I push on the front door, though the brass bolt is visible in the crevice between door and jamb where everything has warped. I lift my hand, watching the diamond ring trembling with my fingers – wondering now why I felt the need to wear it, as if it’s proof of all these promises and dreams from another life.

  Softly, I knock. I’m still his Katie. There’s still that girl inside me who grinned at him when he pushed that diamond onto my finger, who was by his side on our adventures, feeling free and alive. Who imagined with him all the things we wanted together.

  Harry tugs me back from the door. And I suddenly wonder how I’m going to introduce Harry to Jack. How to explain everything – I itch at my ribcage, taking tentative deep breaths. I can imagine Jack’s face, oscillating between confusion, elation and grief – when he’s already had to grieve for me once before.

  ‘What, Mummy?’ Harry whispers, retreating a step down, away from the door as if something nasty might come out.

  ‘I just want Daddy to love you like I do,’ I whisper, looking up at the dark dusty windows.

  ‘You said he would,’ Harry says, shrugging, as if it is no big deal.

  It is though, I think, now I’m stood here. I’m asking him to take over from me, with a child he’s never met.

  I glance over my shoulder, feeling exposed here on the front step. The village slopes down the valley to the derelict shops and church and then up the other side. I scan for movement amongst the rooftops and red and yellow foliage, the big dusty presence of the Cruiser reassuring a few streets down.

  Yet if Jack’s not inside the house, he could be out there somewhere and that glimmer of warmth surges again. Before quickly cooling – in his letter, Jack only said he was heading here soon. Not that he would stay.

  We can’t just stand here. And we can’t wait around the village for long – I can’t rest until Harry is with him and safe.

  Glancing down, I nudge the rotting doormat with the toe of my boot, rolling it up. Nothing.

  ‘Finders game?’ Harry asks, the cracked flowerpot on his step crumbling at his touch with a puff of black specks and dry soil.

  ‘Don’t!’ I pull his gloved hands back, shaking them out.

  ‘I thought it might be a secret place!’ He looks up, eyes watery and worried. ‘Is it bad dust?’

  ‘Just fungus and algae, I think.’ There’s a lot for them to feed off with all the decaying old leaves and pollution leaching from all the bits of plastic dust. ‘But the spores – the tiny bits – can get in your airways and be bad just like the bad dust.’

  ‘I didn’t know there can be so many different dusts Outside too.’

  I scrape at the bits of pottery and dry soil with the toe of my boot – nothing. Harry is jigging on the spot, shaking out his gloves. I’m relieved he’s no longer reaching to touch, but I hate to see him scared, looking down warily at his stiff white trainers, stained and grimy from the little walk.

  But I’m already thinking of where else Jack might have thought I’d either hide or look for something. Somewhere only he and I would know.

  I walk around the side of the house, Harry’s hand tight in mine and little body bumping into my legs. Reaching over the garden gate, I unlatch it from the other side and open it with a hard shove.

  Tall purple grasses with feathery seed heads greet us, thick with spiky black-green thistles and brassy daisies bobbing in the breeze, scratching and fluttering. Gone are the neat rose borders and square of bright green lawn.

  ‘Don’t go in there!’ Harry whispers.

  ‘I think I know where to look – if you come with me, you can do the final guess?’

  ‘The final guess?’ He twists on the spot, worried but tempted.

  ‘First clue,’ I say, pointing at the overgrown steps up into the grass and the rusted fairy figurine paused there in a moment of dance.

  Harry creeps towards her.

  ‘Warmer,’ I say, starting to push into the grass. Harry’s grip becomes painful as he stalls at the edge, jerking away from the stiff grass stems and waxy leaves, shutting his eyes against the wafts of hazy pollen.

  ‘Let’s pretend it’s an obstacle course, just like we play in the flat. Remember how we pretend the chair legs are a thick jungle?’

  ‘This fog is not bad air?’

  I shake my head, though I cringe at the thought of dust collected along stems and leaves about to be dislodged as we brush past.

  Harry sticks to my side, holding his mask on tight with one hand. The garden is small and we’re there, at the back left, in ten steps.

  The tree I remember is just a rotten stump now, its cracks and crevices filled with a white fungus that’s oozing reddish liquid.

