Accidents Happen A Novel

CHAPTER SIX



It was Monday morning, a school day. Normally, Jack would be tucked up under the duvet, buried in the deep hormonal slumber of a pre-teenager.

But things weren’t normal. For an hour now, he had lain awake, ignoring the growing pressure in his bladder.

He rolled over to face the wall and picked at the Blu-tack behind his Arsenal poster. Rows of red-shirted players stood shoulder to shoulder, the goalkeepers in yellow perched above them. Thoughtfully, he stretched his feet towards the bottom of the bed, pushing his arms in the other direction. Nana had said he was ‘about the same’ height as Dad when he was ten and three-quarters, but that wasn’t strictly true. On the back of the airing cupboard door at her house, he’d discovered the names ‘Hugo’ and ‘Saskia’ written against little black marks measured in inches that climbed up the door like a ladder. He had run his finger along a faded date in 1984 to his father’s name. Dad had already been three inches taller.

Jack rested a hand on his stomach. The warmth helped with the cramps.

His eyes drifted to the old fitted wardrobe beside the fireplace. The doors were still firmly closed, as he had left it last night. His electric guitar was still propped up against it to hold the doors in place, now that the metal catch had stopped working properly. The bright red instrument leaned a little to the left, like a drunken sentry. ‘What would his friends say about him being scared of sinister men in his wardrobe?’ he’d heard Nana say last night through the stripped floorboards, as he’d lain flat, wondering why she was talking in a strange voice. As if he was ever going to tell Gabe and Damon that?

His stomach cramped extra hard.

He reached up and took down the little snowdome from his shelf and shook it. Glitter exploded above a miniature plastic mountain. He waited, then shook it again.

Finally, he heard the noise he had been dreading since seven o’clock this morning.

His mother’s bedroom door opening. A pad of bare feet towards the stairs.

He rolled onto his back, stuffing his fingers in his ears.

‘Jack,’ she called gently. ‘Are you up? We’ve slept in.’

‘Hmm,’ he replied, removing his fingers a fraction.

‘You’ll have to get dressed quickly. What do you want for breakfast?’

His stomach gurgled.

‘Nothing. I’m not hungry.’

‘You need something. Do you want a bagel?’

There was a click. He stuck his fingers back in his ears so hard, his nails scraped the skin inside. But it was too late. He had heard it.

‘OK,’ he shouted, willing her to go away.

She was opening the gate. Trying to do it so he wouldn’t hear. Trying to pretend she hadn’t locked it again with that padlock he’d seen in her shopping bag on Saturday. Even though he’d heard Nana tell her not to on Friday night.

Jack looked up at the plastic stars Aunt Sass had stuck on his ceiling when they moved here from London when he was six. Blood thumped inside his barricaded ears. Boom, boom, boom. He shut his eyes and imagined he was swimming under the ocean among those shoals of baby rays he’d seen at the aquarium in London with Nana and Granddad, the muscles in his stomach stretched out and eased by the warm water.

When the biggest cramp came, he focused hard on the poster and imagined saving a penalty shoot-out for Arsenal in the FA Cup. Six foot two, Dad had been. Still smallish for a professional goalie but possible. He needed to eat more to try to catch Dad up.

The faint aroma of toasted bagel floated into his bedroom.

With a grunt, Jack pulled himself out of bed and swept his hair out of his face. He took off his pyjamas, found his school uniform things in his drawers, and pulled them on. He removed the guitar and opened the wardrobe hesitantly.

A rail of clothes appeared, above two shelves that Granddad had built. Checking quickly that Mum wasn’t behind him, Jack swept a hand behind the clothes, touching the wall to check no one was there. He went to pick up his trainers for PE from the bottom shelf, then stopped.

They had moved again.

He was sure of it.

He had chucked them in the other day, and now they sat neatly, pointing outwards.

Jack grabbed them by the laces and stood up. Had Mum tidied them up when she was putting away his clean laundry?

He rubbed his stomach hard, hunched his shoulders and went to open his bedroom door, knowing he couldn’t ask her. She’d just start going on again about someone eating the casserole and look even more worried.

