Scarlett nods.
Tallulah turns her gaze back to the water, to the bowed heads of the ducks bobbing for the wet bread. She tries to picture herself telling various people in her life. Her mother would be fine. Ryan would be surprised but fine. Pretty much everyone she knows at college would be fine. There’s only one person she can’t ever imagine telling.
‘I can never tell Zach,’ she says. ‘He’d kill me.’
‘Kill you?’ Scarlett’s eyes are wide.
‘Yes. He’d kill me.’
‘Are you serious?’
Tallulah closes her eyes. She pictures his face, the way his jaw clenches together when he’s displeased about something, the way his fist comes down upon inanimate objects when he’s annoyed, the flare of his nostrils, the entitled tilt of his chin as he surveys the object of his displeasure. And she remembers the tightness of his hands around her arms when she told him that she didn’t have time for him and imagines that amplified tenfold if she told him that she was leaving him for a girl. Zach isn’t liberal. He has no time for political correctness. He is his mother’s son: small-minded, self-absorbed, inward-thinking, a little bit racist, a little bit homophobic, a little bit misogynistic. All those things that don’t matter when you’re fourteen and in love, but start to sprout insidiously to the surface over the years it takes you to go from child to adult, and even now it’s not blatant but she knows him well enough to know that it’s there. And she knows him well enough to know that he would be humiliated if he found out about her affair with Scarlett and that that humiliation would spill over into anger and that he is strong and he is already only one flash away from hurting her, constantly.
‘Yes,’ she replies, opening her eyes. ‘Yes. I think he would.’
‘Oh my God, Lula. Has he ever hit you?’
She shakes her head. ‘Not really.’
‘Not really?’
‘No. No, he hasn’t.’
Scarlett laces her fingers into her short hair and tugs at it, takes a couple of paces away and then paces back again. ‘Lula. God. I mean, this is bad. Do you even love him?’
‘I used to.’
‘But now?’
She shrugs and sniffs. ‘No,’ she says quietly. ‘Not any more. Not really.’
‘And do you want to spend the rest of your life with him?’
She shakes her head, hard. She can feel tears coming and she doesn’t want them. ‘No,’ she says, her voice cracking. ‘No. I don’t.’
‘Then fuck, Tallulah, you need to sort this out. You need to get rid of him. Because you can’t live your life like this. You can’t live your life being scared.’
‘But how do I get rid of him?’ Tallulah says. ‘How?’
Part Three
37
May 2017
The following afternoon, when she gets home from college, Tallulah takes Noah for a walk around the village at around the time that she would normally put him down for his afternoon nap and have sex with Zach. She turns her phone to silent and puts in her earbuds, the music turned up loud, refusing to allow the image of Zach getting back from work to an empty house to taint her thoughts.
She pushes the buggy into the Co-op and scopes the shop for Keziah. She spies her in the bakery aisle, stacking the shelves with self-raising flour. ‘Hiya,’ she says.
Keziah turns round. She glances at Tallulah and then into the buggy. When she sees Noah she claps her hands to her mouth andmakes a muffled squeaking noise. ‘Oh. My. God.’ She takes her hands from her mouth. ‘Oh my God. Lula. He is so beautiful.
Tallulah smiles and feels the swirl in her gut she always gets when someone tells her that her son is beautiful. ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Sorry he’s not awake. But I said I’d bring him in to show you.’
‘How old is he now?’
‘Eleven months.’
‘Oh my God. Where did the time go! Feels like it was only about five minutes ago you were just pregnant!’