Chapter 7
I made it halfway into the bushes before I stopped, bent forward and hyperventilating, with Tilly rotating in my arms. I wasn’t quite sure whether I was going to be sick, faint or whether I should lie down and have the kind of tantrum that would have had Tilly in awe at my loss of control but, of course, I did none of those things.
I breathed very, very deeply and tried to stop my heart from clambering up my lungs and out of my throat.
‘My boot goed,’ Tilly said, very matter-of-factly.
‘Went, your boot went,’ I corrected automatically. ‘It can stay gone. I’m not going back in there.’
The hand on my shoulder almost caused my bladder to join in on the giving-up-control party although my voice box couldn’t manage more than a brief squeak and I’d not got the adrenaline left for anything other than a quick jerk sideways.
‘Have you got my paper?’
It was Ross Ventriss, still looking more strung-out than a 1980s pop star after an all-night drugs binge.
‘Paper?’ I said, my voice so high that bats were probably bouncing off trees above our heads and dropping stunned to the ground.
‘The page I gave you that you were bringing to give back to me? Today? Here at ten?’ Ross looked at the phone in his hand. ‘It’s ten o’clock now.’
‘Right, right.’ The dreadful panic was subsiding now but it left me with a weak feeling in my head and my knees had lost all strength. ‘Tils, I’m going to have to put you down.’
‘Boots gone,’ she said again and waggled her socked feet. She was right, we’d left one boot behind in that dreaded room and the other had come off at some time during our flight.
‘Look, sit on here.’ Ross pointed to a tree stump festooned with pockets of moss and roped with ivy stems. ‘Then you don’t need to put the child down.’
‘“The child”,’ I said, icily, but sagging down onto the stump with relief, ‘is called Matilda.’
‘Well I didn’t know that, did I?’ he pointed out.
‘I’m a queen,’ Tilly said proudly. I’d drummed it into her that she was named after the Empress Matilda, one of the protagonists of the first English Civil War, in the hope that it would make her grow up with some of the same attributes.
So far all that was evident was the desire to argue and a certain ability to escape captivity.
If I’d called her Elizabeth I’d probably be worrying about my head even now.
‘Do you have the paper?’ A hand reached out in my direction and I could see how badly bitten the nails were. The skin around his cuticles was ripped and torn as though he’d been pulling up grass, and there were patches of eczema on the back.
‘There’s a woman living in there,’ I said. ‘And she doesn’t want to leave.’
‘Oh. Ah.’ The hand fell away and he tucked it into a pocket as though he were ashamed of its presence. ‘Did you tell her the place is being knocked down?’
‘Yes I did. But she’s got birds in there with her.
’ The shudder wouldn’t be suppressed; it crept up the back of my neck and escaped over the top of my head.
‘So we didn’t exactly have an in-depth conversation about it.
’ I scrabbled about in my pocket in search of the folded paper that I’d shoved in on my way out of the flat.
‘You’re going to have to go in and explain to her.
Oh, and she’s mute, so there’s that too. ’
I was sitting on the log with Tilly perched across my lap, so I could see the expressions crossing Ross’s face as he watched me pat myself down.
He had one of those long, mobile faces that showed emotions and thoughts as clearly as if they were printed across his forehead, and enormous eyes that reflected that emotion back again like a pair of parabolic mirrors.
Right now he was showing extreme horror.
‘Oh, great,’ he said with heavy emphasis. ‘That is just… great.’
From the half glance he gave Tilly I got the feeling that he would have liked to have included a lot more profanity but her presence made him hold back.
‘Why, though?’ I said, finally scissoring the paper between two fingers and pulling it free.
‘I mean, you own the place. Just go in with a couple of police and haul her out. She’s squatting, after all.
She’s got birds in there,’ I added, in a tone that seemed to imply that they could then hack her to bits or export her to Peterborough – anything else would be too kind.
Ross sighed very heavily, unfolding the paper to check that his drawing was, in fact, on the reverse. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘It’s complicated.’
Tilly was rocking gently on my lap, humming to herself and sucking her thumb.