The bars of the cage glinted in the morning sun. They were as flat and wide as his school ruler, embedded into a long bracket on the ceiling above. The door had been pushed back quietly into its hook in the wall, leaving the entrance open to the top of the stairs.

Jack ran to the bathroom, peed and washed, then walked through the open gate quickly, trying not to look at it.

‘What do you want on it?’ his mother shouted, as he came downstairs.

‘Peanut butter, please,’ he replied, walking towards the kitchen. He would make himself eat it. Perhaps, when he measured himself again secretly on Nana’s door this Saturday, there would be a difference. Sometimes he measured himself two or three times on the same day, just to be sure.

Kate turned, unsmiling, to butter Jack’s bagel, as he sat at the table and watched her. Her shoulder blades were showing even more clearly than before through the worn cream silk of the nightie Dad had given her, like two L-shapes, back to back. He looked down at her legs. White string with knots in.

Jack sipped the tea she’d made for him and tried to think about something else.

‘When’s the new laptop getting delivered, Mum?’

She groaned as she placed his bagel on the table. ‘This week, I hope. They tried to say they’d delivered it on Tuesday when I was in London – you know, when I went up to see Patricia, our old neighbour in Highgate,’ she added swiftly. Her eyes slid off to the left again, Jack noted. ‘I knew it was coming,’ his mum continued, ‘but I didn’t have time to rearrange the delivery, so I thought they’d just take it back to the depot and I could get it the next day. Anyway, they’re saying they did deliver it on Tuesday, but obviously they didn’t. So it’s their fault, and now they’re sending another laptop on Friday.’ His mum shook her head. ‘I should have just gone to the bloody shop. I’ve got to get some figures off to David in London by next weekend for a sealed bid auction.’

She frowned and returned to the sink. Jack took a reluctant bite of his bagel, thinking. If he got Gabe to invite him round after school, they could use his mum’s computer and see if Aunt Sass had done what she’d promised.

He looked up and saw Kate watching him from the sink.

‘Jack, you’re not getting one. Please don’t ask again. There are reasons that ten is too early.’

He shrugged. ‘I know. There are weird people looking at the internet. They told us at school.’

‘Good.’ She came over and sat down with a cup and no food. He could smell the hot raspberry from her tea. He saw her take an uncertain pause.

‘I like your hair like that,’ she said. ‘Bet the girls do, too.’

‘No,’ he said, awkwardly. ‘They like Gabe. He’s taller than me.’

Her forehead immediately creased again with worry. He sighed inwardly.

‘It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it, Mum.’

Jack took another bite of the bagel, pushing his teeth hard through the tough dough. Just chewing it made his stomach tighten painfully again.

Why was she frowning? Being small was his problem, not hers.

He chewed even harder.

Out of nowhere, Jack suddenly felt very, very cross.

She had locked that stupid, embarrassing gate again last night, even though Nana had told her not to. She had completely lied to Nana. Done the opposite of what she’d promised. And now he knew that she’d lied, and Nana didn’t, and if Nana asked him when he went to stay this weekend, and he told her the truth, Mum would be cross.

He glanced at his mum, but her eyes were lost again, somewhere off in her secret place.

Why did she always have to make everybody so worried?

Why could he never tell her he was scared of the strange noises he heard in the wardrobe at night? Or of the cramps in his stomach, which he suspected might be caused by the same disease that boy had on Children in Need? Or of the Year Eight boys who were making him and Gabe a bit nervous?

Why could he not tell Mum any of this without her stealing his worries and turning them into her own, making it worse, not better?

Jack sat back.

A second wave of anger engulfed him.

A thought took him by surprise. Right now, this minute, he hated her. He wasn’t just cross. He actually hated her.

Jack leaned forwards at the table, chewing harder, savouring this new, strange feeling, glancing at Kate as she stared out of the kitchen window into the garden, sipping her tea with a little hissing noise.

