Anna was brutal with rubbish. There was no room for sentiment when it came to cleaning the flat. James knew that if he put something down in the wrong place, he was liable to lose it.
As the junk slid off the table, Anna caught a fleeting glimpse of Sandra and Mitzi. The photo had been under the pizza box. She stopped and reached into the bag to retrieve it, and stared at the blonde woman and the curly dog.
She nearly dropped it back into the bin then. What was the point of keeping it? Mitzi was only a dog, after all.
But she didn’t throw it away. She wouldn’t want someone throwing away a photo she’d given them of Daniel, even if the odds of recognizing him from it were a million to one. She wouldn’t throw it away. She couldn’t.
She propped it on the window-sill behind the sink.
And suddenly she was looking at the garden through the window.
My God! It felt so familiar!
The angle was odd and the flowers were wrong and the smell was wrong, too – it was grease and dry dust, not grass and blossoms – but Anna was right there, even though the flowers were far away. Or were they? The perspective wasn’t right and she couldn’t tell what kind of flowers they were, even though her father had loved to garden and had taught her some names. She squinted but she didn’t see anything she recognized – not even common flowers like roses and daisies. They were big and coarse and the edges were … black? And there was something on the window-sill …
She reached out a hand to pick it up—
There was nothing there. Her hand hovered between the sink and the window, with nothing in its grasp but air. No flowers, no grass, no misty trees. Just the stale air of a messy kitchen.
Anna shivered so hard she had to put out a hand to steady herself against the table to keep from stumbling sideways. She felt as if she’d been stretched out like a piece of elastic and now she’d pinged back, made limp by the effort.
Barely breathing, Anna waited for something else, but there was nothing, and already she couldn’t recapture the feeling of something.
She needed water. Again. She was desperate for water.
She hurried to the sink and turned on the tap and gulped greedily at the stream that flowed from it.
More.
More.
And more.
She drank more than she needed. More than she wanted. She drank as if her life depended on it. And even after she’d retched a couple of mouthfuls back up into the sink, she continued to let the stream pour down her lips and cheeks as the water spread fast inside her stomach, her legs, her fingertips, her brain.
Anna started to laugh and splutter at the glory of water filling her whole being. She was exhilarated. She put the ‘high’ in ‘hydration’! Oh my God! Oh my God! She felt so alive!
Finally she turned the tap off and stood over the sink, panting with relief.
She looked out of the window, giggling a little as she felt her pumping heart-rate slowly return to normal, and then – just as suddenly – she was overwhelmed with sorrow.
She stood in a puddle of water and cried and cried and cried until she’d emptied herself of what felt like every drop she’d just drunk.
What was wrong with her?
What if this sudden raging thirst was a symptom that there was something physically amiss? This was twice it had happened in a week. It was extreme, and bizarre. So bizarre that Anna wondered whether she should see a doctor.
She had refused to see anyone after Daniel had disappeared – not doctors and not counsellors. What could they have done? How could they have helped? Given her sedatives to make her sleep, make her forget? When she woke up, Daniel would still be gone. What mother wanted to forget her missing child? What doctor would try to make her?
But this … this felt wrong.
Wrong enough to see someone now?
As she stood, shivery-wet and sniffing, Anna imagined the scene.
Doctor, I get very thirsty.
Do you have a tap?
Yes.
Then turn it on.
The thought brought a wry smile to her lips. It was a simple solution to a simple problem. She should drink more water. She’d read somewhere that everyone should drink more water. Maybe this extreme thirst was just nature’s way of telling her that she was falling behind on her quota.
But even if that were true, then what was the vision of the garden telling her?
Something.
She just didn’t know what. And now that it was gone, it seemed to be no more than a momentary flash of wild imagination.
But in her heart Anna knew it had been more than that: she had been there. And it had been almost close enough to touch … She closed her eyes and reached out her hand and tried to re-conjure that vision, but it was just a memory now, and no more or less vivid than any other.
And what would the doctor say about that craziness?
Probably plenty.
If Anna was going mad, she didn’t want anyone else to know. Even she didn’t want to know.
She opened the cupboard under the sink to find tea-towels to clean up the water.
He looks at the photo and he just knows things …
Anna straightened up as Sandra’s words popped into her head, unbidden.
She stared intently through the kitchen window at the grey street and the red buses, but her mind saw only the sorry crucifix on the wall and the crumbs on Richard Latham’s jumper.
He just knows things.
Anna just knew things too!
She knew the garden as if she were there. She knew that the flowers were somehow wrong. She’d seen it all twice, and both times she’d had that raging thirst.
And both times she had been looking at the photo of Sandra and Mitzi.
What did it mean? Was she getting visions? Like Richard Latham? Like … what had Sandra called him …
Like a shut eye?
How else to explain it all? Was Mitzi in a garden somewhere? Or in a house where she could see the garden from the window? Was the dog trapped somewhere without water? Anna hoped not; the thought of that thirst without the relief of the kitchen tap was horrific, and she shuddered.
Was she in psychic communication with a lost dog?
It was ridiculous. Ludicrous.