It took Claire a few failed attempts to get up. The sensation of her blood, crawling its way back to her limbs, made her moan. Benji stayed close, shifting back on his haunches whenever Claire was able to move forward a few inches. When she was upright again, dizziness hit her hard. She managed to get up onto her knees, then support herself on the wall, up the stairs, back into the house, Benji patiently climbing behind her, nosing her calves for encouragement.
In the kitchen, she scrubbed the blood off her face, rinsed out her mouth, gingerly felt for loose teeth. She almost laughed at how outlandish she looked in the mirror: one eyelid cut, the cheek drooping, blood caked in her hair, lips split, ear swollen. Pulling down the neck of her blouse, she saw the fresh flowers of bruises around her shoulders and chest.
She managed to sleep on the sofa, Benji curled up next to her. In the morning her bruises were raised red welts, her eye a garish whirl of colour, her lips too swollen to speak through.
41
She stayed in the house for a week, constantly on guard for Lorna’s return. She showered carefully, bloody hair and scabs clogging the drain. After a few days she could walk without too much pain, and while her eye remained bloodshot, and her cheek frozen, the cuts began to heal.
When she turned on the TV, she kept the volume low, so as to hear any approaching car. The news was a constant reassurance that the world continued. But there was nothing about the fire, nothing about Lorna’s kidnapping.
Hunger, eventually, drove her out.
She drove to the village with Benji. There were more tourists around now, and, while she’d done her best, with scarves and an old pair of Marianne’s sunglasses, to disguise the damage to her face, people still stared at her. At the shop, she took out her purse; it was splashed with her blood. The woman on the till noticed it.
‘I got tangled up in the dog lead.’ Claire smiled, nodded at Benji tied up outside. ‘He’s a little bit boisterous for me. Fell flat on my face. Do you sell any paracetamol?’
‘We’ve got aspirin?’
‘That’ll do.’
* * *
That afternoon she went through the house carefully, and anything that used to belong to Marianne and Lorna went in a bin bag and was put onto the pile of partially burnt toys and books at the end of the garden. She placed logs and crumpled newspaper around the improvised pit, sat down and watched it burn. A walker on the coastal path waved and shouted up:
‘Having a barbeque?’
‘Having a bit of a clear-out!’ yelled Claire, and waved back.
‘Be careful! The wind can get ahold of a fire like that quickly!’
‘Don’t worry, I’m staying with it till it dies.’
And she did, sitting with Benji until the last spark flew, the last ember died. Then she dragged over the garden hose and doused the ashes. Tomorrow she’d rake through the mess to make sure that everything had gone. Every hateful thing.
* * *
After two weeks, her face had healed well, although her cheek still sagged a little, and while she walked a little stiffly, nobody stared at her in the street any more. She even went to a hairdresser’s. Daphne Charles was now a unisex salon named ‘A Cut Above’ and all the staff were new.
‘Lots of grey. Too much grey for a young lady like you.’ The hairdresser stared at her meaningfully in the mirror. ‘Only thirty pounds for a colour?’
Claire was about to say no. Then she looked at her tired face, still so thin, with the lazy cheek and the brown remnants of bruises, and she said yes instead. ‘I used to be kind of a blonde, if you can believe it? A sort of ash blonde I suppose you’d call it.’
‘And you will be again, my love. I’ll cut first, and then Denise will be over for the colour.’
She was sipping tea and watching Denise’s practised fingers wrapping silver foil around sections of her hair, when she heard the news on the radio.
A woman had been found dead in a London hotel room. Her daughter was missing.
Denise clucked and shook her head.
‘London. It always happens in London, doesn’t it? We’re safer, tucked away here, aren’t we?’
‘Yes,’ Claire answered, from far away.
‘Are you all right, my darling?’ Denise stared at her in the mirror. ‘You look, I hope you don’t mind me saying, you look peaky all of a sudden.’
Claire shook her head. The foil wrappers rattled. ‘I was just thinking, about that poor woman. On the radio. Silly. It just got to me . . .’
Denise smiled, turned the radio off. ‘London,’ she said.
‘London,’ Claire agreed.
When she got back home, she turned on the news, but all the reports were tantalisingly vague and brief. No pictures of the victim, no information on the daughter, just a static shot of one of those slightly seedy hotels in the ungentrified area of King’s Cross. Clarence House, it was called. Teenagers from the nearby FE college gurned behind the reporter. There would be more news ‘as we have it’.
It was just a news story. There was no reason to assume it had anything to do with Lorna . . . but still, Claire kept the TV on all day and she didn’t go outside, or even leave the living room. She skipped, instead, between news channels, searching for more on the story. There was nothing until later that afternoon. The same shot of the same hotel, the same reporter, but different faces in the background; commuters now.
‘. . . body found of a woman. She has been identified as Marianne Cairns, forty-eight, who had previously worked as a teaching assistant in secondary schools in the Bristol area. She checked in a week ago with her daughter, Lauren, who is now missing. The hotel manager says that he heard raised voices on the morning of the twenty-third, but that the woman and her daughter were seen later that day, apparently fine. It wasn’t until two days later, when they were due to check out of the room, that the body of the woman was discovered. The police are treating it as suspicious. You can see behind me the white forensic tent covering the window of what we presume is the room in question. Police now are appealing to the public for any information about Ms Cairns, and of course, her daughter.’