Chapter 3
I was late to nursery. Of course I was, I was always late, and if I wasn’t the staff still managed to fill me with a generalised sense of guilt, although I was certain they didn’t mean to.
‘Mummmeeeeee!’ Tilly launched herself at me, hair flying and arms full of a ridiculous number of cereal boxes covered in an inadequate layer of poster paint. Which wasn’t, contact revealed, quite dry yet.
‘Hello, darling. What have you been making?’
Tilly stared at the cereal boxes, which had been glued together to form a random shape. It could have been anything from a house to a scale model of the space shuttle, it was impossible to tell. ‘Box,’ she said firmly.
I smiled apologetically at her named worker, whose name was actually Ashlee. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘See you tomorrow. Say goodbye, Tilly.’
‘Bye, Tilly, see you in the morning!’ Ashlee trilled, sounding way too perky for someone who’s spent the last ten hours in the company of tiny children.
I had no idea how she did it, because after two hours in the company of one small child I was reduced to monosyllables and a terrible desire to smash the TV.
Tilly did not say goodbye. She stared at the heap of blue boxes she was carrying, then pressed them firmly up against me, transferring most of the damp paint to my shirt. ‘Box,’ she said again and then, more hopefully, ‘Ice cream?’
Quadruple pay. That would mean ice cream. Maybe even a visit to the soft play centre that Tilly loved so much. Swimming and proper Christmas presents. ‘We’ll see,’ I said, and she skipped a couple of steps. ‘Did you have a good time at nursery today?’
Tilly’s little face creased for a moment. For a two-year-old she had a very wide range of expressions; she seemed to have come pre-programmed for non-verbal communication. ‘Rupert bites,’ she said, after a moment’s deep thought. ‘No biting, Rupert!’
‘No,’ I agreed, trying to remember which one of her cohort was Rupert. Or rather, since I saw more of the parents than of the children, which of the mothers and fathers I encountered looked like the sort of people who would call their son Rupert. ‘Did Rupert bite you, Tilly?’
Her blonde curls swung as she shook her head definitely.
‘I bites Rupert,’ she announced proudly.
‘Box, Mummy.’ She held her arms out and I thankfully decanted the awkward box heap back into her grasp again, making a mental note to have the ‘no biting’ talk with her again before bed and to ask Ashlee to keep an eye on both Tilly and the masticatory Rupert.
‘We’ll have to put them in the boot,’ I said, blipping the Skoda open. ‘Go and get in your seat and I’ll come and strap you in.’
It hit me again, then, as powerful as the concentrated smell of paint and glue from the model, that this was my life now.
Every so often it caught me by surprise, almost as though my mind believed that I was just playing at motherhood, only pretending to be balancing caring for my daughter and trying to scratch a living, and that I could just slam the car shut, say ‘bollocks to it’, hand the child to her real parents and head back to my actual life.
A life where I could lie in the bath without having a small person tearing off their clothes to join me in a flailing of warm skinny limbs.
A life where I could read a book or have a cup of tea without having to pretend to be a horse or a dog and I could wear clothes that suited me rather than clothes that just didn’t show the porridge stains.
But that life would mean being without Tilly.
And, quite honestly, Tilly was the only thing that made any of this almighty shit show worth carrying on with.
Almost reflexively I checked my phone. The screen was blank, no messages, no missed calls from unknown numbers.
Good. It had been weeks now. Perhaps he’d forgotten about us or decided to let us go.
Or found someone else to terrify and decided that we were too much trouble to try to track down.
Good. Yes.
Later that night, when Tilly was in bed and breathing softly through her nose with a faint whistling sound, pink and clean and rosy like a storybook image of the perfect child, the phone rang.
I stared at it for a moment before I answered. It was from a number I’d called previously but hadn’t put a name beside. ‘Hello?’ Cautious, always cautious. It could be anybody. It could be Him.
‘Is that Libby? Libby Douthwaite?’
‘Er.’ Not ready to commit yet.
‘This is Ross. Ventriss. You’re sorting out Elm Cottage for me?’
Suddenly the voice clicked into place with the mental image of the man.
Wiry and edgy, but not in the way of so many of the men I’d met, trying to look hard because the alternative was to be a target, while strung out on drugs or psychosis, fidgety and wild.
Ross had had the look of a man trying to keep his life together with paperclips and watery glue, and I knew how that felt.
‘Yes, I’m Libby. Hello.’
There was a pause. ‘You’re very quiet,’ he said. ‘I can’t really hear you.’
‘I’m not saying anything.’ Then, feeling slightly sorry for him, ‘My daughter’s asleep and I don’t want to wake her.’
I moved away from Tilly’s bedside, where I’d been sitting holding the copy of Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear? loosely on my lap and watching her sleep. I’d done all the voices tonight while reading to her and it had exhausted me beyond my wildest thespian dreams.
‘Oh, I see.’ More silence. Then, ‘Sorry, sorry, I’m just really tired, I’m not thinking straight. Look, that paper I gave you…’ He trailed off into more silence, during which all I could hear was the TV from the next flat and Tilly’s gentle snores.
‘What about it?’ I prompted, still having to whisper, which made the words sound abrupt and more peremptory than I meant them to.
My heartbeat quickened at the thought that he might have reconsidered his offer of quadruple pay and I wondered whether a signature on a tatty bit of paper could be construed a legally binding contract.
‘I… Is there anything on the back of it?’
He did sound tired. I knew about tired. In the early days, with Tilly a newborn, I’d got my own name wrong to several people, put my house keys on the doorstep with the milk bottles and put a newspaper in the fridge.
I’d cried too. A lot. The tiredness had had to take a back seat once I’d realised the danger my falling asleep could put us in and I had functioned for a long time on almost no sleep at all.
