Hi Lulu, sorry, I’m really sorry. I know I’m not due to see you until Friday but I need your help. Please. Please, Lulu, I really need to see you NOW but I can’t face it, leaving here and crossing town. I can’t face any of it. Can you come here? I’m sorry. I know I’m being a terrible, terrible nuisance but I need to talk to you pretty urgently. Thanks. Paul
Oh my God!
What did he mean, he needed her help?
What had happened?
She quickly replied to say she was on her way, sent texts to the clients she was due to see that morning saying they would have to reschedule, and left the office.
Paul’s street was a brick Victorian terrace typical of thousands all over London. Used to the wide-open spaces of Australia, where even the cities were spacious, Lulu couldn’t get her head round the way people lived here, cheek by jowl, one on top of the other. As she identified Paul’s impossibly narrow little house, the unedifying thought popped into her mind: Thank goodness Nick is rich.
There was a tiny front garden – at least, presumably it had once been a garden, but it was now just two small squares of paving on either side of a concrete path to the front door.
Which was standing half open.
‘Paul?’ She rang the bell, and when there was no response, pushed the door wide. ‘Paul, it’s Lulu.’
She stepped into the narrow hall and, through the open kitchen door, saw his legs and his feet.
Dangling.
Dark jeans. Polished brown leather shoes, swaying gently in the slight breeze from the open front door.
Then she was in the kitchen, grabbing his legs, grabbing the overturned chair and jumping up on it so she could hold him up, so she could hold him round the hips and lift him up to take the pressure off –
She looked at his face only once.
There was blue nylon twine round his neck, tied above his head to an old hook in the ceiling. A pair of eyes goggled at her, not Paul’s eyes, not those intelligent, troubled eyes she’d got to know, but ghastly fish-like orbs. His mouth was open, tongue slightly protruding as if in mockery of her vain attempts to save him.
He was dead.
Of course he was dead.
But she held onto him, she spoke calmly and reassuringly as she would have in one of their sessions. She pulled him to her with her left arm while with her right hand she fumbled in her bag for her phone.
And then she saw him.
Milo.
The little dog was cowering under the table, trembling all over, his head dipped submissively, ears folded back. He was gazing up at her.
‘Oh, Milo,’ breathed Lulu as she stabbed 999.
He didn’t stop shaking, but at the sound of his name his stubby tail moved, tentatively, back and forth.
6
Maggie - August 1997
‘And here they are!’ Duncan was grinning all over his face as he and Nick came into the room.
Maggie was slumped back on her pillows chewing wine gums – recommended after a C-section to ‘restore bowel function’ as quickly as possible – and wondering if she needed to call a nurse for a painkiller top-up. She felt like she’d been hit by a truck. And the nurses here were sadists, making her stand up and move around to get things moving down there, so the first morning in Isla’s life had been filled with her ma’s farts and her da’s chuckles. Maggie tried not to laugh because it hurt too much.
It was dead weird, being here in this room with the baby the two of them had made. She’d never known anything like it. Waves of pure joy kept washing through her, leaving her crying like a baby herself, but at the same time she felt like nothing would ever bother her again.
She couldn’t stop staring at Isla, sleeping in the cot thingmy next the bed. She was two weeks premature and was a wee bit poukit, as Mrs Greenlees would say – a wee bit on the puny side – but she didn’t need oxygen or anything like that. She was fine.
She was amazing.
She was a beautiful, tiny wee human being and she was Maggie’s daughter, ‘an actual person who’s come out of me,’ she remembered blethering to Duncan after the C-section as he handed her a slimy wee thing with arms and legs that moved. She had expected a new baby to just lie there and couldn’t get over the fact she moved so much – funny, jerky movements of her arms and legs.
Maggie would never, ever get tired of watching her, drinking in every wee wriggle, every sound. She had cute bandy legs that Duncan said would straighten in time and her skin wasn’t peachy like Maggie had expected, it was dry and flaky, but Duncan said that was also normal. Her tiny face was perfect, with those big blue eyes, soft gummy wee mouth opening and closing like a wee fish.