The New Girl (Downside) Read Online Free Page B

She knows that the glass of milk he’s pouring will sit, untouched, next to the couch until it grows a skin, until
she
clears it
up.
    ‘Don’t forget to do your homework before you watch TV, Martin.’
    ‘Ja, ja.’
    ‘You need any help with it?’
    ‘Course I don’t. What are you? Stupid?’
    That’s
exactly
what she is, she thinks. Putting up with this crap. She can almost hear her mother’s voice: ‘You made your bed, Tara. This is what you get when you
steal another woman’s man.’ It still rankles that her mother didn’t come to the wedding last year. Stephen offered to buy her a plane ticket, but she didn’t even respond to
their emails until three weeks after the event.
    And anyway, her mother’s right. She
did
steal him, didn’t she?
    She’s done her best to connect with Martin; tried to imagine how she would have felt if her father had left her mother and married someone else. For the first six months after she moved
in, Stephen had been supportive, sympathetic. ‘Don’t worry, my baby,’ he’d say when he caught her crying after Martin had called her a bitch, or refused to eat the lasagne
she’d spent hours making from scratch. ‘It won’t be long before he accepts you.’ Deep-fried bullshit with a side order of crap, she thinks. And Stephen’s no longer
quite as supportive; she knows he thinks she’s not trying hard enough, although God knows what he expects her to do. It’s not as if Martin treats only her with contempt. She’s
lost count of the number of times Stephen was called into the school last year to discuss Martin’s ‘anti-social tendencies’ with the counsellor. The kid’s a spoilt brat and
a bully. Plain and simple.
    She knows she should make Martin apologise to her for his rudeness, but she can’t be bothered. Leaving him to paw through the fridge, she hurries up the stairs to the only place she can
really call her own – the smallest of the four bedrooms at the top of the house.
    She slips inside it, locks the door behind her and breathes in the comforting scent of Johnson’s baby shampoo and talcum powder. She buys the essence bottled, it lasts longer that way on
the babies’ skin, and every day she adds a drop to the carpet so that it’s the first thing she smells when she enters the room.
    She opens the drawer where she keeps Baby Paul, all snuggled up in the monogrammed blanket she cross-stitched herself. She’s not a fan of sewing, but Paul is special – he’s her
fourth baby, but her first boy. She’s only sold two of her babies so far, and both times it’s been a wrench. She doesn’t know how she’ll cope when Baby Paul is adopted, but
if she wants to make this a success then she has to learn to let go. But, God, he’s so beautiful; that perfect blush of health on his cheeks, his little fists scrunched to his chest. For a
second she can almost imagine he’s breathing. She gently strokes the fine hair that coats the shallow dip of his fontanel. There’s no doubt about it, she’s getting better. Really,
she has every right to call herself a professional.
    She fires up her laptop, clicks onto the Gmail account again. Nothing from Susannah, but there’s another email from the weird, spammy account, this one saying: ‘Perhaps we were being
unclarified. Be assured we are serious beyond belief. We necessitate a forespecial baby now. Can you dispense?’
    Could the sender be foreign? That would explain the odd syntax. And if so, she thinks, feeling a flicker of excitement, could this be a commission? God, that would be a real challenge. It would
mean sculpting at least the head from scratch, rather than working from a kit, something she’s never done before. She knows that some of the more skilled Reborners work from photographs, and
she’s well aware of the sad history many of the women who desire to own Reborns share. Women who can’t have children of their own; women who have suffered terrible tragedies – a
cot death or