Two

Gary Fisher looked at his apprentice Anthony in the rearview mirror and then stole a glance at Anthony’s girlfriend who sat next to him in the van. It wasn’t Tiffany tagging along on a job he objected to so much, but strapped in a car seat next to her was her and Anthony’s five-month-old baby girl, Jordan.

“Look, mate,” Gary said, keeping his eyes on the road. “You know I don’t normally mind you taking time off if you need it. But bringing your girlfriend and your kid on a job, well, it’s not exactly the kind of image I want to present to clients—never mind the Health and Safety people.”

“I’m sorry, Gary,” Anthony said. “But there’s no heating in the flat, the last tenant never paid their bills, and they haven’t turned the gas back on yet.”

“And I can’t go home,” Tiffany said, looking down at Jordan. “Mom would never let me see Ant again if I did.”

Gary had to concede that point. Tiffany’s parents had threat-ened to turn her out on the street for even dating a black kid. When they found out that not only did she love him but she was having his baby, they did throw her out and her dad threatened to kill Anthony, and Gary wasn’t sure it was an idle threat, either. He didn’t know Tiffany’s parents, but her dad had a bit of reputation in the area as a hard man. Tiffany had stayed with Anthony at his mom’s until the baby was born and then Tiffany got offered a flat by the Council. Thirteenth floor but not a bad little place; Gary knew, he’d been round to check the wiring.

If it had been any other seventeen-year-old who’d made his fifteen-year-old girlfriend pregnant and homeless all at once, Gary would have been worried. But he wasn’t worried about Anthony and Tiff. Anthony was a good worker and determined to support his family, and Tiff, who had celebrated her sixteenth birthday seven months pregnant at Gary’s business premises with a cup of tea and a bun, had a good sensible head on her shoulders. She was a steady girl, despite her conflict with her parents and the fact that she was over a year younger than Anthony and hadn’t officially left school yet. Still, Gary thought, there was a good chance they’d be just fine; all they needed was a little bit of support now and then, and he didn’t mind doing his bit. They were good kids.

All three of them.

“They said the gas will be on tomorrow, Gary—this is the last time, I swear,” Tiffany said.

Gary shrugged and pulled the van up to pavement outside Number 42, Albion Road.

“You’d better wait here while we see what sort of job it is,” he told Tiff. “I’ll leave the heater on for you.”

Tiff nodded and the second he opened the van door she started to fiddle with the radio dial, desperate to get it tuned into anything except Gary’s favorite, Classic FM.

“Nice house,” Gary said, looking up at the three-story Georgian terrace. “Not often you see these still intact and not converted into ten poky flats.”

Anthony said nothing. He didn’t say much, Gary had noticed over the time they had worked together, unless something had to be said. It was a quality that Gary admired.

He knocked firmly on the door and after a few minutes a woman in a baggy sweatshirt and jogging bottoms opened it, with a baby on one hip.

“Oh thank God,” she said, smiling readily at him. “I am so glad you’re here. Come in! Don’t trip over anything. The lights aren’t working, well, nothing’s working. I checked the fuse box, it just keeps tripping. I unplugged every appliance but still no joy, I’m afraid.”

“Gary Fisher,” Gary said, holding out a hand which Natalie shook with her free one. She had a pretty firm grip for a woman, Gary noticed, and unlike most of his clients, both male and female, she seemed to have a bit of a clue about what she was saying. Her long and, from what he could see in this light, dark hair was tangled and in need of washing. She looked like she hadn’t slept recently and she had that kind of stale baby scent that hung around a new mother. But she acted as if she was decked out in her best party gear and feeling fantastic, which somehow made her seem quite appealing.

“Natalie Curzon,” she said. “I bought this house when it was a wreck. I’ve spent a fortune on getting it restored, including the electrics, but not the heating because that still works just about, and I thought it could wait until I had some money again. But anyway, I had a new fuse box in and everything only two years ago by, um…Coopers? Do you know them?”

Gary whistled through his teeth and shook his head.

“Anthony, get the flashlights from the van,” he said, as if he were asking the boy to pass him a scalpel.

“Oh God, it’s bad, isn’t it?” Natalie asked him, blinking in the full beam of the high-voltage light that Anthony, on his return, had unwittingly directed right into her eyes.

Gary laughed.

“It might be fine,” he said, with a smile that Natalie could just determine as he took the flashlight from his assistant and angled it downward. “Hopefully it won’t be too bad at all. Tell me where your fuse box is and I’ll see if I can get the power back on and then I’ll do some safety checks—okay?”

Natalie nodded. “Downstairs in the kitchen there’s a pantry cupboard on the left—it’s at the back of that.”

