‘Of course you can.’
Maggie would take maybe a hundred quid and add it to her stash. By the time Liam had Maggie and Isla’s new identities sorted, she’d hopefully have a few thousand to start their new lives with. Duncan would never notice if the baby monitor was a new one or not, the big lummock.
She watched him wheel the barrow down the drive with that athletic, springy walk of his. He was wearing manky, worn old trousers and a stained shirt. Maggie had tried to get the stains out, but he’d laughed at her. ‘It’s my bloody gardening shirt! It’s meant to look like shit. I don’t think it’s even been washed for about a year.’
It would break her heart to leave him.
And his, when she and Isla just disappeared one day. Vanished in a puff of smoke.
But it was his own fucking fault! If he would only believe her about Nick, she wouldn’t have to do any of this. He would understand that Isla had to come first.
Maggie pulled the crocheted cap down more snuggly over Isla’s fragile wee skull.
No way was she risking Nick hurting Isla again.
That was the bottom line.
Walking along the passage to the kitchen, she saw there was a tiny piece of yellow plastic by the skirting board. A piece of her measuring spoons. She bent to pick it up and put it in her pocket.
Mrs Greenlees. The first person who had believed in her.
At first, she had hated those Home Ec classes because all the other lassies had laughed at her for not recognising flour and not knowing how to use an oven. But then Mrs Greenlees had told them to shut their geggies. Mrs Greenlees wasn’t all prim and proper like the other Home Ec teachers. She was big and loud and told it like it was. The next week, she’d asked Maggie if she’d like some extra lessons on how to cook, one-to-one, so she could get up to speed with the basics.
Maggie hadn’t wanted the humiliation of extra lessons, but then Mrs Greenlees had said she could take home the results, and she’d imagined herself showing Ma what she’d made, the aroma wafting off it filling the flat, and Ma saying, ‘That’s pure amazing,’ and the two of them sitting on the settee eating it.
Of course, that had never happened. After the lessons, she’d take the food into the janitor’s shed and sit on a bucket and scowf the lot, whatever it was – scones or traybakes or lukewarm lasagne or bread and butter pudding.
She hadn’t taken it home because she knew Ma would turn it round on her somehow. There’d be something not right about it, it would taste ‘bowfing’ or be ‘foreign muck’. Or maybe it would be the simple fact that Maggie had accepted ‘charity’, or Ma would get it in her head that Maggie was trying to show her up. Maggie could never predict what was going to set her off, but there would be something about that bread and butter pudding or those scones that would warrant a battering.
They had been magic, though, those lessons, and Maggie had really got into the process of turning stuff you couldn’t even eat, like flour and yeast and raw eggs, into a finished product that was dead tasty and ‘full of goodness’, as Mrs Greenlees used to say. Sometimes what Maggie produced was so tempting that Mrs Greenlees couldn’t resist, and she’d say, ‘Ooh, can I have a wee taste?’ and Mrs Greenlees and Maggie, and sometimes another teacher if anyone was there working late, would polish off the lot, sitting there in the brightness of that Home Ec room while the winter darkness fell outside. And while they ate, Mrs Greenlees would talk about funny things, like the ‘shenanigans’ of her two grown-up sons and their pals, and she’d ask Maggie about herself and her plans, and the two of them would go off into a fantasy land where Maggie had a fancy restaurant somewhere on the west coast and cooked amazing seafood and got her own TV programme.
When she’d left school with her one O Grade, Mrs Greenlees had given her those spoons. It had been the first time Maggie had received a present, and she’d been made up. All the way home, she’d held the spoons and fanned them out and put them back in place, smiling at how each one was just so much smaller than the one behind that it fitted snuggly against the curve of its bowl. But best of all, she’d known that every time she used them she’d think of Mrs Greenlees and how she’d almost been like a ma.
When they got back from their trip to Langholm, Maggie put Isla in her pram with Bunny and pushed her round and round the garden. There was a breeze, and Isla loved watching the tops of the trees swaying above her. Maggie was talking daft nonsense about how the trees were waving at them when a piercing sound split the air.
The fucking fire alarm.
Probably just Nick or Duncan burning toast, but she’d best check. She parked Isla at the front door and got in there pronto. She could smell burning, the reek of it making her cough. That wasn’t just toast. There was smoke billowing from the kitchen doorway. Putting her sleeve over her nose, she peeked inside.
The smoke was coming from the cooker.
From a pan on the hob.
It had boiled dry and triggered the alarm.
Thank God it was nothing worse. She used a tea towel to push the pan away from the ring and turned it off. Then she opened the windows and got up on a chair to switch off the alarm.
Nick.
Probably hoping she’d take hold of the handle and burn herself again.
She left the hot pan steaming in the sink and ran back out through the hall, out through the front door.
The pram had gone.
No.
No no no!
‘Duncan!’ she yelled. ‘Duncan!’
She ran through the garden, along the paths, across the lawn, behind the greenhouse. As she charged round the side of the house, she was just in time to see the pram hurtling down the drive, bouncing and swaying but going so fast that the bumps in the tarmac weren’t enough to deflect it from its course as it shot in and out of the shadows cast by the trees. Streaming out behind it came Isla’s wail.