Ada couldn’t sleep. It was too hot. She threw off her sheet and clapped at a whining mosquito. Maybe she had slept and hadn’t noticed since the night was quiet now, except for the fluttering of the curtain and the occasional eruption of small lonely sounds that lived outside and tugged dreams out of sleep before they had properly unknotted. Her thoughts were tight and beating against her head, because of the heat and the pale, moon-bleached sky or the empty bed beside her. Tilly wasn’t home; the bedcovers were ghostly still.
Ada lay and watched the room. The moonlight had crept in and bathed everything in eerie shining tones. Everything that looked so familiar during the day was now hiding its true self in a cloak of shadow. Something monstrous lurked in that sort of stillness. It was getting ready. Ada didn’t like it.
Her old wicker pram, which she didn’t play with anymore, was parked with its nose indignantly in a corner; Big Baby probably lay abandoned inside it. Ada ran her eye along the top of the bookshelf, which was covered with indistinct shadowy things like the matching porcelain rabbits in blue jackets that were now dust-covered and so haunted with Ada’s own long ago that they belonged to an elsewhere that time had closed off. Though it was satisfying and right to be so much older than she had been, Ada sensed in their merry frozen faces the remains of a magic that had now been spent.
And then, in the corner, was the special stained-glass lamp that Ada had accidentally broken one day and their mother said she would never buy them anything beautiful ever again, because Ada and Tilly had no respect for the quality of things. Her mother was wrong about that. Ada felt very fiercely that she knew the beauty of things. It wasn’t just the sunsets, which everyone knew about, but Ada knew also the coiled patterns of snail shells and the sliding of raindrops down windows and the fine veins in leaves, the glass balls of dew on nasturtium leaves. Tilly used to notice things, but now she sometimes forgot to look.
Tilly’s jar of buttons sat next to the broken lamp. Ada got out of bed and took it down. She squatted on the floor and emptied the buttons. They splattered on the floorboards, shiny, hard and colour-less. She picked one up and held it close to her eye. It was a button, only a button and nothing else. There was nothing lurking in it.
Ada straightened up. She wished she hadn’t tipped the buttons out because now she’d have to pick them up. She left them there and opened her door and padded down the hall. Later she wondered what had made her go down the hall. It wasn’t that she needed to go to the toilet; it was just that she wanted to go away from the buttons—and that she’d heard something.
The sound came from a person, but the person wasn’t talking. The lamp was on in the living room. Its glow spilled down the hall and with it crept the sound of the breathy voice, as if it had rushed away from itself and come seeking her in the hall. Ada was frightened. Should she run back and hide from it in her room? Should she go and find her father? She was motionless for only a second as the breaths came towards her with an urgent sound, as if something was about to break. The note of pain frightened her, but she was trapped by her own curiosity, which drew her forward.
What she saw, she saw only for an instant, but it etched itself vividly and permanently on her mind. Her dad and Mrs Layton had no clothes on, though her father, who lay on his back, wore one black ribbed sock. Mrs Layton was sitting on top of him, leaning forward, her arms straight and holding her up, her back arched while her head tipped forward and her hair fell across her face. Ada could tell it was Mrs Layton. Toby Layton was in her class at school. Toby Layton was one of her friends, and it was from his mother that the breathing sound came, and it went along with her movements, upward and down again. Ada’s father’s eyes were open, and he watched Mrs Layton. His hands were reached up catching her large breasts. He had a look in his eye that Ada had never seen before. It was a half-lidded, pained look and it made him seem not like her father at all, but like a snake, someone she didn’t know.
Ada drew back into the dark hallway and ran back to her room. She grabbed Big Baby out of the pram and climbed into Tilly’s bed. She would wait for Tilly to come home. She closed her eyes but as soon as she did, the scene in the living room replayed in her mind. She turned on the lamp and stared out the long window into the moonlit garden where the tree branches struck out across the night sky. Should she run outside to Ben’s room and tell him? He might know what to do. Someone should stop them? Ada’s mind was in a commotion. Mrs Layton on her father, her father so consumed, he didn’t even see Ada even though she looked straight into his eyes.
Ada shook her head and clutched at Big Baby. Big Baby wore an ice blue crocheted bonnet. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was open. Her padded arms were flung up, and she looked as if nothing bad had ever happened. Ada held the baby doll and curled up on her side. Poor Big Baby; she wasn’t real. Nothing was the same as it used to be. What she had seen had got inside her and Ada knew it would never sink down into the pleasant, jumbled obscurity of other memories.
She felt serious and old, and she pushed Big Baby away. Now she really was too old for dolls.