Chapter 6: The Weight of a Name
The kick came at 3 a.m., sharp enough to stop my breath. I had been floating somewhere between sleep and the grey edge of a dream, and suddenly there it was, a flutter turned to a punch, a small insistence from inside. I lay still in the dark, both hands pressed to the curve of my belly, and waited. It came again. Softer this time, a roll, a shift, like a fish turning in deep water.
I whispered into the dark. "You're safe. You're loved. You have a mother who will never walk away."
The words hung in the room, small and fragile against the hum of Camden outside. The curtains were thin, and the orange glow of streetlights bled through, painting long shadows across the floorboards. I had stopped counting the weeks of sleeplessness, stopped counting the nights since Mycroft had said goodbye. But the kicks, those I counted. Every one of them felt like a promise.
I stayed awake until the light changed, until the sky went from black to a reluctant grey, and then I got up. The studio felt smaller in the morning. Boxes still lined one wall, half unpacked, the ones I had never quite found the will to open. The baby onesie lay folded on the chest of drawers, a small white square I touched every day, though I tried not to make a habit of it.
The letting agent's list had been sitting under a pile of hospital rotas for a week. I had picked it up twice, read the same three lines, and put it down again. Two-bedroom flat, garden, Camden or Kentish Town. It was more than I could afford, more than I needed, but the word garden kept pulling me back.
I made tea, sat on the edge of the bed, and read the list properly this time. The first one was a ground-floor conversion with a tiny walled yard. It had a separate kitchen, which the studio did not, and two rooms that would be big enough for two cots, though the thought of two cots still made my chest tighten.
I circled it with a biro from my bag, the nib leaving a wobbly ring around the address. Then I picked up my phone, stared at Kate's name, and pressed call.
She answered on the second ring, her voice rough with sleep. "Jill? It's half seven."
"I know. I'm sorry. I just wanted to tell you I'm ready to look."
There was a pause, a shuffle of sheets, and then Kate's voice came back, clearer. "The flats?"
"The flats. The two-bedroom one. I've circled the one with the garden."
"Right. OK. Give me an hour, I'll come over. We can call them, make a viewing for today if they're open."
"You don't have to."
"Jill, shut up. I'm coming over. Have you eaten?"
I looked at the cold tea in my mug and said nothing.
"That's what I thought. I'll bring pastries. Don't go anywhere."
The line went dead. I sat for a moment with the phone in my hand, and the flat was very quiet around me. The hum of the city filtered through the thin window glass, a bus braking somewhere, a bicycle bell, the distant clatter of a bin lorry. I put my hand on my belly again, and one of them moved, a soft press against my palm, as if answering me.
I whispered, "We're going to find somewhere better. Somewhere with a garden. Somewhere with a door you can close."
The onesie stayed folded on the chest of drawers, and I let myself look at it a moment longer than usual. Then I dressed, brushed my hair, and opened the curtains all the way, letting the grey London morning fill the room.
Kate arrived forty minutes later with a paper bag that smelled of cinnamon. She let herself in with the key I had given her in October, kicked the door shut behind her, and looked at my open curtains like they were a diagnosis.
"You're up. Properly up." She dropped the bag on the counter and slid out of her coat. "And you've done your hair."
"I'm allowed to have a good morning."
"I'm not complaining. I'm observing." She held up the bag. "Cinnamon whirls and one of those almond croissants you pretend you don't like. Eat both. You're the size of two people now, apparently."
I took the croissant and sat on the bed with the letting list flattened on my knee. Kate ate standing up, flicking sugar off her fingers, and read over my shoulder with her mouth full.
"Kentish Town. Ground floor. Walled garden." She tapped the circled ring. "How much?"
"Nine hundred a month. It's three hundred more than here."
"It's also two rooms and a garden instead of one room and a neighbour who plays drums at midnight. Can you do it?"
I did the sums for the fourth time that week. Rota, benefits advice from the Citizens' Bureau leaflet Kate had made me take, the small inheritance from Gran that I had been sitting on like a dragon. It balanced, barely, if nothing went wrong.
"If nothing goes wrong," I said.
"Something always goes wrong. That's what I'm for." She wiped her hands on her jeans and held one out. "Phone. Call them. Before you talk yourself out of it."
The agent answered on the third ring. Kate listened with her ear pressed near mine, and when the man said the flat was available for viewing from one o'clock, she squeezed my wrist hard enough to bruise.
"We'll take one o'clock," she said. "We'll be there."
She hung up and looked at me, her dark eyes bright. "Right. That's the easy bit done. Now eat your whirl and tell me what's actually wrong, because you've been smiling for ten minutes and it doesn't reach your eyes."
