The Perfect House Read online

  After what felt like minutes, the rival bidder shook his head and the auctioneer picked up his pen.

  ‘Sold for £330,000 to number 143.’

  Tom sat back in the chair and exhaled long and hard, as though someone had let all the air out of him. An overwhelming urge to giggle gripped Ellie. They did it! They won!

  ‘Oh my God,’ Tom whispered, helping her out of the seat. ‘What have I done?’

  A youngish man in a jumper with ‘Stockfield Auction House’ embroidered on the chest sat in the office, smiling as they approached. Tom’s lips returned a shell-shocked smile.

  ‘Won’t be a moment,’ the clerk said. ‘I’ll just get the paperwork.’

  Grey metal filing cabinets lined the office walls. They both sat on uncomfortable plastic chairs, shooting secret pleased-dazed looks at each other.

  ‘We got it!’ Ellie mouthed and Tom leaned across to give her a loud smacking kiss.

  While Tom and the clerk sorted transferring the deposit, Ellie side-eyed the vendor’s details on the desk: ‘Ms Catherine Wilson’ and a street address in Toronto. Shan had mentioned the owner lived in Canada. No wonder the house felt so forlorn.

  The man brought documents over, still warm from the copier. A couple of signatures, a final handshake and 6 Moss Lane was as good as theirs.

  ‘I’ll be in touch with the completion date soon. Congratulations and …’ The clerk hesitated for a few seconds before he added, ‘Best of luck.’

  Tom groaned and dropped his face into his hands. ‘I can’t believe I did that. What was I thinking?’

  Ellie, who was mentally cartwheeling across the car park, peeled his fingers away and covered them in little kisses. ‘You were thinking we couldn’t lose our perfect house for the sake of a few thousand, same as me.’

  In the car, his panic ballooned as the reality sank in. ‘Head not heart, I said. I told myself I wasn’t going to get carried away. Where are we going to find an extra twenty grand?’

  ‘I’ll sell my car.’

  ‘Won’t cover it. We’ll have to increase the mortgage or use our savings.’ He pulled his phone out and tapped. He frowned at the screen and when he spoke, it was tinged with incredulity. ‘How can I have seven voicemails?’

  ‘Sorry. I put it on silent.’ She manoeuvred the seat back and stretched her tired legs into the footwell. ‘I was worried you’d miss the auction if the station called.’

  Easy-going was Tom’s default setting, but as he listened in grave silence to the messages, the dial had definitely turned to ‘rattled’. Ellie closed her eyes. The adrenalin of the auction had trickled away and from her toenails to her ponytail, every inch of her ached. She leaned against the headrest and tugged the bobble from her hair, massaging her scalp with her fingertips. No matter what happened, the house was theirs. That was all that mattered.

  Only the occasional phrase of Tom’s monologue filtered through as they drove back to his dad’s. ‘Work stuff … Monthly repayments … Contingency budget … Nursery fees … Ask Dad for a loan.’ And it wasn’t until he said her name that she realised they had parked outside Howard’s.

  ‘I’m sorry about your phone,’ she said weakly, opening the gate.

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’ He grabbed her hand, rubbing his thumb over hers. ‘Are you sure you’re all right? I can ask if I can have the rest of the day off.’ The air shimmered at the edges like a heat haze.

  ‘It’s just a bit of a headache,’ she lied. ‘You go. I’ve already dropped you in it enough at work for one day.’

  He held her face with his palms and scrutinised her carefully. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll sort this one thing and be straight back, then we can celebrate. I’m sorry I panicked about the money. Everything’s going to be fine.’ He kissed her. ‘In fact, everything’s going to be perfect.’

  Somehow, she arranged her features into a convincing smile. When the rumble of the car’s engine had merged into the traffic, Ellie dragged herself upstairs and collapsed onto the bed. Colours exploded behind her eyelids in a migraine supernova and the pain scouring the inside of her skull scrubbed thoughts of Tom, the baby, 6 Moss Lane, everything away until nothing existed apart from clean, shining pain.

  She closed her eyes and everything turned black.

  4. Now

  Someone was moaning. She was moaning.

  A knuckle tapped the door. ‘Are you all right, love?’

  The ‘No’ was a groan, but it was enough. Floorboards creaked. Smoke drifted in.

