The Great Escape Read online

  Sadie strides on, hoping that the buggy’s steady motion will soothe her son, and also that Hannah is okay. Of course she is. Her life seems to be going spectacularly well at the moment. She has a great job, having risen through the ranks at Catfish to become head of the entire creative department. She has a gorgeous, caring and enviably grown-up man who loves her to pieces and writes adverts for – actually, Sadie can’t remember who Ryan writes ads for. Hannah has told her several times but it whooshed in through one ear and out the other, as most things do these days. Sadie wonders what’s now occupying the space in her head where her brain used to be. Teddy bear stuffing, or stale air, like the inside of a neglected fridge? Only this morning it took her fifteen minutes to locate her keys before she could leave the house. She couldn’t find the boys’ soft leather baby shoes either, so they’re each wearing two pairs of thick baby socks. Supposedly simple tasks have become virtually insurmountable. Sadie can’t fathom how women manage to hold down paid jobs as well as look after their children, bake cakes and fashion ‘amusing’ toddler meals where the cannelloni look like little people sleeping under a blanket.

  ‘It’s okay, sweetie,’ she murmurs, parking the buggy next to the café that hasn’t even opened yet, and bobbing down to try and soothe Dylan. A young girl is in the café – Sadie thinks she’s Polish – placing small vases of flowers on each table. Milo, apparently unconcerned by his brother’s anguish, is studying the spindly weathervane on the café’s roof. Sadie unclips Dylan’s buggy restraints, picks him up and cradles him close to her chest.

  Rocking him gently, she absent-mindedly jiggles the buggy with her free hand. A ruddy-faced woman, her round cheeks accentuated by a short, choppy hairstyle, is striding along the path towards her. Hannah knows without doubt that this woman will stop and talk to her; it’s what people in Little Hissingham do. As well as motherhood, Sadie is also trying to get to grips with village life where everyone seems to know her as ‘the one with the twins’, even though she hasn’t the foggiest idea who most of these people are.

  ‘Oooh, you’re the one with the twins,’ the woman exclaims unnecessarily, cocking her head to one side as she fixes her gaze on Dylan’s tear-blotched face.

  ‘That’s right,’ Sadie says, pulling her lips into a smile.

  ‘What’ve you got again? Boy and a girl?’

  ‘No. Two boys.’

  ‘Aw, shame! Were you awfully disappointed?’

  No, of course I bloody wasn’t, Sadie thinks angrily. ‘No, not at all,’ she says firmly. That’s better. She’s managed to wrestle her thoughts under control instead of having to restrain herself from slapping the woman.

  ‘Well, you got more than you bargained for there,’ the woman chuckles.

  Sadie places Dylan, who’s calmed down a little now, back into the buggy. ‘Well, yes, it is pretty busy. Keeps me out of trouble, you know.’

  ‘IVF?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Sadie laughs involuntarily.

  ‘I mean, are they IVF babies?’

  ‘Er … no … why d’you say that?’ Sadie feels her heart quickening as, for a split second, she wishes Barney were here to tell the woman to mind her own damn business. Even if they had had fertility treatment – which they hadn’t – why would she wish to discuss it with a stranger in the park?

  ‘’Cause my sister,’ the woman continues, scratching her chin, ‘she and her fella tried for years, the old ovulation kit with the menstrual cycle and all that. Nothing happened. Took all the romance out of it, you know? Became, like … mechanical. Not romantic at all.’ Sadie is jamming her molars together so hard, she fears they might start to crumble. When did she start needing Barney to protect her in situations like this?

  ‘So it was twins they had,’ the woman rants on, ‘and God, they’re hard work, aren’t they? Not a second to yourself. You’ll know all about that, haha!’ She peers down at the buggy. ‘Don’t they have any shoes?’

  ‘Er, yes, but I couldn’t find …’

  ‘It’s a cold day,’ the woman scolds her. ‘Their little tootsies’ll be freezing …’

  Phone bloody social services then, Sadie wants to scream. Or make a sodding citizen’s arrest. ‘Sorry, I’m in a hurry,’ she blurts out, charging off with the buggy, and wondering where she can go that’s not the inside of her soul-crushing house – sorry, cottage – but also where that woman won’t find her and start interrogating her on her sex life.

