“Pardon me, Mrs. Sidney. I can go out the front.”
On the way through the hall she paused and looked up the stairs. All the bedroom doors were closed; the stairhead was in darkness. The final straw, she thought. Four and twenty Sidneys, baked in a pie.
Isabel Ryan was blundering about in her kitchen, still in her dressing gown, though it was nearly midday. That’s nothing, she thought. I can still be in it at four in the afternoon, I can still be in it at eight o’clock, and then it is time to get back into it and go to bed. Have I been to bed? she wondered. The house was very cold, though it barely registered with her. She did not think about what her body needed; it had its own life. She could not remember how much time had passed since she had rung up Sylvia Sidney; one night, or two, or many more. In a mist of grief and nausea, she clung to the edge of the kitchen sink, swaying gently.
Perhaps she should have been more persistent. The woman had sounded stiff and dangerous, as if she were going to snake down the wires and do her some damage. What had she thought, that she had rung up to claim Colin back? After all these years? It must have sounded like it. All she had wanted was information. What was the child like?
Is it some natural kind of child, she wondered, that looks like Jim, or like its mother? Or is it a mystery baby; and does it get solved? She ran her hand down over her body. If this was the solution, would she know it soon enough to put it in her expose? It must come along quickly, because she had almost run out of typing paper; she couldn’t get more unless she was sober, and if she was ever sober there was no saying what she might find out, and the task would be endless. She might even find out if she was pregnant or not. Would Jim stay with her, now she had contracted this mysterious swelling? He hadn’t said.
She could feel resolution spreading inside her; another strange organic growth, beyond her control. I will get together some clothes, she thought, even if it takes me an hour to do it. I will go out and drive my car, even if I crash it. I will go upstairs and find that letter that Miss Suzanne Sidney has written to my husband. Then I will take the address and look at my street map, and taking the letter, I will shred it up finely and flush it down the lavatory. Then I will go round and see her. I will wait outside her house and watch her come and go. I will just look on. I shall just show myself, walk down the street. Then she will see what it is like to be Jim’s wife. She will profit by my example; and I will profit by hers.
Or else I have lost everything, she thought. Jim Ryan, Colin Sidney; and my whisky glass as well.
Less than a mile away from Buckingham Avenue, lying to either side of a narrow and little-used road called Turner’s Lane, there was a tract of open ground. It was surprising that houses had not been built there, but the residents of Lauderdale Road, whose gardens backed onto it, regarded it as an amenity, and had fought with vigour the various schemes for its use which had been put forward over the years. And so it had been unchanged for as long as they remembered; a few desolate acres of tussocky grass, stagnant marshy pools, and little thickets of prickly bushes. The residents never went there; there were houses on three sides of it, and on the fourth side only the old canal. They left it to stray dogs and cats, to the odd exhibitionist, to the passing rabbit and urban fox; and to their children.
It was in one of these prickly thickets that Alistair Sidney and his friends had set up their den. When they had reached school-leaving age, and the winter came on, they had thought they would leave dens behind. But their homes were not congenial to them, and they found that they needed it more than ever. They had a clean dirt floor, swept and compacted; branches curved densely above them, making their shelter almost as wind- and weather- proof as a conventional tent. It was not quite high enough for standing, but you could manage a crouch. The thorns left long pink scratches and puncture marks, which sometimes went septic; but Sherwood had stolen a first-aid kit recently, so that was all right. A dense undergrowth protected them from observation; in spring, as Austin said, they’d be practically invisible. If it had only had video games it would have been perfect.
The children had passed many happy hours here, playing with the skeleton that the Brownies had found by the canal.
“They want to do their karate badge, them Brownies,” Austin said. “Then they could of protected it from us.”
“Kari reckons it’s a rabbit anyway,” Alistair said. “She does biology. Don’t you, pimpleface?”
“Nar,” Austin said. “It’s human, that.”
“It could be a mix.”
“A chimera,” said Karen.
“A wot?”
“A chimera. A mix-up. A bit of this and a bit of that. A monster. A thing of hybrid character.”
“Yer,” said Austin judiciously. “Could be.”
Since Christmas, they had occupied themselves in trying to arrange the bones in an intelligent order, and they were immersed in this, one sunless afternoon at half-term, when the sound of crunching wood and vegetation alerted them to an imminent invasion.
“Christ, it’s my dad,” Austin said. “Nobody else has boots like that. Quick, boil-head, get the bones back in the box.”
Karen leaped up and began to shovel the skeleton into the Tesco box in which they kept it between jigsaw sessions. The sound of crashing and scrunching came closer, punctuated by damning and blasting in a powerful male voice. “It is my dad!” Austin hissed. “Quick, get it out of the way. I’m off. He’s bloody violent. He can cripple you with one kick.”
Heavy breathing warned them that the intruder was almost upon them. Austin fled, bent double, through the back exit. Karen shoved the box after him and, grasping the springy twigs and branches, attempted to cover the signs of his retreat. Her hands bled; she fell to her knees and shovelled dead leaves into a mound, banking them against the entrance to the bolt hole. Before she had time to scramble to her feet the intruder was upon them; not the Reverend Teller, but a wild youth, brawny and stubble-headed, wearing boots the equal of the vicar’s, and with leather thongs binding each wrist.
“Jesus,” Alistair breathed. He sized up the lad and knew he was no match. They were at his mercy. Do something, Scab, he thought, distract him, offer him your body. “We weren’t doing no harm, mister,” he said in a whining voice. “Don’t beat us up, we’ll leave peaceable, honest.” Karen, still crouching, stared up at the youth, holding up hands finely beaded with blood.
The youth’s beefy chest heaved. He reached forward; Alistair was taken up by the front of his zipper jacket and held, skull to hairless skull.
