He was coming off the Formby bypass in the 47 when a Fiesta slid over the intersection like shit off a shovel. The driver was only young; she must have thought she had time to nip out in front of him. He braked, but he couldn’t avoid her. Smacked straight into the driver’s side of her car. Wrecked every panel. And then, bang! – a white van went up the back of him. Jolted everyone. People yelped. It sounded like he was carrying a bus full of animals.
It wasn’t his fault, a fact he supposes he will eventually find consoling. He pulled out of the way of the traffic, got out of the cab and moved down the aisle. ‘Everyone okay? Everyone all right?’ he asked. Back at the cab, he retrieved his phone from his sandwich bag and stepped off the bus. Someone was already leaning into the passenger window of the Fiesta, talking to the girl. He walked over. Didn’t get too close. Didn’t say anything. Just looked at her. She was bleeding from a long cut on the side of her head where she’d hit the window. But she was conscious, talking.
The van driver approached, uninjured and pissed off. ‘I called an ambulance. They’re sending the police, too.’
‘Sorry you couldn’t stop in time.’
‘Yeah. Well. You’ll be all right, won’t you? Just say “My neck hurts” and it’s an instant thousand pounds if you’re in the union. That’s what I’ve heard. You in the union?’
‘My neck’s fine,’ Darren said.
He needed to take photos of the damage. Needed to call his supervisor to arrange a replacement bus. Needed to take the names and addresses of the people who’d seen what had happened. But it felt like his feet were stuck to the road.
The ambulance arrived. Someone put a hand on his arm and said, ‘Maybe you should sit down for a moment.’ So he did. He sat on the grass verge and watched as an elderly passenger holding his wrist joined the girl in the ambulance.
By the time he’d spoken to Brian, his supervisor, and the police had finished with him it felt as if his head was bolted to his shoulders. If he wanted to look to one side or the other he had to pivot on his feet.
They sent an engineer and a relief driver with the replacement bus. The engineer drove Darren and the damaged vehicle back to the garage and then Darren caught a bus to town so he could go to the office and fill out the incident report. He had to go through everything again: his direction of travel, the speed he’d been doing, the weather, the details of the damage to the vehicles. When he reached the part where he had to draw a picture of the accident, he took a break; his head felt like it was trapped in a mangle.
Brian sent him home. The important thing was to keep moving, he said. In the old days people wore collars and kept still. Now the advice was to move as normally as possible. So Darren walked, trying to move in his usual way, even though his hands were trembling and he felt like Eagle Eyes Action Man.
He called out as he unlocked the front door and stepped into the house. He wasn’t surprised at Clover’s absence – she’d be at the allotment. He fancied a cup of tea and some anti-inflammatories and was about to boil the kettle when he heard something above. Went to check. Reached the halfway point on the stairs and noticed the door to the second bedroom was open. Carried on climbing. Arrived. Stepped into the room. Felt something in his stomach stretch and tauten like a skin on a drum. Stood there for a moment while every breath beat against it.
He couldn’t make sense of what he saw. The bed made with their bedding, his and Becky’s. Exactly as it used to be. The boxes on her side of it, gone. The dressmaker’s dummy retrieved from the shed, wearing Becky’s clothes, the bag across its chest, exactly as she used to wear it. Becky’s hair. Oh God. Each breath smacked the drum of his stomach: harder, faster, harder, faster. Photographs, baby clothes, pictures of beaches? And there was Clover, bending over a small pile of things, Becky’s portable CD player clipped to the back of her shorts.
When she noticed him, he was already past adjustment. The old helpless rage was back and it was bigger than him. He could feel it filling his chest, blocking his legs, cementing his shoulders, making it seem as if he’d been pretending for years – how dare he forget the details of this particular pain? How dare he?
He had no words. And even if he’d been able to locate some, they wouldn’t have made it past the latch of his jaw. Clover said something and waited for him to speak.
He couldn’t.
And then he was alone in the room. He closed the door to protect her, and himself. To keep it all from escaping on to the landing and down the stairs.
The room smells of Becky. He glances at the little pile of things on the floor – the perfume, that’s why. He likes to think he has been a good dad. But he isn’t actually sure. He has tried. That much is certain. A for effort – ha! If Becky was here, and if she was herself, he knows she would adore Clover. She’d love her in the same unequivocal way she loved Jim; she’d speak to her in the way she spoke to the old people, her voice laced with patience and kindness; she’d read to her, bake with her, and there’d be a pet, something Jim could pretend to own when he came to visit.
He glances at the wall beside the window. At the word SURPRISE and the silly Latin writing beside it. At the photographs of Becky with Clover, and the religious colouring pages. Baby clothes hang from the picture rail – the tiny red dress he picked that first evening as he hurried round the supermarket, feeling not entirely dissimilar from the way he feels now.
It was terrifying. He skidded through the A&E entrance, knowing nothing, only that Becky was there and she needed him. They directed him to the postnatal ward and he dashed down the corridor, no idea what it meant. She was sleeping in a side room, and okay – she was okay. He was barely able to believe the woman’s – the midwife’s – next words. Minutes later he met the baby and her words became flesh.
The love. That was surprising. The instantaneousness of it. Standing beside the incubator while inexplicably crying. Laughing at himself for crying. Explaining that he was fine, and no, it wasn’t the incubator that’d set him off, he was just surprised, really, really surprised.
