Valentina Read online

  I thought for a second. “I mostly use duct tape.”

  She giggled.

  “Masking tape, forget it,” I continued, “not strong enough, they rip it off. Anything wider and they fucking suffocate on you.”

  “You’re terrible,” she said. “I won’t ask how you get her to eat her vegetables.”

  I raised my eyebrows, leant back a little from the steering wheel. “Let me just say we live in a very remote spot.”

  We exchanged a glance and chuckled. The jeep bumped over the potholes of the lane, the overhanging branches trailed over the windscreen and there it was: the cottage.

  Valentina gasped. She actually caught her breath, audibly, and said, “My God, Shona, it’s even lovelier than I imagined.”

  For a second I thought she was taking the mickey, or play-acting. Then I thought she was going to jump out before I’d even stopped the car. As it was, she opened the door just as I pulled up and got out the moment I cranked the handbrake. I locked the car and made my way to where she was standing, open-mouthed, like she was admiring the Taj Mahal or something.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’s only a house.”

  Valentina followed me up the drive and into the porch. When we stopped at the front door, she stood so close behind me that I could feel her breath warm on my ear. I became flustered, I couldn’t get the key to work.

  “Here,” she said, “let me.” She took the key and opened the door in a second.

  “Go on in,” I said.

  But she already had.

  ***

  You’ve not forgotten about her, have you? Out here alone in the cold and the dark? It’s been a tricky business out here tonight, she’d tell you that herself. There were moments when she couldn’t see the hand in front of her face and, of course, the lane is potholed to hell. The moon helped. Drifted out from behind those clouds long enough to light her way to the picket fence, to the gate. It was easy to sneak across the front of the cottage then. The back was more difficult – those flower pots no more than shadowy trolls on the mossy paving stones and the lawn reaching away into the blackness of an abyss. That got to her all right, but she didn’t make a sound. She knew when she planned this that everything would have to be done in total silence. She is an impostor, you see. This is not her home. These are not her flickering walls. This is not her life.

  ***

  FOUR

  In my cottage, the kitchen continues around to what I’ve always called the secret back door, making a kind of horseshoe. By the time I’d hung my coat up and stepped further inside, the secret back door was clattering against the outside wall. I stepped out and made my way to the patio at the back.

  Valentina was a couple of metres away, twirling around in the vast grassy space like Julie Andrews at the beginning of The Sound of Music.

  “Wooh,” she cried out. “Wooh! Wooh! This is awesome.”

  “Glad you like it.” I kept my voice low, thinking she might lower hers to match. I figured this was what Australians must be like; they came from a hot climate, wide spaces. The truth was, though, with her twirling and her shouting, she was expressing so exactly what I had felt the first time I saw the place. Except that I lived here. This cottage was mine.

  Back in the kitchen, I made coffee and cut some of the gingerbread I’d made, out of a desperate need to find something to do, at the weekend. It was my mum’s recipe – she’d read it out to me down the phone, ran through the instructions as if I were a perfect idiot. I’d done everything she’d said but it had still sunk in the middle.

  Valentina took a big bite and closed her eyes, her eyelashes long, spider-leg thick with black mascara.

  “God, this is awesome,” she said. “Did you make it?”

  “It’s not awesome, it’s as heavy as a brick.” I took another bite all the same. “Playing with dollies does my head in, so I thought I’d pop my cake making cherry, you know? I gave Isla the wooden spoon to lick – that kept her quiet for a few minutes. I let her take the tape off her mouth, obviously.”

  She smiled and shook her head, unwrapped her hippy scarf from her neck and placed it on the chair next to her. “Aren’t you worried about salmonella?”

  “I wasn’t. Until now, of course. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  She clapped her hand over her mouth. “God, I’m such a moron.”

  “No, you’re all right. If only I’d thought of raw eggs before. Maybe I’ll try them on Mikey when he gets back from offshore, that’ll teach him to leave me here on my own in the middle of nowhere.” I pulled a mad face. “I’ve already threatened to put peanuts in his coffee if he’s a minute late getting home.”

