Chapter 14
Mum thought, and still thinks, that she saw the woman first, but I was there too and I’d already spotted her.
She was staring at our house, crying hard, and not only that—she was crying in a particular way.
When I first noticed her, I was struck by the unusualness of that way but couldn’t have explained what was so odd about it to anyone.
It has taken me this long to work out the best way to describe it.
The woman (Lesley Gavey, though none of us knew that when she first appeared outside our lounge window) was crying not as if she was at the beginning of something, or even in the middle.
She was weeping at our house in a way that suggested she was close to the end of a long-running, grueling drama involving her and it (“him,” Mum would have insisted: Shukes was a “him”), and that this—her being here now, sobbing convulsively on the village green—was perhaps the opening of the penultimate scene of that drama, one in which things could still very much go one way or the other.
“That’s weird,” Mum muttered.
“What?” Tobes asked from the corner of the corner sofa, both hands and his entire mind on his phone.
“There’s a woman standing in the middle of the green, staring at our house and crying,” Mum told him.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The woman had been there for about two minutes by the time Mum said anything about her.
She was lurching forward and back every so often and giving an impression of extreme instability.
(Anyone who can stagger and reel like that on something as flat as Swaffham Tilney’s village green must have a dangerous amount of wobbliness inside them.)
We all looked. The crying was constant and added the only wet element to a dry and sunny day.
The woman gulped and heaved, opening and closing her mouth and not making any attempt to stop the flow.
It looked to me like deliberate, committed sobbing, as if coming here and doing this was her chosen project for the day.
“Mum, what have you done?” Tobes asked in a tone of affected weariness. “You must have done something to piss her off, because…jeez.” I think he was scared and didn’t want to admit it. I know I was. I didn’t want someone like this, someone capable of doing this, anywhere near me.
It was definitely Shukes she was focused on—the house itself, not anything inside.
If she’d wanted to see the contents, living and inanimate, she’d have needed to come much closer.
She seemed, while weeping, to be examining every single bit of Shukes in turn: his roof, his front door, the upstairs, the downstairs.
Mum walked over and stood right in the window, but the Weeper gave no indication of having seen her or of caring that Mum was watching her act like a freak in public.
“Mum, what’s going on?” Tobes asked.
“I don’t know. Shh,” Mum whispered, as if the woman outside could have heard us, which she couldn’t. She was standing too far away.
Her hair was glossy, dark brown, shoulder-length—also coarse-looking and a little straw-like, despite not being straw-colored.
Her dark-blue eyes were too big for her narrow nose, and her small, neat mouth was almost cartoonishly mouth-shaped, with a pronounced “M” for a top lip: a Capital M Mouth.
She was wearing a short-sleeved, fitted, knee-length dress—red with a pattern of white flowers—as if she’d escaped from a cocktail party at which something devastating had happened.
Black ankle boots with pointy toes, gold hoop earrings with small pearls hanging down from them, navy handbag over her shoulder.
She was absurdly overdressed for the outdoor pursuit of crying in a Fenland village.
“Looks like she might be about to march up to our front door, so…before that happens, do you want to fill me in?” said Tobes. “Am I going to have to stop her from, like, stabbing you to death?”
“I don’t think she’ll come any closer,” Mum told him.
“But who is she?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Well, what does she want?” Tobes persisted.
Mum shook her head. “I don’t know any more than you, darling. Sorry. It’s very odd. Maybe she’ll… Hmm.”
I thought, but didn’t say, that none of us should try to find out any more than the nothing we knew.
I sensed that the best thing by far would be for the woman to go away and never come back, without us finding out anything about her.
I didn’t want her in my head any more than I wanted her in our village or house.
There was something chilling about the way she was endlessly looking, endlessly weeping.
“I’d quite like to get dressed if I’m going to have to physically defend you,” Tobes said.
He was still in pajama bottoms and bare-chested, with last Christmas’s joke present on his feet: enormous rabbit slippers.
One was missing an ear, thanks to Champ, who had chewed it off toward the end of his puppy phase.
Mum took the bait. “Defend me? I don’t need defending. I haven’t done anything.”
“Are you sure?” said Tobes. “What if she’s, like, Dad’s other woman, come round to make a scene?” He narrowed his eyes in mock suspicion. “Or maybe you’re the one who’s been playing away. Is she the furious wife of your—?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Toby.” Mum pulled a face of exaggerated impatience.
“I’m just saying: You don’t know her, I don’t know her… Maybe Dad does.”
“He doesn’t. Dad doesn’t know people. He’s too lazy. And too busy with work.”
“Fair.” Tobes nods. “Shall I go and ask her what she wants? Tell her to stop staring at Shukes?”
“No,” said Mum. “We don’t own the village green, and we’ve got no right to tell her what to do with her…eyes. Plus, she’s distraught. If I went out and said anything to her, I’d have to ask her if she’s okay, be sympathetic—”
“Er, what? No you wouldn’t.” Tobes sounded as if he’d never heard anything so outrageous in his life. “Just say, ‘Get away from my house, you nutter.’”
