Marie sits in the darkness. Moonlight slices through the blinds. She heard the familiar sounds of the cat leaping out through the open kitchen window when she closed the front door. She’s alone. Her heart is thudding hard in her chest. She remembers the boy on the floor – Harry – how his heartbeat had been deep, but slow. She hopes he’ll be OK. Knows she should have stayed, but glad she didn’t.
She stuffs the plastic bag full of what she assumes are drugs into the back of the cupboard above the sink. The pile of letters falls out, skittering across the worktop, into the sink, onto the floor. She ignores them. Opens the next cupboard. Only wine left now. White. It’ll be warm, but it’ll do.
She kicks the letters across the floor. Unscrews the cap. Pours herself a large glassful. Not a wine glass, a thick tumbler. She doesn’t feel the need for niceties. This is supposed to be a nice wine, she remembers. One that Anne brought her from her last trip to France. Her and Ian go over a couple of times a year to restock their supplies. Whenever they come back, Ian starts the same old debate about screw tops not being as good as corks, and Anne and Marie roll their eyes. Marie couldn’t care less what was used to keep the bottle sealed. She’s just happy now that she doesn’t have to look for a corkscrew.
At the kitchen table, Marie flips open her laptop. She waits for it to boot up. Taking forever in the lonely night. She takes a sip of the wine. Grimaces. Maybe not so nice, then. Maybe a coffee would be better for this. The light from outside has moved, just a fraction. Clouds crossing the moon. Some of the letters are highlighted in a muted glow, the others are dull. She gets out of her seat, turns the laptop round the other way, then goes and sits at the other side of the table.
The letters are behind her now. She can pretend they aren’t there.
Once the Windows screen has done its thing, and the various pop-ups have been closed down, she clicks on Internet Explorer and a browser window appears. Marie has a Facebook account, but she rarely goes on there. She has nothing particularly interesting to share with her handful of Facebook friends, and she’s not particularly interested in reading about people’s gripes and moans, bitching about each other – or the other lot, the ones who post pics of their kids eating breakfast. Fascinating. She’s thought about deleting her account before, but it hardly seems to be worth the effort. They don’t want you to delete your account. They try to make it as difficult as possible.
As for Twitter, she’s looked at it once. Anne called her one night when there was a documentary on about people dressed in animal masks going dogging in the woods. Apparently the Twitter commentary was even better than the show. She’d enjoyed it that night – felt like she was part of a community, all thinking the same thing – but she hadn’t set up an account and she’d never been on the site again. She had even less to say to strangers than she did to her own friends and acquaintances.
It seemed you could no longer browse properly without a login, though. A Twitter handle – was that what it was called? She wants to ditch it. Give up. What’s the point? It clearly isn’t her on there, but she’s curious to know who Scott has been reading about.
She starts to set up an account – like Facebook. It’s not like she has to use it if she doesn’t want to. She starts with her name: MarieBloomfield – too boring? It’s the obvious choice, though. She types it in. ‘Sorry – this username already exists.’ It gives her a few suggestions for alternatives. She scratches the back of her head. Takes another sip of wine. It doesn’t taste so bad this time. OK, so maybe her name isn’t that unique after all. She settles on ‘MarieBloom’, decides against adding a picture. Does the minimum amount of set-up. She’s in.
Suggestions appear of whom she might like to follow. Celebrities. Reality TV stars. Footballers. Footballers’ wives. Alan Sugar. Jeez. Is this what people do on here? She clicks on a couple of the reality TV stars and can barely understand what they’re saying, what with all the links and the heart emoticons and all the bloody hashtags. Everyone is called ‘babes’. Cheers babes, love you babes, miss you babes.
So far, so pointless.
OK . . . so let’s see who shares my name then. Who Scott thought was me. I suppose, if there’s no photo, he wouldn’t know, would he?
She types ‘MarieBloomfield’ into the search box. A few people appear. Some have variations of the name, some with numbers on the end, in the middle, using a 1 to replace the ‘i’. Various tiny photos of people, animals, things like books. Slogans. The one she wants is at the top, the one with her actual name. She clicks.
The profile window pops up.
Marie takes a breath. ‘No. It can’t be.’
The image in the background is of a yellow wicker window box filled with daisies and busy lizzies. A small green windmill stuck in the soil at one side. She closes her eyes, hopes that when she opens them again the image will be gone. It’s still there. A breeze starts up from nowhere. She turns around slowly, towards the kitchen window – left open six inches at the bottom for Cadbury to come in and out. Even in the darkness, she can see the yellow wicker shining in the moonlight. The small green windmill is whirling gently. She feels like a weight is pressing down on her shoulders, crushing her into the chair. There is half a glass of wine left – she picks it up, notices her hand is shaking. Downs the wine, barely tasting it, lets it hit the back of her throat. She feels the warmth start to spread through her.
She turns back to the screen, looks at the profile picture. Takes a closer look. Sees a child. A girl’s face, with part of another face squeezed up next to her, but cropped out of the photo. Waves of panic run up and down her body. She scrolls up and down the page, but there are no tweets. There is nothing. Just the photo of her window box – which she knows is recent, because of the flowers. She only dug it out last week, tidied it up. She recognises the girl in the photograph now, and the piece of the face that is touching hers. She’s not smiling. She looks scared, distracted. She remembers when it was taken. They were at the seaside with their parents. They were eleven. Graeme wanted a photo in the booth as a souvenir. When the curtain was closed, he ran a hand up her bare leg. When the flash pinged, blinding them both momentarily, his finger was under the elastic of her knickers.
‘Not here,’ she’d said to him. ‘What if someone sees?’
‘What if I want someone to see?’ he’d said. He’d kissed her on the ear.
She stares at the laptop screen. There is a little padlock. ‘Marie Bloomfield’s tweets are protected. Please follow to request access to this user’s timeline.’
She clicks the padlock. Waits. Pours another glass of wine.
There’s a faint scraping sound upstairs. She looks up at the ceiling. Sees the light fitting shudder. She keeps staring at the ceiling, as if expecting a trapdoor to open and someone to jump right through. He can’t be up there. He’s locked up. He’s never allowed to get out. If he had got out, they’d have called her, wouldn’t they? Someone would’ve warned her. He’s not allowed near her. She doesn’t want to see him. She stares at the little padlock. Refreshes the screen.
Still locked.
Someone is playing some sort of sick joke on her. Scott? Although why he would do that, she has no idea. Maybe it was a dare. Something stupid. The side gate isn’t locked. Anyone could’ve taken a photo of her window box. The photo of her and Graeme, though . . . she can’t explain that. She has two photos from the strip of four. They are in a box with a load of other photos under her bed. She doesn’t look at them. Graeme has the other two – well, she assumes he does. If he took anything with him when they sent him away.
She refreshes the screen again. The account is still locked. She looks up at the ceiling. All is quiet. Maybe she imagined it. Maybe she’s going mad. She drains the rest of the wine from her glass and snaps the laptop shut. Maybe she’ll look at it tomorrow. Maybe she won’t. She stands, wobbles slightly. Rights herself by laying a hand on the back of the chair. The letters are still where she left them – scattered across the worktop. In the sink. On the floor.
Tomorrow she will put them all in the metal bin in the garden and burn them without reading them. Then she will phone the hospital where her brother has been locked up for the last twenty-five years . . . and make sure he is still there.