Up her legs now. Wonder why she’s got no clothes on. Maybe she had a shower. I can see her privates, but I look away. Not supposed to look at those bits or touch them. Not to touch my own privates – last time I got caught doing that, she took a slipper to my bum, and it was sore for days. But Miss says that detail is key, so I half shut my eyes and hope it’ll be all right and shade in the hair that’s there before moving quickly to her hands. The fingernails are all chipped and bloody – the same nail varnish as is on her feet is all chipped too. I draw the blood and move on up her body, past her titties – again I don’t look. Not going to get into trouble for that. Focussing on her face now, I take another nibble of my biscuit. She’s looking at me, a tear rolling down her cheek, and I wonder why she did this if it makes her so upset.
The front door opens, and Granny comes in. She’s shouting, ‘Bye, Bye’ to the neighbour – old bitch that Mrs Simmons. Always moaning about something. I drop the rest of my biscuit and watch as it falls to the floor under her feet, crumbs all around it. Don’t want to get in trouble for not eating it at lunchtime. She’ll say, ‘It’ll spoil your dinner.’ It won’t though. It’s mince and tatties for dinner, and I love mince and tatties. Nothing will spoil that.
She’s yelling for me now, but it’s all muffly because the door at the bottom of the stairs is shut. ‘What are you doing up there? Where’s your mum?’
‘We’re up here, Granny, upstairs.’
She opens the door and starts to climb up. Then, she stumbles, she says, ‘Oh my God.’
I poke my head round the corner. Granny never says God like that. It’s taking his name in vain. ‘What’s wrong, Granny?’
But she’s staring at Mum, hanging behind me, the rope stretched from a hook in the ceiling. Granny’s face has gone all weird and white. Her fingers cover her mouth and I want to get my sketchbook out. I want to do what Miss says and draw what I see, but I know that would be wrong. I don’t know how I know it would be wrong, I just do.
Granny’s eyes move to me and she swallows hard, then waves her hands at me. ‘Come down the stairs. Come down at once and don’t touch a thing. Nothing, you hear me?’
I duck back to grab my sketchbook and crayons, but she’s yelling now. ‘Right now. Come down right this minute.’
I grab my things. No matter what she says, I’m not leaving them up there, not with that stink. I dodge past my mum, but my shoulder catches her foot and she swings round. Tears are pouring down Granny’s face now and she collapses onto the bottom step. When I reach her, she pulls me into her lap and hugs me too tight. Instead of the awful stink, I smell lavender. She always smells like lavender, does Granny – Granny and Mummy smell exactly the same.
I look over her shoulder back up the stairs and as I look, I swear I see a flicker, like a candle, in Mummy’s eyes. It’s only there for a moment, and then it goes. Like it’s been snuffed out and she just hangs there swinging a little from the rope, her neck all scratched and horrid, her tongue bulgy and yucky. I wonder how she ever managed to keep it in her mouth. If my tongue was that size, I wouldn’t be able to speak, or breathe, or eat.
At last, Granny lets me go. She stands me on the floor, and I wait till she hefts herself to her feet. She doesn’t look at Mummy again, but I can’t take my eyes off her swinging body. I’ve got to remember what she looks like so I can finish my drawing later. Her fingers pinching into my shoulders, Granny turns me round and guides me back out of the house.
I sit in the front garden and do my drawing and before long there’re all sorts of sirens and people moving about in my house, so I turn the page and start to draw them instead.
Chapter 1
Now
Bradford
‘We’ve got to tell him, Corrine. You know we have to. Especially after everything that happened last year. He hates being kept in the dark and we both know why that is, don’t we?’
Corrine’s lips tightened. Fergus was well aware that Corrine worked very hard to accept the fact that their daughter Katie’s partner, Gabriella, was Angus’s ex-wife, but sometimes, even for Corrinne, it was hard to leave that in the past.
Shaking her head as if to dislodge the memory, Corrine exhaled. She was adamant. Her lips tightened and with hands cinching her waist in the combative pose that Fergus recognised so well. ‘No, Fergus, not now. We don’t have to tell him now. Let him have some peace of mind, even if it’s just for another few weeks. There’s a lot going on for him at the moment, what with Gabriella and Katie…’
Her voice trailed off and a furrow spread across her brow. ‘Who knows how he’s going to react to all that when the time comes?’
Fergus McGuire sighed. It wasn’t often he disagreed with his wife, but more and more often, when they did, the disagreements were about their son Angus. He understood Corrine being protective of the boy. Hell, he was protective of him too, and there was no denying Angus had gone through hell a few years earlier. In the dark of night, Fergus still sometimes wakened with a start, his heart hammering and the image of his blood-soaked son, barely clinging to life, being rushed past him in the corridors of Bradford Royal Infirmary. No father wanted to go through the