  “Of course.” She laughed, then frowned. “You mean so he chokes, right?”

  “No actually,” I replied. “He’s allergic.”

  “Really? Poor guy. That sucks.”

  Looking back, I can see that all this joking was no more than the novelty of one another, but it felt good too to reconnect with another old friend: me, my old self, Shona, the same and there all along, laughing darkly in her bright new life. There with Valentina that first time, I can remember it dawning on me that, yes, I had a child, but I could still joke around if I wanted and nothing terrible would happen.

  “So, you gonna give me a tour or what?” she asked when we’d finished our coffee.

  “Sure.”

  The stairwell was ‘ripper’, the bathroom ‘darling’, the bedrooms ‘cute’. She was ‘in love’, she said, with every room. I thought about how, in Glasgow, they’d tell her to get to fuck. But being Australian, she got away with it. At least, I let her get away with it.

  “We call these two rooms the kids’ rooms,” I said, “even though we’ve only got Isla so far.”

  “That’s so sweet, to have plans for another already. You guys must love each other like crazy.” She ran ahead – to mine and Mikey’s room. She went straight in, ran her fingers along the built in wardrobes, picked up the photo from the chest of drawers.

  “Is this Michael?”

  “Mikey, yes. That was us at my parents’ silver wedding.”

  She put the photo back without a word. “I like your bed.” She sat on the edge, bounced up and down as she had in the car. “Oh, it’s perfect. Not too hard, not too soft. Just right.” She grinned. “I sound like Goldilocks, don’t I?”

  “You’ll be after my porridge next. I have to warn you – I take it salty.” I smiled and held my hand out to her. “We should probably be getting back. We said four, didn’t we?”

  “Sod that.” She threw herself back and spread her arms. Her hair fell over the pillow, bright as coral on white rock. “I want to stay here.” After a moment, she sprang up, eyes ablaze, that mischievous expression I was already getting to know making her mouth pucker. “Hey! I could move in! We could change the locks and when Michael gets back from the rig we could jeer at him from the bedroom window and tell him he can’t come in.”

  “So, hold on, what?” I shook my head at her. “I thought we were with Goldilocks, that sounds more like The Three Little Pigs, and anyway we have to let him in, don’t we? How else are we going to poison his coffee?” I reached for her hand. And this time she took it.

  It all seems like such a long time ago now but it wasn’t. Months, that’s all. Less than a pregnancy and, God knows, a pregnancy can change your life overnight. I’ll never forget discovering I was expecting that summer, how I journeyed through the slow accumulation of facts as if I were wading upriver, arriving eventually at the source: the metallic taste in my mouth, the breathlessness if I so much as quickened my pace, oh, and the sick feeling if I even went near a glass of wine. It was that last thing that made me think something was up. I love a drink. But I’ve never been one for recording the dates of my cycle with a discreet letter P on the calendar or anything like that. So by the time I put two and two together, I was twelve weeks gone.

  By this time we were living in Mikey’s flat in Hyndland but I actually grew up in Govan. In Govan you
could hear your neighbours’ televisions through the walls, whereas in leafy Hyndland the flats were what I’d call apartments – high ceilings and original coving that Mikey told me was called Lincrusta, oak skirting three foot high. Mikey being from Liverpool, Hyndland wasn’t home to him either but we were settled enough, as settled as you can be, making a home after only three months together. We were each other’s home, you could say. Wherever he was, I wanted to be and he always said he felt the same. Thing about you, Shone, he used to say, is you get me.

  I’d bought the tester kit in my lunch hour and took it into the loo when I got home from work. I was supposed to wait and use the morning’s first pee but I couldn’t, I was too anxious to know. I sat watching the stick, my jeans around my ankles. The blue lines got darker: one, then two. My chest expanded like an accordion. I’d thought those things took ages but no, they’re quick. I checked the instructions. One line, the test had worked but the result was negative. Two lines, the test had worked and ... no mistaking, I was having Mikey’s baby.

