What Lies Between Us(33)

The end of my working day can’t come quickly enough and when the clock reaches 5 p.m., I grab my coat and I’m out of the door. En route home, I rehearse what I’m going to say to Nina. I’ll slip Sally Ann into the conversation over dinner. I’ll casually ask Nina if she’s heard of The Hunters, then tell her I met the singer’s pregnant girlfriend in the surgery. Her imagination will do the rest.

Since discovering their relationship, I have said nothing to her about it. She has continued to lie to me about staying at Saffron’s house, and I have continued to play along with it. Hunter has me over a barrel. I can’t risk losing her.

I slip my key into the front door lock, but it’s already open. I take a deep breath and tell myself that if I remain poker-faced, this should all go like clockwork. ‘Hello?’ I shout, then work my way around the ground floor of the house until I reach the foot of the stairs. It’s then that I hear it – a moaning coming from behind Nina’s closed bedroom door.

I stop in my tracks, listening closely and hoping to God that she doesn’t have Hunter under my roof and in her bed. She knows that I return from work at around this time – is she really so deep under his spell that she would take such a risk? I climb the stairs and falter outside her room. There’s another moan followed by a shortness of breath. I cover my mouth with my hand, furious at the position she’s putting me in. But I cannot just walk away and pretend this isn’t happening. I cannot let Hunter get away with it. I bang on the door with the palm of my hand.

‘Nina,’ I say loudly and firmly. ‘Get dressed, I’m coming in.’

It’s the way in which she whimpers the word ‘Mum’ that alerts me to the fact that I may have got this all wrong. I grab the handle and open the door, and find Nina alone. But I struggle to make sense of what I’m seeing.

She is wearing a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms and I gawp at her exposed, swollen stomach. It’s then that I realise that not only is my daughter pregnant, but she is in labour too.





CHAPTER 27





NINA


TWENTY-THREE YEARS EARLIER


I hear Mum’s faint ‘Hello’ from downstairs and I know that I can’t keep my pregnancy a secret from her any longer. I’ve done everything I can to hide it but I’m in too much pain, and I need her. As she opens the door, it takes her a moment to realise what she’s seeing.

‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ I begin before I start howling again.

‘You’re . . .’ she says, but she can’t finish her sentence.

‘I think it’s coming. It’s early and I don’t know what to do.’

There are only two other people in the world who know I’m pregnant: the woman at the family planning clinic who confirmed it and who wouldn’t let me leave until I’d stopped hyperventilating, and Jon. And he only learned of it a few weeks ago.

I was lying on my back on a mattress at his friend’s house where we crashed after a party. My head was facing Jon when I awoke in the early hours. He was naked, sitting upright and smoking a cigarette. Sometimes I think he never sleeps or that he’s like a vampire who only comes alive at night. I watched his eyes making their way around my body. I thought I’d covered myself with a sheet, but I’d left a section of my stomach exposed. When I realised, I yanked it so it covered me completely, but it was too late. Jon was focusing on what I’d spent weeks hiding, the morning light capturing it perfectly. The game was up – he knew that I was pregnant.

I heard the crackling of the cigarette as he stubbed it out against the wall, red-hot ash falling to the floor. Then I felt his warm hand against my tummy. He made eye contact with me but I couldn’t hold his gaze.

This is it, I thought. This is where our story ends. Until recently, I’d been lucky, as I’d barely shown. Then, as I gradually expanded, I took to wearing thicker, baggier clothes everywhere. I always kept my clothes on during sex, especially my school uniform, something Jon found a massive turn-on.

I wasn’t ready to have this conversation with him because I knew it would drive him away, just like whatever Mum did to upset Dad that made him leave. That’s what men do, isn’t it? When something big happens that they can’t handle, they use it as an excuse to leave you and you never see them again. Like Dad. Over and over he’d tell me that I was his ‘only girl’, but I wasn’t enough to make him stay. Maybe that’s why I started sleeping around almost immediately after he left – I wanted someone to love me as much as he did. I just went about it the wrong way.

And I didn’t know how I was going to deal with Jon going next because he is everything to me. I can’t lose anyone else. So I closed my eyes and rolled on to my side.

‘You’re . . . pregnant?’ Jon asked. ‘Is it mine?’

I turned my head sharply to shoot him a look. He knew it was the wrong thing to say.

‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It’s brilliant. I’m going to be a dad.’

I hesitated, convinced I’d misheard. ‘What?’

‘I’m going to be a dad,’ he repeated. ‘It’s amazing.’

‘Really?’ I gasped. ‘Do you mean that?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’ He cupped my cheeks as he passionately kissed me. I didn’t want it to end. But when it did, he lit up a spliff and after a few drags, I moved my hand to take it from him and have a puff. He pushed it away. ‘You can’t be smoking this stuff with a baby inside you,’ he warned. ‘No smoking or drinking and no more pills, it’s all got to stop. They can damage it.’