  ‘Very warm,’ I say to Harry. The grey wooden bird box is still fixed to the trunk, where I put it years Before. The little roof is weathered to fingers.

  He nods, face pale, peering at the vines – leaves butter yellow, streaked with pink and purple.

  ‘Is it in the fairy house?’ Harry whispers.

  ‘Maybe.’ I smile and a warm surge of adrenaline makes me grab the delicate roof on its resisting hinges a little too strongly. I think I see something shining inside beneath dry grass and leaves before the whole thing falls apart, scattering in pieces into the grass. I poke around uselessly, Harry whimpering and eyes frightened amongst the tall foliage.

  ‘Perhaps we didn’t win this time, Mummy,’ he whispers.

  Disappointed, we push back through the grass to the back door; its thick plastic – rough and blistered from exposure – is as hard, I know, to break open as the solid front door. I size up the kitchen window instead, which is old-fashioned and only single-glazed.

  ‘Stand back.’ Heaving up the small stone eagle from amongst the menagerie on the overgrown patio, I give the glass a good whack in the nearest bottom corner. Eagle and window shatter. Big jagged pieces of glass and a great cloud of grey sand-like matter come down around me. I scrunch my eyes tight and rush to cover Harry’s, shielding him as it settles, and holding my breath even though I’ve my mask on.

  ‘You’re OK.’ I frantically pat him down, my hands trembling. ‘Don’t touch anything. Not until we can get you washed properly, promise?’

  ‘I said yes, Mummy,’ he says, nodding really fast, and cowering from my hands.

  I stop. ‘Sorry.’

  I help him up over the windowsill, onto the kitchen counter and down onto the floor inside – spongy and wet underfoot and crunchy now with glass. The air meter clicks on in the orange, above ten, the dislodged dust visible in the air, making my blood pound.

  ‘How will you lock it behind us?’ Harry trembles next to me, standing stiff, his arms held out from his body. Dust is still stuck to his raincoat, to his hair too. I carefully pick a piece from his eyelashes.

  ‘We can’t,’ I whisper. ‘Come on, we need to check the house.’ As soon as we’ve done that I can clean him properly and make him safe.

  Harry is quiet and rigid as we edge away from the dust and the broken window, and towards the hallway.

  He whimpers, resisting stepping over the threshold into the hall. ‘What if someone’s here?’

  ‘Jack?’ I call out, my voice stiff and odd. ‘Jack!’ Harry and I stand frozen, the house silent around us, smelling cold and damp and uncared for.

  Harry’s shoulders relax a little. ‘Maybe no one lives here,’ he whispers.

  I swallow down his words, try not to think. But they come roaring back up into my head, along with all the many cold, quiet grim homes I’ve had to go inside. Maybe no one lives here. Everything inside me is scrunching up tight, desperate to tear into each room, yet desperate not to. I reach for Harry’s hand and squeeze.

  16

  I turn to Harry, smoothing my voice to calm and slow. ‘Let’s pretend this is the flat.’

  ‘I don’t want to pretend,’ Harry mumbles.

  I look around the small square kitchen, alert for noises elsewhere in the house, only half-conscious of the opened cupboards with rodent-bitten packets of rice, every grain devoured, shredded paper and card – a stinking mess. Crockery shelves with toppled plates, droppings and spiders. ‘But, see, on that hook, Harry, we had saucepans like that in the flat, and spoons and forks like in that jar there, and a stove kettle.’ The skirting beneath the cupboards is bent forwards and I point it out. ‘See, it even has the same secret places.’ I try to sound reassuring, but my voice wobbles.

  ‘And the same circle doors.’ Harry points to the washing machine in the corner.

  ‘Yes.’ I nod. ‘Let’s come away from this room now,’ I plead, heading out into the hallway, relieved as Harry allows himself to be pulled along this time, still clutching my hand. Down the dim hallway, we step into the lounge together, and I look first at the spot Jack used to sit in, nearest the window, where he would fall asleep watching the rugby with his stepdad on a Saturday afternoon. Disappointment thuds in my chest, as if I’d hoped he’d be sleeping there again now after all.

  No note. No sign.

