Light-headed suddenly, Rowan kneeled on the floor and leaned forward until her forehead touched the boards. With a rush, the room seemed to pull away, taking with it the twilight, the sound of a car on the road outside, the solidity of the floor beneath her. She was suspended, floating.
She was back in that afternoon again. Walking along Fyfield Road, Echo and the Bunnymen playing on the iPod that the Glasses had given her for her twenty-first, the sky deep blue and wide, the leaves on the trees still green, not yet turned brown by the drought that came later. The distant sound of children on one of the Dragon School’s summer programmes shouting and laughing in the outdoor swimming pool. Then, through the bushes inside the front wall, she’d caught sight of something white, large. When she reached the end of the wall, she saw what it was.
She yanked the buds from her ears, feeling the blood drop from her face in a single sheet. The nausea was instant, too – intense sickness, as if the ball of fear suddenly thrust into her stomach was something she could vomit up, rid herself of that way. If only.
Oh, shit, Marianne. Oh shit, oh shit.
A police car squatted on the drive again, incongruous as a spaceship and just as terrifying.
Her heart thumped the back of her ribs like a fist and sweat made beads on her forehead. The days had begun to slip past, one after another, and she’d allowed herself to hope. Now she saw how na?ve she’d been. What Marianne had done could never have stayed hidden.
The front door was open. The Glasses weren’t good at security, they came home all the time to find they’d left the garden door unlocked, a ground-floor window ajar, but even they never left the front door open.
She took a series of steadying breaths and started walking but her mind seemed to have disconnected from her body. Her movements felt unnatural, as if she were operating her limbs with controls, a new driver in the cab of a bulldozer. Jerking, ungainly. Across the drive to the steps, skirting the car as if it were a dangerous animal. She stopped to listen. Silence in the house, not a sound apart from the beating of her heart. The world had gone quiet.
The door creaked as she pushed it further open. ‘Hello?’
A moment passed and then she heard movement in the sitting room on her left. ‘Rowan,’ said a low voice. ‘A family friend.’
Jacqueline’s voice but cracked, barely recognisable.
Soft footsteps across the carpet and a uniformed policewoman appeared in the doorway, her face arranged in professional compassion. ‘Rowan.’
‘What is it? What’s going on?’
‘Come and sit down.’ The woman reached out and put a hand under her elbow.
On unsteady legs, she traversed the carpet. At the sitting-room door, her eyes went straight to Jacqueline’s face. Shock and disbelief. Desolation.
‘What is it?’ she heard herself say.
‘Ro, Seb’s had an accident.’ Jacqueline’s voice rose and fell, reaching her ears in waves.
An accident? Seb? For a moment she didn’t understand. Then she realised – she’d misheard. Or Jacqueline had got it wrong – she was disorientated by what she’d just learned about her daughter; she was . . . But no, a man was talking now. Rowan swung around. In the car, she caught. Dead at the scene; severity of the accident; a second fatality – a woman.
Dead, dead, dead – the word replaced the beat of her heart.
‘The A34,’ said the policeman, and she had the sudden dizzying urge to laugh. The A34! As if he were giving directions. As if they needed to know. As if it mattered what fucking road it was.
That was when she’d made herself look at Marianne. Rowan had known where she was sitting from the moment she came round the door, her stare had burned, but when their eyes met now, the look Marianne gave her branded Rowan like an iron. Shock and loss and a warning, fierce and unmistakable: Don’t you DARE.
She’d had to get out of there. She’d turned and run, the door banging against the wall as she pushed it out of the way. The steps were a blur, she’d missed one, landed on her knees in the gravel. Torn denim, dirt. Up on her feet again and away down the street, not thinking, not stopping even when she heard the crack of the iPod on the pavement. To Norham Gardens then the University Parks, the lawns covered with people, picnics, newspapers, a game of boules. Pelting down the path, breath jagged, people turning to stare, but she reached the footbridge, took the steps at full tilt and down the other side, falling again then wading off into the undergrowth.
Long grass, cow parsley, nettles. She staggered, tripping on roots and brambles as she worked her way further and further in, away from the world and the people until their voices faded and she slumped against a tree, chest heaving, lungs and legs burning with acid. She slid down, bark rough through the fabric of her T-shirt. The rich smell of earth that never saw direct sun, dappling light, not lovely now but flickering and uncertain. She pulled up her knees, wrapping her arms around them so tightly that the ligaments in her back and shoulders hurt for days afterwards.