The Hive (7 page)

She had never had cause before to buy those ginormous cartons of milk. They belonged in those vast fridges, in different kitchens, in another world. Her little family would have to bathe in it to use all that up. Guy didn’t really like too much dairy anyway—not an allergy as such, just an intolerance, really. Sensitive gut. And, with them just having the one child…

A trolley came and parked next to hers. A food mountain was piled up behind the two benign small children perched within. Heather stared at it all in wonder. Jumbo this, family-sized that, one hundred fish fingers? How could any family possibly ever eat one hundred fish fingers? The woman reached over for a gallon of milk and glanced into Heather’s trolley. She took a second gallon, turned and tossed her eyes skywards in a look of sisterhood—“Weekly nightmare, eh?”—and on she pressed.

Heather looked down at what she was buying, the sheer bulkiness of it. Of course. That perfect stranger had not seen it as the trolley of a mother-of-one who was organizing a car boot sale. Perhaps she didn’t even know about the car boot sale. (Though that was a worrying thought. Surely this was a huge thing locally? Had she not advertised enough? Perhaps she should run after the woman and just mention it…) No. She had looked at Heather’s trolley and she had just assumed stuff. She had assumed a big busy household full of open, hungry mouths like a nest in spring. She had assumed a host of small skeletons that needed calcium to grow; that Heather was, like herself, as busy as could be. She had, in fact, assumed that Heather was actually living the life that Heather herself had always expected to live.

She started to walk a little taller. A different woman was trying to manage a furious toddler, and the new Heather peered over her vast trolley and smiled at her. We’ve all been there, said her look. Though she, personally, never had. Maisie had never gone in for tantrums, on the whole. Always a quiet little thing, from the get-go. Too easy, Heather thought, and instantly that sad empty feeling came over her. She took four loaves of bread, though she wasn’t sure why. Do you need bread at a car boot sale? Well, the sheer quantity of it somehow made her feel better, filled a sort of gap.

The Detergents aisle now. She didn’t need any at home, and couldn’t see that she had to get any for Sunday. But Oh! she thought. Just look at them: the multipacks of Flash that she would be buying if she had ended up with the large gang that was her due. She saw her other self—dragging out the mop and bucket twice a day, moaning about the mud on the kitchen floor and the football boots slung in the hall and all the other million and one things she had to do and did nobody appreciate her round here or might she just as well be talking to herself—and smiled wistfully. Hey, why not? What was to stop her?

Heather hadn’t felt this wickedly naughty in a shop since she nicked an eye pencil from the Rimmel counter when she was thirteen. And that was all Georgie’s fault. After a quick scout around to see if anyone was watching, she grabbed the reassuringly solid multipack—Oomph, that’s heavy—and balanced it on the bumper tub of Stork margarine in the trolley. Where was the harm? She wasn’t sure if anyone was looking, but if they were then so what? Woman, forty-two, buys floor cleaner—it’s hardly the first sign of madness, is it? They weren’t going to lock her up. And anyway, she might get that look again. Someone else might look at her, and assume those boys and that mud and the way that nobody appreciated her round there. Someone who didn’t already know that the muckiest thing that ever happened in her kitchen was when Maisie went over the lines in her coloring-in, and that didn’t happen very often because she took a lot of pride in her coloring-in, did Maisie.

Sometimes, just sometimes, in her darker moments—and they did get very dark, her moments; increasingly so—she just wondered if, well, if she wouldn’t have been better off having no children at all, rather than just the one. There. There it was, the awful thought, and there was nothing that she could do about it. It just kept popping up—ping!—of its own accord. Wow. Look at that—a container of Ribena so huge that it needed its own built-in handle. She’d have two of those. Of course, Maisie was everything, everything, to both of them. Guy worshipped the very ground…

