Life was grand for Win who toddled off to work each morning, stopping off at his gym on the way so he could have a hot shower. He worked for a small accountancy practice whose offices were on the top two floors of a house on the posh side of Camden Town and they had a kitchen, central heating, a lavatory that flushed first time; all the mod cons.
And Zoe… Zoe had none of those things.
So as soon as Win left, Zoe would wait for Gavin, their builder and Win’s stepfather, and his crew to arrive, parrot back the instructions that Win had asked her to relay while Gavin cast his eyes to the heavens, and then she would leave too.
It was a straight walk downhill through Highgate Woods to Muswell Hill and the childhood home of Zoe’s best friend, Cath, who would be waiting for Zoe’s arrival, alerted by text message.
‘Hot water’s on, kettle’s on,’ she’d call out as Zoe unlatched the gate. ‘Do you want tea or shower first?’
Zoe and Cath had met eight years ago at the Hay Festival. They’d ended up in the same cab driven by the most racist taxi driver in the world.
For fifteen minutes he’d taken them on a white-knuckle ride down twisty country lanes as he’d railed against foreigners, immigrants and living in London where nobody spoke English and they ‘handed out council houses to anyone fresh off the boat’. Zoe had sat there in an agony of embarrassment, fury and indecision, every muscle tensed in indignation, until she couldn’t bear it any more.
‘Excuse me! But you’re being absolutely offensive,’ she’d squeaked at the same time that Cath had said in a furious voice, ‘Actually, my boyfriend’s black and even if he wasn’t, you are bang out of order.’
A minute later Zoe and Cath were standing by the side of the road, somewhere near the Welsh border, because the most racist taxi driver in the world had thrown them out of his cab.
As they tried to get a signal to phone one of the festival volunteers to deliver them to their hotel, they’d bonded over their current dire situation and once they were back in London and discovered that they both had boyfriends who worked in financial services and were obsessed with Arsenal and spending their Saturdays in second-hand record shops, their friendship was a done deal.
Eight years of Zoe and Cath going out and getting drunk together then nursing their hangovers with kill-or-cure fry-ups the next day. Of mini breaks to Paris, Berlin, Prague and New York. Of suffering the slings and arrows of bad book sales.
So, when Zoe needed near daily access to hot water, a Wi-Fi signal and a working kitchen, Cath hadn’t thought twice about offering up her facilities and Zoe had accepted with only the most token of protests.
Despite her friend’s love of karaoke, gin-based cocktails and jumpsuits, Zoe had always thought there was something quite Renaissance-like about Cath’s beauty; thick brown pre-Raphaelite curls, quite startling green eyes, the elegant sweep of her brow and cheekbones, but lately, she looked haunted and harried as months of worry had taken their toll.
Last summer, Cath’s father Clive, funny, clever Clive, had tripped over a wobbly paving slab and broken his hip. The accident had knocked the stuffing out of him; taken away his innate Cliveness. Before the accident, he’d swum three times a week, was a docent at Highgate Cemetery, a keen gardener and organised local history walks. But now after four months in hospital where he’d then caught a superbug that proved resistant to most antibiotics, Clive was diminished: timid and frail and glued to Homes Under the Hammer, when Zoe popped her head round the living room door to say hello.
So frail that Cath and her boyfriend Theo had rented out their flat in Finsbury Park and moved in with Clive because Cath’s older brother lived in Aberdeen, her older sister had emigrated to Australia and her younger brother spent his days in an anarcho-Marxist squat in Camberwell smoking skunk.
‘I think your dad seems a little brighter today,’ a freshly showered Zoe ventured, because this morning Clive had managed a smile when he’d greeted her.
‘I can’t see it myself,’ Cath said sourly as Zoe helped herself to toast. ‘He wasn’t like this when my mum died.’
Cath’s mother had died from a vicious form of bone cancer when Cath was still at university, long before she and Zoe had met, so Zoe didn’t know how Clive had coped back then. But she knew how he was now and how he’d been before.
