Sweat soaked his T-shirt and rolled down his face but his legs felt good. He looked down and saw his knees pumping like pistons, propelling his body forward. Leaves zipped beneath him and disappeared forever. The machine powered on. He ran when he was confused, he ran when he was worried, when he was annoyed, elated, melancholy. He ran to escape things and to find things. He saw a second runner emerge from the path in front of him, an intruder, a hunched slogger labouring up the slope with neither grace nor love. He was about one hundred yards ahead. He passed the playground where he met her.

‘Was it your first time?’ she asked him afterwards. They were lying on the couch. He was limp and exposed and acutely aware of his nakedness. A slideshow of impossible images, each harder to believe than the last, played in his head.

‘No. Course not.’ But he knew it was obvious. He’d seen films, and read things.

‘Ah, that’s sweet.’

‘Was it yours?’ He scrunched his eyes together. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

He remembered the graffiti scribbled on the side of the climbing frame – ‘Maddi sucks cock for rock’. He’d read it countless times. Maddi didn’t have to mean Madeline. What else then? Maddison? He didn’t know any Maddisons. Her small body rose and fell as she breathed beside him. Her thigh stuck to his. Her arm hung over his chest. The refrigerator still hummed quietly in the corner. He looked down at himself and thought how absurd he was.

The middle-aged slogger was less than twenty yards in front. His head was rocking and his feet landed on the ground like weights. He glanced behind and seemed to slump further into his shoulders. Ten yards. Eight. Five. Two… But Ben didn’t rush straight past. Instead, he slowed his pace and settled on the slogger’s shoulder. The slogger glanced back again and waved his arm, spluttering something that snatched on his breath. But still Ben didn’t pass. He trotted lightly just behind and watched the heavy body struggle. He looked at the short, shuffling stride. He saw how the white knees buckled inwards under the weight and how the feet scraped over the top of the grass. Ben often did this in races. Sometimes he broke early and had the track to himself, but often he left it late, until the last possible moment, just watching and waiting until there was hope to snatch away. They passed the playground where he met her. ‘Maddi sucks cock for rock.’ He could surge clear at any moment. Just one subtle shift would take him away. It would be effortless. But still he waited. Gradually the slogger’s pace slowed. Ben drew level and he could see the mouth hanging open, the red, overheating face, the little belly below his T-shirt, that middle-age spread. And yet. And yet here he still was. In spite of all that. Fighting the tide. Dragging behind him the weight of all the hours and days and years spent behind a desk, in a car, on the couch. Ben saw the hair thinning on top, greying at the side. He saw the tension in the shoulders, the joints grinding in their sockets and the aging, flaking muscles struggling to match the spirit.

He began to slow, letting the slogger pull away again. Two yards. Five yards. Eight. Ten. He saw the slogger look around as he passed the croquet lawn. Twenty yards. Ben let the gap open further. He passed the playground where he met her. He was hardly moving. Fifty yards. He stopped and walked for a few paces and then sat down on the grass. Steam rose off his skin. He didn’t know he wouldn’t run again for more than twenty years.

CHAPTER TWO

Tim woke up at 4.07am. Not by choice. He remained motionless on the mattress, listening to her snore softly beside him. When he could stand it no longer he got up. He was deliberately clamorous. He muttered. He sighed heavily. He bumped the bed with his knee. At the door he stopped and turned around. She hadn’t stirred. ‘Urgh,’ he said resentfully. Sleep, he thought, is like sex and money; it only matters when you don’t have it.

Downstairs, he stood in the centre of the living room, still a little dazed, trying to decide what to do next. It was dark. All around him the house carried on with its clandestine doings; electronic devices set and reset, creaks creaked in far corners, pipes clunked hollowly behind walls and beneath floorboards. The drawer of the cabinet was still on its side on the floor. He looked at it ruefully, absently running a finger along a cut on his hand. Yesterday he’d tried to open one of its drawers. It had snagged on its rollers and all at once something inside him, something that wasn’t him but had recently inhabited him, something ominous that he was wary of, had erupted forth. It had shaken the drawer with unconstrained rage until it broke away and then it had lifted the drawer high and slammed it into the floor. The panels had shattered and bounced and a jagged splinter had ripped his skin.

‘Daddy?’ Ruby had been standing there. ‘Why are you shouting?’

He yawned deeply and walked to the back door and opened it. A blast of cold air hit him. He closed his eyes and let his head rest against the frame. It had started happening more frequently, these early mornings. He’d turned the clock around, he’d tried herbal teas, mindfulness, even acupuncture, but whatever it was that crept out of its hole to unsettle him in the dead of night still came. He knew what waking early meant, or could mean. He didn’t feel depressed though. Tired, yes, all the time. But who wouldn’t be if they kept waking up at this ungodly hour? And what did depression feel like anyway? He was of a generation that grew up thinking some people were happier than others, some better behaved, some more confident. He was mistrustful of labels that explained away personalities.

‘You should see someone,’ Beth said to him.

‘I’m just not sleeping well, that’s all.’

‘You seem to be doing okay when Ruby cries at night.’

