Chapter 24 #2
He stabs his fork into a great hunk of steak and shoves it into his mouth. ‘What?’ he says, around his loud chewing, one eye on his phone on the table. I flinch for a second as a wave of nausea pummels through my body.
I bite down on my lip.
‘Out with it,’ he says. ‘What excitement do you have for me today? Did the kettle break down? Did you finally hoover my office? Did you manage more than half-an-hour of your Davina fitness DVD without collapsing on the floor like a great beached whale?’
My mouth is dry.
He looks at me, scowling so loudly it is almost audible. ‘Are you going to tell me, or what?’
‘I’m pregnant.’
He doesn’t respond for a few moments. He stares into my eyes, then back at his dinner, then into my eyes again and his eyes are fading into pinpricks of ice. My stomach lurches as cold reality hits me in the face. How long will I keep lying to myself about him? About our relationship?
‘What?’
‘I’m pregnant. Look. Here.’ I dig out the test stick I’m sitting on, wrapped up in a ribbon earlier in my eager excitement.
‘What is that?’
‘I—’
He whips it from my hand and looks at it, and then back at me, and then back at his dinner.
Everything turns to slow-motion as he scrapes his chair back, picks up his plate and hurls it at the wall behind me, rivulets of gravy cascading down the Farrow and Ball eggshell paint that he picked out. He’s out from the table and round to me before I can take in what is happening.
My heart is beating too quickly and sweat prickles at my armpits. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’
He doesn’t speak any more words to me. He sets his mouth in a grim line and his eyes are narrowed and pinched together as he gets right into my face, like he does when he kisses me except this is not like that.
This time he yanks at me, pulling me out of my chair, and I stumble and trip against the wall behind me, falling to the ground.
He stands over me, crunched up on the floor, and then his hand is flying to my face before I can move out of the way, and then all I can feel is an explosion of pain and all I can see is a burst of dizzy light.
Later on he says that he knows he shouldn’t have done that, but it is my fault because I shouldn’t have got pregnant.
A part of me wants to say that it takes two to tango but I don’t dare.
He doesn’t say sorry, exactly, but he goes out and he buys me some flowers and says that it’s because he loves me so very much, and because he has got me so far, and now pregnancy will undo all his good work and make me sick again.
It’s only because he cares so much that he got so angry.
So I turn to him and snuggle into his neck and say it’s okay, I understand why and I’m sorry I was careless.
I say please don’t stop loving me. He shushes me and says it’s fine, it’s okay, we can get rid of it, and Penny please don’t tell anyone about this because you know I didn’t mean it.
???
‘He hit me because I got pregnant. With Jake. And other times, too. I always thought it was my fault.’
Kat gazes at me and her eyes are pools of pain.
‘I got away a few months later, but those few months I couldn’t see him for what he was. He wanted me to terminate the pregnancy, but I didn’t want to, and he hit me then, as well. And then he left.’
No one says anything for a few moments. We listen to the whisper of the wind in the trees, and I think it sounds like the cry of a girl who is lost.
‘Kane never hits me, though,’ Jodie says. ‘He’d never lay a finger on me.’
Kat shakes her head. ‘Stop minimising his behaviour. We’ve seen how he manhandles you, Jodie, how he grabs you that bit too tightly.’
Jodie’s shoulders tense under the blanket.
‘We’ve all seen it. He pushes you around, darling.’
‘No he doesn’t.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, he does.’
Jodie’s mouth quivers. ‘But he’s there for me.’
‘Not here for you now, is he?’ Kat says, and Jodie says nothing to that.
‘But we are,’ I say.
Jodie stares up at me through brimming eyes. ‘Aren’t you mad at me?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘A little,’ Kat says, and then laughs, and then Jodie smiles just a little bit.
‘Look at you now,’ I say. ‘You’re free and you’re magnificent without him. He dampens you down, Jodie. He makes you into a paler you, and none of us like that, do we ladies?’
‘It is true,’ Amina says. ‘He makes you into someone you are not. And you always are saying to me, I am controlled, I am forced to be with Bilal and I should set myself free, but you know that it is you who are controlled and me that is free. But it can be like that no longer. He has let you go free and you can take your wings up and fly away now.’
Jodie gazes at the sky.
‘You are glorious without him,’ I say.
‘And so are you, Penny,’ Kat says. ‘You are glorious and you don’t realise quite how glorious.’
‘We’re all glorious,’ Jodie says, smiling through her tears. ‘We’re the flowers who are blooming even on this gloomy day.’
‘We might be flowers, but we’ll be the dying flowers if we don’t get back to that hospital,’ Violet says. ‘There hasn’t been a car for ages. I hope one of you has a bright idea, because this just isn’t working, is it?’
She’s right. We have been sitting on this verge for over twenty minutes now, and nobody has come to our rescue. Kane hasn’t had a change of heart and returned, probably because he doesn’t have much of a heart. And if no one comes, we will wilt away and die.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say, and everyone seems to wither before me, as if they were blossoming for a moment but then the summer died. I turn to Kat. She’s the sensible one. She’ll have something up her sleeve. ‘Do you?’
She just shakes her head, and then she lowers herself onto her knees on a patch of grass and closes her eyes.
‘What are you doing?’ Jodie says.
Kat is silent.
Amina puts her finger on her lips, and whispers, ‘What do you think she is doing?’
Violet wrinkles her nose. ‘Whatever floats her boat, I guess. Lot of use it’s done so far this afternoon.’
‘Shut up, Violet,’ I say, and she looks up in surprise, and I am surprised too.
The darkness draws in further, bringing the cold with it and the damp we can feel under our bottoms and through our bones. Jodie wheezes too loudly and I worry.
Barbara puts out her red-gloved hand, palm upwards, a look of wonder in her eyes. ‘Snow!’ she says, and she sounds like a small child gazing out of her window on Christmas Eve, voice high with excitement and the promise of what is to come.
‘You said it would be dry all day today,’ Violet says to Jodie with baleful eyes, shivering and zipping her silver coat up to the top, burying her mouth and nose.
Jodie sticks out her chin. ‘It said that! Well, I mean, it said it might snow tonight, through the night like, but it said there would be sun through the day, then might get chilly towards late afternoon. Not that it would snow this early or nothing.’
‘But there it is,’ I say.
It only comes in slow floaty flakes, at first, but it is as if time slows down as I gaze at them. I can almost make out the complex intricacy of each one, as if an artist has taken time to craft them from nothing into an explosion of great and mysterious beauty.
‘I don’t like snow,’ Violet says.
Why doesn’t that surprise me? She doesn’t like sand, either, or the sea, or very much at all. Yet it seems she might like us a little more than she did. She liked us enough to come on this doomed outing.
‘It’s too cold,’ she says, ‘snow, I mean. And wet.’
‘Look,’ Jodie croaks. ‘There.’
Something is coming over the horizon to the west of us.
It takes shape as a battered rust-coloured people-carrier trundling slowly down the road pulling a huge old caravan.
The car is a Zafira, I think. When Marcus and I got married I used to plan out our life, how we would have three or four children and buy a Zafira with seven seats and travel the country with our happy brood.
Marcus would be a good father, I thought.
He’d bring them up to be the best that they could be, to be useful and wholesome people.
The car draws closer. Through the murky dusk I can just about make out seventies-style floral curtains waving slightly in the windows of the battered, ancient caravan, which looks like something Jeremy Clarkson would like to play racing games involving fiery finales with.
Kat scrambles to her feet and is out on the road in seconds, ready to flag the driver down. The rest of us remain sitting, steeped in lethargy and apathy. Why should this one be any different?