I’m on my way to the hospital and letting myself out of the front door when the new tenant, the ginger woman from the ground-floor flat, arrives on the steps in front of me, and I look at her with curiosity as I hold the door open for her. She’s very thin and covered in tattoos – a tapestry of names and patterns and hearts and flowers that seems to cover every inch of her. I smile but she doesn’t look at me and though I’m not sure what it is about her that makes me want to talk to her I tentatively clear my throat and say, ‘Hi, I’m Edie, I live—’ But she only nods curtly in response, avoiding my gaze and turning her back on me abruptly as she lets herself into her flat, closing the door behind her. I stare after her, before beginning the long, slow process of getting myself to the hospital.
These days I’m more belly than person; a bump on legs, as if I, or the person I was, has been entirely replaced by my unborn child. And the rest of the world seems to collude in this. In the street, elderly women reach out with narrowed, hungry eyes to touch my belly as though, Buddha-like, it might bring them luck. At my hospital visits I wait, obedient and detached as I’m weighed and measured and scanned and tested, and I feel entirely separate from the life that’s growing inside me. I faithfully attend every appointment and read every leaflet and booklet that’s pressed on me, but if I try to imagine the baby inside me I find that I can’t. When the midwife asks me if I want to know the gender I shake my head in panic, because I only know that I have one wish: I hope with all my heart that it isn’t a girl.
The bus takes me through New Cross towards Camberwell, winding through narrow back roads then on to Peckham High Street, past dusty, sun-baked shopfronts, the jumbled mixture of Georgian terraces and council blocks, strings of nail bars and chicken shops and newly arrived delis and fashionable bars. When we reach Denmark Hill twenty minutes later, the sprawl of King’s College Hospital looms to my right, the low Victorian red bricks of the Maudsley psychiatric unit to my left. I get off at the busy intersection and begin to head towards the maternity unit.
Just as I’m turning into the main entrance I glance across the road and freeze. A woman is standing at the bus stop, turned away and half concealed by the waiting queue of people, but her hair and build and posture is so like Heather’s that my stomach plummets with fright. I crane my neck but a bus pulls up obscuring my view and though I wait, my mouth dry, my heart knocking, by the time it’s moved on again the queue has halved and the woman I’d seen has gone. I stand there for a long time, fear twisting in my gut. But surely it wasn’t her. It couldn’t possibly be. Just another in a long line of lookalikes I’ve spotted over the years – my mind playing tricks again, that’s all. I tell myself to get a grip, the baby gives a hefty kick to my bladder and I hurry on my way.
Today the antenatal waiting room is busy and nearly every orange plastic chair is taken. A small wall-mounted TV shows a daytime property programme, its sound turned low. Women in various stages of pregnancy come and go, each clutching identical blue cardboard folders and occasionally trailing a toddler, a boyfriend or a husband in various states of boredom, excitement or fear. I take the one remaining seat, next to an exhausted-looking Irish woman who nags her four children to get up off the floor, stop fighting, be quiet. I check my ticket. Thirty-nine. The LED screen flashes number twenty-one. I sigh and along with nearly everyone else pull out my iPhone and turn it on.
But a small commotion at the door causes me to look up. A heavily pregnant teenage girl waddles in wearing tracksuit bottoms and flip-flops and shouting at a lad behind her. ‘Fuck off,’ she screams, ‘Fuck off, right? I don’t want you here. I don’t fucking want you here!’ The lad says nothing, his head bowed. They sit on opposite sides of the room, he with his chin almost on his chest, her glaring furiously at him. And as I watch, he looks up and makes brief eye contact with me. He is, I realize, about twenty, the same age Connor was when I first met him, though they are nothing alike – the wounded, vulnerable expression of this stranger is nothing you’d ever have seen on Connor’s face.
In that instant I’m transported back to the night of the fair, the night it all began. I see Connor staring at me across the fairground, feel again the electric charge of excitement. I’d walked towards him and said his name and he’d thrown away his cigarette and nodded. I’d felt suddenly shy and for something to do had taken a swig of the vodka before passing it to him.
‘I saw you,’ he said, when he’d drunk some. ‘On the waltzers, with the fat girl,’ and I’d shivered at the thought of him watching me without me knowing it, those sea-green eyes on me. He’d looked away, and I’d started to panic because he might go: he might walk away and I didn’t know how or when I’d see him again. So I’d blurted the first thing that came to me. ‘Want to go on a ride?’ and he’d smiled; it broke across his face, a beautiful smile, wide and sudden and with such sweetness it had taken my breath away.
In the waiting room the Irish woman gathers up her children and heads towards one of the consulting rooms, but I’m barely aware of my surroundings now, lost as I am in the memory of that night. The big wheel had taken us up into the dark sky, his jeans rough against my bare leg, dark hairs on his arms and stubble on his cheek and a faint smell of sweat and aftershave and cigarettes and something deeper and more pungent, something masculine, indefinable. A man, he was, a proper man, and excitement had fizzed inside me as I’d drunk in his long lashes, the curve of his skull, the line of his neck, and I’d had to sit on my hands to stop myself from touching him.
He pulled a spliff from his pocket and lit it, before turning and squinting at me through the smoke. When he’d passed it to me I’d sucked it down and the hit was instantaneous, mixing with the vodka in dizzying waves, and I’d closed my eyes, then felt the suddenness of his lips on mine, hot and soft and hard, dry and wet, his tongue pushing into my mouth. I touched him, my fingers beneath his jacket eager, hungry, running them over the fabric of his T-shirt, feeling the skin and muscle and flesh of him. Even though I was so nervous I could hardly breathe, I couldn’t stop myself, had no shame, no self-control as I kissed him, ran my lips against his jaw, buried my nose in his neck, breathing him in.
What little I’d done with lads before had been nothing like this. I left that old me there, behind the last tree at the end of the playing fields in Withington, and took a leap into something else, something new. He was touching me too, his hands rough and careless over my chest, beneath my skirt, parting my thighs, slipping his hand beneath my knickers, and the bit of me that would normally smack his fingers away, tell him to get lost, was silenced. I was only feeling and sensation, the big wheel carrying us round and round as I trembled into his neck, not wanting him to stop.
In the hospital waiting room a large West Indian woman touches my arm. ‘Is that you, honey?’ she asks, nodding at the number flashing on the wall.
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘Yeah. Thank you.’ And I gather up my things, pull myself laboriously to my feet and walk towards my midwife’s room.
Edie lives in Tyner’s Cross, the bit of Fremton between the Pembroke Estate and the rest of the town. A scattering of cul-de-sacs and council houses and new builds, as though Fremton proper had emptied out its pockets one day and this rag-bag jumble was what had tumbled out. We get to Edie’s street, a row of small, pebble-dashed houses with falling-down fences, front yards strewn with junk and weeds, and she glances at me. ‘Not like round your way, is it? Mind you, our old place wasn’t much better.’ She sighs, then says, ‘One day I’m going to be rich, Heather. I’m going to move to London, go to Saint Martins and become an amazing artist. I’m going to have a gorgeous flat, and people will go to galleries and buy my pictures for millions,’ she laughs, as though she’s only joking, but I feel a rush of admiration. I want to tell her that I believe her, that it sounds amazing and that I think she could do anything if she set her mind to it, but before I can speak we’ve stopped outside a house with a peeling yellow front door and Edie’s