‘Well, why don’t you?’ Somewhere in her distant past, Sadie remembers clubs with music playing, drinks flowing and women moving freely without lugging gigantic quilted bags. She pictures a glass of white wine, and her entire body tingles with longing.
‘Oh, I don’t know …’ Hannah tails off. ‘What’s that noise anyway?’
‘It’s the boys, they’re hungry. Sorry, Han, I’d better go …’ Sadie clamps her mobile between her shoulder and ear while gently bouncing Milo up and down and rocking the buggy. She eyes the hedge and wonders if anyone would mind if she crawled under it and fell asleep.
‘God, they sound upset. I won’t keep you a minute. Yes, I’ve thought about a hen party but you know what? I’d only want you – you and Lou, I mean – and that would be impossible, wouldn’t it?’
‘Maybe not. I’m only an hour away and York’s not that far … maybe you’d better speak to Lou. I haven’t talked to her in ages. Look, Han, I’d really better …’ Sadie’s attention is diverted by a large black dog bounding towards her, pink tongue lolling from its mouth.
‘D’you think Lou’s okay?’ Hannah asks. ‘I worry about her and Spike sometimes. He never seems to appreciate …’
‘Uh-huh,’ Sadie mutters, holding Milo tightly as she jumps up and tries to form a human barrier between the buggy and hound.
‘I mean, she’s working all hours at that horrible soft play place and keeping the jewellery thing going …’ Perhaps it’s chronic sleep deprivation, or the fact that becoming a mother has turned Sadie into a lumbering beast incapable of rapid movement. Whatever the reason, the dog shoots past her and proceeds to lash Dylan’s terrified face with its tongue.
‘No!’ Sadie screams with her mobile still clamped to her ear. Dylan squeals loudly.
‘I mean, what does Spike do all day?’ Hannah wants to know. ‘Sits on his arse, strumming a guitar, waiting for a recording contract to drop into his lap …’
‘Stop that!’ Sadie shrieks, shoving herself between the dog and Dylan, whose cries have morphed into hearty wails.
‘What’s happening?’ Hannah asks.
‘There’s a dog here! It’s trying to attack Dylan and there’s no bloody owner and—’ She drops her phone onto the path and its back pings off. ‘Shit,’ she mutters, deciding that her baby’s immediate wellbeing is more important than a three-year-old Nokia. A tall, scrawny man whistles for the dog at the rose garden’s entrance. No apology, no acknowledgement that his slavering beast has nearly devoured her child, or at the very least infected him with some terrible dog-tongue disease, and caused Sadie to wreck her phone. As the dog bounds away, Sadie blinks away tears of stress, unleashes Dylan from the buggy and sinks back onto the bench, clutching both of her boys and panting.
She doesn’t feed them straight away. She can’t, not with her heart banging madly and her children so distressed. Sadie just sits there, conscious of faint drizzle now falling on her hot cheeks, and an empty Bacardi Breezer bottle lying on the ground.
She glances down at her babies, taken aback as she always is by the fierce rush of love that engulfs her. Her sons, all round brown eyes and tufts of dark, fluffy hair, gaze up adoringly at her. The fact that they emerged from her own body still strikes her as nothing short of miraculous. All those years of debauchery as an art student, a lifestyle which continued steadily through her twenties, and she was still capable of incubating these utterly perfect human beings. Dylan is smiling now, and Milo is gazing up at her as if she were the most wondrous creature on earth.
This is what it’s all about, Sadie reminds herself. It doesn’t matter that I’m stained and knackered and every little thing Barney does irritates the hell out of me. It doesn’t matter because it’s all about this – being Milo and Dylan’s mum. Sadie bunches up her T-shirt, frees her breasts from her huge, shiny scaffolding-bra and clamps a child to each nipple. Both babies fall upon her as if they hadn’t been fed for weeks. Sadie inhales deeply, kicks the Bacardi Breezer bottle under the bench, then focuses hard on the cracked screen of her mobile which is lying at her feet.
SIX
‘Why aren’t you and Dad getting married in church?’ Daisy fixes Hannah with a cool stare as she enters the kitchen.
Hannah pauses, taken aback by the fact that Daisy’s query isn’t about why she crept outside to make a call on her mobile. Ryan is muttering about gym kits in the utility room and Josh is chewing slowly and rhythmically, like a bull, whilst staring blankly ahead. ‘Well,’ Hannah says brightly, ‘we’re only having a small wedding with the people we’re closest to, and it’s …’ She falters, deciding not to utter the unmentionable words: and it’s your dad’s second wedding, after all. ‘It just seemed right for us,’ she adds. ‘We don’t want anything too fancy or formal, you know?’
Clearly, Daisy doesn’t know. She gnaws on a toast crust and blinks down at Hannah’s bare feet. Josh continues to eat in silence, the Lynx Effect engulfing the kitchen as if being pumped in through a pipe. ‘Why not?’ Daisy asks.
‘Well, er,’ Hannah starts, deciding yet again that it’s ridiculous to feel intimidated by a ten-year-old, ‘I’m not really religious so it wouldn’t feel right for me to get married in church when I don’t go any other time.’
Hannah hears Ryan slamming the washing machine shut and switching it on. Daisy is now gawping at Hannah as if she’s just confessed to a liking for torturing kittens. ‘You mean you don’t believe in God?’ she gasps.
‘Well, not really,’ Hannah blusters, her cheeks flaring up. ‘I mean, I believe in something, I suppose, like we should treat people well and respect each other but, er … I’m not really a churchy type.’
Daisy purses her pink lips. ‘I believe in God.’
‘Well, that’s good, Daisy. It’s completely personal and up to you what you believe in.’
‘Don’t you believe in Heaven either?’
No, because I’m the Antichrist … ‘Er, not really, I mean …’
‘Dad doesn’t go to church either,’ Josh intercepts, pushing back a dark, shaggy fringe from equally dark, foreboding eyes. ‘But him and Mum got married in a church and that was all right.’ He juts out his bottom lip.
‘Well, I suppose what I mean, what I should’ve said,’ Hannah explains, feeling her jaw tighten and any semblance of hunger rapidly ebbing away, ‘is that I don’t really follow a religion.’
‘Do you follow a religion then?’ Josh meets her gaze over the gingham tablecloth.
Hannah frowns. ‘What d’you mean, Josh?’
He flares his nostrils at her, like a horse. ‘You said you don’t follow a religion. Like you’d say you follow Chelsea but you don’t follow Spurs. Like religion’s a football team.’ He sniggers and clamps his mouth shut like a trap.
‘Oh, right!’ She laughs a little too heartily. ‘Well, what I mean is that I don’t support – I mean practise – any particular religion.’ As Josh blinks slowly, waiting for her to dig herself into an even deeper hole, Hannah wonders if this is how it’ll be when she’s Ryan’s wife, and their stepmother. Like being sandwiched between a Gestapo interrogator and a belligerent English teacher who ticks her off for using an ill-chosen verb. Christ-on-a-sodding-bike. She has a sudden urge to shriek, Okay! We’re not getting married in church because your dad was married before, as you both know, a fact I’ve avoided mentioning because I’m trying to be nice. And actually, while we’re on the subject of marriage,