Zoe lay in bed, eyes wide open and fixed on the clock. She must have slept at some point during the night but it seemed that every time she woke up and checked the time, only another fifteen minutes or so had passed. For once, she hadn’t been thinking about the thing she didn’t want to think about, but of Libby. What she could do next to find her. Perhaps a trip to the newspaper library in Colindale to trawl through archive issues of the Ham and High, or the Public Records Office to search for censuses and certificates, though some of that information might be online. And did she really want to find Libby when Zoe couldn’t bear to read any more of her diary? Freddy’s confession and Libby’s heartbreak over the baby was too much, too close to home, so Zoe lay there willing her head to quiet. It was nearly seven now when the alarm would go off and Win would get up, though he’d been twitching for the last half an hour so she knew he was only dozing.
Both of them had their own reasons for finding it hard to sleep and they had little to do with the very uncomfortable airbed.
Win sighed, long and hard. ‘Zo? You’re awake.’
‘Yeah.’ Win rolled over so Zoe felt his breath ghost the tender skin at the back of her neck. ‘Win, what’s happened? I don’t even know who we are at the moment. We’re certainly not us.’
‘It’s the house. The building work. It’s stressful.’
Zoe couldn’t let Win get away with it any longer. ‘It’s not just the house though, is it? Are we ever going to talk about the baby?’
Win sucked in a sigh, then pulled away from her. ‘That was months ago.’
‘Not even four months. That’s hardly any time at all.’
He flopped on his back. ‘What is there to say?’
And when he asked that, Zoe hardly knew where to begin. ‘I don’t know. Don’t you think it’s odd that we never talk about it?’
Win sighed again. ‘Look, Zo, I have to get up. I planned to have a run this morning.’
Zoe pulled a face and rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t go for a run. Stop shutting me out and stay and talk to me. Anyway…’ She angled her neck so she could see the time on her phone, which was on top of a pile of books by the bed. ‘You don’t have time for a run. We’re having a site meeting this morning. There’s absolutely no way that you’ve forgotten about it.’
‘That’s why I need to go for a run,’ Win said. ‘I’ve been lying here thinking about all the issues I want to bring up and I can already feel my blood pressure starting to climb.’
‘Maybe a run isn’t such a bad idea then.’ Zoe tried to offer up something more conciliatory. To show Win that she could be understanding, empathetic to his needs and wouldn’t it be wonderful if he could be the same? ‘You usually feel better afterwards.’
Win was already flinging back the covers. ‘If you want to spend some time together, then you could come with me, if you liked.’
Zoe burrowed deeper into the space that Win had just vacated. It was warm, smelt like him. ‘It’s raining,’ she pointed out, because the faint patter against the windows was all the proof she needed that, although she did want to spend time with Win more than anything, nothing good could come from going for a run. ‘Also, I haven’t so much as broken into a light jog for ages. Running might actually kill me.’
‘It won’t kill you.’ Win’s voice was muffled as he pulled on something black and waterproof. ‘It will just feel like you’re being killed.’
Maybe it was because Win had cracked a joke, was teasing her, which he hadn’t done in weeks, that Zoe decided that there were worse ways to die.
It was still raining when they reached Highgate Woods. Zoe tried to think about the hot shower she’d have after her run, then she remembered that there was still no shower, just a rubber attachment that connected to the bath taps, which invariably fell off, usually when she was trying to rinse out shampoo. Until a new boiler was installed, the water was only ever lukewarm at best too.
There was a small crowd of people waiting for one of the wood-keepers to unlock the gate. Runners jogging on the spot, a frail old man with a West Highland terrier that looked even more frail than him, more dog walkers arriving as one of the keepers finally pulled up on the other side of the gate in his little buggy.
‘It still counts as spending time together if we run in the same enclosed space but would you be offended if we headed off in different directions?’ Zoe asked Win as they threaded their way through the bend in the now open gate.
Win didn’t bother to hide his relief. He preferred to run at the mercy of an app that barked instructions at him to increase his speed and lengthen his gait and beeped to mark every half a kilometre. Win was that person cluttering up his friends’ Facebook walls and Twitter timelines with smug pronouncements like ‘Win ran 8.3 km using the Lets!Run app’, though every time he did, Ed and Theo would both post in the comments, ‘Dude, nobody cares!’
Now, Win sprinted nimbly away and Zoe tried not to unduly exert herself with a very slow trot. She huffed and puffed as she negotiated a really steep slope, then another one, then a really muddy bit before she came to the big green, the cricket pitch. Past the playground, the toilets and before she knew it, she was back at Gypsy Gate, where they’d entered the woods.
