me.’
‘But I’ve never met this guy … Jules, or whatever. What if …’
‘I have.’
‘You have?’
‘Yes, he’s nice. He’s sweet. Totally unthreatening. I’d be more worried about him. He looks malnourished: Maisie could take him down in five seconds flat.’
There is a silence as Adam watches Becky’s fingers flick over her cuticles in quick and silent clicks then dart to the silk skin on her wrist and back again. He knows what she’s thinking.
‘She’s a sensible kid, Becky,’ he says eventually.
‘I know that. But I was a sensible kid before that night in the Hampstead house.’
‘That was different. You were … no one could have predicted … This is so different. Sober school night, parents down the corridor, the girls sharing a room. It’s not a party, they won’t even be drinking. It’s all good, I honestly think it’s all good.’
But he sees from her expression that she’s not convinced and so he continues, ‘She’s growing up quickly. If we box her away from what everyone else is doing she’ll do it anyway and then won’t tell us about it.’ Becky bows her head. Knows he’s right. ‘We have to trust her.’ He’s sweet to put it that way when what he means is that Becky is the one that must trust.
‘It’s not Maisie I don’t trust. It’s other people.’
‘So let’s make Jules wear a monitoring device?’ says Adam brightly, hauling them both back into the present. ‘With the capacity to shock him remotely?’
‘You really think he’s OK?’
‘He’s passionate about the polar ice caps and Dinosaur Junior. That makes him more than fine. Come on.’ He reaches out for her hand and then lets his arm fall by his side.
‘OK, OK, fine.’
He smiles. ‘I think it’s a good decision. For all of us.’
By us he means Becky. Good for her to let go, is what he means. Becky feels her stomach unknot with the feeling that Adam is the net under her tight-rope.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘I think the spare room is all made up …’
‘That’s OK, I won’t need it,’ says Adam casually, ‘I’ll go to poker if Maisie’s going to be out.’
Becky turns to face him, her stomach knotting all over again. ‘Where?’
‘Pete’s new place in Ladbroke Grove?’
She wouldn’t dream of travelling to the opposite side of London in the same situation. She’d get on with stuff at home to quell the anxiety that her daughter was staying in a house she had never before visited, as if knowing the colour of the wallpaper would somehow make Maisie safer. Becky would potter about, phone in her back pocket, just in case Maisie needed to speak to her.
As it is, Becky will be in France and Adam will be in West London. Her jaw tightens. Did he tell Maisie she could go to the sleepover so he’d be free to play poker with his mates? She banishes the thought. It’s not useful. He’s doing her a favour by being on call; what do they call it, in loco parentis?
‘But what if something happens?’ she says. ‘And she needs to come home and you’re not here? It’ll take you ages to get to her.’
Adam turns to her, smiling. ‘Lily’s mum is at the house and Zee can always call me.’
Part of her is scalded with panic: by that time, it will be too late to save Maisie from whatever has happened. And yet another part of her knows that what he’s saying is entirely reasonable. If only she were able to feel the same reasoning in her bones, just a fraction of his confidence, an iota of his assurance. She wishes she was more like him.
‘OK,’ she says quietly. ‘OK then.’
‘I’ll fix that shelf in the hall before I go,’ he says, ‘then the shelf gets to have a good night too.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, trying a smile. ‘And please, keep your phone on and close to you?’
‘Of course I will. And I’ll be here when she comes home from school tomorrow. Come on,’ he winks. ‘This really is fine. Go and have some fun in Cannes.’
Maisie lopes back into the kitchen holding a box of blueberries in one hand and an over-stuffed rucksack in the other.
Too late for Becky to change her mind now, she holds onto her daughter tightly and silently prays for her safety.
‘Be asleep by midnight,’ she says. ‘You’ve got school. And you can call your dad if there are any problems. Or me. I’ll have my phone with me in Cannes. WhatsApp, text, a call, it will all work …’
‘Yes, yes,’ she says quickly, and turns to face Adam. ‘You guys are the best.’
She catches the intense concentration and joy in Adam’s eyes as he flips a pancake onto her plate: the pleasure of a job well done for the people he most loves. So she can’t ask him for everything she might want, and he might not do everything exactly like her, but she feels so lucky for what she has. Things might have spiralled into a row without him there, with Maisie not feeling listened to and Becky the baddie, the mother who fails to trust her daughter.
Adam is her compass. Her confirmation person, her Call in Case of Emergency man. The man her daughter calls Dad. Her best friend. Joint custodian of the great lie at the heart of her life.
Hounslow
Mid-September 2003 to mid-March 2004
In the weeks after the party Becky can wake in the mornings and for a few moments feel as if she has come to consciousness in her normal, untouched life. But then she remembers the badness, and it fills her heart and mind to the brim. She overflows with it.
It becomes a struggle just to get out of bed.
At first, she gets away with some mornings at home, complaining of a virus and, later, the flu. She insists she doesn’t need anything for it but her parents press paracetamol, tea and damp flannels in her direction. Weekends come and go but her usual trips to the pool are dropped and she can no longer countenance the bright and bouncy happiness of Saturday morning television presenters. She chooses to watch soaps instead, passively allowing their stories and characters to slide past her thoughts and feelings.
She hides her body in baggy clothes. She avoids the mirror, as if it might talk to her. She just wants to sleep.
After a fortnight of this her mum declares this period of supposed ill health as having gone on ‘far too long’. Becky is sent to a doctor who diagnoses glandular fever. This buys her another four months of staying in bed, watching television and avoiding food, until her mum begins to mistrust this diagnosis – having come from a generation that does not trust an illness with undefined edges and blurred duration and no brand-name pharmaceutical pill to cure it.
She insists on tests for Becky: blood and urine.
Becky goes to the GP surgery to get her results, alone. Just her and the doctor in his airless, disinfectant-scented, steel-and-chipped-Formica office. The words bend her reality. She thinks that she is losing her mind and that she is instead simply sitting in a maths lesson, studying a Venn diagram of symptoms for depression and pregnancy, looking where the circles bisect. Depression is the blue circle, pregnancy is the red circle, and there she is, all mixed up in the middle, as purple as a bruise.
Then, she cries a lot.
Time slips past her. The abortion clinic judges that she is well past twenty-four weeks pregnant. They offer to try to make an exception