She started to cry and didn’t want Chimpy to hear.
‘Peterborough,’ she says in a more normal tone of voice. ‘Lucky. I’m very lucky.’
Tears have filled my eyes. I can’t blink. They’d spill over and then I’d be officially crying, which would be insane. This woman has been no part of my life for twelve years. Why should I care that something about this phone conversation has upset her?
‘Yes. Tomorrow,’ she says. ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’ I watch as she puts her phone back in her bag. For a few seconds she stands still, looking tired and defeated, relieved that the conversation is over.
She opens the back door of the Range Rover, sticks her head in and says, ‘We’re he-ere!’ The deliberate jolly tone is unconvincing. Then she stands back. Nothing happens.
No surprises there. When the destination they’ve arrived at is their own home, teenagers don’t get out of the car unless nagged extensively. If you’re dropping them at a friend’s house, it’s a different story.
I hear Flora sigh. ‘Thomas! Emily!’ she says in a sing-song voice. ‘Come on, out you get!’
‘Why are you speaking to them like they’re still toddlers?’ I mutter. ‘No wonder they’re ignoring you.’
Even when her kids were little, Flora’s speaking-to-babies-and-children tone annoyed me. Thanks to her, I made sure I always addressed Zannah and Ben as if they were proper people.
Flora stands back as if someone’s about to get out of the car. ‘That’s it!’ she says encouragingly.
Quit it, woman, unless you want them to run off and join a cult. They ought to be able to get out of a car without a pep talk from their mother.
A small, bright blue rucksack tumbles from the car to the ground. I see a leg emerge, then a boy.
A very young boy.
What the hell?
‘Come on, Emily,’ says Flora. ‘Thomas, pick up your bag.’
A little girl rolls out of the car. She picks up the blue bag and hands it to the boy.
‘Oh, well done, Emily,’ says Flora. ‘That’s kind. Say thank you, Thomas.’
This cannot be happening.
I touch the skin of my face with my right hand. Both feel equally cold. All of me feels frozen apart from my heart, which beats in my ears like something trapped in a tunnel.
I lean back in my seat, close my eyes for a few seconds, then open them and look again.
Nothing has changed. The little girl turns and, for a second, looks straight at me.
It’s her. That T-shirt with the fluffy sheep on it … Le petit mouton.
The girl I’m looking at is Emily Braid, except she’s not fifteen, as she should be – as she must be and is, unless the world has stopped making sense altogether.
This is the Emily Braid I knew twelve years ago, when she was three years old. And Thomas … I can’t see all of his face, but I can see enough to know that he’s still five years old, as he was when I last saw him in 2007.
I have to get out of here. I can’t look any more. Everything is wrong.
My fingers fumble for the car keys. I press them hard, then realise I’m pressing the wrong thing. It’s the button on the dashboard, not the keys. I’m waiting for the engine to start and it won’t because I’m not doing it right, because all I can think about is Thomas and Emily Braid.
Why are they – how can they be – still three and five? Why are they no older than they were twelve years ago?
Why haven’t they grown?
2
Several hours later, walking back through my front door and closing it against the world feels like an achievement.
I made it. Me and Ben, safely home. How I was able to concentrate on driving properly, I’ve no idea. I probably shouldn’t have risked it.
I lean against the wall in the hall, shut my eyes and let the sound of Ben telling Dominic about the match wash over me. His voice broke a few months ago, and we’re still getting used to this new deeper one. His music teacher described him as a ‘bass’ the other day, and it gave me a strange, dislocated feeling. My sweet little boy, a bass – the lowest and most booming kind of male voice there is. How did that happen?
How do I tell Dominic, or anyone, what I saw on Wyddial Lane?
I want to be in the lounge, in a comfortable chair with my feet up, so that I can think about what to do. This seems an impossible goal. I can’t imagine getting to that chair, even though the lounge is only a few feet away. Nothing makes sense any more, so I might as well stay here in the hall, looking at the clumps of mud from Ben’s football boots that I’m going to need to pick up at some point.
Where was Georgina Braid? Why wasn’t she in the car with her brother and sister? The last thing I saw before I drove away was Flora aiming her remote-control fob at the car to lock it, and then at the gates of her property, which started to glide shut. Maybe Georgina was inside the car and hadn’t climbed out yet.
She wouldn’t have been able to climb. She’s only a few months old. Flora would have lifted her out in her car seat and …
I push the thought away, appalled by it. How can I, an intelligent adult woman, be thinking this? Georgina Braid was a few months old twelve years ago. She’s twelve now. Thomas is seventeen and Emily fifteen. These are facts, not something to speculate about. There is no other possible outcome, for someone who was five in 2007, apart from to be seventeen now, in 2019.
Unless they’re dead.
That’s not a thought I want in my head either. Thomas, Emily and Georgina Braid are not dead. Why would they be? Two of them can’t be, because …
Because you’ve just seen them? Aged five and three, which we’ve established is impossible? I didn’t imagine what I saw. That’s impossible too.
Ignoring the mud and the discarded football boots, I walk into the lounge and sit down, like someone waiting for something momentous to happen.
There’s a clattering of footsteps on the stairs, followed by Zan’s voice: ‘You need to stop blanking Lauren, like, right now.’
‘Blanking? What does that mean?’
‘You’ll never understand, Dad, so don’t make me explain.’
‘I’m not blanking her,’ Ben says. ‘I’m just not replying to her.’
‘Yeah, and she’s been spamming me all morning about it – so please deal with her, so I don’t have to.’
The lounge door bangs open, hitting the wall. Zannah walks in wearing a black vest top and turquoise pyjama bottoms with white spots. There’s a lilac-coloured towel wrapped around her head and a grainy-textured green substance all over her face. ‘Mum, can you make him sort Lauren out?’ She squints at me. ‘What’s up with you? You look weird.’
Great: she’s picked today to notice that I’m someone whose behaviour might mean something. She stares at me, waiting for a response. In the hall, Dominic is saying that Gary, Ben’s football coach, must regret taking Ben off at half-time, because the other team scored their two goals within seconds of Ben being replaced by an inferior defender. This irritates me in a way it wouldn’t normally. Dom wasn’t there. How does he know? From my brief exchange with Gary at the end of the game, he didn’t strike me as a man racked with regret.