Chapter 29
Cathy wakes early, sitting up in bed with a frown.
The covers are mussed, kicked to the end of the mattress.
Another restless night, she thinks. She picks up her phone, checking the time.
Just gone half five. She stretches, annoyed at the early wake-up.
Scout will be up soon, clamoring for her attention.
It’s a hard age, this one. He needs her all the time.
It’s draining, sometimes. God, she thinks, but I wouldn’t be without him.
Cathy leans back onto the pillows and skims her text messages. There’s one from her side job, dropping her from another shift:
Sorry Cat, times are hard for all of us right now.
Cathy deletes it, trying not to think about the loss of money, the rent. The bills, her debts. The boys needing new clothes, both growing so fast, like beanstalks. The next few messages are all from Suzie, most of them sent last night and one early this morning.
12:01
Have U taken note to police yet?
12:07
Teddy says we should have gone soon as we found the cats.
01:36
Me again—can’t sleep. Call in to shop tomorrow. Important!
This last was sent with a string of heart emojis. Cathy regards it sourly and nearly puts her phone back down, but ignoring Suzie is like kicking a puppy. Suzie, with her capacity for good and her willingness to please. Cathy sighs and fires off a quick message.
Just woke up. Police took deets. Call later.
Cathy scrapes her hair from her face, fixing it into a topknot.
She’d called the police last night, just before midnight.
No one manning the station after ten, apparently.
No, she couldn’t see someone right away.
If it was urgent, she could call 999. Cathy had felt like throwing the phone at the wall.
They’d taken her details and told her they’d be in touch, but Cathy had little faith in that.
Two years prior, the house next door had been burgled and the police didn’t turn up until a week later.
Cathy yawns until her jaw cracks and pulls on her robe.
She’ll go to the police station as soon as it opens.
They won’t be able to ignore her then. She shivers, pulling thick socks over the cuffs of her jogging bottoms. Since she turned off the radiator in her bedroom, she’s keenly felt the cold but heating bills are crazy these days.
It means her room is cold and damp and drafty, but she’ll manage. She always does.
Cathy walks into the kitchen and fills the coffee machine with water, turning it on at the wall.
She’s thinking about Joe finding Hazel standing in his fields of long grass and wildflowers, tall heads of poppies swaying in the breeze.
How the hives must have looked, like crash-landed satellites, smoking craters in the ground.
The air smelling of smoke and honey and melted wax.
Hazel, raw and swollen with bee stings, her skin blotchy.
But she was still smiling, Joe had told her mother, and Cathy knew exactly the smile he’d meant.
She’d seen it herself, the day she went down Shooter’s Hill, the day she’d discovered her two goldfish, Britney and Christina, dead in their tank, the water polluted with bleach.
A big, big smile that barely fit Hazel’s face.
Cathy flips open the sugar canister, wondering what Suzie had meant about having something important to tell her.
She hopes it is something they can use. Everything so far has felt like a dead end.
She yawns again, taking her coffee over to the back door.
She sometimes likes to drink it outside first thing, before the rest of the house wakes up, when the light over the ridge is blue and foggy.
She considers checking in on Scout—after all his room is right next door to the kitchen—but she very much wants a moment to herself.
Cathy would never tell anyone this, but these early hours are a sacred time.
She only becomes aware of the sound of the television as she’s coming back into the house.
A muted voice, a flickering blue light in the dark lounge just down the hall.
A year or so prior, it wouldn’t have been unusual for Cathy to come downstairs and find the TV on and Danny asleep facedown on the sofa, but since she’d moved his TV and PlayStation into his room, those long nights had stopped.
Now she rarely sees Danny surface until after midday.
Cathy puts down her cup, crossing to the kitchen doorway and peering across the hall. The lounge door is open.
“Danny?”
In the sitting room, the curtains are drawn and the television is playing quietly.
Not a cartoon or one of Danny’s ultraviolent computer games but the news, the rolling news, a never-ending feed of suffering.
Cathy hates the news channel and rarely has it on.
It makes her jumpy, hearing about everything happening all the time.
The news anchor is reading out a story about a fire at a clothing factory in Delhi which has killed forty-three people.
The pictures show grieving women covering their faces, scorched paintwork.
Fire engines in cramped and crowded streets.
Cathy pulls back the curtains and reaches for the remote, only then noticing her youngest son as she does so.
Scout is lying on the sofa with a blanket pulled gently up to his chin.
His face is peaceful, sooty eyelashes long against his cheeks. Cathy frowns. What’s he doing here?
“Scout?” She turns the television off. “Baby? How did you get out your room?”
Crouching beside him, Cathy reaches out a hand. Just before her fingertips brush his skin—so pale, he almost looks like a little waxwork—she has a dreadful premonition that he will be cold and lifeless.
“Scout? Honey?”
She brushes his hair gently back from his forehead.
His skin is cool. When she peels back the blanket, Cathy notices he is no longer wearing his yellow sleep suit that she’d dressed him in before bed last night.
He is only in a damp nappy and vest. For a long time she watches the rise and fall of his chest as if to convince herself he is really here, really alive. Inside her, an alarm is ringing.
“Scout?”
Cathy draws him to her and presses her lips to his crown.
He smells like silty water, like copper pipes and rust. It reminds her of the smell that comes off Idless Lake on cool days.
Danny was always wanting to go swimming up at the lake, but she’d never let him.
Something about the idea of the water there being …
infected, somehow. She worried the water would perforate his brain, sending him mad like the lead pipes did the Romans. These woods did funny things to people.
“Scout, wake up for me, honey.”
Anxiety cinches her throat. How the hell did he get out of his cot?
The sides are still up because Scout is a restless sleeper, and she worries about him tumbling out at night.
But there’s no way Scout could have climbed over the baby gate outside his room—it is too high.
How did he get out of his sleep suit? She shifts the weight of him as his eyes flicker open, pupils black and swollen.
He looks up at her, babbling in his lispy, childish voice.
She kisses the soft curve of his cheek, feeling distracted and upset, a fear so deep it gnaws at her bones.
She inhales his skin, trying to work out what feels so wrong.
It’s him, she realizes. He smells wrong.
Normally Scout has a soft, biscuity aura like milk and rusks, like the buttery balm she rubs into his skin after bath time.
Some mornings she would take him into her bed with a cup of coffee and just inhale the feathery hair on his crown, how familiar it was, part of her, part of him.
This morning, sitting here in a place he has no business being, Scout smells bad.
Sweat and damp and earth. She holds him at arm’s length, unease fastening and fattening on her like a leech.
No bruises. No marks. Just that flush on his cheeks as if he’d come in from the cold and that strange, nagging feeling that something is off-kilter.
She checks the front door. It’s closed but not locked.
These days it rarely is. Either Danny forgets a key or she has lost hers.
Cathy always tells herself she has nothing worth breaking in for anyway, but as she holds her son tight to her chest and fights the urge to cry, she realizes that is not true, not true at all.