One of the Boys
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Synopsis
If you could test your son for a gene that predicts violence, would you do it? From the author of Curfew comes a suspenseful, heart-wrenching novel about the consequences of your answer.
Antonia and Bea are sisters, and doting mothers to their sons. But that is where their similarities end.
Antonia had her son tested to make sure he didn’t possess the "violent" M gene.
Bea refuses to let her son take the test. She believes his life should not be determined by a positive or negative result.
These women will go to any length to protect their sons.
But one of them is hiding a monster.
And there will be fatal consequences for everybody....
Release date: July 11, 2023
Publisher: Berkley
Print pages: 352
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One of the Boys
Jayne Cowie
Bea
Eighteen years ago
GSK has announced today that they have developed a new noninvasive test for the M gene, which requires only a cheek swab and gives a result in forty-eight hours. Current testing requires a blood sample and can take several weeks, with a second test often being needed due to inconclusive results. It is thought that the NHS will begin offering the swab test to parents of newborn boys by the end of the year.
Like many things in her life, motherhood came as something of a shock to Bea Mitchell. She hadn't planned it, she wasn't prepared for it, and it was obvious from the start that she had no idea what she was doing. She was twenty-three, unmarried, and hadn't even realized she might be pregnant until she was almost four months gone and her jeans wouldn't fit anymore, and even then she'd spent almost a week thinking it was the cream doughnuts she couldn't seem to stop stuffing in her face. And now, nine months gone, peeing every five minutes, and barely able to dress herself, it seemed she still hadn't figured it out.
"You've come too early," the midwife said. "We can't admit you until you're in established labor, and that could take hours. Go home."
The woman walked off, stiff-backed, before Bea could say anything else. Bea could feel her brain slowing down. Her thoughts wouldn't come together. The air inside the building was too heavy, too hot. She turned and waddled back outside into the cold. It had started to rain, huge chilly droplets bouncing off the pavement, the road, her head. She wasn't wearing a coat because the one she had wouldn't fasten over her belly, and the only shoes she could still get on were her flip-flops.
Her boyfriend, Alfie, stood beside her and sparked up a cigarette with a trembling hand. He'd stopped smoking when she'd found out that she was pregnant. She hadn't even known that he had cigarettes on him. "What should we do?"
Bea pressed her hand flat against the wall and leaned all her weight on it, digging her nails into the gritty stone as she breathed her way through a particularly sharp contraction. "I don't know."
"We should probably go home," Alfie said. "Right? There's no point hanging around here when you're not actually in labor yet. You heard what that midwife said. We can always come back later." He looked even paler than usual, head buried inside the hood of his parka, two days' worth of stubble darkening his chin. The end of the cigarette glowed as he sucked on it.
"Right," Bea said. They walked around to the front of the hospital and had the bus stop in sight before Bea knew that she couldn't make it. It didn't matter that she wasn't in labor yet, that it might be hours before she was. She couldn't get on the bus, sit on the hard, cramped seat, leaning into the corners, bouncing over potholes. She just couldn't.
"You go on," she said to him. "I'll stay here. I'll phone you if anything happens."
"Are you sure? I don't want to leave you on your own." He dropped the cigarette butt to the ground and put his foot on it.
"I'm sure. Go on."
"Has your phone got enough charge?"
"It's got enough," she said. "Give me my bag."
He held out her backpack, and when she didn't take it, needing instead to breathe through another wave of pain, he set it gently at her feet. She wasn't entirely sorry to see him go. Her sister and brother-in-law had both warned her that Alfie would not make a good birthing partner. It didn't matter, she told herself. Women had been giving birth for millions of years. She could do this without him. Wasn't it always a solo effort anyway, in the end? Announcing "We're pregnant!" didn't stop the woman from doing all of it: the sickness, the exhaustion, the food cravings and the aversions, the skin that stretched until it bled, and the feet that swelled, and the body that felt like it belonged to someone else-because it did. The man got to go to the pub and brag to his mates about his virility.
