Robert stared out across the countryside for another twenty minutes before walking back to Martock. Never going to get it together, he thought, and wondered exactly what it was that had made Louisa, usually serene as a Buddhist monk, act the way she had.
Erin and Ruby were in the dining room, Ruby taking advantage of the full English breakfast buffet while Erin sipped pensively on a black coffee. Ruby’s reaction to Robert’s approach alerted Erin although she didn’t look up from staring at the starched linen tablecloth.
‘Hi.’ Robert kissed the top of his wife’s head. He had taken a quick shower and changed into jeans and a green striped shirt. His dark hair was still damp and glistened in the subdued ceiling lighting. ‘Not eating?’ he asked. He thought they could take a drive out to Sherborne Castle. He didn’t want to be around when Louisa’s cousin’s wedding got underway. He didn’t think he could bear to see her dressed in a maid of honour’s outfit, even if she wasn’t quite the bride. He pulled out a chair and sat between mother and daughter.
‘Good run?’ Erin’s tone was as bitter as her coffee.
‘Yeah, thanks.’ Robert unfolded his napkin and the waitress took his order.
‘You went with Louisa.’
‘Dad, can we go to that castle you mentioned?’ A piece of Ruby’s sausage skidded onto the table as she cut it.
‘You could have asked me to go with you.’ Erin shielded her cup as the waitress offered her more coffee.
‘I didn’t think you liked running.’
‘Do
you
?’ Erin stood and walked briskly out of the dining room.
‘Of course we can go to the castle, Ruby,’ Robert said and as he was stirring his tea, he caught sight of Louisa and Erin passing each other in the foyer. Neither of them acknowledged the other.
NINE
I wake to find that I’m wet. My sheets, my legs, my fleece pyjamas are all soaked with something that smells of warm, wet animal. Mother will be angry that I made such a mess. I haven’t peed the bed for several years now. I put on the bedside lamp and see that it’s not just wee on the bed. There’s blood too and as I walk to fetch my dressing gown, I find that I’m still peeing. With each step I take, hot liquid spills down my legs and I try to stop it but I can’t.
I whimper, knowing I’ll get a good slapping for this mess. I pull down my pyjama trousers and see that they’re sodden and streaked with red. I take them off and hide them under the bed. I get the bucket and squat over it. At this rate, it’ll be full in a few minutes. They didn’t empty it yesterday and I wonder if I should tip it out of the window.
I look at my clock. It’s twenty to midnight. Nearly the New Year. Mother told me that tonight they’re going to a party at Uncle Gustaw and Aunt Anna’s house. They’ll be having delicious little savoury
pierogies
,
cwibak
loaf and
piernik
honey cake, and the children will be allowed sips of sweet
miod pitny
from tiny ceramic fish-shaped vials that smell of dust from Aunt Anna’s woodwormy sideboard. Uncle Gustaw will blow the bugle at midnight, like last year, like he has done every other New Year’s Eve I can remember.
Mother watched for the glint in my eyes as she told me of their festive plans, held her breath for any sign that revealed my longing to come too. I couldn’t help it, thinking of them all together, laughing, dancing, singing, eating and drinking in the New Year, my cousins frolicking as a noisy pack, playing pranks, stealing the alcohol. I tried not to look at the pleasure on Mother’s face, that tightening of the lips, the narrowing of her dismal watery eyes when it dawned on me that I wasn’t even invited, apart from being too shamed to attend.
It didn’t occur to Mother that perhaps I didn’t
want
to go to the celebrations, that I was too scared. My poker, dough-faced, bloodless expression aside, trying so hard not to let her think I was disappointed, a worry spillage was set free.
What if
he
came looking for me?
In the early hours, my parents will be walking home, holding hands, rosy-cheeked, chilled, feeling sick, feeling young, exhausted but warm on the inside. The entire Wystrach family, my uncles and their wives and sisters, cousins, aunts, mothers and my
babka
will see in the New Year in their own way; under tight surveillance from Mother and her sister-in-law, Aunt Anna. It is the only night of the year when they all let down their hair.