“Don’t be horrible.” Mum flinched. “Could she be the mother of someone from school, or one of your friends? Is anyone…upset with you at the moment?”
“Good try, Mother.” Tobes grinned. “Nice attempt at buck-passing. I promise you, she’s nothing to do with me. So…that just leaves…you!”
Mum got huffy then. “I don’t know why you’re talking as if I’ve got some kind of guilty secret, Toby.
The worst thing I’ve done in my entire life is once take some treats out of the treat barrel at the vet’s without permission, one day when Champ seemed really hungry.
There was no one behind the counter. I felt bad afterward, and next time I went in, I told them I’d done it. The vet said it was fine.”
“I’m joking, Mum.” Tobes patted her on the back. “Relax your trim. Also, that’s so not the worst thing you’ve ever done, but…look, I’m no saint myself, so—”
“What do you mean? What else have I done?”
“Ooh, let’s see. Bitched about Granny, Oonagh, Auntie Vicky—”
“Not true.” Mum was shaking her head. “Close friends and relatives sometimes behave badly and upset you. When that happens, I sometimes talk to Dad about it, or you, or Ree. Everyone does that. It’s allowed.”
Toby laughed. “Everyone does it, yeah, and the ‘it’ that everyone does is called bitching about people behind their backs. Mum, I’m messing with you. It’s just bantz.”
Throughout this conversation, Mum’s eyes and Toby’s both kept drifting to the window. At no point did either of them forget the presence of the sobbing woman.
“If she stays too much longer, this turns into harassment,” said Tobes. “We can ring the police.”
“No! Don’t.”
“Where’s Dad? He’ll deal with this, if you won’t let me do it.”
“What if she knows we’re about to put Shukes up for sale?” said Mum. “What if that’s why she’s here? I know it doesn’t exactly make sense and there’s no ‘For Sale’ board outside yet, but—”
“How could she know?” Tobes asked.
“She might have spoken to someone at the estate agent’s and they’ve told her.”
“What, and she’s interested? Would you act like this in front of a house you might want to buy?” Tobes made a dismissive noise. “Wait, look, here’s Dad, with Champ. This’ll be crease. Watch his face when he spots her. Bet he gets off the green to avoid her.”
I moved closer to the window and saw Dad and Champ in the distance, up by the playground area, still too far away for Dad to have spotted the Weeper.
I watched as he stopped a little behind Champ, who was busy sniffing the bushy weeds covering Corinne Sullivan’s front wall.
Champ is a very thorough sniffer and likes to approach any flower, plant, or tree from all angles with his “genius nose,” as Mum calls it, before lifting a furry haunch.
“Don’t let him go there, Mark!” Mum was already on her way out of the room. Seconds later, Tobes and I saw her sprinting across the green and heard her shout (because she didn’t bother to close the front door), “Don’t let him pee on Corinne’s wall! Pull him away!”
Too late. Champ was already relieving himself in the prohibited area.
I understood why Mum was so dead set on stopping him, but she needn’t have worried.
Corinne is far too sensible to think that Mark and Champ Lambert could or would ever be part of the official campaign against her.
Yes, there were residents of Swaffham Tilney who—egged on by Michelle Hyde’s husband, Richard, the campaign leader—made a point of training their dogs to relieve themselves against Corinne’s front wall, but everyone knew Mark Lambert was a good sort and not like that.
What worried me far more than Champ’s bathroom break was our open front door. I watched the crying woman carefully to check she hadn’t started gliding eerily toward us without moving her legs.
She hadn’t. Instead, Mum’s bursting out of Shukes and shouting at Dad seemed to jolt the lachrymose lurker into a different frame of mind.
She stopped crying, wiped her face, turned, and started to walk at a brisk pace in the opposite direction, toward the Old Post Office and the Rebel of the Reeds.
Around two minutes later, I saw a blue BMW I didn’t know drive too fast past the green on the other side of the road.
It whizzed by too quickly for me to get a look at the driver, but I was sure it was the sobbing stalker, leaving Swaffham Tilney.
Tobes had muttered, “Bye, nutjob,” when she’d first started to walk away, and returned to the sofa.
Then Dad, Mum, and Champ came inside and closed the front door.
Dad was in placating mode, saying, “Fair enough, Sal. You’ve made your point,” to which Mum replied, “And if only me doing that ever resulted in you remembering for more than thirty seconds and, like, making sure it never happens again!”
“Let me make it up to you, my darling wife,” Dad said earnestly, putting his arms round Mum. “Why don’t I go over and ring Richard Hyde’s doorbell right now, and, when he opens the door, just piss all over him?”
“Stop! Urgh. You’re so disgusting.” He’d made her laugh, though.
Champ, curled up in his beige Sound Sleep Donut bed next to Mum’s favorite leather armchair, didn’t quite bark but made his rumbling-engine noise that means, “I can wake up properly if it turns out we’ve got a problem, but I’d rather not.”
The Lamberts didn’t have a problem, not anymore—or so they thought. The woman had gone, and we all assumed she’d never come back.