Henry loves that.
‘Pleath what?’ he says.
But then he remembers why he came here.
He says, ‘Patrick?’
Patrick steps into the room. He’s treading blood everywhere.
He’s hangdog and surly, slope-shouldered.
Henry finds him disgusting, physically repulsive. He’d like to smash his stupid fucking sulky face in with the brass knuckles, woom woom woom, and that would be that. He’d leave him here, face smashed, brains plopping into his lap like Play-Doh.
Henry says, ‘Where’s the little girl?’
‘Who? Mia?’
‘Yes,’ says Henry, with exaggerated patience. ‘Mia.’
‘I thought you had her.’
‘Does it look like I’ve got her?’
Patrick doesn’t answer.
‘So go and get her,’ Henry says.
‘What about the mother and son?’
Henry shrugs off his backpack, unzips it, takes out the new hatchet. ‘I’ll sort them out.’
Patrick sets off to find Mia. He steps over the au pair — her foot is still doing a farcical little twitch, as if she’s pretending to be asleep but unable to resist dancing to a favourite song heard on a distant radio.
For some reason this makes Patrick sad. That twitching foot, a single brown freckle on the sole.
Patrick heads to the kitchen. It’s a big house with a big kitchen, but he knows his way around. He’s been in here before.
Somebody’s been making an omelette; there’s a jug smeared with egg, a fork still sticking out of it. There’s the black pan, a serious cook’s pan, cooling and greasy in the butler sink.
Patrick’s senses are heightened. He can feel heat radiating from the stove.
Nobody’s in here.
He looks down. There’s a puddle of piss on the floor.
The cupboard under the sink is open.
Patrick kneels. He opens the cupboard door. Sees cleaning equipment. Sponges. A roll of bin bags.
No Mia.
He opens the next cupboard. And the next.
He opens the pantry.
No Mia.
He clambers onto the kitchen bench, looks in the high kitchen cupboards. That would be a good place to hide. That’s where Patrick would think about hiding if he were Mia’s age. (Except Patrick hadn’t hidden at all, had he?)
Mia’s not in the kitchen.
He pads down the hallway. He checks the cupboard under the stairs. A Dyson, a cobwebby Swiffer floor mop, a whole bunch of crap. He shines his little torch into the spidery corner.
No Mia.
He stands at the bottom of the stairs and shines his torch up and into the darkness.
If he were Mia, would he hide up there?
In the darkness? With Henry downstairs?
No.
Patrick heads to the garden.
Mia didn’t want to go upstairs. It was dark. She knew she’d be trapped. So she sneaked out, into the garden.
It’s a pretty big garden, high-walled on three sides. The walls are too high for her to climb.
An old potting shed abuts the back of the house. A long time ago, it was an outside lavatory or something. It’s spidery and horrible. The old bricks are crumbly at the corners.
Mia’s barefoot. She straddles the corner of the outhouse, digs her fingertips and toes into the crumbling mortar between the bricks. She tests it for depth, then lifts herself. Her fingers tremble with the strain.
Her feet scrabble. She rips a toenail. But Dad calls her a monkey because she’s good at climbing.
She’s halfway up the wall of the outhouse when a man walks into the kitchen.
Mia freezes on the wall like a gecko.
The only moving thing is her heart. It feels conspicuous, a sick, wet, whim! wham! in her thin chest.
She watches the man, who has a strangely gentle and worried face, like a boy soldier. Then he opens a cupboard and looks inside. He sweeps all the stuff inside across the floor.
Mia knows the man is looking for her. It’s difficult not to watch, the way it’s difficult not to watch scary movies sometimes, because sometimes looking away is worse.
The man peers through the window. She watches his eyes scan the garden.
His eyes sweep over her.
She realizes that the kitchen light is on, which is why the kitchen looks as bright as a fish tank. The man is probably staring at his own reflection.
But that’s difficult to accept. So when the man turns and storms out of the kitchen, she thinks it’s a trap. She stays there, clinging to the wall, too scared to move.
He’s gone for a long time.
Mia begins to climb again.
She grazes her fingers and her toes, and once her leg slips; she barks her shin to the knee. But she makes it. She heaves and struggles and pulls herself onto the roof of the old outhouse.
Then the young man comes back to the kitchen. He opens the door and steps into the garden.
Mia freezes on the roof of the outhouse. She squats there like a cat. She is higher than the man’s head. If he doesn’t look up, it’s possible that he won’t see her.
He pokes around the garden, probing the corners with the beam of a torch. When he turns in her direction, she sees that his face is different: it’s scrunched up as if he’s been crying. There’s black stuff all over one side of his face, in the vague shape of a human hand. Except Mia knows it’s not really black stuff, it’s red stuff.
She gasps — and the man looks up.
He and Mia stare at one another, perfectly still.
Then Mia scrambles over the remaining few feet of wall between her and next-door’s garden. She drops to the other side of the wall.
Her ankle twists and it hurts. She should be screaming, but she doesn’t even think about screaming. She just sprints, hardly registers the damaged ankle.
She doesn’t look back until she’s crossed the wide garden, waded into the rose bushes where thorns scratch her.
There he is, scrambling onto the garden wall. He jumps down, a lot better than she had. He doesn’t look like he’s hurt his ankle at all.
He lowers into a crouch and scampers towards her.
Mia tries to climb but there’s nothing to grab; the ivy the Robertsons used to cultivate before they moved away is too tangled and loose, it just spools away in her hands. She gets tangled and panicky. She risks one more look, just one more look over her shoulder.
There he is, the sad-faced young man with the red handprint over his face. He’s just looking at her.
She doesn’t know how long he’s been there.
She’s scared to see the young man is scared, too, because that means there’s something even worse in her house — and whatever it is, it’s in there with her parents. Mia wants to cry. Her knees are knocking together.
The man is breathing funny. He looks away, at the empty house the Robertsons used to live in, which is now for sale.
He says, ‘Come on.’
‘No,’ says Mia, although her voice is small.