And then there was this. The part she'd read about over and over and now knew she was totally unprepared for. Her legs and back were on fire as she shuffled into the emergency room, found a quiet spot where the receptionist couldn't see her, and sat there for the next forty minutes, the other people in the room reduced to little more than blurry shapes. She pulled off her hoodie and found her T-shirt drenched with sweat. If this was only the beginning, she didn't know how she would make it to the end. How could it possibly get worse than this? How could anyone be expected to survive it?
She held in the noises she so desperately wanted to make, and when she couldn't hold them in anymore, she somehow got to her feet and staggered over to the bathroom and locked herself in.
She sank to the floor, resting her forehead against the cold steel of the toilet rim. Time seemed to dissolve around her. She closed her eyes. Looking at things seemed like too much effort. She took a breath, and then another, and her body started to push, and it did it even though she didn't want to, the midwife had said it was too early, and the book she'd read had said it was bad to push too early, but she couldn't stop herself. She felt her baby start to move down, huge and hard and impossible. She cried for her mother, something she would later feel ashamed of, because her mother had died two years before. Somehow, her hands found the waistband of her leggings and got them down.
She caught her baby as he emerged, slowly and then all at once, with a gush of hot liquid, crying out with relief as the pain, which had been overwhelming, suddenly stopped. He was slippery, but his little body had places in it where her hands could fit, like his armpits and under his bottom, as if he had been designed for exactly this, to be caught by his mother as he made the transition from the warm, safe world inside her body to the cold, cruel world outside it.
She lifted him to her chest, his little hands leaving smears of blood on her T-shirt. "I thought you were going to kill me," she said. She would remember always that those had been the first words he had heard, though she would never tell him. When he grew older and asked her to tell this story, which she would, many times, she would lie about that part.
But not about all of it.
She looked around, saw the long red cord of the emergency alarm, managed to reach it, managed to pull it. There was noise outside the door, someone knocking, someone shouting, "Are you all right in there?"
"I had my baby," Bea called, but she didn't know if her voice was loud enough to carry. She didn't have any more voice to give, anyway. Whoever was outside managed to unlock the door, it was yanked open, and she caught a glimpse of the waiting room, everyone turning to try and see what had happened, the drama in the bathroom far more interesting than their bellyache (or infected toenail or unfortunate accident with a kitchen knife).
"You should have told us you were about to deliver!" the man in scrubs said crossly, as if this was all somehow her fault.
"I had my baby," Bea said again, but she was no longer looking at the man in the doorway, because her baby had just realized that he had been born. He opened his eyes and blinked up at her, obviously shocked, and then he opened his mouth and started to cry, tongue wobbling against toothless gums. She felt that sound right inside the marrow of her bones.
Things became a blur after that. She remembered a wheelchair and sheets and blankets, and being wheeled through the waiting room, feeling all those eyes sit heavy on her, not wanting to meet any of them. There were hands hidden in latex gloves and people in white coats, and the baby was taken from her even though she hadn't given permission for anyone else to touch him, and he was given back to her with his face wiped and his wrist tagged, wrapped in a white cloth with a dark blue edge that made him look like Mother Teresa.
A few hours later, she was given a bed in a postnatal ward, where a pink plastic curtain that didn't close properly and stopped several inches from the floor was deemed sufficient to give her privacy. Alfie came tiptoeing in with a paper bag from McDonald's in his hand.
"I brought you this," he said, holding it out. He peered at the baby in his little plastic box. "He's very small, isn't he?"
"Nine pounds," Bea said. Not small at all. I've got seventeen stitches to prove it. "You can pick him up."
"Are you sure? He's asleep. I don't want to wake him." There was an empty chair next to the bed, but Alfie didn't sit in it. He looked like he wanted to bolt. "Have you told your sister yet?"
"Not yet," she said.
"Don't you think you should? You know what she's like. We'll never hear the end of it if she thinks she wasn't your number one priority."
Bea glanced at her phone, saw the ten percent charge remaining, and reluctantly called Antonia. She kept it short. Yes, everything was fine. A boy. Nine pounds. Yes, that was big. She was tired. She had to go. Yes, she would send a picture. (She didn't.)