Thoughts began to pile into his head, one after the other. Yes – he hated her. Hated her stupid nightie that she wore all the time even though it had little holes in it like wounds. Hated the way she never listened to him and always made his worries her worries. Hated the way she kept talking about people breaking into their house and other bad things that made him lie awake at night, seeing shadows and hearing creaks. Hated the way she lied to Nana and was allowed to make their house grey and quiet all the time, just because she was the adult.

Jack put down his bagel and watched his mother chewing her lip.

The hate suddenly made him feel brave.

‘Mum?’

‘Hmm?’

‘I want to go to secondary school with Gabe and everyone else.’

Kate stirred her tea even though she hadn’t put any sugar in it. The bags under her eyes were even darker than usual, he noticed.

‘I don’t want to go to that private school.’

He waited for her reaction.

Kate sighed. ‘Well, you don’t have to.’

‘Really?’ He bit his bagel again, his appetite returning a little.

‘No.’ She took a sip of tea. ‘Jack, listen, I made a decision this weekend. You know we moved to Oxford so Nana and Granddad could help me after Daddy?’

He nodded.

‘Well, I think we’re better now.’

He stopped mid-chew. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, I think it might be a good time for us to go back to London.’

Jack tried to swallow the lumpen, soggy dough but it seemed to swell up and lodge in his throat. He tried again, but it stuck there, refusing to move forwards or backwards. In a panic, he took a mouthful of tea and gulped as hard as he could. The hot liquid forced the soggy mass down his throat, hurting it.

Perhaps it was because he was gasping to clear his mouth, that when he spoke it came out in a panicked rush.

‘NO!’ he yelled.

The sides of his mother’s face drew back like curtains.

‘Jack?’

His voice came out so loud it shocked him, too. But there was something about the shout that felt good. Before he could help it, he knew he wanted to do it again.

He jumped up. ‘NO!’ he cried.

‘Jack?’ There was a bewildered expression on her face. ‘Why are you shouting?’

He didn’t know. He just knew it felt good. He tried the new voice again.

‘Because I’m sick of you always making me do what you want to do!’

Her eyes were round and wide, cold amber glass. Jack realized that he wanted to smash that glass, and make her eyes move. Make them move like Nana’s. Make them do something.

‘Jack!’ She sounded scared. ‘What’s got into you? Why are you speaking like this? Has Nana said something?’

Tears were seeping into her eyes.

Oh, not again.

The little boy slammed both his hands down.

‘NO!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t cry. You always do that! I’m not looking at you any more!’

His mother opened her eyes wide. ‘Jack. I’m not crying! I try very hard not to cry.’

He spun round, with no idea where he was going. He just knew he wasn’t doing this. Clenching his fists, he stalked out of the kitchen into the hallway. He sat on the stairs, pulled on his school shoes without undoing them and grabbed his bookbag.

‘Where are you going?’ Kate asked, following him. She was gulping hard, like she was swallowing horrible medicine.

‘SCHOOL!’

‘But it’s only eight o’clock. Gabe won’t be ready to walk to school with you yet.’

He could hear the panic in her voice. ‘I don’t care. I’m going on my own. Everyone else does. Everyone else’s mum doesn’t think they’re going to get KILLED BY A CAR OR A MURDERER!’

She looked dismayed. He didn’t care. His voice was gaining new volume with every sentence. Every time he did it, it felt like he was blowing things up.

Pow! Pow!

The power was exhilarating.

There was a loud sniff from his mother’s direction. He glowered, looking for his trainers. He didn’t care if she was upset. She never helped him. The truth was sometimes he felt a bit scared about the idea of walking to school on his own, but she should be making him feel better about it, not more worried. Helping him.

Jack saw his PE trainers by the stairs and grabbed them.

‘Jack. Please. You haven’t even done your teeth,’ she said. She was trying to say calm grown-up things in a voice that was all wobbly and confused and hurt.

As he took his blazer off the banister, he looked up and saw the stupid cage gate.

He was sick of it. Everyone feeling sorry for him. For his Dad. For having a weird mum, and now a stupid house.

