Until You're Mine (10 page)

The thought of that alone makes me take a sip from the bottle – just a small one – and pick up my phone again. I toggle through all the draft messages I’ve written in the past to let off steam. Then I re-read the message I’ve just typed. It gives me butterflies and makes me feel a little sick to imagine the recipient reading it. I put the bottle to my lips again and this time I take a big swig. With the line of whisky still searing down my throat, I hit send. I couldn’t help myself.

You know I’ll always love you
flies out into the ether.

*

When I come down in the morning, a little twin hand inserted in each of mine, Claudia has already left for work. James strides into the kitchen wearing his Naval uniform and the boys make a fuss as they eat their Weetabix. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going away just yet, lads,’ he says as they abandon their breakfast and lunge at his legs. How heart-breaking for them to have their father away at sea so often, especially after their mum died. How convenient he married Claudia. How lucky she hired me. Children passed down the line. When will it stop?

‘I have a business meeting,’ he says to me after a cursory good morning. My ears prick up. I’m not convinced he likes me. I’m going to be with his wife and boys when he can’t be; look after them while he’s away. I’m the new man of the house. ‘I’ll be back by six and Claudia will be home around then, too. She left early to deal with a tricky case.’

‘Oh?’ I say, trying not to sound nosy, but really I am. There’s so much I have to find out about them and so little time. I desperately want to ask about James’s business meeting.

Plus, I admit Claudia’s job intrigues me. I know she’s a social worker and works in the child protection unit, that she heads up a team. But what her daily routine involves, I don’t have much of an idea. I suppose she tries to make people’s lives better, gets them to live the way she believes is right. Don’t neglect your children; don’t get pregnant when you’re fifteen; don’t hit your girlfriend; don’t take drugs.

Then it occurs to me that she must work with the police quite regularly. The thought of it sends a burst of adrenalin through me just at the same moment Noah knocks over his glass of orange juice. My first thought is to yell at him but I manage to keep calm. James hasn’t yet left. I heard him go into his study.

‘Oopsie,’ I say with a laugh. ‘Fetch the dishcloth, would you, Noah?’ He does as he’s told while Oscar teases him for being clumsy. He drags his finger through the spillage instead of sopping up the mess. ‘Here, let me do it,’ I say. I don’t need a trail of sticky juice all the way to the sink. Mopping the floor is the last thing I want to do. There are other, more important jobs to be taken care of.

*

‘Would you and the twins like to come to the indoor play centre with Lilly and me after school today?’ Pip is stamping her feet and clapping her gloveless hands together. It’s freezing.

The thought of it fills me with dread but I find myself saying yes anyway. No doubt I’ll be surrounded by more pregnant women than I can cope with, each corralling an under-two-year-old while nursing the obligatory huge belly, wondering why they signed up for the lark that is motherhood. They’re everywhere at the moment, pregnant women. It makes everything that much harder – makes me feel emptier than empty; lonelier, more useless and unable to do anything that I ever have done before. I tell myself it’s not for long; it won’t be this way for ever. Things will work out.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. I can’t possibly get it out here. My heart skips a beat.

‘It’ll wear the twins out good and proper for bedtime,’ Pip continues. She’s wearing a faux fur coat with massive cuffs. She’s got a hat to match. ‘Lilly loves it there. They have this gigantic ball pit that she literally gets lost in . . .’ She goes on and on about the play centre and I smile and nod and laugh out shots of icy breath as I try to think of an excuse to leave. My gloved fingers caress the phone in my pocket.

‘Oh look, they’re going in to school,’ I say as the lined-up classes of children snake off to their respective classrooms. I wave frantically as the twins go off without a backward glance. I’m not their mother, after all.

‘So shall we meet up when school finishes?’ Pip asks as we leave through the school gates.

‘Sure,’ I say, wondering how I can get out of it.

Finally, I veer away, leaving Pip to chat with another group of mothers. I wait until I’m around the corner before checking the text on my phone.

I love u 2
sets me right up for what I have to do next.

