‘He adores himself, first and foremost.’
‘He’ll phone, it’ll be fine,’ said Callie, urgently, as if saying it made it true, as if they hadn’t spent hours with a lawyer where it was very much not fine.
The other woman held a hand up.
‘Stick on a CD. Better if we don’t talk till we get home.’
As soon as they turned into Brenda’s road, they saw them: a great crowd of people standing outside the gate of Brenda’s tiny house. There were news photographers, people with TV cameras, sound booms, all talking, idling and yet watching all at the same time. Journalists. People who wanted to write about the big financial case of the week, people who wanted to write about the only person left to answer any questions about the big property investment scheme which had been the subject of the most outrageous fraud.
Brenda’s road was one-way only so there was no backing out. Callie could feel her heartbeat race and the pain in her chest increase. There was nothing for it, short of abandoning the car in the middle of the road and getting out and running, they would have to drive past. Callie grabbed her sunglasses and stuck them on as they passed the house, but it was no good. They were waiting for her, guys leaning forward with cameras, snapping almost dangerously as they drove by – anything to get a picture. It was horrendous, so frightening. How had they found out where she was?
‘What the hell are we going to do now?’ Callie had never seen anything like this, even in the early years with Ricky and Tanner when the band were on the up.
‘Let me think about it,’ said Brenda, easing the car through the path of photographers towards the garage, where at least they’d be secure.
If she ran the gamut of the press now, maybe they’d leave her alone.
‘I’m going in the front door,’ Callie said. ‘It might stop them.’
‘You sure—’ began Brenda, but Callie cut her off.
‘I’m sure – you get inside and check that Poppy is OK.’
Callie stared up into the sky as if looking for something magical to come and fix it all.
But there was no fixing this. She and Poppy had to leave Brenda’s house – that was the only option, she had to go somewhere else. Somewhere they couldn’t find her.
Somewhere like home. As she pushed past the reporters and photographers, all shoving tiny recorders or cameras in her face, she barely breathed and said nothing.
Nothing she could say would help. Only Jason could fix this and he had run away.
Home, her real home, suddenly felt the like only place she could run to.
Sam
Ted kept leaving the radio on in the kitchen and it was driving Sam insane.
Joanne had claimed that babies raised in total silence would only be able to sleep in total silence, so she insisted that vacuum cleaners, hairdryers and street noises were vital in making sure the mother didn’t go insane.
‘Joanne’s so good at this stuff,’ Ted said the night before, while India slept upstairs and he roamed the internet looking for more information on this baby-living-in-noisy-households theory.
Sam gritted her teeth and kept folding small baby things. Ten more minutes and she was off up to bed. She was awake only due to sheer willpower and it was dying by the moment. With luck, crossed fingers and prayers, India would sleep till one, when Ted would feed her a bottle of breast-pump milk.
Once India woke, Sam woke anyway and she couldn’t help herself listening to the sounds of Ted picking her up, talking loving nonsense to his daughter and asking the dogs to be quiet.
Sam felt as if she had two moods these days – irritation towards Ted, which he was aware of but said nothing about, and fear around India.
Sometimes her hand shook as she measured out the formula for the bottles. She was combining bottles with her own pumped milk because she had never managed to get India to drink from her breasts and she didn’t seem to be producing enough milk. One more thing to feel guilty about. When her hands shook, she tried to still them: what if somebody saw them and said she was a bad mother and took India away from her?
Most of the time, she knew this was crazy, but still, there were fragments of every day when she felt so strongly that she knew nothing. Someone would be able to tell. She’d be exposed as a bad mother and her baby would be taken from her.
There were times when she sat with India on the couch, the dogs gathered fascinated at her feet, and there was peace. India would sleep and Sam would examine the tiny little face with pure love: that button nose, her eyelashes resting on her cheeks, the softness of her skin. But those moments of calm seemed like oases in a long day of worrying.
She was lying on their bed watching afternoon TV one day while India slept and Ted was making them both sandwiches when she heard a faint ring of the doorbell. The dogs barked and Sam hoped India wouldn’t wake up.
‘Where are my special girls?’ she could hear her father ask Ted and she smiled weakly, thinking how wonderful it would be to throw herself into her father’s arms and sob: ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’
All of which might have been a possibility if he was on his own, but then she heard her mother’s voice.
