The safe house

crumbs and bits of litter drifted, as if I would see her little body drifting under the oily water. Then I started to run up the other side of the park. ‘Elsie!’ I called at intervals, ‘Elsie darling, where are you?’ but I never expected a reply and I received none. I started to stop people, a woman with a child about her age, a group of teenagers on skateboards, an elderly couple holding hands.

‘Have you seen a little girl?’ I asked. ‘A little girl in a dark blue coat, with blonde hair? With a woman?’

One man thought he had. He waved his hand vaguely towards the circle of rosebushes behind us. A little boy whose mother I accosted said he’d seen a little girl in blue sitting on the bench, that bench, and he pointed towards the empty seat.

She was nowhere. I shut my eyes and played nightmares in my head: Elsie being dragged along, screaming; Elsie being pushed into a car and driven off; Elsie being hurt; Elsie calling and calling for me. This wasn’t helping. I ran back towards the park gates again, stumbling, my side hurting, fear burning into my stomach like acid. Every so often I called her name, and crowds parted to let me through, a mad woman.

I raced into the cemetery close by Clissold park, because if someone wanted to drag someone off and harm them, this would be the obvious place. Brambles tore at my clothes. I tripped over old gravestones, saw couples, teenagers in groups, no children. I called and I shouted and I knew that this was futile because the place was huge and full of hidden corners, and even if Elsie was here there was no way I would find her.

So I went home, hope that she’d be waiting for me turning my stomach to water. But she wasn’t there. Sophie met me, her face scared and baffled. Two police officers were there also. One of them, a woman, was on the phone. I gasped out what had happened – that it hadn’t been my sister in the park – but they’d already had a fragmentary account from Sophie.

‘It’s my fault,’ she was saying, and I could hear hysteria in her normally undemonstrative voice, ‘it’s all my fault.’

‘No’, I replied wearily, ‘how could you have known?’

‘Elsie seemed so happy to go off with her. I don’t understand. She doesn’t take easily to strangers.’

‘This was no stranger.’

No, I didn’t have a photograph of Elsie. At least not here. And as I embarked on a detailed description of my daughter, the doorbell rang. I ran down the stairs once more, opened the door. Then my eyes slid down from the smiling face of another uniformed policeman to a little girl in a blue coat who was licking the last of an orange ice- lolly. I sank to my knees on the pavement, and for a moment I thought I was going to throw up all over the policeman’s shiny shoes. I put my arms around her body, buried my face into her squashy stomach.

‘Careful of my lolly,’ she said, a note of concern at last.

I stood up and hoisted her into my arms. The policeman grinned at me.

‘A young lady found her wandering around in the park and handed her over to me,’ he said. ‘And this clever little girl remembered her address.’ He chucked Elsie under the chin. ‘Keep a better eye on her next time,’ he said. He looked round at the other two police officers who were coming down the stairs towards us. ‘Little girl wandered off.’ The officers nodded at each other. The woman walked past me and began to say something into her radio, cancelling something. The other raised a weary eyebrow at his colleague. Another mad mother.

‘Well, not exactly…’ I started to say and then gave up. ‘What did she look like, the woman who “found” her?’

The policeman shrugged.

‘Young woman. I said you might want to thank her personally but she said it was nothing.’

With an imitation of effusive thanks, I managed to close the front door and be alone with my daughter.

‘Elsie,’ I said. ‘Who’ve you been with?’

She looked up at me, her mouth smeared orange. ‘You lied,’ she said. ‘She came back to life. I knew she would.’

Thirty-Nine

My film excursion, all that was cancelled. It was just Elsie and me at home once more and I gave her exactly what she wanted. Tinned rice pudding with golden syrup dripped on to it in the shape of a baby horse.

‘It is a horse,’ I insisted. ‘Look, there’s the tail and there are the pointy ears.’

It was an overwhelming effort but I made myself be casual.

‘And how was Finn?’

‘Fine,’ said Elsie heedlessly, otherwise engaged in spiralling the golden-syrup pattern in the rice pudding with her spoon.

‘That looks lovely, Elsie. Are you going to eat some of it? Good. What did you and Finn do?’

‘We saw chickens.’

I manoeuvred Elsie into the bath and I blew bubbles with my fingers.

‘That’s a giant bubble, Mummy.’

‘Shall I try and do an even bigger one? What did you and Finn talk about?’

‘We talked and we talked and we talked.’

‘There’s two little baby bubbles. What did you talk about?’

‘We talked about our house.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Can I sleep in your bed, Mummy?’

I carried her through to my bed and I gratefully felt her warm wetness through my shirt. She told me to take off my clothes and I took them off and we lay beneath the sheets together. I found a brush on the bedside table and we brushed each other’s hair. We sang some songs and I taught her to clip up, the game in which I turned my big fist and she turned her little fist into a stone, some paper or scissors. Stone blunts scissors, scissors cut paper and paper wraps stone. Each time we did it, she waited for me to show what I was going to do and then made her own decision so that she could win and I accused her of cheating and we both laughed. It was an intensely happy time and I had to stop myself at every moment from running out of the room and howling. I might have done it but I couldn’t bear the notion of letting Elsie out of my sight for a moment.

‘When can we see Fing again?’ she asked, out of nowhere.

I couldn’t think what to say.

‘It’s funny that you talked about our house with… with Finn,’ I said. ‘It must be because you played such lovely games there with her.’

‘No,’ said Elsie firmly.

I couldn’t help smiling at her.

‘Why not?’

‘It wasn’t that house, Mummy.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It was our safe house.’

‘How lovely, my darling.’ I held Elsie close against my body.

‘Ow, you’re hurting.’

‘Sorry, my love. And did she put things into the safe house?’

‘Yes,’ said Elsie, who had started to examine my eyebrow. ‘There’s a white hair there.’

I felt a vertiginous nausea as if I were staring into a black chasm.

‘Yes, I know. Funny, isn’t it?’ Without disturbing Elsie, I felt behind me for the pencil and pad of paper that I had seen next to the phone on the bedside table. ‘Shall we go into the safe house?’

‘What colour is your eye?’

‘Ow!’ I howled as an interested finger poked my left eye.

‘Sorry, Mummy.’

‘It’s blue.’