Hope to Die

She goes back over to the sofa, feeling the hit of alcohol on her empty stomach. The TV is still on, some politician all hot under the collar about Brexit. As if it matters. As if any of it matters.

She sips again at the drink and tips back her head as the liquid burns down.

Not the father of that child

Not the father of that child

Not the father of that child

The words keep playing in her head. There’s something comforting in the rhythm of them. Like a nursery rhyme. ‘Three Blind Mice’. Or ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’. So charming and innocent and half nonsensical, until you find out where it came from and realize that the song your child is singing is about plague and death. Not her child, of course. No child of hers ever sang anything because she couldn’t have one. She wasn’t a proper woman, you see. Not the ‘real thing’.

Not the father of that child

Not the father of that child

Ring a ring the words go round. When Fawley phoned earlier she could tell he thought he was bearing good news – that she’d be happy and relieved. Vindicated. But there’d never been any doubt about it, not in her mind. She knew Nigel hadn’t fathered that baby, for the simple reason that Camilla had dumped him long before. She’d heard him, on his office phone when he thought she was asleep, begging the little tart to take him back and getting the cold shoulder because she was bored with him and had only let him screw her in the first place because it was her way of sticking it to her parents. Not that Nigel realized it, of course. He thought it was all about him. Men – men and their bloody egos.

She takes another shot of brandy, a larger one.

Not the father of that child

True. But very far from being the whole truth and she knows it. What about the other child – the one that came before? The one that wasn’t even given the chance to be born – what about that child?

She still remembers the look on Nigel’s face, the day it came out about Camilla. The day it was all over the news, and there were journalists at the door, and a police investigation, and he sat her down and gave her a brandy. It’s the only other time she’s ever drunk the stuff. Perhaps that’s why it’s coming back so vividly now. He gave her a brandy and he told her. What he’d done, and how ashamed he was, and how it had never happened again, before or since, and she had to believe him that he knew nothing – nothing – about the missing baby. That bit about other affairs was a lie, for a start, but she’d let him burble on, sitting there gripping her hand in his hot chubby fingers, wallowing in his terror and self-pity, and when he’d finished she told him she already knew. She’d known for years. She knew he’d got the little slut pregnant when she was barely fourteen. She knew he’d used their money to pay for her to get rid of it. She knew it all. The look on his face was almost worth the wait. His slack mouth opening and closing like some huge stupid goldfish. A rather tacky and unedifying pleasure, admittedly, but no less sweet for that. All those years, he’d thought he was the one with secrets, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.

Because there was something else she knew. Something she never told him. Not that day, not ever.

The message on his office phone, the message he never got. The woman didn’t leave her name, but Sheila knew it was Camilla – she’d have known that voice anywhere. Whining on and on, saying she was sorry for how she’d treated him in the past but she needed him now. That there was no one else she could turn to, no one else who could help, no one but him. That there wasn’t much time – if she waited any longer it would be too late – too late to ‘sort it out’ –

She knew what the little tart was going on about, of course. She’d gone and got herself banged up again, hadn’t she. Well, Nigel wasn’t going to be spending their hard-earned money fixing it – not if she had anything to do with it. Not this time. Not when it wasn’t even his kid. So she’d just pressed ‘Erase’ and walked away. But she hadn’t forgotten, and all those years later, when it started to come out, she’d wondered. Because she was pretty sure it had been that summer, the summer of 1997, right about the time the tart must have realized she was pregnant with that baby. The one they said she killed. Sheila didn’t feel guilty – oh no, the little cow deserved everything that was coming to her – but she’d wondered all the same. Because if Nigel had actually heard that message, none of this would have happened. Camilla would have had another abortion and that would have been the end of it. No missing child, no scandal, no court case. No press harassment either, and no bloody Netflix.

And no heart attack?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

She settles back against the cushions and closes her eyes. It doesn’t matter. Not really.

None of it does.

Not any more.

* * *