He turned and scowled at Kate.

‘YOU go to London!’ he shouted, unbolting the door. ‘I’m not staying in this stupid house any more. I want to live with Nana. She said I could. I heard her. Nana’s kind.’ And, then, before he could stop himself, ‘AND, she lets me go to the shop on my own.’

He heard Kate gasp. ‘She WHAT?’

‘She LETS ME GO!’ he yelled defiantly. ‘EVERY Saturday at twelve o’clock when the baker in the village opens to get bread for lunch!’

His mum opened her mouth wide, eyes furious. ‘Bloody Nana,’ she spat. ‘How DARE she? I KNEW this had something to do with her. What else has she done? What has she said?’

He shook his head furiously. ‘It’s NOT Nana. It’s YOU. You’re . . . you’re . . . just the worst mother EVER! I just . . . HATE YOU!’

Turning to find the Chubb key for the lock, he saw his mother’s face. It looked as if it had dried on to her bones.

At that moment, the little boy realized with a strange curiosity that she was not in control after all. The power had always been his to take. He could blow her up whenever he wanted.

He turned and shoved the Chubb key in the lock and tried to turn it.

Behind him came a low moan. It sounded like the cat from across the back when it went into a coma in their garden.

He stopped.

He had seen her worried, seen her eyes furiously blinking back tears, but he had never heard that noise before. A picture came into his mind of that terrible earthquake he had watched with Granddad on the news, where everything was blown up and broken, and the people on the news said that nothing would ever be the same again.

A cramp tightened in his stomach so painfully that he bent over and grunted.

What had he done? He’d told her about Nana letting him go to the baker’s in the village. And now they’d fight about that, too.

To his shame, Jack felt tears coming into his own eyes. Desperately, he tried to grab the door knob and get out before she said anything else.

‘Jack!’ his mother gasped. ‘No!’

He turned the Chubb key and a piercing sound exploded into the air.

Jack jumped back, shocked.

The burglar alarm.

She hadn’t turned it off this morning.

The ear-splitting din filled his head, and he lifted his hands instinctively to cover his ears. At the same time he felt his mum grab the shoulder of his school shirt, pulling him back from the door. He jerked away from her.

‘No, Jack!’ she yelped.

His movement threw him off-balance. His body swung around in her grasp and veered sideways. He felt her try to grab him tighter to stop him falling, but he twisted loose out of her fingers.

Jack saw the hall radiator coming towards him out the corner of his eye. Before he could put out a hand, his forehead glanced off the side of it. It was sharp, and it hurt.

‘Oh my God – Jack!’

He landed on his knees, and stayed there for a second, jolted. He touched his forehead and felt something wet. There was blood on his finger.

The house alarm was squealing at full pitch now, stabbing inside his ears.

It all felt too much. All this blood and power and noise and destruction.

Jack sat stunned, as Kate jumped up, ran to the alarm box under the stairs and punched in a number.

Silence abruptly descended on the hall again.

Jack leaned back against the radiator.

Kate rushed back and grabbed his face, looking at the cut.

‘Jack. I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I was trying to stop you setting off the alarm.’

She wiped blood from his cut with her fingers. It smeared across her skin. Nana would do it with a tissue, Jack thought, jerking his head away. Nana always had a clean tissue. Nana would put a gentle arm round him that smelt of flowers, and talk calmly, not swipe at the blood with bare fingers as if it were attacking her, and look at him in terror. ‘I didn’t mean to pull you so hard,’ Mum was gabbling. ‘Is your head sore? Do you feel dizzy?’

He shook it.

She stopped speaking and let her hand drop. He saw her rub his blood between her fingers. She had retreated again. Lost in her head.

‘Stay there. I’ll get a plaster.’

She went in the kitchen, with her hand over her mouth. Jack sat in the hallway, fighting the tears that threatened to come properly now.

All of a sudden, he felt ashamed. He was sitting on the floor, trying not to cry like a baby, with a scratch on his head. He looked up and saw himself in the hall mirror. What if Dad was watching him? Acting like a baby? Granddad had told him that he, Jack, was supposed to be the man of the house now Dad was gone.

