What was happening over there now?
Cold to hot, her mobile slipped with sweat. She knew PC Yorke worked nights on Mondays. If she talked to him, she could talk to him off the record, as a friend, describe what she had seen: her suspicions, her doubts. Did ‘off the record’ exist in a policeman’s life? Were local policemen ever allowed to make their own judgment calls? He was part of a chain of command. He would lose his job if anything happened to the girl. Then again, if she told PC Yorke, she would be passing the responsibility over. It was an appealing thought.
But what would she tell him? What had she actually seen next door? Her heartbeat escalated. What had she seen? She had seen guilt in Gemma’s eyes. She had seen fear in Rosie’s.
She sipped her tea and listened out, as though her hearing could hone in on Rosie’s bedroom. Dead silence. Deadened perhaps.
She felt a draft down the back of her neck from the open window. Then a numbing sense of cold engulfed her. A dress-strap fell from her shoulder. But when she touched her arm to pull it up, she realised she was still wearing the fleece she had put on earlier this evening. She was disoriented, fearful. Her mind was playing tricks on her, dragging her somewhere she didn’t want to go, like the tides sucking at a pebble on the shoreline. The tides. The beach. What was her memory trying to retrieve? She wanted to push whatever it was back down, but she was unable to. A vivid recollection came to her of a thud against her bare right shoulder. A hot circle of pain. Another stone hit her lower back. Doubled over in agony. Her knees grazed by the sand, the tiny brown flowers of her dress flattened wet against them. The blur of the flowers through her tears.
She remembered covering her head with her arms, waiting for another attack.
‘Get up! Your dress’ll be wet for the party!’ her mother had screeched. ‘You stupid girl,’ she had cried, pulling her to standing by a strand of hair. ‘You stupid, stupid little girl!’ Her mother’s words echoed through the wind, around her head in gusts as she was dragged back over the dunes. Stumbling and tripping, she saw the Natterjack toads leaping away from her feet, scared away, free to escape. Her sister was scampering ahead, knowing she had got away with it.
Mira stood gasping at the open window of her kitchen, drinking in the fresh air, as though she had just experienced a surge of pain that was now subsiding.
It was still now. Blissfully silent.
She was too tired to make the call to PC Yorke tonight.
Her phone lay redundant on the kitchen table as she climbed the stairs up to bed. Her head lolled forward, the effort to raise it was too much for her.
The light was still on in the bedroom. Barry’s detective novel was propped in his hands. His eyes were closed. She slipped under the covers next to him.
‘Did I fall asleep?’ he said, suddenly sitting bolt upright. ‘I hadn’t meant to fall asleep! What happened?’
‘Don’t worry, everything’s fine. Nothing to worry about. Go back to sleep.’
He rubbed his eyes, but left his glasses on the side table. ‘Did you ask them what was wrong with the girl?’
‘Yes, yes, nothing to worry about,’ she repeated. ‘She hurt her arm in the door.’
‘Oh phew. I was worried about you,’ he said, before crashing down again. ‘Come in for a cuddle.’
She lay blinking in the dark for hours, feeling his chest move up and down against her back, comforted by his ability to sleep deeply.
* * *
The next morning she found a Post-it note stuck to the kettle:
Early start at Brook House. Talk later at bath-time. Barry x.
She was restive, tense about last night, and she felt desperately disappointed that he wasn’t there to talk to.
On the tin of teabags, she found another post-it note:
Love you, Mira Meerkat.
She smiled. It was the nickname the children in Year Two had given to her. On the first Forest School Tuesday of the winter term, she and the Forest Team Leader and fifteen seven-year-olds had sat on wood stools around the fire to choose forest names for each other. Little Oscar became Oscar Ostrich, and Bella was Bella Badger. When it was Mira’s turn, she had worried they would choose Mira Moose, which she would not have been able to laugh about. The very thought of the nickname gave her a twinge of her old self.
‘You old softie, Bazzer,’ she said out loud, tucking the Post-it into her skirt pocket. ‘Now, let’s get that egg on,’ she added.
Barry would snigger at her when he caught her talking to herself. He said she sounded completely bonkers.
When she saw her phone lying on the table where she had left it last night, she wondered if maybe she was. Gemma Bradley had come across as a charming, affable woman, albeit a little neurotic. Perhaps Rosie was simply a spoilt brat who made her mother’s life a misery. Who was Mira to judge? She remembered how she had left their house. How rude she had been, flying out without a proper goodbye. What would Peter have made of her? With a shiver, she realised she must have looked like a loony, and not just in the quaint way Barry viewed her.
As she sat dipping her toast into her egg, dip, dip, dip, thinking more than eating, she heard children’s voices next door. She charged up the stairs, knelt on the toilet seat and pushed open the window, just a crack, to see down into the Bradleys’ back garden.
Peter Bradley was crouching at Rosie’s feet, straightening her tie. She was sulking. He kissed her nose. Her smile was almost there, but not quite. Her cheeks looked tear-stained, unless they were the shadows from the apple tree. The little boy – Noah, she remembered he was called – struggled to put his rucksack on his back. Peter stood by the door in his suit, sipping his cup of coffee as he watched his children walk across the lawn to school.
Noah sped ahead, leaving Rosie slouching behind.
With a horrible start, Mira noticed Rosie was cradling one arm in the other. All the feelings of last night came rushing back. The lightness of Rosie’s arm. The fear on the child’s face. Somewhere inside her, she recognised this fear.
If she didn’t do something about this, she would never forgive herself.
She ran downstairs, checking her watch, knowing she would be late for work if she made the call, knowing she had to make the call.
Her flesh trembled as she scrolled down.
The police station telephone rang and rang. Come on, pick-up. Pick-up! If she didn’t do it now, she might lose her nerve. Barry would persuade her out of it. He might not understand what it was like to have a gut feeling about something, to feel with such certainty that something wasn’t right. If she waited around for conclusive evidence, it might be too late.
She kneaded her fingers into her thigh, through the cotton of her skirt. Another memory was rolling up through her like nausea. She looked down at her knees. She saw small, wet prints. She saw salt water marks. She saw little brown flowers.
Then she remembered standing in the bathroom of the house she grew up in, at the plastic pink sink with the mirrored cabinet above it. The soap was too thin and it broke in two. She had rubbed it into the brown flowers of her dress until the salt marks had dissolved away. Her sister, Deirdre, had banged on the door. Mira had scrubbed until the skin on her fingers was sore. The dress was limp and sodden on the hanger, like a sad, deflated version of herself. She had run out of the bathroom, ignoring Deirdre’s taunts, downstairs to the airing cupboard, where she had draped the dress carefully over the padded red cover of the boiler. It would be dry in time for the party and her mother wouldn’t be angry with her.
Forty-five minutes later, she had opened the airing cupboard, ready to slip the warmed material on over her pants, only to find that it had fallen down into its own puddle on the floor. It was as wet as it had been in the sink.