  I went to phone my mum but stopped myself. Jeanie had already texted:

  Have you done it yet?

  But I didn’t answer. Mikey had to be the first to know, and I had to tell him face to face.

  Waiting for him to come home was torture. He was still working in a pub, still putting off the inevitable and now I was going to present him with that very thing: the inevitable. I worried it would weigh him down, that faced with the responsibility he would panic. And leave. I cleaned the flat from top to bottom, kept looking out the window for him coming up the road. Seeing no sign, I made spaghetti Bolognese, for something to do.

  Mikey got in about eight o’clock – a lot later than usual – complaining that he’d had to cover for some dickhead philosophy student who hadn’t turned up for his shift. He came into the kitchen, kissed the back of my neck with a loud smack and reached for a couple of beers from the fridge. I said hi and carried on stirring the sauce like my life depended on it.

  “Sorry I’m so late.” He leant against the countertop, crossed his feet and held out one of the beer bottles to me.

  “No thanks,” I said, unable to keep my face straight.

  “Why are you smiling like that?”

  I turned down the gas and faced him full on. “You know how you said you wanted to have kids?”

  “One day, yeah.” He tipped the bottle to his lips.

  “One day in about, oh, I don’t know, six months?”

  He took the bottle away so fast it foamed at the neck. His eyes widened. Face the colour of stone, he stepped backwards. “What?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  He backed into the kitchen table, hard, as if I’d punched him in the stomach. Felt around the edge as if he were needing to grip onto something to steady himself. The beer froth slid like saliva down the length of the green bottle.

  “Are you no’ pleased?” I helped him into the chair.

  He began to pant, low and shallow. I took the bottle from his hand, helped him put his head between his knees.

  “Mikey?” I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. “Mikey, darlin’, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, I’m ...” His voice was thin, as if he were talking through a long tube.

  “Are you no’ pleased? Mikey? Talk to me.”

  He reached up, took my hand and squeezed it. “It’s just. It’s just a shock, that’s all.”

  “Wait there,” I said. “I’ll get you a wee nip.”

  I ran over to the shelf where we kept the only spirits we had: a bottle of Glenmorangie Mikey’s dad had brought us as a flat-warming present and one of Smirnoff. I poured a big dram of the whisky and took it to him. He’d managed to sit upright again, his brow damp, his face still greyish. He took the glass from me and knocked back the whisky.

  “Are you OK?” I asked him.

  “Yeah.” He gave me a half-smile. “I’ll have to get a proper job now, won’t I?”

  I threw my arms around him and sobbed into his neck. You might think that sounds daft, or soppy, but I was so relieved. I’d thought for a minute he’d ... well, never mind what I thought. What I thought barely matters, not any more.

  The next day Mikey came home with a beautiful gift: a stork made from driftwood.

  “To say sorry for needing a whisky,” he said, holding my hand on the kitchen table, stroking my knuckles with his thumb. “To say I’m happy. To say, bring it on.”

  We kissed. What do you want me to say about that? It was lovely.

  It was love.

  He began to look for serious work. All the oil jobs were in Aberdeen, but he knew someone who worked for a consultancy here in Glasgow and said he could pick up some work there. It was contract work and meant him being away quite a bit – sometimes three days out of a week. I missed him, obviously, but at the end of a long day in the office nibbling on ginger snaps to stave off morning sickness, trying not to puke over my keyboard or worse, over someone I was interviewing, I didn’t mind too much that he wasn’t at home some nights to keep me up late talking – or the other. I was happy to crash out.

  The only time I got really lonely was towards the end when I got signed off work with oedema. A risk of pre-eclampsia, the midwife said, so I had to stay at home all day with my feet in the air. That was when I realised that the main thing I liked about my job was the simple fact of going in, having a laugh and a blether, a coffee break, sometimes a cheeky cigarette out on Renfield Street. At The Tribune, everyone was so clever and funny, the craic was brilliant, how could I not miss it? They were more than colleagues; they were friends.

