She never saw Jackie again.
Over the years, Marisa set herself up in competition with every single girlfriend her father introduced to her. She would always win and in the end, her father stopped dating altogether. The last time she’dseen him, he had come to visit her in her flat in London, wearing a battered raincoat and a tie pockmarked with food stains. His eyebrows were wiry and overgrown. He was slight – slighter than she remembered – and, despite the food stains, looked malnourished. His eyes were rheumy and unfocused as he looked around her tiny one-bed in an ecstasy of insincere appreciation. She could smell gin on his breath. She had made him tea and he had drunk it sitting on her sofa, without taking his coat off.
‘Are you sure I can’t take that for you?’
‘Oh no no no, I don’t want to be any bother.’
He seemed so weak and so old. She realised he would probably die quite soon and when she thought of it, she felt a pang of incipient loss. Not because his death would leave an absence in her life, but because his existence had.
After that, she didn’t contact him again. She ignored his phone calls and his sad ‘To My Daughter’ birthday cards and he stopped trying. Then Marisa moved in with Jake and left no forwarding address.
In her study, she watches the sun rise. The clouded sky goes nicotine yellow. Her desk turns sepia in the light. It is too bright. She takes the roll of masking tape from her desk and starts sticking strips of it across the panes of glass. Better. The central heating starts up, pipes clanking and creaking like stretched sailing ropes. The house seems noisier than it did before, as though all its internal workings have been made audible. She places her hands over her ears, trying to block out the sound. It doesn’t work. The house seems to thrum and vibrate around her. When she looks down at the paper in front of her, she sees she has covered it in black and white lines, a looping spider’s web of intricate design.
Her belly pushes outwards over her tracksuit bottoms. She cannot remember putting these trousers on, but she thinks it was a few days ago now. She rests both her hands on her pregnant stomach, pressing lightly with her palms in a bid to feel something – anything – that will connect her to this growing profusion of cells inside her. Although she knows it’s too early, she imagines that she can feel the baby twitchingjerkily inside her, sudden movements that feel like a soft internal scratching. The websites tell her officiously that ‘Baby could be sprouting hair’ and ‘Baby can use her facial muscles to grimace or smile’ and ‘Baby is about the size of a lemon or your clenched fist’.
She clenches her fist, placing it underneath her navel, and leaves it there, her knuckles white against her skin. The size of a fist. She imagines drawing back her arm, slick as an archer, and unleashing her fist into Kate’s face. She imagines Kate’s look of shock, the way she would raise her hands to her nose as a thin stream of blood trickled slowly out of one nostril. She imagines Kate’s fear as she turned away. She imagines punching her again in the back of the head, this time with such force that Kate would fall to the ground. She imagines looking at her from above, watching Kate whimper on the floorboards and then she imagines her vanishing – her entire body disappearing, as if the elastic of time had snapped and broken and she had fallen through the gap.
On her phone, she scrolls through pregnancy development websites.
‘Baby’s intestines are producing meconium, which is the waste that will make up her first bowel movement after birth.’
‘At week fourteen, fully developed genitals make their grand entrance.’
She visualises a miniature penis and vulva arriving at some glitzy black-tie ball, walking effortfully down a red and gold staircase to the elegant strains of a string quartet.
‘Wash your hands often – and carry liquid sanitiser for times when a sink’s not handy – don’t share drinks or food or toothbrushes and avoid sick people like the plague. It’s OK to banish a sick spouse to the couch.’
A spouse. She doesn’t have a spouse. She has Jake, in whose house she lives, who is having an affair with their lodger while Marisa is almost four months pregnant with their child. The precariousness of her situation hits her. She wants to throw up. She thinks she should be crying, but in the place where there should have been emotion, there is instead a hole: a blackness through which she is cut loose and falling.
‘As many first-trimester pregnancy woes wane, you’re most likely feeling a bit peppier and a lot more human. More good news on the horizon: less morning sickness and fewer trips to the toilet to pee.’
She doesn’t know what to do about it. And yet. She must do something.
Hours pass. Later, in the kitchen, she makes herself a herbal tea, coffee having been designated by the pregnancy websites as one of the endless dangerous substances she must now ingest with extreme caution. She leaves the teabag to stew and presses it against the back of the teaspoon. She sits at the table and stares out at the garden. The grass is wet from morning rainfall and the shimmer of a spider’s web spans the corner of the glass door. Marisa watches as the silver threading refracts the watery light.
So much effort to build a home, she thinks. Her head feels heavy. She drops it down towards her chest, massaging the back of her neck with her hand. As she does so, her eye catches on a flat grey square on the seat of one of the kitchen chairs. It has been pushed under the table and she wouldn’t have noticed it without lowering her sightline. It is Jake’s laptop. He normally takes it to work but he’s clearly forgotten today.
She reaches into the pocket of her dressing gown for her phone. But then, just before she calls him, she changes her mind. She lifts the laptop onto the table, its edges sleek, the surface slightly granular to the touch. She flips open the computer. She knows Jake’s password. She watched him once, typing it into the keyboard as she was standing behind him, pretending to busy herself with the washing-up.
She taps it in: ‘143Richborne’. It is their address. Maybe it still means something to him – this house, their home, their baby, her?
The screen fires up and a picture of a Renaissance painting flashes into place. A rosy-cheeked Virgin Mary, with long golden hair twisting around her collarbone, and a fleshy baby Jesus, placed against an Italianate landscape. He has a thing for devotional art.
Marisa is not sure what she’s looking for. She tells herself she’s logged on because she wants to check the news. Having been so insulated over the last few months, so distracted by her necessary involvement inestablishing their own joint life, she has lost track of what is happening in the outside world.
But before she has a chance to visit the BBC website, an alert pops up in the right-hand corner of the screen. She sees Kate’s name flash up, black sans serif font against a grey rectangle.
‘Did you see her this morning?’
It takes a beat for Marisa to understand. But then she works it out. The laptop is connecting to Jake’s text messages, and she is witnessing his communications in real time. At the bottom of the screen is an icon consisting of two overlapping speech bubbles, one blue, the other white and containing ellipses. There is a red circle with the figure ‘1’ pulsing like an eye above the larger one.
Unread message.
Marisa clicks on the speech bubbles and there they are: text after text from Kate to Jake and Jake to Kate.
The first thing she notices is the number of kisses. Jake never signs off affectionately in the texts he sends her – it is, she has thought, one of his quirks. He is business-like because he has to be, because he has so many other demands on his time at work. This is what she has told herself.
But she has been wrong. When he texts Kate, his messages are festooned with lines of Xs, as if his finger has slipped, as if he is composing nonsense poetry. The lines are so dense it is almost as if he is redacting paragraph after paragraph of a top-secret document.
