Chapter 7
I’d planned to head straight inside, but by the time I make it up my front steps I fear my legs might give out on me, so Daphne insists I sit.
“Would you like to do some deep breathing together?” She starts inhaling.
“I’m fine,” I say to her.
Daphne keeps inhaling like a lunatic.
“For the love of God, Daphne, stop that before you hyperventilate.”
The police and the coroner are inside Ishaan’s house.
In the laneway, Peter and Joan are speaking in hushed whispers.
The idea that Joan knows who I am is unsettling, but Peter knowing is mortifying.
Peter is a good man and a good neighbor.
The idea of him being aware of such a thing about me humiliates me to my very core.
“Forget her,” Daphne says. “Miserable old cow.”
“Forget who? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Daphne rolls her eyes. “You’re shaking, darling.”
“She was the one then,” I say. “Who put the article under the door.”
“But we already knew that, didn’t we?” Daphne says.
I nod. “Now we also know she told Peter.”
“We don’t know that. Maybe Peter already knew?”
I shake my head. Oddly—unreasonably—I feel like I would have known if he did. It would have displayed itself through awkward, stilted conversations rather than the ease and comfort of our day-to-day acquaintance. In the end, I suppose, it doesn’t matter.
“Shoo!” I say, when I look down and see Nugget at my feet. “Shoo, you stupid dog.”
“Let her stay,” Daphne says, always a soft touch. “She misses Ishaan.”
“At least someone does.”
“Someone will come and get her soon.”
I roll my eyes. “Fine.”
We sit for a moment in silence. But when Daphne makes a noise, I glance over at her.
“What?” I say.
She’s giggling.
“What?” I repeat. I’m already laughing too, preemptively.
“What about when she asked the paramedic if there was any evidence of …” Daphne is laughing so hard she can’t finish.
“Foul play!” I cry.
We double over, in the companionable silence that comes when there is no oxygen left for more laughter. It fills up every part of me until there is no room left for fear or shame or horror. This, I realize, is the true gift of friendship. The lifesaving part of friendship.
“What’s so funny?”
The child appears from nowhere, causing Daphne and me to scream. I clasp a hand to my heart. “Mother of God, child, don’t you have a home?”
“Yes. But I like hanging out with you.”
Daphne beams. “And we like hanging out with you, darling.”
“Mother of—”
“Don’t say ‘Mother of God,’ ” Persephone jumps in. “You need to come up with a better catchcry.”
I close my mouth. Impertinent child.
“You have blood on your shoe.”
“What?”
Persephone is pointing at my right foot where blood has pooled on the top of my navy sneakers. “See?”
“So I have.” I pull up the hem of my trousers. There, just above the ankle, is a deep, ragged cut that appears to be oozing blood. “It must have been from the fence.”
Daph winces. She’s never been good with blood.
Persephone recoils. “I’ll get my mum. She’s a nurse. MUM!”
“Don’t get your mother,” I say, not only because she is not, to my knowledge, a nurse, but because it is entirely unnecessary. But it’s too late, Persephone is out of her seat, headed toward her terrace house.
“Mother of—” I cry, then slap a hand over my mouth. Persephone shakes her head disappointedly.
Roxanne lets herself in through my gate and onto my porch, carrying a white tin medicine box under one arm. She’s a tall woman, at least compared to anyone but me, the kind of scrawny slim of catwalk supermodels. She’s yawning, as per usual.
“Your daughter has been bothering me for hours,” I say, gesturing at Persephone. “You wouldn’t ever consider actually parenting your own child, I suppose?”
“God, no,” Roxanne says, setting down the box. She kneels by my feet. “I assume it’s this ankle?”
“Was it the blood that tipped you off?”
Roxanne snorts. She is, it turns out, one of those offensively good-natured people.
It makes me wonder if she is, in fact, a nurse.
It’s always bothered me, nurses and their insufferable cheer.
Never mind that they spend their days doing the most difficult and important job on earth for a wage barely above the poverty line, they do it with a bloody smile on their faces. It’s hard to take, truly it is.
