Mel McGrath - Give Me the Child - the most gripping psychological thriller of the year

‘We already have a daughter.’

Tom glanced at me then looked away. It was as though I was viewing him through an early morning fog. He seemed at once both real and spectral. Cold suddenly, I pulled my cover-up more tightly around my body. Words fizzed and flared without my being able to catch hold of them. Stupid thoughts flooded in: This can’t be happening because it’s a Monday and Monday is clinic day.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, don’t do this to us.’

Tom reached out for my hand and I let him take it. His face was a strange mottled colour, barely recognisable.

‘I’m so, so sorry, Caitlin. I don’t know what to say. I swear I didn’t know anything about her until a few minutes ago. This is as much of a shock to me as it is to you.’

Something rose up in me like a thundercloud, raw and fearsome. I yanked my hand away. This was the worst kind of dream, the one you can’t wake up from, the one that turns out to be real.

‘I doubt that,’ I said.

Tom bit his lip.

I needed the facts, the data. ‘How did this happen? When? ’

‘Not long before Freya was born.’

‘When I was in hospital ?’ My mind zoomed back to the madness of my pregnancy, how helpless I had been, out of my mind and afraid. ‘Jesus, don’t tell me you had sex with someone in the psych ward?’

Tom shot me a wounded look. ‘Of course not. Please, Cat, just don’t say anything and I’ll try to explain and then you can ask me whatever you want.’

It was quite some explanation. Strung out after one of his visits to the hospital to see me, my husband had gone to a nearby pub with the intention of having a quick drink before getting on the bus home. One turned into two, turned into plenty. A woman appeared, apparently from nowhere – ha ha – and sat next to him at the bar. They’d got chatting and what followed – the whole tired suburban cliché – happened in some shabby B&B around the back of Denmark Hill station. He left for home sometime after dawn and that was that. He’d never seen or heard from the woman again. A moment of madness, the result of overwhelming stress. It hadn’t meant anything then and he begged me to believe how much he regretted it now. I couldn’t know how much, he said. More than anything .

As Tom spoke I couldn’t help thinking just how bloody old and worn and unoriginal the story sounded, a clapped-out tale of a faithless husband led on by some mysterious femme fatale. If you saw it on TV, you’d reach for the remote. This wasn’t us . This wasn’t who we were meant to be. So how was it that it was what we had become? I felt myself reaching for words that had already fled. Odd swoops of energy were tearing up my legs and escaping out into the room through my arms. I made to stand up, got halfway, and then sat down again, defeated by legs that no longer held any weight.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Ruby.’

‘I know that! I mean the woman . Your fuck buddy.’ I twisted my head and glared at him but he averted his gaze.

For a moment there was silence, then Tom said, ‘Her name is Lilly, Lilly Winter.’

I felt as if someone had opened my skull and unloaded a skip of building waste inside. Images of lilies crossed my mind. When had they become junk flowers, the carnations or chrysanthemums of their time, the sweet, cloying gesture you made when you’d run out of more meaningful ones? One thought morphed into another and I remembered what happened with the lilies that time just after Freya was born when we’d thought everything was back to normal and then discovered it wasn’t. Oh God, don’t let this bring the madness back. Please, God, not that. Then my thoughts were broken by the faint murmur of female voices in the living room and I was reminded of the policewoman and the time and the fact that there was still so much to know.

The girl’s name was jammed inside my throat but I couldn’t say it. ‘Why is she here? What’s the policewoman doing?’

Tom folded his arms. ‘There was an accident. Ruby found her mother dead in bed sometime around midnight when she got up to have a pee. The police… I don’t know, Lilly must have told Ruby my name and the police looked me up on some database. In any case, they got my address somehow.’

He went on: ‘They think it was carbon monoxide poisoning – faulty boiler, no batteries in the carbon monoxide detector. The policewoman said you don’t smell it, you don’t hear it, you don’t taste it. If the gas leak is big enough, it only takes thirty seconds to kill you. Ruby’s mother was dead drunk, she wouldn’t have known anything about it.’ He stopped and rubbed a hand across his face as though trying to obliterate something, but I was relieved to see there were no tears. Whatever feelings were going through his heart right now, grief for Lilly Winter wasn’t among them.

‘Oh God, that’s horrible,’ I said.

‘Ruby’s room is in a separate corridor in the flat and she was sleeping with her window wide open, otherwise…’ He frowned and sat with the thought a moment, then, getting up, went over to the kettle and refilled the pot. He brought the tea over then seated himself once more in the chair beside me.

‘Drink this, you’ll feel better.’

I pushed the mug away. I didn’t want to feel better. Not now. Not at five thirty in the morning with my husband’s love child in the room next door. I thought about Freya asleep upstairs, still oblivious to the existence of a half-sister, and wondered what we were about to do to her world.

Tom’s head was in his hands now and he was rubbing at his temples with his thumbs.

‘What were you thinking ?’

He swung up so his face was angled towards me and let the air blow out of his lips. ‘Evidently, I wasn’t,’ he said.

I let out a bitter laugh. Even when he wasn’t trying to be funny Tom managed to be amusing. Maybe that’s why we’d lasted as long as we had. The Tom I first met was a glossy, charming man who smelled brightly of the future. I wanted him and he wanted me. We were young and wanting one another seemed if not enough (we weren’t that stupid), then at least the largest part of the deal. Not long after we’d married, life came along. The sex, at first wild, calmed into something more manageable. But it was all OK. We got on well, rarely fought and seemed to want the same things. The years slid by. We had our daughter and moved into a house and enjoyed trips to the seaside on the weekends. We were good parents. We respected one another’s careers. When Tom left Adrenalyze to start his own company, I’d kept the joint account ticking over. He’d supported me as I’d worked long hours at the institute, cheering me from the sidelines when I’d been called as an expert witness in child psychosis. When I’d failed so publically, so devastatingly, and all I’d worked for had come tumbling down, he’d stood by me. Over the years we somehow turned into the couple other couples pretend not to envy. Unflashy, boring, steady. The couple who never got the point of counselling sessions, ‘check-ins’ or ‘date nights’. ‘Never let light in on magic,’ Tom used to say – another of his jokes. We liked it that the outlines of our marriage were blurry and out of focus. Because what is marriage, after all, but a kind of wilful blindness, an agreement to overlook the evidence, a leap of faith for which, in these days of Tinder hook-ups and casual sexting, it pays to be a little myopic?

Tom was going on about something, but I’d stopped listening. The room had begun to feel very claustrophobic. It was as if everything was speeding inwards, converging into a single laser-like beam of almost blinding intensity. Everything has changed. From now on our lives will be different in ways neither of us can predict . Eventually, when I realised he’d fallen silent, I said, simply, ‘I’m so bloody angry I can hardly speak.’