A month after leaving the canister in the gorse for Maxine, I was beginning to wonder if I would ever hear from her again.
The fleeting pink blossom that I loved so much appeared in Zac’s front garden. The blossom, capped thick with snow, made the ornamental cherry tree look as if it was decorated with cupcakes. Flitting brightly among the branches were the crimson faces of goldfinches and the yellow breasts of blue tits. The birds were drawn by the feeders I put out for them.
A package arrived, addressed to me at the hospital. Since Christmas, I had developed a habit of visiting the post room as soon as the internal mail was sorted. Unlike the card that Zac delivered to me personally, the seal on this was intact. I took it into the loo, ripped it open and found a book I hadn’t ordered. It was a journal. Each blank page had a different motivational slogan at the top. It seemed that Maxine had not gone quiet after all. It wasn’t so much a thank-you present as a message, and I imagined her ordering it with a curled lip on her usually expressionless face.
Do more of what makes you sparkle! That was the extra-special encouragement reserved for the journal’s cover. It was Maxine’s sardonic version of a pep talk, telling ‘sparkly’ little me that I had done well to find Jacinda Molinero and Albert E. Mathieson’s names. Given that Maxine was Maxine, she wanted me to ‘Do more’. Those two words were emphasised in gold shimmer, and while the rest of them were inked in a mere flat silver, the purple ‘sparkle’ was fittingly glittery too.
At work, the red smock with the ugly white polka dots strained to cover my twenty-weeks-pregnant lump. Milly gave me her usual wry smile, and touched my hand when we passed, or put a brief, protective arm around my shoulder if she found me in the supply cupboard, but there was a new reserve.
Two days after Zac and I discovered that the baby was a girl, Milly passed me a drawing she had done, her own version of the Mermaid of Zennor, honouring the original’s folk art style, but with a touch of her own whimsy. ‘In case you’d like it for the baby’s room,’ she said, and I threw my arms around her. Mostly, though, she sneakily watched me, like someone with a crush, hoping not to be caught stealing glimpses.
Whenever the nurses clustered for a group talk, whether in twos or threes or fours, and they saw me approach, there was a hush so obvious it made me blush. On one occasion, I heard Zac’s name before they saw me and clammed up.
One of the nurses, Joanne, only wore make-up during Zac’s shifts. Crimson lipstick, foundation, a fresh wash of dark brown to hide her grey roots. My guess was that she was ten years older than I was – maybe about thirty-five. She was forever finding excuses to put herself in Zac’s path. She laughed loudly at his jokes but no one else’s. In fact, she hardly spoke to anyone else. She was constantly touching Zac’s arm when she said hello or goodbye, as if to a close friend at a party.
‘I hate women like that,’ Milly said, taking me by surprise.
One morning, Zac swanned in post-nightshift to check the ward before going off.
‘Life,’ I heard Joanne saying to him, ‘is about dancing, and eating, and making love.’ She bounced up and down and threw her arms around while speaking, as if she was so filled with joy she couldn’t contain it.
Her back was to me, but Zac saw that I had returned to the desk. I was sorting patient files in order to straighten out the notes trolley.
He was bristling with the worst form of the cocky arrogance that I first found so attractive but had come to find acutely distressing. He did his usual thing of raising an ironic brow. He said something I couldn’t hear, and Joanne tossed her head to demonstrate that she was laughing in complete abandonment. The implication was that she did other things in complete abandonment too.
Milly was standing nearby, a hand on her hip, rolling her eyes and glaring at Joanne, and wanting Joanne to see that she was on the verge of getting a slap right across her ecstatic face.
A few days later, when the ward was quiet and I was about to leave, I heard voices in an unoccupied side room. I was careful not to pass the observation window in the centre of the door, where I might have been glimpsed. It was impossible to pick up more than the odd word without literally putting my ear to the door, but I could tell that one voice was Milly’s. The other was Scarlett’s, a nurse friend of hers. I caught my name, and Zac’s. What I did next happened as a kind of reflex.
I went to the metal filing cabinet we kept in the nurses’ station, behind the reception desk. The cabinet was a relic, as we transitioned from paper to electronic systems. Hidden inside was an unidentifiable burner phone that I had stashed. To find and extract the phone, I had to rummage through the mess of blank request forms for blood tests and MRIs and X-rays and imaging and CT scans and echocardiograms. There was a second phone in the drawer beneath, as a fallback, buried beneath out-of-date guidelines and thick British National Formulary books.
I was still moving as I opened the professional voice recording app I’d installed. It had an extra-sensitive microphone. Standing to the side of the door jamb, I held the phone as close to it as I dared with my fully extended arm.
My heart was pounding in my ears out of fear that I would be caught. My stomach felt as if a butterfly was flying inside it. The din of machines on the ward was like a motorbike revving in my head.
My other hand floated to my belly. That was when I grasped that what I was feeling was not a psychosomatic response to the nervousness occasioned by my technological eavesdropping. What I was feeling was physical and real. After days of not quite being certain, there was no doubting it. I was feeling my baby kick.
A couple minutes later, the side room door smashed open, and I turned on my heel, bringing the phone to my ear as if engaged in a conversation. I looked behind me and saw Milly. Her face went bright red, and I knew that she guessed I’d been listening. I knew also that she would never give me away. But her horrified expression made me certain that whatever she and Scarlett had been saying would not be easy for me to hear.