  ‘Wait there,’ Howard said.

  Like she had a choice.

  After that came a chaos of blue lights and sirens. Pain skewered her temples. A woman with a Geordie accent held her hair while she vomited.

  ‘It’s all right, pet,’ she said. ‘We’ll soon have you sorted out.’

  Minutes, maybe hours later, she bumped down a ramp and was wheeled along corridors smelling of school dinners and Dettol. Lights flashed and dimmed. When the trolley stopped, a faceless man tried to get her to wee in a bottle. A curtain rattled on plastic rings, caught in a flurry of hushed movement.

  ‘Where’s Tom?’ she whispered. The Geordie accent promised he was on his way.

  A needle of light pierced the darkness. Ellie’s pupils contracted. Behind the glare, she saw the woman in black from Moss Lane. But then she clicked off the torch, turned to speak to a masked man and the resemblance disappeared.

  A band tightened, beeped, tightened again on Ellie’s upper arm. Fragments of conversation broke through. Protein. PCR test. Blood pressure. Theatre. Another stranger warned her to expect a ‘sharp scratch’. Sleep sucked her down a black hole and she fell gratefully in.

  5. Now

  She woke to the sound of sniffing.

  Slowly, a dim cubicle swam into focus. On the left, a plastic jug and a cardboard bowl. Under her, a rock-hard mattress. Level with the pillow sat Tom with his hair stuck up at odd angles. He was blowing his nose on a piece of toilet roll.

  In the twelve years they had been together, she had only seen him cry twice. The first was the night Mia died. The second, in the visitors’ lounge at Willow Lodge.

  Had they sent her back there?

  Tom poured water into a scratched plastic beaker and held it to her lips, one hand curled under to catch the drips.

  ‘Here.’

  Water streamed down her chin as she gulped.

  ‘Sip it.’ He moved the cup out of reach. ‘You’ll make yourself sick.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  Tom blinked bloodshot eyes. ‘Don’t you remember anything?’

  Pain. Geordie accent. Sirens. Willow Lodge? No. That was years ago. Ambulance?

  Now that rang a bell.

  ‘Sweetheart, I am so, so sorry.’

  At the misery in Tom’s voice, the bell became a shrieking klaxon.

  Panic thrust her forward, but a sharp sting halted the movement. What was that? A plastic thing stuck to the back of her hand. A thin tube that led to a drip. She stared, struggling to recognise this pink swollen hand as her own. It looked like an inflated rubber glove.

  She felt strange. She felt numb. She felt … empty.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  He brought her hand to his lips.

  ‘You’ve had an emergency C-section.’

  Her mind scrabbled for a foothold.

  ‘Your blood pressure went sky high and Dad rang the ambulance,’ He drew in a deep, shuddering breath. ‘It’s all my fault. I am so, so sorry. If I hadn’t gone on about the money and my phone. If stayed with you after the auction, you wouldn’t have got so stressed and …’

  His voice slid over her ears. Was this even real? The baby wasn’t due for five weeks. It was as though she had wandered on to the set of a soap opera and any minute now, the director would yell ‘Cut’ and she would still be pregnant.

  She wasn’t pregnant.

  ‘Where’s the baby?’

  Tom tried to smile. ‘She’s in neonatal intensive care.’
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  Shivers convulsed her. Her teeth chattered cartoon-style, but there was nothing remotely funny about any of this. Tom draped the blanket around her and lowered his face to hers. His eyelashes sparkled.

  ‘The baby’s small, and she needs some help to breathe. But she’s going to be fine. And she’s beautiful, just like her mum. See.’

  He took out his phone. Click. A pinkish blur appeared, swamped by a nappy and wearing a red knit cap. Spread-eagled in an incubator, tubes and wires snaking to machines.

  Trinity. Their daughter, so small and red and new. She reached to stroke the image. He brought the phone closer. Even the simple act of scissoring her fingers drained her energy. She zoomed in on the baby, her face, her miniature fingers and toes. Her ankle, circled with a tiny plastic ring.

  ‘I know the breathing stuff looks scary, but it’s just a precaution,’ Tom added. ‘The doctor said she should be taken off it later today.’

  ‘I want to see her.’

  He kissed her knuckles. ‘I’m sorry, love. They said you’ve got to stay here under observation for forty-eight hours.’

