Their daughter was an only child, she needed another presence in the house, a little creature she could love, be a big sister to.
After breakfast, Clary ran upstairs to get into her uniform and Savannah checked her big bag for notebooks and tablet, and fixed her lipstick in the mirror.
The gate bell rang.
It was Kev, the postman and Savannah greeted him cheerfully.
‘How’s the baby? Is he sleeping yet?’
Kev, young and a new dad, leaned against the wall and settled in for a chat on how his four-month-old still wasn’t sleeping more than two hours at a time.
Clary came down, said a shy hello to Kev and then Savannah looked at her watch.
‘Shoot! Look at the time!’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Calum’s voice from behind her. ‘The time. We’re all running very late indeed.’
‘Morning, Mr Desmond,’ said Kev.
‘Morning,’ Calum replied.
Savannah’s gut clenched. She felt the familiar spasms. The different tones of her husband’s voice were connected to her body. She was a blank canvas on which he could paint any colour, trigger any emotion. To an outsider, he sounded friendly. She knew differently.
Her body knew differently. It could hear his displeasure.
Kev was waving and hopping into his van, Clary was telling her mother about something she’d forgotten: a charity thing where they had to bring two euros into school ‘— and we’ll get a muffin. Please, Mum?’
And Calum’s hand was on Savannah’s left arm, sliding down its slender length until it reached her left hand.
He was very strong and when he touched her little finger and pulled, she had to muffle the gasp of shock. Pure pain arced up her hand as he hyper-extended the finger, pulled and twisted sharply. She felt something crack, a tiny bone shriek.
‘He’s over familiar, that post guy,’ Calum murmured. ‘But you like him, don’t you?’
Savannah couldn’t speak for pain. Her eyes closed.
Don’t frighten Clary. Keep her from seeing this.
‘He likes to talk about the baby. I’m sorry,’ Savannah said. ‘Sorry. I won’t talk to him anymore. It’s just the baby thing—’ She was babbling now. Pain mingled with anxiety that Clary would see what was happening at the door.
It was what drove her daily: keeping Clary safe, unaware.
‘Good. He’s over familiar. I don’t like it. But you know I don’t like it.’
Calum was brusque now as he walked her back in, shut the door. Nobody listening to him or looking at them – the family tableau of three of them in the hall, waiting to leave the house for work and school – would think there was anything amiss.
They wouldn’t see the undercurrents. Nobody ever saw. The years of put-downs, insults, so-called jokes at her expense. Nobody saw any of it. He was like a magician with how he fooled people into thinking him charming.
‘See you later,’ Calum called to his wife, then to Clary: ‘Have you a kiss for your dad?’
Savannah heard Clary mutter, ‘Love you, Daddy.’
Did Clary love him? Savannah felt the wave of pain from her hand overwhelm her but she kept it inside, even though she was now shaking with pain and anxiety.
Leaning against a wall in the hall, she decided that was both strong and weak at the same time. How could a person be both?
‘Nearly ready, honey,’ she called to her daughter and she ran upstairs. In a box labelled ‘tampons’ where she kept painkillers, she found paracetamol. She had much stronger painkillers from that time in the bathroom when she’d banged against the bath.
Her ribs had been fractured and the A & E doctor had taken her word for it that she’d slipped getting out of the shower. He’d given her ten opioid painkillers and she’d used most of them. They made her sleepy, though. She couldn’t be sleepy today. Plain paracetamol would do. Or maybe the one with the codeine in it that made her feel sick. She’d take nausea over pain right now. Her finger was swelling and she thought that perhaps the best thing was to neighbour strap it to the next one, yet it was too painful to do that right now. It was bent at a funny angle. She clumsily wrapped a bandage around it and stuck medical tape on top. She might say she’d shut the car door on it? People did that all the time.
