‘Mike?’ Sarah asks.
‘He was here. Watching her through the glass. I saw him watching her through the glass.’
‘Who was it?’
‘I don’t know. He had a hood up, and there was a trolley in the way so I couldn’t see his face.’
‘How did you know he was dangerous?’
‘He was still.’
Sarah looks at you, waiting for more.
‘Totally still,’ you say. ‘No one is totally still. Everybody’s moving. No one just stands there, watching. He was waiting for her to be alone. For me to leave her.’
I think of that figure on the edge of the playing field; the figure I noticed because of his stillness.
‘He wants to kill her,’ you say.
‘Did you see anything else?’ Sarah asks.
‘He turned away, when he saw me looking, and I just saw the coat, that’s all. A blue coat with a hood.’
‘That’s it?’ Jen says. ‘Some guy in a coat was a bit still?’
But I see that she’s afraid.
‘I’ll be in the garden.’
‘OK.’
She leaves, turning her back on this.
‘It could have been Hyman,’ you’re saying to Sarah. ‘If Jen saw him at the school, or something which incriminated him.’
You’ve said this before, and it’s as if repetition gives increased validity to your suspicion.
‘Or the hate-mailer has become more dangerous than we realised,’ Sarah says, and again I wish to God I could tell her about the red-paint attack.
‘When they stop having to sedate Jenny so heavily, she’ll be able to tell us if she saw something,’ you say.
But neither Sarah nor I share your confidence. Sarah, because she’s not sure that Jenny will ever get well enough for the doctors to stop sedating her; and me, because I know that at the moment she can’t remember anything past texting Ivo at two thirty.
‘I’ll phone the station,’ Sarah says. She leaves ICU to make the call.
I hug you, resting my face against your shirt, feeling your heart beating.
I feel so close to you now, my darling.
We are the only people who know the man in the blue coat is real. Sarah takes it on trust from you, but you and I know. And we are totally united against the threat to our daughter. We are Earth battling the aliens; a testudo of a family.
And although you don’t make Jen finish her homework or revise, or tell her that she ought to do retakes, you guard her ferociously and devotedly when a hate-mailer sends her vicious letters; when a maniac is out to kill her.
And when a doctor says she has three weeks to live without a transplant, you tell her that she will get one.
You say you won’t let her die. And I wish to God I could believe that.
A momentary swish of air as a young man on a ventilator, unconscious and totally still, is wheeled quickly past us. He can’t be more than twenty. His mother is with him. We both watch him.
Sarah rejoins us.
‘Can you stay with Jen?’ you ask. ‘Till the police get here? I need to be with Addie, just for a bit, and-’
She puts a hand on your shoulder.
‘There’s nobody coming. I’m sorry.’
Like Jenny, the police were hardly going to find someone standing still cause for alarm. The trail of trust in your suspicion ends with Sarah.
‘I’ll go and see Silas Hyman, find out where he’s been this morning,’ she says. ‘And I’ll talk to the Richmond Post, and see who told them about the fire.’
‘But first, I need to see Addie and-’
Sarah interrupts you. ‘If someone is trying to kill Jenny, we need to find out who it is as soon as possible. And that will help Addie too. Because I don’t want him to spend another day being accused of this.’
You nod; perhaps remembering all those police statistics Sarah’s quoted at us over the years; the number of cases solved decreasing exponentially with the amount of time that elapses – trails going cold; witnesses missed who then became untraceable; door-to-door enquiries not done in time.
You stay by her bed but I know that you again feel the pain of being torn in half.
I go to Jenny in the garden. The sun is directly overhead, the shadows tiny silhouettes of what make them, offering no shade.
Jen is sitting with her arms around her knees.
‘I’m going with Aunt Sarah,’ I say.
She turns to me. ‘You know when you last saw Addie?’
I nod, flinching at the memory. Mum had told Adam I wasn’t going to wake up again and I’d tried to comfort him but he couldn’t hear me.
‘Just before,’ Jenny continues, ‘you asked me if a scent could have made me hear the fire alarm at school. You know my mad person’s tinnitus?’
‘Donald had just gone into Rowena’s room,’ I say. ‘I thought it could have been his aftershave, or cigarettes.’
‘Like a sensory teleporter?’ she says, caught with the idea. ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’
A you and Adam catchphrase. I smile at her. ‘Something like that.’
‘Do you think a smell could make me remember more of the fire?’
I think of the night stocks in this garden and the grass-scented air at the playing field today, and how each time I was captured by the past, for a few moments actually there. Her sensory teleporter isn’t so off the mark.
‘It might do,’ I say.
