It was two days before I would, unbeknown to me then, go into labour and I was at the dentist. I stepped out of the door, bump first, when Marc’s bandmate Macca appeared behind me.
‘Romilly! Thought that was you. Here, let me help,’ he said, getting the door. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Not seen you for an age,’ said Macca as I turned to him on the pavement. ‘Wow, nice hair.’
I touched my growing-out crop, self-conscious. It was nearly at my bum the last time he saw it.
‘Well, you rock stars tend to keep the family away from the scene, I suppose,’ I said. ‘What goes on tour to your shed at the bottom of the garden stays on tour in your shed in the bottom of the garden, right?’
Macca laughed. ‘Exactly right, Romilly, exactly right,’ he said. ‘In between fillings and X-rays on my back teeth, I am quite the rock star. Not that we’re heading for much fame soon until we get a new guitar player of course.’
He looked at me.
‘That shed at the bottom of the garden is missing your husband,’ he said, mussing up his hair lightly. ‘Still can’t believe he left us. We were on the brink of something big!’
Macca was taking the piss out of himself, and the others, when he said they were on the verge of something big. But I tell you who would say they were on the verge of something big all the time, and believed it? Marc. Marc was going to be a rock star. Which made what Macca was saying all the odder. I stayed silent, because I was embarrassed that I didn’t know what he meant. Because I was confused. Because I thought silence could be the best route to finding out what he meant, without shaming myself and my marriage.
‘Four months since he handed his notice in and we can’t find anyone half-decent,’ Macca ploughed on. ‘It’s music’s loss, Romilly, music’s loss.’
My stomach would have lurched, if there wasn’t so much else going on in my insides.
Instead my throat did the work, filling up with bile.
Four months. Four months since Marc started lying to me.
As Macca carried on talking, I started to back away, muttering something about my belly needing a sofa.
Marc hadn’t been in the band – the band that he formed his identity around – for four months. When we met strangers at weddings, Marc mentioned his day job managing a music shop as an afterthought. The band, his guitars, were the headline. His passion. And Marc was nothing if not passionate.
If he was doing something else when he said he was at his weekly practice at Macca’s, it was something he loved more than the band.
A phone beeps, bringing me back to the campsite, to France, to now.
I look up, Adam glances at it.
Looks at me.
We both know who it is.
Adam’s hand doesn’t move towards it though, and it sits there, too far away for me to read but lit up, a little bomb.
I look around me. See two French teenagers bringing a stack of pizza boxes back for their family, an eight-pack of stubby beer bottles in their other hands. They smile over at Adam and me.
‘Bonsoir!’
I smile. Raise a hand. When I look at Adam, he hasn’t even bothered. His face is preoccupied. Looking at me with expectation.
I keep talking.
When I left Macca, I went to the beach, so many steps down that they put most people off from bothering and I still can’t believe I did that; I was nine months pregnant.
But if you made that effort, the reward was how much beach you got to yourself. How much silence you got to yourself. A few dog walkers in their wellies. Not much else. It was starkly juxtaposed with the tourist beach a mile up the coast; buckets and spades for sale, six different options for an ice lolly.
‘When I was there, I called Loll,’ I tell Adam.
His phone beeps again.
He puts it away in his pocket without looking at it.
‘There is no one more honest than my sister,’ I tell Adam. ‘Loll is a straight talker. When I told her what had happened with Macca, she must have asked me twenty times why I couldn’t just ask Marc where he was going.’
‘And why didn’t you?’
‘Because I was heavily pregnant and I didn’t want to deal with it. Pathetic, eh?’
At the beach, I thought hard.
Before I got pregnant, I did all of my best thinking as I swam in those freezing Thurstable waters that made my heart slow and my mind fizz. Moving, that determination it took, cleaned my mind like a glasses wipe. I would have done anything for that feeling that day.
But I couldn’t go in the water. Not then.
Instead, I watched the people in wetsuits on their paddleboards, in kayaks. That’s the kind of beach it is: you go there to be active; it’s too cold to stay still.
I tucked my chin into my coat collar.
When the wind blew, the cold was sharp.
I wiggled my bum forward, inched a little closer to the sea’s edge. Dug my fingers into the damp sand. I thought of my old frame, wading easily out to deep waters from the shore.
A slimy lake. A toad-green pond. I’ll get in any outdoor water I can find. But mostly it’s been there, on our local shoreline where I grew up paddling in the water, thinking thirteen degrees was balmy.
It’s not a boastful coastline, ours. Not showy. It’s not the Faux France of the South Coast; there’s not the drama of Scotland. But it’s mine. I see beauty.
Any window I could, I pulled on my wetsuit and I swam.
‘Not being able to do it that day, when I needed it the most,’ I murmur. ‘That was hard.’
