On a Beautiful Day Read online

  Chapter Four

  ‘Aaaaand . . . are we ready? Miiissss Polly had a dolly who was SICK, SICK, SICK . . .’

  It was Monday morning and India was leading from the front, a maraca in each hand. This was what she did: chief musician in her very own orchestra. Or, rather, she ran the Mini Music: Happy Tunes for Happy Children franchise for south Manchester, and hosted baby and toddler classes in various draughty church halls four days a week. This, needless to say, had never been part of the career plan. This had not been what teenage India had envisaged all those years ago when she’d had a provisional letter of acceptance from the Royal College of Music. That was life for you, though, wasn’t it? Life and its nasty little habit of lobbing you a curve ball just when you weren’t expecting it.

  ‘She called for the doctor to come QUICK, QUICK, QUICK!’ Beam and sing, beam and sing: that was the mantra that circled around her head sometimes, as she worked through her repertoire. ‘Throw yourself into it,’ Lisa had advised when she’d handed over the franchise to India. ‘It’s all about the energy and enthusiasm. Big smiles and joyful faces mean big cheques and rebooked places!’

  ‘The doctor ca-ame with her BAG and her HAT . . .’ Yes, India had changed the gender of the doctor, and what of it? Why not start the girl-empowerment right here, when they were eight months old? Sometimes it was only by amusing herself with such small acts of rebellion that she managed to stop herself from stabbing the maracas into her own eye sockets. ‘And she kno-ocked on the door with a RAT-A-TAT-TAT!’

  Someone in the room had silently filled their nappy. Perhaps it was India’s over-enthusiastic knocking on the floor that had startled them into a bowel movement, although, let’s face it, dreadful smells and loud farts were invariably an occupational hazard of this line of work. She would open a window just as soon as this song finished, perhaps make a joke about it. A polite sort of joke, obviously. (‘Do not, under any circumstances, offend the parents,’ Lisa had warned, back in the day. She was blonde and perky, with frosted eyeshadow and energetic hand movements. ‘I know you wouldn’t, but – we’ve got to make them feel great too, yeah? This is all about enrichment, fun and joy!’)

  These words had echoed grimly around India’s head for the four years she’d been running the classes. It had seemed like a good idea back when Kit, her youngest, was two and Lisa announced she was going back to her old job in HR, and thus the business was up for grabs. ‘India, you’re musical,’ she’d said, dimpling at her at the end of a session. ‘Ever thought about a new career?’

  It had been like the universe laughing at her, right there. As if Lisa knew about India’s past. Oh, ha-ha. Let’s kick a woman while she’s down.

  Sleep-deprived and – yes, okay, judge her for it – just a tiny bit bored of being a full-time mum, India had been flattered by Lisa’s comment, though. An exhausted mother of three, you had to take a compliment whenever you could get it, frankly. And maybe this was a chance to put her crap business degree into practice, the business degree she’d ended up taking when she mucked up her A-levels in spectacular style and didn’t make it to her prestigious music college.

  Besides, if ever there was a means of atonement for mistakes made, then this was it, she had realized. See how nice I am to the babies, see how hard I smile at them despite their crusty noses and foul-smelling nappies, see how I can get those toddlers doing the actions to ‘Wind the Bobbin Up’ with such charming exuberance that their parents are all beaming with pride. I’m sorry, Universe, okay? This is me, abasing myself and taking my punishment. Am I forgiven yet?

  ‘I’ll be ba-ack in the morning, yes, I WILL, WILL, WILL!’ India clapped her hands and smiled round at her class. ‘Well done, everyone, what a lot of super singing! And, just like the dolly’s doctor, I’ll be back too, same time, same place next week. But now it’s time to put all our instruments back in the box, please. Thanks for coming!’

  Driving home after her last class of the day, tambourines clinking in the boot as she went over each speed bump, India realized that she was humming ‘Five Little Ducks’ under her breath and rolled her eyes at her own ridiculous self.

