He Said/She Said(77)

Four weeks after their flat burned down, Laura Langrishe and Kit McCall, formerly of Clapham Common, SW4, exchanged wedding vows at Lambeth Register Office; Christopher and Laura Smith left the building and returned to their new rented home, a one-bedroom flat on Wilbraham Road, N8. There was no wedding breakfast, no carrying the bride over the threshold, but consummation was sweet and tender in the newly marital bed. The honeymoon was spent with the bride in twice-weekly psychotherapy, the groom working double shifts at his lab technician’s job to pay for her sessions on top of the rent.

We were still only twenty-two and the quiet intensity of those weeks was too much for a couple of kids. While other couples our age were umming and aahing about commitment, we were so utterly enmeshed that we had the opposite problem. What is commitment to a relationship that is only darkness? Even sex, our one previous respite, lost its playfulness. We were all need and no want. When would the fun start again?

We had been living in Wilbraham Road for five months when Kit came home with a long thin tube under his arm.

‘What’s that?’

‘Watch me.’ He unfurled a map of the world and Blu-tack’d it to the blank wall over the fireplace. He’d bought – or more likely got from Adele – some red embroidery thread. Finally, he scissored off a length with a flourish and pinned a red thread across central and southern Africa.

‘Zambia, January,’ he said. ‘There’s a little festival. Just a few thousand people. Not Ling or Mac. Just us. We can keep to ourselves.’ He smiled his old smile. ‘There’s virtually zero chance of precipitation.’

I knew that this was something we had to do if we were not only to survive but to thrive. That only by reclaiming the eclipse, and by standing under the shadow, would we again find our light.





Chapter 40





LAURA

20 March 2015

‘Why’s everyone so obsessed with feeding me?’

Ling is as familiar with my kitchen as I am with hers; without looking, she picks a ladle from the drawer and slops chicken and sweetcorn soup into bowls.

‘Sit,’ she commands.

‘That’s easy for you to say.’ Instead of a table in our kitchen we have a booth tucked into one corner, like something you’d find in an American diner, leather benches running either side of a Formica surface that’s so old there’s a half-inch gap at the join where it’s peeled away from the wall, full of gunk and crumbs. I’ll tackle it the week before the babies come, when everyone says I’ll have a sudden urge to start washing windows and straightening cushions. I sit down and slide along the bench, back against the wall. I can see the whole kitchen from here. ‘I’m not getting back in here till these babies are on the outside,’ I say, feeling the squeeze.

Ling sets the bowl in front of me and watches me not eat, arms folded.

‘I want to want it,’ I say.

She lowers her brow in concern. ‘Isn’t losing your appetite one of the early warning signs?’

‘Oh God, is it? For what?’

‘For anxiety. Why, what did you think I meant?’

‘What if the reason I’m not hungry is because the babies aren’t growing properly? Or worse?’ Ling doesn’t need me to articulate what worse means. She was there for all the times it didn’t take.

‘Sweetheart, you’re a nervous wreck,’ she says. I am; she doesn’t know the half of it. ‘I was the same in both my pregnancies. It’s normal, I promise. Look, we’re literally on the way to get a scan. If it was an emergency they couldn’t see you sooner. They’ll put your mind at rest, I promise – are you even listening to me?’

I look up from my phone.

‘Sorry. Yes. Thanks,’ I say, but I know I won’t relax until I hear Kit’s voice. It’s two hours now since the eclipse, easily enough time for him to find somewhere with a signal. He reckons that once the babies are here we’ll take them eclipse chasing with us; plans are afoot for a family road trip to the States in 2017. If I’m this anxious at the thought of him on his own, how will I cope with guarding two toddlers in the middle of a crowd? I’ll be too paranoid to look up, even for a second. I don’t want to be one of those hovering, obsessive parents you see on the street, even though my fears are justified.

I push my soup away virtually untouched. On the way out, a delivery man intercepts me with a Mothercare package for Ronni next door.

‘What if it’s an omen?’ I say to Ling. She takes it from my hands and squeezes.

‘Feels more like a pair of wellies to me. Come on, let’s get you scanned.’

The last few rounds of IVF were paid for privately, but now that I’m pregnant it’s back to the NHS and the North Middlesex Hospital on the North Circular Road. How anyone’s supposed to recover from anything next to the most polluted road in London I don’t know. As usual, it smells of on-the-turn raw chicken and hand sanitiser. By the time we arrive, the babies are wrestling inside me. There is still no word from Kit and it is with reluctance that I obey the signs and switch my phone off.

My consultant, Mr Kendall, is a specialist in multiple pregnancies. He’s been with me from the beginning and he’ll deliver my babies. (Everyone, even Ling, assumes that I feel robbed of a nat-ural birth. The truth is, it’s one less thing out of my control, and I’m glad this decision was made for me.) Mr Kendall’s flawless hands – he must have them professionally manicured – inspire confidence.