‘He’s lost his confidence,’ she told Cath gently. ‘He’d been leading a really full, very busy life, just a few aches and pains occasionally, then suddenly he brushes up against his own mortality. That’s got to be scary, hasn’t it?’
Cath nodded. ‘I suppose.’ She sighed. ‘I just find it, him, the situation, frustrating.’
‘Is he doing his physio?’
‘Only when I stand over him and nag. I hate nagging but I do it all the time lately. I nag Theo. I nag both my brothers when I speak to them because would it kill either of them to visit? My inner voice has become shrill and hectoring. Ugh! Enough about me.’ Cath looked up from her coffee cup. ‘What about you, Zo? How are you?’
This was Zoe’s cue to rant about how it was impossible to work in a freezing cold house with builders hammering and drilling and singing along enthusiastically to Heart FM. Gavin was constantly knocking on the door of the back bedroom where Zoe lurked to update her on the latest live fuse they’d found sticking out of a wall or to ask her opinion on some topic of house repair that Zoe wasn’t qualified to have an opinion on.
But these were minor problems, compared to what Clive and Cath were going through. Compared to a lot of other people who didn’t have anywhere to live or anyone to love them. There were people facing terminal illness, life-limiting prognoses. People suffering from mental health issues. There were a lot of people, millions of them, far worse off than Zoe.
‘Well, at least Win and I have each other,’ she told Cath. ‘So, there’s that. Someone else to share the pain of splinters. It’s amazing how many splinters you get when you have the builders in.’
Cath pursed her lips, exhaled then closed her mouth. Twisted her lips again. ‘You know how I have this whole child-hating persona where I bitch about women pushing their Bugaboos three abreast along the pavement and I tut and roll my eyes if I hear children not using their indoor voices? But I hope you also know that if things had turned out differently, I would have been the proudest, most doting honorary aunt the world had ever seen and I’m absolutely here for you if you want to talk about the baby. You get that, right?’
Zoe nodded and she couldn’t do any more than that for a moment because there was a throbbing in her throat, a prickle behind her eyes… She swallowed hard. ‘I do get that and thank you, but honestly I… I… don’t even know how to talk about it or what I’d want to say.’ Unlike Cath, Zoe loved children – she made a living from writing children’s books so doing author events would have been challenging if she didn’t – but she’d been not quite ready yet on the having-a-baby front, while Win had been ambivalent. Zoe had known that at some point in the nearish future they were due a serious conversation about if and when they were going to start a family but now she wasn’t undecided so much as terrified, maybe even unable. ‘I didn’t even know I was pregnant so being sad feels a bit hypocritical.’
‘It’s OK to be sad though.’ Cath gestured at Zoe’s sketch pad, which should have been full of drawings for a new picture book proposal about Reggie, a hardened city mouse used to living on his wits and the mean streets, who ended up in the countryside only to be ostracised by the local field mice for his thuggish city ways.
Instead the pages were covered in sketches of a little boy with dark hair like Win’s, impossibly big eyes, fat cheeks made for being kissed.
‘It’s been two and a half months since it happened,’ Zoe said, closing her sketch pad. ‘I don’t know why I can’t just move on, stop dwelling over it. So, anyway… have you heard back from your agent yet?’
‘Has Win moved on, then?’ Cath persisted, because she was off her game lately and wasn’t picking up on the signal that Zoe had just sent out to indicate that the subject was no longer up for discussion.
‘Who knows? Mostly Win is obsessed with his day-to-day wall planner, which takes up the entire hall,’ Zoe said with great feeling, but not good feelings. ‘Gavin’s meant to place the right colour sticker on each task as he completes it and Win is forever fussing over the bloody thing and moving stickers and drawing pins around like some general planning military manoeuvres. It’s the only thing that’s occupying his mind at the moment.’
That wasn’t fair. Or strictly true. Guilt swept over Zoe like a prickly heat rash. ‘I shouldn’t be so mean. It’s good that Win’s on top of all the house stuff, but it’s been ages since we talked about anything that wasn’t house-related. Last night we talked about flaunching the chimney stacks.’