  Both the children are crying now, signalling that feeding time is upon them. Sadie is still breastfeeding the babies, although they do, mercifully, also have bottles of formula, jars of food and her home-made concoctions. Determined to up her parenting grade – she’s awarded herself a D-minus so far – she bought a vast array of vegetables yesterday which she chopped at midnight and simmered until 1 am when Barney (and probably the entire Western hemisphere) was sleeping soundly, only to realise that the damn stuff couldn’t be frozen in ice cube trays until it had cooled properly. She found herself blowing on the vatful of steamy mush, then worried that she was breathing stinky adult germs on it and would infect her children with gastro-enteritis. It was too smooth as well – she’d overdone the mushing. By eight months her children should be managing lumps, finger food, great saddles of lamb, probably. Sadie finally staggered to bed at 2.30 am, cursing Barney for the sole reason that he had the audacity to be asleep, precisely ninety minutes before the babies woke up, eyes pinging open to full alertness, ready for their first feed of the day.

  Is Sadie feeding them too much, too little or too often? She has no idea. She’s read so many baby manuals that they’ve all merged into one fat, hectoring tome. When she presented her hastily defrosted home-made baby food this morning – realising she needn’t have frozen it after all – Milo and Dylan spat it all out onto their white towelling Monday bibs.

  Who could blame them? she thinks now, pushing the double buggy at a determined speed. What’s wrong with shop-bought baby food anyway? It’s made by experts – people whose lives are dedicated to formulating stuff packed with nutrients that babies will actually enjoy and not spit out. Sadie can’t compete with that.

  Catching her breath, she heads for the rose garden where she knows there are benches, and which is shielded from the rest of the park by dense, square-cut hedges. For someone who was once body-confident, pouring her luscious curves into corseted lingerie which she constructed herself, Sadie is incredibly self-conscious about breast-feeding in public. She and Barney pored over soft pencil illustrations of possible feeding positions in Twins: Your Essential Survival Guide. It’s okay for the women in those drawings, she thinks now. They don’t have to sit on damp park benches with a baby clamped to each bosom and spot a teenage boy glancing through a gap in the hedge, looking completely appalled. Plus, the women’s breasts in those illustrations don’t overproduce milk until it seeps through their breast pads, making their gargantuan nursing bras wet and smelly (no boned, hand-stitched underwear for Sadie these days). She has never felt more aware of being a mammal in her entire life.

  She’s just sat down, and is lifting an agitated Milo from his buggy, when her mobile trills into life again. Clasping him tightly to her lap, she fishes the phone from her bag, quickly enough to take the call this time.

  ‘Sadie?’ comes Hannah’s voice. ‘Are you okay to talk for a minute?’

  ‘Yes, sort of,’ she says, phone in one hand, and wrapping her other arm around her writhing son. ‘Just about to feed, though. Boys are a bit unsettled. Oh, hang on a sec …’ Milo squirms in her lap. ‘Are you okay?’ she asks quickly.

  ‘Er, yeah, I’m fine …’

  ‘Where are you?’ Sadie asks.

  ‘Outside. Just outside the house.’

  ‘What, your house?’

  ‘Um, yes … just had to get out for a minute. I know this sounds mad …’ Sadie hears Hannah blow out a big gust of air.

  ‘What’s wrong? Is everything okay with you and Ryan?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s fine! I mean it’s
fine with us. It’s just, um … the kids, Sadie. They’re just …’

  ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘Oh, not really … Look, I’m sorry to load this on you at this time in the morning but they’re all in the kitchen right now, bickering, and I just … I don’t know why, but maybe it’s because I’ve just tried on my wedding dress and it’s horrible. Really ugly and plain. What was I thinking? I should’ve asked you to come into town and we could have had a lovely day and picked something together. And I bought a clutch bag. A clutch bag! I’ve never owned one in my life. Will I have to go around clutching it all day?’

  ‘Well, I’m sure you are allowed to put it down, or someone will look after—’

  ‘It’s horrible,’ Hannah cuts in. ‘Like something Princess Anne would carry. Can you imagine me with a clutch bag? And I got this fear, you know? This horrible feeling about …’ Her voice falters.

