Magpie Read online

  For the first couple of weeks, this devotion had been ardently reciprocated, and then Matt had disappeared for several days, causing her spirals of anxiety. She kept calling him and WhatsApping and there would be no reply and the messages would be left unread until, finally, after a whole week of silence, he had texted her with ‘Watcha doin?’ She had been so happy to hear from him that the previous torturous bout of sadness and self-doubt was entirely forgotten, and they began the whole cycle over again. This lasted for five months, until Matt fell out of her life without a single word of goodbye and promptly blocked her from his phone.

  ‘What about Matt?’ she said as the nail technician rubbed her feet with a rectangular file.

  ‘You were never yourself around him. You let him walk all over you.’

  ‘No I didn’t.’

  But when she thinks back, now, Marisa realises Jas was right. She had misinterpreted his unpredictability as passion, mistaking her anxiety for the butterflies you were meant to get at the beginning of love. And so she kept trying different tactics to keep his interest. If she could just need him a little bit less, Marisa would think, if she could stop issuing demands or ultimatums when he wouldn’t listen to all the other ways she had attempted to express her desires, if she could just cut off this part of herself and then this one and then that one, so that she would barely be any trouble at all, then she would be rewarded. Then she would be worthy of his undivided attention.

  ‘Whatever,’ Jas had said, holding out one hand to examine the purple glitter at the end of each finger and twisting it so that the varnish caught the light. ‘Matt was a fuckwit anyway. All I’m saying is you need to be stronger in yourself. You don’t need to pretend to be someone else to get a dude. You could try to be yourself.’

  Yeah right, Marisa felt like saying. Being herself was the last thing she wanted.

  She says yes to taking in a lodger and she tells herself it will alleviate pressure on Jake and that, as a result, he will be more present for her. The lodger, he tells her, will stay in the spare room in the attic extension which has its own en-suite. The wifi works up there, so there’s no need for a TV because most people tend to watch on their laptops, don’t they? He suggests getting a microwave and a kettle and a mini-fridge so that the lodger can be relatively self-sufficient. Marisa goes along with all of it.

  And then Kate is there. Kate who, at thirty-six, is older than Marisa. She has a job in the publicity department of a film company. She is quietly spoken with a lively, sharp face and brown hair with an unruly fringe falling to just below her eyebrows so that the first time they meet to assess her suitability, Marisa notices that Kate keeps blowing it out of her eyes. She is petite and bony, with flat breasts, and wears denim dungarees and T-shirts that Marisa can’t help but feel are inappropriate for a woman of her age. Still, she is relieved that Kate wouldn’t physically appeal to Jake, who has always made it clear his type is blonde with curved and dimpled flesh and light eyes and honeyed skin that goes freckled in sunlight. Marisa, in fact. Plus, Kate has an office to go to, which means that she will be out of the house during the day and Marisa can work in peace.

  ‘I appreciate you doing this for us,’ Jake says to Marisa that evening. ‘Truly.’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ she says. He has decided to do the cooking for once, and has made an elaborate dish involving duck and cherries. It is too rich for her, the sauce too sticky, but she oohs and aahs and tells him it’s amazing, and later, when they go to bed, she is confident they have made the right decision.

  Sometimes Marisa gets the fanciful notion that Kate has visited the house before, in a past life. She makes herself at home without any self-consciousness. She puts her toothbrush right there in the master bathroom, on the shelf next to theirs, ignoring the perfectly good basin upstairs. She places a mug in the kitchen cupboard, its insides stained mushroom brown and with a stencilled picture of a black horse on the front, accompanied by the phrase ‘Dark Horse’ in block sans serif capitals. She leaves her running trainers by the front door: ‘Mind you don’t trip over them,’ she says to Marisa, sliding them against the skirting board every morning and trailing clods of dried earth across the doormat.

  She possesses an assurance Marisa has always yearned for but can never quite understand. She tells herself this is a good thing. It means they can co-exist efficiently without having to become friends. They can keep their relationship professional and distant and practical and then she and Jake will have saved up enough money not to have to house a lodger any more, and they can get on with their life. It is temporary, she keeps reminding herself. It will be over soon.