  In a daze, I point out the sofas and cabinets to Harry, and he makes me check each corner of the room for any surprises, even though I hurry through it, dragging him to the next room. And the next.

  I try not to look at the photographs pinned artistically to fabric pinboards up the stairs, but I can’t help it as I pass. Jack as a baby. Jack at ten. Jack at eighteen. His parents. Grandparents. Cousins and people I don’t know. All smiling out from glossy rectangles, all ignorant of what’s coming. I can’t help but touch a photo of Jack as a baby. It comes loose, spinning down to the carpet. His little face stares up at me – white-blonde hair, chubby cheeks and full lips, bright blue eyes.

  I can remember Maggie sitting me down in the lounge the first time I visited, the photo albums spread across our laps. She was ill even then – breathing every few breaths from her oxygen concentrator (like so many others) after a nasty flu – and she’d squeezed my hands tightly: ‘At least he’s got his stepdad, if anything happens to me . . .’

  We go through the same checks in the first bedroom at the top of the stairs.

  Halfway down the landing, the bathroom door is shut, the handle missing. A cold sweat comes over me as I press on the door, my breathing ragged as it won’t open.

  I kick and shoulder-barge it, the wood frame weak from damp, creaking and splintering until I burst inside.

  At first I only see the peach-tiled walls, as if my mind has already refused to look down. Neat and perfectly laid. Jack learned how to do it off the internet, him and his stepdad always willing to have a go at anything.

  I see the back of a head of thick desiccated hair, turned grey with dust. A deflated jumper, sunken trousers. Black-soled trainers.

  For a second I imagine how he might have knelt over the toilet bowl to vomit or cough up phlegm and blood, all the dust in his lungs doing its damage.

  Then Jack’s smiling face, alive in all those photos, and my own internal scream are spinning round my head.

  I fall backwards from the doorway and pull at the hole left by the door handle to make it disappear. Make it not true. I’m grasping at Harry, trying to make my legs take my weight again so I can get up and get out of here.

  At least he’s got his stepdad, if anything happens to me . . . Maggie’s rasping voice echoes in my head as I look at Harry, who has no one.

  We shouldn’t have come. We shouldn’t have left.

  That balcony railing back in Hitchin and that ground pulsating below flashes in my mind.

  ‘Mummy!’ Harry is sobbing, stroking my hair. ‘What was it? Was it a monster? Mummy!’

  I manage to take one breath, then another. I make myself get up. Make myself push the bathroom door open again, keeping Harry back so he can’t see. I examine the size and shape of the remains, the type of trousers, the sunken face.

  Not Jack!

  ‘Is it a nasty?’

  ‘No, a man.’

  Ian.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Harry asks, out on the landing, pulling off his mask and clutching it tightly.

  ‘He’s sleeping,’ I say, trying to sound light. ‘A deep one, he won’t wake up.’

  I sink out onto the landing floor again, pulling the door shut once more, and crawl away, into the master bedroom, where Ian used to let us sleep when we stayed over, while he took the single in the little box room. Immediately, his face is smiling out at me from the dresser and I turn away from it, my thoughts swirling.

  Harry tugs at my shoulder. ‘Is it lunchtime?’ he whispers. ‘Like in the flat?’

  My head spins, bile in my throat. I glance back towards the bathroom.

  But it seems the closed door is enough for Harry to forget, for now. He repeats his hope for lunch until I look at him properly, the fog clearing.

  Harry is filthy. He has never been filthy. The bathroom still sharp in my head, I strip and wipe him down from head to toe with a clean cloth from the dwindling stash in my pack, wetted from my flask, searching his ears and eyelids and hair for pale grey particles. Then I get the soft brush out to be absolutely sure.

  He looks much better in clean clothes and I inspect his nose and throat and eyes for inflammation – making him blink and cringe – fretting if his eyes really are a little bloodshot, or his throat redder than it should be.

  He grins when I finally pull out the tin of mandarins from my backpack and let him sit on the floor to eat it. I can’t focus on him though, even when he tugs at my elbow with a big grin and eyes half-closed in happiness. I feel numb.

  As I clean myself, a small Jack beams out at me from the dresser, a fairy-tale castle cake in the photo with him. Six candles. Pink wafer walls, chocolate finger towers and ramparts, and multicoloured Smarties pressed into smooth glistening icing for the roof.

