the short drive he’s never quiet or still, whistling between his teeth, commenting on other people’s driving, asking me questions about when I’m due, what I do, where I’m from, all the while ruffling his son’s hair, thumping the horn or drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. I can’t think of anything to say to him. He’s exhausting and I’m relieved when we reach my building at last.
He jumps out and starts unloading the cot on to the pavement. ‘You got someone to help you carry it in?’ he asks. ‘Which floor do you live on?’
I shrug. ‘It’s OK. I can manage.’
He looks at me and I see it dawn on him that there’s no one to help. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he says. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’
And I feel hemmed in by his persistence, his insistence on helping me. I wish he would leave the cot and me alone here on the street. But up the three flights of stairs he follows me, carrying the cot awkwardly, swearing under his breath each time he bangs it against his shin, the little boy trailing after us.
When I open the door to my flat, the threadbare carpet, the old, ugly furniture and the dirty paintwork look suddenly much worse than they did half an hour before. ‘Put it anywhere,’ I say. He hoists it through into the lounge, knocking a shelf and sending its contents scattering, magazines and old bills and a dozen or so loose pages of drawings falling at our feet. I kneel down, hurriedly grabbing at the pictures and stuffing them back into the folder. But it’s too late: he plucks one from where it landed on his foot and begins examining it. ‘These yours?’ he asks, and I feel my face begin to burn, so painful is it to have this stranger – anyone at all – look at my sketches; my inky landscapes peopled by their spindly ghosts.
I hold out my hand to take it from him, but he’s still engrossed. ‘This is actually really good,’ he says slowly, and then he looks at me, his expression different now, curious, reassessing. ‘Do you paint too, or just draw?’ he asks, ‘Because I—’
But I snatch the drawing from his hand. ‘No, I don’t do anything,’ I say, stuffing it back into the folder and moving away.
There’s a brief, surprised silence. I look at the door.
‘Right,’ he says stiffly. ‘Sorry,’ and he takes his son’s hand and starts to leave.
‘Thanks for the cot,’ I manage to mumble when they reach the door, and he smiles again his easy smile.
‘No problem.’ It’s a nice smile, and for a second or two I allow myself to return it, until Connor’s face flashes across my mind and I turn away with a thumping heart, busying myself with the scattered papers while they let themselves out, closing the door behind them.
As my belly grows I find myself thinking increasingly of my mum. I wonder what she felt like being pregnant with me, whether she felt as scared as I do, whether she loved me right away. She was only seventeen when I was born and for as long as I can remember we fought and bickered like sisters. I was six when my dad walked out and I blamed her for his leaving. And yet, in my heart, I always knew we loved each other, a part of me understanding that the passion with which we hurt each other came from something strong enough to withstand the blows we inflicted. Looking back, I guess I always felt that we would have time to work things out eventually, not imagining what was to come; that we would one day have to cut all ties and never speak again.
When I first came to London and lived with Uncle Geoff I would hear him sometimes on the phone to her, passing on news of how I was doing. Sometimes, when he thought I was out of earshot, I would hear him asking her to talk to me, but she never would and I never picked up the phone myself. I don’t blame her for cutting me off, because I left her no choice, not really. If I’d stayed she would have had to have done something, told someone about what happened that night, so by turning her back she was protecting me in a way. And I think, now, that by confessing to her, I was looking for her to force an end to it all – to put a stop to Connor and me.
And still I dream about Heather. Night after night my sleeping mind replays what happened between us in Fremton. I see us at the quarry, all of us: Heather and me, Connor and Niall, Rabbit and Boyo and Tully and the rest. Even the same music is playing on the car stereo and I see again the sinking sun as it stains the quarry’s water red and gold. In the small hours when I wake, breathless and panicky after reliving it all again, I try to make sense of Heather’s behaviour when she visited me. How she’d acted as though nothing had happened back then, as though we were just old friends catching up. Sometimes, in the long sleepless hours before dawn, I wonder if I’d imagined it all, been mistaken somehow in the part she played that night – perhaps time and memory had played tricks, distorted things. But even before the thought has properly formed I know that I’m deluding myself. Whatever it is that Heather wants from me now, nothing can change that.
I’m on my way to the hospital and letting myself out of the front door when the new tenant, the ginger woman from the ground-floor flat, arrives on the steps in front of me, and I look at her with curiosity as I hold the door open for her. She’s very thin and covered in tattoos – a tapestry of names and patterns and hearts and flowers that seems to cover every inch of her. I smile but she doesn’t look at me and though I’m not sure what it is about her that makes me want to talk to her I tentatively clear my throat and say, ‘Hi, I’m Edie, I live—’ But she only nods curtly in response, avoiding my gaze and turning her back on me abruptly as she lets herself into her flat, closing the door behind her. I stare after her, before beginning the long, slow process of getting myself to the hospital.
These days I’m more belly than person; a bump on legs, as if I, or the person I was, has been entirely replaced by my unborn child. And the rest of the world seems to collude in this. In the street, elderly women reach out with narrowed, hungry eyes to touch my belly as though, Buddha-like, it might bring them luck. At my hospital visits I wait, obedient and detached as I’m weighed and measured and scanned and tested, and I feel entirely separate from the life that’s growing inside me. I faithfully attend every appointment and read every leaflet and booklet that’s pressed on me, but if I try to imagine the baby inside me I find that I can’t. When the midwife asks me if I want to know the gender I shake my head in panic, because I only know that I have one wish: I hope with all my heart that it isn’t a girl.
The bus takes me through New Cross towards Camberwell, winding through narrow back roads then on to Peckham High Street, past dusty, sun-baked shopfronts, the jumbled mixture of Georgian terraces and council blocks, strings of nail bars and chicken shops and newly arrived delis and fashionable bars. When we reach Denmark Hill twenty minutes later, the sprawl of King’s College Hospital looms to my right, the low Victorian red bricks of the Maudsley psychiatric unit to my left. I get off at the busy intersection and begin to head towards the maternity unit.
Just as I’m turning into the main entrance I glance across the road and freeze. A woman is standing at the bus stop, turned away and half concealed by the waiting queue of people, but her hair and build and posture is so like Heather’s that my stomach plummets with fright. I crane my neck but a bus pulls up obscuring my view and though I wait, my mouth dry, my heart knocking, by the time it’s moved on again the queue has halved and the woman I’d seen has gone. I stand there for a long time, fear twisting in my gut. But surely it wasn’t her. It couldn’t possibly be. Just another in a long line of lookalikes I’ve spotted over the years – my mind playing tricks again, that’s all. I tell myself to get a grip, the baby gives a hefty kick to my bladder and I hurry on my way.
Today the antenatal waiting room is busy and nearly every orange plastic chair is taken. A small wall-mounted TV shows a daytime property programme, its sound turned low. Women in various stages of pregnancy come and go, each clutching identical blue cardboard folders and occasionally trailing a toddler, a boyfriend or a husband in various states