  The weeks pass. Marisa makes good progress on her commissions. Prince Moses has been dispatched. She’s immersed in a new project for a set of twin girls called Petra and Serena. The parents have asked her to paint a fairytale with a feminist moral, so she has decided to make the twins into feisty princesses who dress up as boys to prove that girls can rule the kingdom just as well as their male counterparts. She is calling it ‘The Girls Who Run the World’, with a nod to Beyoncé, and she is enjoying story-boarding the adventure. Her favourite panel depicts the twins wearing plaid shirts and straw hats, chewing on matchsticks as they pretend to be a couple of farm boys. Their curly blonde hair is tied up tightly at the nape of their necks.

  ‘Do you think they’ll know who we are?’ one says to the other, a nervous expression on her six-year-old face.

  ‘We’re Peter and Stephen, silly,’ the other replies.

  As she sketches out the panels, Marisa thinks briefly of her own sister, of all the things she missed out on growing up, all the companionship she would have loved. She remembers feeling so lonely. It is partly why she wants so desperately to have a baby with Jake now. When you are a mother you are never truly alone.

  She works steadily for a couple of hours, and then the stiffness in her back forces her to stand up and crick her neck, twisting it this way and that. Yesterday, she saw a sign in the window of the local newsagent advertising a 10 a.m. prenatal yoga class and she decides, spontaneously, to go along.

  Marisa read somewhere that it’s good for women trying to conceive to be around expectant mothers. Apparently the hormones rub off on you, or your body responds to the pregnancy pheromones, or something like that anyway – she isn’t sure of the science.

  She changes into tracksuit bottoms and an old T-shirt, slipping her feet into flip-flops and tying back her hair. She slings her yoga mat over her shoulder and leaves the house, shutting the door behind her. Kate hasn’t left for work yet, so she doesn’t double-lock.

  The studio is high-ceilinged with a parquet floor, recently converted from a disused chapel. Some of the windows are still patterned with stained-glass diamonds and to Marisa there seems to be a faint smell of incense in the air. Her mother always took her to church for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. It was the one time of year they went, and Marisa loved it because she was allowed to stay up so much later than usual. She liked the singing and the feeling of togetherness and afterwards, the vicar would offer her a tin of Quality Street and invite her to pick a chocolate and she would always winkle out the silvery green triangle which tasted of hazelnut and something her mother called ‘praline’.

  ‘Is it your first time here?’ the instructor asks Marisa as she unrolls her mat in the front row.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lovely.’ The instructor is a tall woman with a deep tan and a tattoo of Roman numerals all the way up her left forearm. She wears star-printed leggings and a tank top with ‘Inhale. Exhale. Repeat.’ written on the front. ‘And how far along are you? Just so I know for the modifications.’

  ‘Oh,’ Marisa stumbles. She hasn’t thought this bit through. ‘It’s very early days. Six weeks,’ she blurts out.

  ‘Congratulations,’ the instructor says with a beaming smile. ‘I’m Carys.’

  ‘Marisa.’

  �
��Beautiful name,’ Carys says. ‘Welcome, goddess.’

  Marisa scans the instructor’s face for signs that this is a joke but finds none. Goddess it is, then. Carys moves to the front of the room and tells everyone to sit cross-legged at the front of their mats and to use any props they need to make themselves comfortable. The other women are all in varying stages of pregnancy. Some of them have neatly packaged bumps underneath the expanding waistbands of their leggings. Others, in the later stages, move their limbs around with graceful heaviness, as if swimming through swamp-water.

  ‘Breathe in,’ Carys says, and her voice acquires a performative edge. ‘Breathe out. And again.’

