‘I SAW HER EYELIDS MOVE,’ TOM is saying, his voice close to Lily’s ear. ‘I think she’s coming round.’
‘Thank God,’ Philippa says. She sounds genuine, emotion running through her voice.
Lily’s head is pounding. She reaches her hand up to her forehead. Her hand hurts too. She must have landed on it. She looks around. They must have carried her into the library, laid her on the chaise longue. The vaulted ceiling recedes above her. Books seem to be swaying in their shelves. Lily tries to sit up.
‘Don’t move, yet,’ Tom says. ‘You might be hurt.’
Lily feels plunged into ice. The baby. What if she’s hurt her in the fall? And then her heart hurts as much as her head. This is the first time she’s called her a baby. Up to this minute, Lily’s tried to keep the terms medical – implantation, zygote, foetus – and non-medical ones like Blob – to stop getting too attached. Because, what if she doesn’t attach? What if she goes, what if she’s going right now?
‘Shall we call an ambulance?’ Philippa says.
Tom’s hand goes to his pocket and feels around. Then says, ‘Shit, I forgot she took our phones.’
‘What are we supposed to do in an emergency?’ Philippa says.
An emergency. Lily feels a wave of panic as she thinks of having to go into hospital. ‘I have to go to the loo,’ she says.
‘Steady,’ Tom says, reaching for her hand.
Lily grabs on to him, but still her head reels as he pulls her up. She takes a deep breath, then stands.
‘I’ll go with you,’ Philippa says, holding out her arm. Lily takes it, and together they slowly leave the library.
Lily doesn’t pray, she’s not sure there’s anyone to pray to. But she talks to her baby in her head, and she can’t believe she’s calling it that, saying, ‘Stay with me, little one.’ What can she call her now? Lily thinks of the first scan, at twelve weeks. Of hearing the super-quick bow-wow-wow of the heartbeat. Of seeing, for the first time, the butter bean-shaped lodger in her womb. Lily will, for now, call her Bean.
They go through the fire door into the West Wing, and turn left into the women’s toilet. Philippa helps her into a cubicle then steps away.
Locking the door, Lily holds on to the wall. The tiles are cold under her palm as she lifts her midnight blue skirt and sits down on the toilet. She knows she’d look ridiculous if anyone saw her. Like a gothic loo roll holder.
But she doesn’t care. Crumpling her skirt, she pulls down her knickers. It’s the move so many pregnant people know. The check for blood, for clots. Either longing for blood, or fearing its arrival. Either way, blood holds power over those with wombs.
But, right now, there’s no blood. No cramps.
Lily breathes out, then realises she can breathe more deeply than usual. Looking over her shoulder, she sees her corset cord coiling down next to the toilet like a black ribbon snake. Someone must have loosened it while she was unconscious.
‘Are you all right in there, Lily?’ Philippa says. Sounds like she’s by the door. ‘Do you want me to come in?’
‘I’m fine,’ Lily replies. ‘I’ll be out in a minute. You can wait outside if you like.’
She waits until Philippa leaves, then flushes the empty toilet and leaves the cubicle. As she turns on the taps, she looks in the mirror. A bump is growing just over her left eyebrow. Lower down, the baby bump is also just visible through the loosened corset. She hopes neither Tom nor Philippa noticed.
*
When Lily feels ready to move, Philippa insists on taking her into the kitchen for a restorative cup of Yorkshire tea.
Philippa fusses about, putting on the kettle, finding biscuits. Mrs Castle sits at the table, watching everything through narrowed eyes.
‘Don’t mind me,’ Mrs Castle says, the very model of affronted woman. ‘Just taking a break before I feed you all again. Bet that lot will want a midnight feast.’ She looks at Lily, and for one moment Lily thinks she sees worry in Mrs Castle’s eyes. And then the moment passes and Mrs Castle is glaring at the rind of some stilton.
‘Before we go,’ Philippa says to Mrs Castle. ‘If there’s an emergency, have you got access to a phone so we could call an ambulance?’
‘What’s the emergency?’ Mrs Castle says. Her palms slam on the table as if reassuringly poised to act.
‘Only hypothetical,’ Lily says.
‘Lily had a fall,’ Philippa says.
Mrs Castle half rises. ‘Are you hurt?’
Lily says, ‘I just fainted. I’m fine.’
Mrs Castle’s eyebrows arch. ‘Liliana told me that you keep too much to yourself. If you’re hurt, tell me.’
‘Honestly,’ Lily replies. ‘You don’t have to worry about me.’
Mrs Castle humphs.
‘But what if there is something urgent?’ Philippa says. ‘What do we do?’
‘There’s a house phone in my room,’ Mrs Castle says. ‘All the others were taken out of the old hotel rooms to prevent you lot trying to cheat.’
‘You don’t have a mobile either?’ Lily says.
‘Isabelle even took mine,’ Mrs Castle says. ‘In case one of you was a thieving little so and so and tried to use it.’
‘When do we get them back?’ Philippa asks. Her thumbs tap on an invisible phone as if they don’t know what to do without one.
Lily is surprised how little she misses having her mobile to hand, or the iPad she normally takes everywhere. She definitely doesn’t miss the app where she’s supposed to log every time she feels Bean move. You’re supposed to stay calm as possible, and somehow carry on with your life while counting swishes and, later on, kicks. What’s too few, what’s too many? As if Lily doesn’t have enough to worry about.
Mrs Castle folds her arms. ‘The will stipulates that they’re kept in the safe at Stirling Solicitors’ office till the game is over. Now, if you’ll excuse me,’ Mrs Castle says, closing her eyes. ‘I intend to nap for forty minutes. You should go to bed, too, Miss Lily.’
