Magpie

by Elizabeth Day

After Marisa’s childhood experiences, where passion was deployed by her mother like heavy artillery in a battle with no clear end, she was relieved by Jake’s undemonstrative nature.

She was foolish to have believed in their future. Because happiness was transient, and

She’s always aware of the precariousness of her situation, as if she is a Victorian governess forced to live off her wits, surviving on the charity of richer people.

She had been smitten and only later had she thought to question the fact that ‘smitten’ came from the verb ‘to smote’, something more often associated with angry deities meting out dramatic lightning bolts of punishment and which, when she Googled the etymology, actually meant ‘to smear or blemish’ and wasn’t romantic at all.

She had never found her mother. But with Jake, she had found someone who accepted her as she was without too many questions, and when she fell in love with him, it was not accompanied by fireworks and a surging feeling of rollercoaster stomach-leaping.

He seemed so weak and so old. She realised he would probably die quite soon and when she thought of it, she felt a pang of incipient loss. Not because his death would leave an absence in her life, but because his existence had.

Her thoughts atomise then coalesce into a bright, dazzling white. She crumples to the floor. She’s always thought she would scream if she were attacked. But in terror, it turns out Kate is silent.

in that single quick moment, Kate realised that all of the sex she had had up to that point, all of the flirtations and relationships and kisses, had been a superficial precursor to this. She had been doing it wrong all this time. She had been playing in the sandpit, when there was a wild expanse of beach to explore.

It was as if there had been a tacit agreement as soon as Jake walked through the pub door and into her party, that this was simply how things would be. It was inevitable in its recklessness.

the men in heavy-framed spectacles and box-fresh trainers thinking they were hip-hop stars; the women in combat trousers and straightened hair thinking they were athleisure models.

they would go home, get a couple of hours’ sleep, and then go back into work, wearing dark glasses and leopard-print and eyeliner, still out of it from the night before. Speckles of last night’s glitter on their faces, sticking like burrs to the hem of a skirt. They

The sex was good. It wasn’t, if she were going to be brutally honest, the best sex she had ever had but contextually, it worked. The context being that this was a good man who loved her. When she’d had amazing sex in the past, it had always been with unreliable narcissists who prided themselves on their performance and showed little interest in emotional attachment.

Jake, by contrast, was home. He felt safe. He was solicitous in the bedroom, always asking what she wanted, always concerned in case he was hurting her or making her uncomfortable or in some way not pleasing her, whereas really what Kate wanted was to be dominated and fucked, cleanly and without any conversation.

That was the first time there had been any tension between them, and it had stayed there, this discomfort, like a speck on the kitchen floor from a long-ago broken glass: unnoticeable until you stepped on it with your bare morning feet and the sharpness of it lodged under your skin.

‘What sort of woman would you refuse to buy a car from?’ he asked, smiling. ‘A fallen one. A loose one. One who wears too much Lycra and smokes fags out of the passenger side of her best friend’s ride.’ Jake laughed, without getting the reference to TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’.

and then their laughter stopped, just as unexpectedly as it had begun, and the room was empty and silent and the afternoon suddenly felt ruined, as if oil had seeped into clean water and slicked the feathers of all the swimming birds until they drowned.

The blood seems almost totally removed from her physical self. She walks to the kitchen in a daze, detached from the reality of the situation. She watches herself as she fills the kettle from the tap and presses the button to make it boil. Then she picks up the cordless telephone they keep by the bread bin and takes the garden door keys from the top drawer and slides open the glass doors as quietly as she can. She steps onto the patio.

The sun is low in the sky, partially blotted out by a tall magnolia tree. Along the top of one wall, she spots a magpie and automatically raises her hand to salute it, just as her mother taught her she should in order to ward off evil spirits and bad luck.

An older man is in there with them – bare-chested, his flesh loose, slabs of his skin overlapping each other like some geological curiosity.

She slips her phone reluctantly into the pocket – Annabelle doesn’t like them to have their mobiles at mealtimes but leaving it behind always feels to Kate as though she’s temporarily cut adrift from a world that understands her as a woman in her own right, rather than Jake’s inconvenient appendage.

No matter how much time she has spent in this house or how long she has notionally been a part of this family, Kate always feels so out of place: an interloper from an alien race.

The similarity is so pronounced that Kate wonders why she has never properly noticed it until now. She shivers and looks away. Heat from the kettle has steamed the window. Her vision blurs and when she makes the tea, her hand shakes as she pours.

She’d anticipated questions and widened eyes and maybe even some mild disapproval, but everyone was immediately supportive and accepted the situation with a matter-of-factness that left her slightly deflated.

happen when they asked Marisa to be their surrogate, this is a scenario she could not possibly have anticipated. The fact that Marisa had stopped taking her meds and had deluded herself into believing she was in a relationship with Jake before attacking Kate in the hallway of her own home was almost easier to handle than this charade. Annabelle, the woman who had never fully welcomed Kate into her home, who had always made it clear that she felt her beloved son could do so much better, was now laughing and chatting away so easily with Marisa, it was as though the two of them had known each other for years.

‘Well just look at them, dear,’ Annabelle says, her lips twisting upwards in a strange little smile. ‘They’re two peas in a pod, aren’t they? You must have noticed!’

Kate ignores him. In her mind’s eye, she sees a gun cylinder spinning and clicking and the safety catch sliding off. She imagines lifting the sight up to her eye and pointing the barrel directly at Annabelle’s forehead. ‘Annabelle,’ she says. ‘I’d like you to tell everyone what you just told me in the kitchen.’ Annabelle

Annabelle’s eyes are unmoving. They are silvery, glinting, dead-fish eyes. She is laughing but the laughter does not reach the rest of her face and this makes her more frightening than she was before.

‘This is why your daughters don’t talk to you,’ Jake is saying to his mother now, his voice rising to a shout. ‘This is why they can’t fucking stand the sight of you. They always said to me I’d see it one day, that you’re a raging narcissist who treats us all like fucking chess pieces.’ ‘Shush,

two flawed people, fitted into each other’s failings like ivy burrowing into the loosening gaps between brick. You couldn’t cut back the ivy without risking the house falling down. But the stone would crumble eventually, weakened by the insistent force of the plant pushing its thickening stem into every soft place. And then there would be collapse; a cloud of imploded stone. That was how it ended.

him, as soon as Leo had emerged into the clinical light of the theatre, Kate had recognised him as hers. They had been linked forever, she saw now. She simply had to wait for her son to be born. It didn’t matter which strands of whose particular DNA had gone into creating the infinitesimal nuance of him. He was hers. This she knew to be true. Jake

‘He’s got dark hair,’ she said. It was true – Leo’s head was dusted dark brown, so that when she lowered her lips to his face, and her hair fell forward, she and her son were a perfect match.

Leo was a gift so precious that it was only logical to be expected to work for it. Take away my sleep, she wanted to say. Take away my individuality, my job, my nights out, my ability to read a book, my trendy clothes – take all of it and see if I care. There was no sacrifice too great; no lack that she wouldn’t willingly suffer. She had her baby. Finally, after so much time and so much suffering: he was here.

one of these catch-ups, Jas told her that Marisa was dating an Australian yoga instructor she had met on the Machu Picchu trail. ‘He sounds great,’ Jas said. ‘Really down to earth and kind.’ ‘But she hates yoga.’ ‘I know!’ Jas snorted. ‘That’s what I love about it.’

She has come to realise that the ferocity of this kind of love is enough to drive you mad; that the tragic flaw of parenthood is that you equip your child to leave you. But what if you never want to let them go? And