And so:

At nineteen, Lyn’s chin slams into her steering wheel in a car accident caused by a very drunk driver on the Spit Bridge. Gemma feels nothing, not the tiniest twinge, as she dances seductively in a dark, smoky club on Oxford Street, a frangipani in her ear, a cigarette between her fingers. And Cat doesn’t even pause for breath in screaming at her computer, which keeps crashing while she tries to finish an overdue uni assignment.

At twenty-two, Marcus whispers vicious threats into Gemma’s ear, and Cat senses nothing as she breathlessly wrestles with Dan while just outside the door his flat mate laughs heartily at Hey, Hey It’s Saturday. And Lyn is far away in another time zone and another season and doesn’t look up from suspiciously reading the label on a can of deodorant in a London chemist.

And at thirty-three, Cat rocks back and forth, back and forth, as her abdomen knots and locks and she silently screams, Stop it, stop it, stop it. Lyn feels nothing but pleasure as she watches Maddie’s awestruck face illuminated by the colors of fireworks thundering across the sky. And Gemma feels nothing but Charlie’s tongue and taste as she kisses him in the hallway of some friend of a friend’s New Year’s Eve party.

No, neither of them feels a thing until the first day of the New Year when Dan calls to say, “Cat’s lost the baby.”

CHAPTER 14

“Tell them I don’t want to see anybody,” Cat told Dan. Gemma, Lyn, and Maxine all agreed that was understandable and a good idea but obviously it didn’t apply to them, and so they all arrived separately within fifteen minutes, running up the flat stairs, striding inside, breathless and flushed. When they saw Cat, they stopped and crumpled as if they thought just by coming they could fix things and seeing her made them realize there was nothing to be done and nothing to be said.

They squashed themselves shoulder to shoulder around Cat’s little round kitchen table to drink cups of tea and eat fat pieces of iced walnut bun with lots of butter—Kettle family comfort food. Cat ate hers ravenously. It was what they ate when Pop Kettle died and when Marcus died a few months later.

The difference was that everybody knew Pop and Marcus. Nobody knew Cat’s baby. Her baby didn’t have the dignity of a name, or even a gender.

It was just a nothing. Cat had loved a nothing. How foolish of her.

“We’ll try again,” said Dan solemnly and determinedly at the hospital, as if the baby was a goal they’d just missed kicking and if they really put their minds to it they’d get it next time. As if babies were interchangeable.

“I wanted this baby,” said Cat, and the nurse and Dan nodded their heads patiently and kindly, as if she were delirious.

“Darling! It was Mother Nature’s way of telling you that something wasn’t right with the poor little mite,” said Nana Kettle on the phone. “At least you weren’t far along.” Cat said through a clenched jaw, “I have to go now, Nana.”

Mother Nature can go f**k herself, she thought. It was my baby, not hers.

Cat stuffed bun into her mouth and looked at Lyn standing up to pour everybody’s tea.

The heartbreakingly perfect curve of Maddie’s cheek.

The ugly little ball of bloody tissue that was Cat’s baby.

They took it away, with bland efficient medical faces, like it was something disgusting, like something from a science fiction movie that had been removed from Cat’s body and now had to be quickly removed from everybody’s sight, as a matter of good taste.

Nobody cooed in wonder over Cat’s baby. Cat’s hands trembled at the injustice. Only she knew how beautiful her baby would have been.

She had always suspected that deep within her, there was a secret seam of ugliness, of unseemliness, of something wrong that was the mirror of Lyn’s right. And now her poor little innocent baby had been contaminated by her wrongness.

“Where’s Maddie?” she asked.

“Michael,” Lyn answered quickly, leaning over to pour Cat’s tea. “You’re not going back to work tomorrow. You’ll have some time off?”

“Dunno.”

Gemma gulped at her tea, her eyes anxiously on Cat.

Cat said to her, “You’re doing that slurping thing.”

“Sorry.”

Sometimes Gemma got a particular expression on her face—a quivering pathetic puppy look—that aroused in Cat a powerful urge to kick or slap or verbally crush her. Then she felt racked with guilt. Then she felt angrier still.

I am not a nice person, she thought. I never have been. “You’re an evil, nasty little girl, Catriona Kettle,” Sister Elizabeth Mary informed her one day in the primary-school playground, the black band of her veil squeezed around puffy, red-veined cheeks. Cat felt an uplifting rush of wild courage, like she was about to run off the edge of the highest diving board at the swimming pool. “Well, you’re an evil fat nun!” Sister Elizabeth grabbed her by the upper arm and slapped the back of her legs. Slap, slap, slap. Veil flying. Hefty shoulder heaving. Kids stopped to stare in sick fascination. Lyn and Gemma came running from opposite sides of the playground. “Oh!” moaned Gemma in sympathetic synchrony with each slap, “Oh!” until Sister couldn’t stand it anymore and stomped off, after pointing a silent, quavering finger of warning at each of the three Kettle girls.

“You should certainly not go back to work tomorrow, Cat,” said Maxine. “Don’t be ridiculous. You need your rest. Dan can call work for you, can’t you, Dan?”

Dan had his mouth full of bun. “Yeah,” he said thickly, putting his hand over his mouth. “Course.”

He’d been so gentle and loving last night—as if she were very ill, or as if she’d experienced some painful injury. He played the role of understanding, supportive husband to perfection—so handsome, so caring! But he was playing it wrong. Cat wanted him angry and irrational. She wanted him scornful and aggressive with the doctor: Wait a minute, this is our child, how the hell did this happen? But no, he was all understanding masculine nods as the doctor talked, two logical, reasonable men discussing such a—sadly!—common occurrence.

“I might leave you all for a bit, if that’s O.K. with you, Cat?” Dan stood up and took his mug over to the sink.

“Fine.” Cat looked down at her plate. “Whatever.”

“Where are you going?” asked Gemma.