Carla heard Daniel; he was crying too. “Leave her alone! Uncle Theo! Please! Leave her alone!”
* * *
? ? ?
They came downstairs, Angela and Daniel, holding hands. Angela tried to embrace her sister, but Carla would not have it; she turned away, she hunched her shoulders and crouched down and curled herself into a ball, like an animal protecting itself from a predator.
When they were gone and the front door was closed, Theo’s mother turned to Carla and said, “Why didn’t you let him come to me? I would have looked after him.” Carla got to her feet, she balled her hands into fists, she walked through the kitchen into the back garden, where her son’s tricycle lay on its side in the middle of the lawn, and she started to scream.
Carla and Theo blamed themselves and each other endlessly; every sentence began with an if.
If you hadn’t gone to the conference
If you hadn’t insisted on coming
If you hadn’t been so worried about perceptions
If we had taken him to my parents
Their hearts were broken, shattered forever, and no amount of love, no matter how deep, how fierce, would be enough to mend them.
EIGHT
Twenty-three hours after they’d picked her up, the police told Laura she could go home. It was Egg who delivered the news. “We’ll likely need to speak to you again, Laura,” he said, “so don’t go anywhere.”
“Oh yeah, no problem, I’ll cancel that trip to Disney World I had planned, don’t you worry,” Laura replied.
Egg nodded. “You do that,” he said, and he smiled his sad smile at her, the one that told her something bad was coming.
It was after ten when she walked out of the station into a cold and steady drizzle. She caught the bus on Gray’s Inn Road, collapsing, exhausted, onto the only spare seat on the downstairs deck. The woman next to her, broad-beamed and smartly dressed, wrinkled her nose, shifting herself closer to the window in an attempt to minimize contact with this damp and smelly new arrival. Laura tilted her head back against the seat, closing her eyes. The woman sucked her teeth. Laura ignored her, turning her face away. The woman sighed. Laura felt her jaw tense and her fists tighten. Count to ten, her father used to say, so she tried, one two three one two three one two three—she couldn’t get past three, couldn’t get anywhere at all, and the woman sighed again, shifting her fat arse around, and Laura wanted to scream at her, It’s not my fault it’s not my fault it’s not my fucking fault.
She got to her feet. “I know,” she snapped, eyeballing her neighbor, “I stink. I know I do. I’ve been in a police station for twenty-four hours and before that I was doing my grocery shopping and before that I had an eight-hour shift at work so I haven’t had a shower in, like, two days. Not my fault. But you know what? In half an hour I’ll be smelling of roses and you’ll still be a huge fat cow, won’t you?”
Laura turned away and got off the bus three stops early. All the way home she couldn’t stop seeing the woman’s hurt expression, her face crimson with embarrassment, and she had to bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself from crying.
The lift was still out of order. She dragged herself up seven flights, fighting tears all the way: tired, her leg aching, the cut on her arm throbbing, starving. She’d been given food at the station, but in her anxiety hadn’t been able to swallow a mouthful. She was ravenous, her head light with hunger as she slipped her spare key into the lock, jiggled it about, coaxed the door open. The kitchen looked as though it had been ransacked—had been ransacked, she supposed, by the police—the drawers and cupboards open, pots and plates strewn about. Among them lay the ruined food she’d bought from the supermarket with the last of her money.
She turned her back on it all. Turned off the lights and went to her room without showering or brushing her teeth. She crawled into bed, sobbing quietly, trying to soothe herself by stroking the nape of her neck, the way her father used to do to ease her to sleep when she was troubled, or in pain.
* * *
She’d had plenty of it, trouble and pain. Her early childhood, lived out in grimy south London, was uneventful. So uneventful, she remembered almost nothing of it except for an oddly sepia-toned mental image of a terraced house on a narrow street, the sensation of dry, scratchy lawn beneath her feet in summer. Her memory seemed only to bloom into full color from around the age of nine, which was when she and her parents moved to a little village in Sussex. Where all the trouble started.
Not that there was anything wrong with the village. Laura liked the village; it was quaint and pretty, with stone cottages and cricket on the village green, polite neighbors with blond children and Labradoodles. Laura’s mother, Janine, declared it stultifying, which was a bad thing, apparently. Laura liked it. She liked the village school, where there were only fifteen people in her class, where the teachers declared her a very advanced reader. She liked riding her bike, completely unsupervised, along narrow country lanes, in search of blackberries.