Gary and Anthony headed down to the basement taking the flashlight with them, and Natalie sat back down on the bottom stair with Freddie in her arms and looked wanly at her power-cut emergency candle that she had found in the designated place, in the drawer in the telephone table, as soon as she had finished calling the electrician. It had given her a sense of pleasure and true independence as she marveled at her own forethought and efficiency. Shame really that the same forethought and efficiency had not stretched to storing away any emergency matches too.

Just then the doorbell rang again. Thinking it would be more workmen, Natalie answered it and found a young girl, tall and pale, with what looked like a giant baby in her arms, on the doorstep. She was holding a small flashlight upward, shining it directly onto her face.

“I’m really sorry to bother you,” she said. “Only my boyfriend’s in there looking at your electrics? And I’m bursting for the loo. Would you mind? I brought a flashlight.”

Natalie blinked at the girl, who seemed impossibly thin and healthy-looking to be the mother of the baby. Her long blondish hair scraped back from her face in a girlish pony tail made her look impossibly young to be the girlfriend of Gary Fisher, who must be around forty if he was a day.

“Um, no, I suppose not,” Natalie said, stepping aside to let the girl in. In the gloom that was erratically illuminated by the beam of the flashlight Natalie thought the girl’s baby looked a lot bigger than Freddie, maybe five months old. And only five months after the birth this girl was already wearing straight hipster jeans with no sign that her flat belly had ever once been pregnant. Even with the flashlight it was too dark to see if the inch or so of exposed tummy had stretch marks, but somehow Natalie instinctively knew there wouldn’t be any. In two more months, give or take, Freddie would be five months old and Natalie knew there was no chance her stomach would ever look that way again without surgical intervention—in fact, it had never looked that way.

The girl was watching her expectantly.

“Oh,” Natalie said, tearing her envious eyes off the girl’s small firm breasts. “It’s up the stairs, straight ahead. The door with the frosted glass in it, but it’s dark, so mind the stairs.”

“I’ll take the flashlight,” the girl said. “Do you think you could manage another one?”

And before Natalie knew it she was holding two babies.

“Unbelievable,” she said to no one in particular, “I’m turning into a nursery.”

Natalie was still sitting on the bottom stair wondering what might be happening to her new best friends in the episode of Neighbours she was currently missing, and Gary Fisher was still in the kitchen, when the girl came back.

“That’s better,” she said, taking a seat next to Natalie on the steps. She lifted her baby out of Natalie’s lap with a “hmmph.”

“Oh good,” Natalie said. “Your baby weighs a ton, no offense.”

“None taken,” the girl said. “She eats all the time. Before she started on solids she used to watch us eating our tea, her little mouth working all the time. She loves her mashed veggies but I reckon she’s dying to get her gums into a cheeseburger!” She brushed Freddie’s forehead with the back of her finger. “It’s funny, Jordan is only twenty-two weeks old but I’ve already forgotten that she used to be so tiny. It goes so quick.”

Natalie eyes widened in the dark.

“Not in my house it doesn’t,” she said. “In my house it goes very, very slowly.”

The girl laughed, holding the flashlight between her knees so that its steady beam cast a wider light. “Yeah, it can feel like that too,” she agreed amiably. Her head bent over Freddie. “You are a right little darling, aren’t you? What’s your name, hey? What’s your name?”

“Freddie,” Natalie told her.

“Oh, that’s so sweet—why Freddie?”

Natalie could have told the truth, which was that all the time she was pregnant she had been certain she was having a girl. It made sense to her that it would be a girl. After all, Natalie was a girl, possibly the girliest kind of girl there was, and so of course her baby would be a girl. They would be a perfectly matched mother and daughter, Natalie had dreamed, enjoying a completely different relationship from the one she had with her own mother, which barely existed at all outside the occasional phone call filled with bitterness and recrimination. Natalie and her daughter would be more like best friends from the very start, going everywhere together and in a few years time choosing each other’s clothes and swapping makeup. Natalie had developed quite an elaborate plan for her and little Lucia. There had even been a wedding scheduled somewhere around 2031, the identity of the groom unknown and besides not as important as the dressing up.

So the fact that the baby had been a boy had thrown her quite considerably. And it took her almost a week to get used to the adjustment, a week in which he had no name at all. It wasn’t that she didn’t instantly love him, she loved him with a kind of passion and conviction that she had never experienced before. But she was still catching up to the fact that she had a son, a boy and tiny man that might like football and trains and cars and all sorts of things that Natalie had no understanding of at all.

