Little Disasters by Sarah Vaughan

Author:Sarah Vaughan [Vaughan, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2020-04-01T23:00:00+00:00

LIZ

Wednesday 24 January, 2.45 a.m.

Twenty-three

It’s the sound of a baby that wakes me. The unrelenting, pitiful cry that tears through my sleep and shakes me from a nightmare so engrossing I can’t tell where the boundary between my subconscious and reality lies.

My top is drenched with sweat, my heart castanetting as if I’ve physically tussled with sleep – and, yes, my duvet’s twisted, the cover wrenched from its feathery heft and there’s something pressing down on my face. I thrust the pillow away and knock a half-empty glass off the bedside table. It spills, chill water spreading all around.

I spring out of bed, disorientated as I adjust from the vividness of my nightmare to scrabbling around in the darkness, mopping up a puddle, and trying to locate this ragged cry. No longer a screech but the wearying sound of a baby being soothed by its parent, a child who will still take some time to fall asleep. It’s Max Gibson, our neighbour’s three-week-old baby, who seems constantly befuddled by this strange new world in which he’s found himself. The sound, curiously intimate, seeps from the house next door.

I rifle in a drawer for a dry T-shirt; get back into bed; pull the duvet close around me to stop my shivering and block out this sorrowful lullaby. But the pillow’s cold and lumpy and I toss and turn. Nick stirs in his sleep and reaches out to give me a cursory hug, arm flung over the curve of my waist, hand cupping my left breast. ‘Go to sleep,’ he murmurs, his voice just audible from the depths of his drowsiness. Then he rolls over, dragging the duvet back to destroy the warm cave between us before I give it a quick, assertive tug.

Max’s cries are slowing now. But if he is slipping into sleep then I doubt I will. I glance at the clock radio. 02.47: the worst time of the night to be awake. Insomnia, which plagues me given half the chance, sees an opportunity. I think of Betsey: not technically worsening but far from stable, given the three lengthy seizures she suffered yesterday; and of my mother. Ponder, not just on her drinking but on her reasons for remaining so secretive about my baby sister, to the extent that she’s always refused to divulge her name.

Clare.

I roll her name around in my mouth then whisper it out loud, feeling a rush of tenderness for this unknown sibling; unremembered and only spied through a chink in a door. I’m back in that cottage, peering at her now, or rather spying on my mother. Her expression’s still impenetrable: a mixture of anguish – that’s not too strong a word for it – and a flicker of something else. Horror? Or is it fear?

Other memories crowd in. Slivers of a story that splinter against each other. I am three and sitting on a rag rug in next door’s cottage. Nathalie, one of the hippy neighbours, is trying to plait my hair. Her fingers nip my scalp but I don’t complain.

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