I double up in pain and fall onto my bed. It hurts. I have a cramp in my guts, perhaps because of bad food, perhaps because of no food. I push my face into the pillow and bite and the pain drops away as suddenly as it came. When I stand up, I am shivering and more hot pee trickles down my legs. I wrap my dressing gown around my shoulders and get back into bed. Everything will seem different in the morning, that’s what Mother always used to say when she liked me. I fall asleep.
I was dreaming of Christmas Day, that they let me have extra food and put a cracker on my dinner tray. Who was I supposed to pull it with? In my dream, the cracker turned into a long carving knife and when they came to get the tray, I slipped it into each of their bellies, the flesh bursting precisely because the cracker knife was so sharp. The pain in my belly makes me stretch out and yell. I grip the bedhead behind me, my fists whitening around the metal bars. I scream again. It’s a scream that comes from a place so deep inside, I don’t even recognise that it’s me.
I try to stand up but fall off the mattress and bang my head. That pain doesn’t matter. It’s the pain across my front, whipping round to my back and speeding up and down my spine that I can’t bear. In between the streaks of agony, it dawns on me that the baby is coming. Where is Mother? I call out her name, while I am able, while there is no pain.
I pull a pillow off the bed and doze fitfully on the floor. I can see some of my old toys under the bed – dolly Patricia, a grubby pink rabbit, a pile of Enid Blyton books and that game of Snakes and Ladders that
he
gave me two birthdays ago. It was a sign, he said, that we had good games. He’d wrapped it in tin foil and the ribbon was from a chocolate box and now he tells me to just forget. What, that he gave me Snakes and Ladders? No, the other stuff, he says and laughs at me.
I draw my legs up but that doesn’t help. My face shatters as another wave of pain helter-skelters around my entire belly.
‘
Mother
. . .’
Somehow I get to my feet. I lean forward, resting my hands on the end of my bed, and rock from side to side each time the pain comes. I screw up my eyes and pant out gallons of air, which makes me feel dizzy and convinced the world is upside down. I’m sick. Water vomit erupts onto my quilt. I fall to my knees, too weak to stand.
‘Someone help me!
Mother
. . .’
I sleep again, with my forehead resting on the floorboards and my domed belly stuck between my knees. I dream of
him
and when I wake, because the pain has started again, I’m sweating and scared and panting because the dream was so real and I thought that he was in here with me. I look around. He’s not.
Suddenly, I want to push. I’m like a dog, holding my breath and bearing down, lifting out of myself because I’m on fire down there and I’m screaming and screaming and drowning because there’s no breath in me and still no one comes to make all this better. I am completely alone in the house.
I drop down with my forehead on the floor again. I will do this.
There’s the Snakes and Ladders box again, unopened, mint condition. I slide my hand under the bed, through the dust, and pull the box towards me. A game for two or more players. I lift off the lid and take out the board.Yellow ladders, green and red snakes. There’s a little plastic bag of counters and two dice. I snap open the bag, roll a die and move a counter five places but then the pain comes again and I rear up and grip the metal bed frame and wail like a wolf and strain and push and those hot irons stabbing through me are going to kill me, I know.
I’ve landed on a ladder which takes me directly to square thirty-four. Hurray! A six this time. Then a three and another ladder and I’m reminded of
him
by the face of the little snake that, if I had rolled a two, I would have landed on. Oily, leathery face with eyelids too flared for his black bead eyes, like our heavy living-room curtains. Simply too big.
Pain again and I chip a tooth as I wrap my lips around the bed frame, trying to cool down because everything about me is burning up. I’m a space capsule re-entering the atmosphere. I put another counter at the start, for
him
, so that I can pretend he’s playing too. I want to beat him. Using both dice, to hurry things up, I frantically roll and roll, taking turns, me then him, climbing up, sliding down, on and on to the top. Even with my head start, he’s catching up. I can see his bald, moley scalp getting closer as he steps methodically up each rung. I’m only one level above him now and – I fold with pain – if he reached up a hand, he could probably grab my ankle as I cower on square fifty-seven.
I plunge a fist between my legs. Something’s there, bulging, like a disc of wet animal. I burst out in shrieks of laughter, which turns into exotic wails coming from a part of me I didn’t know existed. The urge to push is all-consuming. If I don’t, I think I’ll die. I’m burning, burning. I scream for my
babka
. She will help. She doesn’t even know I’m having a baby. Three thirty-six, the clock says. Where
is
everyone? I pant gently; have a break; roll the dice. He’s gaining on me, no doubt about it. Only three squares behind.