She supposed that a name would sort of attach itself to him at least sometime before his first birthday. And then a few days after she had got back from the hospital she had been listening to Magic FM in the kitchen when they played. “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen. Something in the lyrics reminded Natalie of her son’s fledgling lust for life that he was already demonstrating on a daily and especially nightly basis, and she decided that until a more suitable name came up she would call him Freddie; after all, he certainly had a great pair of lungs on him.

“All the firstborn males in the Curzon family are called Frederick,” she told the young girl instead, for no particular reason other than it was more interesting than the truth. “It goes back centuries. To, um—Frederick the Great.”

“That’s cool!” the girl said. “I had millions of names for this one, girl or boy. Anthony wanted to call her Thierry if she was a boy because he’s an Arsenal Football Club fan, but I said no way is my kid getting a name that’s going to get it bullied at school. So we settled on Terry, which was bad enough. But luckily she was a girl. I love Jordan, don’t you? She so strong and independent and clever, too, a real role model, don’t you think? My name’s Tiffany, by the way.”

“And I’m Natalie, pleased to meet you.” Natalie shook the girl’s hand awkwardly between the babies.

Silence fell in the gloomy hallway as the thirty-six-year-old and the girl who was less than half her age tried to think of something else to talk about. Natalie peered at the face of her watch.

“Neighbours is on TV at the moment and I’m missing it,” she said. “I know it shouldn’t matter because nothing ever actually happens in any episode, but since I had Freddie my whole world’s shrunk to about thirty-two square meters, do you know what I mean?”

Tiffany looked at Natalie. “I don’t watch much telly, so not really,” she said, making Natalie feel suddenly dumbed down. “But if you’re bored, this is near Newington Green, isn’t it? Barton Lodge Health Center’s up the road, isn’t it?”

Natalie nodded; it was where she was scheduled to take her baby to see the dreaded health visitor, a woman Natalie thought couldn’t seem less interested in babies if she had tried.

“They’ve got a class starting there tonight in a few minutes, at six. Baby First Aid—do you know about it?”

Natalie shook her head. “I’m not very good at knowing that sort of stuff,” she said. “It all sounds a bit too much like school for my liking.”

“Well, it’s on every couple of weeks,” Tiffany explained. “I’ve been meaning to go since Jordan was born, but I don’t fancy going on my own. People look at me like they think they know everything about me,” she added darkly.

“Because you’re so young, you mean?” Natalie asked.

“Yeah,” Tiffany said, lifting her head a little. “They think I’m some dumb cow who got herself knocked up to get benefits, or get off school, or to try and trap a bloke. But I’m not like that. I was on the pill and we used condoms—we were just the unlucky 0.01 percent that still gets pregnant. I wanted to take my final exams this year so I could graduate, but it just didn’t work out that way. I’m still going to do them one day, hopefully. Anthony and me just want to be together, like a proper family. We’re not another statistic on the evening news and it really gets me that all those middle-class rich bitch housewives think they can judge me…no offense.”

“None taken,” Natalie said, both surprised and impressed by the teen’s force of personality. And then she realized what Tiffany had said. “Oh, Anthony’s the father. I thought it was…”

“Not Gary?” Tiffany giggled. “He’s ancient!”

“Do you mind. He’s about my age!”

Both women laughed.

“We could go together if you like,” Tiffany said. “To the class? ’Cos I think it’s important to know all that stuff, don’t you? In case of emergencies or things.”

“Um.” Natalie wasn’t exactly sure what all that stuff was, but oddly enough she liked this Tiffany girl and the thought of getting out of the house to somewhere light and warm was alluring, even if it was on a cold and dark March afternoon and only to sit in the back of some boring class.

“I know it’s chilly out but he’ll be fine all bundled up in a sling,” Tiffany said, thinking she needed to persuade Natalie. “Jordan loved getting out right from when she was tiny. They like the colors and movement, you know. It stimulates their brain.”

Just then the lights came back on, making everybody squint and blink and Freddie fuss. Natalie hoisted him up onto her shoulder and bobbed up and down on the step until the whimpering subsided.

Gary Fisher, followed by Anthony, emerged from the basement. He looked pointedly at Tiffany and Jordan.

“I needed the loo,” Tiffany explained. “And Natalie didn’t mind.”

Gary gave her a skeptical look, wondering how she had managed to be on first-name terms with his new client before he was.

“It’s fine really,” Natalie told him, before adding hopefully, “Just a fuse then?”

Gary, who it seemed was more comfortable communicating with facial expressions than with words, twisted his mouth into a sideways knot and then puffed out his cheeks.

“Not exactly,” he said on an outward breath, as if he really didn’t want to tell her anything bad at all.

“How bad?” Natalie asked him.

The corners of Gary’s mouth plunged downward in a grimace.