Win had already passed her a couple of times with a cheery wave and now that she was actually almost running, taking in huge gulps of clean air, pushing herself that little bit further, relishing the burn in her chest, the ache in her legs, Zoe felt like the person that she’d been before. She could even forgive her body that cruel trick it had played on her because now that she was almost running, she felt as if she were back in charge.
Even when Zoe thought she couldn’t go on, couldn’t make it up yet another slope without her lungs bursting, she had a soundtrack of eighties power ballads, show tunes and Taylor Swift to spur her on. However, it took the big guns, a Beyoncé/Destiny’s Child megamix, to get Zoe through the third and final lap.
She was an Independent Woman and feeling no pain as she sprinted down a steep slope then had to suddenly veer off course as something charged at her ankles. Zoe skidded over a muddy patch and into a puddle, arms pinwheeling, barely managing to stay upright.
‘What the hell?’ She looked down to see what she’d tripped over. Of course, it was a dog. She’d spent her whole run dodging dogs who would appear as if from nowhere.
This was an ugly little thing. Of indeterminate breed, possibly some pug in (Zoe had a cursory look at the undercarriage) her. Rotund and white with brown splodges all over her body and a ferocious underbite, which gave the dog a quizzical expression. She was wearing a bright blue tabard emblazoned with the logo of the local dog shelter and the words ‘Adopt me!’, and trailing a very muddy lead.
‘Hey, doggie.’ Zoe crouched down and made kissing noises and the dog bounded over and immediately rested her chin on Zoe’s knee. Zoe obligingly stroked behind its ears with one hand and was just about to take her phone out of her sports armband to ring the number on its tag when she heard a faint cry.
‘Beyoncé! Beyoncé! Where are you, baby? Beyoncé!’
Zoe blinked to make sure that she wasn’t dreaming, though if she was, it was a very sub-par dream unless Beyoncé herself was about to appear at the crest of the hill. Alas, she didn’t, just a woman with three other dogs in blue tabards.
‘Beyoncé, there you are!’ she exclaimed. ‘Sorry! I was picking up poo when she saw a squirrel and shot off.’
‘It’s OK,’ Zoe said. She was still squatting, Beyoncé’s head resting on her knee as she gazed at Zoe with big brown eyes that looked as if they’d been ringed with kohl. ‘We’ve been getting to know each other. What breed is she, then?’
‘A bit of pug and French bulldog, definitely some Staffy, and who knows what else?’ The woman picked up Beyoncé’s lead and Zoe fell into step with her, trainers squelching, as she explained how Beyoncé had been picked up as a stray a couple of days ago and had had puppies not long before that.
‘Probably used as a breeding bitch though there must have been a problem with her last litter and her owners threw her out when they realised they couldn’t make any more money out of her,’ the woman, Wendy, said as Zoe looked at Beyoncé who was trotting quite contentedly alongside her.
Zoe felt a twinge of solidarity with this odd little dog.
‘She seems happy enough, though,’ Zoe commented.
‘She’s happy to be out. She gets very stressed in kennels. We’re desperate to place her in a foster home,’ the woman said with heavy emphasis as they skirted around the field, but Zoe refused to be drawn. Win wanted a dog but Zoe was the one at home all day who’d get stuck with walking it and picking up poo and handling tins of stinky dog food.
‘Oh, I’m more of a cat person,’ Zoe said and wondered how to extricate herself before she agreed to foster Beyoncé, who was looking up at her beseechingly. She also wondered where Win was. He should have passed her at least twice by now.
They turned a corner and Zoe saw him. ‘Oh God, I have to go.’
She went from nought to sixty, running full pelt, because Win was sitting on a log, face screwed up in pain, one of his legs stretched out before him at an awkward angle and smeared with mud and blood. ‘Are you hurt?’ she panted before she even reached him. ‘Of course you’re hurt! What did you do? Are you all right?’
There was an older man in running gear with Win, who turned at Zoe’s approach. ‘He’s a bit winded,’ he said, as Win clutched his chest and winced and for one awful, world-tilting moment Zoe thought that he was having a heart attack, then Win took his hand away and shook his head.
‘I slipped, caught my foot on a root or a rock.’ He winced again. ‘I’m fine. More embarrassed than anything.’ Win wasn’t the type of man who got a mild cold and took to his bed as if he had bronchial pneumonia. He was more of the stoic suffering in silence type.
‘You don’t look fine,’ Zoe said. ‘You look the opposite of fine.’ His face was pale, grey, and Zoe forced her eyes down to his splayed-out left leg. ‘You’re bleeding.’
