AllFreeNovel
Share Us
thirty-six hours before the wedding
chapter 03
alex
Lottie wakes hours before dawn, still on London time. I toss her my phone, buying myself another valuable half-hour, and burrow back under the covers. Of all the many trials of motherhood, sleep deprivation is one of the worst.
I never wanted a child. This doesn’t mean I don’t love the very bones of her now she’s here; Lottie is my oxygen, the reason I breathe. But I can’t be the only woman who didn’t see herself as a mother until it happened, and, if I’m ruthlessly honest, for quite a long time after she arrived.
In fairness, I didn’t much see myself as a wife, either.
Luca and I met nearly five years ago, in March 2015, a few months after he’d moved to the UK from his hometown of Genoa, in northern Italy, to head up the London office of his family’s coffee import business. In those days, I rented a ground-floor flat one street away from Parsons Green Tube station in Fulham with a couple of friends, and we were sick and tired of having our drive blocked by commuters dumping their cars in nearby roads before getting the train into central London.
One evening, unable to drive to my father’s sixtieth birthday party in Sussex until the owner of the car obstructing mine returned, I lay in wait, seething, and then exploded in the driver’s face.
Italian to his marrow, Luca gave as good as he got. As I recall, our first conversation consisted almost entirely of imaginative swearwords in two languages.
Sometime around the point I stormed back into the flat, grabbed a tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream, and smeared it all over his windscreen, I noticed how good-looking he was. Our encounter descended into clichéd rom-com meet-cute: he asked me out to dinner, I accepted, and we ended up in bed.
At the time, I was twenty-four and had just started full-time work at Muysken Ritter. I was putting in eighteen-hour days, six and often seven days a week. I didn’t have time for a relationship.
But Luca was charming, well-travelled, and fun. I enjoyed spending time with him. The sex was excellent, and I found myself refreshed and more productive after a night together. It was easy to fancy myself a little bit in love with him.
Or perhaps I really was; from this distance, it’s hard to be sure.
Some four months after that first, cystitis-inducing night, I discovered that, thanks to a bout of food-poisoning and consequent antibiotics, I was six weeks pregnant. If I didn’t have time for a relationship, I certainly couldn’t cope with a baby. I booked a termination, and told Luca, because I felt it would’ve been dishonest not to, not because I expected him to have a say in the matter.
To my astonishment, he fell on bended knee and asked me to marry him. I rather wounded his pride by laughing.
He was Italian, of course, and Catholic: for him, the idea of abortion was anathema. He begged me to keep the baby, promising he’d do all the childcare, I’d ‘barely know the baby was there’.
He was passionate, and persuasive.
And I was young enough, and arrogant enough, to believe I really could have – and do – it all.
And then there was my sister, Harriet. At the age of nineteen, she’d been diagnosed with cervical cancer, and although the aggressive chemotherapy treatment saved her life, it’d rendered her infertile. It was impossible not to have her tragedy at the forefront of my mind when I made my decision.
The next time Luca proposed, I said yes. Reader, I married him – twice. We moved into a two-bedroom terrace in Balham, turning one of them into a nursery, and set about building our little family. And when it all fell apart, as it inevitably did before we’d even reached Lottie’s second birthday, I took it on the chin and put marriage and children on the list of experiments worth trying once, but never repeating, along with parachute jumpsuits and floral tea dresses.
I’m woken a second time when Lottie flings the phone at my head. It makes brutal contact and I sit bolt upright, rubbing the side of my skull. ‘Fuck!’ I exclaim. ‘What did you do that for!’
‘You’re not listening to me,’ Lottie says.
‘Damn it, Lottie. That really hurt.’
‘I don’t want to be a bridesmaid.’
I fling back the bedcovers. ‘I don’t give a damn what you want. You said you’d do this, and you’re going to.’
‘My blue mummy says I don’t have to.’
I have no idea what she’s talking about. ‘Well,thismummy says you do.’
I need to pee, but when I try to open the bathroom door, it’s jammed shut. I kneel down and prise out the dozens of bits of paper Lottie has shoved beneath it, an irritating habit she started in the traumatic aftermath of her father’s death. She does it with any door that doesn’t fit tightly to the floor, convinced monsters are going to slide between the gaps. She refuses even to go into my parents’ kitchen, because the door down to the cellar has a half-inch gap she can’t block.
‘For heaven’s sake, Lottie. I thought we’d talked about this.’
She hunches her shoulders, juts out her chin and glares at me mulishly.