  I’ve always brought Harry what I can find: leaves and pine cones, cocooned moths to watch emerge, chalks and pencils and paints once too. Things to play or make things with. We read and make up stories. But he’s never had a cake or proper toys. I think of Playmobil families and Enid Blyton friendship books – it’s all too painful and meaningless. This year I didn’t really mark his birthday – only with the first rabbit catch of the year and both of us thin and hungry for the stew. Harry excited and happy with that. And I told myself that without a calendar I’m just guessing the day anyway.

  But I should have done it properly. Maggie would have done.

  Harry’s little voice whispers inside my head: Do you love me? He hasn’t had enough life yet. Not enough foods or fun or good experiences. Or me.

  The bathroom door seems to grow larger out there on the landing. Now what? The words rebound round my head.

  No Jack.

  Harry’s mouth shrinks to a small ‘O’ as he sucks a piece of fibrous mandarin – it must have gone hard and unpleasant. He grins at me as he wipes his nose on his sleeve. The sight of thick sticky snot mixing with the juices round his mouth snaps me from my ruminating. I try to wipe the snot away even as he turns and struggles to keep spooning up the mandarins.

  He shouldn’t have a stuffy nose.

  I stand up, shifting from foot to foot, raking sharp fingers through my hair.

  The tin is nearly empty. Now what?

  There, on the bed, blending into the greyed sheets. A used brown paper envelope, with HMRC stamped in black in the top left. Harry’s eyes are trained on me as I step forwards and frown at the pencil scribble on the front.

  Katie

  My legs fold beneath me. Harry clatters across the floorboards to fling his arms around me.

  In brackets beneath: Don’t go in the bathroom.

  My anguished laugh makes Harry scrape his sticky fingers over my face, mixing with the tears he tries to brush away.

  ‘Don’t cry, Mummy. I’ll help finders, we can find Daddy. Don’t cry.’

  A creaking and rattling downstairs makes us both freeze, my cry cut off, Harry’s sour breath on my face, mandarin flesh stuck between his teeth. I glance down at our things on the floor, clocking my pack, Harry’s shoes.

  ‘Did he wake up?’ Harry says, trembling.

  ‘Ahoy! Anyone there?’ A man’s muffled voice. Shouted through the letter box in the front door, I think.

  ‘Hello!’ A woman’s voice.

  Two people.

  The sugary acidic smell of mandarins is like vomit at the back of my throat.

  I’m moving, the envelope grasped tight, grabbing my pack, dragging a rigid and unhappy Harry, shoving shoes, overalls and masks on, and racing down the stairs.

  ‘I didn’t finish the mand-rins . . .’ Harry whispers, plastering a hand over his mask, because he knows he should be silent.

  He cries out, squirming in my grip, as I pull him out of the kitchen window with me and through the tall scratchy grass of the back garden. I can’t stop to see what the matter is until we’re safe, so I haul him up and over the garden wall and yank him into a run, tugging him as he stumbles, crying harder, in the too-big raincoat and too-tight shoes, and struggles to keep up.

  There’s shouting behind us and I surge faster, swinging Harry into my arms and pounding all the harder along the road. Blood. Bright blood is pouring down his face from a cut in his forehead. Its sickening metallic scent right at my nose as my mask bounces loose.

  I can’t catch my breath, wheezing loudly now, Harry becoming too heavy.

  I change direction, careening down the side of a semi-detached house where we’re shielded from the road by thick butterfly-bushes, full of yellow papery leaves and soft purple blooms that stink too sweet, and wingless bees that I brush clear as I set Harry down.

  The blood is the ruby shade of red that I remember blood should be. The bees bumble towards it.

  I’m sinking to my knees, lungs whistling – tight and aching, air rushing in and out.

  Was it when we scrambled out of the window? When I pulled him down the wall? He’s no longer crying, his face is pale, tear-stained, eyes beginning to roll. My hands are sticky and warm as I try to stop the bleeding. But it just flows out between my fingers, seeping into the strap of his mask.

  Through the orange willow foliage at the bottom of the garden I can just make out the black dusty roof of the Cruiser. All we need to do is get back to it.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35