Page 27

TWENTY-SEVEN

Martha pulls Nala out of her crib. Her face is red-raw, blotchy, slick with tears. Her skin burns to the touch, and then suddenly she is vomiting again, so forcefully that it spatters down the side of her cot, down the legs of Martha’s jeans, and into the shaggy pink rug on the floor.

The internet tells her that she should take Nala to the hospital, but Alistair has disappeared with the car and the car has Nala’s child seat in it and she feels sure there is a spare one somewhere in the garage but she can’t go hunting around in the garage in the middle of the night with a sick, screaming child in her arms and the boys are at their dad’s and Martha is old, she suddenly feels old, too old for this.

She is nearly forty-eight and she should be sitting with her feet up, watching TV, enjoying the solitude of a night to herself, not dealing with a feverish child, a child she hadn’t even wanted, not really, not at this stage of her life, with the boys finally breaking free, a child that Al had talked her into having, and why?

What for? So he could go cold on her? Disappear every week?

Turn off his phone, come up with strange excuses for his absences, act weird?

She brings his number up on her phone and calls him. It rings twelve times and then goes to voicemail.

“Where are you? Nala’s sick. I have to take her to A and E, and you’ve got the car seat. I need you to get back here now!”

She picks up her boiling-hot child and holds her to her chest. “Oh, my baby, my poor, poor baby.”

Nala goes rigid in her arms and Martha holds her to the side of the bath.

The next load of vomit hits the enamel. It’s clear now.

Is that better or worse, Martha wonders, than opaque vomit?

She soothes Nala again, wipes her mouth with a towel, wraps her in it, rocks her, whispers to her, reaches for the Calpol, the syringe.

The first attempt to get her to take it ends up with a slick of pink down the white towel, a view of Nala’s throat as she screams her disapproval.

The second attempt is more successful. She holds Nala’s mouth closed and feels limp with relief as the medicine disappears somewhere, does not reappear, at least.

She will give it twenty minutes, she thinks, and then she will take Nala’s temperature again.

If it is still 104 degrees and she has not managed to find the spare child seat, she will call her friend Grace, who lives one road away, and ask her to drive them.

She mops Nala down with a damp flannel and then puts her into a fresh set of pajamas.

Please, she thinks to herself, please don’t be sick again.

She pulls Nala’s hair off her face and kisses her hot, red cheek and then she takes her down through the house, the TV still flickering, the sound muted, the dog staring up at her from the kitchen, slightly worried after being shouted at.

She slides her feet into slippers and heads down the pathway toward the garage.

Nala cries, the garage is damp and cobwebby, and Martha uses the flashlight on her phone to pick her way through plastic storage containers, metal shelving racks, cardboard boxes.

Finally, Nala sobbing in her arms, Martha finds the car seat she’s been looking for and then groans when she sees that it is far too small for Nala, it’s for a newborn.

She turns off her phone torch and slams the garage door shut behind her, crunches hard across the driveway and back to the house, where she takes Nala’s temperature again. It’s 105.8.

In a silent rage, she calls Al again, even though she already knows he won’t pick up.

“Fuck’s sake,” she hisses into his voicemail.

“Where the fuck are you, Al? Just… fuck’s sake.

” She ends the call with an angry jab of her finger against the screen.

She looks at the time. It’s been twenty minutes since she told herself she’d wait half an hour.

She takes Nala’s temperature again; it’s still 105. 8.

She sighs and finds Grace’s number in her phone.

“I’m really sorry,” she says. “I really am. But please. I need a huge favor.”

Grace’s fingers are tight around her steering wheel eight minutes later. Martha sits in the back with Nala on her lap, an overnight bag on the seat next to her, just in case.

“This isn’t right,” says Grace, “you know that, don’t you? This just isn’t right.”

Martha purses her lips and nods. “Yup,” she says. “I know that. Of course I do.”

“Do you…” Grace pauses, looks into her wing mirror, then flicks her indicator to the right to pull into the next lane. “Do you think he might be having an affair?”

“I’ve thought about it, of course I have.”

“And?”

“And… I have no idea. He just says it’s the nature of his job.”

“So—where did he say he was going tonight?”

“He didn’t. He was meant to be home from work at seven. We were going to have our usual Wednesday-night dinner. You know, when the boys are at Matt’s. He was going to bring something from the place where he’s been working. So I didn’t even have any food in.”

