‘What happened? In the kitchen?’
Anna looked at the bedroom doorway as if to remind herself where the kitchen was. ‘The police came,’ she told him, still not fully awake. ‘They wanted to read my mind.’
39
EDIE THOUGHT ABOUT taps.
In particular she thought about the garden tap. The one that leaked every summer when Dad put the hosepipe on it.
Every summer was the same. Once the rain had stopped for long enough for the garden to need watering, Dad got the hose out of the shed and fixed it to the tap.
Then every summer he remembered he hadn’t fixed the tap. As soon as he turned it on, some water went in the hosepipe, but some water also came out of the handle where you turned the tap on.
Every summer Dad said, ‘Washer’s gone. I’ll have to fix that.’
Edie was twelve and she could remember that happening when she was eight at least. So that was four years. Four summers. Four summers when water that should have been going down the hosepipe and to the flowers was instead bubbling out of the gaps in the metal and dribbling on to the concrete next to the house.
Wasted.
Curled up on the camp bed, Edie thought of that tap all the time. She thought of kneeling beside it and turning the handle and watching the water squeeze through the gaps. She thought of touching her tongue to the cold metal and feeling the tiny pressure of the flow on her tongue. She thought of waiting until her mouth was half full and then opening her throat to allow the water to trickle gently down her gullet and into her stomach. She imagined the way it would feel spreading through her whole dry, wasting body, making her plump and strong and happy with water.
Happy with water.
She checked the jug again.
It was dry.
Her tummy cramped in want, and she dropped the jug and it broke into icy shards.
Dry icy shards.
When she wasn’t thinking about taps, Edie thought about Peter. She thought about her mouse often now. She thought that as soon as she was back home, she would set him free. She’d only been here for a few days or weeks. Or maybe months, it was hard to tell – but Peter had spent his whole life in a cage.
He coped well with it. In many ways Edie thought he would have made a better astronaut than she was. He ran in his wheel and he hid in his cardboard tubes and climbed his little ladders. He cleaned his whiskers and ran his tiny pink hands over his eyes in that way that made him look so cute and human. He burrowed into the clean shavings and made a nest, and chose the sunflower seeds first from his food bowl, before eating the pellets and then those weird yellow flakes.
Peter kept himself busy.
Edie raised her head a little and looked around the spartan room. A bed, a poo bucket, a strip light, in a room that was barely bigger than a cupboard. Even Peter would have a hard time making much of it.
She got off her bed and nearly fell. She was a lot more tired than the last time she had left it.
She knelt and pulled the carrier bags from under the bed. There were great handfuls of black and brown and dark blue; the few reds and yellows were long gone, and Edie sifted through the rest, searching for the last stubs of maroon and purple.
The sound of the crayons was comforting – a soft, hypnotic clicking as they rolled off her palms and tumbled back into the bags.
For a while she just sat and did that, not really thinking about anything but the sound and the dull feel of the wax sticks falling through her cupped hands.
Space isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The thought caught in the back of Edie’s throat and made her feel like crying.
Then another much better thought popped into her head and she giggled out loud with the fun of it, although the giggle came out all dry and soundless.
She picked up one of the bags and walked unsteadily to the wall opposite the bed, where she had drawn her bookshelf and Captain Kirk. She selected a dark-blue crayon that was almost complete and stood for a moment, judging the space and the approach. Where to start? How to proceed? There was no going back really – even on these smooth cement walls, it took ages to scrape mistakes off with a thumbnail.
Edie’s tongue poked out a little from between her lips, the way it always did when she was thinking really hard. She was thinking so hard that she had forgotten how dry she was.
She didn’t take long to decide; when it came, the idea was so perfect that she really only needed to step forward and reach out her arm and press the blunt point of the blue crayon against the wall.
Then, with one big, satisfying loop that sent a little thrill up the back of her neck, Edie Evans started to draw herself an escape hatch.
40
JAMES COULDN’T REMEMBER the last time he had been this angry. He leaned hard on the heavy glass door to the police station and looked around, spoiling for a fight. There was a little window in one wall, like a Tube station ticket office, and behind the window was a police officer.
‘I want to make a complaint,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the woman. ‘What about?’
‘About some copper who’s been bothering my wife.’
‘OK,’ said the officer, pulling a pad of plain paper towards her. ‘Can you give me your name, please?’
James told her his name, and his age and address. And the name of his wife.
The officer tapped her pen on the paper for a moment. ‘And do you know the name of the officer involved, sir?’
‘Marvel,’ said James.
She wrote it down. Very slowly.
‘And what is the nature of your complaint, sir?’
‘This arsehole has been coming round my flat and forcing my wife to help him on a case. She’s already stressed. My son is missing and she’s mentally not so great, you know? The last thing she needs is this … prick coming round and making her do stuff that’s making her worse!’