In the garden the grass was long and wet. It soaked his toes as he walked. Petrichor. That was the word for this smell. It had something to do with rainfall and sediment. How did he know that? In three hours he would leave for work. It would be another eighteen hours before he could go back to bed. The prospect filled him with such desperation that he tried to cry it out but just coughed once, a sort of choked splutter, and then fell silent. A soft purple was creeping up the horizon. There was birdsong. Away over the rooftops a church bell rang. Someone would be up there now, at the top of that ancient spire, heaving away at the rope.

He considered going for a run. He leant down towards his toes, got only as far as his knees and then stood up again. He hated running. He should’ve started earlier or not at all. Now it was all just gear crunching. His joints had set and weren’t inclined to unset. He remembered that young buck who had been running in the park the last time, prancing on his shoulder, mocking him with his youth and fitness. He looked down at his belly, it was still there, the stubborn, antagonising little shit. Not so little. He tried again to touch his toes, hung in limbo for a few moments with his arms dangling. He imagined how the pavement would jar his legs and make his hips ache. No, there would be no runs today. He stood up again.

Ruby, wrapped in her duvet, was standing on the grass behind him.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Hello. What are you doing up?’ He couldn’t see her face clearly in the gloom. ‘Couldn’t sleep? Nor me. I guess my brain is too full up with things.’

She contemplated this, then said, ‘Everything disappears from my head when I’m asleep. Then new stuff comes in when I wake up. But if I do wake up and it’s still dark I don’t use my normal eyes. I use my sleepy eyes to look around the room. Then I can go straight back to sleep.’

‘Your sleepy eyes?’

‘These.’ She jutted her face forward and scrunched her eyes into slits. He collected her up in his arms and carried her to the porch and sat down. She was so small still, so impossibly small. No one believed she was three until she started talking.

‘What do you think,’ he asked her, ‘about having a baby brother or sister?’

‘Would you still love me as much?’ she asked. She stared at him in that frank, unabashed way that children do.

‘Nothing will ever change how much I love you. Or how much your mother loves you. I know she gets grumpy. But we all get grumpy sometimes. Grown-ups can be very silly.’ He pondered that word, imagined using it to describe her to her face. He could imagine the response. Beth was so unforgiving these days. She sounded always so put upon. What had he expected of her, when Ruby was born? He hadn’t expected her to be so altered. Naively, he thought that becoming a mother would simply add to what was already there.

He looked down. Ruby was fast asleep in his lap, a soft little heap tucked up inside the blanket. Her mouth was open and she was making a low purring sound. He watched her for a moment. He imagined her dreams. Words formed in his mind and he leant over her – that distinct, small-child smell – to whisper them softly. Sometimes he wished she was older. He was eager for the long conversations they would have.

On the horizon, or just beneath it, there was an orange glow. A new day was coming, it was just there, beyond the curve of the earth. All the hours he’d have to endure. There was a hand on his shoulder. It was Beth’s hand. He didn’t turn around, just put his cheek down against it and closed his eyes. She sat down beside him as the church bell rang again, chasing the birds off their branches.

CHAPTER THREE

Beth waited until Tim had left before going out to the bin in front of the house. She rummaged inside it until she found the envelope she’d thrown away the previous evening. She had buried it beneath the cereal boxes and tins. A bouquet of flowers had also been shoved towards the bottom; there it was, its stems broken and bent where she’d squashed it down. She retrieved the envelope and wiped it clean on her jeans. She looked around. The driveways were empty, all the neighbours had gone for the day. She opened the envelope and read the note again: ‘We missed the first plane, but I’ve been brought up to think it’s only polite to give a lady two chances to say no. Love Kyle.’ She rolled her eyes at the word love. There was a boarding pass inside the envelope too. She took both back inside the house, incriminating, incendiary scraps of paper that they were, and put them in her purse.

‘Stupid girl,’ she said to herself.

Upstairs, her new dress was laid out on the bed. She liked the purple and black stripes beneath the spaghetti straps. It reminded her of something she might have worn when she was younger, slimmer, more of the time. Increasingly, she felt now like she was being ushered towards the back door of the party. Turning her back to the mirror she removed her jeans and T-shirt. Of course, when she wore this dress she wouldn’t wear this underwear; she had hold-me-in knickers and a push-up bra that told any number of falsehoods on her behalf. She made a mental note to allow for these concessions, and then, rearranging herself as best she could, tucking down and puffing up, she turned around.

Ah. Well. She’d been hopeful but, after standing at different angles and trying to be as forgiving as possible, her shoulders drooped and her body slouched. She greeted such moments differently each time. Sometimes they hardly touched her. She was older. The dainty, unfulfilled girl she’d been had been transformed. She was a mother now and in front of her was a mature woman whose body bore the inevitable signs of creating new life. But other times these moments moved her greatly. She saw in her body the years that had already passed, the layers that had settled on her and she knew she’d never again be as beautiful as she once was. Each day from now on it would only get worse and how could anybody desire this bloated thing? Most of the time though it was somewhere in between – more resignation than anything else, a slightly sad recognition that came with a question: Can I still get away with this?

