They soft-footed downstairs. Patrick seemed to feel that he hadn’t said enough. The two of them stood, mirroring each other’s crossed arms, on either side of the breakfast bar while they waited for their mugs of tea to heat up in the microwave.
“Please, my love. I know it’s terrible of me to ask, and I wouldn’t if I thought I could go on. I just need a break from it. That’s all I’m saying. Just one night, and then, I don’t know. See how it goes.”
There was a long silence. Lauren couldn’t think how to begin. She kept returning to what he’d said: one of us has to make that sacrifice. What about her sacrifice? The babies were a precious gift, a blessing, of course they were. But if he couldn’t see the extent of what she’d lost, what she might never get back—not just her body, but also her budding career as a sculptor, clients, friends, hobbies, practically everything—then what hope was there?
“How about this,” said Patrick. “While I’m still off, I’ll help as much as I can during the days, and you can do the nights. Like a sort of tag-team situation. Is that fair?”
His voice was distant, as if she’d stuffed her ears with cotton wool.
He came around and leaned on the counter next to her. “I can’t do much anyway, can I? I don’t have the right equipment, for a start.” He chortled lightly, and touched her left breast. She withdrew as if burned.
He was so beautiful to look at. Such good stock. The sort of man who made you want to breed, because you knew your children would have a head start, looks-wise. But she’d begun to understand him properly now. Look at someone every day for long enough and you stop seeing what everyone else sees. You start to see what no one else sees, what is kept hidden from most people. And she’d caught a flash of emptiness behind those lapis-blue eyes. A chasm. A vacuum. She wasn’t ready to see that. Turning towards him, she searched his face and her memories for the part of him that she’d fallen in love with. She held in her mind an image of him at twenty-one, trying hard to help her, nursing her back to health that time, him knowing that it was the right thing to do, and doing it even though it didn’t come naturally.
“Patrick,” she said, “I can’t …”
“Don’t be silly, darling.”
The image of the younger Patrick clicked off, gone. And how ridiculous, trying to invoke that Patrick, such an insubstantial version and so fleeting anyway, here for six days ten years ago and forever after talked about like an Arthurian legend: Oh Lauren, remember that time you were sick all over my flat and I cleaned it up? Wasn’t I such an uncomplaining saint? Aren’t you glad you married me?
Don’t be silly, darling. Her hands formed fists on the counter.
If he saw her eyes narrowing, it didn’t prevent him from continuing. “You can, of course you can. It’s a confidence issue, isn’t it? You shouldn’t put yourself down—you’re so good at all that baby stuff. Much better than me. You’re a natural. And the boys love being close to you, they just cry when I try to take them anyway.”
As he went on, she started to fade him out, so that when he got to the final few words, persuasions, manipulations, he was just a slight, lilting noise. Annoying, sure, but not painful. He was using his work voice, trying to market motherhood, to her. She let her eyes stop focusing on him and turned slowly away. Slack-faced, she sat down on the edge of a chair that was mostly covered in used blue wrapping paper and tiny coat hangers. His voice faded to nothing, just the vague and distant repetition of her name. Her eyes followed the pattern of the floor tiles, brown and white speckles in perfect squares.
I can’t stay here. I won’t.
She got up and went to the shoe rack next to the back door. She reached for her runners and started putting them on. A hand encircled her wrist, but she shook it off.
“What are you doing, Lauren?”
Casting around the kitchen, she located the car keys lying splayed on the side near the toaster and grabbed them up. Patrick’s face filled her field of vision and she had to step around him.
“Where are you going?”
Her ears were starting to sing with that high, piercing drone and it began to fill her head, must get out, outside, away, anywhere, out of my way.
“Lauren, stop,” said Patrick, loud and urgent enough to break through, to make her pause, but not enough to stop her. She struggled away from him, down the step to the front room, quickly across to the door.
“Please. Please.”
