‘This garden is a death trap,’ said Nina. ‘I’m minded to report you to the council.’
‘It’s private property,’ said Amy, feeling defensiveness mix with her shock and grief. ‘Your children were trespassing.’
‘We’re not her children,’ said Charles.
‘Ice cream pleeease,’ demanded Daniel.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said Nina. She turned around and squeezed herself back through the fence. They all heard her slam the back door shut behind her.
‘I kicked my ball over the fence by accident,’ explained Charles. ‘I was looking for it in the brambles. Daniel followed me. He was playing with the cat.’
‘No harm done,’ said Richard, with an apologetic look. ‘Sorry about your pot, Amy.’ Amy looked up. ‘I’ll get that fence mended too,’ he added. He glanced around, taking in her garden. ‘I can see that this space isn’t really designed for little monsters.’ Richard went over to the fence and encouraged both children through. He followed them.
Amy sank to the ground. In spite of the shock, she was determined to use what little daylight there was left to find the pieces of the pot. If she found them all, perhaps she’d be able to repair it. Already she’d gathered about eight pieces, but she was sure it amounted to less than half of what she needed. She squeezed the largest piece in her hand, feeling the shard digging into her palms, then she set it down and balanced the others inside it as she used her whole hand flat on the ground, feeling for more fragments.
Then she stopped. Something was glinting at her in the last of the summer evening’s sun.
She pushed an ivy leaf aside and reached out to pick up the object. It was a ring. A pale blue aquamarine was set in the centre, framed by two tiny diamonds.
Beautiful.
And familiar.
‘Damn it,’ said Amy as a heavy recipe book landed on her big toe and sent little waves of pain all the way up her leg. She glanced down at the book. The Joy of Slow Cookers. She’d never even used it, but she had a couple of slow cookers too, somewhere, probably still in their boxes. She rarely even fast cooked. She decided to get rid of the book, and the cookers too, if she could find them. She looked for a place to start a rubbish pile, but there wasn’t an inch of space in the spare room. Later, she told herself, and kicked the book out of the way.
Except there was no ‘out of the way’. She could barely even get into the room. Amy felt she’d been pretty disciplined in the rest of the house. There were walkways to help her reach the key areas of most rooms: doors, windows, vital furniture. She had a bed she could sleep on, most of the sofa to sit on, enough kitchen to grab food and make tea, and she could almost always get to the toilet.
The spare bedroom was different: it was where it all started. Amy had decided long ago not to beat herself up about it. People kept stuff they didn’t often use in spare rooms. Everyone did.
At first, she’d just had a shoebox. It had been the counsellor’s idea, a memory box to help her accept what had happened. And it had helped. She stopped hassling Tim’s friends and Chantel’s mother for news, stopped writing down everything they said to her in her diary in an attempt to make sense of what had happened. In fact, she cut them off entirely. People were not what she needed; they could always leave. Instead she’d collected her memories and put them neatly into a box.
The shoebox had grown too small, or perhaps her memories were too big. She stopped seeing the counsellor and instead found a large box that had once carried oranges to the supermarket. She filled it; it felt good. Even now, just the smell of an orange made her think of him.
She picked up more boxes, ones that had transported bananas from Peru, mangos from Pakistan and carrots from Shropshire. Once she’d filled these, she gave up using boxes and started piling her treasures on the bed. No one was sleeping there as, of course, Chantel was gone too.
Now, facing a wall of stuff, Amy found herself regretting her decisions. Why couldn’t she at least have kept the original box somewhere accessible? She looked at the objects, piled up. She caught the eye of a china magpie, staring at her accusingly from between two bottles and a broken clock. Spines of more cookbooks mocked her. She hadn’t made a single crumb from 101 Breads and Batters, nor experienced The Taste of India. The saucepans she’d need were probably at the back of that room somewhere, underneath more newspapers spanning the last decade.
She would get rid of it all, she decided, immediately feeling better. Anything she didn’t need would go in the rubbish. She’d find the box in no time. Amy grabbed the china magpie, and felt its cold vulnerability in her hands. She’d keep just this one thing. She reached for a cookbook but made the mistake of glancing at the title. Pie Night. She had to keep that one: she did love pies. A wooden spoon caught her eye. It would be wasteful to throw that away. But she could put it down in the kitchen. That would help.
Amy carefully made her way down the stairs, holding her spoon. Perhaps she didn’t have too much stuff, she decided. It just needed to be better organised. Redistributed throughout the house. She popped the spoon on the kitchen counter and trotted back up the stairs. She’d find that box in no time.
*
Amy sat on the floor, just inside
