‘Thanks, man.’
I take in a delivery of flowers from someone who has forgotten to put their name on and forgotten to check that the baby they had heard had been born hadn’t mislaid its mother. Someone who must have had a text from Romilly or me telling them that the baby had arrived in those blissfully normal hours before this seismic thing happened.
But when I go to shut our front door the image of Romilly, there, transforming it into its current bright green, is so stark it winds me.
Romilly painted that door when we moved in last year.
When the delivery driver pulls away, thumbs up from the van, I stay rooted to the spot.
I picture my wife, kneeling on the step in her denim cut-offs and with bare feet, paint splattered all over her legs.
‘Shouldn’t you put on some overalls?’ I had asked, leaning against the wall next to her with a beer.
‘As if we have overalls, Marc.’ Romilly laughed. ‘Real adults have overalls. Loll probably has overalls. I’ll just scrub it off in the shower. Put my shorts on a hot wash.’
‘And the …’ I had said, gesturing to the blob of green paint on our tiles inside the door. She waved me away.
‘Shush, Marc, shush, it’s part of the process. And it adds character.’
There was something about her expression in those moments that you couldn’t argue with.
Outside the door: Romilly’s royal blue wellies, upside down on the stand outside and still encrusted with mud from our last walk a few weeks ago when her belly ached and the baby pressed on her bladder so hard that she had to wee in the woods and we stopped on the way home for emergency crisps.
‘I’m really into pregnancy Romilly and her diet.’ I had smiled, as she walked next to me shovelling in a family bag of salt and vinegar.
‘Not a word to the café lot,’ she said, finger wagging. Threatened to deny it and tell them they were edamame. The café she manages has an ethos based on ‘wellness’. Always been baffling to me, as a man who eats Coco Pops for lunch.
I stand at the door picturing our life before. Years have passed since then, surely. But no. It was alarmingly recent.
My own khaki wellies are next to Romilly’s, about twice the size. Romilly is a shoe size three, in proportion to her minuscule frame. Pregnancy made her look as though she would topple over.
When I close the door, I shove the flowers on the kitchen table, no water, and think how often flowers are supposed to be a nice thing and all they are is a chore.
Fuck the beauty.
My wife is missing, with a mental health condition that could mean she takes her own life. Any second. This one. This one. Now. Then. Anything. Any time.
And someone thinks I want to look around for a vase; snip off the ends. Add sodding flower food.
Send beer, I think, if you want to send something. Send a bottle of vodka. Send me sedatives so I can sleep until this is over.
When I land back in the living room it is onto the sofa that Romilly and I have sat together on so many times that it is indented by us, moulded to our shapes. Where Romilly’s belly had laid on its side so full of daughter earlier this week as she pored over a hypnobirthing book. Where a tiny stain is left on the arm from that time Romilly’s best friend Steffie stayed over and a tipsy Romilly spilt red wine. This place drips Romilly, spills over with Romilly, oozes Romilly like an overly stuffed burrito.
Now she’s not here in person, though, I want to contain these traces, scoop her up and put her in a cupboard until we fix this.
Seeing her everywhere is too much.
I bow my head low and cover as much of my face as I can with my palms.
It is 2 p.m. It was only one day ago we found out Romilly was gone.
My sister-in-law sits on the sofa next to me, holding the baby. I can feel her eyes on me.
Is he okay? Can he cope? Do we need to call for help?
At least she knows what is happening.
Without the context we have, I know what everybody else will think.
Is it his fault?
They will think I did something. Hurt Romilly. That I caused this. Always the husband and all the other taglines. I have a target on my back.
And when I see them, I will have to force my heavy head upwards to plaster on a smile and reassure them and hope they know that this time, it’s nothing at all to do with the husband, actually: the husband is a good guy, give the husband a break.
‘How’s my girl?’ I ask, looking over at my baby.
I lean down and stroke our white Labrador Henry, who is chilling out by my feet, finally done with investigating the baby.
I wrap my arms around his sturdy neck, the soft coat around it. Inhale. He has been bathed for the new arrival, the smell of old carpet eradicated. For a few weeks at least.
The baby doesn’t have a name yet. It’s the kind of decision you make together, isn’t it? With the baby’s mother having disappeared, our baby doesn’t get to have one.
