9

I get home to discover the entire family sitting on the living-room floor, the family photo albums open on the rug in front of them. It’s rare we’re all at home at once so I’m a bit overwhelmed by the number of bodies spread across the sofa and armchairs and carpet.

‘Oh my God, Mia, I’ve just found the most hysterical photo of the three of us,’ Grace says from where she’s sitting on the floor, her legs stretched out in front of her. ‘Come look.’

I hesitate before flopping onto the sofa behind her. Grace passes me up the album.

I immediately recognize the photo. It was taken outside Rushton Town Hall. I must have been about five at the time. I’m sitting on the edge of the fountain wearing a Hannah Montana T-shirt and eating a chocolate ice-cream cone. It’s smeared round my mouth and dribbling down my chin and wrists. I don’t seem to care though, grinning with both sets of teeth, half of which appear to be missing. Next to me, eight-year-old Grace is perched demurely, her ice-cream cone perfectly intact. Whereas I’d always eat mine in about a minute flat, Grace would make hers last for what seemed like hours, taking delicate little licks, never getting any round her mouth or on her chin. Even Audrey, aged eighteen months and sitting in her pushchair to the right of us, is making neater work of her cone than me. It isn’t just the ice-cream, though – everything about me looks wild, from my tangled mass of hair, to my battered and bruised legs and scuffed sandals. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was the odd one out, even then.

‘Oh gosh, Mia, look at your hair,’ Mum says, shaking her head. She turns to Sam. ‘Mia never was terribly fond of having her hair combed when she was growing up.’

‘You look almost feral!’ Grace adds, giggling.

I make a face at the back of her head and resist the urge to give her smooth hair a sharp tug.

‘Let’s have another look,’ Sam says, clambering up onto the sofa next to me. ‘Aw,’ he says, beaming at the three of us in turn. ‘You guys were the cutest.’

He slides back onto the floor and kisses Grace on the top of her head. She positively glows. It’s vomit-inducing. She turns the page, pausing on a photo of her as a baby. She looks like a doll with her plump pinky lips and saucer-round eyes.

I looked nothing like a doll when I was born. I looked like a baby rat.

‘Oh, look at this!’ Dad says, turning the page of the album he’s holding.

He’s pointing at a yellowed newspaper cutting, marking the one and only time my name has appeared in print, compared to Audrey (eleven times), and Grace (a whopping twenty-two).

I was born six weeks premature. Mum was at the supermarket when her waters broke. It must have been a light week for news because the story made page five of the Rushton Recorder. A few days later the supermarket sent Mum and Dad a hamper filled with talcum powder and baby wipes and nappy-rash cream. They often wonder what they might have been given had Mum actually given birth right there in the store, in the middle of the fruit and veg aisle, Kevin the trolley boy holding Mum’s hand and urging her to ‘breathe’ and ‘push’, instead of Dad.

Dad turns the page again to reveal a set of photographs of me in the incubator where I spent the first six weeks of my life, hooked up to various wires and tubes, sticky white pads holding them in place. I’m pale and hairless, my eyes squeezed shut, a too-large knitted hat on my head. In one of the photos, Dad is lifting up Grace so she can see me. One of her chubby hands is splayed against the plastic cover of the incubator, the other reaching in through the hole in order to stroke my impossibly tiny fist. Compared to me, she looks huge – solid and healthy. Mum and Dad just look knackered; all dazed smiles and dark circles under bloodshot eyes.

‘Causing us sleepless nights from the very beginning,’ Dad jokes, not for the first time.

Mum is flipping through another album. ‘Here we are!’ she says, holding it up for us all to see.

It’s a photo from the day Audrey was born – the five of us crammed on Mum’s hospital bed. I’m refusing to look at the camera, pouting into my lap instead because Dad had just told me off for blowing a raspberry at Audrey, showering her big bald baby head with saliva.

‘Our little family complete,’ Dad says, smiling.

Mum flips back to a photograph of me when I’m about six months old. ‘Oh, Mia, what a grumpy chops!’ she says, laughing and passing the album to Sam, who is doing a very good impression of actually being interested.

I’m bigger in this photo, and less rat-like, the beginnings of my Afro sitting on the top of my hair like a mound of sooty candy floss. I’m glaring at the camera, my forehead all knots and wrinkles. I had a reputation for being a difficult baby, refusing to sleep through until I was over a year old, and catching every bug and infection going.

I hesitate as Sam peers at the hairy infant staring defiantly back at him. He looks up at me. ‘You have almost exactly the same expression on your face in this photo as you do right now,’ he says, smiling.

Everyone else turns to follow his gaze. I feel like a zoo animal.

‘I’m going upstairs,’ I say, standing up abruptly.

I’ve had enough nostalgia for one day.

‘Don’t go too far,’ Dad replies. ‘Dinner’s in the oven.’

‘What are we having?’

