PART 1
My ex-husband had made it very clear that I was no longer his problem.
So I gave birth on my own.
I had been awake since about two with pains I told myself were nothing, and by four I knew they were not nothing, and by half past I was in the car.
I drove myself to that hospital with one hand on the wheel and the other pressed flat against my stomach, shaking through every red light on the ring road, talking out loud to my baby and asking him to hold on for just a bit longer.
He could not.
He arrived at eleven minutes past six in the morning, about forty minutes after I came through the doors, and there was nobody in that room who knew my name before that morning.
Ten minutes after he was born, the doctor holding my son looked down into his face and went white.
And then he started to cry.
Not a tear. Properly. A man of about sixty in a blue gown, holding a newborn, with his shoulders going.
He said: this can’t be possible.
I did not understand a single word of it. I was soaked through to my hair and my hands would not stop and every part of me felt like it had been turned inside out and then back again.
Three months earlier my husband had slid divorce papers across our dining table.
His mother was standing behind him the way a queen stands behind somebody delivering a sentence. She had come round specifically. She had not taken her coat off.
I looked at the papers and I said: I’m pregnant.
Tobiah straightened the silver watch on his wrist — he does that when he is about to say something he has rehearsed — and said:
That’s extremely inconvenient.
And his mother smiled.
She said: don’t make yourself the victim, Alethea. Men like my son don’t stay tied to women who fall pregnant to get their hands on the money.
I laughed. I actually laughed, out loud, at that table, because it was too cruel to cry at and my body did not know what else to do with it.
I said: I never cared about your money.
And Philippa leaned in, close enough that I could smell her perfume, and said:
No. You just got very comfortable spending it.
Inside a week, he had frozen our joint account and cancelled my health cover.
And he had told everybody we knew that I had been unfaithful.
I found that out from a woman I used to have lunch with, who rang me on the Thursday to say she was sorry things had gone the way they had and that she hoped I was getting help.
It went round faster than I could answer it.
Friends stopped picking up. Doors closed. People who had stood up and toasted our wedding in 2018 looked at the floor when they passed me in the supermarket, and one of them physically turned her trolley round.
So I took whatever there was.
At night I cleaned offices on the industrial estate, from ten until two.
Before sunrise I edited legal transcripts online at the kitchen table, which paid by the page and paid badly.
In the daytime I folded towels in a hotel laundry until my ankles swelled up over the tops of my shoes and I had to go down a size and then back up two.
Every pound went on rent, on the appointments I now had to pay for, and into a small folder under my mattress.
