‘It’s that fucking brat inside you, isn’t it?’ he roared.
The fear that night was the worst. It wasn’t just me any more, it was my baby. Did you know that, even at three months, your hands aren’t big enough to protect your belly?
I must have passed out with the kicks. When I woke up, he was gone and I was lying in the bed, with the pain of losing my little boy deep in my belly.
The second baby was at the end. I didn’t know I could still get pregnant then. He punched me in the belly and I lost it.
That was the night something in me changed. Like a light switch going on.
The taxi driver said he wouldn’t charge for driving me to the shelter.
‘No, love,’ he said as he helped me in, then went back to get the few bits I’d taken from the flat. ‘It’s on me. He ought to be locked up, your fella. Locked up.’
Mary in the shelter was the first one I saw, and she got me straight to the hospital. She held my hand all the while, and when I woke up, when they’d scraped what was left of my second baby out of me, she was still there.
Mary didn’t say: If you’d left him, you could have saved your baby. But I was thinking it, and I was saying sorry to the baby.
The police went looking for him, but Antonio was always clever. Someone tipped him off and they couldn’t find him.
I knew he’d come after me, but Mary said I was safe. We used to sit on the fire escape looking out over the city, and she’d say he couldn’t touch me any more.
I believed her. I believed them all.
And then he found me.
Afterwards, the police wanted to know how he’d managed to locate the shelter, because not that many knew where it was, but when he was in a rage, Antonio was capable of anything.
It was nighttime when he came. It was cold and I was sitting up with another girl in the big room with the fire. All of a sudden I heard him screaming my name, and I thought I must be going mad.
‘Danae, you bitch, where are you?’
Then he was there, and the other girl ran to get help, and I was on the floor with him on top of me, choking me.
‘I’m going to kill you, bitch,’ he said. For a moment, I thought: let him. And then I remembered the baby coming out of me and I reached for the coal shovel.
I kept hitting him until his hands fell away from me.
Mary came running into the room with a baseball bat, but she didn’t need it. Whatever I’d done to Antonio was well done by then.
Mara was waiting for the sound of Danae’s car on the drive. It was evening when she finally arrived. She approached the door uncertainly, looking at Mara with anxiety in her eyes.
Mara threw herself at her aunt and enveloped her in a hug.
‘Oh, Danae,’ she said, ‘I wish I’d known. How awful it must have been to live with this for so long.’
‘I shouldn’t have tried to defend myself,’ Danae said, closing her eyes with relief. Mara didn’t hate her after all. ‘The police would have come, he’d have been put in jail.’
‘Only to get out again and hurt you again,’ said Mara angrily. She couldn’t bring herself to say Antonio’s name. ‘You did the only thing you could have done. And that’s why you’ve been punishing yourself all these years, isn’t it? Living alone, keeping away from people …’
Danae nodded. ‘The guilt kills me. Guilt over not having left him sooner, so my babies would have stood a chance. Guilt over what I did to Antonio. No matter what he did to me, I was alive and he was as good as dead. I couldn’t live with that.’
‘Have you never considered counselling?’
‘Apart from six weeks in a psychiatric hospital because I went into a numb state – catatonic, they called it – no,’ Danae said. ‘They were kind to me in there, but nobody could understand. I had as good as taken Antonio’s life away. His family never forgave me. Never. It was all my fault, they said. Your father and mother have always been wonderful. They understood my need to be left alone.’
Mara hugged her aunt even tighter. ‘You poor darling, Danae. You’ve got me now, I’ll do my best to help you from now on. You shouldn’t have to cope with all this pain on your own.’
There was no protocol for meeting your husband’s newly pregnant girlfriend. No book of handy hints. Tess had thought of doing a little Internet surfing before the meeting, but what keywords would she type into the search engine?
Forty-something bitterness versus twenty-something nubile happiness?
What to wear rather than how to behave would have been on her sister Suki’s list for sure.
But then Suki always knew how to dress for the occasion.
Tess was the opposite. When in doubt, she inevitably wore the wrong thing.
And so it was that Sunday afternoon. Tess found herself wearing old fawn corduroy trousers and a dark brown turtleneck sweater that somehow leached all the colour from her face, apart from the two spots of high colour on her cheeks. She took down her hair, realized she hadn’t washed it that morning and her roots were greasy, so tied it up again. What was the point in looking good? Kevin and Claire were a done deal.
But Tess had recently wondered if it was time to make an effort. She had a few grey hairs in the blonde now, and stress had given her purple shadows under her eyes.
Downstairs, she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror. In this ensemble and with tied-up hair, she felt like the picture of a dried-up old prune who’d let her husband out of her sight and then watched him run away to sunnier, more youthful climes. Was there a fairy tale about that? The Stupid Older Woman? All older women were stupid or evil in fairy tales. Only the young and pretty females were treated kindly. Tess was theorizing whether this could be an idea for Suki in her new book when Kitty appeared with her woollen winter coat on, a purple furry handbag in one hand and an excited expression on her small face.
‘We’re having marshmallows, aren’t we?’ Kitty asked for at least the fifth time that day. The marshmallows were very important. Kitty liked to try to melt them into the hot chocolate on her teaspoon, drowning each one until it was a puddle of pinky-brown sludge and then sucking it up.
‘Yes, with marshmallows,’ said Tess cheerily, because no matter how many deranged thoughts were going through her mind, she wouldn’t expose her children to them.
‘Goodie,’ said Kitty happily. ‘Do you think Claire will have hot chocolate too? The baby might like it.’ Despite Tess’ horror at having to tell Kitty about the baby, Kitty was delighted with the news and told everyone.
‘That’s a very good idea,’ Tess said evenly. ‘Milk is good for babies. I drank lots when you were in my tummy.’
She managed a smile. It hurt like hell even to think about it, but this baby would be Kitty’s half brother or sister.
Which made her feel mean and nasty. She wasn’t the sort of person who felt anger towards an unborn child, was she?
Yet somehow, she did feel upset about it all in ways she didn’t even want to think