Isla had latched on immediately, as if to say, ‘It’s okay, Ma, it’s going to be fine,’ and Maggie had sat in the recovery room with her baby – her actual baby – feeding like a pro, and Duncan sitting with his arm round them both.
It really helped that Duncan had done this before.
He knew how to be a da, and what Maggie needed to do to be a ma.
Everything that had happened to her up to now didn’t matter because it had led to this.
To Isla.
So when Nick appeared, big fake cheesy smile on his face, Maggie found she was telling her former self off, her pre-Isla self, for taking against the boy like she had, for thinking he was deliberately saying and doing things to hurt her, to threaten her. Duncan was right, eh? Nick was just a teenager being a teenager. He was bound to have some issues with his new stepmother. It would be surprising if they didn’t butt heads.
They’d work through it.
The Clydes were going to be fine.
She smiled at Nick and said, ‘Meet your new sister,’ and while Duncan went off to the shop to get more wine gums, Nick looked down at Isla in her cot.
As the door closed behind Duncan, Nick laughed. ‘And I thought you were the ugliest thing I’d ever seen in my life, Mags. Christ. It’s disgusting. It looks like a piece of raw meat that’s gone off.’
Before she was even aware of thinking about moving, Maggie was out that bed and on him in mother tiger mode, pushing him away from the cot and yelling:
‘Get away from her!’
As the door crashed open and Duncan came flying back into the room, Nick fell to the floor like a footballer angling for a penalty. Isla yowled. Maggie just stood there in her nightie and bare feet, glaring at Duncan, fists bunched, ready to defend Isla from the both of them.
But it wasn’t Nick that Duncan rushed to.
It was Isla.
He scooped her up gently and cradled her against his chest. ‘She’s premature,’ he snapped at Nick. ‘You have to be very careful around her and not mess about!’
Ha!
‘I didn’t do anything!’ Nick got to his feet. ‘I didn’t even touch her!’
‘You were messing about.’
‘I wasn’t! Maggie pushed me for no reason!’
‘He was tormenting her,’ went Maggie. ‘He made her cry.’ Which was true, in a way.
Duncan gave Nick a long, long look. ‘Not on,’ he said quietly, rocking Isla. ‘That’s just not on.’
The first week after Maggie and Isla came home was ‘challenging’， as the midwife put it. Isla latching on so well after she was born had lulled Maggie into a false sense of security. Now it was a struggle to get her to take enough milk. Maggie had started expressing it and, while Maggie dozed, Duncan would sit with Isla in the armchair by the bedroom window, trying to outwit her with the bottle using all kinds of tricks, like holding her facing out rather than into his body, swaying her, or tickling her upper lip with Bunny, the daft grey rabbit he’d bought her from that posh baby shop in Langholm.
Isla was Duncan’s wee princess, his ‘little darling’ as he called her, and no wonder. She was a wee cracker. You could tell she was bright as a button, the way she looked at them with her big blue eyes, Maggie and Duncan, as if she already knew that these were the two people who loved her the most and always would be.
Duncan spent hours talking to her, making faces at her, just gazing at her like a daftie. He was rapidly filling the nursery up with things he ‘thought Isla might like’， and he’d decided that the mobile they’d bought her wasn’t ‘stimulating’ enough for such a genius baby and was making one for her himself, a Noah’s Ark, a complicated affair of pairs of wooden animals surrounding the bright red Ark, where Noah and his wife stood cradling a baby. Had there even been a baby on the Ark?
When Duncan knocked back Nick’s suggestion of a kick-about because he had to work on the mobile, Nick was all, ‘Neither of you even believes in God, let alone the story of the Ark.’
Maggie made sure never to leave Isla alone with him.
Duncan had taken time off work but had been called in a couple of times for ‘crisis meetings’ about Dean. The rat-faced wee bastard was trying to blackmail Duncan into giving him ￡1000, saying that if he didn’t cough up, Dean would tell the police that Duncan had hit him. Maggie had persuaded Duncan to go to the police himself. ‘That has to be nipped in the bud pronto,’ she’d insisted. ‘What if he does make allegations? You’ve got to get in there first. And let the other mentors know what’s happening. Chuck the wee bastard off the programme.’