  I think you’ve got something special, Miss Nolan, her A-level music teacher, had once said to her. Miss Nolan who had a permanent cold and who crunched blackcurrant-scented cough sweets through every lesson. Her eyes had been so earnest and hopeful that gauche teenage India had felt embarrassed, unsure what to do with the compliment other than shuffle her feet around. I mean it, India, I think you’re the real deal.

  So much for that. If Miss Nolan could see her now, she’d probably have a good old laugh at what had become of her former star pupil, India thought glumly. Either that or give up making doomed predictions for evermore.

  She switched on the radio to banish the irritatingly stupid five little ducks from her head, cursing as a bus pulled out in front of her with a stinking belch of exhaust fumes.

  ‘The time is coming up to three o’clock, let’s have the local news,’ said a young male voice, and India drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, glancing at the clock and hoping she wouldn’t be stuck behind the bus for too long. She first had to make it home, find somewhere to park (not one of her skills) and then dash breathlessly along to the school in order to pick up her younger two children. Esme, who was nine and drifted through life in a sparkly daydream, never seemed to care what time her mother arrived, but Kit, who was six, liked to see her waiting in the playground for him the very instant that school was over, taking it as a personal affront if she was even a minute late. (George, her eldest, was eleven and no longer wanted to be seen on the same bit of pavement as her, electing instead to make his own way home. ‘You are too embarrassing,’ he had informed her, devastatingly.)

  ‘Police have released further details following the crash that took place in the city centre on Saturday,’ said the newsreader, and India felt herself stiffen. She’d avoided watching the news all weekend, not wanting to see footage or hear updates, and she was about to turn the radio off again when she saw a chance to overtake the bus, which she did, rashly and too fast.

  ‘Two of the injured pedestrians remain in hospital, as well as the driver of the vehicle, who is thought to have suffered a heart attack at the wheel. Police have named the pedestrians as Miriam Kerwin, fifty-seven, from Didsbury, and twenty-year-old Alice Goldsm—’

  India gasped out loud, swerving inadvertently towards an oncoming Fiat, before pulling over at the kerb and putting a hand up to her mouth. Oh my God. Her heart was pounding.

  ‘Meanwhile, the driver, sixty-two-year-old Sandy MacAllister, remains in a critical condition,’ the newsreader went on, and India jabbed at the button with shaking fingers to silence him. Her blood seemed to be throbbing in her veins. No, she told herself. No, India. Don’t be silly.

  The bus sailed past her once more but she barely noticed, one hand up on her chest as her breath came, fast and shallow. It was only when she realized it was five past three, and she really, really needed to get a move on, that she started the engine and numbly pulled out once more.

  Meanwhile, across town, Laura was not exactly having a productive time at work. In the morning she had stared at a blank screen for a full twenty-five minutes, willing the press release about Glow Wonder Night Serum to write itself. Being the communications manager for a beauty-products company seemed kind of trivial today. What is the point? she kept thinking, swinging to and fro on her swivel chair as she searched fruitlessly for inspiration. What is the point of this?

  Ever since Saturday, and the horrific metal-grinding car crash, she had been asking herself this question a lot. Deliberating over which fabric conditioner to buy in the supermarket, putting on mascara in the morning, sitting through interminably long production meetings at work . . . why was she bothering with any of it? Why did anyone care about these ridiculous things, when there were people still in hospital after Saturday’s accident, when Death could come at you from out of nowhere? Life was short, she kept thin
king, it was really, really short, and time could pass you by when you were looking the other way. Look at her working in this place, for instance – five years she’d been at BodyWorks now: five whole years. That had never been part of her life-plan. Sure, it wasn’t terrible; the location was great – two minutes from Market Street – and her colleagues were mostly lovely, but sometimes she couldn’t help feeling that the beauty industry was all just a tiny bit too . . . well, shallow, basically. Frivolous. Spending her days thinking up campaigns that encouraged people to waste money on products that barely made any difference was hardly the pinnacle of achievement for mankind; not exactly up there with pioneering scientific breakthroughs or saving people’s lives. Was this really what she wanted to be doing, when there were so many other possibilities out there?