There was nothing to her. She was wizened and skinny like a little bird, her tiny bones wrapped in papery skin. He could hardly stand to hold her. She felt so breakable. What if he dropped her? What if he pressed the dip in her head where the bones hadn’t yet joined? He watched the way it moved up and down with her pulse. She wasn’t even finished, and yet there she was, his and Becky’s. A person made entirely of them. There were other ingredients, of course: bottles of Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio, fish and chips from South Garden, Toffee Crisps, Boost bars and experimental pasta dishes speckled by chopped-up herbs. The baby had been grown in a house-decorating, furniture-lifting, sand-dune-walking, old-people-caring, Westlife-listening, romance-reading body. And despite the less than optimal growing conditions, and his and Becky’s lack of preparation, everyone said she was going to be fine.
Dad arrived with his cheque book and pen and a list he’d copied from the internet, detailing the safest car seats.
‘Your mother would have loved this,’ he said, and ‘Everyone’s all right then?’, a question Darren answered with a ‘yes’ that almost sounded as unequivocal as he’d hoped.
Jim scuffed down the corridor, trainers squeaking. Grabby as ever, he lifted and turned things, touching stuff that didn’t concern him. Becky let him hold the baby and Darren watched, hoping her arrival would annul any plans for him to move in.
‘Look at you! Uncle Jim,’ Becky teased.
‘You can’t put your finger in her mouth, Uncle Jim – it’s not clean.’
‘All right, Daddy.’
He left a series of messages on Maureen’s mobile. She responded eventually, but gave no indication that she was planning to visit.
He used the holiday money. What else could he do? If he’s honest, he quite enjoyed spending it. He asked one of the female shop assistants to help, chose her specially because he was thinking about how much his mum would have enjoyed this task, and the woman looked motherly, as if she’d make exactly the right kind of fuss, which she did. She escorted him around the supermarket, advising him on essentials: the Moses basket, the rocking stand, the special, Tiny Baby-sized dresses and baby-grows, the nappies and wipes. She instructed him on the things Becky would need, laying them in the trolley herself: breast pads, disposable knickers and sanitary towels in packs so thick they could conceivably double as pillows. And a card, from him to Becky, thanking her for the baby; that was essential, she said. She gave him a big kiss at the checkout and told him he’d make a brilliant dad. He liked her. He saw her again, after everything happened. She asked how he was getting on. When he told her she had a little cry and kissed him again.
He drove home and made a list of the things he was leaving there, before returning to the hospital with the other stuff. Becky worked her way through the carrier bags. It should have been like Christmas. That’s how he’d imagined it. But the more things she unpacked, the more worried she looked, and when he showed her the list – the Moses basket, the rocking stand and the various clothes he’d left behind – the extent of the expense dawned on her, along with an understanding of where the money had come from.
Colin told him to fuck off on the phone the following morning. ‘April Fool’s was last week,’ he said. He called back in the evening. ‘Meet me at the bus stop outside,’ he said.
They sat beside each other on the yellow bench seat. Colin opened the carrier bag on his lap to reveal a six-pack of Stella, and Darren accepted a drink.
‘You know what condoms are for, right? Here’s a clue, they’re not for making balloon animals.’
‘Ha-ha.’
‘Is Becky okay?’
‘Yeah. Tired. A bit shocked.’
‘And the baby?’
‘Yeah. Tiny. You wouldn’t believe it.’
‘Everything’s all right with you two?’
‘Yeah. Course.’
‘That’s good.’
They drank and Darren waited.
‘There’s no reason why she’d keep it a secret? She’s not scared of hospitals or anything?’
‘No.’
‘So the baby was doing summersaults and Becky was getting bigger and she just thought . . .’
‘Neither of us thought anything.’
‘You’re still having sex though, right? I mean, surely you must have noticed –’
‘I didn’t.’
‘If I ask something, do you promise not to lamp me?’
‘I wouldn’t fancy my chances.’
‘Are you sure it’s yours?’
‘Course I am.’
‘And Becky didn’t know.’
‘Yeah.’
‘All right then,’ he said.
The meeting ended awkwardly, Colin managing to simultaneously appear sorry and largely unrepentant about everything he’d said.
The next day, he turned up at the hospital with a jumbo teddy and a bouquet that was so ridiculous it wasn’t allowed on the ward and had to be belted into the passenger seat of Darren’s car.
How could someone not know they were pregnant? He found it hard to believe. It was bloody ridiculous. But he should have noticed, too. And he hadn’t. People were sometimes surprised by babies, weren’t they? Years of watching Coronation Street with Mum had certainly left him with that impression. Not many people seemed to make the discovery at such short notice, but even that wasn’t entirely unheard of. The midwife told him that Becky’s wasn’t the first denied pregnancy she’d seen. And by ‘denied’, she didn’t mean that Becky had necessarily known, it was just the name they used when the mother was unaware of, or unable to accept, a pregnancy. She sounded so reasonable and assured. Becky could have misinterpreted the physical changes, she explained, and that made it a bit easier to believe. Despite what he’d said to Colin, he had wondered – a horrible feeling, doubting her. He’d got no idea why she’d need to lie; he loved her and there was no way he’d have pissed off at the news of a baby.
He went over it again and again, looking for signs. They’d been decorating the third bedroom in the evenings and on his days off. Becky had been walking carefully, head stiff, like something might slosh out of her if she moved too much. She’d had back pain, but they’d been standing on ladders, painting ceilings and crouching over skirting boards. She’d put on a bit of weight, but it wasn’t surprising, because they’d eaten a lot of takeaways while sorting out the house. She’d had indigestion. He remembered her crunching her way through rolls of those chalky tablets and glugging that pink stuff that settles your stomach. It never occurred to him to wonder if she might be pregnant.
There was a meeting before they were allowed home, to make sure they were ready. There were questions about Becky’s childhood and how she felt about pregnancy in general. They asked what he thought of the baby and whether he smoked. It felt like an exam. The people asking the questions were apologetic. It was important, they said, in such circumstances, to monitor the attachment between parents and baby. Darren didn’t mind the questions. The protocol helped – it couldn’t be that unusual, he thought, if there were rules to follow and lists of questions to ask.
