In Bloom. C.J. Skuse

won’t be on my own, will I? I ask her. I’ll have the baby?

      No, she says, tidying the cards.

      Does my baby die? I ask her.

      I saw a baby covered in blood.

      I smash her face in with the crystal ball and she crouches behind the table, cowering, her hands over her head. Even when she’s unconscious I keep going. There’s no stopping me. I couldn’t kill a baby. I’m not capable. There is good in me somewhere.

      But it’s buried so deep, she says. It’s the last thing she says.

      *

      This morning, once Jim’s morning farts had cleared from the big bathroom, I treated myself to a bubble bath and a hair wash with two shampoos and the posh antenatal conditioner Elaine bought. Thing is though, my hair is STILL greasy. What happens in a preggo’s body that makes her hair greasy? Why is my body giving my foetus all my shine and bounce?

      Also – dry hands and feet – the fuh? I’m taking on water like the Titanic but every extremity is as dry as a nun’s gusset. This kid is leaching all my moisture and redirecting it to my scalp. I looked at myself in Elaine’s mirror and I cried. I cry at nothing nowadays. I cry at burnt toast and RSPCA adverts and when I got my dressing gown cord stuck in the front door and the UPS guy saw my foof. I suppose that’s down to Heil Foetus as well.

      You wanted him to see it.

      I thought Marnie would have called this weekend about going maternity clothes shopping but I guess she was full of it like everyone else in my life. Bullshit City, that’s where I hang my hat.

      Instead I have been dragged outside the house today to ‘get a bit of fresh air in my lungs’ even though I’m perfectly happy with my existing lungal air. Elaine reckons I’m depressed but I’m not. I’ve just got the morbs. Even serial killers get the blues you know.

      We’re currently sweltering our giblets out in motorway traffic en route to the garden centre.

      ‘Do you want another Murray Mint, Rhiannon?’

      ‘No thanks. Still working on the last one.’

      I’m sitting in the back of the car, strapped in like a child. We used to go on seaside trips when we were kids – me and Seren in the back listening to music through shared earphones, Mum in the front, Dad driving. Mum feeding him wine gums. Dad turning up Spice Girls so we could all sing loudly. My Sylvanians would be buckled in beside me and on cold days, me and Seren would snuggle under the big green picnic blanket.

      Jim and Elaine have the radio tuned to Coma FM. Usually I can’t stand it because there’s too much chatting and this lunch-time quiz where the callers are a sack of dicks, but they’ve just played ‘Father Figure’ and now I’m crying. It had been playing on a paint-splattered radio in a pet shop Craig and Dad were refitting as a tattooist’s the first time we met. The week before he was arrested, Craig said it should be our first dance at our wedding. I wanted to do a routine to ‘Opposites Attract’ but he said it depended how pissed he got.

      Yes, he used to annoy me. Yes, he cheated. Yes, he used to talk through movies and stub out his blunts on my Hygena sideboard. But once upon a time he was mine. And I miss it. This is not the family I was meant to have.

      *

      We’re looking at the potted trees – well, Jim and Elaine are. I’m updating AJ’s Facebook page – he’s ‘in Moscow now, where water’s more expensive than vodka’. Found a pic of the Kremlin and some random guy wrapped in winter knits that obscured his face to accompany the post.

      I heard them talking about me when they thought I was in the loo.

      ‘I wonder why she’s not buying anything for the baby. Spends all her money on those toys. It’s worrying.’

      ‘If it makes her happy I don’t see the harm, E, leave her be.’

      ‘I’m not saying it’s harmful. Just odd. She should be nesting. She doesn’t read those books I got her, she doesn’t talk about it, ever.’

      ‘I know, I know.’

      ‘We need to find out what her plans are.’

      This exchange bugs me all the way round but I swallow it. At a quarter to midday, we headed into the café as Elaine wanted to ‘beat the queues’. We ordered scampi and Jim told me to get the table near the play area.

      I watched some toddlers on their springy ride-on things. A mum was stood behind one of the little girls, her hand on the child’s back. Another was consoling a boy who’d banged his knee. She rocked him and kissed his forehead. There was an older lady – mid sixties – pushing two girls on the swings. They shouted ‘Higher, Granny!’ and she laughed. And they laughed.

      The sun bounced off the metal swing post into my eyes. I got my bottle of Gaviscon out of my bag and swigged it.

      Jim appeared with our tray of cutlery and condiments, gibbering away like an angry badger, and plonked it down on the table.

      ‘What’s wrong?’

      ‘I don’t believe it,’ he huffed, setting out the cutlery. ‘Bloody woman.’

      ‘Who, Elaine?’

      ‘No,’ he said on an angry breath. ‘Over there, third table on the right.’

      I swigged my Gaviscon again and counted along the tables. Two women were eating croissants. The penny didn’t drop immediately.

      ‘Sandra Huggins,’ he said.

      The world around me stopped. A bomb could have gone off and I wouldn’t have noticed. Those two words were enough for me to forget everything. My heartburn merged into something else – for the first time in weeks I felt my own heart beating again, faster and faster the more I took in her face. It was like I’d been dead and she’d brought me back to life.

      I’ve never seen anyone I wanted to kill more.

      ‘I don’t know her,’ I lied, barely able to sit still.

      ‘You know her face, don’t you? She’s dyed her hair but it’s her all right,’ said Jim. ‘I expect she’s been given a new name, new home, all on the taxpayer’s ticket. I bet those kiddies never got as much.’

      ‘What kiddies?’

      He leant across the table. ‘Don’t you remember? She was the one taking pictures of these kiddies at that nursery. Sending them to these horrible men. Little boys. Babies. I think they’re still in jail. Pity she isn’t, rotting. I hope Elaine doesn’t notice she’s back round here.’

      ‘Oh god, that’s awful,’ I said, watching Huggins’s three chins as her mouth worked on her Danish. That one word circled my head like an eel: babies. Babies. Babies. She’d done it to babies.

      Huggins was still as pig-dog ugly as the selfie they’d printed in the paper months ago. Not one of her teeth was aligned and she had the most disgusting forearm tattoos (names in Arabic writing, the obligatory Harry Potter quote, etc). There was a green coat on the empty chair next to her and a red leather handbag, gaping open like a saggy mouth.

      ‘Vile woman,’ said Jim. ‘No, she’s not a woman, she’s a creature. I’ve got half a mind to go over there—’

      ‘Don’t Jim, think of your palpitations.’ Hypocritical of me I know, seeing as I was pretty tachycardic myself at the time, only for a whole other reason.

      He started his deep breathing exercises. ‘I’m all right, I’m all right. Just can’t believe that is allowed to walk around free. Should have thrown the key away. I don’t know if I want this scampi now.’

      ‘Come on, try to relax. It’s all right.’ The refrain of ‘Spice Up Your Life’ popped into my head and began reeling through it like ribbons.

      ‘If