Loll strokes the baby with no name on her nameless nose, smiles at her nameless face.
‘She’s good. Content baby. Clearly oblivious to the nightmare going on around her.’
The smile collapses.
More silence.
‘She’ll come back,’ she says, softer.
I say nothing.
Instead, I stare out of the window into the day that 7 a.m. promised it would be. A toddler flies past on his bright red scooter, a flash of colour. The tulips we planted last autumn are showing off in the sunshine. The day’s palette is bright; my insides are a muddy grey.
The atmosphere feels close, like it’s holding its breath.
‘Kids at school?’ I ask Loll.
And then I think how ridiculous it is that I still feel pressure to make small talk when I am going through something like this. Small talk is small; a tiny speck of pointlessness.
‘Dropped them with my neighbour,’ she says, palm on her forehead, rubbing like a bad massage. ‘She’s a living legend, that woman. It’s half-term – bad timing – and I would have taken them to Jake’s but God knows how he would cope with a visit that wasn’t scheduled four weeks in advance.’
No. No. I haven’t got the headspace for bitching about Loll’s ex-husband Jake right now. Not that that makes any difference when Loll decides she wants to bitch about Jake.
Not now, Loll.
I focus on being grateful that she is here.
Loll picks up the bottle of milk.
‘She’s such an easy baby,’ she enthuses again – like having a good baby might make me feel better about having a missing wife – and tips a bottle back at an angle from The Baby With No Name’s mouth. Something about mimicking the flow from the breast. The midwife did go over it with me before we left yesterday but it was a lot to take in. I’m figuring out that this newborn part contains a lot of very specific practices.
I had nodded at Julie as she showed me the bottle and fed my baby and talked while Loll took over as my brain whirred: your wife is missing, you have no idea where she is, this baby is now your sole responsibility.
Now we’re home, where I expected the answers to lie. But they don’t. Nothing has moved on. Romilly hasn’t been in touch. The baby has no mum. I look at Loll in her place on Romilly’s indentation. Too big for it. Too not Romilly.
Out of the corner of my eye I see Romilly’s nail file. There are fibres of you on there, I think. You are so very definitely not here and yet you so very clearly are. How can I marry these two things?
‘No reflux or anything yet,’ chatters Loll. ‘Hopefully she will be much simpler than my two.’
I look at her.
‘Nothing from the police yet?’ I ask.
My sister-in-law shakes her head. ‘They are checking hospitals; CCTV,’ she says.
‘And you still haven’t heard from Romilly?’ I ask. A bead of sweat runs down my forehead.
Loll’s head snaps up and she puts the bottle down for a second; grabs her own ponytail and yanks hard, almost clasping it. When she speaks her tone is different.
‘Marc, I would obviously tell you if I had heard from my sister.’
Do the words ‘my sister’ have some ownership to them?
I wipe the sweat with the back of my hand.
There is a pause.
She raises her eyebrows at me. Shakes her head in complaint.
I know really that she would tell me if she heard from her.
Loll has been irreplaceable for the last two days, feeding, changing, cuddling.
‘I know this isn’t easy on you, especially on your own with the kids,’ I say, and Loll winces.
‘Don’t,’ she says, pushing her glasses on to her head as she rubs one eye. ‘I’m just trying to make an awful situation a bit less awful. This isn’t about me.’
I should have known better. Loll hates being seen as a victim. It’s one of the main reasons hate pours from her every pore towards her ex-husband; he made her the victim, stuck her on the receiving end of cocked heads and there theres and offers of paella nights with other couples all alone or worse, the worst of all, date set-ups.
I think at times she would have killed him, if she could have. Not for leaving her; for the embarrassment.
We sit in silence for a few seconds, Loll and I, as she feeds and pauses, feeds and pauses, mimics that AWOL breast. On the other sofa Henry yawns, the sound an exaggerated cat mew. He licks his lips. Settles back down. I think he’s getting used to our newcomer.
When Loll’s phone rings though, he leaps – supersensitive hearing.
Loll looks at the screen. Silently hands the baby to me.
‘Mum,’ she says. ‘Thanks for calling us back.’
I had to badger Loll to call her mother Aurelia this morning. She protested it wasn’t worth it; she wouldn’t know anything, Romilly would never go to her, there was no point upsetting her.
