The Other Child by Lucy Atkins, extract

Chapter One

Greg had warned her that Boston summers were hot, but he

never said it would be like this, sweltering and humid like

Bangkok, like suffocation. Joe will boil if she leaves him for

long, even with the car doors open. There is a silvery line of

drool trailing from the corner of his mouth, a babyish touch

on his nine-year-old face, but she resists the urge to wipe it

away. She has to look at the house before he wakes up. She

has to prepare herself for whatever lies behind this astonish-

ingly unattractive mock Tudor frontage so that she can

convey confidence and optimism, show him that this move

is a great adventure, not a reckless mistake.

The house is on a corner plot in a wide, deserted street.

Its front garden curves round one side of the property, with

a wooden swing set and a drive leading down to a garage

under the back of the house. Greg described the street as

almost a cul-de-sac, but it is not a cul-de-sac really, it is a

curved residential road that joins two other residential

roads that lead to more residential roads. She recognizes it

5TH_9781782069874_TheOtherChild.indd 1 23/04/15 5:55 PM

2 lucy atkins

all from Gregs grainy Skype tour, but in the flesh every-

thing looks broader, taller, heftier.

She had imagined them renting a picturesque New Eng-

land home with white cladding, a wooden porch a porch

swing perhaps an apple tree and a mailbox with a little

red flag. This house has none of those features. It has a porch,

but it is red-brick with a pitched roof that dominates the

front. The upper half of the building is stucco, hatched with

Tudor-style timbers. There are tall, dense, prickly-looking

trees, possibly leylandii, separating it from the house next

door. Greg is very clear that this place is a find. Family-

sized rentals, he says, are a rarity in a suburb where people

buy and stay.

She touches her belly, resting her fingers on its new

slopes. This will be their babys first home and when they

are old they will look back at photos of them all standing on

this porch, frozen forever against these dark-red bricks.

Its perfect, hed said when he called from Boston to tell her

that hed given the realtor a massive deposit without con-

sulting her, without even emailing her a picture. His face

blurred in and out of focus on her phone screen. He was in

a public place, probably the cafeteria at Childrens Hospital.

She could see people in the background carrying trays or

coffee cups, many wearing scrubs. Youre going to love it,

Tess, I know you will. Theres a great elementary school, a

big park, a cute little main street with a couple of cafs, a

bar, an artisan bakery, a market, a yoga studio. Its all very

green and pleasant, absolutely no crime and only twenty


the other child 3

minutes from downtown on the freeway. Its the perfect

little town.

I thought it was a suburb?

We call suburbs towns.

She noted the we. After fifteen years in London, Greg

had seemed to feel no affinity with his homeland. His only

remaining American traits were his accent, his handwriting

and an ongoing despair at British customer service. But

now, suddenly, it was we.

You werent answering your mobile, but I had to grab it.

A baby wailed somewhere near him, an abnormal, plaintive

sound, disturbingly thin and off-key. There were three

otherfamilies due after me this morning; it was going to

go. But youll love it, honey, I promise. Its not too far from

Childrens maybe a fifteen-, twenty-minute commute max.

Theres three beds, three baths, a big yard for Joe. A ton

more space than we have now

Three baths?

He grimaced, his eyes half shut, and it took her a moment

to realize that the connection had failed, leaving his hand-

some face frozen in a sinister, pixelated rictus, halfway to a

smile.

She had always thought Greg liked her tall house on the

outskirts of town, with the cornfield behind it and views of

the Downs, improbably green in springtime, lightening to

biscuit through summer and, as autumn wore on, darken-

ing and thickening into wintery browns. When he moved in

he had been charmed by the sloping floors and the wood-

burning stove, her own photographs hanging next to her


4 lucy atkins

fathers paintings, shelves crammed with books, old Polar-

oids tucked behind ceramics, Joes pictures peeling off the

fridge, things balancing on other things and the light pour-

ing in. He had said he did not want to change a thing.

Her chest tightened at the thought of everything shed

be leaving behind.

Greg? Are you still there? Greg? But he didnt respond:

FaceTime had definitely hung.

She is sweating already as she walks up the path. The effort

of moving oxygen into her lungs feels overwhelming, as

ifahot hand has closed over her mouth and nose. Close up,

the brickwork is haphazard, with some bricks sticking

outat angles and some larger than others. She remembers

Gregzooming in on this feature in his after-the-fact Skype

tour, saying that the technique was fashionable in the

1920s, when the house was built. It looks to her like a

structural defect, but he will have read about Massachusetts

archi tecture somewhere, probably when he was at medical

schoolhere, and stored this fact away in his massive mental

database.

She is going to have to trust him that this house is a find.

Perhaps he is picking up cultural nuances that she cant.

The front door looks like something out of a fairy tale: over-

sized, its dark wood studded with brass. She rifles through

her bag for the keys. Somewhere behind her a bird rasps a

repetitive ha-ha... ha-ha... and a mower hums. She feels as

if she is hovering above herself, bewildered at how she can

possibly be standing here, on the brink of this new life.


the other child 5

The speed of it all has been dizzying. In just a few months

she has gone from the secure routines of Joes school

runs,play-dates and Saturday football, and her own photo-

graphic assignments and projects, to estate agents and

house movers, flight bookings, school places, visa forms,

paediatricians, OB/GYNs, health insurance, American bank

accounts, rental agreements. And now it is done. They are

here.

