31 JULY

Twenty-five days before abandonment

10

Dad came home with the rabbit at the end of their first week in Blackthorn Ashes. They were celebrating, he said. He’d got a hutch and water bottles, bowls and straw and food – everything the rabbit needed. He brought other stuff too, wine and flowers and ice cream, but the rabbit was the main attraction. Mum watched him set up the hutch in a corner of the garden. She’d put a smile on but Christie heard her whispering, ‘What were you thinking? You don’t ask me first, just waltz in with a new pet?’ Dad looked surprised, and a bit hurt. He said a house wasn’t a home without a pet.

‘Christie’ll enjoy her. Agnes too. Come on, love.’

Dad’d been wired since before they moved in. He was busy on-site most days, checking progress on the unfinished houses, pep-talking the sales team. Christie had heard him and Trevor talking about how nothing was happening as fast as they needed it to. Dad was serious but it never lasted. You couldn’t stay serious for long round Trevor. When he came home, Dad’d grab the basketball, shouting for Christie to come and shoot hoops with him.

‘C’mon! Move! Nope, too slow!’

Sometimes, it was like he was mad at Christie. But mostly he was just buzzed, touching stuff in the house, grinning so hard you could see the teeth at the back of his mouth. Because he loved it here and because Agnes was back, making them a proper family again.

Christie was glad too, to begin with. Everyone went a bit batshit around his sister, turning down the noise, only using air freshener in an emergency because it brought her out in a rash – but it was cool having her home. He’d forgotten how much he’d missed her.

They named the rabbit Binka. She was pretty cute. Brown fur, long ears. Everyone fell in love with her, even Mum. Agnes was bonkers about her. Christie wanted a dog but Dad said not while the building was going on. ‘When it’s finished, mate. Then we’ll get you a puppy.’

Christie didn’t want a puppy. He wanted a proper dog, a big one he could take on walks, who’d growl at strangers and bark in the middle of the night. He’d never be allowed a dog like that, he knew. It’d freak his sister out. He could hear the arguments, ‘We’re trying to be a family,’ when they’d been one for years, all the time she was in London and, yeah, it was cool having her home but other people’s grown-up kids didn’t come back. She spent more time with Binka than she did with them, sitting for hours in the garden with the rabbit curled in her lap.

‘You used to do that,’ Mum said. ‘When you were tiny, you’d sit in her lap like that when you were upset or sad.’

‘Why didn’t I sit in your lap?’

‘You did.’ She smoothed his hair, stopping when he jerked his head away. ‘But it was Agnes you went to, when you could.’

So that was batshit too, Mum treating him like a baby again when they’d agreed on a new bedtime, more freedoms. He had to listen to shit about his sister all day, which meant listening to shit about when he was a baby. It started getting old, really quickly.

They’d only had Binka a few days before it happened. Christie had stopped cleaning the hutch and changing the water bottles because the rabbit was hers, not his. It was her job to keep it safe. Her fault, what happened.

He was getting a Magnum from the freezer when he saw her in the garden with her head bent over her lap. Her hair was hanging, touching the grass. Mum was working upstairs, Dad with Trevor down the end of the estate. Agnes was rocking but she did that a lot. He’d learnt to ignore it.

The Magnum was getting sweaty in his hand. She was making this noise like scratching but coming from her mouth. He stared past her to the hutch. Its door was open. She was probably rocking the rabbit, singing to it. He wasn’t going to freak out. He’d seen the way Mum and Dad got when she went into one of her states. At first they’d be extra smiley, making jokes to try and jolly her out of it. Then they’d go quiet, spying on her out of the corners of their eyes like they didn’t want her knowing they were worried in case it made her worse. Mum would go stiff, her neck and fingers then her face. She’d get on with whatever she was doing – cooking or reading or looking at work emails – but she’d be getting stiffer and stiffer until Christie started to feel it too like cramp in his neck. All because Agnes was rocking or pacing or pinching her wrists. He bit the chocolate from the top of the Magnum but he didn’t want to eat it now. He couldn’t swallow without pushing past the lump in his throat. She sat there making that sound, bent double like someone in a Japanese horror movie, as if she’d suddenly come upright by cracking her spine and turning inside out, bones snapping, head hanging between her legs as she staggered towards the house howling.

He dropped the Magnum into the bin and raced upstairs.

‘Mum!’

She was sitting at her laptop with her earbuds in. She frowned and shook her head, mouthing she was on a call. He flapped his hand at the garden, mouthing back, ‘Agnes!’ and she ended the call, dragging out the earbuds, dropping them on the desk. She did it so quickly he knew he’d been right to run up here. Panic was the only response that made sense where his sister was concerned.

He followed Mum down into the garden, staying back as she went to where Agnes was bent. Mum knelt three feet away, careful not to crowd her. She said his sister’s name really softly and other stuff he couldn’t hear from where he was standing, using the special voice she only ever used to Agnes, the one that made him think of someone lowering a dinghy into the sea really carefully so it didn’t topple and fill with water.

Agnes kept rocking, her arms out of sight in her lap. Then she started to say, ‘I told you,’ over and over. Louder and louder until she was shouting, ‘I told you!’

Mum put out her hands, not touching Agnes, just trying to calm her down. It was like a police standoff: ‘Put the gun down and we’ll talk.’

‘I told you!’

Agnes rocked back, unbending and opening her arms at the same time so they could see what she’d been hiding in her lap. Binka. Brown fur and long ears, not twitching.

‘Oh no. Oh, sweetheart.’ Mum touched the fur with the tip of her finger. ‘What happened?’

The rabbit was dead. Christie felt a rush of horror, hot and cold. He came closer, wanting to see what it looked like. He’d thought it’d look the same but it didn’t. It looked bad, like it was already stiff. Agnes pushed her hands at it suddenly, as if she wanted Binka off her lap. She wasn’t shouting any more but her face was making the shape of a shout, her eyes big and black.

Mum leant in and scooped the rabbit from her lap, holding it between her hands. She laid it on the grass very gently, stroking it like it was still alive. Agnes watched and after a bit, her shoulders went down and the shout slipped off her face.

Christie’s heart was slamming. He thought he might be sick. He sat on the grass because it was odd to be the only one standing and because he was afraid Mum would notice and tell him to go inside the house. She didn’t. She glanced his way and gave a tiny nod, telling him he’d done the right thing in running upstairs to fetch her.

‘It’s this place,’ Agnes said. ‘I told you.’

‘Sweetheart.’ Mum used the lowering-boat voice. ‘It’s horrible but these things happen—’

‘It’s here.’ Agnes put the heel of her hand to the lawn, pushing until it left a dent in the grass. ‘She died because of this place. It’s not right. It’s sick. It’s going to make us all sick.’

‘No, it’s not.’ Mum held out a hand to Christie but he shook his head. She’d touched the dead rabbit with that hand. ‘These things happen. Agnes? It’s very sad. I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t get it. None of you do. But I told you this would happen . . .’

Christie turned to look at the house. It looked the same as ever but he shivered.

They’d bury Binka in the flower bed in a shoebox; he’d seen it in movies. Agnes would paint a pebble from the beach and make a grave, a place she could point at next time she was freaking out about Blackthorn Ashes. There was poison here, that’s what she kept saying. Coming up through the ground, seeping through the walls while they slept, rotting everything. She said it over and over, in a hundred different ways. It never seemed to occur to her she might be the poison. The cause of Mum’s sore eyes and Dad’s headaches. The reason the rabbit died. It’d start to smell soon. It would swell. Flies would come, then maggots.

Christie shivered. It was on her. Agnes. It was all on her.