Chapter 17
David Barrett is sweeping his yard.
For many people, this would be a mundane, boring task – but not for him.
Behind him, lit bright by the sun, is the farm he has built over the years.
It began life as a detached house, two up, two down, with a scratchy field and dirt land attached.
Even back then, it was expensive to buy, but it had always been his dream to own a small farm, and the property was ideal.
In the decade since he and Kate moved in, he has extended the house itself to one side and carefully cultivated the land around.
They have chickens and sheep. They have rows of crops.
For most things in life, they are self-sufficient.
And it is lovely.
Swish. Swish.
The broom makes a comforting noise as he methodically pushes the dust from the front of the house. It billows across the quiet road outside the property, cast into gentle, rolling swirls by the warm breeze. Swish. Swish. Other than that sound, the world is almost entirely silent.
And then –
‘Mama!’
He glances up to see that Robin is running across the field on the far side of the road, arms and legs working in what seems to David more of a controlled fall than a run.
His son is a little bundle of energy, and it often threatens to overtake him.
He is still discovering the bounds of his small body, and constantly testing them.
‘Robin,’ he calls. ‘Be careful.’
‘Mama!’
‘Mama’s at the shop.’
Robin keeps running, legs and arms pinwheeling.
‘Mama!’
For a moment, David is not even sure if Robin means Kate or not.
The little boy has been slow to walk and talk, and whereas he’s made up for the former since, his language remains under-developed for a child of three.
‘Mama’ was the first word he ever managed, and one he’s stubbornly clung to since.
For a while, everything was ‘mama’, from the bookshelf to the chickens, and even now it’s still the first word to come to mind when the boy is excited.
David supposes that’s natural enough. Kate certainly never minds.
‘Just be careful.’
He doesn’t shout loud enough; the breeze takes the words. And anyway, Robin is already halfway across the field and showing no signs of slowing down or being remotely careful.
David puts the broom down on the yard, his hands in his pockets, and sets off after the boy.
The field is about a hundred metres long, where it meets another curl of the road he crosses now.
There are bushes there, another field beyond the road.
There is no real danger – it is too quiet here; there is rarely even any traffic – and Robin often plays there, but he doesn’t want him out of sight.
‘Robin,’ he calls.
‘Mama!’
The word drifts back, as small as the little boy himself. David can see the bottoms of his tiny sneakers as he runs, like white balls being juggled in the patchy grass.
He isn’t too far from the bushes now.
David speeds up a little.
‘Robin,’ he shouts. ‘Come back!’
If the boy hears him, he doesn’t show it. But now David can hear something else. The whine of a scooter: a constant nasal burr, growing gradually louder.
Maybe the kid’s psychic, he thinks – because Kate is back after all; he can see her scooter puttering along a loop of the road in the distance.
Her skirt is fluttering slightly, revealing rigid calves, and her hair and scarf are rolling out behind her.
She is a stiff but careful driver, and takes the turning slowly that will bring her to the line of bushes Robin is still careering towards.
As she drives along, she glances his way, and David waves a big arm over his head once, pointing down to the bottom of the field to indicate that she has a reception committee.
She waves back slightly hesitantly, then seems to understand, notices her son on the field and slows down gradually to meet him.
She doesn’t get that far. Twenty metres away, someone stands up from behind the bushes just as she reaches them.
David can’t quite see what happens, but the sound drifts across – horrifying on a subconscious level – and it’s like a gunshot followed by a screech of metal.
He is walking, and he moves more quickly now, even as his mind is still registering the sight of the scooter on its side, careering down the road straight past his son, who has come to a halt at the bottom of the field.
‘Kate!’ he shouts.
David starts running.
He’s still trying to put it together in his head – the fragments of what just happened. She crashed. But she didn’t. There was the man. David can’t see him now. His vision of the field is juddering as he runs, but the man is out of sight anyway. Somewhere around where Kate had her accident.
Those facts gradually come together, like two lenses clicking into place, revealing a clear view of the truth. The man knocked her off the scooter.
‘Robin!’ he shouts. ‘Get back! Get back up here now!’
He sees his son’s small face turn to him, sees the look of confusion and shock. The boy is pale. He saw.
‘Robin! Back to the house!’
The man reappears: standing back up, like a shadow appearing over the bush.
He is dressed entirely in black and wearing a balaclava.
He sees David running as fast as he can towards him, watches for a second, then turns and makes striking motions at the ground out of sight.
He is holding something, David can’t see what.
‘No!’
The noise of the impacts carries. David runs hard, feet pounding across the field, not noticing or caring where Robin is now.
Because something has just snapped inside him: some twang of pain that leaves an empty kind of knowledge in its place.
The man is hitting Kate, over and over. He doesn’t know why.
He just knows he has to get there, and that he won’t get there in time, that he is chasing something he cannot catch, something that he has already missed.
And now the man is running up the road, towards the fallen scooter.
Carrying something. David adjusts his course slightly, aiming to meet him – to come charging through the bush and rugby tackle him.
But he misjudges: the man outpaces him. As David reaches the line of bushes, he has already righted the scooter and is kicking down at the pedals, revving the throttle.
David barely notices the tearing thorns as he crashes through the foliage, stumbling slightly on the sudden hardness of the tarmac, turning to see the cough of smoke as the scooter accelerates away.
He knows immediately that he has no chance of catching it. Within a moment, the man is already looping around, heading up to go straight past the front of David’s white-faced, sunlit farmhouse dream.
Kate.
He turns slowly. She is just lying there, twenty metres away. There seems to be a spill of petrol all around her head, and even though he knows it isn’t petrol, for a moment he still holds out hope as he runs.
For the moment it takes him to reach her.