  ‘What, about getting married?’ Sadie exclaims, unable to work out whether her friend’s distress has to do with Ryan’s kids, the dress or the Princess Anne bag.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hannah says. ‘I … I just had to talk to you.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just the wedding,’ Sadie murmurs. ‘All the organising and preparations … you know what? You should have a hen party. Let your hair down and have a bit of fun.’

  Hannah laughs weakly. ‘I’d love one, and the girls at work have been on at me to sort something out …’

  ‘Well, why don’t you?’ Somewhere in her distant past, Sadie remembers clubs with music playing, drinks flowing and women moving freely without lugging gigantic quilted bags. She pictures a glass of white wine, and her entire body tingles with longing.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know …’ Hannah tails off. ‘What’s that noise anyway?’

  ‘It’s the boys, they’re hungry. Sorry, Han, I’d better go …’ Sadie clamps her mobile between her shoulder and ear while gently bouncing Milo up and down and rocking the buggy. She eyes the hedge and wonders if anyone would mind if she crawled under it and fell asleep.

  ‘God, they sound upset. I won’t keep you a minute. Yes, I’ve thought about a hen party but you know what? I’d only want you – you and Lou, I mean – and that would be impossible, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe not. I’m only an hour away and York’s not that far … maybe you’d better speak to Lou. I haven’t talked to her in ages. Look, Han, I’d really better …’ Sadie’s attention is diverted by a large black dog bounding towards her, pink tongue lolling from its mouth.

  ‘D’you think Lou’s okay?’ Hannah asks. ‘I worry about her and Spike sometimes. He never seems to appreciate …’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Sadie mutters, holding Milo tightly as she jumps up and tries to form a human barrier between the buggy and hound.

  ‘I mean, she’s working all hours at that horrible soft play place and keeping the jewellery thing going …’ Perhaps it’s chronic sleep deprivation, or the fact that becoming a mother has turned Sadie into a lumbering beast incapable of rapid movement. Whatever the reason, the dog shoots past her and proceeds to lash Dylan’s terrified face with its tongue.

  ‘No!’ Sadie screams with her mobile still clamped to her ear. Dylan squeals loudly.

  ‘I mean, what does Spike do all day?’ Hannah wants to know. ‘Sits on his arse, strumming a guitar, waiting for a recording contract to drop into his lap …’

  ‘Stop that!’ Sadie shrieks, shoving herself between the dog and Dylan, whose cries have morphed into hearty wails.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Hannah asks.

  ‘There’s a dog here! It’s trying to attack Dylan and there’s no bloody owner and—’ She drops her phone onto the path and its back pings off. ‘Shit,’ she mutters, deciding that her baby’s immediate wellbeing is more important than a three-year-old Nokia. A tall, scrawny man whistles for the dog at the rose garden’s entrance. No apology, no acknowledgement that his slavering beast has nearly devoured her child, or at the very least infected him with some terrible dog-tongue disease, and caused Sadie to wreck her phone. As the dog bounds away, Sadie blinks away tears of stress, unleashes Dylan from the buggy and sinks back onto the bench, clutching both of her boys and panting.

  She doesn’t feed them straight away. She can’t, not with her heart banging madly and her children so distressed. Sadie just sits there, conscious of faint drizzle now falling on her hot cheeks, and an empty Bacardi Breezer bottle lying on the ground.

  She glances down at her babies, taken aback as she always is by the fierce rush of love that engulfs her. Her sons, all round brown eyes and tufts of dark, fluffy hair, gaze up adoringly at her. The fact that they emerged from her own body still strikes her as nothing short of miraculous. All those years of debauchery as an art student, a lifestyle which continued steadily through her twenties, and she was still capable of incubating these utterly perfect human beings. Dylan is smiling now, and Milo is gazing up at her as if she were the most wondrous creature on earth.

