the best thing, except for I can’t talk to her on her quiet days, because she hardly says a thing. On those days I have to talk to myself, make up the voices in my head, pretend there is someone else who will chat to me. Really I know it’s just me but sometimes I can trick myself. I can pretend.
I’m seven nearly eight, I’m getting big, and I know I’m getting taller because on the nights when we sleep in the car my legs hurt more. They’re hurting now, it’s harder to scrunch them up small in the passenger seat. I draw shapes on the car window, circles and diamonds and swirly lines that tangle into great messy scribbles. I am bored. I want to go home. We have been here for hours.
‘I’m hungry, Mummy.’ I am hungry, my stomach is growling like a lion. There has been no food all day. Sometimes Mummy forgets. When there is no reply, I pull on Mummy’s sleeve and eventually she gives me a bar of chocolate, squashed and warm but whole, bright in its wrapper. Yum. Just as I’m about to eat it, I am jerked forwards; the car is moving, we are on our way. Mummy is pressing her foot to the floor, glancing into the rear-view mirror, her eyes alive again. She still hasn’t put the headlights on. The chocolate tastes old and a bit stale, but I don’t mind, I eat it anyway. It’s gone too quickly. I want more.
The car is moving very fast; the chocolate whooshes around in my stomach and I begin to feel sick. We bend in and out of streets, faster and faster, until suddenly we are stopping, Mummy is slamming her foot onto the brakes and our little car is screeching to a halt. Outside the world has become very dark, I can just about see the tiny silver stars if I tilt my head back all the way and look out of the window. The dashboard lights glow; their green and orange lines form a face in the reflection and I jump, startled by the way the features leap out at me. That finally gets Mummy’s attention.
‘What is it? Do you see him?’
‘I see a face,’ I say, and Mummy leans over me, right across my lap so that I can smell her hair, the strange sour scent of her skin. I hate the way my mother smells now. The girls at school tease me for it, they say that it’s because she doesn’t wash. I wash myself, I run myself baths in our little flat, fill the tub up until the water runs cold. I sit in them for ages, wishing I could be a mermaid and live underwater. I don’t like the flat, I want to move back to the big house but Mummy says we can’t. All our money is gone. The bad man took it.
London
Ashley
James still isn’t home. Ashley has put Holly and Benji to bed and Lucy has stomped upstairs with her headphones in. The door to her room is permanently closed these days; Ashley knocked about an hour ago but got no response. Her fifteen-year-old daughter is surgically attached to her phone, the little buzz of it vibrates through the house, tailing her around.
She is in the kitchen, pretending to watch television, but her mind is on the big clock on the wall and all she can hear is the second hand moving, tick tick tick, and all she can think about is James, and why isn’t he home yet.
The phone bill came in today. Ashley went through it late at night with a glass of red wine, hating herself all the way through. It was because of what Megan said, how she looked when they were sitting outside Colours. It made Ashley doubt herself. There have been three silent calls, now. Not a lot by anyone’s standards, but two have been late at night, and she can’t help but wish that just for once, James would be here, and she’d be able to ask him, she’d be able to see his face. Looking at the bill, Ashley tried to pinpoint the times of the calls, but all that shows up is private number. Obviously. Still, she has kept the records, stashed them in the drawer in the kitchen, the one that houses Benji’s school projects and the million phone chargers that this family seems to need.
It isn’t that she doesn’t trust him. It isn’t that at all. They’ve been married for almost sixteen years; Ashley knows him almost as well as she knows her sister. As well as she knows herself. It’s just that there have been a lot of late nights, and he hasn’t given her any explanations. She tries to think back, runs her mind over the last few months. When did his late nights begin? He was here when Holly was born, of course he was, he was up in the night with her for weeks on end while their newborn rocked and raged. The months afterwards are a blur, a sleepless, messy stream of tasks. At some point, they stopped doing them together.
Ashley takes a gulp of wine. Her fingers have left misty prints on the glass in her hand; she stares at them in the light of the kitchen. The gold band of her wedding ring glints and a shiver goes through her. What if it is a woman calling the house? They have all read the stories. If you’ve got a group of girlfriends, you’re bound to know someone whose husband ran off with the secretary, someone who came home one day to find him in bed with the office floozy. Someone who let themselves go, became wrapped up in the children, looked the other way when her husband strayed. Ashley just never considered that it would happen to her.
God, listen to herself! She must stop this. She doesn’t think he’s having an affair, of course she doesn’t. Not really, not deep down. She just feels unsettled, she feels that there’s something not right, something that he’s not telling her. And she hates it.
Ashley picks up a magazine from the side, flips through the pages to distract herself. The women in it are young, glossy. She thinks of her own eye cream sitting in the fridge. She’d given in, bought the anti-ageing stuff that her friend Aoife had raved about. Corinne had laughed at her, told her not to be so silly. She isn’t being silly, she’s being realistic. She’s got four years on her sister, perhaps when Corinne gets to her age she’ll be buying eye cream herself. She turns another page, winces at the bright pink heading. New year, new you! Should she be doing a January diet? She puts a hand in the waistband of her jeans, feels the indents the zips have left in her flesh. She doesn’t know how other people do it, pop kids out then spring back to size. She’s never been able to manage it, but perhaps she isn’t trying hard enough.
She ought to give Corinne a call. Her insemination is coming up. Insemination. When Corinne first started the fertility treatments the word had made Ashley uncomfortable, conjured up grotesque images of cows and oversized pipettes. Now it trips off the tongue as easily as a hair appointment. Ashley sighs. Corinne has had to go through the process more times than anyone should have to bear. It makes Ashley’s heart hurt. When Holly was born, Corinne had come to the hospital room, bearing a huge bunch of yellow balloons and a smile that looked as though it might crack at any minute. They had sat together on the bed, staring at Holly as she nuzzled Ashley’s chest, nudged for the nipple. Ashley had pretended not to notice the tears in her sister’s eyes, knew Corinne wouldn’t want her to see.
Yes, she needs to call Corinne. While she’s at it she should ring her mother too; Ashley worries about her, all alone in Kent, rattling around like a penny in a jar. Mathilde moved last year, barely two months after their dad died, said she couldn’t face being there, surrounded by all his things. They had packed up the Hampstead house together, boxing things up, making endless trips to the charity shops, clearing room after room until at last the big house was empty, full of nothing but dustballs clinging to the floorboards. Ashley had stood for a moment in their old living room, her hand on the light switch, staring at the bare walls, the stripped shelves, the blank windows. Then she had snapped off the switch and closed the door, blinked back the tears that threatened to fall.
Mathilde was installed in her new place quickly, a small house in Kent with a gravel drive and double-glazing. It is better for her, really. Ashley should go and see her, take the children. If James can spare the time.
Ashley looks at the clock again. Ten to ten. Holly will wake up at about eleven, no doubt. Then again at twelve, one if she’s lucky. She has finished the wine so she stands up, pours herself another, fills it to the rim. Her hand is shaking slightly and a droplet of wine hits the work surface, spreads rapidly across the wood. Ashley reaches for the sponge and, as she does so, the phone begins to ring. Ashley stares at it as though it’s a bomb; the