‘Man. Daddy,’ she said suddenly, pulling her thumb out in a trail of dribble and staring at Ross.
This was the first time she’d mentioned David since we’d left.
I’d had a whole load of phrases ready for this moment, from ‘We had to leave Daddy because he wasn’t very nice’ through to ‘If that bastard rots in hell for all eternity it will be too good for him’, but I’d been hoping for more of a run at this discussion.
Until she was about sixteen would have been good.
‘No,’ I said firmly, and resolved to have a word with Ashlee. Nursery must be exposing her to the whole nuclear family thing, despite the fact that several of her cohort had two mums or two dads and many others were single parents.
‘Why?’ Tilly continued to stare at Ross with the fixed glare of the small child.
‘Er,’ I said, my heart screaming a beat like a difficult jazz solo.
‘It’s complicated.’ I did not want to have to go into my carefully age-appropriate talk right now, not with Ross Ventriss hanging over the pair of us with his long legs and his slightly hunched back that made him look like a heron in a suit.
He did seem to have relaxed a little now that he had his page of scribbles in his hand though, and he’d almost got as far as smiling.
‘That’s my line,’ he said.
‘Lots of things can be complicated.’ I stood up now and swung Tilly back onto my hip. ‘We ought to be going.’
Around us the wind scuffed through the undergrowth, kicking up leaves like a disgruntled teenager, and whippy little branches swung their arms so their twiggy fingers snatched at us.
I shivered. Through the trees I could just see the outline of Elm Cottage, its edges wavering as the more slender of the trunks swayed in the breeze, and I was seized with an immense urge to get home, lock the door of the flat behind us, and sit on the bed with Tilly and watch Peppa Pig.
There was something reassuringly workaday about Peppa; no world that contained that ghastly, self-righteous pink monstrosity could spare any room for a spooky old house and flapping wings.
‘I owe you an explanation,’ said Ross. ‘You need to know why it’s all so important to get Elm Cottage empty, and why you have to get that woman to leave.’
‘Isobel Isherwood,’ I said, turning my back on the house and trying not to allow the feeling that it was sniggering while watching me leave. My heart rate was coming back to normal now and had stopped thumping so hard that it had made the background jiggle.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Her name is Isobel Isherwood. And she’s got birds, well, a bird, if all the others that were in there yesterday aren’t part of this shi— This show,’ I self-edited, because Tilly would save up any bad language and bring it all out to show the nursery workers, like she saved interesting stones and bits of grass.
‘So I’m not going back in. I’ve told her the place is being demolished and now it’s over to you. ’
Ross sighed again. He’d got his lower lip twisted, caught between his teeth, like a teenage girl in an Instagram pose, but he didn’t seem to be aware of it. ‘I really do need to tell you what’s going on here,’ he said.
‘Home, Mummy,’ Tilly said peremptorily, swinging her socked feet violently and causing Brass to bounce up and down. ‘Now.’
‘I need to take Tilly home,’ I said, trying not to sound apologetic.
It was none of Ross’s business how I lived my personal life, and I definitely wasn’t going back into that house again under any circumstances, so it didn’t matter to me what his excuses might be.
‘She was sick this morning and she might be ill.’
Ross looked at Tilly, who turned to stare back at him. His glance was wrinkled with anxiety, hers was complacent, but they shared a certain dark intensity of purpose.
‘Five thousand pounds,’ he said suddenly.
‘What?’ I had begun to walk forward against the pull and drag of the undergrowth, but stopped.
‘I’ll pay you five thousand pounds if you get that woman out of the house.
’ He spoke quickly, breathlessly, with the air of reckless determination, as though he would sell everything he owned to raise the money if necessary.
But then, did I care? Five thousand pounds.
I could find us somewhere to rent with that kind of down payment.
Probably. Out of the city, of course, somewhere small, but with a garden and neighbours who didn’t attempt to give the entire building the munchies every time they lit up.
A bedroom for Tilly, toys too. A full-time nursery place so I could work a real job, and I didn’t even care what that might be.