  So while Mikey was away I spent most of the time on the phone to Jeanie at work, catching up on stories they were chasing, getting the gossip, or watching television with the sound on high: late morning panel shows, old movies, the lunchtime news. And it turned out I’d have to get used to Mikey being away because after Isla was born, that’s when he came home with the big announcement.

  “I’ve been offered a job,” he said. “A permanent one. Drilling Supervisor. On a platform, you know.” Coat still on, briefcase still in his hand, standing there like a tax inspector in the middle of the lounge. He wasn’t smiling, even though he’d got a proper job, which had been his aim.

  “I’d be at home less,” he went on, dropping his bag on the floor, pulling off his coat. “But it’d be good, you know, from a career perspective.”

  Isla started crying. I picked her up, shushed her, put her to my breast. “Sounds like you’ve already made up your mind.” I couldn’t look at him, made out like Isla was having a job latching on. “What do you mean, less time at home?”

  “It’s two on, two off.”

  “What’s that?” I knew fine what it was.

  “On the platform, you know, two weeks at sea, two weeks at home.”

  “I thought you wanted to hang onto your youth,” I said. “Now you want to jump onto a floating prison once a month?”

  “But that was before the baby, Shone. Things have changed.”

  “I know they’ve changed. No one knows that more than me but that’s awful drastic, isn’t it? Offshore? I thought you wanted a work-life balance.”

  “I’ll be working towards that – for our future. I might have to put the hours in, you know, get something going before I ease up a bit. I don’t know why you’re being so hard on me.”

  I huffed, shook my head. “I thought you said anyone who let their job take over their life lacked imagination. Your words, darlin’, not mine.”

  “Shona, come on. You don’t need to be like that. Let’s talk about it like grownups.”

  “Two weeks in four is half your life.”

  “That’s a very emotional way to put it.”

  “I am emotional, Mikey. I’ve just had a baby.”

  “OK, look.” He raised the flat of his palms to me. “Let’s stop this. I won’t take it if you don’t want me to. It’s a great opportunity, that’s all.” I was still looking at Isla, her wee
head, her perfect sucking lips: kiss kiss kiss. When I eventually looked up, his eyebrows were up in his forehead somewhere, his Scouse grin showing all his teeth. I wouldn’t call him classically good-looking, more charismatic, with large features, a nineteen-fifties black and white movie face. So I always thought anyway.

  “Come on, Shone,” he said. “This is for all of us, you know it is. We’ll have more money. Well, eventually.”

  “I don’t care about money. Not like I shop in Dolce & Gabbana, is it?”

  “I know but it’s not about buying stuff, is it? It means choice.”

  I remembered when Isla was born, how he had sworn all sorts of tearful allegiances to her and to me, moved to near madness by it all. These pledges included a desire to provide for us and I did see that. But I was stuck against the wall of my own stubbornness and I hadn’t figured how to get back into the room.

  “Choice for you,” I muttered, half-hearted, embarrassed.

  “Come on.” He sat down, put his arm around me, kissed my head. “I meant for you too. It’d be nice to have choices, wouldn’t it, not have to scrape a living?”

  “My parents didn’t scrape.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your parents. Christ, you’re so bloody chippy. Stop reacting and think for a second. We could be ... comfortable. Not have to worry all the time. We could make a family. We could have three kids, four, as many as you like.”

  “OK, OK.” I was smiling by now despite myself. I’d had no sleep for a month, I was daft as a brush with no sleep.

  “What do you think, Shone?”

  “It won’t stop me going back to The Tribune will it?”

  “Of course not. We’ll organise childcare when the time comes. And you’ve got your mum and dad to help out.”

  “It’s only for a year or two, I suppose.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I guess you’ve got to start your career sometime.”