He went on soothingly, ‘Don’t you think this stuff with Nick . . . don’t you think you could be projecting your fears onto him, your fears about bringing a child into a world that’s hurt you so much?’
All she could do was shake her head.
She thought of Nick, and his face as he said how much he was looking forward to being a big brother. She had come up against mental bastards like him in the system – the real headcases, the ones that looked at you with those ice-cold eyes, and you knew there was nothing there, nothing at all, nothing human you could appeal to.
She opened her eyes, stared right into Duncan’s face, willed him to listen as she said, ‘Nick hates me and he wants to hurt me.’
He sighed. ‘He doesn’t. He really doesn’t. This is just the trauma of what happened to you when you were a kid, coming back now you’re about to be a mum. And the pregnancy hormones, making you hypervigilant and ultra-protective of your unborn child. It’s nature’s way of ensuring the safety of a pregnant woman, I suppose. Making sure they avoid any dangerous situation by making them a bit . . .’
‘Paranoid?’ she suggested, her lips twisting round the word.
And suddenly she wanted to hit him again.
Her hands made fists under the covers.
But he smiled at her, her wonderful Duncan, and how could she even have begun to want to hurt him?
She made her fingers relax, and smiled back at him, and said, ‘Maybe.’
He got into bed beside her and spooned her, pulling her close into the warmth of his body. And for a while, five, ten minutes, it was fine. It was good.
But then, lying there looking out at the trees, she started thinking.
What would happen when the wee one was out in the world, outside the protection of her womb?
What might Nick do then?
Duncan must have felt her tense up, because he held her even closer and started to whisper in her ear about the mountain stream, and she closed her eyes and visualised Nick there: the stream was swollen by floods, all churning and foaming, and he was standing there watching it. Maggie came up behind him with a rock and smashed it onto the back of his head and he fell forward into the water and went under.
Bye-bye, Nick.
Finally, she closed her eyes.
And that was when the first wave of pain hit her.
5
Lulu - May 2019
‘Good morning, Mrs Clyde.’ The porter at the desk, an older guy called Adeel, nodded to Lulu and then went straight back to reading his paper. No doubt the porters had all been told to give her as wide a berth as possible. They were bound to know the reason Harry had been sacked last week and probably blamed her.
‘Hi, Adeel,’ she said briefly, and went on past and out of the building.
She fell asleep on the Tube, missed her stop and had to get another train back to Hammersmith. As she ascended from the mineral, hot-engine smell of the Underground into the early morning London air, a mix of fumes and dusty pavements and cooking and, somehow, grass, every step shuddered pain into her head. Her phone buzzed with a text message from Nick:
Just checking you’re OK
Sighing, she messaged back:
Fine. Can’t always text you on the hour every hour.
And she left it at that. She wasn’t going to justify herself. It wasn’t reasonable to expect her to text him every hour as he’d requested. She was finding his smothering behaviour, after what had happened with Harry, increasingly hard to deal with. He didn’t let her go out alone after dark, saying he wouldn’t have a moment’s peace for worrying about her. He’d even started following her about the apartment. If she went to sit on the balcony for a few moments to herself, he’d join her. If she went back in to watch TV, he’d be there, snuggling up to her.
It was such a relief to be out of there. Even when he wasn’t physically present, there were all the damn notes. She’d taken them with her, as usual, but as she passed a bin, she rooted in her handbag for them. As she turned to drop them in the bin, she was conscious of a man some way down the pavement wheeling round and walking in the opposite direction. He was a fair distance away, but from here he looked a bit like Harry. Same lanky frame, same very narrow bum.
Oh, for crying out loud!
She was becoming as paranoid as Nick.
In her office, she just sat for a moment, eyes closed, centring herself before the first client of the day. Putting all thoughts of stalkers and overprotective husbands out of her mind.
Her phone buzzing woke her up.
‘Urrrgghhh!’ she vented, picking it up.
But it wasn’t a text from Nick.