As she opened the front door, she turned towards her husband. Patrick looked imploringly at her, cartoon-puppy eyes covered in a film of panic. He held onto her sleeve with his thumb and forefinger. The drone in her head receded towards a silence as their eyes met. Her mouth was a thin line, where his was parted slightly as he inhaled, about to speak. Then the baby monitor vibrated with the sound of Riley’s cries. She knew immediately it was Riley, not Morgan, even through the cheap speaker of the small plastic device. Even though to everyone else, apparently including Patrick, they looked and sounded exactly the same. The knowledge held her there, briefly. I am that child’s mother.
And then, after stepping into the evening sun, ready to abandon her babies to the attentions of their inadequate and unwilling father, after wrenching her sleeve free and turning towards the street, ready to run, flee, get away to she didn’t even know where and right then it didn’t matter, she stopped. Her breath stopped in her throat.
In the scrap of woodland opposite the house, more like a clump of bushes really, four or five trees fringed by globes of stingers, a dark figure. It was her. Dog’s tails for hair, on either side of her face. Eyes shadowed beneath the forehead, glimpsed in this moment but inserted, full-colour, by the power of their living image in Lauren’s memory. Icy fingers of fear pressed their way up Lauren’s spine as she tried to look away, couldn’t, found herself staring at the woman’s mouth as it curled into a cracked smile. Lauren clapped a hand over her own to stifle the scream.
She turned back to Patrick, her face changed so totally but he didn’t understand. He hadn’t seen …
“It’s that woman,” she breathed, “from the hospital,” and she pushed him, two-handed in the chest, toppling him into the door, which banged and crunched against the wall, in her rush to get back into the house.
Patrick said, “What?” and leaned outside, searching up and down the street.
“There,” she said, pointing, but he didn’t see. There in the bushes, not on the pavement, not in the street, right there across the road, in the bushes in front of the house. The woman had ducked down, but Lauren could still see the dark dome of the top of her ratty head. Crouching there, ready to pounce.
“Where?” he said. “What woman?” but he was facing the wrong way.
“Shut the fucking door, Patrick. Quickly.”
She got hold of one of his arms, pulling him off balance so that he lurched backwards into the room and she slammed the door, leaned against it, breathing hard.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” He rubbed an elbow where he’d banged it on the doorframe.
She went to the window. The dark shape stood, looking right at her. Holding the basket, that basket of rags and horrors, the handle hooked over one arm.
“Look,” Lauren’s voice a harsh whisper, “come here and look.” The woman was so close, perhaps she could even hear them through the glass. Lauren took her eyes off the woman and reached out desperately for Patrick. “She’s after me. She’s after the boys.”
No sound in the room but the pounding of her heart. Riley had stopped crying. Through the monitor he gave a series of staccato sighs, asleep but still upset. Lauren retreated to the wall and pressed her back against it, behind the door, where the woman couldn’t see her.
Patrick went to the window and stared outside. “I don’t see her,” he said. “Show me where.”
“Look in the bushes. See? She might be crouching down.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
He rushed to the door, threw it open, and was gone.
; Lauren hoped he wouldn’t catch the woman. She hoped he would scare her away, so that she would leave them alone, but Lauren didn’t want to see her, to face her, to be forced to look at her up close again. She slipped to the carpet and hugged her knees, feeling blood pulse in the place the woman’s nails had torn her skin, listening to the babies breathing through the monitor.
Something in her pocket was digging into her leg. She pulled it out—there in her hand was a business card bearing a police logo. Detective Sergeant Joanna Harper, Greater Yorkshire Police CID. She remembered now, that policewoman who came to the hospital, who’d been kind to her. She’d given her the card before she left that day. Ring me anytime, she’d said, if anything unusual happens. Anything at all. Lauren found her phone in her other pocket and dialled the number.
“Hello?”
“Detective Harper?”
“Speaking.”
