Persons Unknown: A Richard and Judy Book Club Pick 2018. Susie Steiner

furniture for a living. Tables mostly. I take pieces of wood, and I sand them and turn them and create joints, and when they’re made, someone pays me for them, and they take the table away. And that I can understand. I used to ask him again and again, but his work stayed a mystery to me.’

       Manon

      ‘Oh God, you need wine,’ Manon says, pouring Sauvignon Blanc into a glass and handing it to Ellie, who’s sitting at the kitchen table pushing a balled tissue into a nostril. Her eyes are red, her lips cracked. She takes the glass gratefully. ‘Hang on,’ says Manon, making for the doorway, ‘right back …’

      Out in the hall, she calls ‘Fly! Fly?’ up the stairs.

      No response. She can hear the bath running, knows what they’ll be doing up there. Fly will be lying on his bed reading his latest Anthony Horowitz novel, imagining himself a teen spy, while Solly squats on the carpet constructing the same dinosaur puzzle he works at every night: repetition being a source of unalloyed joy for the 2-year-old.

      ‘Fly!’ she shouts, a notch louder and with more irritation.

      She weighs up her exhaustion and desire to talk to Ellie versus the need to intervene. She very much doesn’t want to heave her bulk up those stairs but knows that Fly’s total immersion in his book means Sol could be drawing on the walls while the bath overflows. Her belly creaks, she yawns, thinks, fuck it. ‘Turn the tap off!’ she bellows, her parting shot as she returns to her sister, whose floodgates have re-opened.

      These are feelings entirely not put to bed, Manon thinks, looking at Ellie’s dissolving face.

      ‘Sorry,’ Ellie says.

      ‘Don’t be.’

      ‘It’s just … it’s just … there’s no chance of anything now,’ she says in a watery voice, plucking another tissue from the floral cube beside her, ‘for him and Solly. No chance of a father for Sol. That’s going to be a loss all his life. It’s a fucking tragedy.’ She breaks down again. ‘It, it, it can’t be undone. I can’t ever make this better for him.’

      ‘His parents are here, did Harriet tell you? There’s a chance to give Solly some grandparents. We should invite them to stay.’

      ‘I did,’ says Ellie. ‘They didn’t want to but they’re coming to meet Sol tomorrow.’

      ‘Is part of it,’ Manon begins, girding herself, ‘that there’s no chance for you and Jon-Oliver now?’

      ‘No. No, it’s definitely not that, not even in my unconscious. I’d never have gone back to him. Jon-Oliver was a great one for fresh starts, saying he was going to change, but you’d have been a complete moron to believe him. You know, when he first reappeared in the summer in London, he said, “I want to be good. I want to be a good father.” And I said, “Right, and you think Solly’s going to make you good? That’s a lot to ask of a 2-year-old.” He said, “I just think I can be a different person if you and Solly were in my life.’’’

      ‘So he wanted you back? What did you say?’

      ‘Told him he could leave me out of it.’

      ‘Are you hungry?’ asks Manon. ‘I could make the tarragon chicken thing.’

      ‘Christ, is that a threat?’

      ‘Crisps?’

      ‘Go on, then.’

      In the getting up, opening a cupboard, emptying the Kettle Chips (sweet chilli flavour) into a bowl, Manon says, ‘What was it like with Jon-Oliver?’ Of course they’d discussed it in the past, but never in detail.

      Ellie sighs. Sips her wine. ‘He had this slept-in face – and my God he could be funny. Slightly dangerous-funny – irreverent, bit close to the wire. We’d come home from a night out, he’d mix some cocktails and then we’d go out again. And the sex—’

      ‘Yes all right,’ says Manon, shoving more crisps than seems feasible into her mouth, frightened it might be true – about all the sex she’s missing out on.

      ‘Anyway, he had all that rich boy’s confidence, and I knew he was a bit of a player – you could just tell from his moves, and I’m telling you, his friends from the City were wankers, I mean boorish, sexist, the works. But Jon-Oliver … I suppose I thought if I was the one he settled down with, then I’d get all the sexiness and the money – the money was a really big part of it, I’m not gonna lie – and the other stuff he’d grow out of. Thought I’d be living in Holland Park and wearing taupe to yoga.’

      ‘Nearly got there,’ Manon says.

      ‘Single mum living in Hinchingbrooke? Yep, not far off.’

      ‘So what happened? Between you and him, I mean.’

      ‘Playboys aren’t fun when you’re pregnant. They’re the opposite of fun. First there was just a line over and over again on a bank statement he’d left out by accident. Awork. I Googled it. Adult work – a prostitutes’ website. He came clean, said he was watching porn videos late at night, nothing more than that. But it’s always more than that. The stuff they come clean about is only ever a fraction of it. To be honest, it was a disaster to have got pregnant and I say that with love in my heart for Sol.’

      The thought of the unaware baby upstairs makes them both silent.

      Ellie rotates her glass. ‘To be honest, I’m not that surprised he’s dead. I know that sounds awful, but the world he moved in … It was all glinting surfaces hiding God knows what. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was trading for dangerous people. There was no heart …’ Ellie is rubbing her fingers together, as if trying to assess a fabric. ‘Nothing real to it, you know? He was a man without any substance. Every now and then, he’d deny himself – no coke, no prostitutes, back to the gym, kale in his NutriBullet, a really superficial bout of CBT. And then he’d rebel against the clean slate so hard it was terrifying. Jon-Oliver liked a cold kind of pleasure – sex without a relationship. I’d say it was some Russian bitch he was shagging. That’ll be who stabbed him.’

      They are silent again. Ellie sips her wine. Manon wishes she could have some.

      ‘He told me some insane stories about the City. Champagne, hotels, piles of drugs, piles of girls. He told me about one party they had where they hired a whole floor of a London hotel and it ended up being a sea of naked bodies.’

      ‘Don’t get much of that in the police,’ says Manon. ‘Not on cold cases, certainly.’

      ‘No, there’s not much of it in nursing either. I mean there’s bodies, and they’re often naked, but not in a good way.’

      ‘In general,’ Manon says, ‘if you’re after the orgiastic experience, public sector isn’t really the way to go.’

      She is struck by a drip on the bridge of her nose. She touches it with her fingers, looks at the wetness, looks up at the ceiling. There is a small gathering of drips, trembling on the ceiling, waiting to fall.

      ‘Fuck!’ says Manon. ‘The fucking bath!’

      She gets up and makes for the hallway with every molecule of haste she can muster and generates all the speed of an 80-year-old. ‘Fly! Flyyyyy! Pull the flipping plug out!!!’

      Upstairs, the water is tumbling over the edge of the bathtub – rather beautifully, she notices, like an infinity pool at a posh hotel. She turns the tap off and pulls out the plug, wetting her sleeve and hearing the gushing of water down the waste pipe. The sound prompts an urgent need to pee. She grabs all the towels hanging on hooks on the wall and flings them onto the floor to soak up the wet; sighs, closes the bathroom door.

      Only five months pregnant. Is it possible she will become still more ungainly?

      When