Astonishing Splashes of Colour (9 page)

We munch together and the pile of Quality Street diminishes. Suzy will know I’ve been here when she gets up tomorrow because I always sit down and eat the lot. I hope she feels too ill to notice.

“Anyway,” I say, “Adrian isn’t even in Birmingham. He went to London.”

Jake coughs. I can hear the phlegm in his chest. “No. He came home—he had to walk out of a major awards ceremony.”

“Whatever for?”

“Lesley phoned him on his mobile. She thought the children had been abducted. People think like that, you know, if their children aren’t where they should be.”

“They weren’t in any danger,” I say.

“But how would Adrian know? The three of you could have been murdered.”

“I wrote a note,” I say and stop. “Actually, I think I might have forgotten.” My eyes shift away from his gaze. I’m not very good at lying.

“Quite.”

“Lesley wasn’t supposed to come home so early. I was going to tell her all about it once the children were safely in bed.”

He picks out all the coffee creams and lines them up on the arm of the sofa. He starts eating them one by one, folding the papers neatly and throwing them into the wastepaper bin. Not one of them misses.

I snatch a handful of sweets irritably. I can’t bear to watch his neatness, his precision. I start to stuff the sweets in my mouth, not waiting to finish one before starting the next.

“You’ll have to face them tomorrow,” he says mildly. “You can’t hide for ever.”

I shrug. “Don’t worry. I’ll be gone before you get up.”

We have nothing to say to each other. I know he won’t push me too far. Like, “Is it to do with the baby?” He won’t be able to ask me that, because he knows I can’t answer.

“I’ll get to bed, then,” he says. He stands up in his pink dressing gown and coughs again. It doesn’t sound good. “Help yourself if you want to make a drink. Only—”

“Yes?”

“Try to be quiet. Suzy needs a good sleep.”

“By the way,” I say, “the porch door is unlocked.”

He stops at the door, about to say something, but changes his mind. I pick up the remote control and put on BBC2. It’s the Open University. They’re having a discussion on cloning.

“Sleep well,” I say. “You can count babies to help you nod off.”

He’s gone. I only said that because I knew he wouldn’t hear it.

I listen to an earnest woman with glasses on a chain round her neck, and a younger man wearing a white coat with a pager in the pocket. Scientist or doctor? I wonder. They talk with great conviction, but they don’t agree. I’m beginning to warm up. My eyes are suddenly heavy and aching. I huddle down into the chair, lean my head on the cushion and try to concentrate on cloning.

I wake with a jerk, and my neck cracks with the movement. The telly is still on, but I can’t work out what they’re talking about. The faces are blurred, the words incomprehensible.

I was dreaming about babies all over the place—in beds, on chairs, in prams. There is nowhere to sit because everywhere is full of babies. They are gurgling, sleeping, screaming. In the second before I wake, I realize that I am one of them, and open my
mouth to scream, to prove it. I wake up at that precise moment, feeling stiff and ill.

I look at my watch. It’s 5:30. Time to go home, before anyone guesses where I am.

A group of suited men on the television are talking in a foreign language. I leaf rapidly through the
Radio Times,
wanting to know what it is. Russian. No wonder I can’t understand them.

I turn off the television and get up. My legs are very stiff and I nearly fall over, my right foot tingling with pins and needles. I jump up and down on it until it starts to work again.

When I turn the light off, I can still see—it’s no longer dark outside. Going into the hall, I move very carefully so that I don’t wake anyone, but just before I open the front door I hear a movement behind me. I turn round, expecting Jake, and find myself confronting Suzy.

“Oh,” I say in alarm and put my hand over my mouth.

She looks strangely unfocused. “Kitty,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

“Well,” I say, and I haven’t a thought in my head. “I was just passing …”

She stares, but her intense concentration is not directed at me, but on some internal dilemma. I’ve never seen her before in nightclothes, her face pale without makeup, her hair greasy and ragged.

“Oh—” she groans suddenly and races away into the kitchen.

As I unlock the front door, I can hear her retching into the sink. I shut the door behind me, trying not to hear her being sick. I know about this—being sick all day. She doesn’t have a tummy upset, she’s pregnant. I recognize the look.

My legs are heavy, as if I’m trying to run in water, and it feels as if they’re not moving at all. I’m not sure I can manage to get home.

I
HESITATE OUTSIDE MY
flat door, uncertain where to go. Home or to James? Where would Adrian expect to find me? My flat? I wouldn’t let him in and he wouldn’t have a key. He might go to James and ask him to let him in. Would James do it? I’m not sure. Hovering agonizingly, I consider going to visit Miss Newman on the floor below. She’ll invite me in for cake and tea. This is unrealistic. It’s too early for cake.

I move from one door to the other, incapable of making a decision.

The decision is made for me as James’s door opens and Adrian comes out.

“Ah, there you are, Kitty,” he says, as if it is normal for him to be coming out of James’s flat at 6:30 in the morning.

“Yes,” I say and look at my feet. My shoes are covered in mud.