Grateful for the out, Lily nods and gets up to leave. Philippa comes with her, and they climb the stairs slowly, with Philippa’s arm under Lily’s. When they get to Lily’s door, she gives Philippa a quick hug. ‘Thanks,’ she says. Philippa looks as if she wants to say something else, but Lily is already closing the door.
Going to bed on Christmas Eve used to be a magical ritual. With all the conference goers home for the holidays, Endgame House was all hers. After dinner, Lily would drink hot chocolate with marshmallows while she wrote a note for Father Christmas. She’d then hang her stocking on the living room mantelpiece and place the letter on the black tiles of the hearth below. Next to the note went a carrot for Rudolph and, for Santa himself, a mince pie made earlier in the day while carols played. Mum also poured Santa a tankard of Baileys which she was certain was his favourite, no matter what anyone else said.
Upstairs, Lily would find a new pair of pyjamas and a book on her pillow. Tucked up by Mum, who always sang the same song, Lily then went to sleep listening for sleighbells. Even when Lily no longer believed in Santa, she still hung up her stocking, and on to the magic.
Until that last Christmas. Finding your mum dead on Boxing Day will have that effect. On that New Year’s Eve, she’d thrown her new pyjamas into the fire, and swore she’d never read The Subtle Knife, the book she’d been delighted to receive only seven days before. And she hasn’t. It still lies at the end of her bookcase, next to Jacqueline Wilson’s Girls in Love.
This Christmas Eve, she’s in the same room but instead of sleighbells, she’s listening to the wind outside and, from two floors below, someone shrieking along to ‘Last Christmas’. George Michael advised keeping one’s heart safe this Christmas. And Lily always listens to George Michael. His mother had died the same year as hers, and she’d wished that she could feel and express the same eloquent grief as him. Maybe losing someone to cancer is different to when they take their own lives. Maybe. Lily can still taste the shame she felt at not being enough for Mum.
Only someone else may have taken her mum’s life. Taken her from Lily.
Lily cracks open the front of her corset, lets the carapace fall to the floor, and moves over to her bookcase. Smash Hits stickers still cling to the shelves. She takes The Subtle Knife down and carries it over to the bed.
Placing Christina on her lap, she snuggles into the pillows and opens the book. On the inside cover is Mum’s message in her signature green ink.
To my darling daughter,
May we never be parted. And if we are ever worlds away, let’s tear down their walls till we’re together again. I love you.
Mum
Xxxxx
Reading that message on the night she’d received the book had made Lily feel hot-chocolate warm. Reading it a few nights later, she’d thrown it across the room, scalded by the hypocrisy. Tonight, she reads a message from a woman not far off the age Lily is now, who pledges to always be there for her daughter.
Lily curls up, lying like a comma on the bed. When the sobs stop, she takes a deep breath. She’s older now, she can do something. Time to find out who wrenched her mother from this world.
She turns over to try and get herself comfortable, stuffing a cushion under her burgeoning bump, and propping another behind to keep her lying on the left. Someone on a parenting forum said that switching to the right could result in a lack of oxygen to the foetus, and woe betide you if you went onto your tummy, which is how Lily used to sleep. Same as her mum. Most of these rules didn’t exist when Mariana was pregnant with her. She could drink, a little, smoke slightly more, eat all the cheese, although even the thought of it makes Lily feel sick. At least Lily’s morning, afternoon, all-day and all-night sickness is subsiding, although it could come back, like a monster at the end of a horror movie.
There’s so much to worry about as a pregnant person. So many things to take, to not take. What if she can’t remember it all? What if her body takes over and turns her onto her tummy by habit? What if she wakes in the morning to find she’s lost Bean after all?
Just then, she hears a tap at the window. That’ll be the tree outside, knocking on the glass. Mum used to say that it was the tree telling her to go to sleep. It’d be reassuring to see the tree, see the branch that links her to her past. She shifts until she’s sitting up and reaches to pull back the curtain. But, when the window is revealed, no spindly twig fingers tap their knuckles on the glass. Then she remembers that the tree was cut down just after Mum died.
The tapping comes again, but this time from inside the room. As if it’s in the walls, scratching to come out. And now there are whispers. Sibilant shushes. Like wind through reeds. And then nothing. The clock tick-tocks, scoring time into silence.
She wonders then if she had been dozing, or in that state half in, half out of sleep, and imagined it all.
And then she hears her name. ‘Lily.’
The voice is too faint, too feathery to recognise. But it feels familiar. It makes her bones ache and yearn to be held.
‘Lily, I am here for you,’ the voice says.
She doesn’t think it’s her mum’s voice. And it couldn’t be. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, of course she doesn’t.
‘Lily,’ the voice says again.
The ice-cold certainty that there is no such thing as ghosts is based on the fact that she has never felt her mum’s presence, or heard her talk. And she still hasn’t. She can’t have.
And yet.
‘Lily.’ The voice again.
Her certainty is in danger of melting.
She tries to reply but can’t. Her throat’s frozen. For a moment she thinks that she can’t move either, and that maybe this is sleep paralysis. But then her hand moves at her command.
Removing the covers, she gets out of bed, feeling the winter air on her skin as she goes over to the wall that she shares with Mum’s room. Lily hopes the cold will wake her up, let her speak, but her mouth still feels as dry as years-old fruit cake.
She places her hands on the wall, feeling the ridges on the wallpaper. Waits for the voice to say something again.
‘Lily, do not trust them,’ the voice says. The sound comes from beyond the wall. It’s as if someone is tickling the wall as her mum used to tickle her back to help Lily go to sleep.
Lily swallows, trying to unstick her voice. ‘Mum?’ she’s able to say at last.
The clock ticks on, but the voice has stopped. The scratching has subsided, leaving only the silence of the night.