IT RAINED DURING THE night. Cara could smell it when she opened the front door; the fecundity of worms and roots, the sliminess of the leaves. This car attracts bug life. Her wing mirrors were swathed in spider webs, each invisible thread jewelled in rainbeads. There were four garden snails suckered to the wheel-cap, their shells cool as marbles under the vague sun. Denise insisted on pulling them off before she would get in the car for school. Poor snails.
Cara’s only just noticed the ladybird. It’s clinging to the dashboard, trembling along with the vibrations of the car. Any moment now its shell will snap open, revealing the little frenzy of wings beneath. That’s all it will take for the creature to be lost to some invisible nook of the car. Then it will turn up dead in the pocket of a door or the crease of a seat, compact and weightless as confetti, tossed in the dust with the copper coins. Thinking of that makes her feel weak and loose and sorry, like finding fragments of moth wing on the windowsill, or when her children tear open the buds of poppies, exposing the private twirling tissue of a flower that will never unfold.
The phone directs her calmly and clearly in a clipped English accent, but she keeps checking the screen with the same habitual glance she gives her mirrors, searching for the reassuring dot of her car pulsing along the roads.
While she drives, she plots the simple patterns of the ladybird – the blocky shapes for eyes and the funny little paddles of its feet. Poor mite must be drying out in here. She imagines it drinking a droplet of dew from a leaf or sliding down the side of the text in a big tear of rain, then pottering off onto the next page, two fat little domes of rain still on its back; and they splash off as it takes flight on the closing frame. She could work that into The Rainy Day Book…
The Rainy Day Book is a worry. ‘Make it your own,’ her agent said, but then they rejected the duck and asked for a boy and a girl instead. She was reluctant to accept the job in the first place, but she can’t back out of a commission, not with Pat working all the time, saving and saving as though shoring up against some terrible disaster. It hurts Cara, and makes her ashamed of him and then ashamed of herself for that betrayal, to see him undo the rubber band and count rolls of money into envelopes before stashing them under the floorboards like a greedy criminal. ‘It’s fine. We’ve nearly saved our target for this year. It’s fine…’ He’s started working weekends and evenings again – nixers here and there on the black to add to those envelopes.
‘It’s hard for men,’ is what Grandma would say. ‘Oh, it’s hard for men. They think they must control everything. They feel great burdens. Try to understand it’s hard for men.’
He opened her bank statement yesterday, and he went spare. But it only showed a bit of her overspending. He doesn’t know what she took out of her savings account for Denise’s violin. She isn’t supposed to touch that account.
It will be fine. She can move money over. She can tell him she’s getting a little less for this job, make it up that way…
She should get decent money for The Rainy Day Book. She hates it, though. It will involve illustrations of the various activities suggested for rainy days. They are stupid projects requiring double-sided sticky tape and craft tacks and pipe cleaners and all sorts of things that kids never have at their disposal. The editor emailed photographs of the finished products – characterless creations assembled by adult hands.
The GPS has led Cara into a little cul-de-sac beside a park and instructed her to drive through the house in front of her.
She will be late for this appointment, it seems, despite her best efforts. She is always late. Pat thinks it’s a feature of her personality that she likes to cultivate, but he’s wrong. She tries to be on time. She is ashamed of being late all the time, but still it happens. Parked in front of the angular new-build, she checks her emails to make sure she has put in the right address. She is left with no choice but to phone the woman and ask for directions. The thought of that makes her stomach flip and she rests her face on her palms and closes her eyes. The pregnancy sickness has started already. This time there seems no pattern to the waves of nausea. They come without warning, sweeping her into a useless heap when she least expects it.
She has been uneasy all day. This always happens to her if she doesn’t work well in the morning. It is something she withholds from Pat guiltily; her inability to enjoy anything unless she’s done some good work that morning. Pat – whose hands come back split clean to the tissue and angry with splinters, who works and works with his head bent until his neck aches, and then keeps working; who works only to support them all, to look after them – how would he feel, if he knew that she can’t bear any of it; the cooking and cleaning and driving, the nonsense the kids talk in the back of the car, the ridiculous squabbles?
If she has rendered a detail perfectly, or planned her layout, or any achievement at all, she can appreciate it all, she can take pleasure in every little thing – reading to the kids, listening to their jokes; cooking elaborate meals and eating them together around the table.
But on days like today it is all a hassle, pulling her away from what she needs to do. Everything slides away from her; half real, half formed. If she hasn’t been able to work, she thinks of nothing else. She sketches in her mind while her husband makes love to her; she pleasures him hurriedly, twitching with the need to put lines on paper.
Pushing her knuckles into her eyelids, she feels already as though she is in trouble for something – her own secret, wicked selfishness – thinking about nothing but silly scribblings.
A sensation like vomiting comes over her and she groans audibly, inhales as though this breath can suck her back together, and scrolls back to the email in her phone:
Dear Cara,
Thank you for getting in touch. I would like to meet with you to discuss your concerns. Please call me on the number below to arrange an appointment.
She almost hopes the woman won’t pick up. She can leave a voicemail saying she’s lost, then go home and put it all off until another day. It was the directness, perhaps, of the email, that made the whole thing seem so dramatic, and then the voice on the phone – dull, so very monotonous, as though weighed flat by the gravity of her job. But even as she wrote the enquiry, she felt the seriousness of what she was doing. A creeping fear set through her like something dropped into her blood. Once she has transgressed like this, there is no going back to the codes of family loyalty.
She hasn’t had a chance to talk about it properly with Pat. Freya is always there, and Freya can’t cope with what is happening with their aunts and their grandma and their mad mother.
Freya is like a child. She’s let this thing with Jem’s father get out of hand, and now she expects Cara to know what to do about it. She expects Cara to pick up all her broken pieces. Cara had to march her into the legal aid office and, as it turns out, ignoring him like that didn’t ‘do her any favours’. When it gets to court, they said, Freya will look unreasonable. She should have given him access as soon as he ‘expressed an interest’. It’s all Freya wants to talk about. She wants advice but she never takes it. It never occurs to her that Cara doesn’t know what to do either, that she is barely holding her own life together.
The call rings out, and Cara feels she has willed it that way.
With her nail, she nudges the ladybird very gently. It tucks its legs under itself. Then she remembers something – the matchboxes in the glove compartment! Denise has been collecting them for school. Her class is making a matchbox town or something. Children used to come to the door in the summer, selling matchboxes full of ladybirds for ten pence. Grandma bought them for the roses and gave the children a handful of Fox’s Glacier Mints as well as the money.
Cara slides open a matchbox and pushes it at the ladybird. The creature is still clamped up neatly, and it is easy to topple it into the box. She slides the cardboard closed and puts it in the door of the car.
Just as she is about to call and leave a voicemail, the phone rings. The woman sounds chirpier than she did last week. She says the GPS always gets them wrong, and they are back across the road, behind the church, that Cara will see the Health Service Executive sign on the gate of the car park. She is to ring the bell that says ‘Protection of the Elderly’.