It Could Have Been Her(40)

I shrug. “Because I’m nosy.”

She shrugs too, and sidesteps a big puddle, almost stepping off the curb of the narrow pavement and into the road. I pull her back quickly. “Careful!” I say. “God, can you imagine me going back to your mum and telling her that I let you get run over? Jesus.” I press my hand to my heart and feign fear.

She laughs. “I don’t think she’d mind that much,” she says.

I glance at her. “Don’t be silly. Your mum loves you.”

Daisy sighs. “I know she does. But I think her life would go on just the same without me in it. You know. She’d just carry on.”

I find my breath held as these words make contact with my consciousness. As much as she’s a little odd, I have found myself growing very fond of this child, who is, in my opinion, very easy to love. It hurts me that she feels her mother doesn’t care about her. “Wow,” I say. “That’s quite a big thing to say.”

“It is what it is. She is what she is. I think,” she says thoughtfully, “that Mum had a bit of a weird childhood. That’s all.”



* * *



When I get back from dropping Daisy at school, Jessamine has taken herself to bed. I sit on the foot of her bed, next to the steeple in the duvet formed by her bent knees, and I ask her what I can do for her. She asks for mint tea and honey and two Ibuprofen. I slide up the bed and touch her forehead. Her temperature feels normal, she looks fine, but I head downstairs to the kitchen anyway and fetch her the tea and pills.

“Where’s your mum?” I ask as I drop the pills into the upturned palm of her hand.

“She’s gone out.”

“Where?”

“Shopping, I think.”

I nod. “When will she be back?”

“After lunch.”

I smooth her hair away from her brow and tell her that I will leave her to sleep. Then I head downstairs and systematically move through the house looking for something to explain the people who live here.



* * *



I find a photo album in one of the heavy dressers in the living room. It’s old and jacketed in a dark, slubbed linen with a metal spiral spine. I sit down and open it up on my lap.

There, immediately, is the face of a man who I take to be Grandad Allen: a stern-looking man with a dark mustache and a very slim physique. In the first photograph, he has been caught unawares, pruning shears in one gloved hand, a cigarette in the other, a fully blossomed rosebush behind him. He’s wearing a white shirt, unbuttoned to reveal an undershirt, and is looking at the photographer with barely disguised annoyance.

In the picture beneath he is posing in the same garden scene, wearing the same clothes, but this time he is smiling into the lens, his arms folded across his stomach. In the background I can see the blurred figure of a young woman, staring across the garden toward the photographer. I can’t tell who it is. I feel it must be Jessamine, but something doesn’t seem right about the set of the figure’s shoulders or the shape of the face.

On the next page are photos of Jessamine and, I assume, Jasper. They appear to be teenage, or on the cusp of teenage. They sit on stools at the kitchen table and look as though they weren’t expecting to be photographed. Jessamine wears blue trousers and a white T-shirt. Jasper wears a T-shirt with a photograph of a clown on the front, and a pair of jeans. Both children look drawn. There are dark circles around their eyes, and what looks like bruising to the side of Jessamine’s face.

I flip faster and faster through the album, trying to piece things together. There are photos of an elderly lady who wears her white hair in a topknot, and photos of Annie when she was much younger—and very attractive: the looker of the family, it is clear. There are photos of Allen looking stern and vaguely annoyed, and then photos of Jessamine and Jasper when they were older, still looking tired, Jasper appearing increasingly unhinged, his thick hair grown out into an unruly mop, his eyes slightly wild, his face often blurred as if caught in the act of movement. Jessamine is thin and unkempt, while Annie shines at her side in designer clothes and coiffed hair.

Then I turn the page and there is a photo of the older man, the one with the mustache who I take to be Allen. He is wearing a tweed jacket with a packet of cigarettes poking out of the breast pocket. And in his arms is a beautiful gray cat. I stare at the cat, and even though the last time I saw this cat it was an emaciated sack of bones sucked dry of life in a black plastic bag, I know that this is the same one, this is Tina. A terrible bolt of sadness and darkness runs through me.

There’s a dead cat in the shed.

The way Annie had said it, as if it was just any cat. Not their cat. Not a family pet. And here is said cat, alive and well and in the arms of Annie’s husband. There is warmth in the way he holds the cat, visible affection. How long, I wonder, how long had Tina been in that shed? And how aware was Annie of the fact that she was there? I pull the photo out of the album and turn it over. In ballpoint pen on the back it says: “Allen and Bella. 2001.” Bella then, but she will always be Tina to me. And even assuming she was young in this shot and lived until she was twenty, she would have died at least five years ago.

I push the photo back into the album and turn the next page, but the album ends abruptly, a few empty leaves left unfilled. I shut it and put it back in the cabinet.