  Carys plugs her phone into a cable by the windowsill and the room is filled with the plinkety-plunk of strings, offset by the rhythmic beat of a tribal drum. The music is too loud for Marisa to hear what Carys is saying, but everyone else seems to know what to do through an unspoken herd instinct, so she follows as best she can and crouches back into a wide-kneed child’s pose. She has always struggled with yoga, with the idea that you have to be in the present moment and concentrate on what you’re doing rather than on anyone else. Marisa can’t help but compare herself to the other women here. The one next to her, whose mat has been positioned slightly too close to Marisa’s, is one of those skinny, glowy women whose body hasn’t much changed since adolescence. She has elegant shoulders and slim hips and her baby bump is as discreetly scaled as the rest of her, in a way that accentuates her thinness rather than masking it. That is how I want to look when I’m pregnant, Marisa thinks.

  ‘Today, I slept through my alarm,’ Carys is saying. ‘And it meant I was a bit late for everything. I left my flat without eating breakfast. I forgot my umbrella. The first tube was too busy to get on. We’ve all been there.’ Carys laughs gently. ‘And I just felt so, disconnected, you know? Unrooted from Mother Earth and, like, not in my own skin. I was getting frustrated and anxious. And then, yogis, I remembered what I say to you every single week. I did what I tell you to do. I closed my eyes. I looked inwards. And I found my breath. Because breath is life. And as you are in charge of bringing beautiful new life onto this earth, we need to free our breathing now more than ever. Let it float! Liberate it!’ On the mat, Marisa is trying to liberate her breathing. The skinny blonde on the mat next to her is making a noisy, rasping sound emanating from the back of her oesophagus. Marisa tries to emit a slightly louder rasping sound just to prove that she can, but then her throat constricts and she realises her competitiveness is distinctly un-zen. Bugger it, she thinks.

  At the front of the room, Carys is still proclaiming. ‘As the teachers tell us,’ she says and then she launches into something that sounds like Sanskrit, by way of Chelmsford: ‘Sarva karyeshu sarvada. Please make my understandings free of obstacles.’

  Please make my yoga class free of Carys, Marisa thinks. She is already sweating and they haven’t even started properly yet.

  There follows an hour of side-bends and gentle pigeon poses. The music rises and swells and then drops off again for the final resting pose, when Carys launches into a meandering disquisition on the nature of creation (‘What does it mean to create, to be fertile, to open your heart up to the wonder of the universe?’). After it is over, Marisa rolls up her mat. The blonde woman next to her catches her eye and smiles.

  ‘You new?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Marisa says, loosening her ponytail so her hair falls around her shoulders.

  ‘Thought I hadn’t seen you before. She’s great, isn’t she? So in tune.’

  Marisa looks over at Carys, who is mid-conversation with a heavily pregnant mother-to-be, nodding intently while keeping her hands clasped in prayer at her chest.

  ‘Mmm,’ Marisa says, knowing that she will never come back to this class. There have to be easier ways to trigger pregnancy hormones, she thinks.

  ‘I always feel so much better after coming here. How far gone are you?’

  Marisa can’t remember what she told Carys, so she fudges it.

  ‘Oh, it’s still early days for me,’ she says and doesn’t elaborate.

  The woman raises her eyebrows but when the silence draws out, says, ‘Well, good luck. See you next week.’

  ‘You won’t,’ Marisa utters under her breath and then she turns to walk out of the studio as quickly as she can without making eye contact with Carys. It’s only when she is right at the back of the hall, about to push the door open into the street, that she catches a familiar shape out of the corner of her right eye.

  It takes her a minute to focus. Dark hair. Fringe. Grey harem pants and – of all things – a crop-top sporting the logo of an expensive athleisure brand. And when it all slots together into one human form, even then Marisa has to blink to ensure it is actually her. The lodger.

  ‘Kate,’ Marisa is astonished to find her here. It feels as though Kate has been snooping, and she has the uncomfortable realisation that she would have been able to watch her throughout the class from her vantage point at the back of the room. Surely she can’t be pregnant … can she? And then, quickly, Marisa remembers that she isn’t pregnant either and that she can’t ask the question without facing uncomfortable questions of her own.

  ‘I didn’t see you here.’

  Kate grins, revealing her slightly crooked front teeth.

