Naomi sits on the toilet, puts her forehead in her hands and tries to breathe.
‘Mummeeee. Mummeeee. Mummeeeeee.’ Her daughter sounds more manic with every drawn-out word. She’s been screaming at the bottom of the stairs for fifteen minutes. It’s nearly an hour past her normal bedtime. Naomi needs her to go to sleep soon or she’s worried about what she might do. It’s been three days without Charlie and she’s been edging towards breaking point from almost the moment he left. Prue has never been this bad before. It’s like she’s doing it on purpose. Naomi has sent Charlie messages calling their daughter names she wouldn’t call her worst enemy. Better that than scream them in the little girl’s face, she tells herself.
Naomi hears a bump, probably Prue’s little head on the floorboards. The floorboards that are still covered in staples and nails. She jumps up off the toilet and runs down the stairs to her daughter. Apart from the mania in her eyes, Prue is fine. Naomi tries to pick her up but she bats her mother off so she goes to the fridge and, as if she were a cartoon mouse, lures her daughter up the stairs with little cubes of cheese.
It’s only when she stops running the bath and Prue’s angry sobs smoulder to nothing that Naomi hears it. A loud noise, almost like a fan being turned on and off, punctuated by the sound of scratching and scrabbling. The muscles in her cheek begin to spasm, she clenches her teeth to stop them. Prue’s singing ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ to herself. The sound flurries again, twice as loud as before.
She gets Prue out of the bath, wraps her in a towel and heads out of the bathroom towards the sound. It’s coming from upstairs. As they pass the spare room, the room they’re planning to turn into a nursery for baby number two, Prue screeches and grabs on to the doorframe. Charlie puts all the toys that cause Prue to get the most angry when they’re taken away from her into that room, but he hasn’t hidden them behind the door so her toy pram stands in plain view at the end of the room.
‘My have it,’ she calls out. Naomi can’t face more histrionics so she grabs it and heads up to the top floor, holding the pram in one hand and her damp two-year-old in the other. Further up the stairs the sound gets much louder and Prue cowers from it, nuzzling into Naomi’s neck. She struggles up to the top of the stairs and opens the door to Charlie’s study. The room is still. The noise comes from above. The attic. It sounds like something blowing wildly in the wind followed by what could be thousands of tiny fingernails scratching at the ceiling.
She leaves the pram at the top of the stairs and puts Prue down on Charlie’s swivel chair in the middle of his room. Her daughter holds her hands up to her, not wanting to be left alone, so Naomi gets her a pen and a stack of Post-its from Charlie’s desk to placate her. Naomi grabs the metal pole and opens the attic hatch with it. The small space into the attic is pitch black but the noise becomes deafening.
‘Mummay,’ Prue moans, but Naomi has to find out what’s up there. The ladder shifts around on the landing as she climbs up it. She gets to the top. There’s a flurry of noise, of wings flapping. Pigeons. Standing on the floor of their attic is what seems to be hundreds of pigeons. She makes a sharp screech of disgust and it’s like they all notice her at once. They lift into the air and they’re suddenly flying round her head, wings flapping past her ears, dank air fanned into her eyes. One hand comes off the ladder as she races to climb back down, struggling to hold on. Then there’s a creaking sound, a sharp snap, the ladder comes away from its fixtures and the foot of it slides towards the gaping staircase. She doesn’t let go of the ladder, instinct won’t allow her to grab on to thin air. Its top end clatters against a wall, the bottom end jolts further towards the staircase but then crunches to a stop, wedged into the toy pram that’s caught on the top of the banister. Naomi rolls off on to the floor. The top of the ladder slides down the wall and takes the pram with it as it crashes down the stairs.
She looks into Charlie’s office and Prue’s face is in the moment of shock before it creases up into a terrified wail. Naomi pushes herself up, runs to her daughter and grabs her up into her arms. Some of the pigeons are out of the hatch, flapping in the high space of the landing, her bare foot kicks at Charlie’s door to shut themselves in. She notices acute pain in her back for the first time.
The thought hits her, the baby. She feels her bump for movement, tapping it as if trying to get a message through to her growing child by Morse code. She pushes her thumb into the bump, winces with the pain, trying to wake her baby up. There it is, the fluttering. Not a kick or a punch but its body moving towards its mother’s touch. Naomi pulls her daughter’s head away from her chest, sees the wells of tears in her eyes and kisses them roughly before planting kiss after kiss on the fine hair on the crown of her head. Prue finds a giggle at her mother’s crazy behaviour.
It was the pram that stopped her going down the stairs. This little girl, her little girl, might have just saved her unborn sibling’s life. Naomi catches herself in the mirror on the back of Charlie’s door. She watches Prue, naked of her towel now, grabbing at Naomi’s hair, trying to put it in her mouth. The curve of her daughter’s wet cheeks catches the light through the Velux window. There are more days of sunshine in this part of the country than anywhere else. She grips Prue’s chubby legs and pulls them in close to her, squeezing her flesh into her body until it’s almost too hard.
Everything else is meaningless she mouths at her reflection as Prue throws her hair back into its shape with a flourish.