‘You look pretty, Mummy.’ The little voice startled her. She turned quickly from the mirror and saw Ruby standing in the doorway. She watched the child waddle slowly over towards her and then her arms were wrapped around one of her legs. She looked down at the curly mess of blonde hair. Her hands hovered awkwardly in the air. The dress had no pockets into which they could retreat. Eventually, at a loss, she started to pat the child on the head.

She was three, this child of hers, nearly four, and Beth couldn’t help but see herself in her, the nose, the sardonic, slightly strange twist to the mouth. Yet still she looked at her with wonder, not doe-eyed wonder full of pride and love and adoration, but wonder in the sense of surprise and curiosity, as in, ‘I wonder who you are, and what you’re doing in my home.’ The child would toddle into the room, as she had done then, and Beth would stare at it uncomprehendingly. ‘Hello, Mummy,’ it would say, making its way across the carpet towards her. She would see it coming, getting closer, and realise that she was its destination. It would clamber onto her, paw at her face, and Beth would respond by doing and saying the things she’d seen other mothers do and say.

Ruby arrived more than a month early. Beth had still been at work when suddenly a puddle formed between her feet. A day later she was at home with this tiny living thing that had suddenly taken the place of everything else in her life. She had read in books what to expect and how she should feel, but none of it matched. Instead, she felt disengaged, even irritated. Rather than some ethereal glow and a new, deep, otherworldly peace, she was pale and tired and her ruined body ached all the time. She spent the first two weeks in bed, spending as little time as she could with the child. But then Tim returned to work and she found herself alone with this strange person. It kept looking at her, trying to touch her. It seemed to be demanding something from her.

‘I have nothing for you,’ Beth said, shrugging her shoulders at it.

Over the fence she’d watch her neighbour manage a brood that seemed to multiply every month. One and then two and then three of them, from infant to toddler, clinging to her ankles while she waded over the grass. They wailed, laughed, screeched, babbled, chattered; all the time this constant noise coming out of them.

‘You have your hands full,’ Beth said.

‘And they’re all so different,’ said her neighbour smiling heartily. She seemed to wallow in it. She chatted back to them in strange voices and made faces and seemed, to Beth at least, who stood silently watching with the wet washing soaking her top, the happiest person she’d ever seen. She’d go back inside to where Ruby remained strapped in her chair, gurgling to herself and batting the soft toys hanging from her mobile. She would kneel down and the child would stop playing and look at her expectantly. She would try to think of something to say. After a while she’d make one of the noises she’d heard her neighbour make, but it sounded odd and embarrassing and she’d fall silent again. The baby would grow bored, it would turn its attention back to the fluffy toys dangling in front of her. Beth would flick at one too, watching it swing back and forth, and then she’d get up and walk away.

For nearly two years she felt like this around her child. At first, she thought it would still come, this bond, that it had only been delayed because Ruby was premature and her body hadn’t been ready and the maternal chemicals not yet produced and released into the bloodstream. But when it didn’t come, not in the first week or the first month or the first year, its place was taken by an insidious shame she could never articulate.

‘She’s absolutely adorable,’ the mothers in the park would say. ‘You must be so proud.’ Beth would agree that she was, yes, so proud, but to their backs she’d hiss, ‘Sometimes I just want my life back! Is that so fucking terrible?’

It didn’t help that Tim was a natural. It had come from nowhere. He’d never had any interest in babies or children before, and even during her pregnancy he’d acted as if nothing was changing, showing only the most cursory interests in scans and kicks. But from the moment Ruby was there he behaved as if she always had been. He hardly broke stride. While Beth was so terrified of hurting this precious bundle that she felt hardly able to touch it, Tim manipulated Ruby with confident carelessness. She’d watch him wrestle her, throw her into the air, change her nappy while balancing her on his knee. Each effortless gesture of his felt like a finger pointed at her. She began, inevitably, to hate him a little. ‘You’re a great mother,’ he said to her encouragingly, more than once, but she didn’t believe it and he didn’t mean it.

Beth went downstairs into the kitchen. She stood at the sink watching the water slowly rise above last night’s plates and this morning’s bowls. There were three people in the household. How could there be eight dirty spoons? He wouldn’t have all that energy to play with her if he had to do this every day; he gets to be the fun one while I’m busy doing all the work. She looked down at her hands in the dirty water. She hated the way the washing-up liquid made them smell, and how it dried them out.

‘Mummy.’

If you rinsed a bowl immediately it made such a difference. But he’d left his on the side. It had been there for hours and the porridge had hardened like cement. She scratched at it faster and could feel the cloth sliding futilely over the corrugated surface.

‘Mummy.’

She dropped the bowl back into the sink. She made a mental note to come back to it later, after it had soaked for an hour or two. There was something else as well, something else she was supposed to do, or to have done. She stared out the window and tried to remember what it was. Would he ever cut the grass again in his life? A school form that needed signing, perhaps, or more milk, or was there washing in the machine? She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. There was so much to remember.

‘Mummy.’

‘What now!’ She spun round. Ruby was staring at her through wide eyes.