Elisabeth Carpenter - 11 Missed Calls - A gripping psychological thriller that will have you on the edge of your seat

Good as gold? I sound like my mother.

‘I can’t make the afternoon visiting times today,’ he says, ‘but I’ll be there at seven tonight. I’ll drop Bobby off at school, then I’ll work straight through. Is that all right? I have to make sure I can spend at least a week at home when you both come out.’

‘That’s fine. Monica’s visiting this afternoon.’

‘Good, good.’

‘I have to go now, though. They’re bringing lunch round.’

‘Really?’

‘Bye, Peter.’

I place the handset back into the cradle. I hate making small talk, especially while a whole maternity ward can hear me shouting down the payphone. The nurse doesn’t say anything, even though when I look at the clock on the wall it’s only eight in the morning, and four hours from lunchtime. I suppose she’s seen everything, so I don’t feel as embarrassed as I should. I’ve spent so long lying to Peter – Yes, I’m fine and Yes, I’ve always wanted two children – that it comes naturally to me.

Why is he taking a whole week off? He’s branch manager now at Woolies – surely they can’t be without him for that long. I’m sure he didn’t with Bobby, though that time is a blur. I don’t think I can remember anything – I might’ve forgotten how to look after a tiny baby.

The woman in the bed next to me is snoring so loudly, it’s like being at home. A silver chain her boyfriend bought her is dangling off the hospital bed. ‘I can’t wear necklaces at night,’ she said yesterday, ‘in case they strangle me in my sleep.’ I was about to tell her that I was afraid of spiders to make her feel better, but I remembered Mum saying I shouldn’t make everything about me. ‘It’s called empathy,’ I said. ‘Ego,’ she said. She’s too humble for her own good. I blame Jesus – she loves him more than life itself.

Yesterday, she whispered, ‘Mothers are so much older these days.’ (Some of her opinions aren’t as Christian as they should be.) ‘Women want everything now,’ she said. ‘They all want to be men.’

It was, of course, a stupid thing to say in a maternity ward. And she was an older mother herself.

An assistant is coming round to change the water jugs.

‘It’s good that you’re dressed,’ she says to me. ‘Makes you feel a bit more together, doesn’t it?’

I look down at my Frankie Says Relax T-shirt and red tartan pyjama bottoms. My mouth is already open when I say, ‘Yes.’

She looks at my birthday cards, displayed on the cabinet. I can’t even remember opening them.

‘Happy Birthday, lovey,’ she says.

It’s only then I realise that Peter forgot my birthday.

At last, Annie makes a feeble sound as though she can’t be bothered.

‘I know, little girl,’ I say. ‘Sometimes it’s more effort than it’s worth, waking up.’

I pick her up and out of the plastic fish tank (that’s what Bobby called it when he visited yesterday) and put the ready-prepared bottle to her lips, settling back into the pillows. She suckles on it – probably going too fast, too much air – but I let her. She’s going to be a feisty little thing, I can tell.

Everyone else wanted me to have a girl. No one believed me when I said I didn’t mind, that healthy was all that mattered. But I would’ve been happy with two boys, I’m sure. It seems longer than nearly six years since I had Bobby – I was only twenty-one, but I felt so grown-up. He’s so loving, so sensitive. ‘Perfect little family now,’ said Mum. ‘One of each.’ And I should feel that, shouldn’t I?

But I don’t.

Anna

I used to have dreams that Debbie was dead and had come back to life. Sometimes she would be rotting, sometimes she would be an unwelcome guest as the family was sitting around the table for Sunday lunch. I don’t remember seeing her happy in my dreams. When I was eight, I used to have the same nightmare, over and over. I still remember it now. Our house was burning down, and a woman stood at my bedroom doorway screaming. Robert came to my side that night and sang ‘Hush, Little Baby’. I thought it childish the morning after, but at the time it soothed me. He said that Debbie sang it to me in the middle of the night a few times when I wouldn’t sleep.

I can’t sleep now. My mind won’t be still.

If Debbie were alive, then it would mean it was my fault that she left. She was fine until I came into the world. Not that anyone has said as much, but Dad, Robert – they all probably think it is down to me that she isn’t here any more. Perhaps I was a mistake.

I can’t stop thinking about her. I wish I hadn’t put all of Debbie’s photographs in the loft. Jack would call me crazy if I got the ladder down at three o’clock in the morning.

What would she look like now? Would she still hate me?

Random thoughts like these always come into my head when I try not to think of her.

A few years after we married, Jack told me I was obsessed with her.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘It’s not enough that you’re aware of it,’ he said. ‘You have to change it.’

Yesterday, he came home after Dad and Robert had left, and Sophie had gone to bed. Dad asked why a conveyancer would be called out to work on a Saturday, but I’ve stopped probing Jack about it. He must be so busy at work that he forgot my birthday. He knows I hate birthdays, which is his usual excuse. I should tell him that it’s not enough that you’re aware of it .

We met when I was twenty-two and Jack was twenty-four, at a Spanish evening class. I only went on Monica’s suggestion. ‘You’re too young to be stuck in all day on your own, love,’ she said. ‘I don’t like seeing you so lonely.’

I had been desperate to meet someone, perhaps have children – a family of my own. I’m not sure I would be in so much of a rush, had I the chance to start again; I was far too young, but I had no friends and hardly ever went out. I had just finished university and was applying for at least twenty jobs a week.

Before the first class, Monica took me into Boots to have a makeover.

‘Could you do something with her eyebrows?’ she said to the lady dressed in white – plastered in thick foundation and bright-red lipstick. ‘They’ve gone a bit wild.’

‘Monica!’ I said through gritted teeth, as I sat on a pedestal for everyone in the shop to see.

‘We might as well, while we’re here.’

After my face had been transformed, Monica took me to the hairdressers: my first visit for several years.

‘She has beautiful hair,’ Monica said to the stylist, ‘but perhaps we could put some highlights at the front … to frame her lovely face.’

On the way home, I caught sight of myself in her car’s vanity mirror and got a fright. I didn’t look like me any more.

When I walked into the classroom that evening, I thought Jack was the teacher. He was standing at the front, talking to the students with such confidence. But when he opened his mouth, he spoke with a broad Yorkshire accent and was worse at Spanish than I was. I learned that he’d stayed in Lancashire after university, after his parents abandoned him to go and live in Brighton.

Jack said I wasn’t like other women he met. ‘You’re an innocent, Anna. It’s like you’ve been sheltered from the world.’

But that was my act – the character I chose to present to others at that time. Self-preservation. I didn’t even look like the real me. I could act like I had no silly fears − of heights, swimming pools, and other irrational things. But I couldn’t pretend forever. When I confessed my greatest fears three months later, Jack hadn’t laughed at me. ‘They’re perfectly reasonable phobias,’ he’d said. ‘But life’s about risk sometimes.’