Win’s knee still looked like its normal, knobbly self but there was a deep laceration which gushed blood like a small tributary merrily making its way to the sea. So much blood. Zoe turned her head and threw up a mouthful of bile, bitter and acrid.
‘Are you all right?’ It was Win’s turn to ask, his voice sharp, as Zoe wiped her hand against her mouth and leaned back against the other man, who was now holding her up, because her legs didn’t want to. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘So sorry. I don’t know what came over me.’
The blood. There was still so much she couldn’t remember, didn’t want to remember, about that night. Passages of time gone, erased, but she remembered the blood.
Remembered the pain she’d had in her side for a week. A stitch on her right side, which had come and gone then became a constant, slightly worrying thing, which she self-diagnosed after a phone call to her mother and a quick Google search as trapped wind, maybe even indigestion. Nothing that Gaviscon and some yoga stretches couldn’t sort out.
And then that night, after dinner, though Zoe could hardly eat a thing and she had a pounding headache, they went through the surveyor’s report on the house in Highgate and Gavin’s estimates for the work that needed to be done.
Zoe had sat there with her hand tightly pressed against her side as Win did the sums one more time, then looked up from his pad because he preferred to do maths the old-fashioned way with pen and paper. ‘Zo, we really can’t afford it,’ he’d said with genuine regret in his voice. ‘If it was just superficial work, then we could muddle through, do it bit by bit, but this is big, expensive, structural… God, you look awful.’
‘Yeah, really don’t feel that great.’ Her face twisted with the effort it took to talk. ‘I’m starting to think I might have appendicitis.’
Win put a cool hand on her hot, clammy forehead. ‘Or you could actually go and see a doctor. Tomorrow, first thing, I’m going to ring up the surgery and get you an emergency appointment.’
‘I have to send off some final artwork before lunchtime,’ Zoe protested without much vigour. ‘I’ll go in the afternoon. I promise.’
Then Win had explained about the house. How much they’d have to increase their existing mortgage, make inroads into their savings, that estimates were never a good indication of how much things would cost in the end. Zoe couldn’t concentrate. Could hardly bear to sit on the hard kitchen stool.
‘Hold that thought,’ she’d said and got up, started shuffling to the bathroom because even walking added another level to the pain and she couldn’t remember if she’d planned to take a bath, or do some more stretches, but what she remembered next was lying on the bathroom floor, Win kneeling over her, his face as pale as the white bathroom tiles.
‘Don’t leave me,’ he’d said. ‘You hear me, Zo? Don’t you dare leave me.’
‘Where would I go?’ She was being carried away on a sea of pain, of blood, could see splashes of it on the floor and Win had put a towel between her legs to try and staunch the flow and covered her with one of the big bathsheets, a shroud stained with a trail of bright red. He’d used their nicest towels; the ones they’d got as wedding presents.
Then Zoe was gone, to a place beyond the pain. The rest was half-glimpsed: the paramedics in green looming over her in the ambulance, the lights dancing over her head as she was wheeled along a hospital corridor.
Waking up, Win on one side of her, leaning over so his head rested on the bed, Jackie on the other side clutching Zoe’s hand. To be told her fallopian tube had ruptured as a result of an ectopic pregnancy. A collection of cells, which could have evolved into a brand new person, had taken root in the wrong place. That she’d lost something precious without ever knowing that it was there.
They’d cleaned her up but when Zoe had lifted a heavy hand to her face, there was dried blood caked under her fingernails. It was hardly surprising when there’d been so much of it. So much blood.
Zoe rocked back in her soggy trainers. Forced her attention back to Win and the blood that ran down his leg. ‘Can you walk?’
The man, he said his name was Brian, helped them make their slow, torturous way home. Win took tiny mincing steps, his features contorted in pain.
Zoe hadn’t ever thought she’d be pleased to see the house, but she was relieved to turn the corner and there it was with its new roof and sacks of rubble in the drive.
Brian stayed with them until they reached their front door. ‘You’ll be running again in no time,’ he said, then looked doubtfully at Win’s knee. ‘You really should get that X-rayed.’
‘You really should,’ Zoe said, as she helped Win to manoeuvre through the door. ‘We’ll cancel the site meeting and I’ll drive you to the Whittington.’
Then she shuddered and thought she might throw up again. When Win had called for an ambulance that night, they’d taken Zoe to the Whittington Hospital as the emergency resus unit at the Royal Free, which was nearer, was backed up. ‘I am never setting foot in the Whittington again,’ Win gritted, echoing Zoe’s own thoughts. ‘And we are not cancelling the meeting. It’s taken weeks to get everyone to agree to be in the same place at the same time.’