Page 70 of 59 Minutes
CARRIE
Pepper places a mug of something on the nightstand next to the bed, the sound as loud as a gunshot in this silence. Her eyes stay trained on the ceiling as if they’re nothing to do with her, and she’s nothing to do with whatever he’s just brought in.
‘ Kochanie ,’ he says. ‘Your daughter needs you. I went downstairs to get her some things but I don’t know if they’re right.
She’s not impressed with the clothes I chose, she says she’s allowed to pick for herself and she is asking for her mummy.
’ He lowers his voice, hesitant for once. ‘And for her mama.’
Carrie rolls over slowly, her body tender. She faces away from him, her eyes trained on the window, the red curtains almost black in this light.
She misses the whine in her head from earlier, which would have snuffed all this talking right out. Misses the tears of relief that came so easily. Before she knew. Before she was cursed to always know what she had done to Emma. The love of her life.
Now she is crisped, dried of all emotion. A brittle hostage to that blank ceiling, that black-red curtain. Pepper’s incessant speech grates on her ears, missing any of his usual humour, his spiky barbs.
‘Come and tuck Clementine in,’ Pepper tries. The curtain billows, just for a second, bellying inwards. A breeze that she doesn’t feel.
‘I killed Emma,’ she says. Her voice is dry and flat. But time must have passed because he has gone. The curtain hangs limp. The room is cold. Clementine must be asleep in the other spare room, cuddled up to Barnaby, her rabbit teddy.
Her nickname in the womb was Bunny. She had twitched her little nose on the twenty-week 3D scan and that was it.
Bunny. Long before she was born, they’d bought rabbit bedding, a rabbit mobile, a rabbit-eared baby towel.
‘How can this be so tiny?’ Emma said, and then sobbed all over the fluffy fabric so they had to wash her mascara out of it.
Just before the birth, when Carrie was finally on parental leave and spending her days peeing endlessly and watching old films all day, Emma came home with Barnaby the soft rabbit.
Barnaby was placed in the plastic cot on the newborn ward and has never left her bed since.
They were still debating calling her Bunny for a first name on the walk to the register office to make it official.
‘But what if we ever move back to Devon?’ Carrie said.
‘People there don’t have a London tolerance for wacky names. ’
‘I can’t see us moving back to Devon,’ Emma had said, quietly, a shadow passing over her face.
‘Not with you-know-who there. And anyway,’ she’d said, and then smiled.
‘You know full well we’ll move out to Brighton when we’re sick of this city anyway.
We could call her Whizz Bang Banana Pants and no one would give a monkey’s in Brighton. ’
In the end, as they wheeled the giant pushchair through the doors like it was made of fragile glass, they decided that Bunny would be her middle name and she could choose whether or not to use it when she was older.
‘She’ll probably change her name to Jane no middle name Smith,’ Emma said, ‘and take out a restraining order against her mad mums.’
When Carrie gets up now, her knees buckle as if they’ve forgotten their business, muscles weak and trembling. She staggers to the window and slips behind the curtain, slamming the window down to shut out the breeze. She wants to spoil and grow stale in here. She wants to rot.
She rests her forehead on the cold glass and looks out.
Under the glow of the ornate streetlamps, she can make out Pepper sitting stiffly on a bench among the mess and rubble.
He wears a hat and scarf, the collar on his tweed coat stiff around his jaw.
At his feet, something bulky is wrapped carefully in one of the thick throws from his settee.
She presses a hand to the window but it’s too much.
It’s all too much. She fights her way back through the curtain and into the room, half falling onto the bed in haste, and wraps herself tight in the eiderdown, tighter still, face under, mouth full of satin, an unbreathing thing.
As close as she can be to being the body out there, her twin heart stopped. But not close enough.