The Secret Baby Room

D.D Johnston

Description

You think you are ready for children. Your husband says he is ready for children. The only problem is your new neighbourhood, where children disappear. Claire Wilson knows what she saw: on the eighth floor of a derelict tower block, a woman was bottle-feeding a baby. But why would anyone take a baby into a boarded-up tower block? In an area of Manchester plagued by unexplained tragedies, the only allies Claire can find are a pagan witch, a wild-child party girl, and a husband with too many secrets.

Sujets

• police
• Psychological
• Hulme
• Northern England
• Mersey River
• Manchester
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Barbican Press
• Date de parution: 11 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909954199
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

First published in Great Britain by Barbican Press in 2015 Copyright © D.D. Johnston 2015
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention No reproduction without permission All rights reserved
The right of D.D. Johnston to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
Barbican Press, Hull and London Registered office: 1 Ashenden Road, London E5 0DP www.barbicanpress.com @barbicanpress1
A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-909954-18-2 eBook ISBN: 978-1-909954-19-9
Typeset by Tetragon, London Cover by Jason Anscomb of Rawshock Design
Printed by Totem, Poland

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Contents Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Acknowledgement s About the Author
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For mothers. For all our mothers.
‌ One
CLAIRE WILSON was in the spare room of her new home, unpacking a box marked ‘miscellaneous,’ when she glanced up and saw the strangest thing. High up in the abandoned tower block that overshadowed their estate, a woman was bottle-feeding a baby.
She watched for a few seconds, straining to make out more detail. Then she returned her attention to the unpacking. The box at her feet was one of those they had filled at the last minute, and it was full of all the stuff that had no proper place: a collection of batteries, her husband’s football shin pads, an empty picture frame, the plunger from a cafetière that so far remained lost in transit. She thought for a moment and then carried the plunger downstairs, setting it on the kitchen windowsill. When she looked back at the tower block, the woman and the baby had disappeared.
Already the image was fading in her mind. She thought the woman might have had blonde hair, but it could have been grey. She thought the baby might have been wrapped in a purple blanket, but it was difficult to be sure. And yet, for some reason, it occurred to her that the figure she’d seen in the distance was not dissimilar to the girl who lived next door. She had blonde hair. She sunbathed topless in her garden and drank cocktails through a straw and played dance music in the early afternoon. Claire had yet to speak to her neighbour, but she knew every beat of her music collection. In fact, the present silence was unusual and she wondered whether perhaps—
But then why would the blonde neighbour, or anyone else, take a baby up there ? How would she take a baby up there? The tower and its grounds were fenced off with construction barriers, and yellow-black warning signs were spread around the perimeter. Beyond that, the weeds had grown unchecked, a forest of thistles and nettles and rosebay willowherb. The building’s entrances were blocked with plywood and clearly marked: DANGER. DEMOLITION IN PROGRESS. DO NOT ENTER. Above that the lower floors were wrapped in dark tarpaulin that flapped at night like the rigging of a ghost ship. And yet, higher still, beyond the fire-charred glassless windows, at a window on the eighth or ninth floor, there had been – she was certain of it – a woman cradling a baby.
If the demolition had gone according to plan then Sighthill Tower, like the other high rise flats in this part of Manchester, would have been demolished before the Wilsons moved in. While the other blocks had disappeared, built over by privately-owned semi-detached suburban homes, Sighthill Tower had made a defiant stand. Claire had followed the news online from their old home in Birmingham: a resident in new-build suburbia, Morgana someone or other, had challenged the council on a point of health and safety – something to do with asbestos. The complaint was upheld and the controlled implosion was postponed. The rescheduled demolition would now go ahead – touch wood – in four weeks’ time.
Feminism was a wonderful thing, Claire thought, but in her opinion women had been conned when it came to work. Once upon a time, or so it seemed from old sitcoms, men did a day’s wage labour and women did a day’s domestic labour; now, most of her married friends seemed to do a day’s wage labour, and then come home to do a day’s domestic labour. They should have made the men do half the domestic labour and offered to do half the paid work in exchange. Everyone would have worked part-time, and everyone would have enjoyed a healthy balance between employment and home life. She’d come to this conclusion over the last week when, for the first time ever, she’d done the whole housewife thing. When Dan was offered the manager’s job at Manchester coach station, she’d seized the chance to escape unhappy memories. But fleeing the past had meant doing something she’d always said she wouldn’t: she’d quit her job and moved with her husband’s work.
