Hannah Begbie - Mother - A gripping emotional story of love and obsession

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2018

Copyright © Hannah Begbie 2018

Cover design: Claire Ward © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2018

Cover photograph © Trevor Payne / Trevillion Images

Hannah Begbie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008283230

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008283247

Version: 2018-06-26

For Tom, my North Star

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

We were a normal family for exactly twenty-five days.

On the second day we brought her home from the hospital in a car seat. We put it down on the black-and-white weave of the living room rug and Dave said, ‘I feel like I can breathe again.’ Because for most of the pregnancy it was like we had held our breaths.

‘Dave, come on. She’s almost asleep.’ My smile was fading but his was wide and bright like a row of circus bulbs and part of me thought, let him just enjoy it.

‘BABY!’

His volume made me flinch. ‘Dave, please stop.’

‘What? Come on! Mia is here!’

Mia. Found on page 89 of The Great Big Book of Baby Names and circled like a bingo number. He kissed me on the forehead and I smiled for him. I kissed Mia and there we were, connected in a Russian doll of kisses. What a lovely family , someone looking on might have said.

‘It’s all right,’ he whispered. ‘Nothing’s going to get us now.’

And I believed him. I really think I did.

It was the kind of summer where everyone knew it was going to be a good one, right from the first days of the end of spring. The week she was born, the doorbell rang twice a day with deliveries of fresh-baked muffins, wrapped packages of soft toys, and cards printed with storks, peppered with sequins.

Mum, my sister Caroline, Dave’s mum. Our house seemed constantly full of people making the tea, padding in and out of the living room in their socks holding plates of cake, burbling their news. I would look up occasionally, to make a show of listening, but she was always there, cradled in my arms – a tiny person wrapped warm and safe in blankets, peacefully living out her first days in soft, new skin that shone like crushed diamonds.

I am lucky , I thought, in the mornings, as Mum emptied the dishwasher and waxed lyrical about the church pews being cleaned with an alternative furniture polish that had given Sarah-from-six-doors-down a terrible thigh rash.

I am so fortunate , I thought in the afternoons, as Dave and I walked – no, strolled – in the local park, gripping pram handle and coffee cup, like all the other parents.

A hood and a hat for the blinding sunlight.

Balled socks and folded babygros in neat stacks.

Floral fabric conditioner and frying onions lacing the air and warm, sweet milk everywhere. Bubbling away in me. Poured over the porridge that would feed me, so that I could make yet more milk to feed her. I never felt like an animal, not in the way of feeling hunted or preyed upon, but I also didn’t feel any more complicated than an animal. It was hard to explain exactly. Grazing and feeding her. Sun up, sun down.

There were plenty of times when, despite how happy I was, how honestly happy I was, I would start to think about the past. But I could always stop myself, because the important thing was that she was here.

Dave and I had spent ten years together already, looking at each other – across kitchen and restaurant table. Staring and blinking and watching and glancing in bed, meeting rooms, waiting rooms and at parties. De-coding the hidden messages in each other’s eyes. We knew every wrinkle, line and tic in each other: the single eyelash that ran counter to the rest. How the face contorted with laughter and tears.

The right time, then, to greet something new, a new version of ourselves with her barely there hair and tense red fists wrapped in a cellular blanket – cellular, like the mathematics paper marked with its complicated workings and rubbings out.

And there were other times, more than I care to remember, when Mia writhed and bobbed and made her warning siren sounds with a rounded mouth. And I worried. Like any mother would. I would pull her away from a feed, the sweat that had once sealed us now escaping, tickling and itching, all the while thinking: She is in pain. Something is hurting her.

‘She needs a new nappy, that’s all,’ Dave would say. ‘You’re just worried about things going wrong.’ That smile again.