Later, one of the midwives escorted them to the car, insisting, despite his protestations, on carrying the car seat Dad had recommended and paid for. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t carry the baby himself. It felt like the midwife was making sure she didn’t come to any harm while on hospital property. He drove home like a learner, hands at ten to two, ducking the speed limit, hardly able to believe they were allowed to transport such a teeny human.
Mrs Mackerel pounced as soon as they unfastened the car seat. ‘Welcome HOME!’
‘Where would we have been without you?’ he said and thanked her again, which had her beaming.
‘Isn’t she GORGEOUS? What a SURPRISE! Have you THOUGHT of a NAME?’
‘Not yet.’ He answered for Becky, whose skin looked grey in the daylight.
‘She’s so SMALL. Are you WORRIED? Well, DON’T be. You’ll be FINE. You’re GREEN behind the EARS, but it’s the same for EVERYONE in the BEGINNING.’
‘We should go in now,’ he said. ‘Don’t want her to get cold.’
As they stepped into the hall the clocks went off, a welcome-home fanfare. He closed the front door and they were a family.
Becky was in pain. Although the baby was small, she’d arrived quickly, ripping skin and tissue as she burst into the world. He’d seen the stitches. Becky had shown him in a fit of despair. Look. They weren’t at all as he’d imagined: more like a series of knots than the neat lines his mum had made with her sewing machine.
‘It will be fine,’ he said. ‘It happens to women all the time, doesn’t it?’
There was another tear, one they hadn’t stitched, higher up. It would heal by itself, the midwife explained. In the meantime, Becky moved slowly and cried when she had to pee. They’d told her to pour a jug of warm water over herself as she did it, but she couldn’t coordinate the urge with the pouring. He tried to help.
‘I’ll pour,’ he said, pretending to be posh as he knelt beside the toilet.
She said she was ready and held the slack, empty nest of her belly out of the way, but when he poured she couldn’t do it. ‘Hurry up,’ he called, which didn’t help. She ran a bath instead, then stripped from the waist down, climbed in, peed and got out.
He knew it was hard. He also knew women all over the world had babies every day. And they fed them and changed them and loved them. So it was hard, yes, but it was also doable. People did it all the time, didn’t they?
‘We should take the baby to Peacefields,’ he said. ‘Everyone will want to see her. And they’ll be missing you.’
‘Maybe next week,’ she said.
He returned to work, leaving the house reluctantly, hurrying home the instant he could. When he got back after his second shift, the baby was listless. Her skin seemed loose. He picked her up and she sagged, little legs dangling like skinny drumsticks.
‘Don’t disturb her,’ Becky said. ‘She’ll wake when she’s hungry.’
‘When did you last feed her?’
‘This afternoon.’
‘When, though? I think we should wake her.’
They’d given them a book at the hospital. A sort of instruction manual for pregnancy. Most of it was irrelevant, but the last chapter was about newborns.
‘Small babies mustn’t go more than three hours without feeding, otherwise there’s a danger of dehydration. Told you,’ he said, cross with Becky for not knowing something he hadn’t really known himself.
He set an alarm. Every three hours he lifted the baby out of her basket, changed her and passed her to Becky to be fed. Before he left for work he made sure the alarm was set for the next feed. Within twenty-four hours the baby looked better, but he kept setting the alarm, just to make sure.
There was such an enormous amount of shit for Becky to put up with: the stitches and the soreness, the constipation and the peeing arrangements. He hadn’t expected the bleeding. She showed him the blood collecting in the nappy-like sanitary towels; it was coming out in chunks, like liver. And he hadn’t counted on the state of her nipples. Everyone said breastfeeding was beautiful, natural. He’d never imagined that it might hurt. The midwife said Becky wouldn’t bleed if she latched the baby on properly, but she couldn’t get the hang of it.
‘You’ve got no idea how much this hurts. It’s like needles in your balls – imagine that.’
‘It shouldn’t hurt,’ he coached as she struggled. ‘Is she latched on properly? Is her head tipped back enough? I should be able to see her nose. You have to relax.’
She endured one humiliation after another; she leaked milk, and blood and tears. She was so brave and good. God, he loved her.
Mrs Mackerel came round with a bunch of daisies.
‘Becky doesn’t LOOK RIGHT,’ she said as she left. ‘Has she got some of that POST-MORTUM depression?’
‘It’s just baby blues,’ he replied, parroting the words on the website he’d found. ‘She’ll be better in a few days.’
‘You know when someone dies and you wake up in the morning and there’s a moment when everything is okay?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And then it dawns on you.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And everything is ruined.’
‘Yeah.’
‘When I wake up and remember her, that’s how I feel.’
‘No you don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t be silly.’
He bought flowers. Nice ones from a proper shop. Chose them himself. Pinks and whites with some of that fluffy stuff – ‘baby’s breath’, the florist called it. That’d cheer her up, he thought.
When the midwife came, he covered for her.
‘How are you getting on, Becky?’
‘She’s doing really well, aren’t you, babe?’
How could he say otherwise? Becky covered for Jim and Maureen, always casting their actions in the best possible light. That’s what she would expect of him, so he did it, newly aware that loving someone for herself involved also loving her when she was not herself.
‘We should take the baby to Peacefields,’ he said. ‘Everyone will want to see her. And they’ll be missing you.’
‘Maybe next week,’ she said.
Becky leaned against the worktop, vague and preoccupied. His words seemed to float past her. He asked again, determined to be patient.
‘What do you think? We’ve got to choose.’