‘But what if she does know something?’ I said, incredulous. ‘Who might you go to when times are tough? Is your mum not up there?’
Eventually, she gave in.
Aurelia is only just getting back to Loll now, hours later. This is the speed at which she moves through life; I envy the lack of urgency.
I watch Loll’s face as she speaks; it gives nothing away.
Romilly and Loll don’t have a dad; he is dead now but to all intents and purposes that happened to Romilly and Loll a long time ago; he left and picked himself up a new family soon after Romilly was born, is how the story goes. Contact was on and off when they were small; more off than on.
My own mum is elderly and in a care home in Sussex and my dad passed away three years ago. So Aurelia’s belated return call is the nearest we are going to get to any parenting for the adults.
I am close enough to Loll to hear the other side of the conversation too, as Aurelia is shouting.
‘Sorry, darling, am in the van!’ she yells. She and Bill, a man in his seventies with a long white beard and loafers who is referred to as her boyfriend, are travelling through the Basque region in a camper van. ‘But I got your message about Romilly. Goodness me! Do you need me to come home?’
Loll’s lips are pursed. She sends her eyes skyward, like she doesn’t believe the offer is genuine, or just thinks that it is useless, or both. Even from this distance, I would admit it sounded token. Not to mention reticent.
‘No, it’s fine,’ Loll tells her.
‘Ask her if she’s heard from her,’ I hiss.
Loll does.
‘What’s that, darling? From Romilly? We haven’t heard from her since her text to say the baby had arrived safely, have we, Bill? But if she turns up here we’ll send her straight back to you.’
My turn to pull up my eyebrows.
Loll winces too, interrupts.
‘We’ll keep you posted,’ she says.
‘Bad reception in the van, darling!’ Romilly’s mum shouts. ‘But yes. I’m sure it’s just a freak-out about giving birth. I remember being utterly horrified the first time I tried to put you to the breast. The agony! Like it was on fire! Maybe something like that?’
‘Mm hmm,’ says Loll, eyes rolling like dice. ‘Yes, perhaps. Anyway I’m helping Marc to look after the baby.’
‘Good, good, you’re very good at that, the whole mummy bit. He’s lucky to have you!’ she shouts.
I see Loll cringe. ‘Mummy bit?’
‘I’d better go now, darling, but keep in touch, Lolly, and get Romilly to call me when she’s home, won’t you? Bless her, what an upheaval. She might need her mama there. We’ll do some talking, some being together, even if it’s just on the phone.’
Loll’s face does not say good things.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Sure. Some being together, on the phone. I’m going now.’
She is about to hang up and then remembers: ‘Oh, and Mum. Your granddaughter is a beauty, if you were wondering.’
‘Yes I saw the picture – adorable darling!’ yells Aurelia, distracted, already with her head in a map on the way to San Sebastián most likely, daydreaming about the fresh seafood platter she’s going to order for lunch alongside half a cider.
I imagine worlds existing outside this one. Simple ones, with seafood specials and map reading. With art galleries and toes dipped in the sea and sun cream ready to be slathered on. It seems like fantasy.
When she puts her phone down, Loll throws her head back to the sofa and sits for a minute.
‘Told you,’ she mumbles. ‘Pointless.’
I stare at her.
‘Why didn’t you tell her it’s postpartum psychosis?’
Loll shoots me a look. She sighs.
‘I don’t know how much Romilly has explained to you – or even how much she really understands about our mum, because I’ve always tried to protect her from Aurelia as well,’ she says. ‘But my mother needs to live in a bubble. She needs to be treated like a child. Like, the way I don’t mention death in front of my three-year-old and pretend sex doesn’t exist even to my ten-year-old, you have to do that for anything that will make her stress out. Just … pretend it’s not there. That was as far as I could go. We don’t talk about it.’
It’s Romilly’s mum who is the reason she was being monitored for postpartum psychosis. Aurelia, giving birth in the Eighties, was never diagnosed but Loll and Romilly are sure in retrospect that when Romilly was born, that’s what she had.
Loll pushes her fingers into an imaginary mark on her forehead.
‘But she might have wanted to know.’ I pause. ‘She might have had some … insights,’ I say gently. ‘Since she lived with it herself.’
‘She wasn’t the only one who lived with it,’ Loll snaps. ‘I was there too. And I was a lot more lucid through it than my mother was.’ She sighs. ‘Look, Marc, trust me – my mum cannot deal with this.’