  Heaving a sigh, she stared back at her computer. Meanwhile, here in the real world, there was still an empty screen in front of her, a patiently winking cursor and no press release.

  Glow Wonder is . . . she typed, then paused, hands on the keyboard, her creativity seemingly having taken an early lunch break. She found herself remembering how, back when she’d originally applied for this job, she’d had to submit a test press release for a new hand cream as part of the selection process. Trying to help, Matt had spent a whole evening brainstorming with her, although his main contribution had been the completely unsexy suggestion ‘It’s kind of . . . gooey?’ They had roared with laughter at the sheer crapness of the sentence, at how hilariously inapt it would be within a press release and, since then, it had become one of their in-jokes, frequently wheeled out to describe a dodgy cheese soufflé, an ancient tube of glue, a mawkish Christmas card from his mum.

  Kind of gooey, she typed now, for her own amusement, before backspacing through the letters again. It had been a while since she and Matt had laughed like that, admittedly. He’d come back late and steaming drunk from the football on Saturday (happy drunk – United had won in extra time and his throat was hoarse from singing), and then they’d been at his parents’ house for Sunday lunch, after which he’d slumped on the sofa and nodded off until it was time to go home.

  Staring at the screen again, she felt a wave of boredom break over her. The thing was, back when she’d accepted this job, she’d secretly assumed she’d only be there a year before getting pregnant and swanning off on maternity leave. But twelve months had slipped by, and then another twelve months, and she’d started to feel trapped, as if she couldn’t leave. What if she handed in her notice and then got pregnant? What if she started a new job and then got pregnant? The timing would be all wrong. The safest thing, she had decided, was to stick it out here, and keep on trying in the bedroom. And trying. And trying. And . . .

  Anyway, she said to herself, forcing a stop to her downward spiral of doom as she noticed her boss, Deborah, approaching. Okay, Glow Wonder Night Cream: time to pull some writing out the bag, and fast. Shallow and frivolous or not, it was Glow Wonder and its stablemates who were paying her wages, after all.

  So that was the morning. The afternoon saw Deborah calling the entire company to the boardroom to make a big announcement: that BodyWorks would be bringing out a new line of maternity and baby products, and that the whole team was going to be involved ‘pretty much from conception onwards, ha-ha’. As the senior management team elaborated about luxury body lotions for mums-to-be, and a delicate organic range for the newest of new babies’ sensitive skin, Laura could feel a creeping agitation start up inside her, a prickling dismay. Oh Lord. And she was going to have to write gushing press releases for all of this stuff, wasn’t she, wanging on about the beauties of a pregnant belly and the gorgeous smell of a newborn baby’s head, while inside she felt like screaming and crying and throwing things around the office. Because that was what happened when, month after month, your own reproductive system refused to cooperate with your wishes. That was the sort of maniac spell it cast upon a woman.

  Deborah had broken off, mid-spiel, and was giving her a very odd look. Yikes, thought Laura, she hadn’t gone and blurted any of that out loud, had she?

  ‘Laura?’ her boss was saying. ‘Are you with us?’

  ‘Of course, yes, absolutely, just thinking how wonderful it all sounds,’ she cried enthusiastically in response. Ground, come and swallow me right on up, she thought, her cheeks becoming fiery as everyone turned to stare.

  She and Matt had been unofficially trying for a baby for almost six years now, originally in a casual, laying-off-the-contraception-and-seeing-what-happens manner, and then more recently with an increasingly serious, charting-ovulation, we-need-to-do-it-TODAY approach. So far she had had three pregnancies – joy, joy! – followed by three agonizing miscarriages, and she was starting to despair that her own body had it in for her. Ooh, look, pregnant, hormonal – this could be it, this could be happening . . . NAH. Changed my mind. Off to hospital, for a scrape and a cry, you go.

