The Girl Before You. Nicola Rayner

      But in the evening, the leather shoes and suit were gone, replaced with corduroys and old jumpers with patches on the elbows. He would do odd jobs in the hotel garden when he could – mow the lawn, build bonfires – and he smelled of wood smoke and beer when he came to kiss us goodnight. The rough texture of his jumper tickled us as we sat up in bed to hug him. He wasn’t the best at bedtime stories – it wasn’t really his thing. Our mother was better, revealing tantalising snippets from Gone with the Wind or acting out the narrative of operas with doll’s house dolls – though not Madama Butterfly (‘it’s too sad’). Our mother had to be careful about things that were sad.

      Our dad was good at sums and puzzles. Horses and riding. Dogs. Swinging us high in the air. Long walks on the windy clifftops. Our mother was for tummy aches and baking cakes and singing. She’d sing in the hotel bar on open-mike nights – never for long, just a couple of songs, which she’d murmur into the microphone with her eyes closed, her hair messy from a night’s waiting in the restaurant.

      The men in the bar would look at her face carefully then, as if they were looking at the sun. ‘A rare beaut,’ our father used to call her. ‘You’re my rare beaut,’ he would say as he stood behind her in the kitchen and wrapped his arms around her, and she would smile and say, ‘You’re silly. Isn’t your dad silly?’ But she would look flustered, as though she liked it really.

      The men who drank in the hotel never really forgave our father for stealing our mother – I think that’s the way they saw it. They called him a spiv. Ruth dared me to ask our mum what it meant and I knew, even as I asked, that it was an ugly word – something we should have looked up in a dictionary rather than saying out loud. Our mother’s fingers touched the corner of her apron, squeezing the material in a ball for a second.

      ‘Where did you hear that?’

      We had heard the word in the bar, from the mouth of Dai the Poet, a camp, overweight man in his fifties, with drama school enunciation and a nasty turn of phrase when he was drunk.

      ‘What does it mean?’ Ruth asked.

      ‘It means people are jealous.’ Our mother let go of the apron, brushed it down and looked away.

      Of the many things our father was good at, making money was the one that attracted the most attention. It was his gift. He could see opportunities where other people couldn’t; he could crack through the sums; he could glance at the restaurant or the bar and know, more or less, how much they would take that night or what they could do to make more. He had turned our grandmother’s Pembrokeshire hotel from a bohemian labour of love into something profitable in just eighteen months.

      ‘He came from nothing,’ the posh men would whisper in the bar. Like that was a bad thing: to create something from nothing.

      ‘He’s not even from here,’ the locals would say. As if that were the final insult: that he had whisked away their most beautiful girl, made heaps of money and, worst of all, he didn’t even have the decency to be Welsh.

      The bar was full of tribes – the rich men who’d made their money early in life or inherited and come out to live on the coast; the locals who’d cram the bar on Fridays and Saturdays; or the holidaymakers whose drinking tended not to be bound by which day of the week it was – but our dad didn’t belong to any of them.

      Instead, we made a tribe of our own: Ruth and our father with their red hair, my mother and me, with our dark eyes. Neither parent had much tolerance for tales, though we never gave up trying to embroil them both in the ongoing battle of the halfway line, mainly in the car, where it existed as an imaginary border that separated Ruth’s messy side from my neat one.

      There were just eighteen months between us. We witnessed the very first moment we met on cine film, a silent movie in muted colours. Ruth, clutching Nunny, her pink toy rabbit, in our grandmother’s arms at the front door, had stretched out to greet our mother as she came back from hospital carrying me in a large white blanket.

      ‘Baby,’ mouths our mother in the film, tilting my face, peeking through the blanket, towards Ruth.

      ‘Baby,’ repeats my sister, climbing out of our grandmother’s arms to join me, heedless of the halfway line even then.

       Alice

       February 2016

      It has been three weeks since Alice had approached Naomi on Facebook and had no response – three weeks, too, since the doctor had told her unequivocally that she was pregnant. The news had come as a shock to both of them: Alice wonders now if perhaps they had started getting used to the idea that they couldn’t – or wouldn’t. George had leaned heavily against the kitchen counter when she’d told him. He was quiet for what seemed like a long time. Eventually, he had said, ‘Oh! darling, that’s wonderful,’ and come over to where she was sitting at the kitchen table to embrace her, pressing her face against his stomach.

      A baby. A person made up from George and her. Alice tries hard to think of what such a person might look like and finds she can’t picture it, can’t imagine how George’s strong features might be combined with her more delicate face. Lying in bed, she puts a hand on her stomach. Since her sixth week when she found out she was pregnant, she has been feeling extremely unwell indeed. She’s had to take weeks off work and finds herself staggering around the house from the bedroom to the loo. It is not quite the euphoria she imagined. The sickness makes her feel light-headed, depleted. She has fitful dreams often set in St Anthony’s, with Dan there too, and other people she hasn’t seen for years. But the dreams are so vivid, so clear, it feels as if no time has passed at all.

      When she feels well enough to get up, she wanders down to George’s study. She trawls the internet looking up people on Facebook, searching for Ruth’s face. In a weak moment, she decides to order Richard Wiseman’s book but she clicks through too quickly and finds she has sent it to her work address. On a well-worn trail, she tends to return to George’s desk, to try the drawers in case. Just in case.

      Yesterday, a particularly bad day, she picked up the photo collage on his desk and looked at it again. It took her a moment to realise, but the photos seemed to be in a different order from when she last saw them. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. Yes, they’d been changed around. Her eyes returned to the photo of George and Dan, and it seemed smaller, as if it had been cropped. Alice traced her finger around the edge. The red hair had disappeared. It had been cut away.

      She had called Christie to talk about it but found she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it out loud. Perhaps she’d wait to see her in person. Instead, she said, ‘Did you know Naomi Walker is pregnant, too? I noticed on Facebook.’ It had been something a mutual friend had written, tagging both Naomi and Alice in the post.

      Christie paused. ‘No, I hadn’t heard.’

      ‘It just made me think,’ said Alice, playing with the cord of the house phone. ‘It just made me think that if Ruth were still alive, it might give her a reason to come back.’

      Christie had been silent for a long time. She has been quite short with Alice recently. Maybe she just thinks Alice is being a wet blanket. Christie efficiently pushed out three bouncing boys without any fuss and was back to work within six weeks of the last one’s arrival.

      ‘Don’t you think, darling,’ she said, ‘that you’re being weird about this?’

      What had she been like before she met Christie? Alice tries to focus. She had always thought of herself as, if not mousy exactly, someone who had to try rather hard. She had started college a term late because of glandular fever, which had lingered for months after her A levels. By the time she arrived, other freshers had separated into clusters. She’d had to make up for the lost months. So she was grateful to have happened upon Christie, who had the bedroom above her and invited her up one morning for coffee. Sitting there, as Christie fussed over a compact Italian coffee machine, Alice noticed the Post-it notes on the wall above her desk: ‘Fit