swings it low and vicious, at her son’s knee.
Dan has long, skinny legs and big feet — Steph’s legs. Sometimes at night they still hurt with the growing.
Steph hears bone crack and thinks of ice cubes in glasses.
She draws in her breath but before she can scream the younger of the men rushes forward and shoves the hot, greasy bucket of chicken into her face.
She chokes and panics, stifled by a gorge of fried skin and flesh and hot fat.
The young man punches her in the stomach. Steph falls, gagging, to the ground. The young man starts kicking her.
Patrick turns from the woman and goes to the kid, Dan. He’s howling about his broken leg like a fucking baby. Patrick glances nervously left and right. But no lights come on. Nobody comes to their window. Nobody shouts. Nobody interferes.
Nobody ever does.
Patrick hits the boy with a homemade cosh, a hiking sock filled with AA batteries. It wrecks the teeth in the kid’s head. The kid coughs and cries and spits fragments of tooth all over the concrete path.
The kid grabs at his mouth and makes a weird muffled noise, like somebody trying to say something urgent through a thin partition wall.
Henry drags the woman into the house by her hair. He gets chicken all over his fingers.
Marcus sets down the omelette pan and says to his daughter, ‘Stay here.’
She stares at him with wide eyes as he hurries away. She listens to the omelette burning on the stove. She can’t believe her dad — so orderly, so safety-conscious — has forgotten it. And this thought makes her feel weak and afraid and very small. In its way it’s worse than the horrible noises — the bangs and the crashes and most of all the terrible, terrible screams — that are coming from the other side of the house.
Mia needs to feel big. So she walks to the cooker and turns it off. Then she moves the pan off the hob.
She puts the hot pan into the damp sink. It sizzles, shockingly, like a serpent. She recoils from it.
A man in dark clothes drags Steph through the open door. Steph’s face is smeared in some kind of matter.
Gabriella thinks at first that it must be vomit, that Steph’s eaten her KFC and it’s made her unwell and this man must have brought her home.
But only for a moment.
The man sees Gabriella and grins a wolf’s grin, chop-licking, ear to ear. He kicks Steph in the ribs, then steps forward, raising a baseball bat.
Gabriella steps away. She stumbles over a shoe, one of Mia’s Converse.
The man swings a bat. It connects with the side of Gabriella’s head. She hears it. She falls.
The man stamps on her stomach three times, like he’s putting out a camp fire.
Marcus runs into the hallway.
Steph lies with her eyes open. She’s making strange movements with her right hand.
Dan is fighting with a young man in the front garden. The young man is hitting him again and again in the face.
Marcus makes a move to intervene, then notices the man in the living room. He’s stamping on Gabriella’s belly. He’s only a door away from the kitchen.
Marcus calls out, ‘ Mia, run! ’
Then he races into the living room and punches the man in the back of the head.
He grabs the man’s shoulders and throws him into the wall.
The man drops his baseball bat.
Gabriella drags herself to the far side of the room. She’s making a sound. Marcus hopes he never hears a sound like it again.
He casts around, looking for something to kill the man with. That’s his only thought.
His eyes settle on the TV power lead. He steps forward, meaning to grab it.
The younger man steps into the living room and stabs Marcus in the back with a hunting knife.
Mia stands frozen. She can feel the heat of the cooker on the back of her neck.
Because she’s eleven years old, her life so far has been full of horror: the horror of lying in bed at night and worrying about Mum and Dad dying in a plane crash or getting divorced.
The horror of the wardrobe door. And the thing under the bed. And worst of all, the teddy bear Grandma bought her for her fourth birthday. It’s perched on the edge of Mia’s bed and glares at her through glassy, malevolent eyes. When Mum and Dad have gone to bed Mia covers Bad Bear with a fleecy blanket, making him just a vague lumpy shape. It freaks her out to think of his amber eyes blazing in rage. But it’s better than having him glower at you all night. (She’d wet the bed a few times, and made up some stories about drinking too much water before going to sleep. But really, it was Bad Bear.)
One day, Mia told her the au pair (in those days, a Spanish girl called Camilla) that she was too big for bears now. Perhaps it was time for a Poor Child to have him (the world, she knew at five years old, was full of Poor Children).
Camilla was touched by this gesture. And so was Steph. So Steph and Mia sat in Mia’s room, on the edge of the bed, holding hands.
Steph said, ‘Camilla told me you’re too grown up for Cuddle Bear.’ (Cuddle Bear was what Mia’s mum and dad thought Bad Bear was called.)
Mia nodded and bit her lower lip. She could feel her eyes welling, because she was sure Mum was going to say no, that Bad Bear was a gift from Grandma, who had now passed.
Steph misread her daughter’s welling eyes. She stroked her brow and her soft hair with a firm palm. ‘Where would you like Cuddle Bear to go?’
Mia shrugged: I dunno.
‘Well,’ said Steph. ‘I know they always want toys at the children’s hospital.’
Mia endured a little shiver of terror at that thought: at how Bad Bear would delight in all those beds, all those sleeping children! But (and she feels a throb of guilt about this, even six years and half a life later) she nodded and said yes. And that was that. Bad Bear went to hospital.
No fear since has been anywhere near as bad.
Except for now. She stands in the kitchen and terrifying noises come from the hallway. The noise of men shouting and things falling over and what sounds like a horrible laugh, a screeching hysterical laugh. But it’s not a laugh.
Mia pisses herself. The warmth runs down her legs and over her bare feet and pools on the tiles.
Dad calls out for the second time, ‘ Mia, run! ’
Mia remains frozen for a moment. Then something snaps inside her and she runs.
After stabbing Marcus, Patrick hurries to the front garden to drag Daniel inside.
Daniel’s semi-conscious. Patrick dumps him near his mother.
He sees that look, the look that Henry told him about.
Henry was right. It looks like adoration.
Patrick hates Daniel for it. He stamps on Daniel’s shattered knee.
After Patrick has incapacitated the husband, Henry turns to the au pair.
Although under normal circumstances he’d like to fuck her, Henry’s not interested in her tonight. She’s more of a pet than part of the family.
So he drags her by the hair to the middle of the room and cuts her throat in front of Marcus. There’s a satisfying jet of arterial blood.
She twitches comically and Henry laughs. He catches Marcus’s eye, the way two strange men will catch each other’s eye on the seafront when a pretty girl walks past.
Marcus jellyfishes on the floor. He’s muttering something about God.
Henry laughs, enjoying himself. He slips on the old brass knuckles and punches Marcus in the face — woom woom woom.
Marcus’s nose explodes across his face. Henry thinks he’s dead. But he’s not.
‘Pleath,’ Marcus says, through his shattered mouth. ‘Pleath. Pleath. Pleath.’
