She walked upstairs ahead of Gavin, to her ex-front door. He reached around her to put the key in the lock; his body touched hers, his forearm brushed her upper arm.
“Sorry,” she said. She inched aside, shrinking herself, folding her arms across her chest.
“No, my fault,” he said.
She held her breath as she stepped in. Would Zoe, like Alison, be one of those people who fills up the rooms with her scent, a person who is present even when she’s absent, who sprays the sheets with rose or lavender water and who burns expensive oils in every room? She stood, inhaling. But the air was lifeless, a little stale. If it hadn’t been such a wet morning, she would have hurried to open all the windows.
She put her bag down and turned to Gavin, questioning.
“Didn’t I say? She’s away.”
“Oh. On a shoot?”
“Shoot?” Gavin said, “What do you mean?”
“I thought she was a model?”
“Oh, yes. That. I thought you meant like on safari.”
“So is she?”
“Could be,” Gavin said, nodding judiciously.
She noticed that he had placed his car magazines on a low table in a very tidy pile. Other than that, there was very little change from the room she remembered. I’d have thought he’d have redecorated, in all these years, she said to herself. I’d have thought she’d have wanted to put her stamp on it. I’d have thought she’d throw all my stuff out—everything I chose—and do a make-over. Tears pricked her eyes. It would have made her feel lonely, rejected, if she’d come back and found it all changed, but that fact that it was all the same made her feel somehow … futile.
“I suppose you’ll want the bathroom, Gav,” she said. “You’ll have to get off to work.”
“Oh no. I can work from home today. Make sure you’re all right. We can go out for a bite of lunch if you feel up to it later. We could go for a walk in the park.”
Her face was astonished. “A what, Gavin? Did you say a walk in the park?”
“I’ve forgotten what you like,” he said, shuffling his feet.
In the corner of Colette’s room, where the air is turbulent and thickening, there arises a little pink felt lady whom Al has not seen since she was a child.
“Ah, who called me back?” says Mrs. McGibbet.
And she says, “I did, Alison. I need your help.”
Mrs. McGibbet shifts on the floor, as if uncomfortable.
“Are you still looking for your boy Brendan? If you help me, I’ll swear I’ll find him for you.”
A tear creeps out of Mrs. McGibbet’s eye, and makes its way slowly down her parchment cheek. And immediately a little toy car materializes by her left foot. Alison doesn’t trust herself to pick it up, to handle it. She doesn’t like apports. Start on that business, and you’ll find some joker trying to force a grand piano through from the other side, pulling and tugging at the curve of space__time, wiping his boots on your carpet and crying, “Whew! Blimey! Left hand down a bit, steady how she goes!” As a child, of course, she had played with Brendan’s toys. But in those days she didn’t know how one thing led to another.
“I don’t know how many doors I’ve knocked on,” says Mrs. McGibbet. “I’ve tramped the streets. I’ve visited the door of every psychic and Sensitive from here to Aberdeen, and attended their churches though my priest told me I must not. And never a sighting of Brendan since the circus fellas put him in a box. He says, ‘Mam, it is the dream of every boy to join the circus, for hasn’t my sister Gloria a costume with spangles? And such a thing was never seen in these parts.’ And that was true. And I didn’t care to spell out to him the true nature of her employment. So he was taken on as box boy.”
“They put him in a box?”
“And fastened round the chain. And box boy will burst out, they said. A roll on the drums. The audience agog. The breath bated. The box rocking. And then nothing. It ceases to rock. The man MacArthur comes with his boot, oi, box boy!”
“Was MacArthur in the circus?”
“There wasn’t a thing that MacArthur wasn’t in. He was in the army. He was in the jail. He was in the horse game, and the fight game, and the box game. And he comes with his boot and kicks the side of the box. But poor Brendan, he makes not a murmur; and the box, not an inch does it shift. And a deadly silence falls. So then they look at each other, at a loss. Says Aitkenside, Morris, have you ever had this happen before? Says Keith Capstick, we’d better open it up, me old china. Morris Warren protests at the likely damage to his special box, but they come with a lever and a bar. They pull out the nails with pliers and they prize off the lid. But when they open it up, my poor son Brendan is gone.”
“That’s a terrible story, Mrs. McGibbet. Didn’t they get the police?”
“The police? Them? They’d be laughed out of the place. The police are the king of boxes. It is well known in every nation that people who trouble them disappear.”
“That’s true,” Alison said. “You’ve only to watch the news.”
“I would help you out,” the little lady said, “with your memorizing and all, but I’m sure the topic of MacArthur’s eye is not a topic for decent people. I’m sure I wasn’t looking, though I do recall the man MacArthur lying drunk as a lord on your mammy’s couch, for though I might have shifted his head to see if Brendan was under the cushion, if he then fell back into his stupor I barely recall. And if the man they call Capstick was incapable too, lying with his head under the table, I’m sure I was too busy to notice. I can’t recall at all you stooping over them vermin and patting their pockets, hoping for a shilling to roll out, for I wouldn’t know where the minimart was or what sort of sweeties you were fond of spending on. Now one or the other might have roared ‘bleeding thief,’ but then it could have been ‘bleeding Keith’ for I can’t claim I was paying attention—and you wouldn’t mention to them, would you, that it was me, McGibbet, that told you nothing at all about it, for I’m in mortal fear of those fiends? I’m sure I wasn’t seeing a little girl with a pair of scissors in her hand, snipping about a man’s private parts. I’m sure I was too busy about my own business to notice whether that was a fork you were carrying, or that was a knife, and whether you had a spoon in your pocket, or whether your mouth was bristling with pins. I’m sure I wouldn’t have known if you were carrying a knitting needle, for there were several on the premises, but I’m sure I was too busy seeking my boy Brendan to know whether you had opened the drawer and took one out. And I wouldn’t say I saw you go down the garden to feed the dogs, neither. If I hadn’t been peeping under the furniture as was my habit, I might have seen a smile on your face and a bowl in your hand, and a trickle of blood running down each arm. But your age I couldn’t swear to, it was no more than eight years, nine or ten. And I never saw the fella called Capstick run out and collapse on the ground at the side of the house, shouting
I paid him, Alison thought. At least one of the bastards is paid out. Or did I pay out two? “Mrs. McGibbet,” she urged, “go on.”
“I’m sure,” said Mrs. McGibbet, “I never heard the moment Morris Warren ceased to laugh. I never looked in the dogs’ bowls, curious to see what they were eating, for if you came near them they’d bite your leg off. And therefore I couldn’t have noticed MacArthur’s eye plop off a spoon and fall into a dish—surely I must have dreamed it, for such a thing could never be. And if your little self, no more than eight, nine, ten years old, were to have cried out, ‘Now wink at me, can you, you bloody bastard?’ I wouldn’t have known it because I was searching down