Wetsuit on, a woman about my age pulled a paddleboard out, wading until she was deep enough for the fin not to catch. She was experienced, on in seconds, graceful as she knelt, her paddle digging into the water. I was far from her chest but I could still see her breathe out. Leave her day behind. Work through whatever she had to work through.
It’s a meditation, whatever you do in the water. In, out, forward, onward.
I sighed. Lay on my side on my elbow on the sand and watched. My stomach was being punched rhythmically from the inside; hey, baby. They would be on the outside soon; I could trace their outline through my belly.
Over the next hour, the paddleboarders moved further and further away. Above me the noise from the microlights that always hovered above this part of shoreline became louder, only rivalled by the unembarrassed squawk of the gulls.
That night, funnily enough, was band practice. At 7 p.m., I was in my regular position in the only spot I could now get comfortable in on our sofa. Pregnancy pyjamas on.
Marc bounded downstairs and pulled on his Converse. No guitar in his hand; normally I’d have assumed it was in the hall, or he’d put it in the car already. Now I noted its absence.
‘Heading to Macca’s?’ I said, finding my bump a shelf on a cushion.
The look he gave me was odd.
‘Course,’ he said.
I knew there had been four months of them but this one, this outright lie to my face, still came as a shock.
I stared at him.
‘What?’ he asked. Eye contact too. Nice.
I shook my head: nothing. Turned on a bad dating show. Slipped my hands under the cushion to hide the fact that they were shaking. Said goodbye.
When he left I turned the TV straight off and sat in silence, picturing him in various scenarios.
I’ll have this baby, I thought, at first – then we’ll come back to this. But while he was out, I thought fuck that: I’m not scared of being a single mum. But I am scared of being lied to for my whole life.
I am scared of the man Marc has become.
I turn to Adam.
‘It wasn’t out of the blue, Marc behaving weirdly. The band practice thing was a shock but there had been things in our life that had happened that no one knew about, Adam.’
Adam moves his sunglasses up off his eyes and looks at me.
‘Including me?’ he says.
I nod.
‘Including Steffie?’
And again.
I was scared of drifting further from who I was. Being pulled away from friendships. Craving junk food like I never had, shovelling it in for comfort. Being stalked around the café with his impromptu visits. Told my career is pointless; don’t build up your part with all this ‘community hub’ shit, you’re a fucking waitress. Reminded that I am stupid, stupid, stupid. Made to watch Marc’s band play on YouTube over and over and fucking over, so I understood how good he was: so I understood that it was my fault he didn’t make a career out of it. I wasn’t supportive enough, see. That’s my problem. I never am.
I was scared of all of it; of that drip-feed being my life, of what it would do in the end to my soul.
I felt a surge.
Touched my hair then, as I sat on that sofa and wondered where my husband was, and remembered.
The next thing I remember are fingers that pressed, and pressed, and pressed.
It’s 1 a.m. Marc just home from wherever he had been instead of band practice.
I was finally asleep; the discomfort of late pregnancy meaning it had taken this long to manoeuvre into position.
I woke up to my husband pulling at my thick pyjamas.
‘I’m scared, Marc,’ I whispered, curled childlike, tired deep inside my bones. ‘The baby feels so low.’
I was nervous. All I wanted was a hug.
He carried on pulling.
My body tensed.
‘Marc, I’m scared,’ I repeated. ‘I’m scared for the baby.’
I twisted my body away, not tired anymore.
A beat.
And then he stood up. Slammed the door behind him.
The baby had saved me, I knew. I was under no illusion.
Downstairs, I heard a bottle smash against the wall.
The noise made me jump so much I was scared again, for the baby, and counted its kicks for hours. When he came back up, I had finally dozed off.
I was shaken awake.
‘D’you know how humiliated you made me feel then, rejecting me? Why do you do this?’
Gin on his breath made me gag.
I apologised, to make it end.
‘No,’ he breathed. ‘I want to explain to you how it made me feel. You’re my wife. You are supposed to listen if I’m upset.’
My eyelids sagged.
‘In the morning …’ I whimpered. Begged.
He shook his head. Heaved me out of bed. This couldn’t wait. He pulled me out of our bedroom.
‘I’ll make you coffee. That’ll wake you up.’
I was pregnant and couldn’t even have coffee; he knew that.
Didn’t matter. He was in a zone that didn’t incorporate the real world.
‘I was so tired that I stopped to get myself together. He shoved me, told me to keep moving.’
I inhale suddenly now. Or gasp.
‘Are you okay?’ asks Adam.
I nod. But the humidity makes me feel like I can’t breathe. That, or the remembering.
I try to breathe deeply.
I was wrong to think my pregnancy would protect me. In the end, he couldn’t stop himself.
‘Adam,’ I say. A beat. ‘When Marc pushed me, I was right at the top of the stairs.’