And just like that, Jack’s hate for Kate disappeared as quickly as it had come.

As she hurried around looking in cupboards, her lips were forming words as if she were having a conversation with someone invisible.

It took him a moment to work it out.

‘You have to stop this,’ she was mouthing. ‘You have to stop this.’

What had he done? As she began to walk towards him, Jack dropped his eyes.

‘Jack?’

He stayed still.

‘Jack? Darling.’

Eventually, he looked at her.

‘Let me . . . do this . . .’ She knelt down and dabbed at his cut with an antiseptic cream that stung a little, and then placed a plaster over the cut. It was strange being this close to her. He could smell raspberry tea on her breath. He could see how the pale purple circles under her eyes grew deeper in tone under her dark eyelashes.

‘Are you sure you feel OK?’ She made him follow her finger with his eyes to be sure.

‘OK. Oh, Jack.’

She sat back and surveyed his face. He saw her eyes working hard, as if she was thinking.

She went to speak, then stopped – then tried again. ‘Jack. Listen. This is so bad. I don’t know how to say this to you, but . . .’ She looked him in the eye. ‘If anyone asks you how you got the scratch, I need you not to tell them that you hit your head on the radiator.’

He waited.

‘The thing is, they might not understand that it was an accident. Nana, for instance. Or your teacher. So, if it’s OK, you could just say you fell off your skateboard. Is that OK?’

There was such a pleading tone in her voice that Jack shrugged.

She leaped towards him and threw her arms around him. He was too surprised to resist. Her body pushed into his face and he smelt her anxious sweat through the silk nightie.

‘Jack. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what is happening to me, but I will make this right,’ she murmured. ‘I just . . .’ She sniffed. ‘I just want you and me to be safe.’ It was such an unfamiliar sensation, being in her arms again, that Jack let his face press against the protruding bone of his mother’s shoulder and watched, curious, as a trickle of watery pink blood from his forehead seeped into the pores of her shoulder strap. He found himself hoping the stain would finally force her to throw it away. He stayed there, even though he knew the embrace was to make her feel better, and not him. Knowing that she was trying.

The thing was, if he kept being angry like this, and destroyed her, he would also destroy any chance that his old warm funny mum, whom he was starting to forget, would return from behind those amber glass eyes. He had to do it for Dad, in case Dad was watching, counting on him to look after Mum, counting on him to be there waiting if she ever came back.

So Jack stayed there, still, inside Kate’s embrace, trying to stay hopeful that she was still somewhere inside.

It was after nine by the time Kate had cleaned Jack up and she could drop him at primary school, nervously gauging his Year Six teacher’s expression through the window as he entered the classroom. Kate left before Ms Corrigan could call her back. She knew that, under scrutiny, her eyes would expose the lie about the skateboard.

She drove home and ran upstairs to her office, sat at her desk and looked out at the rich green leaves of the magnolia tree that had months before shed its pink flowers onto the lawn. She sat there for an hour, doodling tight-knit webs and teetering towers onto white paper, then for another hour.

Jack’s face haunted her vision. Blood dripping from his forehead. The angry voice that sounded as if it had emerged from a long tunnel, thickened by echoes. His glance of disgust when she asked him not to tell Nana what had happened.

Social Services. That was what Helen had said on Friday.

Kate bit her thumbnail. The skin around it was raw and wet.

From nowhere, a forgotten memory of her mother-in-law returned. A memory from fourteen years ago that Kate thought she had long put to rest. It had been the first time, she had met Richard and Helen. She and Hugo had arrived at their house for Sunday lunch, trying to shake off the hangover from a student party in London the night before. Helen had come behind Richard down the hallway, drying her hands on a tea towel. Kate had smiled nervously as she went to hold out a hand.

‘Ah, my precious boy,’ Helen had said, ignoring her, instead reaching up to Hugo’s face. She touched his cheeks tenderly, while Kate stood to the side, feeling awkward. Hugo had given her a flutter of a wink over his mother’s head.