  Forty-eight hours? She shuffled up the bed, or at least, her brain sent the order but her legs refused to obey. Instead, something cut into the soft skin of her belly like wire. She retched and Tom rushed to pour more water, but she waved the jug aside.

  ‘I’m not waiting for two days.’

  Tom half stood and lightly pressed her shoulders. ‘Stay still or you’ll rip your stitches. You’ve got to let yourself recover. Listen, I know it’s hard, but she’s in the best care.’

  ‘Let me look at her again.’

  He tilted the screen showing the close-up of the baby’s hospital tag. Ellie stared.

  Baby Wight, it read. September 12th.

  Realisation crashed around her. ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Tuesday. Just gone eight in the morning. You’ve been here since last night.’

  September 12th.

  The anniversary.

  She dropped back on the pillow and closed her eyes. You could spend your days believing you had escaped the past. Every time today turned into yesterday, the secret guilt sank a little further from the surface until one day, you woke up and your first thought wasn’t ‘Mia’s dead’.

  ‘Ellie?’ Tom whispered. ‘I promised your mum I’d ring when you woke up. I won’t be long.’

  After a few seconds, his lips bumped her ear. Too much coffee had soured his breath. The curtain rattled on its track and his footsteps retreated.

  September 12th. Her daughter’s premature birth and her best friend’s premature death. Present and past, forever entwined.

  It’s my fault, Tom had said. But it wasn’t. It was hers.

  Rain drummed on a flat roof. A distant machine beeped and every few minutes, an ambulance sped under the window. A faulty light flickered and her mind, which should have been filled with the baby, swarmed with images of Mia.

  Karma hadn’t forgotten her at all.

  6. Now

  The time passed in a chaos of tests, injections, blood pressure spikes but the physical pain was eclipsed by the pain of not seeing the baby. What if they looked into each other’s eyes and felt nothing?

  Unable to sleep, Ellie listened to the pulse of the night shift. Swishing mops, murmured conversations and the soft beat of the cleaners’ shoes transported her to the months after Mia died. With comfy beds and their own stuff – books, posters, teddies – Willow Lodge was meant to have a laid-back home-from-home vibe, not a hospital feel. And it could have worked, except at home, your mum didn’t swipe you in and out or confiscate your nail scissors. Oh, and there was nothing laid-back about Willow Lodge.

  Lying in the narrow hospital bed she remembered a resident, Alina, whose baby had been taken into emergency foster care. On her first day at Willow Lodge, she smashed her forehead so hard against the visitors’ lounge wall that her blood stamped poppies on the plaster. Although Ellie never knew what happened to Alina, or her baby, she understood the girl’s anguish. The pain of separation.

  When Ellie was finally wheeled in to her daughter, a rolling wave of love swept away her fears. A fierce love that started in her gut and roared through every cell in her body. She looked in her daughter’s eyes and felt everything.

  Determined to make up for lost time, she followed the midwife’s instructions as though they were carved on tablets of stone. Expressed milk. Cupped those doll-sized feet. Stroked the peach-soft limbs. Lay skin-on-skin. Kissed each one of her tiny, perfect fingers and toes. Ellie held her and sang to her and did everything she could to make up for the fact she had so royally screwed up Trinity’s arrival on the planet.

  But every inch of her hurt. And she was so tired. Whenever she cajoled the baby to latch on, the tiny fists would flail: You’re doing it wrong! By the time they mastered feeding (Ellie lying on her side, holding the baby like a rugby ball and almost not wincing) she’d overshot the miracle of motherhood and landed squarely on knackered where she remained, permanently dazed, for the next five weeks.

  Days and nights merged in a jumble of blood pressure complications, feeds, nappy changes, check-ups, and a surgical site infection that extended their stay until Ellie thought they would never be discharged. Visitors came with flowers and helium balloons. And Tom, worn out from juggling work with moving, brought the completion paperwork and photos so she could plan how to put their stamp on 6 Moss Lane.

  At last both of them were well enough to leave. Ellie dressed Trinity in a ladybird vest Jess had brought in and covered her with the white cellular blanket, exactly as she had been shown.

  ‘Home tomorrow, baby,’ she whispered. ‘Daddy’s been working hard to get everything ready for you.’