He’d lifted the Moses basket off the stand in the lounge and carried it through to the kitchen, where it lay on the floor beside him while he made tea. The baby was entering the restless stage before waking: her limbs were twitching and she made an occasional mewl. Becky eyed the basket with a wariness that made him uncomfortable.
‘Daisy,’ she said.
‘Hmm, I don’t know.’
‘Rosemary.’
‘Not bad. I think –’
‘Clover.’
He glanced at the yellow tub on the worktop, at the bunch of white flowers from Mrs Mackerel, at the herb tray on the windowsill.
‘Are you just saying random stuff? Working your way round the room? You are, aren’t you? God, Becky. I’ve got an idea, how about Toaster? Eh? Daisy, Rosemary, Clover! You want to name her after margarine?’
‘It’s butter.’
‘Butter? Oh, that’s all right then!’ He strode to the fridge, tugged it open and glanced at the contents. ‘Tell you what, let’s call her Stella. That’ll make a good story when she’s older.’
He slammed the fridge shut and carried on, racking his brain for edible names. He knew he was being a dick but he couldn’t stop.
‘Olive – too posh. Sherry? Come on, what do you think?’
When she replied, her words came out slowly, as if uttering them was the most enormous effort. ‘I. Really. Don’t. Care.’
‘All right, all right.’
She looked like she was about to cry. He knew she cared, underneath.
‘So let’s have one of yours.’ He considered her suggestions: Daisy and Rosemary were girly, names he’d never have chosen, not in a million years. ‘How about Clover? It’s not bad, actually – sounds nice, soft. She’ll be the only one in her class, won’t she? I think it suits her. What do you think?’
‘If you like,’ she said.
The baby – Clover – started to cry. He lifted her out of the basket and passed her to Becky. It was years later, when Clover was learning to write, that he noticed the word love hiding in the middle of her name.
He was adaptable, a veteran of abandoned plans. But Becky seemed to be grieving the loss of hers. There was something steely in her that resisted a change of course. Something broken, too, he noticed, a crack in her characteristic optimism. And he began to see how, despite her persistence and patience, Jim broke her heart, as did her mother and the dad she so carefully remembered – her whole fucking family broke her heart and, if he didn’t act, he could see how he might join them.
A four-pack of Boost bars. Her favourite treat. Wrapped in shiny paper and ribbon.
‘This should give you a boost,’ he said.
She would have laughed, before. At the very least, groaned.
He drove round to Dad’s and asked if he would mind writing a cheque for a steriliser. Although he was on board with breast is best, something had to give.
Becky leaked through the breast pads as she bottle-fed Clover, soaking her T-shirts with circles of milk. She still cried during feeds. Now it was guilt.
‘We should take Clover to Peacefields,’ he said. ‘Everyone will want to see her. And they’ll be missing you.’
‘Not yet,’ she said.
Clover was sick on Becky after every feed. It was funny, a coincidence that had the potential to turn into a running joke, like Colin getting sprayed when he opened bottles of fizz, or the way half-drunk autumn wasps always dive-bombed Dad. It was one of those things, that’s all. But Becky took it personally – she was taking everything personally. He began to wish Clover would be sick on him, just to level it out. Once or twice he winded her especially vigorously, goading her gag reflex.
The sick got in Becky’s hair and she didn’t have time to wash it every day, so she started tying it back in a plait. It made her look different, older. Like a mum. He was used to it down; even for work she only ever tied up a piece from the front, always leaving the back part loose.
‘I must be feeding her wrong,’ she said.
He tried to help, watched as she did it, making suggestions: perhaps if she held Clover differently, sat straighter, was more relaxed.
‘You do it,’ she’d say. ‘You’re better at it.’
He went to the library on his way home from work. Once he’d registered and received his ticket, he grabbed a small stack of novels from the Romance section. He was about to present them for stamping when it occurred to him that it might be good if there were some babies in the books. The covers were child-free, but that didn’t necessarily mean the stories were. He found a chair and made himself at home, flicking through the last pages of each book. A couple ended in weddings, one in a very steamy sex scene – he rearranged the pile on his lap – another with news of a pregnancy. The characters fell in love and then what? What came next? Perhaps the next part of the story was not appealing to the writers; he hoped it was appealing to women in general, and to Becky in particular.
He gave up searching and took the stack of books to the desk. ‘These aren’t for me,’ he explained. ‘They’re for my girlfriend.’
The woman nodded. She didn’t care and her expression indicated that she only half believed him. He could feel heat creeping into his cheeks and around the back of his neck.
And after all that, Becky didn’t read them.
The midwife’s visits ended and the health visitor made an appointment.
‘Tell her how you feel. She’ll know what to do.’
‘She won’t take Clover away, will she?’
‘Why on earth would she do that?’
‘If I say I’m not looking after her properly.’
‘You are looking after her properly. You’re just worried. You’re very worried. And tired. That’s what you’ll tell her.’
‘What will she do?’
‘She’ll talk to you. And then you’ll feel better.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes, that’s all she’ll do. Promise.’
‘But if that’s all, how will it help?’
He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything.
The health visitor said she needed to wash her hands, but he was on to her: she was checking up on them, seeing whether the bottles were sterilised and the dishes washed. They were: he’d got wise to the midwife’s hand-washing and had made sure everything was tidy.
He was on a late that day and wanted to give them some privacy, time to have a proper chat, so he waited in the kitchen with Clover, enjoying the chance to hold her while she slept. But after a while curiosity got the better of him and he tiptoed through the dining room and into the hall, where he could hear them talking.
‘– questions we ask. Is that okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘And are you having any difficulty sleeping?’
‘Not really.’
