when you lived with a couple full-time, but she didn’t know what they should be like, how bad this one was on the overall scale.
Eleanor lay on her back and pulled the blanket over her head. It was odd being here, and it almost felt as if she’d taken a full circle back to her own childhood, to a state of mind akin to mild dissociation. Here, in a place called Crouch End, with its chichi stores and café culture, and endless strollers and playgrounds and bohemian vibe, had seemed a good spot for her to hide out for a while, lick her wounds, get over her heartbreak without losing face. But now Lizzie’s questions had rattled her. Was it so wrong to have not told her parents what had happened between her and Rufus? After all, they’d lied to her for years about the state of their relationships, and God knows what else besides, and at least this way they hadn’t had to worry about her. She’d just called them up a couple times, and that had seemed to be enough for them. Out of sight and all that.
Eleanor turned over on to her front and sank her head into the pillow, until she could barely breathe. The noise downstairs had quietened now, so presumably the argument was over, and Eleanor was glad. She hoped for Lizzie’s sake that Oliver wasn’t being an asshole. In Eleanor’s opinion he was more than capable of it, although she had no real solid evidence. It was just a feeling. But since the incident with Barney, he’d made her feel uncomfortable, as if he’d sussed her out now and thought she was bad news . . . And yet at other times, he was friendly, perhaps too friendly, especially if he’d been drinking. But maybe she was wrong. It made her feel disloyal to Lizzie to even think like that.
Men, Eleanor thought. Were they destined to confound her? She wasn’t sure. But there was no point worrying about it. All she could do for now was hang in there, look after the twins, help Lizzie . . . and do her best to stay out of Oliver’s way. Just to be on the safe side.
11
PAUL
Paul grimaced as he swallowed the coffee. It was weak and too hot, and it had first burnt his tongue and now was doing a pretty good job of scraping the skin off his throat too. He felt flailed, inside and out.
He was a father! Thirty-odd hours after he’d arrived home from work to find Christie in labour, he finally had a newborn little girl. Not the healthy, pink princess of his imaginings (nor, thankfully, the blue, dead one of his nightmares), but a wrinkled, gnarly little thing, so apathetic she’d barely reacted to being born. Yet perhaps that wasn’t too surprising – it had been a horrendous experience for all of them. First Christie had had to endure a long-drawn-out, excruciating labour, throughout which he’d stayed resolutely beside her, despite him being half-frightened out of his wits, despite her repeatedly yelling at him to fuck off and leave her alone to get on with it. On the couple of occasions he had stepped out to use the bathroom her eerily bovine bellows of anguish had leached through the corridors and pounded inside his head, as if there were no escape from them. The midwife had said that all the women were like that, but still Paul hadn’t been sure. He’d never seen Christie like that before, and it was a discomfiting sensation, implying that there was a depth and a rage to her that he neither knew nor understood.
Unfortunately, things had only got more abject from there. It had been appalling to discover, after hours and hours of strain and noise and drama and trauma, that Christie’s efforts had been a complete waste of time. It seemed the baby had got stuck – neither in nor out – and as the beeps on the machine had become increasingly insistent, the natural birth process had been brought to an abrupt halt, with low mutterings about distress and heartbeats and a load of other stuff that Paul had failed to understand and that had only elevated his level of terror. He’d had no time to even ask any questions before Christie had been wheeled through to the operating room, where the doctors had performed a swift, brutal emergency Caesarean, redolent of some kind of blood-sluiced butchery ritual. Or maybe they were all like that – Paul had no idea. But either way the air had been thick with blood and tension and fear, and afterwards he’d tried to comfort himself that at least both mother and child had survived. That was the important thing – wasn’t it?
‘You OK, Christie?’ Paul said now, as he hovered next to his wife, unsure whether to sit down or not. The baby was asleep in her plastic crate, her nose twitching, looking vaguely inhuman, like a laboratory specimen. The way Christie looked up at him wordlessly, her face pale, her hair fanned against the pillows, made him feel uncomfortable, as if he’d said something really stupid. He remembered his father used to look at him like that, and he felt a throb start, in his little toe, of all places, before he pulled himself up. Now was not the time for bad memories. He had the future to think about.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Good,’ he replied. There seemed nothing else to say. He’d tried to imagine this part at least being joyful, but it was surreal, sombre almost. It seemed inappropriate to ask what was the matter with her. Hopefully it was just exhaustion. He wondered if he should pick up the baby, offer her to Christie, but he was scared to, and he wasn’t sure who he was trying to placate anyway.
‘Well, well done, pet,’ he said, patting her hand. The words were asinine, appeared to stumble over each other, as though the air was too dense for them.
Christie closed her eyes. ‘It wasn’t well done at all,’ she murmured. He watched as the outer edges of her eyelids began to glisten.
‘Oh, Christie,’ Paul said. Instinctively he took her hand. ‘Of course it was. You’re amazing.’ And as he leaned over to kiss her, he truly believed it. He truly believed that they were a family now, and that this strange little addition to his and Christie’s lives would help bond them back together . . . That they’d got through the worst part, and everything would be OK from now on. It was up to him to make it so.
12
ELEANOR
There had been a temporary pause in the dismal weather, yet still Eleanor was undecided whether to risk it. The forecast had been for rain all day – again – but over to the east the sky had opened up suddenly to reveal a serene celestial white, as if the sun were straining to break through and show the clouds who was boss. Barney and Jessica were still not quite over their chickenpox, but they were both missing being at nursery now, and in truth Eleanor was missing them being there too. A whole week at home with a pair of unwell twins had been exhausting, had tested her childcare skills to the brink. She was proud of herself, though, that she’d managed. But this morning all three of them needed to get out of the house – there was a limit to everyone’s patience, after all. Plus Oliver was upstairs today, and even though he mainly kept himself to himself whenever he was working from home, it still made her feel uneasy – trying to make sure the twins didn’t make too much noise, in case he was on a call, or stressing about being in his way if he came down to make a sandwich, or that she was seen to be looking after his children properly. It was odd how tense the atmosphere felt between them these days. There was an invisible aura that surrounded Oliver, which she could feel when he got too close to her, and sometimes she noticed the glances he gave her, although she was never quite sure what they meant. She remembered the occasion when he’d brushed his hand against her midriff, and still couldn’t decide whether it had been deliberate or not. But mostly she assumed that he just didn’t like her, still suspected she wasn’t suitable to look after his children. Sometimes she’d even wonder whether that was partly what the rows with Lizzie were about, and then she’d tell herself she was being paranoid.