She picks lint off her plain grey jumper.
‘Not as in she doesn’t like it, like the rest of us, but cannot deal with it. You have to keep it away from her. We all have to. This is no different. In fact it’s worse – it’ll bring it all flooding back for her. I can’t do that.’
‘But it’s her daughter, Loll. You’re a parent. You know what you sign up for.’
We stare at each other.
I nod. Don’t trust myself to speak. I look at the baby and everything contracts.
‘To be honest, Spain is the ideal place for my mother through this,’ says Loll, dry. ‘A couple of hours’ plane ride away. The last thing you want is her turning up here. It would make the situation harder, not easier.’ Her face is darkness.
‘So if she’s not with her mum, Loll,’ I say, trying to push down the bubbling sensation, ‘where would she go? Because that was about my best guess.’
I look at Henry. Lying down with that solid head of his between his outstretched front paws. Huge, sad sigh. Do you miss her, buddy?
‘Will she miss him?’ I ask Loll. ‘Through the fog? Or is there not room with it to compute feelings like that?’
Like I say, she is the expert. I don’t know how many things fit through the gaps with postpartum psychosis.
But if anything would, if even our baby is too unknown yet, the thought of Henry would. She loves that dog. She normally can’t cope if we leave him for twenty-four hours.
Loll looks at me. Then at my hands, knotted into fists. I uncurl my fingers.
Something flickers across her features and she goes to speak but stops herself. When she starts talking again her face is reset. ‘I don’t know.’
And I must be imagining it because it’s Loll and she’s made of rock but I swear I see a globule of a tear.
Is it the chat with her mum that’s done it? Or are the tears coming finally as a response to everything that has happened to our family in the last two days? We all have limits.
Loll coughs lightly then as she picks up a text. She slips her phone in her pocket. Heads out of the room. I hear her turn the lock on the bathroom door.
When she comes back in, my sister-in-law’s arms hang awkwardly. Loll is so used to having her own children, Keira, three, and Lucy, ten, attached to her, feeding them, wiping them, cuddling them, that she looks incomplete without them.
The baby – my baby – usually fills the space but I hold her now so Loll’s arms are empty. Maybe – looking at how awkward she is – for the first time in ten years.
Instead, Loll fills them with dirty plates and cups, with rogue bibs and dirty nappies. She hoovers up Henry’s ever-moulting coat. By the time there is a knock at the door, the baby is asleep in her Moses basket and Loll has found a can of Pledge and is dusting furiously, the air sharp with cleanliness.
‘I’ll go,’ I say. ‘It’ll be Steffie.’
Or I hope so. Yesterday was like being at an elongated version of my wife’s wake. Those close to Romilly, but no Romilly. Neighbours popping over to see the baby, turning up at the doorstep with facial expressions so perfectly one-dimensional they are like emojis. Their words are similar: bland reassurance. I suddenly realise what Loll must have gone through with the break-up.
I don’t blame her for hating it.
I don’t blame her for wanting to rip Jake to pieces.
When I open the door, Steffie flings her long arms around me and I let her, relieved to see someone who’s less tense than Loll, less active. Steffie will sit with me, talk; she won’t need to dust the top of the TV while she does it.
‘Oh, Marc, my love,’ she sighs. ‘How are you doing?’
I nod. Shrug. Bite my lip to stem the sob. She puts her arms back around me.
Romilly is a hugger and Steffie is the same. She and Romilly always have an arm slung around each other’s shoulders, a hand at the other’s waist. They clutch palms, kiss each other on their heads. It’s absent-minded because they spend so much time together.
Steffie works at the café that Romilly manages (usually; Steffie is managing it when Romilly is on maternity leave) and they glide around each other all day, handing over green juice, drizzling over the chilli oil, taking away the plates.
It’s a version of cohabiting; it contains the same comfort, the same ease, exacerbated by the fact they have known each other since school days. In our bedroom there are drawers stuffed with postcards they wrote to each other when they were away at university, two or three a week, like a diary, and the odd more detailed letter too when a small rectangle wasn’t enough. Their minds are used to sharing a space, and their bodies too: when they go away together, Romilly tells me they are frequently naked. That’s what long-term friendship can do, apparently.