*

When I open the door, Claudia and James’s bedroom smells faintly of deodorant, hairspray and perfume. The mix of all three combined with a faint whiff of sleep makes me think that someone’s actually in the room with me. The curtains are still closed, which is probably a good thing in case any curtain-twitching neighbours opposite catch sight of me. I flick on the light and go right in. This room’s as good a place to start as any. Despite my paranoia, I’m certain I’m the only one in the house. I even checked the garage to make sure James’s car had actually gone. In order to leave with what I came for, I have to find out as much about them as I possibly can. I daren’t go through his study until he’s left the country. I can’t blow this. I only have one chance.

I go into the ensuite bathroom. The smell of Claudia is even more pungent in here, with the steam of her early morning shower still hanging in the air like sweet pollution. There’s a towel on the floor and the shelf above the basin is a mess – littered with uncapped bottles and lotions for face and body. A line of floss dangles down while a toothbrush lies discarded in the basin. The bristles are touching a globule of toothpaste that’s stuck to the porcelain, as if someone left in a hurry.

I gaze around. What am I supposed to glean from the inner sanctum of Claudia and James’s existence? There’s little point me being in here but I couldn’t resist a snoop. Every bit of information I can get will help me build a picture.

I imagine Claudia at work in a haze of perfume and neglectful parents, making life-changing decisions about broken families that she doesn’t really know enough about, not if she’s honest with herself. Then, in my mind, I see her sitting in her office, chewing on her pen, changing people’s lives for ever, but before she knows it she’s suffocating beneath an avalanche of baby powder and a mountain of soiled nappies, and being deafened by a thousand screaming infants. She’s choking, sucking it all up into her pregnant body. She instinctively grabs her stomach, wincing from the pain as she goes into labour. She falls to the floor, legs apart . . . and then I am there to help her . . .

‘Stop it!’

I stare at myself in the mirror. What’s wrong with me? My cheeks are sunken and I have grey rings beneath my eyes. I must take control. Taking a deep breath, I switch off the bathroom light.

Back in the bedroom, Claudia’s wardrobe is more organised than her messy bathroom. On the left side she hangs her tops and dresses, and on the right she has a selection of stretchy skirts and large-waisted trousers. Most of these are dark in colour to contrast with the voluminous and brightly-coloured tunics she’s stocked up on. I imagine her wearing each of these outfits, all perfectly chosen and coordinated from expensive boutiques. Me, if I were pregnant (the very thought makes me morning-sick with envy) I’d wear tight-fitting T-shirts in shades of brown or grey and have them stretch and ruche over my bump. I’d sling on a man’s cardigan with big deep pockets in which to stuff my tissues. There’d be a lot of tissues. I’d be very emotional, all those hormones racing through me, controlling me, making me feel crazy and sad one minute then ecstatic the next. But, as things stand, I am stuck on the even keel of not being pregnant; no wacky rush of hormones for me today. I’m pretty numb to it now.

I touch one of the maternity dresses and it slides off its hanger. I stare at it on the floor of the wardrobe. I pick it up and hold it against me. Claudia is taller than me. Un-pregnant, I imagine she’s a size twelve or fourteen against my size eight. The dress is a pink and orange Pucci-style print and it makes me look barely there behind its gregariousness. It comes down to mid-calf on me whereas I reckon it would be a more fashionable knee-length on Claudia. Plus, her colouring – those swathes of dark hair and her rosy complexion – would handle the clash of hues on this bright dress. On me, it would simply confirm my invisibility.

I throw it onto the floor and stamp on it in my socked feet. Sobs well up in my throat, as if someone has their hands round my neck, squeezing ever more tightly. When will this choking feeling end?

I grab the wardrobe for support and still myself, head bowing between my arms. What was I thinking? Momentary loss of control is not part of my agenda. I pick up the dress and shake it out. It mustn’t look creased. I hang it back in the wardrobe and am about to shut the doors when I notice something on the floor of the cupboard. It’s a pretty white and green floral box with ‘Keepsakes’ printed on the lid.

I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Oh yes, many times on numerous trips to the baby department of John Lewis or Debenhams or stacked up among Baby’s First Albums and soft rag books in that fashionable little baby boutique near my place. My
old
place.

I stop and tilt my head to the ceiling, trying to make the tears go back in.