It made me slightly impatient with people who said they were tired after one late night. They had no idea.
I fetched the paper, from the pocket of my jeans. I’d folded it carefully, it was my only proof that he’d promised the quadruple pay and I was hanging more hope on that than I should have been. ‘It’s got some sort of drawing thing on the back, very faint, in pencil? Is that what you mean?’
There was an interesting noise down the phone now, an almost rubbery scrubbing sort of noise.
I wondered what on earth he was doing, and then figured that it sounded as though he was rubbing his hands over his face.
It was a sound that made me want to get into bed and sleep for eighteen hours.
‘Yes, that’s it. Look, I’m really sorry but I need it back.
I need the sketch. I didn’t realise I was writing on the back of it and I couldn’t find it and the only logical explanation was that I’d given it to you but I had to find out.
’ He spoke in a rush as though he was trying to get the words out before his eyes closed and he lapsed into unconsciousness.
‘Clearly you did.’
‘Can I come and pick it up?’
I stared wildly around the room. ‘No!’ Then, slightly less panicky, ‘No. I’m here alone with my daughter. I can’t have a strange man turning up at the door.’
‘No, no, I see that.’ He couldn’t possibly see, and even I felt that I was overreacting just a touch – after all, there were people in all the other flats, what was he going to do, batter his way in?
But his calm acceptance of what I said made me like him a little bit, and the knowledge that he wasn’t reneging on his offer made me like him even more. ‘Could you bring it over tomorrow?’
‘I was going to go to Elm Cottage tomorrow and get it sorted for you.’
‘Oh.’ I could now hear the conflict in his voice. He needed the paper, but he needed the house empty. ‘Can you do both?’
‘Not really. Not if there’s someone in the house and I need to explain to them that they need to be out.
My daughter only has a few hours at nursery, and I can’t drag her around with me.
She needs structure,’ I added, taking a wild stab at hoping that he knew nothing about small children and wouldn’t realise that lack of structure was almost their raison d’être and any attempt to maintain it was down to my need rather than Tilly’s.
‘I could meet you at the cottage?’
I sighed. ‘If you’re going to the cottage anyway, why don’t you sort out any squatters you might have? Save yourself the money and my time.’ I’d sounded brusque, but it went with the territory.
Another pause. Then he sighed too. ‘Because I can’t be seen to interfere with the eviction. I have to keep jobs like that at arm’s length so I’m not accused of harassment,’ he said.
‘Harassment?’ I’d got a bit loud, and Tilly rolled over, one hand clutching out for Brass, her inexplicably named soft dragon.
His tail was flopping again, I noticed with that half-brain that mothers seem to have concentrated on their children at all times, like instinct.
I was going to have to do some more sewing.
‘Harassment?’ I repeated, more softly. ‘What the hell am I getting involved in here?’
‘Oh, no, no, nothing sinister,’ Ross hurried to reassure me. ‘Really. I just can’t be anywhere near the inside of that cottage if there’s anyone in there. If there isn’t, if they’ve moved on or it’s all rumour and shadows, then I can dance the hornpipe up the stairs if I want to.’
I widened my eyes at the thought of that rumpled, exhausted-looking man doing anything as energetic as dancing a hornpipe, but of course he couldn’t see.
‘Or knock the place down,’ he went on. ‘Which is what I need to do. So, if you’re going to be there, can I come and get the paper from you? The sketch really is dreadfully important and I was stupid to give it away. You do still have it?’
He sounded a little frantic now, as though he was afraid that I’d already thrown the paper away and was just about to admit that today was rubbish day and his precious sketch was currently on its way to the recycling centre.
‘Yes, yes, I’ve got it.’ I was still mentally stitching Brass’s tail back.
‘All right. I was going to get there about ten, so any time around then.’ Plus, if I had to go back into that terrifying bird-infested room again, at least someone would be outside to drag my pecked and clawed body from the ruin and inform my relatives.
Hyperbole, to me, was just a collection of syllables.
‘Tomorrow at ten, then. Please remember the paper.’ He hung up, leaving me feeling slightly resentful.
Why did he think I would forget it? Because he was having trouble remembering things?
But tiredness was a bitch, I knew that much from all the sleep-deprived nights with a wailing baby, walking, walking, wondering if she was ill, too terrified to ask for help.
My heart rose on a sickening beat and I breathed carefully until it went back to its rightful place again.
I had no need to panic. I was here, Tilly was here and it might have been only a glorified bedsit but it was ours.
We were away, out of the clutches of David de Winter and his control, and I could spare a quick look back over my shoulder to check out the memories without that snatch of fear, that constant feeling of dread and the driving certainty that neither Tilly nor I would be safe until we were away from the paranoia and the overwhelming feeling that every move I made was being watched.
Tilly muttered and turned over again. She was slightly flushed and I hoped she wasn’t running a temperature, but her forehead felt cool enough to my hesitant palm.
I put Can’t you Sleep, Little Bear? on the side table and stared around the room again.
One room. One double bed with an alarming dip into which I rolled every night, a tiny bathroom and a kettle and microwave.
The world’s tiniest flat, surrounded by similar tiny flats, occupied by those whom charity had deemed worthy of emergency housing.
Next door was Tia with her four children, and the other side held three Ukrainian students whom Tilly adored.
We were all in the same boat, all stuffed into this makeshift arrangement and none of us knowing how long we would be here.
But it was safe, it was reasonably warm and if I’d got a little bit fed up with every recipe in my microwave cookbook, at least we had hot food when we wanted it.
I had work, occasionally, on an ad hoc basis whenever something suitable presented itself, and Tilly had a place at nursery.
Things could have been worse. Things had been worse.
Tilly shifted again. I allowed myself a tiny sigh and climbed into bed beside her.