“I don’t know if you remember me, but we met last week, in the hospital. I’d called the police, in the night. They told me it wasn’t real, but she’s come back. She’s outside my house—she was staring at me. My husband’s chasing her now, but if he catches her I can’t have her in the house. She scares me, Harper. She wants to take my children—”
“Is that Mrs Tranter? Lauren?”
“What shall I do? Can you come? How does she even know where we live? She must be following me.”
“Lauren, calm down. Give me your address. I’ll be there as soon as I can, OK?”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know who to call. You said anytime …”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry. Just tell me where you are.”
Lauren told her the address and hung up. Soon there was the sound of her husband walking back towards the house. His head appeared in the doorway as he reached the top of the steps and bent to inspect the sole of one foot. Blood from a cut dripped onto the doorstep.
“Did she get away?” asked Lauren.
He paused before he answered, sliding his eyes sideways, considering. “Darling,” he said, “when you said it was the woman from the hospital, did you mean the one you saw in the middle of the night?”
“Yes, of course that one. The one that threatened me.”
“Ah. OK. I understand now, I’m so sorry. I thought you meant a real person.”
Lauren felt dizzy. “She is a real person. I saw her, she was right there.”
Patrick was using his soft voice, the one he used with the babies. “I know, darling, I know. She seems real to you. But she’s not. Remember what the doctor said? It’s because of the tiredness, that your mind forms shapes from the shadows, making them seem real. There was no one there.”
“No one there?”
He shook his head. “I looked in the bushes, then I went to the top of the road and down to the corner in both directions. I’ve only gone and cut myself. Are there any bandages?”
“I don’t understand, Patrick. Where did she go?”
Patrick huffed and sighed. His patience was draining away. He prodded tentatively at his cut foot. “There was no sign of anyone, darling.”
“But I saw her. She was standing there, staring at me.”
“I know you think you did, Lauren. But perhaps you were just … could it have been a shadow, perhaps?”
She could still see the texture of the woman’s skin, the dirty hair. The slow smile, and the way the sun through the branches laid a dark pattern on her face. Definitely not a shadow.
“Look at this cut. Do you think I need to go to hospital?” said Patrick.
The wound on his foot had two lips, a slashed red mouth. He eased it open and dark blood oozed out thickly, speckled with black pavement grit.
If he wasn’t chasing the woman, if he couldn’t find her, then maybe she was still there, hiding nearby. Lauren crept closer to the door and peered around him, searched the place where, only a minute or two ago, the woman had stood, crouched, stood again. Nothing.
“Is it tetanus, for this sort of thing? Have I had a booster? I can’t remember.”
Patrick gripped the doorframe and hopped into the room, struggled over to the couch. He took several tissues from the box and wadded them up, winced as he pressed them to the wound.
“Hey,” he said to Lauren, “come here,” but she didn’t move. She stood in the open doorway, searching the greenery opposite.
“I must have imagined … I suppose I can’t have really seen her …” What did it mean? What was wrong with her? How could her brain conjure something that seemed so real, something laden with so much horrifying detail, and yet there be nothing there at all?
The screeching drone in her head twisted its volume to piercing and painful, starting up from nothing, surging to everything like waves of feedback so high-pitched that she bent at the waist, clutched at her ears, screwed up her eyes against it. She managed to shut the door and half fell onto the couch next to Patrick, who put his arm around her. Deep breaths, she told herself. Try to stay present. Beige carpet, she thought, blue couch. Black jogging bottoms. She relaxed slightly, uncurled, and as she held onto him the drone faded away. They fitted together so perfectly, like they always had; they were just the right shape. His warmth, his skin and his smell.
“You’re shaking, darling,” said Patrick. “Don’t worry. It’s OK now. Shh. Just the way the shadows fell, made you think it was a woman out there. There’s nothing to be afraid of. When the doctor explained it to me he said that if you were tired enough, your brain starts to dream even though you’re awake. That’s why it seems so like a nightmare; because it really is one.”
“I called the police. They’re on the way.”
“You did what? Why?”