“That’s terrible, Marth.”

“I mean, not that I’m bothered about that. I’ve put on so much weight recently, since I stopped breastfeeding. Quite happy with a girl dinner, y’know. But it’s the principle, isn’t it?”

“Try him again,” Grace says, eyeing Martha in the rearview mirror.

“No point. He won’t answer.”

Grace sighs. Then there is a poignant silence before she says, “Have you ever thought about using a tracker on him?”

“What!”

“You know, one of those things you can use to track your luggage, or your dog. Just drop it in his pocket, or in the car, so you can see where he actually goes when he’s abandoned you at home.”

“That’s a horrible idea,” Martha says, and she means it. She has never been the sort of person to overstep boundaries, to infringe on other people’s privacy.

“Well, no more horrible than what he’s putting you through.”

“Yes, but why should I lower myself to his level?”

“Because he left you without a car or a car seat for your baby, Martha. That’s why.”

They fall silent as Grace pulls up outside the hospital and turns off the car engine. Martha sighs softly but doesn’t reply.

Nala has gone quiet and limp in Martha’s arms as she carries her into the emergency room, which worries her more than the rigid screaming.

They don’t have to wait long, are triaged quickly into the children’s waiting room and from there quickly into a doctor’s consulting area, where Nala is prodded and poked and touched and tested, and an hour later Martha has a diagnosis for her baby of norovirus and severe dehydration.

She is taken away to be put on a drip and Martha is left sitting on a squeaky chair in a brightly painted room with a harsh strip light overhead that makes her head pulse with tiredness and sickness and fear.

It’s nearly lunchtime the following day when Martha and Nala are finally home again.

The shop is shut and customers have had their orders canceled, and Martha has spent the entire morning fielding calls from irate people who have been mildly inconvenienced because her child was ill and because her husband was not around to pick up the slack, and she now knows, without a shadow of doubt, that she can’t do this anymore; she can’t do any of it.

She can’t do the shop, she can’t do the business, she can’t do the juggling of it all, and she can’t, she really cannot, do Alistair Grey, her stupid fucking husband with his stupid fucking job and his stupid fucking phone that he never switches on when he’s not at home.

She needs a break from everything, from all of it.

She wants to go to bed, and she wants to sleep for a hundred years and wake up and find that everyone has sorted out everything while she was gone.

That there is nothing left for her to do.

That she can finally, finally , sit down.

Martha won’t be able to take Nala to the childminder now for at least a few days as she has an infection.

She will have to keep her at home or take her to the shop, and it’s cold in the shop and Nala is ill and needs to be in a warm house with a television and toys and her mother sitting on a sofa with her.

She’d opened Martha’s Garden seven years ago and had seen it as her ticket to midlife contentment, her dream come true, the thing she was always destined for.

She thinks back to those early days, getting the keys to the shop, choosing paint colors with the boys, her first drive to a customer’s house with a van full of table displays for their daughter’s wedding.

It was hard work, it had always been hard work, but it had been going somewhere, building toward something.

She’d thought of another branch, maybe two, maybe a small empire, a soft landing into retirement with money in the bank and a legacy.

But then life had taken over, and now this…

a sick child and a husband who has disappeared in the car with the child seat in it.

And where is all the money going? Why does it not matter that however hard she works, however many hours she slogs, there is never any money?

She puts Nala into her cot and for once Nala is asleep immediately, her face a picture of relief to be home.

She turns onto her side and Martha stares at the curve of her cheek, the kick of strawberry blond hair, the curl of her fists, and she aches inside with it all: her choices, her decisions… Al.

There’ll be no caving when he gets home this time. No submitting to the allure of wine on the sofa and cold toes buried under his lap. Not this time. Not this time.

He returns an hour later. He is rumpled and smells like he slept in his clothes, which, he tells her, he did.

He was so tired at the end of his day’s work, he says, and there were no empty rooms at the hotel where he was working, so he took a sofa in the staff room, he says, took off just his shoes and socks and slept in his shirt and trousers.

His stubble looks unwashed, his breath is stale.

“Please,” he says. “Can I just go up and have a shower?”

Then and only then does he look at Martha and say, “How come you’re home? Who’s looking after the shop?”

She sighs and shakes her head.

“Go and have a shower,” she says. “I’ll tell you when you come back down.”