Instinctively, I reach for the pillow that is already lying on the floor. I drag the quilt off my bed and make a nest. It’s my only hope. There are little animal noises, me I think, and a warm milky smell bubbling from inside me. This is it. I’m on my back, half sitting, half lying, propped on elbows, legs as wide as they can go. It’s bursting out of me. The world goes black and quiet for a moment – the eye of the storm – before I’m stretched to infinity with a pain that now, compared to my game of Snakes and Ladders with
him
, seems bearable.
The large, masterful figure looms over me, watching, laughing, spit collecting in the corners of his wide, hungry mouth as I split myself in two, his shiny boot nudging my hip, his hands creeping where they shouldn’t. The head’s out. No pain for a moment, just me with two faces, one of them squirming, squinting between my thighs, the other thrown back, flushed, exhausted.
It makes a noise. A squeak. I heard it and felt the tiny vibrations shiver up its body inside me. Then, with one final griping pain, the rest of it suddenly comes out in a rush and slithers in mucus and blood onto the quilt. I grab my baby roughly so that
he
can’t get a hold of it first. I press it to me, without even bothering to look at its unfolding body, urgently hiding it from the figure that is kneeling beside me now, easing me back onto the quilt, his thin lips searching for mine, his smooth, moisturised hands creeping around my deflated belly.
I press the baby’s mouth to my nipple and realise, as its grey legs pound the unfamiliar space in anger, that I have a baby girl, born on the first day of the New Year.
Something else glides out of me, warm and thick and smelling of raw liver. I leave it lying between my legs and, with his finger pressed on his mouth to silence me forever, the figure vanishes, leaving behind the faint tang of pipe tar on my lips.
I wrap myself round my baby to keep her warm, praying that he won’t come back. I’m shaking. The quilt is soaking but I pull it up over my shoulders anyway. I’m too tired to move and as I’m falling asleep I realise that because of Uncle Gustaw, my daughter must be my cousin too.
TEN
Robert had instructed Jed Bowman to come back in half an hour. The client wasn’t pleased, his already ruddy cheeks flushing, his cold eyes darting over Robert as if sizing up which bit to thump. Robert clicked the reception door locked as Jed left so that he and Tanya wouldn’t be disturbed. Den was out at a meeting all morning and Alison, his PA, was off sick so it was just the two of them.
‘Right, pick up the phone.’ Robert felt a pang of guilt as he addressed Tanya like an impatient teacher would address a disobedient child. However competently she’d managed Fresh As A Daisy for Erin on Saturday, she’d be clearing her desk by the end of the week if she didn’t get hold of Ruby’s birth certificate. He stood over her as she dialled the number.
‘Put it on speaker phone.’
‘Good morning, Northampton Register Office. How can I help you?
‘Hi,’ Tanya replied. ‘I’m calling about an application for a copy of a birth certificate.’
‘Hold, please, while I transfer you.’
‘They’re always busy,’ Tanya protested, covering the mouthpiece with her hand as her boss stood glaring down at her. His dark hair, stiffened shoulders and deep chest barricaded by crossed arms told Tanya that he wasn’t budging until she got answers. Having worked as Robert’s assistant for many years, she’d always thought him a reasonable man.
An electronic voice told them they were number five in the queue. While he waited, Robert re-read the letter from the General Register Office: ‘. . . unable to issue a copy birth certificate from the information given . . . no record found for Ruby Alice Lucas . . . DOB 1/1/92 . . .’ The details were correct. No doubt. He wondered if Ruby had another middle name that he didn’t know about, that never got used, or if Ruby was indeed a nickname. He would ask Erin. He needed facts.
As they moved forward in the automated queue, Robert considered that Erin might have given Ruby her maiden name after the split from Ruby’s father – a defiant act of completely cutting herself off from the man she didn’t love any more. He could imagine Erin doing such a thing in a fit of pride and independence. If that was the case, if Ruby’s birth had originally been registered under her father’s name, when her parents were happily married, then of course no record would be found. Robert released the tight embrace of his arms a little, relaxing as he realised a rational explanation was entirely possible.