Instead, walking ten thousand steps filled her day and hundreds of squats, burpees, press-ups, dead lifts and bench presses pushed her limbs to a shaking point.
The rest of the empty hours were simply spent watching. She cataloged and reviewed, compared what she’d seen from one day to the next, one apartment to the next. Most of the time there was nothing much happening. Just day-to-day life. Straining pasta or potatoes into colanders. Washing up. Women and men sucking their tummies in and turning this way and that in the reflection of the nearest window.
When the flats lie still and Robin’s limbs are too heavy to stand, she watches TV, silent guitar next to her, hand draped over it like a special stuffed toy.
Sometimes, she finds herself tapping out a tune, but then faces from her childhood flash across her mind and she catches herself. The tune disappears, scrunched away along with the memories, and she throws herself into pacing again or lifting weights in her spare room. If nothing else works, she takes one of the sleeping pills she bought online and climbs under her bed, where she feels cocooned. That feeling of safety, wrapped up and hidden, has been chipped away at recently. Signs were getting harder to ignore.
The frantic knocks had come again today. A dry fear coating Robin’s throat as she again accepted that this was not a random visit, not a parcel for a neighbor, not a well-wisher. Being stuck in her house for years on end had given Robin an acute eye for patterns. And this was one pattern she could not ignore. Someone had tracked her down, and they weren’t taking silence for an answer.
EIGHT
SARAH|1991
Downstairs, we can hear the top notes of music and bursts of laughter. The warmth of merry adults rising up. It’s the same every weekend, to the point where Robin and I think of Callum’s room as “our room” now. He doesn’t seem to mind, although I’ve noticed he hides things on top of his wardrobe so Robin can’t break them when she gets overexcited. For some reason, no matter whose fault anything is, it’s always Callum’s fault as far as his dad’s concerned.
Tonight, Robin had smuggled Penguin Bars, leftover Easter chocolate and Golden Wonder crisps from our kitchen cupboards at home to Callum’s room. When we’d been put to bed by our mums, Robin opened up her rucksack and tipped it all out on the bed. Callum was immediately panicked. “I can’t eat in my room. My dad’ll kill me if he finds that stuff!”
“But he won’t find it if we eat it all,” Robin had assured him. Still, he’d got up quietly and wedged his desk chair under the door handle to buy us more hiding time, just in case.
Robin launched into a feeding frenzy. She is two-thirds of my size but she can eat like a lion. And now, within ten minutes of finishing, she’s whimpering and holding her tummy.
“You can’t throw up in here. It’ll go everywhere,” Callum says.
“Help me take her to the bathroom,” I say.
“No,” Robin sobs, “I want to go home.” She looks smaller now, shrunk back down to size and tugging at her pajama bottoms to hold them away from her skinny little belly. Only sixteen minutes’ difference, but she looks like she belongs to a different generation. It’s my time to shine. I love looking after people and taking charge of this kind of situation. I give Callum triage duties: “Get a cold compress for her.”
“A what?” He pulls a face.
“Some wet toilet roll,” I explain in a matronly way.
He creeps down the hall to the bathroom and brings a dripping pad of loo roll, which we hold to her forehead like her life depends on it. While she whimpers, Callum and I help her along like a wounded soldier, holding her hands and stepping three abreast down the thickly carpeted stairs.
I can hear music, “Midnight Train to Georgia,” and the low rumble of my dad’s snoring. He sleeps like a dying fish, mouth gasping and breath catching in his throat and burbling back out. When Mum chides him, he says, “You know you love my cat purrs, Ang,” but I don’t think she does. We get into the living room, and on the large leather sofa that forms part of the new three-piece suite, Dad is lying with his feet up on the armrest, one arm flopping toward the floor and his flapping fish mouth open in the dim light. There’s zero point trying to rouse him—this is Mum’s domain. Where is Mum? Or Hilary; she’d do. A mum is what we need.
We thread our way around the furniture and toward the connected dining room. No one at the table, the stereo playing obliviously, its graphic equalizer bubbling up and down. It’s a new piece of equipment and the CD player is the jewel in the crown. Apparently you can put jam on the CDs and they’ll still play. Robin’s been desperate to test the theory, Callum draining white every time she even steps near the stereo. There’s still no sign of Hilary as we enter the dining room and wind our way through to the shiny white kitchen.
As we wedge into the connecting archway, Robin slumping dramatically like she’s taken a massive heroin overdose, I see Mum.
“Mum,” Robin whimpers, and I don’t think she’s really seen the full picture. Callum and I look at each other and Mum and Drew pull apart like a zip.
“What’s wrong?” a voice behind us says. I spin around. Hilary is coming into the kitchen from the hall, hair in curlers and wearing a dressing gown.
Robin moans and clutches her belly and I just watch, confused, as the two mums start moving around the kitchen like practiced colleagues, sorting Robin out and ferrying Callum and me back up to bed.
“Where are your antacid tablets?” Mum calls after Hilary, who is chivvying Callum and me along the hall toward the stairs.
“Top cupboard on the far left,” Hilary calls.
Am I in the Twilight Zone? Did I just imagine seeing my mum cuddling up to Callum’s dad, while my dad snored on the sofa?
ROBIN|1991
Sarah and Callum are already awake and Robin opens her eyes slowly to the sound of their low talking. She swivels her head around and sees the bucket next to her side of the bed. She sits up, remembering her bellyache from last night and feeling hungry now.
“What time is it?” she says groggily.
“Nearly nine,” Callum says, reading the time from the radio alarm clock on his desk.
“What are you two talking about?” Robin asks, irritated that they’ve been chatting without her and have managed to wake her up in the process.
“Last night,” Sarah says.
“What about last night?”
“Nothing,” Callum answers. “We’ve got Variety Pack downstairs and you can have the Frosties if you want, Robin.”
Robin nearly falls over leaving the bed in a hurry and rushing out the door.
Downstairs, the girls’ dad is still wearing the clothes he fell asleep in last night. His socked feet are still on the armrest but now he has a pillow over his head. Their mum is in her nightie, nudging their dad to give him a pint glass of water with something white and bubbly at the bottom of it.
“Morning,” Angie says, but she doesn’t look directly at her daughters or Callum.