But being back in that fire, even for a few moments, would be terrifying.
‘It’s before the fire that I need to remember,’ she says, seeing my anxiety. ‘When the person was lighting it.’
‘I’m not sure you can control your memory like that.’
‘I have to do something to help Addie.’
I remember his small face as Mum led him away, the bruised shadows of grief under his eyes, how his whole body seemed mute.
‘You go with Aunt Sarah and I’ll go on a scratch-and-sniff tour of the hospital,’ she continues.
I nod, because I’m not worried about her remembering anything too close to the fire – there’s nothing in the hospital that smells remotely like a fire, or even like the school.
‘You’re sure it doesn’t hurt you to go outside?’ she asks.
‘Absolutely.’ Fingers crossed behind my back.
This time I don’t think she’s getting rid of me. But I do think there’s another reason she wants to stay in the hospital.
‘Flights this time of year get really booked up,’ I say. ‘It might take him quite a while to get a standby.’
She turns away from me, as if caught out; a little embarrassed. ‘Yeah.’
I leave the hospital with Sarah.
As we drive I think about the young man I saw in ICU. I’d wondered if he would die or if he was brain-dead already and just being kept alive. I’d wondered if he was the right tissue type for Jenny. I’d hoped that he was.
Then I’d seen his mother; her suffering. And I felt ashamed. Because I still hope that he’s the right match for Jenny; and that he’s dead. The hope is ugly inside me, tarnishing the person I once was.
I think you feel the same.
It’s not always good things that unite people, is it?
Sarah pulls up outside Silas Hyman’s house. The pain still hasn’t kicked in. I’m building up greater stamina.
Natalia opens the door, looking hot and flushed and furious.
‘Yes?’
Her voice is aggressive, ambient rage surrounding her like a heat haze.
‘Detective Sergeant McBride,’ Sarah says, her voice cool. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Like I get a choice?’ she says, but there’s fear on her face.
Sarah doesn’t answer her question, but follows her into the flat.
‘Is your husband home?’
‘No.’
She volunteers nothing more.
It’s sweltering in here. The walls of the flat probably ooze damp in the winter but now trap the heat. A toddler, grimy and hot, is screaming, his nappy sagging heavily.
Natalia ignores him, going into a bathroom. Sarah follows.
‘Do you know where he is?’ Sarah asks her.
‘A building site. Been there since first thing this morning.’
He was in the hospital the last time he’d told her he was at a building site.
Two little boys are in the bath fighting, one of them swishing the scummy water over the edge of the bath onto the chipped tiled floor. They have sunburnt necks and faces.
‘Do you know which building site?’ Sarah asks.
‘Maybe the same as yesterday’s. A big development in Paddington. But he didn’t know if they’d want him again. Get out of the bath, Jason. Now!’
Building sites are a pretty good alibi.
‘Early for bath-time?’ Sarah says, and I think she means to be friendly but it comes out as a criticism.
Natalia glares. ‘I’ll be too knackered to do it later.’
The youngest one is still screaming, more desperately, his nappy almost at his knees with the weight of urine. Natalia sees Sarah looking at him.
‘You know how much they cost? Nappies? Do you know that?’
Through her eyes I see Sarah for a moment. I used to think that she was judgmental too.
‘Do you know when he’ll be home?’ Sarah asks.
‘No clue. He was out till past ten yesterday. Didn’t stop working till it got dark.’
Natalia grabs one of the boys and pinions him in a towel as he struggles to get free. The red sunburnt marks are livid red stripes.
No wonder her exotic beauty is fading so fast. Three boys under four in a small flat with no patience to expand the walls.
‘On Wednesday afternoon, you said Silas was with you?’
‘Yeah. We went to Chiswick House Park for a picnic. Set off from here ’bout eleven, got back around five.’
‘A long picnic?’
‘Would you stay in here? The park’s free. Suncream isn’t. How are you meant to put it on as often as you’re supposed to? Silas played with them. Let him ride on his back, that kind of stuff. He could do it till the cows came home. Bores me mental.’
‘Does Silas know Donald White?’
She wants to know why Donald phoned Mrs Healey the night of the prize-giving, countermanding Maisie’s request for a restraining order. Why did Donald protect him?
‘Who?’ Natalia says and looks genuinely blank; or maybe she’s a proficient actress.
‘Would it be alright if I wait for Silas in the sitting room?’
‘Suit yourself.’
Sarah leaves.
I look back to the bathroom, the tension impregnating the steam and dampness. And it seems so sad that bath-time is fraught and hostile.
I remember Jenny at three hiding under a towel after the bath.
