Broken Harbour

“Monday,” Jenny said. Her eyes skidded away to the window and for a sinking second I thought I had lost her again, but then she drew a long breath and wiped off another tear. “Yeah. OK.”

Outside the window the light had moved; it fired the whirling leaves with a translucent orange glow, turned them into blazing danger-flags that made my adrenaline leap. Inside the air felt stripped of oxygen, as if the heat and the disinfectants had seared it all away, left the room dried hollow. Everything I was wearing itched fiercely against my skin.

Jenny said, “It wasn’t a good day. Emma got up on the wrong side of the bed-her toast tasted funny, and the tag in her shirt bothered her, and whine whine whine… And Jack picked up on it, so he was being awful too. He kept going on and on about how he wanted to be an animal for Halloween. I had a pirate costume all made for him, he’d been running around with a scarf round his head saying he was a pirate for weeks, but all of a sudden he decided he was going to be ‘Daddy’s big scary animal.’ He wouldn’t shut up about it, all day long. I was trying everything to distract him, giving him biscuits and letting him watch the telly and promising he’d get crisps when we went to the shop-I know I sound like a terrible mum, but he never gets that stuff normally; I just couldn’t listen to it, not that day.”

It was so homely, the anxious note in her voice, the little furrow between her eyebrows as she looked at me; so ordinary. No woman wants some stranger thinking she’s a bad mother for bribing her little boy with junk food. I had to hold back a shudder. “I understand,” I said.

“But he wouldn’t stop. In the shop, even, he was telling the girl at the till about the animal-I swear I would’ve told him to shut up, and I never do that either, only I didn’t want her to see me make a big deal of it. Once we got outside I wouldn’t say a word to Jack all the way home, and I wouldn’t give him his crisps-he howled so loud he nearly broke my and Emma’s eardrums, but I just ignored him. It was all I could do just to get us home without crashing the car. Probably I could’ve handled it better, only…” Jenny’s head turned uneasily on the pillow. “I wasn’t in great form either.”

Sunday night. To remind her of being happy. I said, “Something had happened. That morning, when you first came downstairs.”

She didn’t ask how I knew. The boundaries of her life had been turning ragged and permeable for so long, another invader was nothing strange. “Yeah. I went to put the kettle on, and right beside it, on the countertop, there was… there was this pin. Like a badge, like kids pin on their jackets? It said, ‘I go to JoJo’s.’ I used to have one like that, but I hadn’t seen it in years-I probably threw it away when I moved out of home, I don’t even remember. No way had it been there the night before. I’d tidied up, last thing; the place was spotless. No way.”

“So how did you think it had got there?”

The memory had her breathing faster. “I couldn’t think anything. I just stood there like an eejit, staring at it with my mouth open. Pat used to have one of them too, so I was trying to tell myself he must have found it somewhere and put it there for me to find, like a romantic thing, like to remind me about the good times, to apologize for how awful things had got? It’s the kind of thing he would’ve done, before… Only he doesn’t keep stuff like that either. And even if he had, it would’ve been in a box in the attic, and that stupid wire was still nailed over the attic hatch; how could he have got it down without me noticing?”

She was searching my face, scanning for any particle of doubt. “I swear to God, I didn’t imagine it. You can look. I wrapped the pin up in a piece of tissue-I didn’t even want to touch it-and stuck it in my pocket. When Pat woke up I was praying he’d say something about it, like, ‘Oh, did you find your present?’ but of course he didn’t. So I took it upstairs and folded it in a jumper, in my bottom drawer. Go look. It’s there.”

“I know,” I said gently. “We found it.”

“See? See? It was real! I actually…” Jenny’s face ducked away from mine for a second; her voice, when she started talking again, had a muffled sound to it. “I actually wondered, at first. I was… I told you what things had been like. I thought I could actually be seeing things. So I stuck the pin into my thumb, deep-it bled for ages. I knew I couldn’t be imagining that, right? All day, I couldn’t think about anything else-I went straight through a red light on the way to get Emma. But at least when I started getting scared that I’d hallucinated the whole thing, I could look at my thumb and go, OK, a hallucination didn’t do that.”

