Most days she did a tour of inspection of the various sites of work in the Hall, to make sure all was going well. She decided to stick to her routine, but it proved to be very hard for her. She had the feeling, everywhere she went, that someone was walking with her, someone who found it difficult to go at her pace, who kept falling behind, but who caught up with her whenever she stopped for more than a few minutes. She found it hard to maintain her usual friendly relationships with the men, and in conversations with them she dried up twice, and totally lost the thread of what she was saying. They were polite, as they always were; there was something about her, a confident professionalism, that had earned their respect right from the start, but she noticed one or two of them reacted to her in an unusual way. They seemed to avoid her gaze, and looked around and behind her while she spoke, and she found their inattentiveness most disconcerting. She was glad when she was able to return to her office, but she wasn’t any happier when she got there, because she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t alone all day.
In the evening, when it was cooler, she walked out along the South Front of the Hall, sat on a bench in the empty Fountain Terrace where she could watch the water playing, and tried to come to terms with the panic growing inside her. She reasoned that, though she was subject to delusions, she was still able to function, and do her job. If she sought help, from a psychiatrist say, they would be sure to tell her to stop work, to rest, and that would be calamitous. She couldn’t bear to even contemplate the prospect of giving in and giving up. No; she decided to tough it out, to take it easy as much as she could, and hope that her – neurosis, whatever it was, would go away. She closed her eyes and tried to relax in the beautiful, peaceful, already night-scented gardens.
But she was not alone.
The sound that came to her from a little way along the empty bench beside her was strange, but familiar. It reminded her of something, but, at first, she couldn’t remember what. It was a soft, wet, slobbering noise, accompanied by a gentle nasal grunting; a sound, all told, of quiet contentment, though it made her flesh creep. What is it? she thought; I know I know, I’ve heard it before hundreds of times. She was determined to calm her fears by concentrating on unlocking her memory.
She recalled a time, before she was widowed, when, after they had both had their evening meal, she would sit with her daughter and watch teatime children’s programmes on TV. Clara would sit beside her, or on her lap, very still and almost silent, hypnotized by the cartoons and puppets frolicking in front of her. The only sound, a tiny sound, that came from her was exactly the sound that Myra was hearing now, the susurrations of a comfortable, slightly drowsy child on the edge of sleep, sucking its thumb.
Something invisible was sitting next to Myra on the bench and sucking its thumb.
And Myra was afraid it might be her daughter.
“She remanes with you.”
Myra cried out, got up, and ran to her rooms. That night she took two pills.
* * *
For the rest of the week, Myra was never alone, but, in spite of that, she managed to make a show of continuing with her work.
But on the fourth day, a Friday, Ron called on Myra in her office. He said he wanted to speak to her urgently. He looked as though the last thing he really wanted to do was speak to her, but she told him to sit down. They were both very obviously nervous. Myra’s face was pale and drawn with worry, and Ron’s was red with embarrassment. Nevertheless, he got right down to business.
“The men have asked me to speak to you, Mrs Cooper. There’s been a lot of complaints, I’m afraid, about you, you see, about the way you’re carrying on, and we need to clear things up.”
Myra nodded. She was not surprised. The men’s attitude towards her had turned right around in the last two or three days, and she felt they almost hated her now.
“What – what am I doing wrong?” she asked.
“It’s more what you’re not doing,” Ron said, almost angrily, then shut up.
Myra urged him to continue with a look.
“All right; it’s like this; the boys don’t like the way you’re treating that child.”
“Child! What child?” Myra said, and she could hear fear in her voice.
“The little one, the toddler that goes about with you, the funny-looking little blonde girl.”
“Blonde?” Myra’s daughter’s hair had been dark, like her father’s. In spite of everything, she felt some slight relief.
Ron pressed on, determined now to say his piece. “You just ignore it, Mrs Cooper, and the men can’t understand you. The kid’s skinny as hell, it’s always crying, but it won’t take food from them, or let them so much as touch it to comfort it, and cries worse if they try to. It hangs around your feet all the time, and you never so much as look at it or speak to it. To tell you the truth, some of the men are for calling in the police, or social services, to get something done for the poor mite.”
“Yes, they could try that,” Myra said.
“Now come on, Mrs Cooper,” Ron said impatiently, “I’m trying to be reasonable, to get things sorted out. That’s what we’ve got to do . . .” and he went on and on and on, but Myra had stopped listening to him. She nodded from time to time, when he seemed to want her to, and managed to appear attentive, but then she must have gone into some kind of trance.
When she came out of it, Ron wasn’t there. Myra got up, locked the door, and returned to her swivel seat.
She sat on for a long time, until the room grew dark. Twice someone knocked loudly on her door and called her name, but she ignored them. She was listening to the child as it toddled around her. It had its doll now, to play with. She could see the disgusting little toy moving round the floor as the child dragged it behind her. Once she threw it into the air, dropped it and left it, then came back for it later, and started talking to it. Myra couldn’t understand what the little girl was saying, she spoke too softly, and with a peculiarly harsh accent.
