38 WEEKS
HELEN
Since the party, I keep finding myself consumed by an urge to wash things, to clean everything in the house. It’s normal – I’ve read about it. Instinctive. A sign that your body is readying for labour.
I have scrubbed every surface in the house, bleached every floor. Scoured the skirting boards, some of them twice, my huge belly pressing against my thighs as I bend. Daniel suggested we call off the building work for a few weeks, until after the baby’s born, and I agreed. He’s right – we need some time to be just us. We need the house still, quiet.
And clean. There is no limit to my hunger for the chemical smell of lemon, the scalding bliss of hot soapy water. At night, I dream of cleaning. In the morning, I haul myself bolt upright in bed, flip my legs over the side, pull my maternity tracksuit bottoms on.
‘It’s the weekend, Helen,’ Daniel complains. ‘Can’t we just relax?’ But I want to keep going. I clean the windows with water and newspaper until they gleam, I polish the banisters on the stairs, dust the ceiling roses. I wash all the baby clothes, load after load. I lay them out to dry on the rack, then take them to iron in front of the TV. I stack the short-sleeved bodysuits in little piles for the drawer, arranged by size. The newborn ones are so little I am not sure I know how to fold them. They feel so small, so strange to my hands. The idea that, soon, I will have a newborn baby, that I will be placing him in these clothes, is still not real to me, even now.
I have tried to put Rachel out of my mind, to focus on us, on the baby. I always thought I’d be delighted if she just disappeared. But whenever I think about the night she left – the night I can’t remember – I’m filled with that sick feeling. My thoughts keep looping back to her, to the spare room and our last encounter.
The more I try to remember the end of the party, the further away it seems to drift. I try to think if there is any chance I could have drunk something, accidentally, like Daniel said. I haven’t touched alcohol for nine months – I’m sure it wouldn’t take much. But enough to make me forget how I got to bed?
Over the past few days, I keep finding myself on the stripped bed in the spare room, looking around as if the room might hold the answers somewhere. I sit there for a long time sometimes, staring up at the cornices on the ceiling, the blind cord, the shelves on the far wall, the baby stuff piled up in the corner. Anything that might jog my memory into life. The air in the room feels cold, quiet, thick. She is gone. I got what I wanted. But if everything is all right now, like Daniel says, why does it feel like it isn’t?
The other night, Daniel found me in there. I’m not sure how long I had been sitting on the bed. It had got dark, but all the lights were off. I hadn’t noticed I was sitting in the dark. When he asked what I was doing, I wasn’t sure what to say.
The laundry is a displacement activity, probably. But it seems to work better than most things. The soft hiss of the iron, the clouds of steam that come and go in front of my eyes, the smoothing of creases, all of it is hypnotic somehow.
Daniel says he is going out for a run. Running seems to be a new obsession, like mine is cleaning.
‘Don’t you want to watch this?’
I have been encouraging Daniel to watch episodes of One Born Every Minute with me. I think it will be useful for him. Every time one of the babies is born, I find I have tears all down my face. Daniel doesn’t seem to enjoy it as much as I do, however.
‘You carry on. I think I’ve seen this one.’
‘No, you haven’t, it’s one of the new –’
‘I won’t be long.’
He is still out when the knock on the door comes. I place the iron upright on the board, brush my hands on my jeans. Steam clouds the windows, little drops of condensation gather in the corners.
Two blurry shapes in the glass of the door.
Only when I open the door do I see the police badges. The man speaks first. He is tall, red-haired, gangly, young-looking, his jacket sleeves just slightly too short.
‘Good evening. I’m DS Mitre and this is DC Robbin.’
DC Robbin nods, her eyes travelling from my face, to my bump, and then up again. She is thick-limbed, powerful-looking. Her skin the colour of coffee, her eyebrows plucked into two elegant arches.
‘We’re from Greenwich CID,’ DS Mitre continues. ‘We’re looking for Rachel Wells. We understand she was staying here?’
KATIE
You get to know every detail of a court building when you are on jury watch. The grubby windowsills, the scuffed green plastic chairs. The lift buttons, the smeared mirrors in the toilets. You learn the graffiti on the backs of the cubicle doors by heart.