Bea was more surprised than she should have been when, half an hour later, her brother-in-law tweaked back the curtain and stuck his head round. "Mind if I come in?"
That was Owen, always perfectly polite. He smiled at Bea, nodded at Alfie. Bea had finally managed to get Alfie to sit down, but he hadn't taken his coat off, and there was a smear of yellow mustard on his chin. When she looked at Owen in his shirt and tie and white doctor's coat, she felt a pang of shame.
"I heard you had a rough time," he said as he stood next to the plastic box that they called a cot and looked down at her son, who was asleep, still in his Mother Teresa getup. One hand had managed to escape, and he was sucking his thumb, tiny fingers splayed across his face like a starfish.
"Do you mind if I . . ." Owen began, but he was already unwrapping the baby, so she didn't bother to answer. What was the point? She watched as Owen examined him, touching his hands, his feet, his round little tummy with the blue stump of his surprisingly juicy umbilical cord in the middle of it, and she gritted her teeth as her son howled out his disapproval. Her gaze flicked to Alfie, and she realized that he, too, was watching. She wondered how he felt, seeing the ease with which Owen touched his son when he'd been too afraid to even pick him up.
"He seems healthy enough," Owen said, wrapping him back up again. "You were lucky that nothing went wrong. Giving birth alone can be very dangerous."
"I didn't do it on purpose!"
"At least you were in the right place," Owen said, continuing as if she hadn't said anything. "Quite the drama. It's all anyone downstairs can talk about."
He stroked the baby's cheek and then, finally, he turned his attention to Bea. Her bed was next to the window, and the light outside was fading. What remained bathed Owen in soft shadow. Bea pulled the sheet up to her chin, a shield against him. All of a sudden, she felt very vulnerable and leaky and sore and afraid. Everyone knew in theory that you were allowed to tell a doctor you didn't want them to touch you, but to actually do it was something else entirely. She didn't want Owen to touch her, especially not in front of Alfie. She didn't want him to put her in the position of having to stop him.
"Congratulations," he said. "He's a lovely little boy. Have you got a name for him yet?"
"Simon," Alfie said. "After my dad."
Bea looked at Alfie in disbelief. That hadn't been on their list. He'd never even mentioned wanting to use it. And anyway, shouldn't it be her decision, given that she was the one who'd done all the work? She opened her mouth to reply, but Owen got in there first.
He looked at Bea. "Are you going to have him tested?"
"Tested for what?" Alfie replied, although Bea knew that the question had been directed at her.
"For the M gene. It's simple, completely painless."
"I don't know," Alfie said, turning to Bea, looking for the answer.
Bea ignored him. "Why?" she asked Owen.
"Why what?"
"Why should I have him tested?"
"It's important to know what you're dealing with," Owen said.
"I'm dealing with a baby," Bea said, and she turned her face to the window, away from Owen, away from Alfie, away from her son. She hadn't had any of the other tests while she was pregnant, and she had no intention of having this one. She didn't understand why anyone did. The idea that you would want to classify a baby as right or wrong, good or bad, perfect or imperfect, was abhorrent to her. As far as she was concerned, you got what you were given and you made the best of it.
"What is that supposed to mean?" Alfie asked. "Are you saying there's something wrong with him?"
"I'm not saying anything of the sort," Owen told him. "I'm merely making you aware of your options." Bea sensed more than heard the pause in his breathing, the moment of careful consideration, and she looked at his reflection in the window and realized that he was watching her. "Antonia is pregnant, by the way. It's still early days, so we aren't telling everyone yet. Risk of miscarriage and all that. But I thought you should know."
"Congratulations," she said. She felt suddenly, unexpectedly, that she wanted to cry, and it struck her as odd that this should be the moment when the tears came after everything that had happened in the past few hours.
"Yeah, congrats," Alfie said, echoing her words as the baby started to howl. The noise was enough to have both men making their excuses and leaving, but it wasn't until they had gone that Bea leaned over and snatched the baby up from his crib. She held him close to her body, her breasts pulsing in time with his cries, Owen's words echoing in her ears.
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