was no reaction. They just stood, sullenly.
‘DOWNSTAIRS!’ Naomi bellowed.
It produced not the slightest response.
She tried to pull them towards the door, and to her shock, found she could not. They were resisting with a strength that was more than a match for hers.
Releasing Phoebe’s hand, she pulled Luke as hard as she could, jerking deliberately to try to unbalance him. But he stood his ground, his polished black lace-up shoes slipping just a fraction on the carpet pile before digging in.
Close to losing it, she yelled, ‘If you don’t come downstairs right away, you’re going to bed, both of you. No computer, nothing. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?’
John, camera in his hand, was standing in the doorway. ‘What’s going on?’ he said.
‘Dr Michaelides is right,’ she said. ‘We should put them in a bloody institution, miserable little sods.’
She released Luke’s hand. John knelt down and stared at him, then gently but firmly took hold of both of his hands. ‘Listen, little fellow, you and your sister are having a birthday party and you’ve got friends here and a great clown. I want you to come down and behave the way a host and hostess should behave. OK?’
Naomi watched Luke. In his navy trousers, white shirt and tie, black lace-up shoes and serious face he looked more like a miniature adult than a child. And Phoebe, in a floral dress with a lace ruff, had an expression like ice. You’re not children, she thought, with a shudder. You’re bloody-minded little adults.
God, just what the hell are you?
John stood up. Luke and Phoebe gave each other an unreadable look. Then, after a moment’s further hesitation, Luke walked after his father back out into the landing. Tight-lipped, Phoebe followed.
They re-entered the living room. Luke and Phoebe walked solemnly to the front of the little group and sat back down on the floor, crossed their arms and fixed their eyes on Mr Pineapple Head, who had engaged the help of Ben in spinning plates on sticks.
‘Everything all right?’ Harriet whispered to Naomi.
No, she wanted to say. Not all right at all. Instead she just smiled and nodded. Fine. Absolutelysodddingfine.
*
That night, after her mother and Harriet had both gone up to bed, Naomi stood wearily in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher and passing plates to John, who stacked them back in the cupboards. Fudge and Chocolate were wide awake, both pressing their faces against the bars of their hutch, making their funny little chamois-leather-polishing-glass squeaks.
Naomi poured herself a large slug of wine. ‘This residential facility that Dr Michaelides mentioned – maybe we should think about it after all. I’m at the end of my tether, John, I don’t know what to do any more. Maybe they’d respond better to discipline if it comes from someone they don’t know. Perhaps after a couple of weeks they’d start to see reason.’
She picked up her glass and drank half the contents in one gulp. ‘I never thought in a million years I’d say that. But that’s how I feel. I don’t know what else to do.’
‘They were bored today,’ John responded. ‘That was the problem, I think. That’s what Harriet thought, too.’
‘She doesn’t know anything about children,’ Naomi said, a little acidly. ‘She dotes on Luke and Phoebe.’
‘Does she ever say anything to you about them? About how they don’t respond to her?’
‘She thinks it’s a phase they’re going through.’ He concentrated for a moment on finding a place to put a jug, then said, ‘Let’s hope Dr Michaelides is right, that more intellectual stimulation is needed. Maybe we made a mistake having a clown, perhaps we should have had an astrophysicist talking about the molecular structures of rocket fuels, or climate change.’
She gave him a wan smile. ‘That’s almost funny.’
81
At six in the morning John was wide awake after a restless night. Naomi had tossed and turned continually, and he’d twice been woken by the rustle and popping of a blister pack as she took paracetamols. Now she was sleeping soundly, as usual right over his side of the bed, leaving him almost hanging over the edge.
He extricated himself as gently as he could, trying not to wake her, padded across the floor and peered out of the window into the darkness. It was still the best part of an hour before daybreak. Pulling on his dressing gown, he dug his feet into his clogs and tiptoed downstairs in the darkness.
Someone else was up, he realized, hearing the sound of voices on television, and seeing light seeping under the living room door. Was it Naomi’s sister, he wondered, although Harriet was normally a late riser. He opened the door and peered in.
Luke and Phoebe, in their dressing gowns, squatted on the floor, backs against a sofa, utterly absorbed in a television programme. But it wasn’t any of the kids’ shows Naomi would ordinarily have put on for them; it was an adult science lesson, something to do with the Open University. A teacher, standing in front of a three-dimensional model of a complex atomic structure, was talking about the formation of halogen. He was explaining how a quartz halogen headlamp on a car worked.
‘Good morning, Luke, good morning, Phoebe,’ he said.
Both shot him a cursory glance as if he was some minor irritation, then looked back at the screen.
‘Like any breakfast?’
Luke raised a hand, signalling with it for him to be quiet, to stop distracting them. John stared at him, unable fully to take this in. His three-year-old children were sitting in front of the television, at six o’clock on a Sunday morning, utterly engrossed by a man talking about halogen gas.
He backed out of the room and went through to the kitchen to make some coffee, deep in thought. Just how bright were they? Had it been them accessing his computer and taking over his previous chess game with Gus Santiano – and beating him?
They were going to have to let the psychologist carry out tests on them, for sure. And he was going to need to discuss with Naomi about sending them to a special educational facility. There must be places that were not residential, where they could just take them each day, and still have a family life with them outside of that – doing fun family activities with them, such as learning about the molecular structure of halogen gas together.
He filled the kettle and switched it on. Then he spooned some coffee into a mug, and took a bottle of milk out of the fridge. Something felt strange; it seemed too quiet in here, a sound was missing. There was a distinctly unpleasant smell, he suddenly realized, as well.
Bad meat.
He wrinkled his nose, opened the fridge door and sniffed. Just fridge smells – nothing bad in there, nothing that had gone off. He closed the door, sniffed harder, puzzled. He checked the freezer door as well, putting his nose close to the trays, but there was nothing bad there either.
The kettle rumbled louder, then clicked off. He poured boiling water into the mug, added milk and stirred it.
Then, turning round with his mug in his hand, he saw it.
The mug slipped from his fingers, hit the floor and shattered, spraying china fragments and scalding coffee everywhere. But he barely noticed. His eyes were riveted to the floor, to the two sheets of newspaper that had been placed beside the guinea pigs’ hutch.
On one sheet of newsprint, amid a stain of dried blood, Fudge was laid out on his back, paws in the air, his midriff slit open from his neck to his tail, his internal organs placed in an orderly row beside him. On the other sheet of paper, Chocolate lay similarly opened up and eviscerated.
For an instant, his thoughts wild and ragged, John wondered if a cat had somehow come into the house and done this. But walking over, and peering closer, he realized that theory was a non-starter. A small pile of coiled intestines lay beside each; their kidneys, livers, pancreas, hearts, lungs, were laid in matching rows. The tops of