Sometimes, to me, it’s different to that: it’s like my wife is one half of another marriage.
But the Goodness Café is Romilly’s other home, Steffie is Romilly’s other partner and by extension she and I are comfortable in each other’s company. Steffie has been in constant contact today. Now she is in tears.
As Loll starts scrubbing at the windows, Steffie and I get on with our hug, her sinewy arms bare in a running vest. There is a slight musk of sweat. I pull her closer.
‘Sorry I asked how you’re doing,’ Steffie says, pulling away finally and whipping her waist-length ash hair up and into something I think is called a topknot. I notice the stubble in her armpits. She slips off her trainers. ‘Stupid question.’
Fingers rub across her eyes, angrily. When she takes them away, she looks like she’s suffered an allergic reaction. She picks at the corner of ragged nails.
‘Are you still thinking,’ she says, nervously, ‘that this is to do with what happened to her mum?’
I look back at Loll and she turns to face me. Breaks for a second.
We both nod.
‘That’s what we think, yes.’
I glance into the living room at our baby dozing in her Moses basket; Loll has changed her nappy and her babygrow is brand new, the folds from the packet still down the front. She has a decent crop of black hair, the baby, the colour of Romilly’s.’ No trace of my strawberry blonde. It is still disconcerting how tiny she is, but I long for her to stay tiny enough that she has no idea what’s going on. The idea that we get to a point where that baby becomes a small person who can understand the concept of absence and who can ask about Romilly is unfathomable.
I shake my head. No. I can’t race ahead like this. For the sake of my own sanity. Romilly will be back while we are still putting on brand-new babygrows with folds down them. When the baby’s face is still wrinkled. When Romilly’s breasts still spurt milk.
She has to be.
The doorbell rings again.
‘You’re serious, mate, the police have nothing?’ says my own best friend Adam, ambling in behind Steffie as he ambles everywhere, emergency or no emergency, new baby or no new baby. The fact that his body language is identical now to how it was in the pub in the heady, innocent days of two weeks ago at the baby shower he insisted on throwing for me (‘Mate, why CAN’T a guy have a baby shower?’ he protested for a long time and I capitulated but when I showed up it was just us and three mates having a drink, which was fine but, you know, not a baby shower) is reassuring.
Adam is Steffie’s boyfriend. He and I met through the girls.
I realise that he is staring at me.
We are bunched together with Steffie and Loll now, in our narrow hall.
I am staring at the wall behind him.
I snap out of my daze.
‘Well, they’ll look at some CCTV, check hospitals but other than that there isn’t a lot they can do,’ I murmur, trying not to wake the baby.
I glance at Loll.
‘Yep,’ she confirms. ‘She’s an adult. They will bear our comments on postpartum psychosis in mind but with no official diagnosis, it’s tricky. She’s just a grown woman who left of her own accord.’
Steffie is crying again now, standing in the doorway to our living room. Loll is still too, head bowed low.
‘Tears aren’t going to help, Steffie,’ she says, a little snappy.
Slowly Loll raises her chin and she’s pale, I think, paler even than usual, her shoulder-length dark hair much shorter than Romilly’s used to be before she had it cut into a crop. Easier for the wild swimming that she loves apparently. Loll sighs. ‘I don’t mean to be harsh. But they aren’t helpful. To any of us.’
I think about that rogue tear though. It’s in there.
I put an arm around Steffie, marking myself out as being in her camp, the camp made up of the emotional wrecks; the people who cry at a wedding reading and get goose bumps at a beautiful song and are singed with life’s highs and lows.
Loll likes to keep to room temperature.
Romilly, I know, would stand with Steffie too. Mutter about her sister and her pragmatism as Loll turned away from us and fogged the mantelpiece with Pledge.
But Romilly isn’t here.
The baby wakes up.
I go to swoop in but Loll gets there first and I don’t argue because in my pocket, my phone is ringing.
I pick it up. See the name.
I nip out to the kitchen. I shouldn’t answer this, not when they are all here, but how can I not?
So we talk, in hushed tones, me pacing the kitchen with my head down until I glance over at the half-open door and see the bottom of Steffie’s leggings standing just outside the kitchen and then her long feet in their trainer socks quickly walking away.
Steffie leaves to pick up something from work soon after. Her hug is half-hearted. She doesn’t make eye contact with me.