20 weeks
Lara takes the girls into the front garden of Naomi’s house while she gets the shopping out of the back of the car. Charlie’s parents are on their annual winter-sun trip in Sri Lanka and her mum can’t get the time off work so Naomi’s had no help. Charlie has tried to make himself available, but for the first time in years he’s genuinely busy. Naomi’s watched him nodding his head in earnest excitement when he’s on the phone to Teddy and companies she’s heard of, Leica and Nikon, have expressed an interest in their line of products. He’s shown her the emails.
Prue, bored of spending so much time with her mother, is pushing the envelope to a worrying degree. There hasn’t been any more biting, but every quotidian moment has become a battleground. Naomi’s been using a breathing exercise Lara learnt from a hypnobirthing class to try to stay patient with Prue’s tantrums and it’s actually working. She never would have gone in for anything New Age before but she can’t stop thinking about the little kidney bean in her stomach. Her bump’s much smaller than it was with Prue at five months. The baby’s still not growing.
Prue, of course, has realised she can penetrate her mother’s Zen-calm very easily by doing dangerous things, like trying to climb through the railings on the clifftop when they go for walks or not holding her hand when they’re next to a busy road. She kept a large pebble in her mouth for twenty minutes a few days ago and was laughing and taunting her mother, closing her mouth and pretending to swallow it until Naomi was forced to turn her upside down and pry it out. A loss of composure she instantly felt guilty for.
Prue’s been waking in the night as well. Almost every night. Crying until Naomi or Charlie go in to soothe her. They’ve racked their brains as to what it could be but all the normal problems – teeth, a cold, being scared of the dark – don’t make sense. Children begin to have nightmares at around two years old so that could be it. Or it could be the noises in the house.
Naomi’s tried not to think about Sean, about how he knew that the French door in their bedroom didn’t lock. There is a rational explanation. He came from upstairs when she first came in because he was checking the builders’ work like Charlie had asked him to. But why check the door? The builders haven’t been near it. But if he has been going into their house, planting strange kids’ things in her daughter’s room, why tell her exactly how he’s been getting in? When you spell it all out, it doesn’t make any sense.
Sean has been true to his word about not seeing Charlie. He’s stopped going to football. She asks after him and Tayo after Charlie gets back on a Wednesday night and each time he says ‘Sali’ wasn’t there. He sounds so disappointed, as if he’s a long-lost brother rather than someone he’s just met. Charlie thinks he might be working in Cornwall but Naomi knows he isn’t. Or at least his van isn’t. Naomi’s seen it three times. Once on a street two down from the warehouse where she works and twice while walking Prue around in the buggy near their house. So she texted him, asked him whether he would consider going through with his suggestion to move somewhere else. She spent more than an hour drafting the text. Trying to get the tone right, to make it clear how difficult it would be for her and Charlie, for their unborn child, if he still lived nearby. He hasn’t responded.
‘Oh, Prue, no, no put that down, sweetheart,’ Lara says. Naomi looks over to see Prue dancing on the steps to their house holding something in her hand. Naomi pulls the bags out of the car and slams the boot shut. Lara tries to trap Prue in the porch but she ducks under her outstretched arm and towards Naomi, squealing with excitement at her new game. It looks as if she’ll try to escape her mother as well so Naomi drops the shopping on the crazy paving and picks her daughter up by the hips. Prue immediately puts whatever she’s holding behind her back and grins, face flushed by the exertion. Naomi holds Prue into her and looks over her shoulder, sees what it is and lets out a disgusted screech. Her daughter is holding the dismembered wings of a pigeon.
She bends Prue’s wrists towards her, grabs the wings and drops them on to the floor. Lara appears with a wet wipe and Naomi holds Prue’s hands out to her so she can scrub them.
‘She found it on the front step,’ Lara says. ‘I tried to get it off her.’ Naomi nods back, smiles it off. She looks down at the thing on the ground. Both wings are intact, two full sets of feathers joined in the middle by strands of spiny bone. ‘Must be foxes,’ Lara says. Naomi can’t take her eyes off the bird’s remnants. ‘You’re all right, my little baked potato.’ Lara grabs Prue’s chin and waves it around erasing the growing concern on the little girl’s face. ‘Can we go in? I’m bursting for a pee.’ Naomi smiles wide and goes up to unlock the door. She puts Prue down on the doormat and encourages her to toddle in and take her wellies off.
She goes back down the path to get her shopping bags but on the way to them she kneels down to look at the carcass. Something about the bones that remain, the ones that link the two wings doesn’t seem right. She doesn’t know much about foxes but to eat every morsel of head, body and tail feathers and to leave the wings, attached, completely untouched like this, as if someone had managed to isolate just the arms and shoulders of a human but left nothing else behind, would an animal do that? Even by accident, could an animal do that? She edges her hand towards it, she knows she should pick it up and look closer, see if there’s any sign of it being cut, but she can’t touch it.
‘Mummay, water, Mummay. My water,’ Prue shouts from the doorstep, waving her arms, irate. In the gloom of the hallway she sees Margot drinking out of Prue’s cup. She picks up the bags and heads back towards the house. She pauses on the threshold and looks up and down the street at the row of cars on the esplanade. She doesn’t see the yellow van.