‘Feeling anxious or worried?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Have you been crying more than usual?’
‘I don’t – I don’t think so.’
‘Are you enjoying the things that you used to enjoy before the baby was born?’
‘I think I would, if I had time.’
The health visitor laughed sympathetically as he loitered in the hall, twitching. If he interrupted, what would the health visitor think? Bursting into the room to contradict Becky would be a betrayal. As were her denials. If he interrupted there’d be an argument and Becky would cry. Could they really take Clover away if they knew she was struggling? He waited and pretended a timely arrival when the health visitor commented on the baby’s unusual name.
A cookery book from Oxfam: Faster Pasta: Good Value Family Meals. No wrapping paper or jokes this time. No words, either: his actions would express things better than he could – I love you, I’ve been thinking of you.
‘I know I haven’t been doing much cooking, but –’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘– every time I try to do something she starts crying. I can’t get anything finished –’
‘I didn’t mean for you to –’
‘– I know I’m not doing enough, and I’m sorry.’
‘No, it’s my fault,’ he said, retrieving the book. ‘I’m sorry.’
There were purple-brown smudges under Becky’s eyes. If she could get some proper rest he knew she’d feel much better.
‘You need to make sure you sleep when the baby sleeps,’ he said.
She flinched, and although he hadn’t done anything wrong, her response made him feel as if he had slapped her. She was like a cactus, there was no handling her.
They needed help during the day, he decided. She wouldn’t go out, so he’d provide her with company, someone to keep an eye on things and see that she got some rest. He asked Dad, who was still working at the Philips factory during the week, but potentially free during the weekends Darren had to work. Dad recommended caution: child-rearing was up to women, and if there was one thing women didn’t like, it was interference. Anyway, he’d never fed a baby or changed a nappy. He wouldn’t be averse to giving the garden a bit of a once-over, though, if that was of any use? Darren said he’d get back to him and instead asked Mrs Mackerel if she’d mind popping round for a couple of hours on the odd afternoon. But she was supervising the tiling of her roof, and once that was completed she was having her back garden paved, which meant she needed to be in the house to make cups of tea and oversee everything. Ha! – needed to let them know who was boss, needed to interfere and tell them off at every opportunity, more like. Colin laughed when Darren asked if he’d like to come round and have a go with the baby. In the end he called Maureen.
‘I think Becky would really like to see you,’ he said. ‘And you’ve not met Clover yet.’
Maureen came up from Portsmouth on the train, just for the day. Becky was terribly anxious. Unfinished projects loomed large: the uprooted upstairs carpets, the bare walls and lack of furnishings. He cleaned the bathroom and wiped the kitchen worktops, bought a Victoria sponge and a new one of those plug-in air fresheners Becky liked – Linen and Lilac.
Maureen arrived laden with carrier bags of newborn clothes. A grand gesture and total waste of money – she could at least have bought different sizes or, better still, bothered to ask whether there was anything in particular they needed. Once she’d cooed over Clover for a few moments, she got stuck in.
‘What’s your brother doing in a B&B when you’ve got all this space?’
‘We were decorating the front bedroom for him, before.’
‘That’s right,’ he agreed, determined to present a united front, though they still hadn’t discussed it properly and Clover’s arrival surely jeopardised the plan – he certainly hoped so.
‘It’s going to take us a while to finish things off, Mum. We had to buy baby things. There’s no carpet upstairs and –’
‘Of course, if you’re worried you could always take Jim back to Portsmouth with you,’ he said, and Becky’s face fell; he’d promised not to cause trouble.
‘Perhaps I should. When was the last time you saw him?’
‘Last week,’ he said. ‘He came round for tea. I cooked. When was the last time you saw him?’
‘This afternoon, before I came here. And he’s not well. You’d know if you’d been looking out for him.’
‘God, he picks his moments.’
‘Don’t, Darren.’
‘There’s no reason why one of you couldn’t put the baby in her pram –’
‘We haven’t got one yet –’
‘– and walk down there to check on him. It’d do you good, Becky. Get rid of some of that fat.’
‘Cup of tea, Maureen?’
He didn’t wait for an answer, he left the room as fast as he could, the expletives swimming in the pouch of his throat like fish.
As Maureen left, she took Becky to one side and, in a stage whisper, hissed, ‘You’d better pull yourself together – brush your hair and get some make-up on. He won’t hang around if you don’t.’
He’d never felt more like punching her. He wasn’t going anywhere. But later, in the evening, when he was washing the bottles, Clover started to cry and he discovered Becky sitting beside the Moses basket, staring into space, as if the baby was nothing to do with her. He decided he was doing quite a bit more than his fair share and called Colin.
‘What’re you up to?’
‘I’m on the train, to Liverpool.’
There was a whoop and a few half-arsed cheers in the background and Darren experienced a stab of self-pity. He should be out having fun too; he hadn’t asked for any of this.
‘I’ll wait for you at Moorfields if you like. How long do you think you’ll be?’
‘I’m not going on the pull with you.’
‘Why not? I used to go with you.’
‘We were pulling girls then,’ he said, although what he really meant was I need someone to talk to.
‘Oh, don’t be such a baby. You’ll love G-Bar, it’s a right laugh, and it’s mixed. Come on!’
‘No, you’re all right.’
He went out by himself. Walked down the road to the Blue Anchor and nursed a pint of cider while checking his watch. Clover should have had her ten o’clock feed. He hoped Becky was all right.
On his way home he went to Bargain Booze and bought a bottle of Malibu and two litres of Lilt. When he reached the end of The Grove the house was in darkness. He was glad: it meant Clover had gone down after her feed and Becky had followed suit; it made him feel better about leaving them. He watched crap on the telly and drank until he was nicely pissed. He went up to bed clumsily, stood on a pile of Becky’s books, stubbed his toe on the corner of the bed and woke Clover.
