I catch Laura looking at her watch. She’s working her way through a stack of papers, heaping half of them onto a pile for the shredder. It’s making me itch. Anything relating to the business should be in the showroom, but what if she accidentally destroys something important? I’m a director of the business—albeit a somewhat passive one. I can’t just throw paperwork away without checking what it’s for.
The weight of my gaze makes Laura look up. “All right?”
“You should get off. Mark’ll be back soon.”
“I promised I’d stay till he got back.” She puts another sheaf of papers on the shredding pile.
“Blame me.” I haul myself to my feet and hold out a hand to help Laura up.
“We haven’t finished sorting this lot.”
“We’ve done loads. It’s practically finished.” It’s a gross exaggeration. Laura’s piles of “things to keep” and “things to throw” have merged, and I’m no longer sure whether I’m keeping a giant ball of rubber bands because I’m sentimental, or because they’re useful, or because they’ve slid from one pile to the other.
“It’s a mess!”
“That’s easily solved.” I pick up Ella, usher Laura out of the room, and shut the study door. “Ta-da!”
“Anna! I thought we agreed that wasn’t the way to deal with things?”
You agreed, I think, then immediately feel I’m being unfair. It was my idea to sort through my parents’ study. I who asked Laura to help. “I’m not ignoring it because it’s upsetting, though. I’m ignoring it because I don’t want to tidy anymore. Completely different.”
Laura narrows her eyes at me, unconvinced by my breezy tone. “What are you going to do about the card?”
“You’re probably right. Some sick joker with an ax to grind.”
“Right.” She’s still not sure if she should leave me.
“I’m fine. I promise. I’ll call you tomorrow.” I find her coat and wait patiently while she looks for her keys.
“If you’re sure . . .”
“I am.” We hug, and as she walks to her car I stand at the door, one hand on Rita’s collar to stop her running after phantom squirrels.
Laura’s car gives a splutter, then cuts out. She grimaces. Tries again, revving hard to keep it from cutting out, and backs out of the driveway, waving from the open window.
When I can no longer hear the sound of her car, I return to the study. I survey the piles of papers, the birthday cards, the pens and paper clips and Post-it notes. There are no answers here, only memories.
Memories I want to keep.
I take the lid off a box of photographs and sift through them. On top are six or seven photos of Mum and Laura’s mum, Alicia. In one they’re in a sunny pub garden, in another a café, having a cream tea. Another photo has been taken from an angle, as though the camera was propped up and slipping to one side. Mum and Alicia lie on their stomachs on a bed, Laura between them. She’s perhaps two years old, which makes Mum and Alicia no more than eighteen. Just kids themselves.
There are dozens more photos in the box, but all—as far as I can tell—of Dad, the showroom, me as a baby.
I have lots of photos of Dad, but hardly any of Mum. Always behind the lens, never in front of it—like so many women once they have a family. They’re so intent on documenting their children’s lives before they grow too old, it doesn’t occur to them to document their own. That one day, their children will want to pore over photos of a time they were too young to remember.
In the short time between Mum going missing and her suicide being established, I gave the police the only clear photo I had of her, which lived in a silver frame on the mantelpiece in the sitting room. They circulated it immediately, and when news of her death broke, the papers used the same photo to accompany the story. The police gave me back the framed picture, but every time I looked at it, I saw the headlines. Eventually I had to put it away.
Apart from their wedding photo, where she’s hardly visible beneath the floppy hat that was all the rage at the time, there are no photos of Mum on display. I put the ones of Mum and Alicia to one side so I can have a couple framed.
I open Mum’s 2016 appointment book. It’s a fat A4 book, with each day over two pages: appointments on the left and space for notes on the opposite side. It’s nothing fancy—a corporate gift from a car manufacturer—but I run my fingers over the gilt-embossed logo and feel the weight of the pages as it falls open in my hands. The datebook is filled with Mum’s writing, and the words are illegible until I blink hard to stop them swimming. Every day is full. Meetings with suppliers. Repair visits booked for the photocopier, the coffee machine, the water cooler. On the right-hand side, that day’s to-do list, with items neatly scored through when complete. If you want something done, ask a busy person—wasn’t that what they said? Mum couldn’t have fitted more into her life if she’d tried, yet I never heard her complain she had too much on her plate. When her own mother—a crotchety woman who rationed her affection like wartime sugar—was admitted to a hospice, Mum drove each day from Eastbourne to Essex, returning only once Granny was sleeping. It was only afterward Dad and I found out about the lump Mum had found in her own breast; the anxious wait she’d had for the all clear.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” was all she’d say.
The mix of work and home in the datebook blindsides me. Adele tickets for A’s birthday? is sandwiched between a reminder to call a Katie Clements back about a test-drive, and the phone number for the local radio station. I press the heels of my palms into my eyes. I wish I’d looked through Mum and Dad’s things earlier; I wish I’d known on my birthday what she’d thought of as a present.