“We need a talk,” he says, and he sounds like an all-knowing headmaster, a benevolent father, a big brother.

James comes out behind him. They’re both fully dressed, but crumpled.

“Kitty!” he says, coming towards me. He sounds pleased to see me, but I’m probably misreading him. He comes over and puts an arm round me. “Kitty,” he says again, and I lean against him. He is pleasingly warm and soft. “Thank goodness you’re all right.”

I feel not very all right at all. My legs are stiff, my neck hurts, I have a tummy ache and I can’t remember where I left my bag with my purse and key in it. This strikes me as hilarious, because I wouldn’t have been able to get into my house anyway. I fight back a wave of giggles that threatens to ripple through me. I can imagine Adrian’s response to that. “Laughter is not appropriate.”

Adrian leads the way and they guide me into James’s flat. I want to say, “I can walk, you know,” but what I actually say is, “Suzy’s pregnant.”

There’s a smell of burning toast, and James dashes out, leaving me alone with Adrian. This is unfair. James is married to me and I’m partly his responsibility—even if he’d prefer not to be involved. I’m more important than toast.

Adrian paces up and down, putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out again. There’s a dark stubble on his face and his brown eyes seem more hollow than usual. I have never seen him genuinely agitated before, and watching him makes me breathe too fast. My head starts to swim and I wish he would stop.

“I really think, Kitty …” he says and slows down.

His shoes are hard and noisy on the wooden floor. I worry about Miss Newman downstairs. She will be woken up with all the noise. If I wait until Adrian goes, I could slip down and see her. She might be ready for tea and cakes by then.

He tries again. “Why didn’t you say something? It seems so— so—”

James comes back into the room. “Go home,” he says to Adrian. “We all need some sleep. I’ll ring this evening.”

Amazingly, Adrian turns and goes out of the door. He rarely takes James seriously, so I wait for him to change his mind and come back to finish his argument. But the front door closes behind him.

I sit on the sofa and wait. Everything around me is unnaturally bright and hard-edged. Then James is in my line of vision. He has done it again, walked across his floor without a sound. I look up at his face, waiting for the questions, but none comes. He sits down beside me, but doesn’t touch me.

Does he know about the train tickets? I start to sweat. Has he found out? Did I tell him?

“Come to bed,” he says gently. “We’ll talk later.”

Obediently, I get up and follow him into the bedroom. We undress
and climb in under the double duvet. We lie side by side, neither of us moving. After a while, his body grows warm and heavy and his breathing becomes even. Poor James. He must be exhausted after his sleepless night. I move closer to catch his warmth.

But every time I close my eyes, a tangle of colours races across my mind. Butterflies dancing in the wind, crocodiles, dark green glossy plants, cloned Peter Pans talking Russian, Suzy carrying five babies together, all laughing and being sick down her smart pink suit.

I jerk my eyes open. I don’t want to sleep. It’s too exhausting. I can’t think about the last twenty-four hours, so I think about my mother instead.

She died when I was three, so if she miraculously appeared now, resurrected, I wouldn’t recognize her. When I dream of her, she’s real. I see her long dark hair and the necklaces of beads that I played with as a baby. I don’t know how much is memory and how much imagination. The dream is not a nightmare, it has only comfort in it, but I lose it too fast when I wake, and I lie alone with a terrible pain inside me, a hole that will never be filled. I can’t decide which is worse, to not have a mother, or to not have children. An empty space in both directions. No backwards, no forwards.

She died in a car crash, but nobody will tell me anything about it. Whenever I ask, an enormous vagueness descends. I would like more detail. Whose fault was it? Was she driving? Was there anyone else in the car? I need an end before I can go back to the beginning.

My brothers rarely talk about her, as if they’ve all agreed to forget. Unlike me, they have a memory of her being there for their childhood, but they can’t seem to translate that into a physical description. Sometimes I think they all knew a different person.

When I was about twelve, I tried to find out more about her and pushed my brothers for some details.

Paul’s mother is tall with short hair. “She liked gardening and her nails were always black with soil. She only talked to us for a bit at mealtimes, and even then she started looking through the window again, thinking about the garden.” He can only describe her outside, pruning, raking the leaves, designing an herb garden.

“She sang in the garden,” he said once. “I could hear her sometimes, after I’d gone to bed, when there was still some light left outside. I think she went on gardening in the dark, with a torch.”

“What did she sing?” I asked.

He looked confused. “I don’t know. I couldn’t hear the words.”

“‘A Hard Day’s Night’? Or ‘Penny Lane’?” I discovered the Beatles records in the lounge when I was eight, and played them over and over until I knew all the words. My mother always sings them in my dreams.

But Paul shook his head. “No, of course not. She was too old for that. We were the Beatles fans. She sang—” He stopped and tried to think. “I don’t know—folk songs, I suppose. ‘Green-sleeves,’ ‘The Ash Grove,’ and things like that.”

I was disappointed, and certain that he was wrong. He was only twelve when she died.