"Nothing's wrong. I'm tired. I was up at three."
"The kicks?"
"One of them was doing somersaults. I think it was the one on the left."
"Good. Training early for the football team." She passed me the pastry and didn't push, which was one of the things I loved about her. She just sat down beside me on the narrow bed, shoulder against mine, and ate in companionable silence while London went about its morning on the other side of the glass.
At half twelve we took the bus up Camden Road. Kate had insisted on coming, saying it was her civic duty to stop me from renting somewhere with rising damp. The flat was on a quiet street off the high road, behind a black railings and a gate that needed oiling. The agent was a young man in a puffer jacket who kept glancing at my belly and then very carefully not glancing at it.
"Ground floor, so no stairs to worry you," he said, unlocking the door.
Inside it smelled of paint and old carpet. The front room was long and narrow, with a bay window that caught the grey light and turned it soft. The kitchen was separate, small but real, with a window over the sink. I walked through it slowly, trailing my fingers along the wall, doing what I always did in empty rooms, filling them with furniture that didn't exist yet.
"The bathroom's through there," the agent said. "And the second bedroom at the back."
The second bedroom was barely bigger than a cupboard. But it had a window, and through the window I could see the garden, walled and overgrown, a tangle of bramble and the skeleton of an old rose bush. I stood at the glass with both hands under my bump and forgot, for a moment, that the agent and Kate were in the room at all.
"Kids would like that," the agent said quietly.
"They'd like it," I said.
Kate came and stood beside me, looking out at the same tangle of weeds. "Needs work," she said. "Couple of hours with a strimmer and you'd find the lawn."
"There's a lawn under there?"
"There's a lawn under there. Trust me."
The agent waited by the door while I did one last slow circuit. Kitchen with a window. A room for me. A room for them. A door I could close, a garden with a wall around it. My chest did something strange and tight, not fear this time, or not only fear.
"How quickly could we move in?" I asked him.
"Notice period's already run on this one. You could have keys by the first of the month."
Kate looked at me, one eyebrow up, waiting. The agent held out the tenancy application like a menu. I took it, and the paper was warm from his hand, and my own hand didn't shake at all.
"We'll take it," I said.
The agent looked between the two of us, the application still in my hand. "Brilliant. I'll get the paperwork sorted this afternoon, you can sign in the morning."
Kate clapped her hands together. "Right, that's that. Come on, let's go get a celebratory tea in a real café where nobody's wearing a puffer jacket inside."
We left him locking up behind us, and I walked down the path with the application folded in my coat pocket, the edges already softening from my grip. The street was quiet, a milk float humming somewhere off the main road, and I could hear birdsong, which was something I had not heard outside my window in months.
"Say it," Kate said as we reached the bus stop.
"Say what?"
"That you're excited. That you're happy. I can see it in your face, you're practically glowing, and it's not just the pregnancy."
I looked up at the grey sky, at the leafless plane trees that lined the road, and I did feel something. A lightening. A shift in my chest that had nothing to do with sleep or food.
"I'm excited. I'm scared, too."
"Course you are. You'd be mad not to be. But you did it. You called the number, you looked at the place, you took it. That's the hard bit."
The bus came and we sat upstairs at the front, the way we used to after night shifts in our old life, before Mycroft, before any of it. Kate watched the street unroll below us and said nothing, which was her way of letting me hold the moment.
We got off at the high road and found a café with the same lino as every other café in Camden, and Kate ordered two teas and a slice of Victoria sponge and said "none for you, you're on the squash," and then she put her elbows on the table and looked at me properly.
"Are you going to tell him?"
The question landed like a stone in still water. I took a sip of my tea and watched the steam curl.
"I don't know."
"Because the flat's a step. A real one. And you keep taking steps, and each one takes you further from the place where you could still tell him."
"That's the point, isn't it? That's what I wanted."
"Is it?"
I set the mug down. The sugar bowl sat between us, and I turned it idly, the way I used to turn my ring when I was thinking, before the ring came off.
"I wanted to be the one who walked away. But he left first, and I can't keep pretending I'm walking anywhere. I'm running. And running works, until it doesn't."
Kate nodded slowly. "So?"
"So I tell him. Once. Not to get him back, I don't think I even want that anymore." The words surprised me as they left my mouth. I pulled them back, examined them, and found them true. "But he named them. He has a right to know that there are two of them, even if he never sees them."
"When?"
"When the lease is signed. When I'm in the new place. When I can stand up straight and say it without my voice shaking."
She looked at me for a long moment, then raised her cup. "To making him pay for that croissant."