by Paul Clayton
Whichever way she looked she saw cars rushing past along the widest road she’d ever seen in her life. Sometimes little rundown shops huddled together in the shadow of glass towers that spiralled out of sight into the night sky.
The car was cool, but when they pulled into the driveway of a sizeable house hemmed in by high white walls, she stepped out into a hot bath of desert air.
Marta went first, turning on lights as she moved from room to room. The house seemed vast, all the rooms leading off from one huge central space. One wall consisted of sliding glass doors that looked out onto a garden where Little Girl could see a fountain sparkling under lights that illuminated exotic-looking trees and bushes. She wanted to explore at once.
‘It’s late, darling, and you need to sleep. Everything will still be here for you to explore in the morning.’ Marta opened a door and ushered her in. ‘Here is your bedroom.’
Little Girl stepped into a simply decorated room with one tiny window, too high for her to see out of. A vast bed stood in the centre of the room on a glossy wooden floor. White sheets, a fur coverlet and a mountain of pillows adorned it. Tiny recesses in the walls on either side, shaped like the towers of the minarets they had passed on the ride from the airport, held small coloured lights. On the walls hung silk tapestries. It was like a princess’s palace and, for a moment, she was playing with her dolls once again at her parents’ house.
To her delight, a second door opened into a private bathroom. An enormous bathtub stood in the middle of a marble floor with a large rain shower hanging above it. Someone had arranged bottles of potions and creams around two sinks, and a pile of white fluffy towels stood two-feet high on a wooden stand. This was to be her kingdom; this would be her genuine delight.
Marta kissed her good night and closed the door. Little Girl heard a key turn in the lock. She was familiar with the sound and it no longer frightened her. The bedroom was her palace; here was safety. This was no prison. Within this mystical place she could be happy.
She opened the suitcase and started to hang the clothes Marta had bought her. She placed her paltry things from the home around the room but they looked wrong, cheap. She swept her arm across the top of the chest of drawers, knocking them all into a bag and hiding them in the bottom of the wardrobe.
The action made her realise how tired she was. It had been a long and strange day. She had moved to another world and now sleep called. She went into the bathroom, prepared herself for bed then settled between sheets. These were the finest sheets she had ever slept in. She rested her head on a marshmallow pillow. She thought of sweets purchased from a shop on the way home from school, Flumps, soft and doughy. She remembered her dolls and their tea parties. She saw the early light of a summer’s evening through the curtains of a childhood bedroom.
As her eyes closed and she tumbled into slumber, one thought echoed in her mind: ‘I’m safe here.’
Chapter Forty-Three
As a child, Frankie had longed for Christmas Day to go on forever. This year she couldn’t wait for it to finish. Her plans to make it extra special and to give the four of them everything they wanted had been destroyed. She couldn’t get the picture of Dimwit, cut open amidst a mess of blood and entrails in the yard, out of her head.
After shoving Henry back into the flat, she’d dialled the number PC Ashley had given her. To her surprise, he was at the door within half an hour with WPC Barbara Something who, while looking a little less friendly, seemed to understand how distressing the sight of their family pet had been. Frankie put the kettle on and started making cups of tea, her universal cure-all.
‘And the dog was with Mr Jenkinson?’ PC Ashley asked.
‘Yes. He takes him all the time and in return we do a bit of shopping for him. Drop the dog off in the morning, pick him up after school. I think George – that’s Mr Jenkinson – likes the company.’
PC Ashley nodded and tipped his head in the direction of next door. WPC Barbara stepped out of the kitchen door and left the flat. PC Ashley went into the sitting room where Henry sat huddled up at one end of the sofa.
The constable sat down next to him, his knees lifting high from the low sofa. ‘I’m sorry about this, Henry. Whoever did this is wicked and cruel. I can’t make any promises, but we will do our best to find out who it was.’
Frankie stood in the doorway, carrying a mug of tea, and saw how Henry gazed up at the young constable as though he were some sort of superhero. In her heart, she knew they might never find out who’d done this. ‘Tea, constable?’
