“Emma started crying. I don’t know what time it was; I was dozing off and on, waiting for Pat to come up, listening out for what he was doing downstairs. Emma’s always had nightmares, ever since she was tiny. I thought that was all it was, just a nightmare. I got up and went in to her, and she was sitting up in bed, totally terrified. She was crying so hard she could barely breathe; she was trying to say something, but she couldn’t talk. I sat down on the bed and I hugged her-she was clinging on to me, sobbing her poor little heart out. When she calmed down a bit I said, ‘What’s wrong, sweetie? Tell Mummy and I’ll fix it.’ And she said…”
Jenny caught a deep, openmouthed gasp of breath. “She said… ‘It’s in my wardrobe, Mum. It was going to come get me.’
“I said, ‘What’s in your wardrobe, sweetie?’ I still thought it was just a dream or maybe a spider, she hates spiders. But Emma went, she went, ‘The animal. Mummy, the animal, it’s the animal, it’s laughing at me with its teeth-’ She was starting to go to bits again. I said, ‘There’s no animal here; it was just a dream,’ and she wailed, this awful high noise that didn’t even sound human. I grabbed her, I even shook her-I’ve never done that before, ever. I was scared she was going to wake Jack, but it wasn’t just that. I was…” That great gasp again. “I was scared of the animal. That it would hear her and come after her. I knew there was nothing there. I knew that. But I still-the thought of it, Jesus, I had to make Emma shut up before… She stopped wailing, thank God, but she was still crying and clutching at me, and she was pointing at her schoolbag-it was on the floor by her bed. All I could make out was ‘in there, in there,’ so I switched on the bedside lamp and dumped everything out of the bag. When Emma saw that…”
Jenny’s finger hovered over the drawing. “This. She went, ‘That! Mummy, that! It’s in my wardrobe!’”
The gasping was gone; her voice had stilled, slowed, just a small pinpoint of life scratching at the thick silence of the room. “The bedside lamp’s only little, and the paper was in a shadow. All I could see was the eyes and the teeth, in the middle of black. I said, ‘What is it, sweetie?’ But I already knew.
“Emma said-she was starting to get her breath back, but she was still doing that hiccuppy thing-she said, ‘The animal. The animal Daddy wants to catch. I’m sorry, Mummy, I’m so so sorry-’
“I put on my sensible voice and I went, ‘Don’t be silly. There’s nothing to be sorry for. But we’ve talked about that animal before. It isn’t real, remember? It’s just a game Daddy plays. He’s just a bit confused. You know that.’
“She looked so wretched. Emma’s sensitive; things she doesn’t understand, they just rip her up inside. She knelt up in bed and hugged me around the neck, and she whispered-right into my ear, like she was scared something would hear her-‘I see it. For days and days now. I’m sorry, Mummy, I tried not to…’
“I wanted to die. I wanted to just melt into a little puddle and soak away into the carpet. I thought I’d kept them safe. That was all I ever wanted. But that animal, that thing, it had got everywhere. It was inside Emma, inside her head. I would have killed it if I could have, I’d have done it with my bare hands, but I couldn’t do that because it didn’t exist. Emma was going, ‘I know I wasn’t meant to tell about it, but Miss Carey said draw your home and it just came out, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’ I knew I had to get the kids away, but there was nowhere I could take them. It had escaped; it had got outside the house, too. There wasn’t anywhere left that was safe. And nothing I could do was worth anything, because I couldn’t trust myself to do things right any more.”
Jenny laid her fingertips on the drawing, lightly and with a kind of bleak wonder: this tiny thing, this slip of paper and crayon that had changed the world.
“I kept so calm. I said to Emma, ‘It’s all right, sweetie. I know you tried. Mummy’s going to make it all OK. You go to sleep now. I’ll stay right here so the animal can’t get you. OK?’ I opened her wardrobe and looked in all the corners, so she could see there was nothing there. I put all her things back in her schoolbag. Then I switched off the lamp again and I sat there on the bed, holding her hand, till she fell asleep-it took a while, she kept opening her eyes to double-check that I was still there, but she was exhausted from getting so freaked out; in the end she went off. And then I took the drawing and I went downstairs to find Pat.
