‘Yes, sir,’ she said, and left.
Without the inhibition of a witness, Marvel turned back to Anna and tapped the picture. ‘Mrs Buck, can you tell me what it was that you saw when you looked at this photo?’
‘What does it matter now? The dog is home.’
‘That’s true,’ he acknowledged. ‘But indulge me. Tell me what you told Sandra. And anything else you can remember.’
She looked at him warily.
‘Please,’ he said with sincerity that sounded genuine, even to his own ears. ‘I want to know what you saw.’
He held the photo out to her again. This time she took it, but immediately put it face-down on the table between them.
For a long moment he thought Anna Buck was going to refuse to say anything else.
But then she sat a little more upright in her chair and said softly, ‘I saw a garden …’
Marvel went cold.
His fingers pressed so hard on the Edie Evans file that the tips went white. Under his splayed hands were the interviews with the psychic, Richard Latham. Marvel didn’t believe a single word the man said, but he knew every one of them off by heart. Latham’s visions were random and unverifiable. A broken glass jug, a white disc with a red centre, rolling across a floor …
A fake garden.
Marvel’s voice was tight. ‘What kind of garden?’
‘Just a garden,’ said Anna. ‘But it wasn’t … right.’
‘What do you mean, not right?’
‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘There was just something a bit wrong with it. Like it wasn’t real.’
22
EDIE EVANS DREW a garden on the wall of the tiny concrete room.
She’d said she was bored, and two days later the alien had brought her hundreds and hundreds of wax crayons, all broken stubs, in two plastic carrier bags.
She was lucky they had them aboard the spaceship, but all the good colours were gone. There was no bright red or orange and those were her two favourites, but she started drawing flowers on the wall beside the little camp bed whenever the light was on, which usually it was.
Sometimes the alien switched it off as he left, and on those days (or nights) Edie had to be very, very patient because the gaps between stars were huge, and you couldn’t expect to see the next one soon – maybe not even in your lifetime.
But whenever the light was on, she drew flowers. Mostly blue and purple and a few yellow ones, but there weren’t that many yellow crayons either, so she had to make do. She made all the middles yellow, so that the blue and purple flowers weren’t so dark. There were a few maroon crayons and she used them sparingly too, and a blue that was too dark for anything – even the sky. There were lots of whites and blacks and browns, so she made a white window frame so that it was like looking out of her bedroom across her garden to the woods beyond. She coloured the trees, enjoying the bobbly-rough sensation of the wax passing from each crayon to the cement trunks. It wasn’t like using a pen; the crayons shrank in her determined fist as they escaped to the wall, layer by layer. She could watch it happening and wonder at the change from coloured stick to coloured wall. Often she would have to stop and peel back paper from the wax crayons so she could keep colouring.
After Edie finished the window and the garden, it wasn’t enough, so she re-created the rest of her bedroom around the walls – all from memory. Her wallpaper, her posters, the door with Neil Armstrong on it, the old fireplace, the shelf with the clock and Pink Ted and Pengie the penguin, and her books. She wrote the title on each spine, trying to remember all of them: Island of Adventure, Chocky, The Silver Sword, Matilda. There were more, and she drew blank books so she could write on the spines as she remembered. She drew Peter in his cage and hoped Frankie was feeding him and playing with him. She drew his cage much bigger than it really was, just in case, and put in extra toys. Then she made sure there was plenty of water, and lots of brown-and-black food in the little purple bowl.
It was hard to fit everything on to the walls because the room was so small – only as long as the camp bed and three times its width – but Edie did her best. Her fingers quickly smelled of wax, and were tipped with little crescent rainbows under each nail.
The alien came every day. He was tall and skinny and his face was a mask above a flowing black shroud that hung to his hips. The eyes did not blink, and in the wan glow of the small fluorescent strip, the teeth glimmered sharply within the rictus of the lips.
At first she was scared of the mask. She had been scared a lot at the beginning, despite her mind’s best efforts to construct a story she could live by.
Remain sane by.
But after a while she became more scared of what might be behind the mask, and hoped she never found out.
On that first day, the alien had brought a dead chicken with him, and Edie had crouched in mute terror as he’d sung a strange song and swung the chicken over her head in circles. There hadn’t been any blood, but white feathers had fallen from the bird on to the bed, and after the alien had left, Edie had gathered them together and cried for the poor chicken. There were seventeen feathers ranging from the little tufty fluffy ones right up to the single long wing feather, like something you could write with. It had slender spines that separated with an actual tiny sound, and then knitted back together so perfectly you couldn’t see the join.
But every day after that, he brought her water in a tall glass jug, and proper food. Bread and butter, old bananas, and dented pots of custard or rice pudding. A mug for drinking and a plastic spoon. A bowl, and a bar of yellow soap that smelled like lemons but tasted like soap.
‘What do you want?’ she asked him once, early on, and when he didn’t answer, she got cross and shouted, ‘What do you want?’