‘I think Scott really liked you,’ Mary tells Becky. ‘At the time.’
Becky sees Scott just one more time before she gives birth.
She finds him sitting alone out on the school playing fields. She has gone to find him, and she has. She knows she only has days to go, and then she might never come back here.
He looks up at her as she approaches.
She looks him in the eye. ‘I just want to tell you that I know about you, OK? I know,’ she says.
‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ he says.
She wants to stay. She had promised herself she’d have the whole thing out, but she’d expected him to deny it. He looks pathetic. Frightened. And she can’t do it anyway. She turns and walks away from him, her foetus – his foetus – awake and kicking hard.
‘Becky!’ he calls after her, but no, she won’t come back. A sob bubbles out of her throat as she wobbles away. She still wants to kill herself.
She almost hates Adam for what he has done, binding her to being alive.
She doesn’t go back to school again, except to sit her exams. She is in and out.
The day she brings Maisie home from the hospital, she opens her bottom drawer and takes out the pink pants she has wrapped in a plastic bag, and throws them away. She fills the drawer with spare nappies and wipes.
Adam and his parents are off buying a cot and clothes for the newborn.
There is no more room for questions. She has a daughter now.
She breastfeeds her girl, and waits for peace to fill the hole that was burned in her.
Chapter 24
‘Please don’t tell anyone.’
Please, just don’t say nothing.
Becky has spent the day in silence.
By the time Adam and Maisie find her back at the hotel, curled up and shivering under the duvet, she has showered the worst of the vomit away. They fuss and flap over swollen eyes and pale skin and dry lips. Time to get you home, one of them says in motherly tones. Adam calls for Matthew’s car to drive them home, forgoing their planned second night at the hotel.
She falls asleep on the way back and wakes in her own bed, early the next morning – disorientated and hot, under layers of blankets. The morning light is still low and the birds are waking at once quietly, and then loud – their songs tumbling and bumping into each other. She has the sense that her body has become unmoored in space and yet, in time? She is more clearly orientated than she ever remembers being: the day she has been holding off is here now. At the office they will think she is still on holiday so for the meantime she is safe to go about her business unquestioned. So long as she is careful.
The house smells of fresh laundry – Adam must have hung a load that night after their return. She finds him curled up like a guard dog at the foot of her bed on a blow-up mattress.
Silently, so silently – she must be careful not to wake him – she folds back the duvet, skin bristling with early morning cold. The reflection she catches in the mirror is smudged and tangled, hair standing on end like field stubble, but her skin shines white and her eyes are bright. The person she sees is both someone she recognizes and someone she has not seen before.
Her toes bend softly on the floorboards as she makes her way toward the doorway but she stops a moment before leaving, turning to see the shape his face makes.
Adam would have had such a different life without her. He might have travelled to South East Asia and Australia. He might now be married with a baby, be on his third business enterprise, instead of paying two sets of utility bills and visiting a family he doesn’t live with, loyally servicing a sixteen-year-old lie.
She no longer wants him to make sacrifices for her. She wants him to be free.
She wants to be free.
Enough, now.
On the bus into the city, sitting with her eyes closed, she can smell the dry cleaning chemicals of skirts and jackets whipped out of their polythene body-bags, and the cloying hand-washing florals of silken City shirts, and body odour, and perfume, and stale shoes.
She feels inside her pockets for her tools: for the empty and folded, gum-edged envelope, flat and clean and ready to be filled. For the nail scissors: nicely sharp at one end, handles smooth and round as a child’s rattle the other, ready to be used. She has cleaned them. They are the same scissors she must stop cutting herself with.
She grasps her phone tight in her palm and checks her social media feeds every minute. Refresh, refresh, refresh, until she knows exactly where she is going.
Scott always posts what he eats for breakfast, and where. If he does repeat a breakfast choice – Variety isn’t always possible, even for the most organized – he’ll be sure to include some life advice like Smile, and the world smiles with you! He likes to treat himself with positivity and kindness. He calls it self-care, like it’s something he invented. These are the posts that make Becky want to hurl her phone through a window, because she hates the freedom of it. It is not a freedom that should belong to him. It has been paid for, day after day after day, as she sublimated and ignored and blamed herself for his crime.
This morning he has cared for himself by going for an open water swim in Hampstead Ponds. Hashtag-blessed and fuck you, she thinks. And then he has further self-cared with a ‘good breakfast’ of almond milk flat white and acai granola. Picture: spoon half in, half out, glazed pottery bowl, sunshine, a café next to his office called cafffine, whose sign is totally Instagrammable what with the white Courier font on black background and their