She grabbed a Cadbury’s Party Selection. And then another one. In for a penny…She and Guy had always agreed that when they had children she, Heather, their mother, would be there for them. She would get them up every morning, be there at the school gates and read their stories, know their friends and boil their pasta, kiss their little heads good night. That was what made a child sane and secure in their opinion. And Maisie had come along, and Heather had left her job and then…Despite their very best efforts and those of the medical profession, nobody else had come along afterwards. And Maisie had turned out sane and secure, thus proving all their theories correct. But she was so wretchedly sane and secure that it didn’t leave Heather with very much at all to do. And she could find a job of some kind; but then if she did, well, she wouldn’t be being at home with the one child she had managed to produce and she wouldn’t know its friends or boil its pasta. And she might have to work late sometimes so then she wouldn’t kiss its little head good night. And so it—she, Maisie—wouldn’t be sane and secure anymore. She was, to use one of Guy’s favorite expressions, “in a bit of a pickle.” She thought enviously of Bubba and her Milo. “An
exceptional
child,” that’s what Bubba had called him, and he did sound so original. Bubba’d certainly got her hands full there. Lucky thing.

As her mood sank, Heather’s progress started to slow. She dragged herself towards the till, only to be cut up by that woman with the food mountain, who was practically breaking the speed limit. “Rush hour,” that’s exactly how Bea described these years the other morning, over coffee after Pilates. She had said that when our children are small, that’s the “rush hour” of our lives. She started to unload her mega-shop on the conveyor belt. Well if this is my rush hour, thought Heather, it’s an odd one. Like a rush hour after some hideous atrocity, or a member of the royal family has snuffed it or there’s a really big football match which England could win and then doesn’t: it’s all quiet and underpopulated and eerie.

It was her turn at the checkout and the cashier prepared herself for the onslaught. “Well you’re a big shopper and no mistake.”

“Oh no, not really.” Heather rubbed her fingers against the opening of the carrier bag. “It’s not all for me.”

Rachel had been slumped over her drawing table since she’d read the text. Her clean sheet of paper was now soaked to the point of uselessness. The sound of her thick, choking, snotty sobs bounced off the walls and echoed around the empty rooms of the rest of the cottage. The cat was studying her with an air of amused superiority. Actually, now she thought about it, it was technically Chris’s cat—and something else he’d deserted. She lifted her head up—“So you needn’t look so bloody smug”—and sank right down again.

She used to love the daytime quiet of her own house. When it had been the noisy teeming hub of a happy family life, to get it to herself every day seemed such a luxury. The last few precious moments before everyone came clattering back home were always her favorite—like a party venue before the revelers arrived. And first thing in the morning, after Chris had done his swearing at “Thought for the Day” on the radio—“Bishop, you are a
tosser
”—and gone off for the train, and Josh had thundered up and down stairs for the final time and rushed to get the bus by his usual regulation-length whisker. She would stand at the door, after dropping Poppy off, and listen, just listen for the quiet like a doctor might listen for a heartbeat. Then she would sigh with pleasure and feel free to get on with her day.

It wasn’t like that anymore. There was still a party every night, clearly. But it was going on elsewhere and Rachel wasn’t invited. There might still be a heartbeat, but the patient was in a coma. They were all so quiet now, especially in the evenings. And especially Josh. Her once loving, laughing, darling boy now was always in his own room, on another planet, and communicated only in a series of grunts. But was that because his father had moved on or adolescence had moved in? Rachel was finding it hard to tell. And the only other person who might know chose not to be around.

The worst thing—no, not the worst thing. Let’s face it, this separation business was one big worst thing. It was a whole wide world of pain, you couldn’t pick out one particular landmark and declare that the most horrible. One was genuinely, miserably, spoiled for choice. But she could say that the aspect of the separation that was occupying the bulk of her available mental space at that moment was this: the much-loved father of her beloved children was a total and utter scumbag. How could that be true?

Eight o’clock in the evening, thirteen years and nine months ago: their first night out together after the birth of Josh. Rachel was—miraculously—ready to go, her mother was on the sofa, studying the TV listings, ready to babysit, but Chris? Where was Chris? Where had he got to? She found him upstairs, studying his baby’s face by the soft nursery night-light, utterly lost and absorbed. Rachel had tiptoed in—they were so new to it all then, didn’t know you needed gelignite to actually wake a sleeping baby that wanted to sleep—and touched his arm. “This is the point of it all, isn’t it?” he had said to her. His eyes were damp. “The point of us: it was him, all along.”