The two days leading up to Christmas seemed interminable. Even an email with the results of her online training, a welcome to the job and starting details for early January did little to cheer Frankie up. Her supervisor, Victoria Adams, looked forward to meeting her at the principal office in Langley Park.
Frankie put the letter to one side and started to wrap the presents she had bought. She opened a bag and pulled out the little jacket for Dimwit. Her eyes filled with tears as she held it in her hands. How could someone do something like that? Ever since she’d become a mother, she’d always hoped that the world into which she’d brought her children would be better than the one she had experienced as a child. Sometimes it seemed an absurd idea.
She put the little doggy jacket into a plastic bag and placed it in her shopping bag, making a mental note to drop it off at the charity shop on her first journey into town after Christmas. Shannon had wept a great deal and Jonny had remained silent, not sure how to react. The burgeoning man wanted to be big and strong and try not to let it affect him, but the little boy inside him was just as distraught as Henry at the loss of their family friend.
It reminded her that she still hadn’t told the three of them the truth about Luke. She’d had the best of intentions, but the moment had never seemed quite right. She said that he’d gone away for work. The most depressing thing of all was that now even Henry seem to have forgotten him.
‘Lying is a form of love, you know,’ Cora had told her when she’d asked how she might explain Luke’s death. ‘It’s good you’ve told them something positive. Children tend to hang on to bad memories.’
Christmas Day came, full of films and food. By the end of Boxing Day afternoon, Frankie had had enough of being cooped up in the flat. Dimwit would have provided the perfect excuse for a walk, but that was no longer possible. ‘Going for a walk in the park. Anybody fancy it?’
Jonny shook his head and shifted his attention back to the science-fiction film he was watching. He lay sprawled out on the sofa with Henry curled up by his brother’s feet. He shook his head too.
‘I’ll come, Mum,’ replied Shannon.
As they walked into the park, Frankie wiped the corner of her eye on seeing the sign which divided the path into Dogs and No Dogs. She was about to turn to the No Dogs side when Shannon caught her sleeve. ‘We can still go this way, Mum. Even without him.’ Frankie linked arms with her daughter and the two of them set off defiantly down the Dog path.
As they walked, there were places where Frankie remembered trying to control the little bundle of mongrel energy that had been Dimwit. She remembered how her heart had leapt into her mouth on the afternoon when Dimwit raced back towards them with no Henry on the other end of the lead. Without a word, she sat down on Ivy Tillotson’s bench and looked across the reeds to the still, black waters of the lake.
Shannon perched on the bench arm next to her. ‘How did they know where to put him?’
‘What, darling?’ Frankie turned and saw her daughter’s baffled face.
‘Dimwit was with Mr Jenkinson all day in the yard. Somebody who was just being cruel and horrible would have done what they did to him in Mr Jenkinson’s garden, but they didn’t, did they?’
Frankie realised what her daughter was getting at. ‘Which means they must have known he was our dog.’
Shannon started to weep. Frankie moved along
the bench and flung her arms round her. She held her tight while Shannon’s body was wracked with sobs.
‘You’re a truly clever girl,’ said Frankie. ‘They put him in our garden because they knew he was our dog.’ She sat holding her daughter as darkness fell around them.
When she spoke to PC Ashley after the holidays, he told her what Mr Jenkins had reported to WPC Barbara. ‘Evidently he let Dimwit into the yard and then fell asleep in his armchair in front of the television. The next thing he knew, Barbara was knocking on his front door. So we can’t be certain when it happened.’
Frankie told him what Shannon had said.
‘Can you think of anyone?’ he asked.
Frankie laughed. ‘Who hates me enough to want to rip open my dog? I’m not always an easy person to get on with, constable, but I think that’s a bit over the top. I don’t suppose there’s any news.’
‘’Fraid not,’ said PC Ashley.