“A lot of drama today.” Roxanne rolls up the leg of my slacks and starts efficiently unwrapping a sterile cloth from its plastic wrap. “How are you feeling?”
“Me?” I say. “I’m feeling fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”
In fact I’m feeling clammy and a little unwell.
“Not every day you see a dead body.”
“No, I suppose not,” I say. My voice sounds a little funny, so I clear my throat. “Unless you’re a coroner, I suppose. Or in the medical field. By the way, Persephone tells me you’re a nurse.”
I mean it comically, to highlight the fact that children are insufferable liars, but Roxanne shoots her daughter what I would consider to be a look.
“I am,” she says after a beat. “Also a cook. A chauffeur. A cleaner. Generally I go by the job title of mother, though.”
“That’s why you’re always yawning then,” I say. “All that mothering.”
She shrugs. “You have to hustle, don’t you? To make ends meet.”
I consider this. “Persephone’s father contributes, though? Financially?”
“We make do,” Roxanne says. She rummages in her box and pulls out a tube of something. “Anyway, let’s see what we have under all this blood.”
As she begins to clean the wound, I find myself staring.
She’s a lovely looking girl. Almost black hair, pale skin, rosy cheeks, water-blue eyes.
She’s in a tracksuit today, but I’ve seen her tarted up to go out on the town, and in her tight dresses you can’t help but notice her hourglass figure.
There’d been a time when I would have yearned for even one-hundredth of this beauty, but one of the many glorious things about old age is that while aspirations of beauty may linger, they sit well below aspirations of health, comfort, and absence of pain.
“Owww!” I cry. “Mother of God, Roxanne! What are you putting on me now? Acid?”
“It’s antiseptic,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Sissy.”
“Elsie Fitzpatrick?”
We all look up. A pair of uniformed police stand in front of us.
“Good afternoon,” one says. “I’m Constable Harris and this is Detective Gibson.”
The police are both men, which is disappointing. All the British crime shows I watch have led me to believe that police partnerships are exclusively between a man and a woman, generally a young, exceptionally attractive couple with Cockney accents and a lot of unresolved sexual tension.
“Oh good!” I say. “Are you here for the dog?”
“Which dog?”
I point at Nugget. I get the feeling that these policemen aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.
They are both that north-of-sixty, thick-necked variety of man—the kind that still lives with his elderly mother and tells people that he “cares” for her when really he’s just waiting it out so he can steal her fully-paid-off two-bedroom villa unit in Bonbeach.
They are the same height (five-foot-eight would be my guess) and same build (rotund), and both have that pink-stained, mottled skin of one who drinks too much and doesn’t take care of himself.
It would have been difficult to distinguish one from the other had it not been for Harris’s thick salt-and-pepper mustache and beard, and the fact that Gibson is bald as a bowling ball.
In light of this, I call them—inside my own head—Hairy and Baldy.
“Nugget isn’t my dog,” I say. “She’s Ishaan’s. Ishaan who just died?”
Understanding dawns, finally. “Oh. Well, no, we’re not here for the dog. You’ll have to call the animal shelter.”
“I’ll have to?” I blink. “Can’t you call the animal shelter?”
“I’m afraid not. We just wanted to give you our card, as you were the one to find your neighbor.”
The mustached policeman holds out a business card and I take it.
“What happened to your arm?” he asks.
“What?” I look at my arm. “Oh, that. It happened a couple of days ago when I discovered Nugget in my garden. When I returned her to Ishaan, he grabbed her and scratched my arm! That’ll teach me to do a community service.”
“Rude,” Persephone says.
“Yes. Well. Admittedly I was threatening to send her to the sausage factory. But never mind that.”
There’s a short silence. Even Persephone doesn’t speak. It’s irritating, having to be the one to fill the silence all the time.
“Anyway, why do I have to call the animal shelter? Nugget is the only resident I dislike more than Ishaan.”
Roxanne also gives me a funny look. I realize I might have made a faux pas.
“Disliked,” I correct. “My apologies. “Disliked more than Ishaan.”