Finally, holding the doll in her arms, she came and rested against Myra’s legs. She could feel the weight of the child against her knee. Strangely, in the dark, Myra thought she could almost see her, or at least the shine of her pale yellow hair.
Something changed in the middle of the night. The child suddenly seemed restless, and more solid and real. Her movements, out in the pitch blackness of the office, were clumsier. She bumped into things; things fell over. Myra didn’t stir at the sound of objects falling, because she knew her life was ruined, and that nothing mattered. Nevertheless, she was pleased when the child returned to her, and put its hand upon her leg, because everything went very quiet.
Except for the sound of the little girl sucking her thumb, that was.
The hand on Myra’s leg moved caressingly, travelling up away from her knee with an easy, steady determination. Her attention abruptly fixed on the hand, all of her attention, and she began to feel that something was wrong. The hand moved on and up, quite slowly, while Myra sat absolutely still. In the almost silence she could hear her own heart beating, and it was beating very loud. She thought she knew what was coming next, and she was right, because the hand then started doing things a child’s hand would not do.
The chair Myra was sitting on was turned sideways and close to her desk. In the dark, she stretched out her right arm and fumbled for the little reading lamp she kept there. She had no trouble finding it. She pressed the switch, and in the wash of light saw the child for the first time. She was sitting on the edge of the desk. She was terribly thin, her face was covered in a rash, she was dirty, her clothes were rags, her nose was running, she was sucking her thumb – and in her other hand she held her doll. So she was not touching Myra’s leg, but someone was, and holding it painfully hard.
Myra looked down to her left at the kneeling figure stooping beside her as he turned his scarred face up to look at her.
“Though I come and go,” he croaked, “she remains with you.”
Then he reached out for Myra with his other hand.
Not Here, Not Now
STEPHEN GALLAGHER DESCRIBES himself these days as a “writer of contemporary suspense”. Born in Salford, Lancashire, he worked for Yorkshire Television’s documentaries department before becoming a full-time writer in 1980. His novels include Chimera, Follower, Valley of Lights, Oktober, Down River, Rain, The Boat House, Nightmare With Angel, Red Red Robin and The Painted Bride.
He has also worked extensively in radio and television, from scripting two Doctor Who series in the early 1980s to adapting his own novel Chimera into a 1991 mini-series, scripting Peter James’s Prophecy for Yorkshire TV’s Chillers series, and working as a scriptwriter, story and continuity consultant for BBC-TV’s popular Bugs series. Several of his books have recently been optioned for filming.
HE CAME AROUND the corner too fast, there was no denying that. But it wasn’t his fault, it was the way they’d laid out the road. The Mondeo’s offside wheels veered out over the double white lines and hogged a piece of the opposite lane, but he had a clear run at the bend and so that was no problem. He took it wide to avoid dropping his speed. He hated to brake. Only bad drivers braked on bends.
Bad drivers, fainthearts, and life’s born losers.
Oh, shit, was the thought that then flitted through his mind in the two-fifths of a second before disaster struck.
Because what lay beyond the bend was all wrong. There was a school on the far side of the road and a line of parked cars half-on the pavement where they shouldn’t have been. A big yellow refuse cart was coming the other way and it had swung out to pass them. There was room to squeeze by it to the left, just . . . but the way wasn’t clear.
Just beyond the dustcart, someone was crossing.
A mother and child, the girl holding the woman’s hand and pulling ahead. What happened then happened in an instant, and it both amazed and dismayed him.
He was going to hit something, that was inevitable. He was going too fast to stop and there was nowhere to swerve. The refuse cart was like a lumbering wall of glass and metal and shiny hydraulics. The girl was about seven years old. And . . .
It was already too late. There was no point in trying to make any kind of a thought-out decision because some part of him had already reacted.
He’d chosen the child.
There was a thump and a flurry as they went by, just like an empty cardboard box that he’d once struck on a windy day on the motorway. He was braking hard and he was thrown forward against his seat belt, the car sliding to a halt a good fifty or sixty yards on.
Then he dropped back into his seat as the car finally stopped.
The accident was way behind him now. He gripped the wheel, blinking. He was so out of phase that he wouldn’t have been surprised to look in the mirror and see nothing unusual, no sign of anything having happened at all. As if it had all been one of those little flash effects one saw in movies, a few frames of nightmare and then back to normal. Like God saying, Boo! and then you look and nothing’s changed.
But when he did raise his eyes to the mirror, he could see that the child was lying in the road like a dropped sack and the woman was crouching over it, shouting. He could hear her, now. He turned in the seat for a better look back. People were running to them. The men from the dustcart, in those shiny yellow jackets. More women, from the direction of the school.
All converging. All so far behind him. For a long moment he sat there, knowing that he had to get out of the car and that he would have to go back and confront what he’d done.
Everyone was concerned for the child. Any moment now, some of them would raise their heads and transfer their attention to him.
He floored the accelerator, and took off.
