‘Jake told me.’
Kate couldn’t understand why Marisa had been so unforthcoming about it.
‘I know Annabelle can be … a lot,’ she said, trying to gloss over it.
‘I thought she was wonderful,’ Marisa replied. ‘I really admired her.’
Kate didn’t push it. She told herself it was a positive thing that Marisa should feel this way and that perhaps it would encourage Annabelle to support the arrangement too. So she and Jake continued to treat Marisa as a fragile, precious fledgling which must be cosseted and handled with great care. Marisa was shielding their baby and they in turn had to shield her. Kate attributed her listlessness and occasional absent-mindedness to pregnancy tiredness, and turned to the online fertility forums to find the evidence she needed to back this assumption up.
‘Never felt tiredness like it,’ wrote @wheresthegin42. ‘I went to bed for three hours every afternoon.’
‘When I was pregnant with DD, I was so sick,’ added @MummaBear. ‘Like the worst hangover but no wine lol. Making up for it now though!’
‘You go girl,’ replied @northlondonprincess. ‘Us mommas need some me-time!!!!’
The weekend before their twelve-week scan, Kate and Jake had been in the sitting room reading the papers while Marisa was upstairs. It was comfortable, the two of them like this, just as it had been in their Battersea flat, and Kate wanted to put on some music that would remind them of those earlier years, before life had got so serious. She flicked through the playlists in her phone until she found an old Oasis album, then she plugged it into the speakers, turned it up and allowed the drums to kick in.
She started singing the lyrics, jumping up and down and letting her hair fall over her face like she was at a festival, and then Jake was next to her, dancing with one hand up in the air as he always did, and they were both singing the chorus now, feeling the bass thrum up beneath their feet, sending a vibrating jolt through their bodies. It was so good to let loose like this, to allow the air into their lungs, to move like they didn’t care, to forget their adult selves for a brief moment and she was grinning wildly at Jake, and then the song stopped and there was a pause before the next banger kicked in.
They were both out of breath, so they leaned against the mantelpiece to recover, allowing the album and its memories to blaze through them as they nodded their heads to the beat.
‘Do you remember this one?’ Kate said. ‘Such a fucking classic.’
‘Yeah. Love it.’
They didn’t see Marisa at the door. It was only when she shouted ‘HELLO?’ that they realised she was there. Kate was startled. They looked at Marisa, with her untidy hair falling snake-like over her shoulders, and Kate noticed an electric shimmer to her eyes that she hadn’t seen before.
‘Could you turn the music down?’ Marisa said, her voice still raised, as though she couldn’t control it; as though she didn’t even notice herself how loudly she was speaking. ‘I’m trying to work.’
Her hands were twisted together, the nails of one scratching the back of the other. She seemed jittery and unmoored, like a ball pinging against metal.
‘The music?’ Kate said.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s really not that loud.’
‘It’s loud enough that I had to put in earplugs,’ Marisa said.
Kate’s throat constricted. She felt like a child who had just been told off by a teacher. She should be penitent, but instead she found herself on the verge of giggling. The dancing had unleashed something in her. She was free and young again.
She caught Jake’s eye and saw he was also struggling to hold it together. There was something about the way Marisa was standing there, arms now folded over her lumpy cardigan, that made it even funnier.
‘Ooookaaaaayyy,’ Jake said. ‘Sorry about that.’
He stopped the music. Marisa stood there for a few more seconds, glowering at them both. Then she turned and left the room. Kate waited until they could hear her tread on the stairs and then she could hold it in no longer. She started to laugh, helplessly until tears rolled down her face. She gripped her mouth in her hands, trying to stem the flow of it and Jake was shushing her but he was laughing too and thentheir laughter stopped, just as unexpectedly as it had begun, and the room was empty and silent and the afternoon suddenly felt ruined, as if oil had seeped into clean water and slicked the feathers of all the swimming birds until they drowned.
At the scan, Marisa was back to her usual self: smiley and polite and so friendly to Mr Abadi that Kate felt it was almost flirtatious. Marisa’s eyes shone as she talked and outlined all the early pregnancy symptoms she’d been experiencing: tiredness and tender breasts and an aversion to green vegetables.
‘Jake’s been making me lots of lovely dinners,’ Marisa said, catching Jake’s eye. ‘He’s been a lifesaver.’
Kate was taken aback. She was the one who did most of the cooking. Perhaps Marisa had misremembered.
‘Good, very good,’ Mr Abadi said, genially.
Kate and Jake sat next to Marisa as she lay back in the reclining chair. They held hands as Mr Abadi squeezed the ultrasound gel over her tummy, ever so slightly sticking out now if you knew what you were looking for, and then he placed the transducer to the left of Marisa’s navel.
‘Now then,’ he said, angling the screen so that Kate and Jake could see it more clearly. ‘Let’s see what’s going on in here.’
