He tilts my face up towards the light. I have bitten my lip and made it bleed. He presses the tissue against it tentatively.
‘I must have been dreaming. I don’t remember.’
My flesh prickles with shame. I take the water and gulp it. Marco is watching me, leaning against the sink. The look on his face frightens me.
The next day I wake in the pale morning light. Marco is dressing and I watch him silently. I slept full and deep with no dreams. His hands cross as he knots his tie. There are worry lines on his forehead, more at the corners of his mouth, drawn down in concentration. He sees me watching him, one leg curled outside the duvet. He smiles.
‘I’m sorry, Marco,’ I tell him. I say his name the way I said it the first time, Marc-oh. A delicious sound with an almost exotic lilt, like Vietnamese or Thai. I say it again. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry for making your life complicated.’
He sits on the edge of the bed, stroking my hair from my face with the flat of his hand. He tells me it is okay, and he tells me not to worry and beneath it all is a wariness he thinks I don’t see. As he leaves the room I prop myself up on my elbows, look at him over my shoulder. It’s coquettish by design. I want something.
‘Honey,’ I say. He looks over at me. ‘Can you leave me another one of those little pills?’
For a second I think he might say no. I know Carmel has some Valium at home because her mother eats them like sweets, like ripe cherries one after the other, because of her nerves. I know Carmel keeps them in her dresser drawer with her Pill and bottles of lube and a pin badge of Smurfette she’s had since college. I know this because I’ve been taking one a day since the funeral, just to keep the edge off. But I can’t keep taking them. She will start to notice. Besides, I’m due back at work next week and the thought of it fills me with a dread as cold as bright-blue water.
‘Sure,’ he says finally, and closes the door.
The café we go to for lunch is small and busy, and Carmel and I are lucky to get a table. The walls are pine-clad, except in the places where cracked Victorian tiles still cling grimly to the walls.
‘Sorry I’m late.’
Martha, who is never late, puts her bag on the table and starts ferociously unwinding the scarf from her neck. Carmel and I exchange a glance. We have known Martha eight years, since a New Year we spent in Berlin. There had been a party on a rooftop and fireworks at midnight, and I’d forgotten to bring a coat so I was shivering in my dress, face tilted up to the sky. Martha had given me hers, a thick camel-coloured trench which hung heavy on my shoulders. We’d introduced her to our friend James and only saw him again three days later, rushing to the airport to catch our plane. He looked like he’d been sleeping in a hedge.
‘I love her,’ he’d said simply, as we checked our luggage in. Carmel had oversized sunglasses on, her manicure chipped and fractured. She had laughed – hah! – and James had turned to her earnestly. ‘I love her and I’m going to marry her.’
He had, of course, and now three years later here she was, her pretty round face looking uncharacteristically flustered, a brick-red colour building in her cheeks. She looked from me to Carmel and back again.
‘What?’
‘Is everything all right?’ Carmel asked her.
‘Yes, fine.’
‘You look pale,’ I said. She did. Tired too, I could see purple smears beneath her eyes.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You look like shit,’ Carmel said. ‘Are you ill?’
I saw Martha take a breath and then another, swallowing as though she might cry. The soft flare of her nostrils. Her hand strayed to her stomach. It was not tears she was trying to hold back. I realised before Carmel did, but only just.
‘Holy shit, you’re pregnant.’
Carmel’s mouth fell open.
Martha put her head on the table and groaned. ‘I can’t stop being sick. It’s like a wave, one after another. I didn’t know it was this hard. I’d never have done it otherwise.’
‘Done what?’
‘Had sex!’ she said loudly. I saw a few heads turn to our table and I couldn’t help smiling. Martha took my hand. Hers was cool and soft, gentle.
‘I was sick on the bus on the way here,’ she told us as Carmel poured her some water. ‘Then again just down the road. A man asked me if I was all right, and when I turned around I thought I would faint. Oh God. Perhaps I will die. I hope so. Dying would be better than this.’
I see Carmel make a slicing motion across her neck with her finger – shut up, shut up – and Martha looks at me, her pale eyes big and round. ‘I’m sorry. Stella, I’m sorry. So clumsy!’
‘It’s okay.’
‘It’s not, it’s not. Was für ein Arschloch, I’m sorry. How are you? How was the funeral?’
‘Terrible,’ I answer honestly.
‘It must be very hard,’ Martha tells me, squeezing my wrist. I feel tears prickle at her kindness, the balm of it.
Carmel rolls her eyes. ‘Listen. I’ve got her puking on one side of me, and you crying on the other. I’ve nothing against body fluids but for now, can we not?’
We laugh. It is the first spontaneous laugh I think I’ve had in weeks, wholly organic. It feels good. Martha tells us that she is worried that she will start swearing during labour.
‘I hope I do not make the midwives blush!’ she says. ‘I found out that your cervix expands to ten centimetres!’
Carmel and I exchange a look. ‘Oh no,’ I mouth. She shakes her head.
‘That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.’
Carmel is looking at her hands, measuring.
‘That’s the same size as a box of Dairylea,’ Martha tells us wonderingly. ‘It’s a melon being squeezed through a straw.’
‘Jesus Christ, Martha, you’re a hell of a woman.’
‘Do you think it will hurt too much?’
Carmel and I exchange another look. I mutter something about the joy of children transcending the agony, and then I start laughing. I can’t help it.
Carmel snorts. ‘“The joy of children”?’ she repeats. ‘Your fanny is going to look like roadkill.’
And then she and Martha both begin to giggle, only for a minute we aren’t sure because Martha also has her head in her hands and could be crying. We laugh and laugh until tears spring to our eyes. It’s good. I feel light and untethered as though an anchor has been weighing me down.
Chapter 4
I book a weekend break in a B&B in Cumbria for me and Marco.
Carmel laughs at me. ‘You’re turning into one of those couples,’ she says.
‘What couples?’
We’re sitting on the sofa together. I have a bag of crisps on my lap, and now I press one against my tongue, enjoying the tingle of salt.
‘You know.’ She puts on a syrupy voice. ‘“Two weeks today!! Love my little koala bear”, “Can’t wait to see my boo-boo, a whole hour apart!” All that shit. You know. On Facebook.’
‘You jealous?’
‘Of Marco? Hardly.’
I’m used to her acerbic tongue, of course. But even this shakes me, a little.