He didn’t breathe until he was around the next corner and out of their sight. Some of their faces were like little painted dabs of outrage in his rearview mirror. It took only seconds, but those seconds seemed like an hour. He knew that he should have gone back, but what could he have done? The child was already getting help. He couldn’t change anything now. He’d get abuse, he’d get blame, no one would want to hear him explain . . .
And it hadn’t even been his fault.
He drove like a robot, hardly aware of the moves that his body was making. His mind was racing hard on a track of its own. The traffic was thinning out at the tail-end of the rush hour; it was almost nine and most people had made it to where they were going by now. Just the flexitime crowd and the late-spurters. Late for the shop or the office.
Late for school.
At least the ambulance wouldn’t have to fight its way through.
Damn that kid. Damn her! And her mother too! What the fuck did they think they were doing?
His rage was sudden and real. Half of those cars had been parked on double yellow lines and a couple of them had been left on the zigzags where even the Pope couldn’t stop if he’d wanted to. It was as if women dropping off their kids thought that rules didn’t apply to them. They parked like shit, they pulled out without looking, they’d even stop in the middle of the road and walk their darlings to the pavement if there were no spaces left. They put the hazard lights on and seemed to think that was some kind of a charm. It’s only for a minute, they’d almost certainly say. But how long did it take? They’d as good as condemned that kid.
It was their fault. They deserved the real blame.
Not him.
He’d gone past the building where he worked before he’d realized it. He drove on anyway. He couldn’t face the idea of going in now. He’d call in later with some excuse, but for now he had to think.
Had anyone taken his number? Or a description of him or the car? He hadn’t been aware of it, but there was no way to be sure. Apprehension sat in him like a sickness. As he joined the traffic on the ring road he began to wonder if the car might be carrying any telltale marks. He tried to raise himself in his seat to peer at the wing, but the angle was impossible. There were no shop windows on the ring road, which mostly went through industrial land. So no chance of catching a reflection there.
He could always stop and check, of course. But that would mean getting out of the car.
He needed some time to think, and he felt more at home behind the wheel than anywhere. He was a good driver, one of the best. There were five accidents on his insurance record but not one of them had been down to him; idiots pulling out ahead of him, most of them, or taking too long to manoeuvre or moving too slow.
Like that dustcart. Chugging along like an ocean liner down the middle of the road, guaranteed death if he were to hit it head-on at the speed he’d been going. It wasn’t as if he’d consciously decided to hit the child. Some reflex had been responsible for that, some uncluttered animal circuit in the brain that saw certain mortality and acted for survival. No questions, no considerations. You couldn’t plough into a truck like that and live; whereas with a seven-year-old, you could.
It was basic human programming. Automatic, and beyond conscious reason. Surely anyone would have done the same.
He watched for police cars. If they had his number, they’d certainly be watching for him. But the chances were that they didn’t. People didn’t think that fast in a crisis. He had to stay cool and he hadn’t to panic. It was sad – no, it was worse than sad, it was lousy – but it wasn’t as if he’d knowingly opted to do harm. Harm had simply chosen him as its messenger that day. It could have been almost anyone. That didn’t make him a bad person.
Just unlucky.
He knew the woman’s type. Middle-class parents. He saw ones like her every morning, hanging around and chatting on the pavement outside the school gates. Dressed up, made up, nowhere useful to go until pick-up time but, God, couldn’t they complain about how busy they were. When it came to whining, they were experts.
So even with all that screaming, it was entirely possible that the child hadn’t actually been hurt.
The bump had been nothing and he’d all but brushed by. The more he thought about it, the more cer
tain he became. The image of the small body sprawled on the tarmac would be a hard one to get out of his mind, but things like that always looked worse than they actually were. If he’d hit the kid, really hit her, then she’d surely have been thrown somewhere further along the road.
A tiny pocket of chilled sweat had collected under his waistband at the small of his back. He arched slightly in his seat, and shivered as he felt it run.
The ring road was curving through the edge-of-town industrial estates and bringing him back in a full circle toward the area of his home. He was about ten minutes away from it and he could think of nowhere else to go. Once there, he could phone work and say that he was unwell. He could pretend he hadn’t even left the house yet.
No one would ever know.
But when he was making the turn into the road where he lived, he saw that there was a police car across the end of his driveway. Its lights were on and its engine was running. He quickly cancelled the indicator and went on past the junction. He wasn’t sure whether he’d seen anyone in the car. If they’d gone around the side of the house, they wouldn’t have been able to see him at all.
What was he going to do?
What was he going to do?
For a few desperate seconds he actually tried to make some other kind of sense of the situation, but that wouldn’t work. They had his number, and he was sunk. He’d left the scene of the accident. They had a name for that; hit and run. It wouldn’t matter that he could explain, that there was a perfectly rational sequence to what had happened; hit and run would stick, and the truth would go unheard.
He’d been driving like an old woman since it had happened. He’d just gone along with the flow and hadn’t overtaken a single car in the past twenty minutes. He checked his mirror and saw that the police car was emerging from his road, blue lights flashing but with no siren. So they’d seen him, then. He changed down the gears and tried to get ahead of the car in front, and that was when the siren started up.
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