He really hadn’t seen it. Seen her, the woman from the hospital, the woman in the bushes. But Lauren had, solid and real as the trees themselves; the eyes still glared at her when she closed her own, the image burned there like she’d looked at the sun too long. She was going mad, she must be. That or the woman was some kind of witch, some kind of demon who could disappear at will. And that was not possible, which meant she was back around at mad again. Just a shadow. Jumping at shadows. She really needed to get some sleep.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I thought it was the best thing to do. I’m sorry.”
Patrick squeezed her tightly. “Don’t worry. We’ll just wait until they arrive and tell them there’s nothing to concern them. It’ll be fine.”
She lifted her face away from his chest.
“Patrick.”
“Yes, my love?”
“You have to help me.”
He blew out a long sigh that held exhaustion, reluctance and resignation, but he said, “Yes, darling, I know. I will, don’t worry. You’re safe now, I’ll keep you safe.”
She slid down into the comfort of his words and pretended they could be true.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I’m so sorry for wasting your time like this, Detective,” said Patrick. “My wife’s been under a lot of pressure, caring for the boys. Newborn babies, you know, and they’re twins. She just needs some rest.”
Harper was sitting opposite Lauren and Patrick in their small front room. Lauren held both babies, exactly as she’d been doing the first time they met, in the hospital, with the same protective cradle that was almost a grip. Not everything was the same: this time she was dressed in jogging bottoms and a T-shirt instead of a hospital gown. She seemed thinner, and perhaps paler than before, but the haunted expression was the same. The babies were noticeably bigger, and still colour-coded in sleeveless vests; one in yellow, one in white with green stripes.
“I can’t put them down for more than a few minutes at the moment. They just wake up.”
“I know, darling. I know,” said Patrick. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you get some rest tonight.” Patrick stroked the head of the baby closest to him, then got up from the couch and turned on a lamp by the fireplace. Outside, the last of the daylight washed the landscape pink and orange.
When
Lauren had called, Harper had been in her flat, stretching her calves after a long run. The other woman had sounded so scared. After hanging up she’d thrown on jeans and a top and raced to her car, wondering briefly if she ought to call the station to log her actions before deciding against it. One creepy woman was no match for Harper, and this situation easily passed the threshold for reasonable grounds for arrest. Traffic was sparse and she’d made it across the city to the address in less than nine minutes, already picturing the look on Thrupp’s face when she brought the woman in. Not a figment of someone’s imagination after all, then. See, sir?
It was disappointing in the extreme, therefore, to be greeted with Patrick Tranter’s apologetic face, and no apparent suspect. Patrick hadn’t wanted to let her in, and it had been an effort to get him to invite her inside. But she wouldn’t be turned away—there was still that feeling. She needed to hear what Lauren had to say.
Harper retrieved her notebook and pen from her satchel, and turned towards Lauren. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
Lauren glanced at her husband before she spoke. “I was about to go out. Patrick and I, we’d had a bit of an argument—I just wanted to get away for a few minutes, to clear my head. But when I opened the front door, that was when I saw her.”
Patrick cleared his throat. Lauren glanced at him again.
“I mean, that was when I thought I saw her. In the bushes across the road. I told Patrick to look but he couldn’t see anyone there. It was quite shadowy, I suppose. And it’s true, I am really tired. I can’t think straight most of the time, to be honest.”
“It’s not your fault, darl. None of this is. You can’t help it.” Patrick stroked his wife’s shoulder. “Do you want me to take one of the boys?”
She blurted, “No,” and flinched away, but immediately offered an apologetic smile. “Maybe in a minute.”
The “no” had occurred in Harper, too, a stab in her gut. She wants to hold them, couldn’t he see that? She needs to have them close to her. Where they’re safe, where they belong. Harper tried to ignore her own longing to reach out and take one, to feel the warm weight of a baby in her arms again. At the same time she knew it couldn’t ever be the same, to hold someone else’s child.
Little Darlings Page 9