I can’t help myself—I turn to 21 December and look at the day she died. There are two appointments and a list of tasks left incomplete. Tucked into the back of the datebook are a handful of business cards, leaflets, and scribbled notes. The datebook is a cross section of Mum’s life, as illuminating as an autobiography and as personal as a journal. I slip the photos inside and hug the book to my chest for a moment, and then I start to put everything back where it came from.
I replace the desk organizer, and with it the paperweight I made from clay and painted when I was in primary school. It used to live on the dresser in the kitchen, holding down the myriad classroom letters.
I run my finger over the superglued crack that divides it neatly in two, and I have a sudden, sharp memory of the sound it made when it hit the wall.
There were apologies.
Tears. Mine. Mum’s.
“Good as new,” Dad said, once the glue had dried. But it wasn’t, and neither was the patch of wall where he filled the dent and painted over it in a shade that didn’t quite match what had gone before. I wouldn’t talk to him for days.
I pull out the bottom drawer of the desk and retrieve the bottle of vodka. It’s empty. Most of them are. They’re everywhere. At the back of the wardrobe; in the toilet tank; wrapped in a towel in the depths of the airing cupboard. I find them, I pour away the contents, and I push the glass to the bottom of the recycling bin.
If there were bottles before I went to university, they were better hidden. Or I didn’t notice them. I returned home to a life that had altered in my absence. Were my parents drinking more, or had I been swayed by a world beyond the narrow scope of my childhood? After I found the first bottle, there seemed to be hundreds—like learning a word and then seeing it everywhere.
An involuntary shiver tickles my spine. Someone walking over your grave, Mum used to say. It’s dark outside. I catch a glimpse of something moving in the garden. My heart thumps, but when I look properly, it’s my own pale face staring back at me, distorted by the old glass.
A noise outside makes me jump. Pull yourself together, Anna.
It’s this room. It’s full of memories, not all of them good. It’s making me jumpy. I’m imagining things. A ghostly figure in the window, footsteps outside.
But wait: I do hear footsteps . . .
Slow and deliberate, as though the owner was trying not to be heard. A soft crunch of gravel underfoot.
There’s someone outside.
There are no lights on upstairs, and none down here, save for the desk light in the study. From the outside the house will be in near darkness.
Could it be a burglar? This street is filled with high-value properties, crammed with antiques and paintings bought as much for investment as for show. As the business grew, my parents spent their money on beautiful things, many of which could be easily seen through the downstairs windows. Perhaps someone came by earlier, when Ella and I were at the police station, and decided to return under cover of darkness. Maybe—a hard knot of fear forms in my throat—maybe they’ve been observing for a while. All day I’ve been unable to lose the feeling I’m being watched, and now I wonder if my instincts have been correct.
As a child, I knew the code for the burglar alarm long before I could memorize our telephone number, but it hasn’t been set since Mark moved in. He wasn’t used to living in a house with an alarm. He’d set it off every time he came home, cursing in frustration as he fumbled with the keypad.
“Rita’s enough of a deterrent, surely?” he said, after telling the alarm company that, yes, it was another false alarm. I’d fallen out of the habit of setting it myself, and now that I was home all day with Ella, we had stopped using it entirely.
I consider setting it now, but I know I won’t be able to fathom how to zone it in the dark, and the thought of being there, by the front door, as a burglar tries to get in, brings goose bumps to my arms.
I should take Ella upstairs. I can pull the chest of drawers in her room across the door. They can take what they want from down here—it doesn’t matter. I assess the sitting room with an objective eye, wondering what they’re after. The television, I suppose, and the obvious things, like the silver punch bowl that once belonged to my great-grandmother and now holds African violets. On the mantelpiece are two porcelain birds I bought for my parents on their anniversary. They aren’t valuable, but they look as though they could be. Should I take them with me? If I take the birds, what else should I take? So many memories in this house; so much I would grieve over. Impossible to take it all.
It’s hard to work out exactly where the footsteps are. The quiet crunch of gravel gets louder, as though the prowler walked first to one side of the house and is now returning to the other. I take up my mobile, lying next to the baby monitor. Should I call the police? A neighbor?
I scroll through the numbers on my mobile phone until I find Robert Drake’s number. I hesitate, not wanting to call him but knowing it makes sense to do so. He’s a surgeon; he’ll be good in an emergency, and if he’s still at home next door he can come out and take a look, or just turn on the outside lights and scare off whoever’s out there . . .
His phone is switched off.
The crunch of footsteps on gravel gets louder, competing with the rush of blood singing in my ears. I hear a dragging noise. A ladder?
To the side of the house, between the graveled front drive and the landscaped back garden, is a narrow strip of land with a shed and a log store. I hear a dull bang that could be the shed door. My heart accelerates. I think of the anonymous card, of my haste to take it to the police. Did I do the wrong thing? Was the card meant as a warning—that whatever happened to Mum could happen to me, too?
Maybe it isn’t burglars outside.
Maybe whoever killed my mother wants me dead, too.