She stood and led him upstairs and made him undress. She folded back the duvet and he lay, corrupt and sweating, in the clean bed. He left on his boxer shorts; he could smell his genitals. He cupped his throbbing testicles and slipped into a feverish sleep. The testicle ache spread to his lower back, like a bruise across his kidneys.
Elise's spectre lay a cool hand upon his forehead and he woke with a shout to see it was only Holly, his wife. She put a thermometer into the corner of his mouth. It was the instrument she'd once used to time her ovulation. She waited, then she removed it and held it to the hallway light.
'You're burning up.'
He reached out and held her hand by the fingertips.
She said, 'You sleep. I'll drive down to the chemist and get something for the fever.'
He sat up. Grabbed her wrist.
'Don't.'
'You need to get that fever down. I'll be back in twenty minutes.'
'Please don't go.'
She looked at him - backlit, the thermometer held high in one hand.
He said, 'Don't leave me alone in the house.'
Slowly, she lowered the thermometer.
'You're scared of the dark, aren't you?'
'Yes.'
She sat on the edge of the bed, holding his hand.
'You never talk about it.'
'Would you?'
'Did you think I'd laugh?'
'Yes.'
She laughed.
'You see,' he said.
She leaned in a little closer. 'What happened, to make you so scared ?'
He turned away on his side.
'Nothing.'
He could feel her, looking at him.
She said, 'Shall I turn on the light?'
'Please. And leave the door open.'
She kissed his forehead and turned on the reading light. She left the bedroom door ajar. He heard her, descending the stairs; picking up the telephone and taking it through to the front room. She'd be calling her mother, seeking advice on how to treat a man who never fell ill, who wouldn't let her leave the house to get medicine.
He woke to a cool flannel on his forehead.
Holly pressed a mug into his hand; Lemsip Cold Flu.
He said, 'Where did you get these?'
'Shhh,' said Holly.
He began to panic. 'Did you leave the house?'
Then he saw June, framed in the doorway. She'd driven to a twenty-four-hour chemist in the town centre. Nathan looked at her.
Then he looked at Holly. She brushed back his sweating hair.
'Get better, now.'
Later, the sound of the front door closing: June going home. He imagined her at the wheel, a bubble of light in the darkness, hurtling past the earth where her daughter lay.
25
In the morning, Holly woke him with another Lemsip and a kiss goodbye.
He drank the Lemsip, then pulled on a tracksuit and thick socks and his dressing gown, and limped to the office.
Holly's workstation was a chrome and glass table: a Compaq desktop, replaced every couple of years; a filing cabinet, a cheap plastic desktidy, stacked in-and out-trays, a desk diary, a mobile phone charger. Nathan kept a smaller workstation in there - a corner desk, a laptop, not much else.
He logged on and skim-read his work emails. Later, he would answer the more important of them, because he wanted his bosses and colleagues to consider him a martyr and a workaholic. Then he logged on to the Internet and ran a search on the proposed Cabot Green estate.
There were dozens of hits - Cabot Green had been a local interest story for years now. According to the published minutes of the Sutton Down Action Group, Graham and June Fox had declined an invitation to act as group secretaries. (Probably they'd have thought it hypocritical to accept, given Holly's chosen career.) Holly must know about this proposed development - all the local developers seemed to know and enjoy gossiping about each other. She might even have mentioned it, over dinner or breakfast: Nathan had probably acknowledged her and immediately forgotten all about it, having little real interest in the matter - no more interest, say, than Holly had in the wholesale of greetings cards.
The final appeals had failed. Planning permission had been granted. Building work was due to commence.
Nathan navigated to the development company's website and found his way to a map of the proposed Cabot Green estate.
It took some time to make sense of the plans, but not as long as it might have -- Holly often discussed similar proposals with him, and he'd learned how to read them.
Whoever now owned Mark Derbyshire's estate had sold off a good portion of it -- including the woods that ran to the main road. On the map, Nathan was easily able to find and identify the lane. It was simply marked, given no name. He was able to trace the wiggling brook beside which they had laid her.
Superimposed on this map in dotted, coloured lines was the ghost of the housing estate to come. Around the brook, there was to be a modern playground with climbing frames and, across a small bridge, a picnic area. Nathan knew that such facilities were often designed into new estates' proposals -- and were often dropped at the last minute, as a cost-saving exercise; such projects always ran above budget. But factoring in designated recreation sites helped get the project past the protesters. It helped foster the illusion that a new community was being designed from the ground up.
He could see written into the plans that Elise would be found. She would be disinterred by a mechanical digger, or by some boys who'd scrambled over the chain-link fence, drawn to the unexplored moonscape behind it, or she would be sniffed out by badgers or foxes or a domestic dog tempted by the thick, sweet smell of old carrion.
He cleared his Internet history, as if he'd been viewing pornography, then accessed his work emails. He answered several of them on corporate autopilot: they seemed to address problems that had arisen decades ago, and did not greatly interest him. Then he logged off and went back to bed. He couldn't sleep. He dragged the duvet downstairs and, wrapped in it, watched daytime television.
As a student and as a doley, he'd watched and thoroughly enjoyed daytime TV -- but now the charm seemed to have gone from it. He watched tawdry, depressing quizzes, a sordid freak show disguised as a discussion programme, cookery programmes, yet more quizzes, and a comfortingly soporific programme about watercolours. He made beans on toast. He hadn't eaten beans on toast for a long time.
He called Bob at 5 p.m. -- two hours before Holly was due back.
Bob said, 'How have you been? I've been worried.'
'I've been ill.'
'Stress, I expect.'
'Yes.'
'So. Anyway.'
'So anyway. Let's do it.'
'When?'