Zac was on nights, no doubt assisted tirelessly by Joanne, whose shift began an hour before mine ended. I glimpsed her trailing after him as I left the hospital, but I still double-locked the front door. If he did somehow come home early, I wanted the extra warning of his loud curses when he realised he needed to undo the second lock.
I had thought some more about Zac’s discovery of my orange journal in its kitchen hiding place, trying to quell the mortification and force myself to examine the circumstances clearly. I’d also been replaying the way he came home to find me inspecting his old suitcases – he said he’d forgotten his phone, but I was no longer convinced. I wondered what really made him turn around and come back. The only explanation I could think of was that he somehow saw me dragging the suitcases out of the cupboard. And he saw me hiding my journal.
That is why I brought a new toy home with me, a multi-function sweeper for detecting hidden cameras that I’d stashed at work. My extremely disturbing theory was that Zac had installed some kind of surveillance system. If so, chances were that it recorded onto the cloud, so he could have infinite storage space and be able to check the footage from anywhere. He would want to be able to watch in real time or fast forward through it until he caught something interesting.
Turning the Internet router off was the best way I could think of to kill any cameras, because I certainly didn’t want him to see me sweeping the house. My heart was pumping faster as my finger approached the router’s off switch. I was crossing my fingers and toes that there wasn’t a lens trained on the router.
If there was, then I would casually mention to Zac later that the Internet had been playing up, and wonder aloud if he had had problems too. I would also say that I turned the router off for a few minutes to try to reset it and improve things.
The router sat on a small table on the first-floor landing. I aimed the sweeper at every possible place a camera might be. When it became clear that there was nothing there, I exhaled in relief. Zac might still notice the outage, but everyone’s Internet sometimes blipped.
I peered through the flashing red monocle of the camera lens finder, going from room to room, scanning as systematically as I could. I found four tiny red dots. Zac had been spare but targeted, favouring central ceiling positions with the widest vantage points. He had chosen rooms where conversations and activities were most likely to happen, but he had left private spaces, undoubtedly for himself. I was bending my neck to wipe the tops of my cheeks against my arms and blinking hard, angry at myself for crying as the reality hit that he had been using visual surveillance on me.
One camera was tucked in the sitting room’s chandelier. It made me remember my first night with him, making love beneath it. As I suspected, another was in the kitchen, in the middle of the track lighting, which confirmed how he watched me hide my orange journal. The third was in the main hallway, which would ensure he saw whoever came in and out of the house, and also took in the cupboard under the stairs – so that was how he’d caught me with the suitcases.
The fourth camera was in the pendant that hung above our bed.
My hand was visibly shaking as I switched the router on again, but my stomach was a tight ball of fury. I tried to calm my breathing as I went to the camera-free zone of the baby’s empty room, taking along some scatter cushions from the sitting room. I piled them in a corner and made myself as comfortable as I could.
There was that saying about fighting fire with fire, though I was no longer sure which of us was first to light the flames. I did know he had been spying and me, and I intended to spy right back. I would not sit and weep myself into a crumbling wreck over the camera he’d trained on our bed.
I got to work on the recording, reducing the distortion, sharpening the clarity, fine-tuning still more before finishing off with the amplification tool. I relaxed into the cushions, rested my hands on my lower belly in the hope that I would feel her move again, and listened.
It was Scarlett’s voice first, picked up mid-sentence – ‘to the police but they didn’t want to know.’ Scarlett paused. ‘Are you going to tell her?’
There was a small gasp and I realised I had inadvertently recorded myself, capturing my elation at feeling my baby kick for the first time.
Milly spoke next, her voice trembling like it always did when she was upset and trying not to show it. ‘She’s barely recovered from the bleed and the sickness. She’s lost so much confidence.’
There was a rustling, somebody moving, and I imagined Scarlett closing in on Milly to offer a gesture of support. A squeezed shoulder. Maybe a hug. ‘You’re an amazing friend,’ Scarlett said, ‘but she won’t want to hear it. He’s got her completely brainwashed. She doesn’t sneeze these days without his permission.’
‘It’s hard to look at,’ said Milly. ‘It’s hard to be around her right now.’
Milly. That was my Milly. Saying those things of me. Feeling that about me.
‘Joanne keeps saying she thinks he’s charming,’ Scarlett said. ‘She thinks Holly’s lucky he’s so protective, that she doesn’t appreciate him, doesn’t deserve him.’
Milly mumbled something. I played it again and again, but it was impossible to hear it clearly, so I let the recording run forward. ‘Did the healthcare assistant make a formal complaint?’ Milly asked.
‘Yep. Said he pressed up against her.’ It was Scarlett’s voice again. ‘Said he made comments about her breasts.’
Milly groaned. ‘What exactly did he say?’
‘That they were ripe,’ Scarlett said.
‘Please excuse me while I puke,’ Milly said.
As my heart sped up, listening, my baby seemed to wake up too, and it was the strangest co-existence I had ever known of despair and pure joy. I hit pause for a minute, to wipe my eyes and blow my nose. Then I steeled myself and pressed play again.
Scarlett went on. ‘He denied it, of course – it was her word against his. They moved her to Care for the Elderly.’
Milly sighed. It was a sigh I knew well, and one that she got from Peggy, who used it when the state of the world made her sorrowful. ‘Don’t you love it? He harasses her and she’s the one who has to move.’
‘I’m so sorry for Holly,’ Scarlett said.
The last few seconds of the recording were the creak of the door and my own footsteps as I hurried away, stunned by the expression on Milly’s red face.