I take a breath. This is a box for keeping safe newborn photos, first bootees and locks of hair tied with cotton. This is the kind of place you stash wobbled-out milk teeth – tiny and jagged – and snapshots straight after the birth that Mum doesn’t want in the family album. It’s where you find baby’s first birthday cards and a christening order of service, or the first wavy marks ever made on paper by a clumsily-held crayon. This box holds the deepest memories, the most special mementos, the very beginnings of life. It gets opened once every few years and added to less and less as time goes by.

I lift it out. It’s heavier than I’d expected. I give it a little shake. There’s stuff in there. Has Claudia already been collecting keepsakes from her pregnancy? Or perhaps the contents are for the twins, collected by James and his first wife. The lid is veneered with a skim of dust, indicating it’s not been looked at in a while.

I blow hard at the top of the box, place it on the carpet, and kneel down beside it. I stop. Listen. Did I hear something, someone? My heart thumps in my throat like a second, guilty beat. What would I do now if Claudia came home, burst into her bedroom to find me rummaging through her wardrobe?
Sorry, Claudia. I just wanted to know what it feels like to be pregnant; to have pregnant things; to wear pregnant clothes.
Would she accept that? Would she understand that I probably want – no,
need
her baby more than she does?

I lift the lid. I stare at the contents.

I feel as if I’ve taken a peek inside a womb, the very inner sanctum where life is held so precious. My fingers itch to rifle through this box of . . . of . . . what are they? Keepsakes? Treasures? My vision goes a little blurry at the sight of them.

Oh my God.

My heart pounds faster, if that’s possible. I hold my breath and crouch over the box. On top of all the items in the box is a photograph. It’s not particularly in focus but it’s of a baby – a tiny, naked, baggy-skinned baby – lying in a clear plastic hospital cot. The baby is blue-grey-purple and has no nappy wrapped round its frog-like legs. A white plastic bracelet dwarfs its twiggy arm.

Someone has written in blue marker:
Charles Edward. Born prem at 22 wks. 20/9/07 to 24/9/07.

I lift the photo with freezing fingers. I’m shivering. Beneath it I find a tiny woollen hat, knitted in the finest and palest blue yarn. A bloodied yellow umbilical cord clip is nestled within the woolly folds. Then I see a strip of printed-out ultrasound scan photographs, already yellowing around the edges with age. I’ve seen these type of things on the telly and admit to taking a look at some on the internet, wondering what it would be like to have the doctor explain to me where each limb was, if it was a boy or a girl, showing me the flappy heartbeat as it lub-dubbed what little blood had so far formed around tiny veins.

The small digital print on the dark image reads
Claudia Brown
. They are her scan pictures then, but the date – 19/4/2003 – tells me they are not from this pregnancy. The womb is identifiable – a dark oval area – and within this space is a fuzzy white-grey blob. If it’s a foetus, it doesn’t look very big. I am staring inside Claudia’s womb. The thought makes me shake more. On the back, someone has written:
Baby Ella. 18 weeks. Stillborn.

Saliva pools in my mouth as if I’m about to be sick.

I continue my trawl of tragedy. The box is brimming with many similar mementos, each one a reminder of a baby lost. There are three further scan pictures, each from a different pregnancy taken around fourteen weeks’ gestation and all with the date of miscarriage written on the reverse. There are poems penned by a bereft mind –
My empty arms ache to hold you . . . The smallest fingers, the cutest nose . . . No woman as barren as me
– and a crumpled piece of paper bearing two footprints:
James Michael, passed 7/10/2008
.

‘These are the prints of a doll,’ I whisper, marvelling at the ten tiny perfect toes.

Claudia’s misery, her emptiness and self-loathing are apparent from the heartfelt poems. I’m assuming it was she who wrote them as my eyes drag over the grief they contain. How can one woman suffer such loss and yet still continue to try for a baby? I drop my hands to my lap. It makes me feel even more wretched about what I am going to do to this family. ‘But all this has made her strong,’ I say to myself, stroking the side of the keepsakes box, trying to lessen the guilt.

I stop dead still. Did I hear someone? There it is again.

I replace the lid on the box and shove it back inside the wardrobe. I dash out of the bedroom and run down the stairs. Someone is hammering on the door. When I get there, a delivery man is standing on the top step tapping his fingers on a large package leaning against his thigh. ‘Sign here, please,’ he says impatiently, handing me an electronic gadget and a stylus. I do this, and he passes over the box. He leaves without another word and I lug the delivery inside.