One Sunday morning, nine years and—what?—six months ago. Chris and Rachel were sitting, squashed together, on the sofa. Josh was outside on the swing. They had the garden door open, they could see him, he was fine. Chris’s feet were up on the coffee table, and laid out on his long, lean thighs was their new daughter. They felt like a single organism then; like when you take lots of little Play-Doh figures and mash them together to make one big blob. Chris had his left arm around Rachel, and with the forefinger of his right hand he was stroking Poppy’s face in rhythm, from the top of her forehead to the tip of her nose, and they were trying to decide: when should she be weaned? The health visitors had changed their guidelines, inconveniently, somewhere between Josh’s infancy and Poppy’s, and they were desperate, completely desperate, not to do the wrong thing. They had laid aside that time so that they could discuss it properly: to stewed-carrot or not to stewed-carrot? It had seemed, at the time, quite overwhelming.

They had embarked on the journey of family life together. So what happened? Chris saw someone else through the windscreen, threw Rachel out of his still-moving vehicle and swerved off course, onto another journey of his own. Was that really all it took? Not an unusual story, of course. Nor was it unusual for one departing parent to find that there was no room, as it were, in the backseat for the children after all. Not unusual, but depressing. Definitely depressing. That the man she chose could go from worrying about baby rice to “Got to work Sat. Soz” in less than a decade. That he should have been so concerned about the development of the lining of that little tummy, when all along he was just going to take that little heart and a great big club and just mash it to a pulp, week after week after week…Well. It was just depressing. That was all there was to it.

Stop. No more crying. She had cried so much that she was actually bored of it. But she couldn’t see that she was going to get any work done now either. Yet again. Funnily enough, it just wasn’t easy drawing pleasant little pictures when one was in the grip of a murderous fury. Rachel’s current project was a storybook—
Ellie’s Wellies
—in which a pair of little red Wellingtons went off on their own adventures when the size 1 feet of their little moppet owner were otherwise occupied. Yet the only image that kept coming to her tortured mind, demanding to be realized, was that of a hobnail boot having its own adventure on Chris’s stubbly gob.

She breathed deeply, pinched her eyes together to halt the tears, pushed her chair back and collided with another cardboard box. That was enough. Although Chris himself had moved out at the end of the summer, these wretched little boxes of his treasured possessions had remained, strategically placed around the cottage like chips on a roulette table: he hadn’t completely gone, he was still hedging his bets. Well, she was going to make up his mind for him. Something she could do right now was sort out her “old bits”—Christ, Heather—to dispense from her car boot on Sunday, and amass all Chris’s stuff for him to take at the same time.

She made a pile of the boxes he had already filled, and then grabbed a couple more. As well as Chris’s clothes, his “effects” as they say when someone has snuffed it—which he sort of had, or might as well have done—he could also take his books. Not that he ever read anymore—nothing beyond the iPad and his BlackBerry—but Rachel did and she could do with more book space.

When they’d first got together, she couldn’t believe how well-read this man was. How knowledgeable, how bloody clever he was on not just novels, but pretty much every other subject under the sun as well. Rachel had given up reading once she’d had to give up Enid Blyton—the rest of world literature had, frankly, failed to come up to snuff. After that, she’d done nothing but draw and paint and model and just float around really, somewhere inside her own head. So she’d spent the first two years of their relationship just sort of sitting at his feet, drinking it all in. Then she had got up, promoted herself to her own chair, and had had her nose in a book ever since. And sometime after that, she noticed, Chris stopped reading altogether.

She took down all the paperbacks he had once known and loved. The ones he—they—used to talk about, with such passion, once upon a time.
The Secret History, Persuasion,
the Anne Tylers and their mutual top favorite: all the Graham Greenes. It was strangely comforting to think of him taking them all into his new life: like a dirty river dragging debris from its pure, clean source. Trace elements of the better man he used to be.

And now she’d got Saturday free to spend with Poppy. They could make that Dalek suit. What did they need? Egg boxes. Silver paint. Kitchen utensils. It would take everyone’s mind off things. And on Monday morning the cottage would be cleansed. Ordered. And Rachel would be able to commence the rest of her life.