‘Salmon en croûte.’

Otherwise known as Grace’s favourite.

‘OK,’ I murmur, slinking away, leaving them to it.

 

I need a fag. Urgently. At dinner Grace and Sam held hands the entire time, forcing Sam to use his left hand to shovel food into his mouth. I kept trying to catch Audrey’s eye across the table so I could pull a face and share my horror, but she didn’t seem to notice me.

I rifle in my handbag for the lone cigarette I know is in there somewhere. I find it at the very bottom, covered in fluff. It’s a bit crooked but will have to do. I push open my window and climb out onto the roof.

Although Grace and Audrey have access to the roof, they obey the rules and rarely venture out here. As a result I’ve come to think of the view – not that it’s anything special, just the back garden and houses beyond – as mine and no one else’s.

‘Hey,’ a male voice says, making me jump.

Sam is sitting outside Grace’s window, his arms resting on bent legs, his face illuminated by the soft glow of light behind him.

‘Jesus, you bloody scared the life out of me,’ I say.

‘God, sorry. Are you OK?’

‘Yeah. Luckily. I could have fallen off the roof and sued the shit out of you.’ I sit down, annoyed I’m not going to be able to smoke my cigarette in peace.

Sam lifts a cigarette to his lips. The tip burns orange.

‘You smoke,’ I say. ‘But you’re going to be a doctor.’

‘I know, I know,’ he says, smoke seeping out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Do as I say and not as I do and all that jazz. For what it’s worth, I’m giving up. I’m down to two a day now.’

‘From how many?’

‘Used to be a whole pack, a pack and a half some days.’

‘Jesus,’ I say, fumbling for the lighter I keep hidden under a plant pot. ‘That’s loads.’ I straighten my cigarette out the best I can and light up.

‘I plan to be down to zero by the time Bean arrives,’ Sam says.

God, I wish they’d stop calling it that.

The sky in front of me is hazy and starless and the colour of scorched toast. My eyes trace the fuzzy silhouette of next-door-but-one’s cat slinking his way across the top of our fence.

There’s a pause. I notice Sam’s cigarette has burnt down. I offer him the plant pot. He thanks me, tossing his cigarette butt in. For a few seconds I think he’s going to go back inside and leave me to it. Instead, though, he angles his body towards me, so his knee is almost touching mine, forcing me to scoot backwards, the edge of the window frame digging into my shoulder.

‘Can I ask you a question, Mia?’ he says.

‘You can ask,’ I reply. ‘No promises I’ll answer, though.’

‘Fair enough. It’s just about your reaction to the baby.’

‘What about it?’

‘The fact you pissed yourself laughing. I’m curious as to what you found so amusing?’

It’s funny; he doesn’t seem angry or annoyed about it, more intrigued.

‘Are you kidding me?’ I say. ‘Grace is like the last person on earth you’d expect to get pregnant by accident. How else was I supposed to react?’

Sam cocks his head to one side, like he wants more of an explanation.

‘Look, it’s just kind of how I roll,’ I add. ‘Totally inappropriate stuff comes out of my mouth sometimes, end of.’

‘That must make life interesting.’

‘Ha. Not everyone thinks so.’

‘Who’s everyone?’

‘Who do you think? Mum, Dad. Grace.’

Especially Grace.

‘Baby,’ a female voice calls from inside. ‘Are you coming to bed?’

Speak of the devil.

‘A-ha, the lady hath spoken,’ Sam says, standing up. He pauses, one foot resting on the windowsill. ‘For what’s it’s worth, Mia, and I know I’m a terrible example seeing as until very recently I smoked like an absolute chimney, but you’re far too young and beautiful to partake in such a thoroughly filthy habit.’

I raise an eyebrow. No one has ever called me beautiful before. I’ve been called hot and sexy and fit and gorgeous, but never, ever beautiful. Not that Sam meant it like that, but still, it’s sort of nice.

‘I mean it,’ he continues. ‘Quit now before you get totally addicted like I was, waking up in the middle of the night convinced I couldn’t go back to sleep until I’d had a smoke.’

There’s another pause. I can hear the muted roar of an aeroplane, thousands of feet above us, a dog barking, a baby crying.

‘Night, Mia. It was nice chatting to you.’

I shrug.

He smiles before climbing back through Grace’s window, pulling it shut behind him.

 

I’m in that weird half-sleep when I hear them – Sam’s groans mingled with Grace’s fluttery gasps, the occasional ‘shhhhh!’, the rhythmic squeak of Grace’s bed on the other side of the wall. But what about the baby? Are you even allowed to have sex when you’re pregnant? What about Grace’s bump? Surely it’s totally in the way? I yank my pillow from under my neck and wrap it round my head like a hat so it covers my ears. I stay like that for at least ten minutes, my eyes squeezed shut. When I finally remove the pillow, the house is silent again but it takes me ages to get to sleep.