‘You have no idea how long it took me to get her to sleep.’
Her voice was weary and he realised that she hadn’t been asleep at all but had, in fact, been lying there, wide awake.
‘Sorry.’
‘I’ll get her, you’re drunk.’
‘Not drunk, just a bit pissed.’
‘Pissed, then.’
‘Sorry.’
Once she’d changed and calmed Clover, she climbed back into bed. He was half asleep, fuzzy, relaxed.
‘I might do something,’ she whispered, her voice so quiet that it felt like he was hearing her thoughts. ‘Something stupid.’
He couldn’t let it pass without comment. ‘What do you mean by stupid?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You won’t. You’re not stupid.’
In the morning, when it was light, her words seemed imagined, nightmarish. And he didn’t know how to ask her about them. His dad had talked a man off a bridge – where was his emergency reserve of words?
He noticed the missing clocks the moment he stepped into the house. The hall looked bare and unfamiliar.
‘They were driving me mad.’
‘Where did you put them?’
‘Back in their boxes. In the dining room.’
‘It looks shit now.’
‘Get some pictures like a normal person.’
‘There’s no need to be –’
‘You try staying here all day with five ticking clocks going off every thirty minutes, an alarm every three hours, and a screaming baby you weren’t planning on having.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll put them back when you’re feeling better.’ And he pulled the nails out, just in case they snagged and hurt her as she passed.
Later that week he came home from work to find Clover in the basket in the lounge – face scrunched and purple, occupied almost exclusively by her mouth, which had subsided into a wide, raging yowl. He attempted to calm her as he searched for Becky, heart pounding.
She was in the bathroom, sobbing quietly. She looked strange: there was something odd about her face. No, it was her hair. It was gone. Gone – fuck. It lay on the floor beside her, a bobble fastened around one end, the partially unbraided curls at the other fanning the floor. He cradled Clover in one arm and bent to retrieve the hair, stupidly holding it up to Becky’s head for a moment, as if he might refasten it. Accepting the impossibility of his wish, he laid the hair to rest in the sink and went downstairs.
‘Can you come?’ he asked Kelly. ‘With your hair things?’
‘Is everything okay?’
‘Not really,’ he replied, experiencing the relief of making the admission to someone at last.
Becky sat on the side of the bath, her face mottled and swollen. She’d stopped firing blank, dry after-sobs; Clover, too. The crying over, he allowed himself to feel wronged. He loved her hair, she knew that. Yes, it was hers, but she could at least have told him, let him know what she planned. It was hard not to take it personally, to see it as a protest.
‘Hiya, Becky,’ Kelly called as she stepped into the bathroom. ‘Darren says you fancy a – oh, you had a go yourself . . .’ She paused and studied Becky’s lop-sided mop. ‘Not to worry,’ she said, smoothing her own hair, which was elfishly short and pillar-box red. ‘I know the feeling! Sometimes I want a change and I can’t wait.’
She lifted Becky’s hair out of the sink, getting him to hold the bobbled end while she re-plaited the length. Standing like that, on the holding end of the job, opposite a chatting woman with busy hands and a concentrating face, reminded him of folding sheets with his mother when he was a boy, and he was struck by a bolt of missing her. Once she ran out of hair, Kelly dug in her bag for a bobble and fastened it around the plait so it was secured at both ends.
‘You could do something with this, you know? Send it off to a charity, to be made into a wig.’
He didn’t know what to say. The idea of someone walking around wearing Becky’s beautiful hair made him feel queasy. Becky said nothing; she appeared, for the moment at least, to be past speaking.
‘No? Well, you could just keep it, if you like. That’d be fine, too. I’ve got my nan’s plaits. She had her hair cut when she was twelve. Wanted a grown-up style. If you ask me, she ended up looking like Paul McCartney – I’ve seen the photos – but she liked it, that’s the main thing. She went to the hairdressers’ after school and they started by chopping off her plaits. They let her take them home with her. Is there a chair you could carry up, Darren . . . no? Don’t worry. Could you just swizzle round and face the tiles?’
Becky placed her feet in the empty bath and faced the wall, as if in disgrace.
‘I’m going to comb through your hair, just to get rid of any tangles, okay? Anyway, I found them – my nan’s plaits – in a drawer when I was about six. The hair was dark brown. Hard to believe they were my nan’s, because she was white-blonde by then. You know how some people go blonde to cover up the grey? I loved them. Used to play with them all the time.’
He was so glad to have her there, flattening his fright with her stream of ordinary words. She didn’t know Becky terribly well, but she touched her like a friend, and although her words came fast, her hands were gentle as she smoothed the jagged hair at the base of Becky’s neck in a stroking motion that seemed to say, ‘There-there, there-there.’
‘So, I’m thinking that we want to make your hair look uniform, but still hold a nice shape while you grow it out – if that’s what you’re planning?’
Becky didn’t answer.
‘Hair like yours is difficult – I mean, it’s really lovely and you’re very lucky, but it’s tricky. And I haven’t got much experience. You have to cut less than you want because curly hair shrinks. What I need to do is minimise bulk and maximise curl. Then you can wear it back from your face, like Andie MacDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?’
‘Don’t worry about all that, Kel. Just tidy it up.’
‘All right,’ she said, setting to with her scissors. ‘So, have you got any holidays planned?’
Becky made a choking noise. ‘Ask Darren,’ she said.
Kelly glanced over her shoulder at him. He shook his head and she stopped talking and concentrated on Becky’s hair.
