An emoji popped up. It was a skull.
Does that mean bad?Coralie replied.
It means better than good, Zora wrote back.It means it was so good, I died.
“She says it was so good, she died,” Coralie reported.
“Right,” Anne said.
Jeremy Corbyn got to his feet. Coralie felt another unmistakable tightening. Back on her phone, she downloaded a contraction timer from the App Store. It took an age to get it working. Another contraction had come, and Corbyn was ending his remarks. “The prime minister is not winning friends in Europe; he is losing friends at home. His is a government with no mandate, no morals, and—as of today—no majority!”
“That’s clever,” Anne said. “He must have ad-libbed that.”
“Are you a Corbyn fan?” Coralie asked curiously.
“We havea lotof Jewish friends,” Anne said. “Sono.”
•••
On and onthe debate went. After a while, Coralie took herself upstairs to the bedroom, planning a short lie-down before Florence came home. She woke two hours later when a terrible pain entered her consciousness. For the first time, she began to get scared and cried to herself as she restarted her contraction timer history (she didn’t want her average to be affected by her sleep). She’d missed two calls and several messages from Adam. She envied other women the boring jobs of their partners. Coralie could see what he was dealing with just by tuning in to the news. In a perfect world, he’d be with her, but Brexit wasdo or die. How could she summon him home for atwinge? Last time she’d taken so long to dilate that a doctor had called her cervix “recalcitrant.” (Rude!)
She wandered into the yellow nursery and picked up Flo’s toy cat, Catty. Tears once more came to her eyes. What a fool she was; worse—a criminal. For ruining a perfect life, with her one perfect child, by taking a punt on another. She could die in childbirth, or the baby could. Even if all went well, Flo’s life would be destroyed. And what about Zora? What if it took her two years to enjoy herhalf brother, as long as it had taken with Rup? Coralie had wasted the past ten months of her life, distracted by pregnancy. Wasted ages before that by trying to get pregnant. Ages before that by leaving her baby girl in nursery so she could work her stupid job. She wasn’t a good person, a good mother, or a writer. It was all a complete disaster.
She heard Florence in the kitchen, banging her enamel dinner plate with the sippy cup she insisted on using. Thank goodness Coralie hadn’t slept through bedtime.
“Mama,” Florence said when she went in. “Axe the lottle comes from Mexico.”
“The axolotl, I think,” Sally murmured.
“The axolotl! Did you find out its name?”
“David!”
Coralie laughed until tears came to her eyes. “Of course. David. Oof.” She held the table for support.
“Breathe.” In a louder voice, Sally said, “Flo? Maybe you’d like a Sally bath?”
“Sally bath!” Flo cheered. “Yeah!”
In the sitting room, Anne was drinking a glass of red wine and crunching an abstemious Barack Obama portion of almonds, her chiseled jaw cracking.
On the screen, live in the House of Commons, a scruffy Tory was speaking from the backbench. “The prime minister,” he said, “is much in the position of someone standing on one side of a canyon shouting to people on theotherside of the canyon that if they do not do as he wishes, he will throw himself into the abyss.”
Titters in the chamber, and in the Wilton Way sitting room (Anne).
“Oh, it’s seven—Coralie, do you mind?” Without waiting for an answer, Anne switched the channel.
From the screen there came the propulsive strains of theChannel 4 Newstheme, which brought Coralie almost to tears again with its energy and forward motion, as though the news were somehow pioneering, brave, and free, rather than a bleak and disingenuous roundup of the lives and times of malignant show-offs. Jon Snow was crossing live outside Westminster in a zany airport-shop tie and flesh-coloredX Factorheadset. Behind him, the Elizabeth Tower (which housed Big Ben) was clad in a sinister scaffolding exoskeleton. Beneath it, a carnival of mainly white middle-aged people waved EU or Brexit flags and shouted in each other’s faces.
“MPs have returned from their summer break straight into a defining moment for Brexit,” Jon Snow said. “They will vote this evening on whether to seize control of the parliamentary agenda from the government. If they win, Tory rebels and other parties could then introduce a law to force a Brexit extension. In theory, that would stop us leaving without a deal at the end of October. Boris Johnson has saidthatwill result in his calling a general election—but to achieve that, he needs two thirds of MPs to vote for one.”
“Ow.” Coralie clutched the sofa’s armrest.
“You seem to be saying that quite often,” Anne said. “Are you timing?”
“I’m trying to use my app…”
Anne stood and walked toward the kitchen. She returned with a piece of Florence’s drawing paper and a crayon. “Let’s do it the old-fashioned way.”
