“What did you talk about?”
“The girls.”
Graham stares at her. She watches his face go still.
“The girls?”
“That’s right. I told him all about them.”
She watches his face, stricken. A chip of ice in her throat. He shakes his head.
“Why did you tell him about the girls?”
“Because he asked me. He asked me everything about them, actually, and I told him. I told him lots of silly things, things I haven’t even dared think about in all this time. I told him about Tuffy—remember Tuffy?—Tuffy and Peppa Pig, all those words I hadn’t said aloud in ages. It felt good. We talked and laughed about them.”
“You laughed?”
“Yes, we did. I told you, it felt good. It made me feel better. It was very nice, to be asked about them and to be allowed to talk in a normal way. It made me realize how very much I’ve missed having someone to talk to about them.”
Mary finishes, unable any longer to stand the pain on his face. Real pain. He is looking at her and then he isn’t looking at her. He drops his head. For a moment neither of them speaks.
“I’m sorry,” she says at last.
She looks up at the sky, darkest blue, almost black now. The end of day, beginning of night. She thinks that maybe she can see a star. Graham sits down on the bench, brushing leaves off. Gazing into the long grass.
“Are you OK?” she asks him.
He shrugs. “Not really.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. You don’t have to be.”
Mary sits beside him on the bench. Glancing at him. She thinks of reaching out and placing a hand on his leg, his knee, a comforting hand, but finds she can’t quite bring herself to do it.
“It was horrible, you know,” he says at last. “Seeing her lying there, in A and E. Her mouth all black from the stuff they gave her. All those wires on her. It was even worse than I thought it would be. When I first saw her, I thought—”
Mary turns to him.
“What?” she says softly. “What did you think?”
He hesitates.
“I suppose I thought that she was dead.”
IT WAS YOUNG MISS NARKET THAT CAME AND TOLD US ABOUT Phoebe. She was a busybody and always liked to be first with local news. Her hair was dirty and her cap falling off and her face was wild from lack of sleep, but she wasn’t going to be stopped from getting her story out. I held my breath and listened while she gave it to my mother.
Only I was expecting her to come and help me with the hymnbooks, wasn’t I? And then, when there was no sound or sign of her, I thought it tremendously unusual and I got quite worried and sent Addie Sands to go and see what was happening and that’s when she found her.
Found who? my mother said.
Her mama! Poor Mrs. Harkiss! And in such a state, screaming and crying and on her knees praying and demanding God’s help in finding the girl. On top of being a widow, she lost a daughter to diphtheria last year and I’m not sure if you’ve heard but the son has gone lame and can’t help at the smithy anymore. I tell you, that woman has had nothing but bad luck since a year last November and I honestly do not think she can take any more strain and worry and now this.
My mother, standing there by the gate, her hands covered in flour and her belly poking out as big as anything, regarded Miss Narket with careful eyes.
I expect it’s nothing, she said. I expect it’s a prank. My own kiddies disappear from time to time—Charlie is a terror for doing it—and I don’t give it a second thought; in fact, I’m glad of the peace and quiet, if you really want the truth. She’s probably gone off and hid somewhere and is waiting at this very moment to be found.
Miss Narket looked at my mother and then she looked at me.
That girl’s not got a tricky bone in her body. She wouldn’t hide.
All kiddies like to hide, my mother said. You don’t have to be tricky to want to hide sometimes.
Miss Narket shook her head.
Not that one. She has a nice, plain imagination, that one does. I don’t know about your children, but young Phoebe Harkiss don’t have any of those kinds of mischievous ideas in her head.
I thought about Phoebe Harkiss’s nice, plain imagination and wondered what Miss Narket would say if she knew that her beloved little helper had gone around telling half the village that the Narkets bathed in the same water as their pigs and that they all, as a consequence, had nasty, weeping sores in unmentionable places.
As if she knew what I was thinking, Miss Narket looked at me and scowled.
And another thing. We had a church trip planned for Saturday to go and ride the donkeys at Yarmouth. I know that she was very much looking forward to it and would not have missed it for anything.
I tried to picture Phoebe Harkiss on a donkey. Her freckled hands grasping the tuft of the animal’s neck, her gingery body wobbling as she clung on. Part of me wanted to give her a small shove and watch her topple off.
I wondered, then, what she would do in Yarmouth. I wondered whether she’d want to have a go at the machine that you hit with a hammer and the thing slid up. The High Striker, James had said it was called. I was wondering about all of this and wishing, slightly, that I could go along to Yarmouth with them all, when I remembered that Phoebe Harkiss was dead and lying in the black water at the bottom of Yarrow’s ditch and wouldn’t be going anywhere near any donkeys or fun fairs ever again.
Thinking that last thought made me flush bright pink to the roots of my hair. I remembered James’s dark threats. The way it had felt when he grabbed my neck. I looked away quickly, worrying that either my mother or Miss Narket would notice.
Well, Saturday’s still some way off, my mother pointed out. I daresay she’ll be back by then.
She’s such a friendly girl, I said, still feeling badly hot in the face. I do hope nothing bad has happened to her.