“He was on the kitchen floor. He had the cupboard door open, this cupboard where he’d made a hole at the back, and he was crouching in front of it like an animal, like this great big animal waiting to pounce. He had one of his hands in the cupboard, spread out on the shelf. In the other hand he had this vase, this silver vase, it was our wedding present from my grandmother-I used to put it on the windowsill in our bedroom with pink roses in it, like I had in my bouquet, to remind us of our wedding day… Pat was holding it by the neck, holding it up like he was about to smash something with it. And there was this knife, one of these really sharp cooking knives that we bought back when we used to do Gordon Ramsay recipes, it was on the floor right next to him. I said, ‘What are you doing?’
“Pat said, ‘Shut up. Listen.’ I listened but I couldn’t hear anything, there was nothing there! So I said that: ‘There’s nothing there.’
“Pat laughed-he didn’t even look at me, he was just staring into this cupboard-and he said, he said, ‘That’s what it wants you to think. It’s right there, inside the wall, I can hear it, if you’d shut up for a second you’d hear it too. It’s smart, it keeps very quiet till I’m just about ready to give up and right then it does a quick little scrabble, just to keep me on my toes, it’s like it’s laughing at me. Well fuck that, I’m smarter than it is. I’m staying one step ahead. Yeah, so it’s got plans, but I’ve got plans too. I’m keeping my eye on the prize. I’m ready to rumble.’
“I go, ‘What are you talking about?’ and Pat goes-he’s hunched over towards me, practically whispering, like he thinks this thing can understand him-‘I finally figured out what it wants. It wants me. The kids too, and you, it wants all of us, but most of all it wants me. That’s what it’s after. No wonder I couldn’t catch it before, fucking about with peanut butter and hamburger- So here I am. Come on, motherfucker, I’m right here, come and get me!’ He’s like beckoning at the hole with the hand in the cupboard, like a guy trying to get another guy to go for him. He goes, ‘It can smell me, I’m so close it can practically taste me, and that’s driving it wild. It’s smart, all right, it’s careful, but sooner or later-no, sooner, I can feel it, any minute-it’s going to want me so bad that it can’t be careful any more. It’s going to lose control and it’s going to stick its head out of that hole and take a big bite of my hand and then I’ll grab it and bam bam bam not so smart now motherfucker not so smart now are you-’”
Jenny was shaking with the memory. “His face was all red, all covered in sweat, his eyes were practically popping out-he was smashing the vase down over and over, like he was hitting something. He looked insane. I yelled at him to shut up, I was like, ‘This has to stop, I’ve had enough, look at this, look-’ and I shoved this thing in his face.” She had both palms on the drawing, pressing it into the blanket. “I was trying to keep it down because I didn’t want to wake up the babies, I couldn’t let them see their dad like that, but I guess I was loud enough that at least I got Pat’s attention. He stopped waving the vase around and grabbed this and stared at it for a while, and then he was like, ‘So?’
“I said, ‘Emma drew that. She drew it in school.’ He was still looking at me like, ‘What’s the big deal?’ I wanted to scream at him. Pat and I don’t have screaming rows, we’re not like that-weren’t. But he was just squatting there looking at me like all this was totally normal, and it made me-I could barely even stand to look at him. I knelt down next to him on the floor, and I said, ‘Pat. Listen to me. You have to listen to me. This stops now. There’s nothing there. There never was anything there. Before the kids wake up tomorrow morning, you fill in every single one of these bloody holes, and I’ll take these bloody monitors down to the beach and I’ll throw them in the sea. And then we’ll forget this whole thing and we’ll never mention it again, ever ever ever.’
“I actually thought I’d got through. Pat put down the vase and he brought his bait hand out of the cupboard, and he leaned over and took hold of my hands, and I thought…” A quick breath that caught Jenny off guard, juddered her whole body. “They just felt so warm, his hands. So strong, just like always, just like they’ve always felt since we were teenagers. He was looking straight at me, properly-he looked like Pat again. For that one second, I thought it was OK. I thought Pat was going to give me a hug, a big long hug, and then we’d find a way to fix the holes together, and then we’d go to bed and sleep wrapped round each other. And someday, when we were old, we’d have a laugh about the whole insane thing. I actually thought that.”
The pain in her voice went so deep that I had to look away in case I saw it open up in front of me, a blackness gaping right down to the core of the earth. Bubbles in the magnolia paint on the wall. Red leaves rattling and scraping at the window.
