Sam goes to sleep in the spare room. It’s as though, now that he’s told me, he wants to give me space to digest this in private. Does he think I’m going to go back to bed for a week? I can’t admit to him that this doesn’t feel as sad as losing Zoya. I knew Zoya for half my life; Chloe, I remember nothing about. Though this helps explain Sam’s behaviour towards me, I don’t see how I can fix this. I cannot be the wife he misses. Clearly great sex and a few shared stories don’t come close to eleven years of lived history.
That night, I struggle to sleep, so I scroll through my phone, back through all the years I’ve missed, looking for evidence of this child’s existence. I find the same photos that were printed out in the memory box. There is just one video, taken in the hospital. Sam must have been filming. I’m holding a tiny bundle of sleeping baby in my arms while lying propped up in a hospital bed.
‘So, where’s my push present, Sammie?’ I ask in the video, grinning at the camera. Do I call him Sammie?
‘What’s a push present?’ asks Sam’s voice.
‘You’re supposed to buy your wife a present for pushing out a baby. You still owe me one for Felix.’
‘Isn’t your present the baby?’ Sam asks, his voice amused.
‘No, I will give you my approved list of websites,’ I say, grinning at the camera, then looking down at the baby in my arms. ‘Isn’t she perfect though?’
‘Just like her mother. Chloe Zoya Rutherford, welcome to the world,’ says Sam. Her middle name was Zoya. ‘How am I going to handle having a daughter, Luce? I’m going to be one of those horrible overprotective father types, aren’t I?’
‘Daddy won’t let you have a boyfriend until you’re twenty-one,’ I tell Chloe in a baby voice.
‘Twenty-five,’ says Sam.
That’s the end of the video, that’s all there is. The sum documentation of Chloe’s life and she was asleep the whole time. I watch it again, trying to catch a glimpse of her tiny face, but it is too fleeting.
Scrolling forward, I find other footage of my future self, noting the ways she is different from me – she has better posture, fiddles less with her hair, she looks more confident. I examine videos of Sam too, the way he looks at the camera when she is filming him. It is painful and beautiful to see – all the love in his eyes for this alternate version of me.
I don’t think I should be watching these videos. Life isn’t supposed to be lived in the wrong order like this. These light-hearted hopes and jokes about the future, recorded on camera, now imbued with a bleak foreshadowing.
Staring up at the ceiling, I realise I don’t want to sleep alone. Whatever I am to Sam, he is hurting too, and nothing about this situation is his fault. Padding along the corridor to the spare room, I crawl into bed beside him. He is awake and reaches out a hand to me.
‘Are you okay?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’ I nod.
‘I do love you, Lucy,’ he whispers.
And even though I know these words are not meant for me, I let myself fall asleep with my hand in his, believing that they might be.
Chapter 24
The next morning at breakfast, I try to act normally. Sam looks at me across the breakfast table with these huge doleful eyes, as though he’s hoping for me to say something, to announce that my memories have come back and I am his real wife again. Unfortunately, I can’t do that and I have no idea what to say to him in the meantime. I settle for making him a coffee and a bagel with cream cheese.
Maria arrives for work looking terrible. Her skin is red and raw, her eyelids swollen and bruised. She looks as though she’s been in a fight with a meat tenderiser.
‘Oh, Maria, you poor thing. Are you okay?’ I ask, wincing as I see her face.
‘Oh much better, you should have seen it before,’ she says cheerfully. ‘It will look great in a few days.’ Having assumed Maria was about fifty, I wonder if perhaps she is much older. Her face is alarming me, so I’m worried it’s going to scare the children, but Amy only claps in delight to see her.
As I make to leave for the station, Maria intercepts me in the hall. ‘I get a discount at this place if I recommend a friend. You could get your neck done.’ She hands me a brochure for something called ‘Snip ’n’ Tuck’. Their tagline reads, ‘Nip and tuck that skin, while your hair gets a trim!’ Then there’s a picture of a hairdresser wearing doctors’ whites, holding two pairs of scissors.
She bounces a hand against her blond bob. ‘Very easy, very quick, very cheap.’
‘Thanks, I’ll think about it,’ I say, taking the brochure.
I might not be certain of much in my life right now, but one thing I can be sure of, I will not be booking an appointment at Snip ’n’ Tuck.
After a challenging day at work, sifting through a bulging inbox and racking my brain for this elusive ‘big idea’, I feel completely wiped out. All I want to do is go home, crawl into bed and watch Poirot alone, but I have promised to go over to Alex and Faye’s. Roisin is finally back from America, and they’ve invited us both over for dinner.
When my cab pulls up to the address, a complex called ‘The Old Golf Club, Sands’, I hardly recognise what’s in front of me as housing. The development looks like a series of landscaped mounds, with turf and solar panels covering every inch of their curved surface. Faye appears from a doorway in one of the mounds and waves to me as I get out of the car.
‘What is this place?’ I ask.
‘Ah, you don’t remember the eco village,’ she says. ‘Come on, I’ll give you the tour.’
Following her inside a curved wooden entrance, I see that much of the dwelling we’re in has been built down into the ground and is far more spacious than it looked from the outside. As Faye shows me around, I marvel at the tactile surfaces of polished wood, furniture that feels part of the house rather than contents within it. There are living walls of plants, which filter the air, a hydroponic larder, and even a fully insulated living roof. While I’ve noticed subtle changes everywhere I go – new technology, new buildings, the cars and roads – nothing has felt that radically different. But this? This feels radical.
‘Faye loves giving people “the tour”,’ Alex tells me, handing me a gin and tonic in a long glass, with two sprigs of mint. ‘You’re really doing her a favour by forgetting you’ve already had it.’
‘Hi, Alex,’ I say, taking the drink and greeting her with a kiss on the cheek, as though we’re old friends. ‘I love the hobbit home.’
‘Do not let Faye hear you using the H word,’ she says in a conspiratorial whisper.
Roisin soon arrives with an overnight bag, wearing impossibly tight white jeans and a grey silk blouse, her hair cut into a sharp red bob. Seeing her in real life, rather than on a screen, I notice that Roisin has aged in a different way from me and Faye – her breasts look perter, her forehead is taut and shiny. I suspect she might have had work done, or maybe it’s just the youthful elixir of being child-free. She drops her bag and walks straight over to me, clasping my elbows while looking into my eyes with a serious expression.
‘I hope you haven’t forgotten that you owe me five hundred quid?’ she says, her mouth twitching into a smile.
‘Rosh,’ Faye says, eyeing her with wide, disapproving eyes. ‘You shouldn’t make jokes.’