Frankie pictured him sitting on their sofa that disastrous afternoon comforting Henry, his shoulders rounded in disappointment. ‘Thanks for coming so quickly and helping me deal with it all. The body and burial and everything.’
‘No problem. And if there is anything at all, call me, Mrs Baxter. Please.’
The family were going to spend New Year’s Eve together. It was what Frankie wanted and, although Jonny had made arrangements with friends, he seemed to have no problem in cancelling them so they could be together. Frankie had rung Cora and invited her, but there was no reply to her message. Cora was being extremely serious about having no informal contact before Frankie started her job.
They had a favourite evening meal of garlic chicken Kiev with chips and a sherry trifle, which Frankie had done her best to assemble in the afternoon. Then they played a game where each of them put a card in a band around their head and pretended to be a historical character and the others had to guess who they were. Jonny proved unusually skilled at it, guessing when Henry was Baby Spice, a fact that Henry detested. There was a lot of laughter.
Frankie let Henry dilute some of Jonny’s beer into a shandy as midnight approached. They toasted each other. ‘Here’s to a big, bright, better year for all of us,’ she said.
‘And here’s to Mum’s new job and lots of money and a new dog,’ said Henry.
Frankie winced at the word ‘dog’ but thought this wasn’t the best time to question it. They raised their glasses again and laughed. It was almost two in the morning when Frankie persuaded them all to go to bed.
She finished the last little bits of washing-up and stood looking out of the window. A night bus pulled up and deposited a few revellers on the pavement. Judging by the noise, they’d had a good time. She watched them stagger across the road, thinking how strange these days were when everyone should be having a wonderful time, when every family searched for happiness and wanted to celebrate together.
She recalled the ghosts of Christmas past when there hadn’t been people or presents. She had so much now, for which she was grateful. And New Year was a time for new chances, for fresh starts, and that was exactly what she intended to have.
Chapter Forty-Four
Lottie cleared away the fragments of Christmas toys that were still scattered all across the living-room floor. One child produced an awful lot of junk. Every night since they’d unpacked their Christmas stockings, Lottie had cleared away the plastic and the cardboard and the dressing-up outfits. Each day, a new piece of toy had gone missing. Now, on New Year’s Eve, with her child in bed at long last, she needed the house to be as perfect as possible before Craig arrived home.
There were no New Year celebrations for her other than a bottle of beer she’d found in the fridge. She hoped to be in bed before Craig returned from wherever he’d spent the evening. That was the simplest way of handling things. His mother would be round in the morning to wish them Happy New Year, and to cast her eye over the house to ensure it was all spick-and-span. For a woman who drank as much as she did, Mrs Heaton had superior standards of spick-and-span.
‘The fact is Lottie,’ she said on the day they unpacked their few boxes of belongings into the unfamiliar council house, ‘this place will be your responsibility now. Craig is out there making money. He’ll expect to come back to a lovely home every evening. Won’t you, my darling?’
Craig found his mother’s attention no less embarrassing than Lottie did, but he smiled and returned to the Daily Mirror.
The bedsit in which Lottie and Craig and baby had struggled to coexist for nearly eighteen months was clearly too small for a second child. Mrs Heaton had surprised Lottie by taking charge of the search to find somewhere new.
‘A baby on the way and one to look after. You can’t all be staying in this shit hole.’
A shit hole, thought Lottie, that Mrs Heaton had been all too willing to dump them in after the first baby had arrived. The constant pestering of ‘someone with influence on the housing list’ ultimately produced results, a modest two-bedroom brick box on the Park Crescent estate, rented from the council but at such a reasonable cost that, with Craig’s increasing income, it looked like they might actually have a bit of money in their pockets at last.
That had been the decision behind her second baby, although Lottie was not sure it was a decision in which she’d had any involvement. Craig had found her contraceptive pills in her bedside drawer, pills she’d asked the doctor to give her in order to buy some time after the birth of their first child.