‘Magic rock, magic rock,’ I had to say.
‘Yes!’ From under the towel.
‘Will you give me a little girl of three with fair hair called Jenny, please?’
Towel is thrown off. ‘Here!’
I’d pick up her warm, still-damp body and put my arms around her.
Magic.
In the hallway Sarah passes the open doorway to the kitchen and goes in. She’s noticed the school calendar hanging on the wall: 11 July – Adam’s birthday and sports day – ringed in red like a curse.
She goes into the sitting room and quietly rummages through a pile of papers and post in an untidy heap on a table. I don’t know quite how illegal this is, what will happen to Sarah if she’s found out, but she continues, quickly and methodically with that quiet courage of hers that I’ve only just discovered.
At the bottom of the heap, in an envelope, are birthday cake candles. Pastel blue. Eight of them.
Natalia comes into the room behind Sarah, silently. Her movements, like her eyes, are feline. I shout a warning, loud as I can, but Sarah can’t hear me.
‘Silas said he found them on the mat yesterday morning,’ Natalia says and Sarah starts.
‘Weird thing to do, isn’t it? Why would someone post us fucking birthday cake candles?’
I remember Jenny talking about the arsonist and her mobile phone. ‘Perhaps he wanted some kind of trophy.’
Was that what Silas Hyman had done? And then pretended someone had sent them?
Two of the little boys, trailing water, run into the room; one is screaming, the other hitting him, their commotion not filling the silence between the adults.
Sarah goes towards the front door.
‘You’re not waiting for Silas, then?’ Natalia asks.
‘No.’
So we won’t, yet, find out where he was this afternoon.
I think Sarah has been jolted by something. Perhaps it’s just hit her how many laws she’s breaking by coming to their house and going through their things.
Perhaps it’s the candles.
Natalia yells at the children to shut up. Then she blocks the door to Sarah. She looks hostile and sweaty and plain.
‘I didn’t used to be this way,’ she says, as if seeing herself through Sarah’s eyes.
No, I think, you were exotically beautiful and poised not that long ago, when Silas was still in work and when you only had one child.
‘You didn’t used to be this way?’ Sarah asks, and there’s fury in her voice. ‘Jenny didn’t used to be this way either,’ she continues. ‘And Grace used to be able to talk. Smile. Look after her children. Count yourself lucky your children are healthy and you can be a mother to them. Count yourself lucky.’
Natalia stands aside as if Sarah’s blast of words have shoved her, and Sarah leaves.
I hadn’t thought to envy Natalia Hyman. Now I realise there’s every reason in the world why I should.
We drive towards the Richmond Post. I watch Sarah as she drives.
‘You’re being over-sensitive, Grace,’ you said; use of my proper name, bad sign. ‘Sarah likes you, how many more times?’
‘She
‘Well, I don’t know how these women-things work.’
No, I thought, because men don’t spend time in the kitchen thinking that being in proximity to food or washing up means two people will bond. Even women with high-flying careers still do the ‘Can I give you a hand in the kitchen?’ thing. Sarah and I had done that countless times over the years, but had remained like toddlers, parallel playing.
And all this time we could have been friends.
‘You say that,’ my nanny voice interjects, ‘but would she have wanted to be friends with you?’
I wish she’d hang out with some positive nanny voices, the ones who’ve been made kind by years of cognitive therapy, but she continues relentlessly. ‘You don’t have anything in common, do you?’
And I have to agree that, family aside, we have nothing in common.
I’d hoped when Sarah had a baby, a year after Jenny was born, that we might bond in some way. Or, more accurately, that she would show a flaw or two. But she was brilliant at motherhood, just as she was brilliant at her career, with a baby who slept through the night and a toddler who smiled on his way to nursery and a child who could count to ten and read long before the end of reception, while Jenny as a baby screamed the house down at four every morning and clung to me at the playgroup gates and saw letters as impossible hieroglyphs.
And Sarah was back at work and being promoted! Still on her fast-track career. I told you before I was jealous of her; well, sometimes I loathed her. There, said it. Terrible. I’m sorry.
The truth is, loathing her was easier than not liking myself.
I did the whole baking muffins for cake sales and going on trips and being there to do homework and inviting friends round. All of that. But I didn’t know how to do what was important.
‘Magic rock, magic rock, give me a confident teenager with ambition and self-confidence and the A-level grades to get into university with a boyfriend who is worthy of her. Give me an eight-year-old boy who is happy at playtime and isn’t bullied and believes he’s not stupid.’
I was meant to be their magic rock, but I failed.
And I have no excuses.