‘How are you, my darling?’ Helen asked.

Hugo took her hands in his own, physically turning her to the left. ‘Good! Mum! This is Kate.’

Kate knew from the emphasis he placed on her name that he was introducing her to Helen as someone significant. Someone he and his mother had already discussed. But, as Helen turned her pale watery green eyes on Kate, Kate suspected, already, that she’d failed. Right there, hungover, in her studenty jeans and scuffed boots, with her Shropshire accent and her state school education, she knew that everything Helen, in her grand riverside house, had been hoping for had not appeared this morning.

‘Hi,’ Kate said, holding out a hand. ‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Hello, Kate,’ Helen said, taking it. She displayed a modest smile. The smile stretched as she turned back to Hugo, only to find him watching Kate, mesmerized.

Later, Kate would wonder if that was when Helen decided that whatever concerns she had about Kate’s suitability for her ‘precious boy’ were to be packed away immediately. That the glow in her son’s eyes as he looked at Kate told her that this was deadly serious. There was no going back for him.

Certainly, Helen had never treated her like that again, to the point where Kate had convinced herself that she had imagined that first encounter. Blamed it on her hangover.

Till now.

She looked out of the window as the sun disappeared around the back of the garden. What if that malevolent undercurrent she’d glimpsed in Helen on their first meeting did exist? Had always existed, but been hidden for Hugo’s sake, then Jack’s?

On impulse, Kate sat back and opened a drawer in her desk, to take out a photo.

She hesitated, her fingers outstretched in mid-air.

The photo was turned on its front, not face-up as she had left it on top of her work diary.

Her heart pounding, Kate glanced round her office. Had she been burgled again?

Helen’s irritated words flew back to her about the casserole. ‘It had not gone.’

Kate stopped.

‘Must have been Jack,’ she reassured herself out loud.

She removed the photo, propped it on the desk, then lifted her eyes to meet Hugo’s. It was a good photo. Saskia had taken it secretly through the kitchen window of their Highgate house five years ago. Unaware, Kate was lying back on Hugo’s chest, his hand casually lying across the breast of her shirt. She was wearing a headscarf from painting Jack’s room. Her face was tilted up, laughing. He was trying not to smile at her bad joke. Behind them was the magnolia tree, just a baby then, in a pot, its first pink blossoms yet to burst through.

Kate shook her head, the irony of it, painful.

‘Don’t laugh at me,’ Hugo had been saying, putting on his hurt voice.

His fingers played on her rib below her bra, slowly, with no intent, while he used his other hand to write on a pad placed on the garden table.

‘But how can I help it? You’re so funny. See? I can’t stop laughing at you . . .’ Kate opened her mouth as if to laugh – then froze. ‘Oh wait – yes I can.’

‘F*ck off.’ He pinched her skin through her top, and carried on writing.

She lay back on the garden bench, looking at the baby magnolia tree.

‘What are you writing?’ she asked.

‘Instructions for your assassination.’

‘No, really.’

‘Instructions for your assassination.’

‘That’s a nice thing to say to your poor wife whose parents were killed,’ she said in a whiny voice, screwing up her eyes and laughing silently at her own mean joke. They both knew he was cornered.

He sighed loudly, and she grinned with satisfaction, feeling his chest reverberate under her.

‘Some notes for the refurb on Algon Terrace,’ he grunted.

She sat up sideways to see one of his neat sketches of a room dominated by a Georgian fireplace.

She lay back again, wondering where to plant the magnolia. If they put it just to the right, it would grow under Jack’s bedroom. By the time he was eight or nine, the blooms would reach his window.

‘It’s not that I think you shouldn’t do it . . .’ Hugo started.

‘But . . .’

‘Well, I just don’t want you to do it.’

‘Hugo,’ she groaned, hitting his chest. ‘Honestly. Don’t start. It’s what I want for my thirtieth. You can’t say no.’

‘What about Jack?’ he said, grabbing her hand and playing with it.

