Chapter 3: Late

Peter calls before he has decided to. The ring tone is wrong, long single burrs with gaps between them, a sound from somewhere very far away. She picks up on the fourth.

"Peter." A whisper.

"Hey. I'm here. Are you all right?"

"I can't talk. My mother is up. The walls are like paper."

He gets up off the sofa without knowing why and stands in the middle of the room. The street light outside makes an orange square on the carpet.

"How late?"

"Three days. I'm never late. Never, Peter. I'm like a clock."

Something in his stomach drops a floor.

"But you're on the pill. Aren't you?"

A silence, with a hiss in it. "What pill?"

Behind her a woman's voice calls out, a word he doesn't know, rising at the end. Jessica answers in the same language, bright and easy, a voice for mothers. Then, low and fast, back to him: "I have to go. I'll write. Sorry. Sorry."

The line clicks. He stands there with the phone against his ear, listening to nothing.

He sits down. He gets up again and puts the kettle on, because it's what you do, and stands over it while it roars.

The phone buzzes.

*sorry. she wanted to know who calls so late. i said a friend from the hike*

He types with his thumbs, deletes it, types again.

*The contraceptive pill. When I said I hadn't got anything, you said it was fine. I thought you were on it.*

The three dots appear, vanish, appear. The kettle clicks off. He doesn't touch it.

*i thought you meant you were clean. no diseases*

*we don't have the pill. it's not allowed*

*Not allowed?*

*the hormones go through you into the water. into the lagoon. we drink from the lagoon. when my mother was young the fish went wrong and the doctors said the babies would be wrong too. everyone knows this*

He reads it three times. The fish went wrong.

*OK. And condoms?*

*i know the word. we don't have them either. i never saw one. is that what you meant? that you didn't have one?*

*Yes.*

*oh*

*oh Peter*

He puts the phone face down on his knee and rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. He knew. That's the thing he can't get past. He's the one who knew what it meant, and he said it in a mumble with his heart going and took her "it's fine" as gospel because it was what he wanted to hear. And at the second shelter he didn't even ask.

He picks the phone up again. He's thirty-five, he's a decent bloke, he knows what you say. He writes it carefully.

*Listen. Whatever happens, you're not on your own in this. And if it is, and you don't want it, there are options. I'd pay for all of it. You could even come over here for it, if that's easier.*

He sends it before he can fiddle with it.

The dots come. They go. Ten minutes. He makes the tea after all and lets it go cold on the arm of the sofa.

*please delete that*

*i mean it. delete it now*

*Jess, I only meant*

*i know what you meant. here that is murder. not like a word people shout. the law. prison for life. for the woman, the doctor, and the man who paid. everyone involved. i'm not angry. you didn't know. but please delete it*

He holds his thumb on the message until the menu comes up, and deletes it, and feels like a man in a film disposing of a weapon. Which is mad. He's in his flat in Manchester with a cold cup of tea.

*Done. I'm sorry.*

*it's ok*

*Then I'll help properly. Whatever it takes. I could come out there.*

*you can't just come*

*Why not?*

The dots go on a long time.

*it's complicated. not tonight. and if there is a baby it's yours. it counts*

*Counts?*

*against your two*

*My two what?*

Another pause.

*Peter. how many children can a man have in england?*

He actually laughs, alone in the flat.

*As many as he likes. As many as he can afford, really.*

*here it's two. a woman can have as many as she wants but a man can only father two. then he chooses*

*Chooses what?*

*the card. or a cage. or he leaves the island*

A cage. He looks at the word. It must be her English, some local word that's come out wrong. A cage. He thinks of a hamster.

*A cage??*

*a lock. for there. it's for life. some men want it. most take the card in the end, it's simpler*

*anyway it doesn't count for you now, you're not from here. only if you ever became one of us. then it would. my cousin's husband had twins on the first try and that was both*

*What happened to him?*

*he got his card. he's fine. he plays football on sundays*

*What card?*

*from the clinic. they cut him and give him a card to show he's done. it takes a minute*

Peter reads it and waits for the joke. There isn't one. He scrolls up and reads the whole thing again from the start, and it's still there, in her small lowercase letters, sitting next to a photo from last week of a bowl of fruit.

*if there is a baby i'll be a single mother. you don't know what that means here. there's a woman on my street*

*You wouldn't be on your own. I'd be there.*

*from manchester?*

He has no answer to that. He types three and deletes all three.

*i have to sleep. i have class at eight*

*Text me tomorrow. Any time.*

*i will. goodnight Peter*

He sits up until two with the phone on his chest, doing sums in his head. Days, weeks. The flight to wherever she is. The size of his savings. And somewhere under all of it, a number he doesn't want to look at.

Two.

---

Jessica takes the register at eight with a voice that sounds, to her, like somebody else's.

Twenty-three children in white shirts answer to their names. Her cousin's twins sit together in the second row, as they always do, the boy kicking the girl's chair, the girl pretending not to notice. Jessica writes the date on the board and underlines it and stands looking at it for longer than she should.

