Greenwich Park(8)

She takes the probe again, gently moves it down towards my hip. The screen is filled with a hand.

‘Ah, see? Baby is waving.’

I look at Daniel, smiling at his mesmerised expression. He squeezes my hand again but doesn’t take his eyes off the screen. The image of the baby is reflected in his glasses, two lit squares of black and blue.

She flicks the lights on and hands me some tissues. ‘All done for today. I’ll make a picture for you to take home.’

As I turn to look at Daniel again, I see that he is still staring at the screen. His entire face is wet with tears.

‘Oh, Daniel,’ I say, half laughing. ‘You’re worse than me.’

He does not seem to hear me, though. His eyes are locked on the freeze-frame of the baby’s waving hand. When the sonographer switches the screen off, and the image is gone, he continues to stare at the grey square of the monitor.

‘Daniel? Is something wrong?’

Daniel drops his head into his hands, his shoulders shaking. I put my arm around him. The sonographer is back, standing in front of us, apparently unsure what to do. She snaps her blue plastic gloves off, first one, then the other. I see her glance at the clock. She has other couples to see.

‘Daniel? Come on, we need to go.’

I stroke his back, try to drop my head, meet his eye. But no matter what I do, he can’t seem to stop.





GREENWICH PARK





In Greenwich Park, there are old doorways. He noticed them the first time he came here. Even in the moonlight, they stay in shadow. He walks through the park at night, past the line of bent trees, twisted over to one side by the wind on the hill. His shadow is long, looping over the tarmac paths that criss-cross the lawns. She makes him hunt her, her hot blood smell.

She likes doorways. Alleyways. Walls wet with ivy wet with rain. The backs of churches. Once even a graveyard, the stones lined up against the path. Dark, cold, secret places where she is the only warm thing. She grips him, tightly. They move quickly, on all fours, or against walls. They bite, scratch, claw at each other’s wrists. When she finishes, she gasps, like she is drowning, and in that moment, he feels that he is not old or young or rich or poor or even himself, really. He is just here, awake in the dark, an animal, and alive.

Does he want to get caught? Does she? He is not sure. God knows what she wants. Mainly he just wants this feeling, this feeling like he is falling, like he might die if he lands but in the falling he is alive, to his fingertips.

He wonders sometimes what he would do without it. How he would exist. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how he would breathe without this, without knowing it is coming.





27 WEEKS





HELEN





It hadn’t mattered so much when we were both at work. But now that I’ve had to give up, and I’m stuck at home, I’m finding my patience with the building work is slowly unravelling, like a fraying hem. With every new misery, another thread comes loose.

The work was Daniel’s big idea. I wasn’t convinced we needed it at first – to me, the house is beautiful as it is. It has a huge garden, which Mummy loved and filled with flowers – foxgloves, delphiniums, rambling roses. Upstairs there are five big, light-filled bedrooms, perfect for us and the three children I hope we’ll have one day. Admittedly, the bathroom on the ground floor is a bit old-fashioned, as is having the kitchen, larder, dining room and living rooms all separate and comparatively small – but they are always like that in homes as old as this one. It had never bothered me before, and anyway, you can’t just knock through walls – not in a Grade II listed house.

Eventually, though, Daniel convinced me that once we had a family, we would want a big, modern living area: open plan, for the children to run around, with light flooding in from above. Daniel knew that the English Heritage people wouldn’t let us change the old house, or stick a modern extension on the back. But they loved the idea of his ‘underground courtyard’ – a huge, free-flowing living and dining space built around an ultra-modern kitchen with an island – especially since it will be almost invisible from the ground, save for the old patio becoming a huge skylight window. To one side of the main ‘courtyard’ will be a wine cellar and laundry room; to the other, a study for Daniel. A new staircase will lead up our old cellar steps, with a landing where the bathroom used to be.

The whole project is a dream for Daniel, and I don’t want to keep punishing him for it. I have seen the way he cringes when he sees me bending to wipe dust off the expensive new carrycot in the hallway, or haul kettles of hot water upstairs for a bath because they’ve had to turn the water off. But as I get bigger and heavier, the pile-up of small miseries gets harder and harder to bear. The hideous layer of filth over everything. The constant unsettling presence of strangers in our home. The head-splitting sound of drills. Sometimes I even hear it in my dreams. Then, I wake up to find the noise was real, that it has started again.

When I told Daniel I was worried about being stuck at home alone for weeks on end because of my early maternity leave, he’d rolled his eyes at first. ‘Oh, come on, Helen,’ he laughed, through a mouthful of toast. ‘It’ll be great! Watch daytime TV and eat biscuits.’

Then when he looked up and saw my face, he stopped eating. Reached out, put his hand on top of mine. ‘Oh, love, I’m sorry. I’ll have a word with the builders, OK? Make sure they keep the noise and mess under control.’