‘What do you think’s going to happen?’ she asked, running his fingers through her own. ‘I thought you wanted me to get back to normal again. Have some fun?’

‘You are back to normal.’ He dropped his voice to a stage whisper. ‘Normal for a weirdo, anyway.’

She dug her elbow into his rib.

He shifted his weight to release it. ‘Really. I just don’t think it’s a good idea.’

Kate tried to sit up. ‘You’re not serious?’ she asked.

He shrugged, sipping his beer and continuing to write. ‘I’ve just got a bad feeling about it.’

She threw her hands up. ‘Says the man who’s bought a car that looks like a penis.’

He pinched her harder, and carried on sketching.

‘What do you think about all this, Sass?’ she said, as her sister-in-law wandered outside to the garden from the kitchen, waving a camera.

Saskia settled herself on Kate’s thighs gently, and leaned back.

‘Don’t know, don’t care. Look. . .’

Hugo and Kate peered forward to see the image of themselves, with Kate laughing at her own joke, and Hugo trying to hide his grin.

‘You were laugh-ing!’ Kate sang childishly.

‘Right. That’s it. Both of you, off,’ Hugo grunted, pushing off the combined weight of his wife and sister. ‘I’m not sitting here being harassed. What time is your film?’

‘Half eight?’ Kate and Saskia said in unison, checking with each other.

‘Right. I’m going for a quick drive in my penis car then.’

That had been the summer, five years into their marriage, when she had finally emerged from the darkness of her parents’ deaths. The year she knew who she was again without their solid mooring on the planet. She was turning thirty, finding renewed strength in the idea of a new decade. Even broaching the idea of another baby, now Jack was starting primary school. Hugo had stopped tiptoeing about her, trying to make something better that could not be made better. With unspoken relief on both sides, they had found their way back to the easy rudeness of old. She had even made a risqué joke about the way she’d been after her parents’ death, knowing her parents would not have minded. Knowing they would have just been overjoyed that she was starting to heal. It was over, the joke said to Hugo. He and Kate could finally move on.

Kate looked at the photo closely. The contours of her body and Hugo’s ran into each other, without borders. What had it felt like to be that physically intimate with another person?

Her eyes drifted to the baby magnolia tree. They had never planted it, of course. Four hours later, Hugo had been dead.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said to the photo. But the low resolution of the camera had blurred the sharpness of Hugo’s pupils, robbing her of the chance to interpret some peace and understanding in his eyes.

What would he say, anyway? Tell his mother to keep her nose out of Kate and Jack’s business? Or would he stand beside Helen as her ally? Would his face say that he now realized his mother had been right in that brief moment in her hallway all those years ago, when she first met Kate? She had been correct to be disappointed: Kate had proved to be a failure after all. Fallen apart in a crisis. A terrible mother to Hugo’s son.

At one time, Kate would have known, of course. Years’ worth of Hugo’s reactions and opinions, she had discovered after his death, had been safely wired into her head, ready to draw upon in his absence. It had been a comfort. But that was from another time; already he was five years younger in this photo than she was now. Those reactions and opinions belonged to then, not now. Hugo had never seen an iPad or a Twitter page. He had belonged to a different time. He was disappearing from her view, like a man overboard in the wake of a ship.

Kate dropped the photo on the desk and looked at the clock. Nearly eleven.

Jesus.

Biting her lip, she glanced at her work schedule on the wall. David needed her funding proposal for his new renovation project in Islington by next week. She had to get out of here or she would never start work.

Kate jumped up. Flinging back her chair, she grabbed some papers and walked downstairs, pausing to lock the gate with the new padlock. Checking that all the windows, and then the inner doors, were locked manually downstairs, she grabbed her bag, turned on the alarm and left, double locking the front door.

Without meaning to, she glanced up at the strong sun that had now moved to the front of the house. Should she drive or cycle? Statistics about road accidents began to swarm around her head. Mixed up in them were half-remembered percentages to do with air quality and skin cancer.

• 90% of skin cancers are caused by direct sunlight.

