Page 2 of Famous Last Words

She picks up the note.

If anythingis written on one side. Huh?If anything? And crossed out? Cam holds the piece of paper up to the light. She turns it over.It’s been so lovely with you both.Lx.

Maybe theIf anythingis old. The main note is this one, surely? An end-of-maternity-leave note.It’s been so lovely. A kind ofGood luck, maybe?

There’s nothing else on it.

How weird. Luke – a writer, after all – is usually clear.

She finds their text thread. She’s asked once where he is, called twice, but she’ll text again.

As she stands there, overthinking, Polly strapped to her chest, she finds she doesn’t know where to start. Everything’s so loaded these days. Before the baby, time alone was justthat. But now it’s a currency. One person’s me-time is the other’s solo-parenting. They’re not used to it. They’ve rowed about it …

All ok? Sorry to ask again. PS. It’s about to happen! The big drop-off!! I am to be a working woman once again.

She reads it over, used to proofreading for tone.

She touches the note, just once, sends the text, then leaves.

It is 21 June, the longest day of the year, and the hottest so far, too, even at eight o’clock in the morning. The sun is as sharp and yellow as lemon drops. Cam turns her face to it, apricating in it. Huge flowers have bloomed in the street, big and open happy faces nodding as Cam walks by. She points them out to show Polly (should Polly be understanding gestures yet?), thinking how much she has taken the weather for granted lately. It’s been balmy for six straight weeks. No breeze, no rain. The same high blue skies every day, pale at the edges, a deep cyan way up above, as if they’re living inside sea glass.

Cam and Luke’s lawn has turned yellow and beachy-looking. Each night, once Polly is in bed, Cam takes a novel out there, sits in a deckchair, and just plunges deep into its pages, like diving into a pool containing other worlds. Luke deals with Polly if she wakes. And he knows better than to try and strike up a conversation with Cam, too, during what she calls her introvert hour.

They reach the nursery quickly. A three-storey Victorian building sandwiched between a bank and a laundrette – very London. Cam feels a dart of dread as it looms into view, that distinctly parental mix of guilt and approaching liberty. The thing about motherhood, it seems to Cam, is that most forms of freedom come with a price. But today she’s just going to pay it, and try to relish it: the returnto herself. To the job where she gets to read novels for a living.

Besides, Luke won’t be fearing today, won’t be imagining Polly not settling or sleeping or eating. Luke is happy-go-lucky, a man who never overthinks. If asked, he would say that the baby will be fine, he’s got to work anyway, so what can you do? That’s life. Sometimes, Luke tries to reassure Cam by telling her she cannot control situations, and there is nothing that Cam finds less reassuring than this.

And, clearly, he is not fearing today, is he? He’s not even here. Gone to work, or wherever, without a second thought. How could he?

‘Aha, Polly Deschamps,’ one of the nursery workers says, greeting them at the door. Reflexively, Cam holds her daughter’s warm body closer to her chest. ‘We’ve been telling everyone about your first day,’ the woman continues. ‘We’re going to have so much fun.’

‘Hope so,’ Cam says. She takes a breath, then lifts and passes Polly into the arms of the nursery worker – a woman whose name Cam doesn’t even know, or has forgotten.

Polly swivels back and reaches for Cam, just once, their hands momentarily touching for the purest of seconds, before she is pulled away from her, and Cam is free, but, right now, she doesn’t want to be.

She grabs for her phone to tell Luke all of this, to say don’t worry, I’ve done the nursery run, something perhaps slightly passive-aggressive, but that’s when she looks at his WhatsApp profile:last seen today at 05:10.Huh. She didn’t notice it earlier when she was busy with Polly and cleaning up. Ten past five is so early, and not online at all since? Unlike him. So strange.

Cam walks into her agency’s offices and, immediately, the aroma gets her: books. They’re everywhere, and it smells like home.

In the kitchenette, having greeted a few colleagues, glad she used the Tube journey to apply too much make-up, she makes a coffee and thumbs through a historical fiction debut someone else represents. She can feel the pull of the words already.

The streets are so dark they look sooty, lit only by a single oil lamp at its end.

And, just like that, she’s in: Cam really could stay here, on the Victorian street, standing up in the kitchen, and read this whole thing, the way she has done her whole life – the back of cereal boxes in the mornings; Sweet Valley High books on the school bus.

She closes the cover and breathes out, thinking.

Look. This is fine. It’s fine. Luke is doing something somewhere – she’s forgotten what, her mind taken up with Polly, that’s all. That’sall. And Cam’s here, with good coffee, books to delve into and to sell,andshe’s being paid for it. She’s lucky. She’s so lucky. She doesn’t need to create problems.

But something is creeping up behind her. A kind of dread. Thatlast seen. The note.

A beep.

Also.

A text from Libby. This is how she messages. Often one word at a time. This is howtheymessage. Well, this or trading mutual insults, usually, anyway.

Libby: I’m baking a cake for this pissing client thing tonight. Is this unacceptable or OK?

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