She went to the toilet twice before school, and once already since, and each time she knew before she looked. Nothing.

"Miss? Miss, are we doing the animals?"

"We are doing the animals." She turns round and smiles, the teacher smile, and holds up the picture card. "What is this?"

"A cow!"

"A cow. Repeat after me. The cow is in the field."

The cow is in the field, they chant, and she thinks: you would be a single mother by a foreigner, and every one of their mothers would know by the end of the week.

At break she sits in the staff room with a coffee she doesn't drink and reads Peter's messages again. Options. She knows what he meant, she's seen films, she knows how it is in other countries. It still made her cold all down her arms. Years ago there was a case in the papers, a girl from the north coast, and the nurse who did it, and the boyfriend who drove her to the nurse's house. All three are still in prison. Her mother read it out at breakfast and shook her head over the boyfriend most of all. He drove her, her mother said. Can you imagine.

Peter didn't know. She tells herself that again. He thought she was on the pill, and he'd never heard of the law. She thought *I haven't got anything* meant he was clean. Two people in a stone hut, each sure the other one had it handled.

She needs a test. That's the next thing, the only thing she can do.

The pharmacy is on the main street, two minutes from her mother's house. Mr. Tane has run it since before she was born. He puts everything in brown paper bags, folded twice at the top, and he knows what is in every bag, and so by evening does half the street. A married woman buys a test and he winks and says good luck. An unmarried woman buys a test and her mother hears about it before she gets home.

So on Saturday she borrows her mother's car, says she's going to see the beaches on the far side, and drives two hours to the other end of the island with the windows down and the radio loud so she can't hear herself think.

The pharmacist there is young, a woman with her hair tied up in a scarf. She takes the box from Jessica and scans it, and her eyes go once, quickly, to Jessica's left hand, and come back up.

"Do it in the morning," she says. Not unkind. "First thing. It's stronger then."

"Thank you."

"Is it your first?"

Jessica doesn't know if she means the test or the baby. "Yes," she says, which is true either way.

She drives home with the paper bag on the passenger seat. Halfway, on the long straight road along the coast where the sea is so blue it hurts, she has to pull over. She sits with the engine running and her hands on the wheel and lets herself think it, all of it, for the first time.

A baby with straw-colored hair. A man who lives in a city she can't picture and makes sure the bits fit.

She didn't tell him the rest, the night she wrote to him. What a man has to agree to at the airport before he can walk out of it. One thing at a time.

---

On the Monday after her message, Peter shuts his office door, which he never does, and types Paradise Island into the search bar.

The first thing that comes up is a travel site with a photo of the same impossible blue he's seen on his phone. The second is a short encyclopedia page. Population approximately 120,000. Official languages: the native language and English. Noted for its strict population policy. There's a citation link at the end of that line, and it goes to a government site.

It's in English, all pastel colors and rounded letters. At the top is a cartoon family holding hands on a beach: a mother, a father, two children, a dog. Everyone is smiling. The dad is smiling hardest.

He clicks on Frequently Asked Questions.

How many children may I have?

Every man is entitled to father two children. Women are free to have as many children as they wish!

The exclamation mark is the worst part, somehow.

What happens after my second child?

You are free to choose! You may be sanitised at any clinic, at no cost, or wear a long-term device, or emigrate. The state never decides for you.

Sanitised. He sits back. Through the glass in the door he can see Dave from purchasing eating a sausage roll over his keyboard.

It's the sort of thing, he decides, that's on the books and nobody does. Every country has them. In Chester it's still supposedly legal to shoot a Welshman with a longbow after dark, or so his granddad used to say, and nobody in Chester goes about with a longbow. Some old law from after a war, or a famine, written by a committee of men in hats. Jessica takes it seriously the way people take their own country seriously, the way he'd get prickly if someone laughed at the NHS.

He closes the tab. He opens it again and reads the bit about the clinic one more time. He closes it.

That night he lies in bed in the dark and finds himself doing it. Counting. If it's a baby. If he ever went there. If it counted. One, in a stone hut in the rain, without even knowing he was spending it.

And how many children, she asked him on the trail, as if there were a right answer. He put it down to her English. He doesn't now.

On Saturday night the phone goes.

*i have a test. i'll do it in the morning. the woman said it's stronger then*

*Ring me when you do. Any time. I'll be awake.*

*it will be very early for you*

*Don't care. Ring me.*

He sets an alarm anyway, and doesn't need it. He's lying with his eyes open when the phone lights up the ceiling, some ugly hour with a four at the front of it.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi." A whisper again, and a soft echo around it. A small room, tiles. He hears a tap running. "I did it. It's on the edge of the sink. Face down. I can't look."

"Okay. You don't have to look yet. I'm here."

"It says two minutes."

"Then we wait two minutes."

He sits up in bed and watches the clock on his phone. She breathes on the other end. He breathes on his. Neither of them says anything. He can hear a bird somewhere outside her window, singing a song he's never heard, in a morning that's already started where she is.

At two minutes he hears her take a breath.

"Peter."

"I'm here."

"Okay," she says. "Okay. I'm turning it over."