Maisie Brogden. Aged four and three-quarters, curly of hair, bruised of knee and now, with the compass I of course eventually agreed to purchase, amateur explorer extraordinaire. A child with a chuckle so throaty she sounded like an old man; a child who insisted she read Father Christmas Needs a Wee three times a night every night (regardless of the time of year), once with me, once with Grandma and once with Grandad. Lauren Maisie Brogden. Proud owner of a fish called Bob and awkward teller of jokes. ‘What did the fish say when it hit the wall?’ she’d ask, pointing to Bob shimmying around his tank. ‘Damn.’ And then, before the punchline had time to settle, ‘Do you get it Mummy? Damn. The fish is swimming underwater and so it hits a dam, which is this thing that keeps water in one place. But when you say it out loud it’s the same as the swear word. Do you see?’
I checked the alarm clock: 5.56 a.m. Not long now.
Lauren Maisie Brogden.
It had taken me some time to realise I was pregnant. My periods had always been a bit all over the place and so, at first, hidden by the extra three stone I carried then, Lauren had stayed like a secret inside me, growing and swimming and making herself at home for my entire first trimester before she’d decided to show herself. Five months later and hours into a feral labour, she’d made up for those meek beginnings in spectacular style. With Mum at my side, cheering me on as best she knew how, I’d spent the night in hospital mooing and growling until finally, just as dawn was breaking, I’d roared Lauren out of my battered body and onto the bed.
Whenever Jason saw pictures from that time he would struggle to recognise me. I was so much bigger. But then, with Lauren gone, food became like dust. Unnecessary, unpalatable, forgotten.
The weight loss changed my face in ways I could never have predicted. Suddenly my eyes seemed bigger, my chin pointed, my cheekbones pronounced. In the first year without Lauren I couldn’t walk down the street without people stopping to offer their condolences. Nowadays, apart from the odd puzzled glance, I can go about my daily life in relative peace and for this I am grateful.
I looked out at the row of Victorian terraces opposite. Identical in every way to our side of the road, there were no front gardens. Instead, a single stone step acted as the tiny boundary between house and pavement. We’d bought the house just before we got married and, although it and the surrounding area were nothing like the orchards, fields and coastline of my youth, I’d grown to think of it as home. Built on a hill, our house was situated at the very point where the incline began to steep down to the town below. A river town – ‘the steel river’ Jason said they called it – its communities had been raised and fed around its ability to forge, smelt and temper. Nowadays, the steel industry existed here only in small, tentative pockets, pockets that Jason used to work, just like his dad and his dad’s dad before him.
I angled Lauren’s compass up and tilted it into the silty morning light. The needle wobbled for a moment and then lodestoned north, towards the iron-gored Eston Hills and beyond. North to where, right now, the boy from the off-licence was probably fast asleep. I wondered if he had a bedroom to call his own or if he was being kept locked up somewhere dark and out of the way. I tried to remember how the shop had looked from the outside. Did it have an obvious cellar or a basement?
On the bed behind me I heard Jason stir, and for a brief, ridiculous, second I worried he was somehow able to listen in on my thoughts. There was another rustle of duvet and then the bed-frame gave a loud, telltale creak. He was getting up. Padding across the room to where I sat, he reached his arms around my shoulders and leant his head against mine. I breathed in his sour sleep smell and for a moment I let my eyes close. We stayed like that a while and then, as he came back up to standing, I felt him tense. He’d registered the time on the alarm clock. I worried he might say something. That, despite his better instincts, he might