“But you were still upset.”

“Well, yeah, obviously I was. I could only come up with two answers, and they were both… they were bad. Either that same person had broken in again and left it there-except I checked the alarm, and it was on; and anyway, how would anyone know about JoJo’s? It would have to be someone who’d been stalking me, finding out everything about my whole entire life, and now they wanted me to know they knew-” She shuddered. “I felt like a crazy person even thinking about it. Stuff like that doesn’t happen, except in the movies. But the only other thing I could think of was that I actually still had my badge somewhere, and I had done the whole thing myself-gone and dug it out, put it down in the kitchen. And I didn’t remember anything about it. And that would mean…”

Jenny stared up at the ceiling, blinking to keep the tears back. “It’s one thing doing everyday stuff, autopilot stuff, and forgetting about it-going to the shop or taking a shower, things I would’ve done anyway. But if I was doing stuff like digging out that badge, crazy stuff that didn’t make any sense… then I could do anything. Anything. I could get up one morning and look in the mirror and realize I’d shaved my head or painted my face green. I could go to pick Emma up from school one day and find the teacher and all the other mums not talking to me, and I wouldn’t have a clue why.”

She was panting, working for each breath like the wind had been knocked out of her. “And the kids. Oh, God, the kids. How was I supposed to protect them, if I couldn’t tell what I was going to do the next second? How would I even know if I’d been keeping them safe or if I’d, I’d-I couldn’t even tell what I was scared of doing, because I wouldn’t know till it happened. Thinking about it made me want to get sick. It was like I could feel the pin upstairs, wiggling, trying to get out of the drawer. Every time I put my hand in my pocket, I was terrified I’d find it there.”

To remind her of being happy. Conor, floating in his cold concrete bubble, with nothing to moor him but the bright silent images of the Spains moving across their windows and the thick-twined anchor rope of his love for them: he had never dreamed that his gift might not do exactly what he wanted it to, that Jenny might not react the way he had planned; that, with all the best intentions in the world, he might smash down the frail scaffolding that kept her standing. I said, “So what you told me the first time we met, about that evening being an ordinary one-you and Pat giving the children their bath, and Pat making Jack laugh by playing with Emma’s dress: that wasn’t true.”

A wan, bitter half-smile. “God, that. I forgot I said that. I didn’t want you thinking we were… It should’ve been true. We used to do that, back before. But no: I washed the kids, Pat stayed down in the sitting room-he said he had ‘high hopes’ for the hole by the sofa. He had such high hopes, he hadn’t even eaten dinner with us, in case the hole did something amazing meanwhile. He said he wasn’t hungry, he’d get a sandwich or something later. Back when we were first married, we used to lie in bed and talk about someday when we had kids: what they’d look like, what we’d name them; Pat used to joke about how we’d all have family dinner round the table together every night, no matter what, even when the kids were horrible teenagers and they hated our guts…”

Jenny was still staring up at the ceiling and blinking hard, but a tear escaped, trickled down into the soft hair at her temple. “And now here we were, with Jack banging his fork on the table and yelling, ‘Daddy Daddy Daddy come here!’ over and over, because Pat was in the sitting room, still in his pajamas from last night, staring at a hole. And Emma with her fingers in her ears screaming at Jack to shut up, and me not even trying to make them both be quiet because I didn’t have the energy. I was just trying so hard to make it through the rest of the day without doing anything else insane. I just wanted to sleep.”

Me and Richie, on that first torch-lit walk-through, spotting the rumpled duvet and knowing someone had been in bed when it all turned bad. I said, “So you bathed the children and put them to bed. And then…?”

“I just went to bed too. I could hear Pat moving around downstairs, but I couldn’t face him-I couldn’t handle hearing all about what the animal was doing, not that night-so I stayed upstairs. I tried to read my book for a while, but I couldn’t concentrate. I wanted to put something in front of the drawer where the pin was, like something heavy, but I knew that would be a crazy thing to do. So in the end I switched off the light and I tried to go to sleep.”

Jenny stopped. Neither of us wanted her to go on. I said, “And then?”