‘Since when do you have visions?’
She said nothing. She opened another drawer and smoothed the clothes in it – just for something to do. They’d all have to be washed, but not today. She would have to do everything in the correct order. Efficiently, so that one thing did not contaminate the next.
‘Is this about that bloody church?’
When she didn’t answer him, James said, ‘A vision of what?’
‘Of a garden. And of circles and … and … eighty-eight.’ She shrugged.
‘Eighty-eight what?’
‘I don’t know.’
James sighed. ‘You know all this makes you sound mental, right?’
‘I know. I just thought they might be something to do with the dog.’
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t they?’ Sarcasm didn’t become him. James never used to be sarcastic with her.
Before.
‘Nobody believes shit like that,’ he went on.
‘The police took it seriously,’ she said without inflection.
‘Were they wearing white coats?’
She knew he was trying to be mean, but she ignored it. ‘They asked me all about it and to draw pictures of all the things I saw. They had me there for two hours.’
‘Yeah?’ said James. That obviously surprised him and he lost that knowing expression.
‘It was nothing to do with the dog though. The dog had already been found.’
James laughed – relieved to be back on solid ground.
‘They thought it might have something to do with a girl who went missing.’
‘What girl?’
‘Her name’s Edie Evans. She was in the photo.’
‘What photo?’
‘Of the dog.’
‘Where is it then?’
‘The police kept it.’ Anna opened another drawer – this one full of bits and bobs. The tie James had worn to his mother’s funeral, spare batteries, a small sheaf of Daniel’s drawings that had been transferred from the playschool to the fridge and then were too precious to make their logical way to the bin. Wax crayon on butcher paper; random three-legged animals and wonky houses with curly smoke.
‘Why are we even together?’ Anna said suddenly.
James looked at her in surprise, but Anna felt calm inside – as if she were on a slow summer ocean. She couldn’t believe that just a few hours earlier she had been curling up to die on a police station floor …
‘I mean, we only got married because I was pregnant with Daniel.’
‘What?’ He looked at her in disbelief. ‘You know that’s not true.’
Anna avoided his eyes. ‘And now he’s gone—’
She stopped. She had said that without crying. She said it again.
‘Now he’s gone …’
The second time was a charm, and she felt the lump growing in her throat that meant that soon she wouldn’t be able to speak at all. She stared into the drawer filled with her son’s baby clothes and whispered, ‘You can go too. If you want.’
James went.
On his way out he slammed the door, and opened the floodgates.
James only got as far as the King’s Arms, where he drank until he ran out of money. Then he drank until he ran out of goodwill, and then he got into a scuffle with someone who wouldn’t buy him another pint.
Then he got thrown out.
In revenge he pissed into the drooping pansies planted in barrels along the front wall. They were already fighting a losing battle against the waterlogging and the traffic and the cigarette stubs, so it was a mercy killing really.
He headed for home. Anna had told him to leave, but he was going back. She might claim to have married him because of Daniel, but that wasn’t the only reason he’d married her.
So he was going home. Or, at least, to the place where he paid the rent – and if she told him to leave again, he’d ignore her again.
He’d drunk so much that he couldn’t make it home before he needed to relieve himself again, so he stumbled down the alleyway next to the mini-mart and pissed with his forearm against the wall and his face cradled in the crook. Hot and cold in shivery waves, dimly feeling the rain seeping under his collar and the splatter on his trainers.
He thought of the red dungarees, and the way they smelled of Daniel, and his eyes overflowed too, and his nose.
‘James?’
‘What?’
‘OK?’
‘Piss off,’ he snuffled into his elbow.
There was silence bar the sound of rain gurgling down the supermarket gutters.
‘You want to eat?’
James turned his head to see Ang standing a few feet away, his thick black hair plastered close to his small head.
‘What?’
‘You want to eat?’ repeated Ang, and gestured that James should follow him behind the building.
James pushed off the wall gently, but still too hard, and stumbled backwards as he zipped up. Then he followed Ang round the back of the supermarket.
He had disappeared.
‘Hello,’ said Ang. He was in a skip, holding a sandwich in a cardboard wrapper.
‘What are you doing?’ said James.
‘Eating.’
James peered over the lip of the skip and Ang switched on a torch. James noticed it was the one Brian Pigeon kept in the office. Ang directed the beam at the rubbish. Cardboard, plastic, a couple of black bags, and scattered food in broken packaging. Ang had collected a little pile of booty at his feet: bread rolls in plastic wrap, fish fingers and yoghurt; two boxes of eggs, only half crushed.
James wiped his face on his arm and said, ‘No. Going home.’
Ang nodded doubtfully. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Me too.’
He put his food in a plastic bag and clambered out of the skip and they walked together, James stumbling and Ang hovering around him like a worried bee, touching him now and then to keep him steady and headed in the right direction.
Halfway home, James threw up.