Miss Narket gave me a sharp look. She folded her arms and turned back to my mother.
Three murders there’s been in this county since March, did you know that? And all of them young girls and all of them the bodies hacked at and partly burned and then left barely covered at the edge of a field somewhere.
My stomach dropped and I felt the blood go to my cheeks. But my mother’s face didn’t change.
I knew it was in the Gazette, she said. But thanks very much for giving me the unpleasant details.
WHEN THEIR GIRLS WERE AT LAST ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE ditch where they had lain for so long, their bodies were put into bags and driven to the hospital in a private ambulance. Mary and Graham were asked if they wanted to be there while this happened and they thought about it and said they didn’t. But then in the morning they changed their minds. As if he had known this would happen, Dave, the youngest of the family liaison officers, was at their door almost as soon as they’d put down the phone.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said when they tried to apologize.
It had rained that night, but it was a bright day. Puddles shining on the black roads, the hedgerows pale with the beginnings of blossoms. He drove them there in silence, the two of them sitting in the back, their fingers laced together like teenagers.
Mary had thought, or hoped, that it would all be over very quickly. But getting them from the ditch to the ambulance took much longer than she’d expected. She saw that it made Dave tense, the waiting. When he caught her watching him, he leaned over and touched her arm.
“A lot of formalities, I’m afraid.”
By the time the ambulance was ready to leave, the afternoon had fallen away and the light was starting to go, the air cold and damp, a raw mist rolling in across the fields. And once they’d turned off the power and lost the strong lights, and there was only what came from the vehicles, it was a shock, feeling for the first time that thick darkening air all around them. She saw that they were in the middle of nowhere, in a world that would go on forever and ever in this way: wide-open to the elements an
d empty and relentless and black.
They were asked if they wanted to go in the ambulance with the girls and Mary started to say yes—the swift, unhesitating response of a parent who wouldn’t dream of not accompanying their child to the hospital or anywhere else for that matter. But before she could continue, Graham stopped her. Taking hold of her arm and speaking in a low voice to the driver. Telling him that no, it might be better if they followed.
And so she did as she was told. She let them drive her away. And as they drove—all four vehicles moving with such terrible, hushed slowness over that huge and darkening earth—she did not dare allow herself to look back even for a moment at that place that had for a while contained their girls.
She wishes now that she’d fought harder to be with them on that last journey. Wishes that she hadn’t allowed herself to be led and persuaded and put in a separate car like that. It was no one’s fault. She blames herself. What could she have been thinking? Did she really imagine it was an opportunity that would come again?
She used to be the kind of mother who knew how to focus, who could cope with anything—able to find any amount of nerve and courage when it came to her girls. When the school secretary phoned to say that Flo had fallen off a climbing frame at break and needed to go to the hospital, she not only got herself there in ten minutes flat but also kept her distracted in the ambulance with stories about SpongeBob SquarePants and Peppa Pig—continuing the stories later as she held her on her lap while the shattered arm was cleaned and dressed and put in plaster.
In fact, so entirely alert was she to this task, so numb to every other idea or sensation, that she didn’t realize until much later that at some point during all this she’d somehow cut her own hand and it had bled all over the pale cotton of her shirt.
“Mummy, don’t cry,” Flo whispered to her as the nurse passed her bunches of rough blue paper towels to clean it.
“Mummy isn’t crying,” said the nurse. “Are you, Mummy? Look at how very good and brave your mummy is.”
MARY WAITS UNTIL GRAHAM HAS LEFT FOR WORK. THEN SHE goes into the room they call the snug—the only room where she can be sure not to be overheard by Ruby—and she closes the door as softly as she can and then she calls him. He picks up at once.
“I don’t know how to say this,” she says, standing in the cool, fusty room next to the old armchair flanked by the stacked-up cardboard boxes that she can barely look at. “But the way I behaved. I don’t know where it came from. Please can you forget it? Forget it ever happened. Forgive me, I mean. I’m really very sorry.”
There’s a pause. She waits, trying not to look around the room, trying not to see him too clearly in her head either.
“What do you mean?” he says.
“The things I did. Yesterday. Things I said. I shouldn’t have. I didn’t mean to do what I did.”
“You didn’t mean to kiss me?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You didn’t?”
“You know I didn’t. I’m sorry. Please let’s just forget it, Eddie.”
He says nothing. There’s a long silence. At last she hears him exhale, a long, slow breath. Smoking, she thinks.
“Look, Mary,” he says at last, “it’s cool, all right? You can relax. But you’re asking too much of me. I told you honestly how I feel about you—and you responded honestly. When people say and do things, it’s usually because they mean them. You can’t just undo it all. You can’t just undo life when you feel like it, take it all back.”
Mary feels herself freeze.
“I’m not trying to undo anything. I’m trying to apologize and ask that you—”
“I love you,” he says. “Everything I said. I meant every word. My heart is in your hands. I mean it. I wouldn’t mess with you, Mary.”
Mary shuts her eyes. When she opens them, she sees all over again where she is. In that room, surrounded by their things.
“Please,” she says, sitting down on the chair next to the low coffee table where she sees with relief that Graham has put all the photos back in their green floppy wallets. “Please, Eddie, I’m asking you not to say that.”
