Tallulah can feel herself begin to blossom and grow during these weeks, as winter turns to spring. Her life now brings her two sources of joy. Her baby boy. Her secret girlfriend. The days grow longer, the nights grow warmer, Noah gets bigger andlearns how to hug, Scarlett dyes her hair lilac and has Tallulah’s initials tattooed on the side of her foot.
tm
‘If anyone asks,’ she says, ‘I’ll say it stands for ‘trademark’.’
But Zach is still in Tallulah’s life and Zach is not a source of joy.
He’s working extra hours at the builders’ depot, desperate to grow a nest egg of money so that they can get their own place together. He has a spreadsheet and demands that Tallulah sit down every evening to look at it with him.
‘Look,’ he says, pointing at figures, scrolling up and down. ‘If I can get the promotion to assistant aisle manager next month, that’d be an extra sixty-eight a week. Plus overtime. Plus my mum says she can lend us a couple of thousand, so I reckon by the summer, look … we’d have 13,559 pounds. In the bank. And obviously we’d end up in a shared ownership, most likely, but there are some really nice ones, just outside Reigate. Look.’ And then he switches screens to a new tab where he has the details of some tiny, boxy flats with no outside space for Noah, miles and miles away from here, from her mum, from Manton, from Scarlett, and Tallulah nods and makes a smile and says, ‘They look really cute,’ and all the while she is thinking,No, no, no.No, I do not want to live there with you.
Instead, she is thinking of a world without Zach in it, trying to imagine the contours of that world, how smooth and perfect itwould be just to exist for Noah and for Scarlett, not to have to exist for anyone else.
At the beginning of April, when she is nineteen years and old and Zach is nineteen years old and they have had their joint party – a subdued affair at an American-themed restaurant in Manton, just family, not friends, saving money for the flat that Tallulah has no intention of ever moving into, for the life that she has no intention of ever living – Zach books a viewing at one of the flats on his shortlist for Saturday morning.
He’s buzzing with it all that morning as he showers and dresses.
‘Nineteen years old,’ he says. ‘Nineteen years old and about to buy his first property. Ha!’
Tallulah’s mum drives them to the development and they all peer through the windows at the half-built blocks of flats lined up alongside the A25. They are constructed from a kind of off-black brick, with areas of dark grey plastic cladding designed to look like wood. Each block is built around a courtyard lined with tiny saplings encircled with wooden fencing and new baby grass covered in netting. A woman in a glass office greets them effusively, and expresses wonder at their young age, at the cuteness of Noah and excitement at the concept oftheir very first home.
She takes them to see three units. They’re all icy cold and smell of paint and laminate glue and their voices echo when they speak. One has views across the A25, the next has views across the central courtyard, and the last across the scrappy edges of Reigate’s suburbs. The kitchens are shiny and white, designed to emulate the huge glossy kitchens of rich people’s mansions, buta tenth of the size. Around the bathtub there are metro tiles in shiny dark grey to match the cladding on the outside of the building. It’s all very smart. It’s all very modern. It’s all so very not what Tallulah wants. But her mum makes all sorts of positive noises and a conversation buzzes around her head between Zach, the saleswoman and her mum about the layouts, the potential, which would be Noah’s room, what colour you could paint the walls, the local area, the new supermarket about to open in the retail development across the way, and Tallulah feels numb and scared that she is letting this happen to her; angry that she is nineteen years old and in love with Scarlett Jacques, but looking at flats in a cold block with a man she wishes was dead.
In the car on the way home she sits in the back and holds Noah’s hand as he sleeps. In the front Zach and her mother are chatting. After a moment her mother turns to Tallulah and says, ‘What did you think, sweetie?’
‘They were nice.’
‘Which one did you like best?’
‘The one facing the courtyard,’ she replies dutifully, as she knows that’s the one Zach likes the best and it will draw the conversation away from her.
In bed that night, in the warm, airless space between Noah’s and Zach’s sleeping bodies, Tallulah decides that when she sees Scarlett the next day she is going to tell her about Noah. She is going to tell Scarlett that she is a mother, that she has had a baby, that the stretch marks Scarlett has run her fingertips over are not because she ‘used to be fat’ but because she once grew an 8-lb 2-oz baby inside her. And then she is going to ask her to stopbeing her secret girlfriend, and be her real girlfriend, and she is going to tell her mother, and she is going to tell Zach, and she is going to stop her life veering off into this place of flats on A roads and controlling boyfriends and secrets. She is going to own her destiny, own her identity; she is going to be true and real and honest, her best, most authentic and pure self.
The following day she watches Zach leave with his football kit bag over his shoulder from her bedroom window and she throws her things into her bag, runs down to the kitchen, kisses Noah and her mother, grabs the bike from the side return, straps on her helmet and cycles as she never cycled before to Dark Place.
But at the front door she sees another bike, leaning up against the place where she normally leaves hers. She glances around herself, but can see no sign of anyone. Maybe, she thinks, it’s the gardener, maybe it’s a cleaner or someone come to skim leaves off their swimming pool. She rings the doorbell, her heart pattering under her rib cage with the exertion of cycling so fast, the anticipation of seeing Scarlett, and the door opens and there is Scarlett, still in her pyjamas, her hair scraped back into a spiky bun, and there is a young man, in jeans and an old-fashioned navy-blue jumper with a high zipped neck.
Scarlett looks at Tallulah and then at the man, and then she says, ‘Lules. This is Liam. Liam, this is Tallulah.’
Tallulah throws Scarlett a questioning look. She sees Scarlett’s hand go to her neck to cover a mark. She sees that under her pyjama top she is braless. She looks at Liam, who eyes her strangely before saying, ‘Nice to meet you.’
He has bare feet and his shoes are nowhere to be seen.
‘Liam came over last night,’ Scarlett says, her hand still clutching her neck. ‘I was having a freak-out and my mum was out. He decided – well,we—’
‘It was me, really,’ Liam chips in. ‘I decided to stay over because we had a bit to drink—’
‘Yes. It was safer. So, he stayed.’
‘Yes. I stayed. And now,’ he says, ‘I’m going, if only I could remember where I put my shoes.’ He starts to wander about the hallway, hunting for his shoes, and Tallulah looks at Scarlett.
‘What the hell?’ Tallulah whispers.
Scarlett shrugs. ‘I’m not allowed to call you. So I called him.’
Tallulah peels Scarlett’s fingers away from her neck and sees the tell-tale grey-red graze of a love bite.
Scarlett’s fingers snap straight back to the spot. ‘It was a messy night,’ she says. ‘We didn’t have sex. We just … you know …’