“Well,” the midwife said quietly, “shall we see if we can hear your surprise’s heartbeat?”
I looked at Robin. I hadn’t expected this. She nodded in encouragement.
I lay down on the paper-covered bed and lifted up my top as she gestured. The midwife dragged my stretchy jogging bottoms down so the waistband sat below the small bulge that had sprung up in the last few weeks. I instinctively wanted to bat her hand away. She squirted something cold on my tummy and then put something called a “Doppler” on my belly, jiggled it roughly until a beat filled the room. It was real. It was alive. It was mine.
Robin stood up from her chair and came over to me, slipped her hand into mine.
Afterward, my belly was wiped clean with a scratchy tissue and my blood pressure was taken. After that, vials of my blood were siphoned by the midwife while Robin still held my hand, then I was given a narrow jar to pee in.
When I came back into the room, I heard Robin say, “You should ask my sister that, not me.”
Whatever it was, the midwife didn’t ask it. Instead, she told me that I had already missed one standard scan at twelve weeks and was already due for the next one.
“Can she find out if it’s a girl or a boy then?” Robin had asked.
“If she’d like to know,” the midwife said. I just sat numbly while they talked about what would happen, and that I’d get a letter with a date and time, that I’d need to arrive with a full bladder. That Robin—or someone—could come if I wanted them to, but that only one person could come in with me. “So you couldn’t bring your mum and the baby’s dad or—”
“I’ll be going with her,” Robin interrupted.
—
We walked back from the surgery in silence. Robin’s jokes had run out and she seemed distant, almost anxious. As we turned in to our road, my sister turned to me and said, “Who’s the dad, Sarah?”
I stared dumbly. It was a reasonable question. “The boy at the party,” I answered, and the third-person script of it hung in the air.
“Okay,” she said after a moment. “You don’t have to tell me.”
—
I’m awake. It’s still black outside and my heart races with the shock of being conscious. I look at the alarm clock next to me. It’s just gone two. I don’t understand why I’m awake, until I hear voices downstairs. I get up, wrap my big dressing gown around me and tread carefully onto the landing. Robin’s heading down the steps, and Hilary and Dad are already downstairs talking quietly to each other and someone else.
Callum. Apparently he’s been dropped off at the house by Rez’s cousin. Even by peering down the stairs I can see he’s far thinner than before. Tall like his dad, but he still has a skinny child’s body. As I take a few steps, I realize the sour smell rising up is from him.
In the dim hallway light he looks pale and yellow. He’s slid down the door so he’s squatting on the floor, leaning back. His eyes roll around like loose marbles, and when he focuses, he screws his nose up and spits at whoever he’d focused on. I’ve never seem him like this. I’ve never seen anyone in this state.
Dad sees me on the stairs and tells me to go to my room, a chastising voice I’ve not heard since I was small. I don’t argue. As I walk back up to bed, Callum asks whose room I’m staying in.
“Her room,” Dad says sharply. “This is her home.” As I shut my door, I hear Callum’s garbled protests.
—
He’s been in Robin’s bed for two days, sweating and raging. She sleeps on the sofa; there’s no room in my bed. When he emerges from his pit, Callum’s different. Apologetic, embarrassed, he avoids all our eyes.
“I’m really sorry if I said anything to you,” he says to me as he makes instant coffee and offers me tea. “I was on something. Mum said Rez didn’t know what to do with me so he brought me here. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t say anything to me,” I lie. He looks relieved and stands up a little straighter.
“How are you?” he asks quietly, stirring sugar into his mug.
“I’m okay.” I wrap my cardigan around me, hug my belly to obscure the small bump.
“How come you’re living here? Had enough of my dad?” he asks, without looking up from his work with the spoon.
“Both of them,” I say. He grunts in recognition.
I want to ask him so many things. I want to ask so many questions to which, maybe, I don’t really want answers. But instead we just sit at the table together in quiet understatement.
—
He stays another two days, calling in sick to his call-center job and having angry calls with his boyfriend that he thinks we can’t hear. With every hour that passes, he and Robin giggle more, play each other songs they’ve found in their time apart. They warm up old jokes, and color fills in both their faces.
Robin is less interested in me, partly because I’ve sworn her to secrecy about the baby, so her chief source of interest is off-limits. She isn’t unkind to me though, and I find myself tearful with gratitude.
When Callum disappears again this afternoon, collected by his grubby-looking boyfriend, Rez, who’s hanging out of someone’s Vauxhall Corsa with a joint in his hand, Robin is inconsolable.
“Every time Cal pulls himself out, he gets sucked back in. I don’t know what the fuck he sees in that rat-faced little weasel. He’s not even funny. He’s got shit taste in music. He’s nothing.”
ROBIN|1998
Nobody says anything in this family. That’s the problem, as far as Robin can see it. They didn’t speak up fast enough when Callum started giving up on who he was, started sliding down this shitty road instead.
She swipes at the guitar in her lap again, enjoys the ugly clash of notes, bends them into shape. She hears her twin moving position on the bed in the room next to hers, the mattress creaking and complaining under the increased weight.
Robin swipes again, then walks her callused fingers along the fretboard as if she’s reading braille. The band started as fun and grew into something that earned a bit of cash but is fast opening up as an escape hatch.
Sometimes it’s unbearable living somewhere so small, all the oxygen sucked up by secrets. The world is bigger than this bedroom, than this village, than this country even. Robin wants to get out there—she’s hungry for it. The thought of being cooped up in a small family house for the rest of her life makes her want to stick a gun in her mouth.
She reaches for her notepad. Angry lyrics about small-town suffocation start to bubble up. She jots them down in her illegible form of shorthand, tinkers with some clashing chords to sit beneath them.
She turns the page, stops dead. Sarah’s neat handwriting is right where it shouldn’t be. “Romper suits, age 0–3 months, newborn socks, breast pump,” it says. What the fuck is a breast pump? It has no place among her angry lyrics.