‘We should take Clover to Peacefields,’ he said. ‘Everyone will want to see her. And they’ll be missing you.’
‘I miss it.’
‘Well, exactly. That’s what I’ve been saying. That’s why you need to get out, see people –’
‘Going there will only make it worse.’
On his day off they took Clover to the clinic to be weighed.
‘She cut her hair,’ he told the health visitor as Becky undressed Clover.
‘Looks lovely.’
‘But she’s always had long hair.’
‘People often fancy a change after they’ve had a baby.’
‘She did it herself. With the kitchen scissors.’
‘That was brave! No harm done, it suits you, Becky.’
‘She was very upset.’ Becky was going to be furious with him, but his worry was finally bigger than his fear of hurting her. ‘She was crying.’
The health visitor inclined her head. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Tired,’ Becky confessed.
‘Emotional?’
‘A bit.’
‘Are you eating?’
‘Yes.’
He couldn’t understand what food had got to do with it. ‘Tell her what you told me in the night.’
Becky froze. ‘What?’
‘The other night.’
She looked from him to the health visitor, deciding. ‘You mean when you were pissed?’
His mouth dropped open and the health visitor inclined her head again, this time addressing him.
‘You shouldn’t smoke –’
‘I don’t!’
‘– or drink around the baby.’
‘It was the first time I’ve left Becky alone with her at night, apart from at the hospital. I was a bit tipsy when I came to bed, that’s all. Becky was looking after her.’
‘What did she say that worried you?’
‘I don’t know what he thinks he heard, but he was pissed.’ Becky placed Clover in the scales. ‘Look at that!’
‘Oh, that’s great. I thought she’d put some weight on when I saw her. How many ounces is she having now?’
And, just like that, his concerns were cast off and replaced by a conversation about Clover’s weight, sleep and bowel movements.
‘I can’t believe you did that to me,’ he hissed as they returned to the car.
‘The feeling’s mutual,’ she said.
The black skirt from Dorothy Perkins. It had been in the window, before, and she’d commented on it. ‘That’s pretty,’ or something, she’d said. It wasn’t in the window any more, but it was easy to find: red flowers, floaty, delicate.
‘I bought this for you.’
There was a flicker of something in her expression, and he felt pleased with himself.
‘Try it on. Go on.’
He waited in the lounge, but she returned still wearing her trackie bottoms and T-shirt.
‘It’s too small.’ Her voice was small, hurt.
‘But the waist is elastic.’
‘I know.’
‘And it was the biggest one they had,’ he said, which made things worse.
Clover had been crying since he’d arrived home at six o’clock, longer if he counted the hour Becky claimed before his return. Fists clenched, knees flexed; two whole hours of screaming. His ears were ringing, his forehead and neck rigid with tension, his throat squeezed by a clenching anxiety.
There was a knock at the door and he answered, nursing Clover as she howled.
‘COLIC!’ Mrs Mackerel shouted. ‘BICYCLE HER LEGS. Put some CAMOMILE TEA in her BOTTLE or get some GRIPE WATER.’
She turned to leave, changed her mind and stepped, uninvited, into the house. She took Clover from his arms and sat on the sofa with her. There was something in her confident, no-nonsense hands that stopped Clover’s crying. She moved Clover’s legs up and down and spoke to her sternly.
‘THAT’S ENOUGH. If you’re going to keep SCREAMING I’ll need some of that CAVITY WALL INSTALLATION.’
Clover paid attention.
‘THERE’S ABOLUTELY NO NEED FOR THIS. Your mother looks AWFUL.’
Clover listened, eyebrows raised, forehead wrinkled.
‘Get the GRIPE WATER and the CAMOMILE TEA. Don’t put all your CHICKS in one BASKET.’
‘Eggs,’ he said.
‘NO, I DON’T think so. I wouldn’t feed EGGS to a baby THIS SMALL.’
She passed Clover back to him and strode out of the house. But within moments, Clover was screaming again.
It’s possible for a loving person not to love their own baby. He saw it, but didn’t comprehend it; couldn’t quite believe it. Becky had got off to a slow start, he decided. It was like the other kinds of love: sometimes it took a while to build. Once she had forgotten her chewed nipples and stopped leaking blood, once she had noticed what everyone else saw, that Clover was her in miniature, perhaps she would be able to forgive her for arriving.
There were sparks at the edges of his vision as he approached the end of The Grove on his way to the garage. It had been the worst in a series of worst nights. Clover was in the throes of her first cold. When she finally fell asleep the mucus bubbled in her nose and throat, keeping them awake. In the early hours she filled her nappy and the shit oozed past its waistband, right up to her shoulders. He changed and cleaned the Moses basket while Becky dealt with Clover. After her feed, Clover coughed, and the whole lot spouted into their bed. He changed the bedding and wiped the mattress while Becky changed Clover and prepared a second bottle. There were quiet moments during the rest of the night. He’d managed some sleep, dozing off each time Clover calmed down. But Becky hadn’t slept at all. Every time he’d stirred during the previous few nights, she had been wide awake. She needed to sleep.
He turned back, hurried down the pavement and the driveway and tiptoed up the stairs. They were flat out. Clover, arms up, surrendered to sleep at last. Becky, completely under the covers, starfishing the bed in his absence. This memory is well worn; lift the covers and kiss her goodbye, he sometimes tells the self that stands in the bedroom on that particular morning. Wake her and say you love her, he instructs. Better still, stay home, don’t let her out of your sight. But the self in the room scribbles a note, instead: Clover next door for a couple of hours. Get some rest xx. He lifts Clover out of her Moses basket, grabs a couple of nappies and the packet of wipes and tiptoes downstairs for the tin of formula and a pair of sterilised bottles.