  This is what it’s all about, Sadie reminds herself. It doesn’t matter that I’m stained and knackered and every little thing Barney does irritates the hell out of me. It doesn’t matter because it’s all about this – being Milo and Dylan’s mum. Sadie bunches up her T-shirt, frees her breasts from her huge, shiny scaffolding-bra and clamps a child to each nipple. Both babies fall upon her as if they hadn’t been fed for weeks. Sadie inhales deeply, kicks the Bacardi Breezer bottle under the bench, then focuses hard on the cracked screen of her mobile which is lying at her feet.

  SIX

  ‘Why aren’t you and Dad getting married in church?’ Daisy fixes Hannah with a cool stare as she enters the kitchen.

  Hannah pauses, taken aback by the fact that Daisy’s query isn’t about why she crept outside to make a call on her mobile. Ryan is muttering about gym kits in the utility room and Josh is chewing slowly and rhythmically, like a bull, whilst staring blankly ahead. ‘Well,’ Hannah says brightly, ‘we’re only having a small wedding with the people we’re closest to, and it’s …’ She falters, deciding not to utter the unmentionable words: and it’s your dad’s second wedding, after all. ‘It just seemed right for us,’ she adds. ‘We don’t want anything too fancy or formal, you know?’

  Clearly, Daisy doesn’t know. She gnaws on a toast crust and blinks down at Hannah’s bare feet. Josh continues to eat in silence, the Lynx Effect engulfing the kitchen as if being pumped in through a pipe. ‘Why not?’ Daisy asks.

  ‘Well, er,’ Hannah starts, deciding yet again that it’s ridiculous to feel intimidated by a ten-year-old, ‘I’m not really religious so it wouldn’t feel right for me to get married in church when I don’t go any other time.’

  Hannah hears Ryan slamming the washing machine shut and switching it on. Daisy is now gawping at Hannah as if she’s just confessed to a liking for torturing kittens. ‘You mean you don’t believe in God?’ she gasps.

  ‘Well, not really,’ Hannah blusters, her cheeks flaring up. ‘I mean, I believe in something, I suppose, like we should treat people well and respect each other but, er … I’m not really a churchy type.’

  Daisy purses her pink lips. ‘I believe in God.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, Daisy. It’s completely personal and up to you what you believe in.’

  ‘Don’t you believe in Heaven either?’

  No, because I’m the Antichrist … ‘Er, not really, I mean …’

  ‘Dad doesn’t go to church either,’ Josh intercepts, pushing back a dark, shaggy fringe from equally dark, foreboding eyes. ‘But him and Mum got married in a church and that was all right.’ He juts out his bottom lip.

  ‘Well, I suppose what I mean, what I should’ve said,’ Hannah explains, feeling her jaw tighten and any semblance of hunger rapidly ebbing away, ‘is that I don’t really follow a religion.’

  ‘Do you follow a religion then?’ Josh meets her gaze over the gingham tablecloth.

  Hannah frowns. ‘What d’you mean, Josh?’

  He flares his no
strils at her, like a horse. ‘You said you don’t follow a religion. Like you’d say you follow Chelsea but you don’t follow Spurs. Like religion’s a football team.’ He sniggers and clamps his mouth shut like a trap.

  ‘Oh, right!’ She laughs a little too heartily. ‘Well, what I mean is that I don’t support – I mean practise – any particular religion.’ As Josh blinks slowly, waiting for her to dig herself into an even deeper hole, Hannah wonders if this is how it’ll be when she’s Ryan’s wife, and their stepmother. Like being sandwiched between a Gestapo interrogator and a belligerent English teacher who ticks her off for using an ill-chosen verb. Christ-on-a-sodding-bike. She has a sudden urge to shriek, Okay! We’re not getting married in church because your dad was married before, as you both know, a fact I’ve avoided mentioning because I’m trying to be nice. And actually, while we’re on the subject of marriage, why don’t we just forget the whole business and carry on living together? It was your dad’s idea in the first place, you know. Getting married, I mean. Because he loves me. Yes, I know you might find the idea completely repulsive, and God knows, his feelings might waver a bit when he sets eyes on my cauliflower nurse dress. But still …

  ‘What were you saying, Daisy?’ Ryan asks, emerging from the utility room with a bundle of sports kits.

  ‘We were just talking about the wedding, Dad,’ Daisy says pleasantly.