‘Sounds rude,’ Cath decided. ‘What’s flaunching?’
Zoe shrugged. ‘I’m still not entirely sure.’
‘All Theo and I talk about is my dad,’ Cath offered. ‘Last night we compared and contrasted various styles of stairlift. When did we become responsible adults?’
‘I don’t know, but I miss being irresponsible,’ Zoe said and then with great responsibility and not much enthusiasm, she reached for her sketch pad again. ‘Cath, we really need to stop talking and get working.’
At four, Zoe left Cath’s for the walk back up Muswell Hill Road (she was fast realising that there was no way to get anywhere in their new neighbourhood that didn’t involve a brutal uphill walk) but, as ever, the thought of the wall planner made her delay going home.
Sometimes she would go and work in the library, which was five minutes away from Elysian Place. It was warm and there was free Wi-Fi and a public toilet but the library was also a refuge for mothers and where there were mothers there were children, from impossibly small, tightly swaddled newborns to rambunctious toddlers who ran about shrieking and bashing each other over the head with soft toys.
Each childish yelp made something inside Zoe twist and ache and she’d have to pack up her papers and pens and leave.
She couldn’t bear the thought of the library today but walking home and taking the scenic route through Highgate Woods was never a chore. There were babies in Highgate Woods too but they tended to stay in their prams. And much better than babies were the dogs; from large, sleek red Vizslas to silly, curly cockerpoos and everything in between. Zoe had a particular tendresse for the dogs from the local animal shelter who were walked by volunteers, the dogs wearing blue tabards with ‘Adopt me!’ printed on them. They tended to be mostly Staffies who’d lunge at Zoe, only to bat their big square heads against her hand until she gave in and stroked them.
All the while, as she walked, her left hand kept returning to the pocket of her parka. Even with gloves on, Zoe could feel the round button against her fingertips. A red cherry button once attached to a tiny cardigan for a tiny baby. It must have fallen off the night that she and Win had unearthed the layette set in the suitcase at the back of the wardrobe.
The next morning, Zoe had spotted the button, red and faded, on the dusty floor. It was cracked and brittle, made before plastic was invented. She thought it was probably Bakelite. It was the sort of thing Win would know but she hadn’t told Win about the button; she didn’t want to talk about anything that would cause his face to grow tight and cold. So she’d put the button away, only to find that she had to keep checking on it; picking it up, turning it this way and that. Wondering who’d bought it and sewn it onto that tiny cardigan.
In the end, Zoe had painted the button with clear nail varnish to stop it cracking further and now it was always there in her pocket. Not a good luck charm, not when even the most abstract thought about babies, of what had been lost, made Zoe curse her own bad luck. She supposed the button was a worry bead, if anything. Something real that she could fuss at instead of the thing that gnawed at the inside of her head whenever she thought about it.
Zoe clasped her fingers around the button now as she arrived back at Elysian Place just as Gavin was packing up so he could give her a detailed progress report, which she’d then impart to Win.
‘It would be much easier if you both, oh, I don’t know, maybe called each other,’ she said to Gavin as he bombarded her with information about the party wall agreement.
‘Ah, no. You see, if I start speaking to Win about this, then we’ll stop speaking,’ Gavin said, which was cryptic but also the truth. Gavin and Win had stopped speaking for two months when Gavin had installed a new kitchen and bathroom in their old flat. They’d both promised that this time Gavin would communicate better and Win wouldn’t micromanage everything, but they’d broken those promises within a week. ‘Don’t worry about it, pet. This is the nature of house renovations. Things get much worse before they can get better.’
‘They’re not going to get much worse, are they?’ Zoe asked with a desperate note to her voice. ‘I thought they were already next-level worse. Peak worse.’
‘A few months from now, when this place is all shipshape, you’ll hardly remember what a shithole it was,’ Gavin said sagely and then he was gone.