‘Just helping,’ she said.
He watched her pick tiny twigs and petals of blossom out of Daniel’s footprints. Her hands were small and pink and she had a plastic ring on one forefinger, with a fake green emerald in it. She had to keep stopping to adjust her school bag, which kept slipping from where it was slung across her back. She pushed it around patiently each time and carried on with her task.
‘Do you know who made those footprints?’ he said.
‘Daniel,’ said the girl. ‘He got lost and this is all his mummy has left.’
James felt unbalanced by hearing their lives summed up in a single bald sentence from a small girl he’d never seen before.
‘She still has me,’ he said.
The child stared up at him. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Daniel’s daddy.’
The girl looked away again, and carried on picking grit from the next print.
‘You left the door open,’ she said.
All the breath left him as if he’d been punched.
He stared down at the back of the girl’s head. Her shiny dark hair was parted in the middle all the way down to her nape and there were two hairclips holding the strands in place. Two little goldfish, smiling up at him, waving their fins.
Was she even real?
Was any of this real?
Was this how Anna felt when she had her visions? Shocked and sick and kicked in the belly?
‘Yes,’ James said slowly. ‘I left the door open.’
The little girl stood up and brushed her hands together, then wiped them on her thighs for good measure. She left dusty finger marks on her black uniform trousers.
She hitched her bag up on to her shoulder and looked up at James. ‘You must feel terrible,’ she said solemnly.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘You didn’t mean to do it though, did you?’
‘No,’ he said huskily. ‘It was a mistake.’
The girl looked down the road, pushed a strand of hair behind one ear and took a deep breath. ‘Miss Henderson says everybody makes mistakes, but it’s what you do after the mistake that’s important. Like, I pushed Bethany Court over because she called me fatty four-eyes, but then I said sorry, and she said sorry too, so it was OK.’
James nodded and the girl hitched her bag up again and said, ‘I have to go to school now. Bye.’
‘Bye,’ said James.
They headed off in opposite directions.
Before he went into the garage, James looked down the street. The girl was still there, walking away.
She was real.
He watched her until she turned the corner, just to be sure. Then he went inside.
Marvel parked across the road.
Number 148 was next to a garage which had been built into a gap in the houses most likely caused by a wartime bomb.
Just a few doors down the same sooty terrace was 152 – TiggerTime playschool.
It might have been a coincidence. If Marvel had believed in them.
A tall man in dirty blue overalls leaned against the garage wall, smoking a black cigarette. Marvel took a photo of him – and of a Chinese kid with a broom who was sweeping the forecourt. Even through two lanes of traffic, Marvel could hear him singing. It was tuneless and yet with curious little lilts and curlicues that made it sound deliberately so.
The door of the flat opened and a slim, dark-haired young man in overalls and work boots emerged.
He presumed it was James Buck, and took three photos.
As Buck cut across the cement forecourt he stopped and chatted to a stout, bespectacled girl, who was squatting, playing some sort of game on the ground.
Marvel took another photo.
After a minute, the girl got up, and after exchanging a few more words with her, Buck walked slowly across the forecourt. He stopped briefly and looked back down the road, then disappeared inside the garage.
Some commute.
Marvel fiddled about until he found how to review the photos on the complicated digital SLR camera he’d checked out of work. One was of a blurred lorry. One was of the top of Buck’s head. The third was his profile. The fourth was horribly over-exposed, even though the tech moron had assured him that the bloody thing was automatic. All he could see were Buck’s legs, and the girl’s, under a pale-blue haze. He’d have to use the profile shot. It wasn’t great, but it was better than nothing.
He waited until the boy had finished sweeping the forecourt and gone back indoors. Then he got out of the car and crossed the road. On a whim, he took the camera with him.
There was a narrow alleyway between Number 148 and its neighbour, and Marvel went down it. It was a dank passageway, green with algae from gutters that must always be blocked and dripping.
The sound of the traffic muted behind him as he went, until his own footsteps were the loudest thing in his ears. It was so long since he’d been conscious of the sound of himself that it almost creeped him out.
He emerged behind the buildings into a slightly wider alleyway, and turned left. The rear of TiggerTime was easy to spot because the brick wall at the back of the tall Victorian house had been amateurishly painted in a Disneyesque nightmare. There was a spotted rat with a broken leg that he guessed was supposed to be Bambi, and a gurning axeman who looked like Richard Nixon. Marvel assumed it was one of the Seven Dwarves, but only because there were six similar others – each armed with a different tool.
The back gate was locked, and there was a skip outside filled with playschool junk. Black bags overflowing with disposable nappies, broken toys and great sheaves of shite art. Finger paintings and sheets covered with thick black wax crayon. Marvel scraped at the black with a fingernail and – lo! – the colours underneath were exposed.
He smiled. He couldn’t help it. He was a child again – and then, just for a moment, he was overwhelmed by the sense of the past and the future colliding. Right here, in his very own hands – the hands of the child he had been and the man he continued to be, existing simultaneously.