Joes school place has been taken by a child from Somer-

set; a Dutch family will move into their house today; her

studio in the collective has been taken by a feminist concep-

tual artist who fills handbags with lard; and her old Ford is

now owned by a maths teacher. This is what death must be

like: your space in the world simply closing over, like a pool

of water when you lift out your hand. A wave of nausea rises

through her: morning sickness, heat, jet lag perhaps all

three.

She really cant find the keys. She straightens, her head

spinning, and looks back at the hire car. It squats like a sil-

ver insect, wings spread as if it is about to buzz and hum

and take off with Joe inside. Behind it, on the other side of

the road, a heavy red-brick house sits on a plot hacked out of

the hillside. Steps zigzag up a steep rockery to the front

door. She imagines it creaking, heaving, sliding off its foun-

dations and cruising over to flatten the car, the fence, the

mock Tudor house, before moving inexorably down the

slope, through the leafy streets beyond.

She bends back to her bag, digs deeper. Her T-shirt is

sticking between her shoulder blades now, and her jeans


6 lucy atkins

have shrink-wrapped themselves to her thighs, the waist-

band already too tight, even worn low like this, under her

belly. At eighteen weeks she is already much bigger than she

was at this stage with Joe. She should have travelled in some-

thing cooler, but it was raining when they left England, the

kind of August day that makes British people dream of

emigrating.

Nell was there to wave them off in the taxi they both

knew an airport goodbye would be too hard. Look after

yourself, Nells voice wavered, and Joe and this baby. I

cant believe Im not going to be there when its born.

Just come and visit soon, OK?

I will. Nell pulled back, swiping at tears. And if it

doesnt work out, if for any reason it doesnt work out, just

remember you can always come home. Nothings irrevers-

ible. She stopped herself and tried to smile, pushing back

her dark curly hair, the dimples on either side of her mouth

deepening. But of course, you know, its going to work out

just fine! Itll be great!

It was the first time that Nell had let any doubts show.

Over the past few months she had made a phenomenal

effort to be a supportive friend. But from the outside, this

whole thing must seem reckless and impulsive.

When she agreed to marry Greg she had not even known

him a full four seasons.

For a moment this small fact yawns up at her, exposing

the lunacy of standing here, alone and keyless, thousands

of miles from home, while he is at a conference in San

Diego.


the other child 7

She has been waking at dawn every day lately, her head

crowded with doubts about the wisdom of moving Joe, leav-

ing all her work contacts, giving birth in a foreign medical

system, in a country in which 90 per cent of the population

owns a gun. And as Greg slept next to her, she would try to

calm herself by going back over the reasons she had chosen

to do this other than loving Greg.

With David posted to New York, it made sense for Joe to

be in the same country as his dad. And it was surely good for

any child to experience a different culture. She would build

up new photography contacts in America, the hospital had

world-class obstetricians and Greg was right, this suburb

was officially one of the safest places to live in the whole of

the United States. But despite this list, in those early hours,

there seemed to be so many possible fracture points, so

many things that could go wrong.

She shoves objects around the bottom of her bag. She can

picture the key envelope on the kitchen counter as she did

the final walk-through this morning. Greg is not flying into

Boston until tomorrow. She straightens her shoulders. If she

has left the keys at home, then shell just have to deal with

it. She has a credit card. This is civilization. She imagines

getting back into the hire car and driving Joe around, look-

ing for a hotel, motel, B & B, trying to make it all seem like

fun.

She glances at her watch. It is mid-afternoon in Califor-

nia. Right now, Greg will be in a room full of cardiac

surgeons and he will not hear his phone even if it is switched

on. She tips her bag upside down. Tissues and cereal bars


8 lucy atkins

spill out on the doormat, a Simpsons comic, her paperback,

her scarf, receipts, lipstick, hairbrush, hair ties, hand cream.

And then there it is, the smooth envelope. It must have been

lying flat on the base of her bag.

KEYS. Gregs assertive capitals feel somehow accusatory.

Get. A. Grip. Tess.

She scrapes everything back into her bag and fits the big-

gest of the two keys into the lock. It is stiff and she has to

wiggle it around.

She pushes open the front door. The harsh scent of clean-

ing fluid hits the back of her throat and she is thrown

straight back it is the smell of her childhood, of clinics, of

institutions; she can feel her fathers warm hand around

hers, hear their shoes squeaking as they walk down too-

quiet corridors. For a second she stands very still, waiting

for these feelings to subside. It has been a long time since

this happened. She shuts her eyes.

Then opens them. The hall is cool and dim with white

tiles, white walls, a steep wooden staircase ahead, a vast,

parquet-floored room on her right with a wide brass fire-

place, another room a dining room on her left and a tiled

corridor leading past the stairs to the back of the house, pre-

sumably to the kitchen. Hot air is seeping in behind her.

Joereally will boil in the car. She has to get him out.

She turns and steps back through the porch and out

again into the heat, blinking under the white sun. She hur-

ries back down the path away from the silent, waiting house

with all the empty, disinfected rooms that she has yet to

enter.


The Other Child by Lucy Atkins, extract

Documents

Transcript of The Other Child by Lucy Atkins, extract