Chapter 31
31
Drew flung open the front door.
‘Sarah!’ he yelled up the stairs, flicking on the lights and dropping his keys into the bowl. ‘Sah, I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry.’ He raced upstairs into the bedroom. The bed was still made or as close to being made as it ever really got. Running back downstairs, he opened the door to the living room.
‘Sah?’ His pulse, which had maintained a fairly high pace since he left the party, kicked up another notch. ‘Sah?’ The room was in darkness. He began scrambling around on the floor to try and plug the phone lead into the wall socket. Once that was done, he scooped up the receiver. ‘Shit,’ he said out loud. What the hell was her phone number? He squeezed his eyes closed as he tried to remember it. There was a double four in there somewhere, he thought. Maybe a four, zero, four. Or four, four, zero, four?
‘Buggering hell.’ Why did he not know his own wife’s mobile phone number for crying out loud? He could still remember the number for the house he lived in until he was thirteen and the number of Steve Moore down the street. He could even remember the number of his Aunt June, who had moved three times and died since. ‘Stupid technology!’ he screamed at no one in particular. He would drive around to his parents, that was what he’d do.
Still busy swearing to himself, and only half a mile away from their house, Drew lifted his foot off the accelerator. Would Sarah really have gone to his parents? He considered. She had to be dragged there under duress at the best of times. And where would she have slept? On the sofa? And then there would be all the questions about why she wasn’t with Drew. The car slowed to a crawl as he realised there was no way in hell she could have put herself through that. But where else did she have to go?
‘This is ridiculous. You do realise you have taken us hostage? Do you hear me? Hostage .’ Brogues was near apoplectic with outrage. ‘I’m going to call the police. I’m going to. If you do not turn this bus around this instant, I am calling 999.’
Sarah had been moved to the back seat of the bus: the place where all the cool kids sat. She didn’t feel like one of the cool kids right now, though, with her dress up around her hips and her feet pressed against the window.
‘Perhaps you ought to draw the curtains,’ someone said as a lorry beside them beeped their horn. Even in her state of shock and denial, she could see it was probably a good idea.
‘Does anyone have any more water? We’re all out of water here.’ Jenny asked, having already used her own supply along with her scarf to mop up the mess on the floor.
From somewhere up front, a bottle was passed back to them. Sarah gulped as much down as she could manage. Several more big contractions had already come and gone, and while the baby and its health were highest on her list of priorities, there was another more immediate issue to deal with.
‘Plastic bags,’ she said, during a break in the pain. ‘You need to cover the seat with plastic bags.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll make sure you’re comfortable,’ Jenny replied.
‘I don’t care about comfy. I just don’t want—’ She stopped herself. ‘Just put some damn plastic bags down, will you?’
Involuntary bowel evacuation. Another part of that whole process Sarah had wished to suppress: the act of crapping herself, perhaps repeatedly, in front of whoever happened to be present in the room at the time. She had thought the second time would be better for some reason, that she would be able to feel the difference between a baby and emptying her bowels in front of a midwife. Nope. With Eva, she had been letting it all go and not giving a crap. Literally. And it was going to happen again. All over the cool kids’ back seat. Well, that would stop them wanting to sit there again in a hurry.
‘Jenny, you won’t leave me, will you?’ Sarah clamped onto her new friend’s hand. ‘I’m not very good at this.’
‘You’ll be fine. You’ve already done it twice.’
‘And it was horrible. I didn’t want to do it again. I don’t want to do it again. Please don’t make me do it again!’ Pressure surged down her stomach, momentarily distracting her and causing her to remember her more immediate fear. ‘And will you get me some damn plastic bags?’
Due to the complete middle-classness of her fellow commuters, only one plastic bag could be found among the group. She was instead lying upon a mix of hessian, canvas, and organic cotton totes, one of which was so horrendously placed that the handle was chafing her backside. She would have complained, but it wasn’t like the rest of them were having a particularly pleasant journey either.
‘Did you not hear me? I’m going to call the police.’
‘Will someone shut him up? Because if someone does not shut him up soon, I am going to pull up on this lay-by and push him out myself.’ The driver was keeping her eyes forward on the road, despite the standstill.
‘We’re already late. Won’t make any difference now,’ someone said. ‘Let’s just make sure she gets to the hospital. Get this bubba out safe.’
A general hum of agreement buzzed through the bus.
‘Shouldn’t we call an ambulance?’ someone else said. ‘Wouldn’t it make sense to call an ambulance?’
‘You think they’re going to be able to get here any quicker?’
Sarah let all the conversations fall into her periphery. That was for someone else to deal with. The bus, the journey, they could argue over that. Her job was to keep the damn baby in until they reached the hospital. And try not to have any panic attacks in the meanwhile.
Sodding Drew. The lying, cheating idiot of a man. Could he not have just been by her side for this and then gone off and screwed the intern? Would that have been too much to ask for? The thought went around and around in her head. Of all the nights…
‘How far away are we?’ Jenny yelled to the front. ‘Contractions are at three minutes this end.’
