Prologue

October 1987

(edited extract)

Cora’s mother always used to say children were whipped up by the wind, that even the quiet ones would come in after playtime made wild by it. Cora feels it in herself now, that restlessness. Outside, gusts lever at the fir trees behind the house and burst down the side passage to hurl themselves at the gate. Inside, too, worries skitter and eddy. Because tomorrow – if morning comes, if the storm stops raging – Cora will register the name of her son. Or perhaps, and this is her real concern, she’ll formalise who he will become.

Cora has never liked the name Gordon. The way it starts with a splintering sound that makes her think of cracked boiled sweets, and then ends with a thud like someone slamming down a sports bag. Gordon. But what disturbs her more is that she must now pour the goodness of her son into its mould, hoping he’ll be strong enough to find his own shape within it. Because Gordon is a name passed down through the men in her husband’s family, and it seems impossible it could be any other way. But this doesn't stop her arguing back and forth with herself, considering all the times she’s felt a person’s name might have influenced the course of their life. Amelia Earhart. The Lumière brothers. Only last week, she’d noticed a book on her husband’s bedside table, Clinical Neurology by Lord Walter Russell Brain.

‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’ she’d asked.

‘Coincidence,’ Gordon had replied. ‘Although you wouldn’t believe the number of urologists called Burns, Cox, and Ball. And, actually, Mr Legg is pretty common in orthopaedics.’

Do you not see the risk? she’d wanted to say. Do you not see that calling our son Gordon might mean he ends up like you? But she couldn’t. Because surely that was the point.

She rests the crook of a bent finger against the warmth of the baby’s cheek as though his skin might transmit some vital message. Of what he wants. Of who he might be. But before anything can be divined, something crashes against the back wall of the house – a sound both heard and felt. She draws the baby closer as the security light flickers on outside, illuminating the roiling silhouettes of the firs. Vast and looming, then receding, before being made large again. She hears Gordon emerge from the next room and belt down the stairs, pictures him striding pyjamaed across the dark of the living room towards the patio doors, then standing in the spotlight, squinting without his contact lenses, trying to determine what’s out of place. She imagines him reduced by the looming threat of the trees, the immensity of the storm.

A few minutes later he opens the door to the nursery, and Cora feels a draught of cold air, as though it’s attached itself to his clothing and followed him up the stairs. ‘It was just the watering can,’ he says. ‘Come back to bed now.’ ‘Soon,’ she agrees. But she doesn’t want to leave the baby alone and so she lets him sleep on, his head heavy against her arm as the sounds of the storm meter out the minutes of night unrevelling  into day. Gordon is on the phone to a colleague already at the surgery. Cora overhears them discussing the lack of warning in the previous night’s weather report, then the possibility of cancelled appointments and staff not getting in. She makes breakfast one-handed, the baby preoccupying her other, as she helps Maia tune in to a local radio station to listen as names of schools closed by storm damage are read out. Maia’s comes halfway down a roll call of unfamiliar primaries, eliciting a small, delighted smile and a silent thumbs-up, which falls to  her side as her father enters the room. 

Reaching for a slice of toast before he heads off, Gordon says, ‘My parents are coming on Sunday. Make sure you get to the registrar’s today.’ Two statements, side by side, delivered as though one justifies the other. ‘And don’t cut across the common,’ he adds. Flashers, murderers, and, today, trees that might still come down in the aftermath.