‘I applied for a job today,’ she told Dan when he came in.
‘Oh yeah? Doing what?’
‘Same thing – medical secretary. It’s a pay band lower, it’s only twenty-eight hours a week, and it’s fixed term, but it’s something to tide me over, right?’
‘Where’s it at?’
‘That’s the best bit – it’s in Wythenshawe. I could walk there if I wanted to.’
Dan opened the fridge and pulled out a Carlsberg. ‘Is it ophthalmology again?’ he asked without looking round.
‘No – urology.’
‘Isn’t that penises and stuff?’
‘It’s genitourinary, yeah. Kidneys, bladders, urethras, testes, prostates, penises …’
‘So you’re going from looking at eyes to looking at bollocks. Is that progress?’
‘I don’t look at anything. I keep the records, type the notes, find the files.’
‘Files filled with pictures of diseased penises,’ said Dan, easing into the sofa. ‘What a day I’ve had, Babe – you wouldn’t believe it.’ He clicked on the TV. ‘A pile up closed the M6 in both directions near Knutsford, so the London coach were two hours late, meanwhile the shuttles were delayed cause of some road rage incident on the M62. Bloke with a machete, they said on the news.’
Claire had learned to stop listening during Dan’s traffic reports. The state of Britain’s highways was of great importance to Dan and his colleagues, but it bored the hell out of her. Last Christmas she’d accompanied Dan to the Birmingham region’s annual staff party, where she’d spent the night listening to Dan and his colleagues debate the M42 road works.
She sat next to him and took a sip of his beer. ‘I saw something really weird today.’
‘Oh yeah?’ said Dan, flicking through channels.
‘I looked out at that tower block and quite high up, the seventh or eighth floor or something, there was a woman with a baby.’
Dan paused. There was a beat before he spoke. ‘Really?’
‘I swear they were there.’
‘Weird. A homeless woman sheltering from the mid-day sun? A mother wanting to visit her childhood home before it disappears forever?’
‘I guess. There was just something really freaky about it – something haunting.’
Dan started to laugh. ‘One of the 350 drivers, Tommy, is dead into all that ghost business. According to him, that church up the road—’
‘St. Michael’s?’
‘Yeah. It’s the most haunted place in Manchester, he reckons. All the ghost hunters go there and camp overnight.’
‘I think the solution may be more mundane.’ Claire lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘It was hard to tell from here, but the woman looked a bit like her from next door.’
‘The hippy woman?’
‘No, her on the other side.’
‘Oh. I spoke to her this morning.’
‘Why?’
‘In a neighbourly way. Her name’s Lianne, she seems sound, and she certainly didn’t have a baby with her.’
‘Well, whoever it was put that baby in needless danger. Do you think we should phone someone?’
‘Claire,’ said Dan, rubbing her shoulder, ‘don’t go mithering social services. Let it drop.’
Later, when the bell rang, Claire expected it to be the pizza guy. Instead, she opened the door to her new neighbour – not Lianne, but the hippy woman who lived on the other side. Snakes of hair stuck out from her green headscarf, and despite the heat she was wearing a woollen poncho. From her neck there hung a wooden triple-moon symbol, which seemed to Claire like a new-age version of the Coco Chanel logo. The woman was flanked by two young children. ‘I do hope we’re not disturbing you,’ she said. ‘Adrian, my husband, said we should let you two settle in before pestering you with the business of the neighbourhood, but I did so badly want to stop by and say hi. I’m Morgana Cox, and these are my children, Mooncloud and Unity.’
‘That’s very kind of you.’ Claire wanted to shake Morgana’s hand but saw that she held a clutch of photocopied leaflets. ‘Dan,’ she called into the house, ‘come and meet Morgana Cox from next door.’ After a shuffle of awkward greetings, during which the children smiled rigidly as if hypnotised, Claire asked whether Morgana was the same woman who had intervened to delay the demolition of Sighthill Tower.
‘Oh, that was nothing,’ said Morgana, as if to deter an impending chorus of praise. ‘It was just my duty as a concerned member of the community. I mean, for all we know there isn’t any asbestos up there, but it’s the principle of the thing, isn’t it? It’s just such a masculine attitude: if there’s a problem, blow it up. There’s a lot of energy in the tower – both good and bad – and it needs to be handled carefully, don’t you think? It’s the same with the redevelopment of the old church house, isn’t it, children?’ The children maintained their glazed smiles. ‘I swear half the people working on that site are illegal immigrants. But we mustn’t talk about that here,’ whispered Mo