  ‘I was at the back!’ she says. ‘I’m working from home today so, you know, I thought I’d drop by.’

  Her yoga mat is one of those expensive, padded ones. It is mottled grey with a swirling pattern of palm leaves and Kate has it neatly rolled up and slung over her shoulder with a purple strap. She notices that Kate’s toenails are painted a bright, shiny orange – unlike hers, which are flaking pink and in obvious need of a pedicure.

  ‘Did you enjoy the class?’ Marisa asks, placing a certain emphasis on the verb.

  ‘I did! I saw you coming and thought I’d join in at the back. I thought it would be a nice thing to do together, you know?’

  Kate’s manner is relaxed and comfortable, as if it were totally normal to follow one’s landlady out of her house to a pregnancy yoga class without explanation. Kate is looking at her frankly, as if expecting Marisa to be appreciative. She is stunned by the sheer entitlement of this.

  ‘Except we didn’t.’

  ‘Didn’t what?’ Kate says, holding the door open for her.

  ‘Do it together. You skulked at the back.’

  Kate laughs.

  ‘I wasn’t skulking! I just wanted to give you your own space.’

  Funny way of showing it, Marisa thinks. They walk out into the street.

  ‘Do you fancy a coffee?’ Kate asks. ‘It would be great to chat.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ Marisa says, flustered and then annoyed with herself for being flustered. ‘I mean, I’ve got a deadline. Work stuff.’

  ‘Ah yes. The painting! How’s it going?’

  How can she get rid of her? Marisa wonders. Why all these questions? They are standing on the pavement now, facing each other, Marisa with her arms crossed in an attempt to create some physical boundary between them.

  ‘It’s going well, thanks.’

  ‘That’s great. Do you like working from that room?’

  She’s just trying to be friendly. It is not how Marisa would have gone about it, but she must try not to judge. She calms her breathing as Carys would have advised. Inhale. Exhale. Empty your mind of anxious thought.

  ‘Yeah. The light’s amazing.’

  ‘I’m so glad.’

  Why are you glad? Marisa thinks. It’s my fucking house.

  ‘OK, well that’s a shame about the coffee but let’s do it another time.’ Kate reaches out to squeeze her arm. ‘I’m so happy we’re living together.’

  She looks at Marisa with such intensity it is almost as if she is staring, and although Kate is smiling, the smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes, w
hich remain dark and narrow and slanted. Marisa pulls the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her hands.

  ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Kate says.

  As Marisa walks away, she knows without looking that Kate hasn’t moved. She crosses the road at the lights and turns left by the cafe that has faded gilt lettering in the window, and when she turns back, Kate is still there.

  Kate lifts one arm and waves.

  ‘See you back at home!’ she shouts across the street.

  Automatically, Marisa raises one hand in response. Then she quickens her pace until she gets back to the house and when the door shuts behind her, she realises she has been holding her breath.

  6

  Back in her study the next day, Marisa can’t concentrate. She stares at the photo of Petra, one of the six-year-old twins, that she has pinned onto the cork-board above her drawing table, trying to communicate her features to the tip of the paintbrush she has poised in one hand above the blank sheet of paper. Petra is a pretty child – prettier than her sister, which seems unfair given they are identical twins. But such things are unquantifiable, Marisa has come to learn. It’s not about the physical fact of a child’s appearance, it’s about the dimple in a chin or the way someone frowns or laughs, revealing tiny, jewel-like teeth.

  The photo she has of Petra has been taken during a family day at the beach. Petra is in a blue swimming costume, imprinted with orange pirouetting dancers, and she is standing with her back to a sand dune, so she must be facing the sea. It is windy and Petra’s wavy, yellow hair is being buffeted, thin strands of it landing across her face. She is looking directly at the camera, with a steady intensity. Most children would be grinning on demand, Marisa thinks. Or they’d refuse to pose at all. Or they’d be actively scowling. But Petra does none of these things. She simply stands there, a calm, stocky little person in the middle of the wind and the sand and the sea, waiting for the photograph to be taken.