“I can’t remember, I’m too stupid and exhausted.”
“Oh, Cor, beautiful Cor.”
They lay there for a long time.
“Boris expelled twenty-one Tories for voting against him,” Adam murmured.
Coralie didn’t reply. Like a boat slipping its mooring, she drifted off, asleep.
•••
By 6 a.m.the next day, she was walking around the hidden green space in the middle of a Hackney estate. There were two conker trees—what was their real name? Horse chestnut. She was trying to have an “active birth” this time, and active meantwalking, not lazing on the sofa while Anne made snide remarks about the news. She was back on the timer app, a contraction for a full minute every five. Even as she walked laps and breathed through the pain, part of her was eagerly anticipating Adam waking up and finding her gone. At seven, she received a video call. The screen opened up, but all it showed was darkness. “Flo.” She could hear Adam’s voice. “Flo. You can’t eat it.”
“Send Mama a kiss-kiss,” Flo said.
Adam seized control of the phone and held it at arm’s length. They were in bed. “Where are you?”
Her labor couldn’t be serious if she was still trying to achieve a good angle on FaceTime. She sighed. “I’m out near the school. Hello, Flo-Flo. I love you. I miss you.”
“Oh, she’s run off,” Adam said. “Are you coming home for breakfast?”
“I suppose so.”
“Should I put the tea on?”
“I suppose so.”
“You’re doing so well, my darling.”
Tears filled her eyes. “I don’t think I can do this, not much longer. I should have booked a C-section.”
“Come home,” Adam said. “We’ll be here.”
As she trudged up to Wilton Way, she heard someone running behind her. She struggled to stow her phone in the pocket of her ASOS leopard-print maternity dress. Not now, she couldn’t afford to be muggednow.
“Coralie!”
“Anne!” Coralie held on to a fence for balance, partly from exhaustion, but also from shock—Anne was wearing toe-shoes, those running shoes like gloves for feet. As she reeled, Anne beeped her sports watch and walked in a circle, hands on her hips. She was very trim in her black leggings.The toe-shoes! God, don’t look.
“I see you’re admiring my Vibrams,” Anne said. “Closest thing to barefoot running! I don’t use them all the time. Just sometimes, to keep all the muscles toned and the bones, especially my arches, very strong.”
“Ow.” Coralie buckled over. For a moment she thought she’d be sick.
Anne put her hand on Coralie’s shoulder. “Coralie?”
When she was young, and living in Canberra, her parents had given in to her pleas for a pet, allowing her a goldfish, because by the time her father got a new posting, it would probably be dead. They drove to the pet shop in Woden, where she picked out a black fish with googly eyes. The pet-shop man caught it in a net and plopped it into a thick plastic bag full of water. She kept the plastic bag, about the size of a basketball, on her lap for the drive home, marveling at the fish, which belonged only to her. She set up the small bowl (with the colored stones, two special weeds, and a treasure-chest ornament) on her desk so the fish could keep her company while she was doing her homework. Concentrating, she sat down, forgetting that the fish, in its bag, was on her chair.Pop!The bag burst open, the water flooded out, and the fish was a meter away, flapping on the carpet.
He was fine. Her father heard her screaming, ran in, and saved the day. He was great in a crisis, always happy when life was hanging in the balance, actually pretty angry when it wasn’t.
And that great pop, and splash, and shock, was exactly what it was like when Coralie’s waters broke on Lansdowne Drive.
“Coralie!” Anne cried, looking down at her soaked left toe-shoe. “These cost a hundred pounds!”
•••
What was thereto say? Some people just couldn’t give birth. She arrived at hospital contracting like mad, refused all pain relief except gas and air, was four centimeters when examined (not too bad), and dilated to tenfullcentimeters over the course of nine hours, but the baby was floating off somewhere like an astronaut in space.
“Baby’s not there,” she heard someone say, and a huge shameengulfed her. She wasn’t even pregnant. She had wasted everyone’s time. But what about the kicks she’d felt, and the printed-off sonogram photos on the fridge, his perfect nose pointed upward like a puppy in101 Dalmatians?