  When Trinity sank into the twilight calm of the hospital, Ellie tried to follow. But the other patients’ nocturnal coughs and moans kept jerking her back to wakefulness. She weaved in and out of uneasy dreams, until a new sound caught her attention: the carefully subdued swish of the curtain. She hugged the covers.

  Go away. Need sleep.

  The cot wheels gave a tiny metallic squeak.

  Ellie’s eyes flew open.

  A woman stood in the cubicle. No nurse’s uniform. The greying crown of a head and black-clad bumps of spine leaned over the cot.

  ‘Hey!’ Ellie said, struggling to extricate herself from the paralysing sheets.

  The stranger lifted a finger to her lips. Dirt lined the creases and a grimy crescent marked the nail. Glasses. Iron-streaked dark hair.

  ‘I know you,’ Ellie said, louder. ‘I saw you on Moss Lane. What are you doing?’

  In reply, the woman reached her filthy hands into the cot. The track rattled as the curtain whipped open and she vanished into the darkness of the ward before the baby’s blanket even hit the floor. A silver ‘It’s a girl!’ balloon bobbed in her wake.

  Ellie thrashed her legs. ‘Come back!’

  The covers pinned her to the mattress. She twisted and kicked, but they held her tight. Grunting with effort, she tore at the taut fabric. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t save her baby.

  ‘Stop her! Help!’

  Ignoring the ripping sensation across her stomach, she yanked the call bell, but a nurse was already striding towards the cubicle.

  Finally, the covers came free. She swung her legs over the side.

  ‘She’s stolen my baby! Quick, catch her.’

  The nurse jogged the last few feet and caught Ellie’s elbow.

  ‘Nobody’s taken your baby. Look, she’s right there.’

  Ellie followed the nurse’s gaze to the cot and did a double take. Trinity lay in her ladybird vest, delicate fists curled, her face tranquil in deep sleep.

  Some of the other patients began calling out, asking what was going on. What’s the fuss? A new-born launched a thin wail and it didn’t take long for others to join the chorus.

  Panic made Ellie’s voice shrill. ‘I saw her. She tried to snatch my baby. I know where she lives.’

>   Around them, the murmurs intensified. Taken a baby? Where? Who?

  An eerie glow emanated from one of the bays as a phone screen illuminated. The nurse addressed the small side ward, pleasantly but firmly.

  ‘Everything’s fine, ladies. Someone’s had a bad dream, that’s all.’ Frowning at splotches of dirt, the nurse stooped to pick Trinity’s blanket off the faded tiles. ‘Let’s get you a clean one.’

  ‘She must have walked right past you,’ Ellie insisted, clenching fistfuls of hospital sheet. ‘Why didn’t you stop her?’

  The nurse shook out a fresh blanket and expertly tucked Trinity in.

  ‘Anyone coming through that door walks past me,’ the nurse said crisply. ‘And I haven’t seen another soul all night.’

  ‘Then you can’t have been looking. I saw her.’

  A cloud crossed the nurse’s face. ‘I can review the CCTV and note your concerns on your file if you like.’

  Skin slick with sweat and weakened by ebbing adrenalin, Ellie flopped back onto the pillow. Stupid. The security was watertight. A member of staff buzzed everyone in and out and checked their ID. Only that morning, she’d seen an irate dad refused entry.

  ‘It seemed so real,’ she said quietly.

  The nurse’s irritated expression softened. ‘You had an SSI and you’ve been put on blood pressure medication, right?’

  ‘Yeah. I had pre-eclampsia and it hasn’t gone back to normal yet.’

  ‘Well, vivid dreams can be a side effect. Have you had any other symptoms? Low mood, anxiety, confusion?’

  Ellie shook her head. ‘Just tiredness.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure every new mum has nightmares about something happening to the baby, especially if there have been complications. Try and get some sleep now. You’ll feel better in the morning.’

  The white clogs shushed across the tiles to the midwives’ station. In the cot, Trinity slumbered on, her blanket rising and falling with each fluttering breath.

  With the covers up to her chin and her heart beating erratically, Ellie tried to relax her muscles in turn the way they’d been taught at Willow Lodge. Soften the cheek muscles, loosen the jaw. But her forehead stayed tense. Something was … off. What was it?