  Three tiny babies who never made it past the ten-week stage, a trinity of tiny snuffed-out infants who hadn’t reached the finish line of birth. She carried them with her always, that unborn trio – her failed pregnancies, as the medical staff spoke of them – ghostly and far away, their pale infant arms reaching imploringly to her across the divide. My darlings. My angels. Although she and Matt had tried their hardest not to dwell on the what-might-have-been, those phantom babies had taken up space between them, moving in silently and reproachfully, to create a division of dead air that it was proving more and more difficult to ignore. I’m sorry, he had said each time she ended up in hospital, and he’d held her and soothed her, and they’d cried together, tears wet on one another’s shoulders. But however kind he was, however supportive and tender, she could see it in his eyes sometimes, a flash of disappointment – with her and her incompetent uterus, her body’s inability to hang on to those poor helpless babies quite long enough.

  These days they had stopped talking about the subject altogether. He had asked her to desist from telling him when she was ovulating, because he said it made him feel under pressure, like he was some kind of performing bear. She had reached a grudging stand-off with her body, as it dutifully offered up a period every twenty-eight days, and she had learned to squash down her hopes of a small, warm body in her arms, of Moses baskets and baby vests and travel-system pushchairs, just in case it was her wild, desperate yearning that was actually putting the baby off. (Somehow. Maybe. Look, she wasn’t a scientist, all right? But she wouldn’t be surprised if such a phenomenon was possible. Wouldn’t that be just her luck?)

  Tuesday afternoon was Jo’s sexual-health drop-in clinic and even though she had so far seen a selection of genital warts and quite the most disgusting discharge in one case of gonorrhoea, she found herself singing ‘Oh Happy Day’ without a single shred of irony as she threw another pair of latex gloves into the bin. Because it was a happy day, despite the grey clouds outside, despite the rashes and crusty bits and weeping sores that would be making up her workload for the next hour and forty-five minutes.

  Who would have thought, twelve months ago, when she was on her knees with marriage break-up agony, that she would ever feel like this again? That she would have met someone like Rick, who was so funny and sexy and lovely, who kissed her all over, as if he really liked her too, who brought her coffee in the morning and had the most fantastic flat in a fancy new apartment block right in the centre of town? Who? Nobody – that was who. Least of all Jo herself.

  Goodness, though, the last few days had been glorious. The passion! The laughs! The cosiness and cuddling, too; the waking up and not being on her own in bed . . . just that closeness of having another person to go back to after work. How she’d missed it. How she loved it.

  She had stayed at Rick’s place the whole weekend and still hadn’t left. Rushing into things? Whatever. Her landlord remained AWOL, the electricity remained off, and so Rick had shrugged and extended the invitation. ‘Stay as long as you like’ had been his exact words, and a thrill had surged through her, both
at his generosity and at the fact that this bubble of bliss could continue. And that he hadn’t gone off her, either, having now seen every inch of her naked, freckled body.

  ‘Seriously? That is so kind,’ she’d said, stunned. They were in the bath at the time, a deep hot bubbly one, with glasses of wine and candles. (The decadence! The luxury! Jo had almost stopped feeling self-conscious about her wobbly bits, it felt so fabulous.) ‘Are you sure? Wait, though . . . Aren’t you off to Dublin this week?’

  That easy shrug again. ‘That’s all right. You can stay here while I’m away.’ He’d raised an eyebrow at her and, for some reason, it made her pulse race. (The man even had sexy eyebrows, would you believe.) ‘You can go crazy and water my plants for me, if you feel like it.’

  ‘I will shower them with love and care,’ she assured him. ‘I might even put your post in a neat little pile for you and everything. No extra charge!’

  She smiled now, remembering, whilst trying to ignore the suspicious voice that kept muttering darkly in her head about this all being too good to be true. Three whole nights they’d spent together now, and it was as if her body had been shocked back into life, reawakened after a long lonely slumber by the things he did to her. Whoa. How unlikely and unexpected to feel like this again, at the age of forty-two, when she’d all but written herself off as spinster material for the rest of her life!

  Anyway. Enough sighing and dreaming. It was time to call in her next patient, who would no doubt bring her back down to earth. But just then she heard the sound of her phone ringing in her bag. Whoops, she thought guiltily, because she must have forgotten to turn it to silent. In the next second she thought, I hope it’s him.