“But what if it’s true?”
She takes a breath, puts her hand to her face.
“It’s not true. It can’t be true.”
She hears him pause.
“I can’t stop thinking about you, Mary. I woke up this morning and all I could see was your face. Your eyes. Your beautiful hair. I fall asleep thinking of you and I wake up thinking of you. The taste of you is in my mouth, on my tongue, in my heart. You’ve no idea how much time each day I spend thinking about you.”
Mary says nothing. Her heart thudding as with one hand she opens a flap of the wallet, slides out the top photograph.
“Mary?” he says.
In her hand, Ella and Flo are standing by a low brick wall. Where were they? The wall is familiar. Is it the little children’s zoo in the park? Ella is wearing a bomber jacket, blue and red from Gap, Mary remembers the one. Staring straight ahead and smiling. Her hair tied back. Her arms lifted, spread against the wall. Flo is gazing off to the left, holding Tuffy by his ear.
“Mary? Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“You went very quiet. Are you OK?”
Mary stares at the photograph. She does not cry. She does nothing. Says nothing. She does not breathe.
SHE GOES UP TO RUBY’S ROOM, TAKING THE STAIRS SOFTLY, lightly, two at a time, finding her hunched in bed, blinds pulled down, duvet around her knees, earphones in her ears. The door’s open just enough that she can put her head in, but as soon as she does it, Ruby scowls.
“Can I talk to you?” she says.
Ruby’s face doesn’t change. She takes out one earphone, holding it an inch from her ear.
“What about?”
Mary pushes the door a crack and takes a small step into the room. Mess immediately exploding all around her. Smell of warm clothes and deodorant. Dirty cups and plates. Towels on the floor. She tries not to look.
“What are you doing?”
“Listening to music.”
“What sort of music?”
“Just music.”
Mary hesitates.
“I wanted to see if you were OK.”
“I’m OK.”
Ruby waits for her to go. She doesn’t go.
“You’re all right? You don’t mind staying here? With us, I mean?”
Ruby shrugs.
“I don’t have any choice, do I?”
Mary takes a step closer to the bed.
“Can I sit down?”
She doesn’t wait for an answer but puts herself on its edge. As the mattress moves under her weight, the duvet is pulled off Ruby’s knees. Ruby yanks it back, but before she does so, Mary sees a bright plastic lighter, a packet of something she doesn’t recognize.
“I want to talk to you,” she says. “Can you take those out for a minute?”
Very slowly, Ruby removes the other earphone. Keeping them both in her hand. She looks at Mary, holding her gaze in a direct, faintly insolent way that Mary knows is supposed to make her uncomfortable.
Mary sighs. Choosing her words carefully.
“Look, Rubes, I know you’re angry. I know that, OK? I’d just like to be able to understand why, that’s all.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
Ruby looks down at the bed. The earphones in her hand.
“Why do you need to understand? What’s the point?”
Mary takes a breath, touches her hand.
“You poor thing. You’ve had such a tough time recently, haven’t you?”
Ruby says nothing. Shrugs. But as she presses her lips together, Mary thinks she sees her chin wobble. She puts a hand back on the duvet, close to where Ruby’s leg is. Immediately the leg moves away.
“We’ve all been very worried about you,” Mary says. She watches Ruby’s face. “Do you realize that? I hope you do realize that.”
“Whatever,” Ruby says.
“You don’t care that everyone’s been worrying about you?”
Ruby shrugs. Looking away. Mary sees her chin wobble again.
“Are you anxious about anything?” she asks her. “Is there something we don’t know about?”
Ruby looks at her.
“What do you know about?”
Mary hesitates. “All right, is there anything you’d like to talk about?”
Ruby blinks.
“Why would I talk to you?”
“Because I care about you.”
“Why do you care?”
Mary looks at her hand on the bed.
“Why do I care? Oh God, Ruby. Where do I start? So many reasons. Come on, you know very well how much I care about you.”
Ruby mutters something Mary doesn’t catch. She lifts her head.
“What?”
“I said you’re not my mum.”
Mary takes a breath.
“I know I’m not your mum. I’m not trying to be your mum. Why would I try to be your mum? You’ve got a great mum who loves you very much. But that doesn’t mean I can’t care as well, does it?”
Ruby says nothing.
Mary looks around the room. The mirror. The chest of drawers with clothes spilling out. The window with its tattered old blind, Ruby’s incense burners and joss sticks lined up along the sill. The faded, peeling wallpaper. The blackened, soot-charred remains of what was once a small fireplace.
“We should paint this room for you,” she says. “We really should. We could make it a lot nicer, you know.” She looks at Ruby. “Get you some better curtains as well. Would you like us to do that?”
“Do what you like.”
“You don’t care what it looks like?”
“Not really.”
“You don’t think it’s worth making it nice? If you’re going to be spending a bit of time here?”
“I’m not going to spend any time here,” Ruby says.
Mary is silent a moment. Something occurs to her.
“You’re not still scared, are you? Of the house, I mean.”
The Stopped Heart Page 29