‘ETA of ten minutes,’ the driver called to the back. ‘Just hold it in a little longer.’
Jenny’s hand came across and rested on her shoulders. For all her youth and constant nattering, Sarah was thankful there was someone here to hold her hand through this.
‘You can do this,’ Jenny dropped her voice to a low resonance. ‘Breathe in through your nose and let the breath go out and down through your vagina.’
‘Sorry?’ Sarah blinked, alerted to her words.
‘In through your nose and out through your vagina. Feel the surges blooming through your body.’
Sarah reached up and grabbed Jenny’s hand.
‘You know Mind Birthing?’ She twisted her head up, not sure if this was an auditory hallucination she was experiencing and whether that was even possible.
‘Did I not mention I was my sister’s birthing partner for all three?’ She grinned. ‘She’s all about the hippy nonsense.’
Then, for a hundred reasons, each of which was entirely deserved, Sarah burst into tears.
In less than ten minutes, Drew had found the crazily painted fence. Never again would he comment on its ridiculousness. There was no way he’d have been able to tell the house apart from the other hundred identical new builds without it. He might even paint his own those colours when he got through this. Not that he and Sarah had a fence; they had a wall. They could paint that instead. Leaving the engine running, he raced through the gate and hammered on the door.
‘Drew?’ Nelly answered the door in what he assumed were pyjamas. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Is she here? Sah!’ he called over her shoulder and into the house. ‘Sarah, I’m sorry. Honey, I’m sorry.’
‘Drew!’ Nelly placed her hand on his chest and held him outside. ‘What are you doing? It’s half ten.’
‘Is she here? I can’t get hold of her.’
‘Who? Sarah? I haven’t seen her since she picked up the dress. I thought you were staying the night in London?’
‘We were. It’s just… it’s well… look…’ Drew peered over Nelly’s shoulder into the house, wringing his hands as he spoke. ‘Can you just call her, please? Find out where she is?’
‘Why don’t you ring her?’
‘She took my phone. And I don’t know her number.’
Nelly looked at him sceptically, which he really didn’t feel like he deserved considering his panicked state and the fact that no one actually knew anybody’s number by heart any more. ‘Please, can you just ring her?’
At the most disturbingly slow place possible, Nelly ambled back into the house, pushing the door closed in a manner that indicated to Drew he probably wasn’t welcome to join her inside. Looking down, he noticed he was standing on a brown doormat with the words I like it dirty woven into it. Beside it, two garden gnomes were copulating. Sarah did have the strangest taste in friends.
A moment later, Nelly reappeared with her phone in her hand.
‘It’s going straight to voicemail,’ she said.
‘What? Give that to me.’ Drew snatched the phone off her and hit the call button himself only to find it was, as Nelly had said, going straight to voicemail. ‘It must have run out of battery.’
The realisation hit him like a train. ‘She’s got your phone, you damn idiot,’ he said to himself. He might not be able to remember Sarah’s number, but he could remember his.
‘I know it ain’t ideal timing, but you should really have a few pictures to remember this moment by,’ Jenny was saying as she picked up Drew’s phone and flicked it to camera mode.
During the impromptu photo shoot, Sarah realised there was only one thing for it. She would have to call Drew’s mother. She desperately didn’t want Amanda with her during the birth, probably any more than Amanda would want to be there, but it did look like her only option.
‘Oh, that’s a smashing one,’ Jenny said. ‘And this one. Here, let me show you.’ She turned the phone around so Sarah could see the screen. It was possibly the worst photo Sarah had ever seen of herself. Her hair was matted to her forehead, she had a pained grimace on her face, and her eyes were like those of a cornered wild animal. Fortunately, she didn’t have to look at it for long. The moment she went to take the phone so she could call Amanda and Neil, the screen went completely blank.
‘I think the battery might have gone,’ said Jenny.
With the call going straight to voicemail, Drew handed the phone back to Nelly. If only he hadn’t used the sat nav on his phone all the way to London, he thought.
‘Look,’ Nelly said, placing a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t need a hand on his shoulder. He needed to know where the hell Sarah was. ‘Maybe she’s just gone for a walk. Or to a bar. Or just to have some space outside of that crappy little house of yours she hates so much.’
Drew stepped back. ‘She doesn’t hate the house. She loves the house.’
‘She loved the house years ago when you bought it, Drew. Now she hates that house. And she hates that you don’t even see she hates it.’
‘She says it’s cute.’
‘When, Drew? When was the last time she said that it was cute?’
He bit on his bottom lip, attempting to chew over all the things he was hearing. Only, after a minute, he realised it didn’t matter.
‘Look, she wouldn’t have gone for a walk. She wouldn’t. No matter how pissed off she is with me.’
‘Exactly how pissed off is she?’
‘Please, Nelly. Can you just help? I need to find her. I need to know she’s okay. I’m begging you.’ And he was, he realised. Hands clenched, leaning forward, begging for all he was worth.
Nelly’s gaze went back to her house, a pinched lined creasing her brow.
‘I suppose we’d better start by calling the hospitals.’
She disappeared into the house for a second time.
Wearily, Drew followed her in.