“It’s pretty bad,” he said, looking as if the whole thing was his fault. “You don’t want to hear this but I have to tell you, it’s about as bad as it can get. It was dangerous. You’re really lucky that everything shorted without starting a fire—it could have been much worse…”

Gary stopped talking when Natalie burst into noisy, messy tears that surprised everyone, including Natalie, who didn’t just cry but emitted long, loud, heartfelt sobs that rattled with phlegm on every intake of breath.

“It’s all going wrong!” she wailed, starting Jordan off. “I can’t cope with this! How am I supposed to cope with…with…this!”

Inside her head Natalie could hear herself crying, and she could feel the overwhelming wave of anxiety that had gripped her without warning. But there was some integral part of her that was asking incredulously, “What am I doing?”

Internally she realized that things weren’t that bad and that of course she could cope with this, she’d coped with far worse in her time. It was an odd kind of split personality that had developed since Freddie was born. The “normal” her was still there; the capable and excellent-in-a-crisis woman she knew took pride in but she seemed to be trapped inside this other crazy woman who was prone to crying and wailing when she couldn’t get the lid off a jam jar never mind deal with a power cut.

Slowly Tiffany put her arm around Natalie’s shoulders. “There, there,” she said.

“I’m so sorry,” Natalie managed to say at last, calming down a little as she sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. “I don’t normally cry. I’ve got a business and a mortgage and everything…I used to be great under stress. I don’t know what’s happened to me recently.”

“That little one happened to you,” Tiffany told her, patting her shoulder gently. “This isn’t you. This is your hormones. You’re not a nut, honest. You wouldn’t believe the hell I put Anthony through right after Jordan came. It’s the same for us all. And the last thing you need is any kind of hassle on top of all that. So don’t worry, all right? You’re totally normal.”

Natalie looked at her baby’s now tranquil face—at least he wasn’t upset. A light switched on suddenly might unsettle him, but he didn’t seem the least bit distressed to be held by a sniveling, incompetent woman. She found herself smiling at him and then Tiffany.

“I made Jordan cry,” she said apologetically.

“She likes crying,” Tiffany said, patting Natalie’s shoulder lightly again. “It’s her main hobby.”

There was a cough by the front door and Gary edged a little closer to Natalie before crouching down beside her.

“I’m really sorry, Mrs.”—Natalie did not feel like filling in the gap so he went on—“I didn’t explain it very well. I mean, yes, it was dangerous, but like I said, you’ve been lucky. I can patch it up safely for you tonight and then I’ll need to come back and start rewiring as soon as possible. I’ve got a lot of jobs right now but if you decide to use me then I’ll put them on hold.” Gary glanced back over his shoulder at Anthony, who had thrust his hands deep into his pockets and was studying his sneakers with infinite care. “If you liked I could have a word with your husband…?”

Natalie sighed. She suddenly felt terribly tired and didn’t want to have to explain herself to the electrician, deciding it would be much less complicated to tell him a small but convenient lie instead.

“My husband works away a lot,” she said. “In…Dubai. He’s an engineer.” She glanced up at Gary’s concerned face and gave him a watery smile. “You’ll have to deal with me, I’m afraid. I’ll try to keep the crying down to the bare minimum.”

Gary nodded, his hands on his hips.

“Well, I don’t like to see anyone left in the lurch, least of all a young lady on her own. I can be back tomorrow to make a start if you like. Or if you want to get in a few quotes from other electricians and check my references…”

Natalie looked up at Gary Fisher. He wasn’t that much older than her, she thought, perhaps four or five years, but something about his turn of phrase and attitude made him seem as if he was from another era, when everybody lived in black and white and a nice cup of tea solved everything.

“Start in the morning,” she told him decisively, with a smile that would have been flirtatious if it wasn’t for the appalling condition of her skin, not to mention her swollen nose and red eyes. “And thank you very much. You’re my hero.”

Natalie was charmed to see Gary blush as he bustled back toward the cellar with Anthony to make sure it would be safe for the night.

“The power will have to go off again for a bit,” Gary warned her as he headed down the stairs.

Natalie looked thoughtfully at Tiffany. “Come on then,” she said. “Let’s go to the baby class thing.”

“It must be tough being on your own,” Tiffany said, as they headed toward the health center. “Haven’t you got any family to help out?”

“No,” Natalie said. “I was an only child and my dad was killed in a car accident when I was quite small and as for my mom…she lives in Spain. But it’s not help with Freddie that I want, it’s seeing people outside the four walls of the house. I’m going barking mad with no one but Fred to talk to all day. It’s just really nice to have a conversation with someone my own age—well, half my own age.”

Tiffany laughed. “You know what you need, don’t you?”

“A nanny?” Natalie suggested.

“No, dummy,” Tiff said amiably. “A baby group!”