Mrs Mackerel’s bell played Brahms’ ‘Lullaby’. It was early, and her workmen were nowhere to be seen. The door whipped open and there she stood, feet planted, body braced, ready to be affronted.
‘OH, it’s YOU,’ she said, apparently disappointed not to be accosted by an early morning, bell-ringing burglar. ‘And the baby.’ Her voice softened as he proffered Clover and the bag of baby things.
‘Please,’ he said.
He sits on the floor beside the shut door, head resting against the wall. How to tell Clover about what happened next? He can take the pieces of the story and arrange them this way, that way, but the fact is, he doesn’t really know. He doesn’t know whether he inadvertently cleared the way for Becky to do something stupid by leaving her on her own. He doesn’t know whether he saved Clover by removing her after that worst of worst nights. He doesn’t know whether it was an accident; a mistake caused by exhaustion. He doesn’t know whether it was planned; an idea he could have cut off, uprooted, if he’d tried harder. And he’ll never know. Right in the middle of him there’s a not-knowing hole that he has filled with every kind of just-in-case and maybe-one-day thing he can find. And shame. A horrible, vacillating shame. Shame that she may have preferred death to a life with him. Shame at the comfort that comes from imagining her loss as an accident. It has been such a long time since he ploughed this ground. By the time Clover started school he was convinced that there weren’t any new ways of getting at the pain, yet here he is, sitting in a room full of it – assailed by another instance of not-knowing.
There are tears on his cheeks. Idiot. He swipes them away with the back of his hand.
And then the bedroom door is opening and closing, and it isn’t Clover but Dad entering the room, making a low whistle as he perches on the end of the bed.
Darren stares at Dad’s high-topped feet and bare legs, at the tessellating veins and the slack skin that collects under his knees in a series of smiles.
‘Well,’ Dad says, and then he pauses to inhale.
Darren hears the steady, reeling sound of breath and awaits the cast.
‘At least she didn’t pour water over everything, eh?’
Darren laughs. It’s a bark, involuntary, almost a half-cough – it certainly hurts like a cough, scuffs the back of his throat, bangs against the dread skinning his stomach.
‘You kept all this, then?’
He nods and his neck burns.
‘For Clover?’
He doesn’t know.
‘Is this what she’s been doing all summer? Not a boyfriend after all?’ Dad picks some papers off the bed. ‘And you – you’re all right with this . . . arrangement she’s made? You don’t mind?’ He pauses to allow Darren to respond.
He can’t.
‘But of course you mind,’ he says. ‘She’s made a thing. A sort of guide to this.’ He settles himself on the bed and examines the papers and a notebook.
‘You remember Paul?’ he asks, when he has finished reading.
‘Mum’s . . .’
‘That’s right, your mum’s Paul.’
‘Yeah, she had that picture.’
‘She did. She kept some other things, too. Just a few. To remember. Her old ring, a necklace he’d bought her, a couple of cards from their wedding, the photograph. Different situation, hers, not like yours . . . This – this is . . . I’m not criticising, I’m just saying, son – this, what you’ve kept, is a lot.’
‘It wasn’t deliberate.’
‘Well. That’s time. Catches up with you.’
Dad gets up and opens the door. He comes back in almost immediately with a mug that Clover must have left for him. He makes a note in his B&B book before taking a sip.
The wall is hard against the back of Darren’s head. His neck is knotted and when he swallows there are repercussions in his shoulders.
‘I’m just going to wait here with you, son.’ Dad takes another sip and Darren hears the water move down his throat. ‘Warm water,’ he says. ‘It’s good for you.’
The sun streams through the window: summer’s last hurrah. Soon it will be autumn again, another year drawing to a close.
‘You and me, we were your mum’s second chance. And she was happy. Wasn’t she? People get them sometimes – second chances. Course, they have to be open to them. Receptive.’
Darren closes his eyes. He hears the sticky sound Dad’s old mouth makes as it opens and he waits for the words, but they don’t come. He hears the sound again and wonders what it is about these particular words that makes them hard to articulate.
‘There are ways to love someone who no longer has a body.’
Darren opens his eyes.
‘But you need to keep your best love for a person who breathes, someone who can love you back.’
‘Just like you do?’
‘I’m old enough to give advice that I’ve got no intentions of taking, it’s a privilege of age, and if you’ve got any sense you’ll listen instead of trying to smart-mouth me.’
Darren listens, wondering where all these words are coming from.
‘Your mum used to visit Paul’s mum every so often. Nice lady, kept his bedroom exactly as it was when he died. Dusted all his things, guarded them for years, as if she was expecting him back. It was a sort of pretending. People do strange things.’
‘I’m not . . . it’s not pretending. I just never got round to this.’
‘You never got round to lots of things.’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s a shame.’
‘You’ve not done much in recent times, either.’
‘And?’
‘I suppose you’re going to say that’s a privilege of age, too.’
‘ “Sir, I am too old to learn” – that’s King Lear, that is.’
‘And you learned that when, last week?’
Dad chuckles. ‘Touché,’ he says, and raises his mug in a toast.
There is a relaxing of something between them, allowing Darren to ask, ‘What shall I do with all this then?’
‘It’s up to you, son.’
He looks at the bin bags and the displays, the little pile of objects on the floor beside the bed, some of which aren’t even his, and he feels lost.
‘You’ve done really well. I wondered how you’d get on. No one to help you.’
‘People helped.’
‘No wife to help you.’
‘No.’
Dad taps the side of the mug with his index finger. Tap, tap, tap. ‘Would you like some help now?’
He shifts as he thinks about it, trying to find a more comfortable position for his aching neck. Today it’s not so hard to believe that, once, his dad talked a man off a bridge.