Craig was having none of it. ‘The first one might have been a mistake, but this is the perfect time for us to be settling down as a family. A brother or a sister for our little one.’ He flushed the pills down the loo. Lottie had to visit the doctor later that week and explain that she’d mistakenly thrown a packet into a bin and needed another prescription. But it seemed that Craig had got lucky. Two attempts at sex during that week and now here she was, with baby number one fast asleep in a narrow bed in this dump of a house and baby number two kicking its way around her belly.
She picked up the last box of toys and shoved them into the hall cupboard. She turned off the lights in the tiny living room and was making a cup of tea in the darkened kitchen when she heard the front door.
Craig stood in the kitchen doorway. ‘What the fuck you doing up? Fuck off to bed.’
‘I’m going. I’ve just been clearing up.’
‘That kid makes more fucking mess than an army.’
Lottie ignored him and finished making her tea. Craig stood blocking the doorway. One thing he’d not lost since school was weight; he filled the door, despite doing what he said were several sessions a week down the gym. Fat rather than fit were the words that came to mind when she looked at him.
He staggered over to the fridge. ‘Oy, there was a fucking bottle of beer in here.’ Lottie remained silent; clutching her mug of tea, she headed towards the door. ‘Did you hear me? Where is my fucking beer?’
‘I wanted a drink at midnight. Just something to celebrate and it was all there was.’
She couldn’t remember whether she felt the scalding hot tea run down her arm first or the fist smack into her cheek. Her head cracked back against the wall and she slid down it as the tea burned and soaked into her lap.
‘It was my fucking beer,’ said Craig. He stepped over her and headed to bed.
Chapter Forty-Five
At what point does a dream become a nightmare? As you rest your head on the pillow and fill it with happy thoughts to steer you through the darkness, what is rotting away in the deeper corners of your brain ready to ooze through your dreams, poisoning sleep and making you yell in terror in the dark of night.
Little Girl could not recall a day where the taint of her nightmares had not soaked into her life. The morning after her arrival a single ray of bright sunshine awoke her, shooting down through the tiny window in her room like a golden spotlight waiting for the arrival of an actor i
n a play. Throwing back the bedclothes, she stood where the light shone on the polished wooden floor. She could sense the heat of the early morning.
Her hand reached out to open the door and she remembered the sound of the turning key when Marta had left the previous night. Was there any point in calling or knocking? Her watch said eight o’clock, but she was confused whether she had changed the time on landing last night.
She went into the bathroom and started to fill the tub. She poured bath oil and creams into the water. When it was full, she let herself slip below the surface of the bubbles to wash away the night.
Marta walked into the room while she was still soaking. ‘Good morning. I thought you might still be tired and asleep. There’s breakfast in the garden and you can spend the day out in the sunshine.’ She smiled at Little Girl. ‘But don’t try to leave the house. Eric will be back this evening to talk to you.’ She turned and left the bathroom.
Little Girl thought Marta sounded different. She no longer sounded as if she was playing the role of mother but seemed more like a wardress.
A small table stood on the terrace outside covered with a crisp white cloth. A silver coffee pot, a dish of fresh fruit, and some pastries and bread were laid out as a breakfast feast. To Little Girl, it was all very grand. No Coco Pops today. She poured herself some coffee and ate some bread and jam. While still munching on her breakfast, she wandered around the garden. Considering the size of the house, it was small and compact. The high white chalky walls were topped by broken glass and gave no view of the world outside. A flowerbed ran around the edges of a patchy lawn, but this was not a garden laid with love.
Once she had finished her breakfast, she went back into her room and changed into one of the swimming costumes Marta had bought on the shopping trip. She topped the outfit off with sunglasses bought at the airport. There was a bundle of magazines in the room; snatching a handful, she went to the far end of the garden where two sun beds were separated by a small brass-topped table. Stretching out, she saw herself like many of the women in the magazines and tried to believe she was on some exotic holiday. Yet so much was unexplained. The puzzle as to why she was here provoked a nervousness in her that she found hard to let go. Soon heat, weariness, and confusion lulled her into sleep for most of the day.