Page 29 of Don't Let Him In

She picks up her boiling-hot child and holds her to her chest. “Oh, my baby, my poor, poor baby.”

Nala goes rigid in her arms and Martha holds her to the side of the bath. The next load of vomit hits the enamel. It’s clear now. Is that better or worse, Martha wonders, than opaque vomit? She soothes Nala again, wipes her mouth with a towel, wraps her in it, rocks her, whispers to her, reaches for the Calpol, the syringe. The first attempt to get her to take it ends up with a slick of pink down the white towel, a view of Nala’s throat as she screams her disapproval. The second attempt is more successful. She holds Nala’s mouth closed and feels limp with relief as the medicine disappears somewhere, does not reappear, at least.

She will give it twenty minutes, she thinks, and then she will take Nala’s temperature again. If it is still 104 degrees and she has not managed to find the spare child seat, she will call her friend Grace, who lives one road away, and ask her to drive them. She mops Nala down with a damp flannel and then puts her into a fresh set of pajamas. Please, she thinks to herself, please don’t be sick again. She pulls Nala’s hair off herface and kisses her hot, red cheek and then she takes her down through the house, the TV still flickering, the sound muted, the dog staring up at her from the kitchen, slightly worried after being shouted at. She slides her feet into slippers and heads down the pathway toward the garage.

Nala cries, the garage is damp and cobwebby, and Martha uses the flashlight on her phone to pick her way through plastic storage containers, metal shelving racks, cardboard boxes. Finally, Nala sobbing in her arms, Martha finds the car seat she’s been looking for and then groans when she sees that it is far too small for Nala, it’s for a newborn. She turns off her phone torch and slams the garage door shut behind her, crunches hard across the driveway and back to the house, where she takes Nala’s temperature again. It’s 105.8.

In a silent rage, she calls Al again, even though she already knows he won’t pick up. “Fuck’s sake,” she hisses into his voicemail. “Where the fuck are you, Al? Just… fuck’s sake.” She ends the call with an angry jab of her finger against the screen. She looks at the time. It’s been twenty minutes since she told herself she’d wait half an hour. She takes Nala’s temperature again; it’s still 105.8.

She sighs and finds Grace’s number in her phone.

“I’m really sorry,” she says. “I really am. But please. I need a huge favor.”

Grace’s fingers are tight around her steering wheel eight minutes later. Martha sits in the back with Nala on her lap, an overnight bag on the seat next to her, just in case.

“This isn’t right,” says Grace, “you know that, don’t you? This just isn’t right.”

Martha purses her lips and nods. “Yup,” she says. “I know that. Of course I do.”

“Do you…” Grace pauses, looks into her wing mirror, then flicks her indicator to the right to pull into the next lane. “Do you think he might be having an affair?”

“I’ve thought about it, of course I have.”

“And?”

“And… I have no idea. He just says it’s the nature of his job.”

“So—where did he say he was going tonight?”

“He didn’t. He was meant to be home from work at seven. We were going to have our usual Wednesday-night dinner. You know, when the boys are at Matt’s. He was going to bring something from the place where he’s been working. So I didn’t even have any food in.”

“That’s terrible, Marth.”

“I mean, not that I’m bothered about that. I’ve put on so much weight recently, since I stopped breastfeeding. Quite happy with a girl dinner, y’know. But it’s the principle, isn’t it?”

“Try him again,” Grace says, eyeing Martha in the rearview mirror.

“No point. He won’t answer.”

Grace sighs. Then there is a poignant silence before she says, “Have you ever thought about using a tracker on him?”

“What!”

“You know, one of those things you can use to track your luggage, or your dog. Just drop it in his pocket, or in the car, so you can see where he actually goes when he’s abandoned you at home.”

“That’s a horrible idea,” Martha says, and she means it. She has never been the sort of person to overstep boundaries, to infringe on other people’s privacy.

“Well, no more horrible than what he’s putting you through.”

“Yes, but why should I lower myself to his level?”

“Because he left you without a car or a car seat for your baby, Martha. That’s why.”

They fall silent as Grace pulls up outside the hospital and turns off the car engine. Martha sighs softly but doesn’t reply.

Nala has gone quiet and limp in Martha’s arms as she carries her into the emergency room, which worries her more than the rigid screaming.

They don’t have to wait long, are triaged quickly into the children’swaiting room and from there quickly into a doctor’s consulting area, where Nala is prodded and poked and touched and tested, and an hour later Martha has a diagnosis for her baby of norovirus and severe dehydration. She is taken away to be put on a drip and Martha is left sitting on a squeaky chair in a brightly painted room with a harsh strip light overhead that makes her head pulse with tiredness and sickness and fear.

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