She caught herself, and pinched her palm hard with her other hand.

‘Shut up!’ she growled, bringing Jack’s shocked, bloodied face from this morning into her mind.

Forcing herself to ignore the numbers, she marched down Hubert Street, towards the hub of east Oxford.

Helen’s words returned to her. ‘The next time I ring Social Services it will not be anonymous.’

Nobody could help her. She had to do this by herself, and it had to start now.

Magnus heard the front door bang next door. He looked down into Hubert Street from his upstairs window. The skinny woman, Kate, was going out again.

He picked up his camera and took a quick shot of her from behind.

Skinny, but not bad-looking. Dark hair, thick and lustrous. She even had the upturned nose like the girls from home.

It was her face that was a put off. Miserable. In need of a good cheering-up.

He shut up the laptop that had been delivered to Kate’s house last Tuesday and turned it off. It hadn’t been difficult. He’d just accessed her emails, noted when the new laptop was due, then lurked outside her gate in a baseball hat without his glasses, till the delivery van came, then pretended he was coming out of Kate’s house when the man asked for someone to sign for it, and used an indecipherable signature.

It was a good computer, this one. Better than the one he’d stolen two weeks ago from her house, along with the email password she’d so ‘cleverly’ stuck on a sticky note beside it on her desk. She’d upgraded. He might even keep this one, instead of trying to sell it.

Talking of which . . . better check she was really going out and not just popping in to see a neighbour. He watched out of the window till the woman reached the end of Hubert Street, counted fifty, then bounced down the worn stair carpet, pulling on his black T-shirt from yesterday, enjoying being reacquainted with his own pungent smell. The kitchen was empty. It smelt slightly of damp – not that that bothered him.

‘Hello?’ His shout echoed around the cheap units and into the hall, where piles of post for former student tenants lay in messy heaps.

No one replied.

Luckily, the other students were out. Not that they spoke to him anyway. The short one with the sharp face had complained just last night about him singing drinking songs when he arrived home at 2 a.m. No one knew how to have a good time in this bloody town.

Magnus went out of the front door and walked up to Kate’s house to check it was empty. He rang the doorbell, twice, ready with a fake question about the rubbish collection day. No answer.

Good. Quickly, he returned home and lumbered up to his bedroom.

He shut the door and locked it, just to be sure, then went to the heavy wardrobe that stood against the wall he shared with Kate’s house, and moved it, grunting, a shoulder against the edge.

It travelled with a deep scraping noise across the laminate floor, leaving a fresh new grey skid mark on top of a previous faded one.

In front of Magnus was a hole in the wall, just above the skirting board, a metre wide by half a metre high. A scouting trip to steal the first laptop five months ago had told him the best place to do it.

It had taken him three days to create, chipping away the mortar with a rock hammer when both households were out, and taking out the bricks carefully one by one. As always, before entering the hole, he double-checked with a prod the metre-long, ten-centimetre-square piece of wood that he’d inserted under the top of it, which in turn rested on two more vertical wooden lintels that sat either side of it. The support didn’t budge, still solidly supporting the weight of the bricks above it. He nodded, pleased.

In front of Magnus, on the other side of the hole, was a piece of MDF. He had painted it white to blend in with the wall next door and inserted across the hole with two clips. Carefully, he unclipped it and pushed it into the empty space beyond, then turned it diagonally and pulled it back through the hole.

In front of him now lay a gap into the bottom of a fitted wardrobe, which was presently covered in shoes and boots. There was a shelf just above his head.

Magnus pulled the shoes out of his way, lay on the floor, put his long arms into the hole and pushed the wardrobe doors ahead of him open. As usual, there was a thud on the carpet in front of him. Then he put his head through the hole and pulled his body after him, into the wardrobe, then out through the open doors on the other side. There was just enough room, with a few centimetres either side.

It was a tight squeeze but he did it.

Magnus pulled his big body into all fours, then stood upright, dusting off a scattering of mortar dust from his shoulder.

He stood the electric guitar upright again from where it had fallen, and surveyed Jack’s bedroom.