The LED screen flashes number twenty-one. I sigh and along with nearly everyone else pull out my iPhone and turn it on.
But a small commotion at the door causes me to look up. A heavily pregnant teenage girl waddles in wearing tracksuit bottoms and flip-flops and shouting at a lad behind her. ‘Fuck off,’ she screams, ‘Fuck off, right? I don’t want you here. I don’t fucking want you here!’ The lad says nothing, his head bowed. They sit on opposite sides of the room, he with his chin almost on his chest, her glaring furiously at him. And as I watch, he looks up and makes brief eye contact with me. He is, I realize, about twenty, the same age Connor was when I first met him, though they are nothing alike – the wounded, vulnerable expression of this stranger is nothing you’d ever have seen on Connor’s face.
In that instant I’m transported back to the night of the fair, the night it all began. I see Connor staring at me across the fairground, feel again the electric charge of excitement. I’d walked towards him and said his name and he’d thrown away his cigarette and nodded. I’d felt suddenly shy and for something to do had taken a swig of the vodka before passing it to him.
‘I saw you,’ he said, when he’d drunk some. ‘On the waltzers, with the fat girl,’ and I’d shivered at the thought of him watching me without me knowing it, those sea-green eyes on me. He’d looked away, and I’d started to panic because he might go: he might walk away and I didn’t know how or when I’d see him again. So I’d blurted the first thing that came to me. ‘Want to go on a ride?’ and he’d smiled; it broke across his face, a beautiful smile, wide and sudden and with such sweetness it had taken my breath away.
In the waiting room the Irish woman gathers up her children and heads towards one of the consulting rooms, but I’m barely aware of my surroundings now, lost as I am in the memory of that night. The big wheel had taken us up into the dark sky, his jeans rough against my bare leg, dark hairs on his arms and stubble on his cheek and a faint smell of sweat and aftershave and cigarettes and something deeper and more pungent, something masculine, indefinable. A man, he was, a proper man, and excitement had fizzed inside me as I’d drunk in his long lashes, the curve of his skull, the line of his neck, and I’d had to sit on my hands to stop myself from touching him.
He pulled a spliff from his pocket and lit it, before turning and squinting at me through the smoke. When he’d passed it to me I’d sucked it down and the hit was instantaneous, mixing with the vodka in dizzying waves, and I’d closed my eyes, then felt the suddenness of his lips on mine, hot and soft and hard, dry and wet, his tongue pushing into my mouth. I touched him, my fingers beneath his jacket eager, hungry, running them over the fabric of his T-shirt, feeling the skin and muscle and flesh of him. Even though I was so nervous I could hardly breathe, I couldn’t stop myself, had no shame, no self-control as I kissed him, ran my lips against his jaw, buried my nose in his neck, breathing him in.
What little I’d done with lads before had been nothing like this. I left that old me there, behind the last tree at the end of the playing fields in Withington, and took a leap into something else, something new. He was touching me too, his hands rough and careless over my chest, beneath my skirt, parting my thighs, slipping his hand beneath my knickers, and the bit of me that would normally smack his fingers away, tell him to get lost, was silenced. I was only feeling and sensation, the big wheel carrying us round and round as I trembled into his neck, not wanting him to stop.
In the hospital waiting room a large West Indian woman touches my arm. ‘Is that you, honey?’ she asks, nodding at the number flashing on the wall.
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘Yeah. Thank you.’ And I gather up my things, pull myself laboriously to my feet and walk towards my midwife’s room.
Edie lives in Tyner’s Cross, the bit of Fremton between the Pembroke Estate and the rest of the town. A scattering of cul-de-sacs and council houses and new builds, as though Fremton proper had emptied out its pockets one day and this rag-bag jumble was what had tumbled out. We get to Edie’s street, a row of small, pebble-dashed houses with falling-down fences, front yards strewn with junk and weeds, and she glances at me. ‘Not like round your way, is it? Mind you, our old place wasn’t much better.’ She sighs, then says, ‘One day I’m going to be rich, Heather. I’m going to move to London, go to Saint Martins and become an amazing artist. I’m going to have a gorgeous flat, and people will go to galleries and buy my pictures for millions,’ she laughs, as though she’s only joking, but I feel a rush of admiration. I want to tell her that I believe her, that it sounds amazing and that I think she could do anything if she set her mind to it, but before I can speak we’ve stopped outside a house with a peeling yellow front door and Edie’s pulling a key from her bag.
At that moment it swings open and a short, stocky woman comes out. She stops abruptly when she sees us, her small eyes flickering over me without interest before turning eagerly on Edie. ‘Ah,’ she says, ‘There you are, Edith.’ She takes a step forward and puts a hand on Edie’s arm, standing very close. Her hungry smile shows a mouth full of sharp little teeth. ‘I’d been wondering where you’d got to. How are you? Everything OK?’
Edie gently releases herself. ‘Fine thanks, Janine.’ She shoots me a look; ‘Mum’s physio,’ she explains.
The woman nods. ‘You look after your mum now. We’ll have her up and about in no time.’ Her gaze lingers on Edie, hot and slippery.
‘Right you are,’ Edie says. ‘See you next time.’ And together we hurry through into the hallway, Edie laughing into her hand as soon as she closes the door. ‘Yuk,’ she says, and though I roll my eyes and nod, unease shifts inside me, an unpleasant memory of playground taunts, an ugly word to describe shameful, unnatural things. I force myself to rid the woman from my mind as I follow Edie down the hall.
The living room is small and cluttered and I drink it all in eagerly, not wanting to miss even the smallest detail. ‘It’s basically mostly my nan’s old stuff,’ Edie tells me carelessly, but I think it’s lovely. Little china ornaments on every surface, flowery wallpaper and a thick, swirly brown carpet and a green sofa with a matching foot stool. A vase of plastic flowers on the brown-tiled mantelpiece. It’s untidy and stuffy and smells of burnt dust and cats, but I know instantly I’d rather live here than my house any day.
Edie throws her keys on the coffee table. ‘Mum,’ she calls, ‘I’m back.’
A woman walks slowly in on crutches and I remember how Edie had told me her mum had been in a car accident. Even in her nightclothes she looks beautiful, so glamorous and young, with make-up and long hair and a pink silky dressing gown very different from the one my mum’s usually buttoned up in. She glances at me and smiles briefly but before I can say anything she looks past me and says to Edie accusingly, ‘Where have you been? I had to wait for that bloody woman to turn up just to have a cup of tea.’
Edie rolls her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’ll make one now, shall I?’
Her mum takes a pack of cigarettes from her dressing-gown pocket and lights one. ‘Don’t put yourself out.’ With difficulty, she lowers herself on to the couch and, picking up the remote, turns on the TV, staring sulkily at the screen.
‘Fine,’ Edie mutters. ‘Come on, Heather.’
I murmur a quick goodbye before hurrying after her.
Her bedroom is tiny, barely large enough for the single bed that she’s lying face down on. Half-unpacked cardboard boxes cover almost every inch of the worn pink carpet