Money. Security. But also, birds.
But I’d been prepared to do it for a few hundred, hadn’t I? There was a price on my phobia, clearly.
‘You haven’t got five thousand pounds,’ I said, disentangling a thorny tendril from my coat.
‘I can get it. I’ll tell the TV company it’s special circumstances, they’ll let me have it, I’m sure.’ Ross put a hand on my arm. ‘Please. I really do need to tell you.’
I wondered at that. A TV company was involved?
There was nothing about Ross that even hinted at involvement with media of any kind.
Maybe he was a location scout? And there would be other people out there who would do this.
Plenty of people, maybe not as understanding as me, who would see an elderly lady alone in a house and use physical force to get her out.
Physical force or mental cruelty. I remembered how that felt: the silences, the questions – always the questions, with answers I wasn’t certain I could or should give – uncertainty and fear.
Isobel Isherwood might not survive that kind of treatment.
Plus also, then I wouldn’t get the five thousand pounds. Even if I couldn’t find somewhere to rent, that would help with Christmas, clothes for Tilly, my car had an MOT lurking in the near future – we needed that money.
I could do this. I’d done scarier things to keep my daughter safe.
I stood in a small clearing within sight of the road now.
My car was still there, parked against the muddy verge, and a neat little grey car was parked behind it, which must be Ross’s.
Above us the tree shed golden leaves like rain and in the polished blue sky a few dark dots circled lazily.
There was a smell of encroaching winter, sharp and sour, which billowed up from the drifts of dead leaves at our feet.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it, if your explanation is good enough.’
Beside me Ross slumped further. He looked as though he needed to lie down and sleep for a fortnight, so I didn’t let him slump too far.
‘But not now,’ I added. ‘I need to get Tilly home and see if some toast stays down, and you can’t come with me.’
‘Tomorrow?’ He sounded almost indecently eager. I ran the awkward complications of my life through my head. Maybe Tia or Galina would mind Tilly for an hour or so? Then the fear of leaving her cut in and I shook my head.
‘I’ve got Tilly.’
‘Me,’ said Tilly, over my shoulder and smug.
‘She won’t just sit quietly with crayons, she’s not that kind of child.’
A few more moments of crunching ensued as we crossed the leaf-scattered ground and burst out from the trees onto the sanity of the tarmac. A lone cyclist went by, turning his head to register us for a second but seeming to look right through us. I wondered if we’d become invisible.
‘What about the park? Does she like the park?’
‘Park!’ Tilly chimed in, lifting her head from my shoulder now. ‘Park, Mummy!’
‘Yes,’ I said wearily. ‘She likes the park, as long as there are swings and a slide and not just interesting examples of dahlias and cacti.’ David’s idea of a good day out was wandering through a botanical paradise with his wife and child looking immaculate and said child regarding her daddy with wide adoring eyes.
And never needing a nappy change, needing food, randomly screaming…
David was not a natural parent, unless the child was an unnatural child.
Tilly was, it had turned out, very, very natural.
‘All right. Let’s meet in Rowntree Park tomorrow.
At eleven?’ Ross was standing up straighter now, as though he had renewed hope.
Isobel had been right, he actually was quite tall when he stood properly.
He was dark, too, I noticed as I remembered her description of him: shaggy dark hair threaded with those grey strands which matched an outcropping of dark stubble across his cheeks.
I couldn’t comment on her opinion of him as good-looking as I had less desire to admire a man than I had to go back into that avian-haunted house.
‘Yes, all right,’ I said, aware that I didn’t sound very gracious, but I was trying to stumble my way to my car carrying a hefty toddler.
The sides of the road were rutted with tyre marks as though construction vehicles had recently passed this way and been forced to pull over to let more conventional traffic get by.
‘Fantastic.’ I looked up in time to see Ross smile. It was a smile that slid him firmly into Isobel’s self-determined ‘good-looking’ category. It relaxed his face and crinkled his eyes, pushed that tautness away until he looked twinkly and happy. ‘That’s great.’
Something lurched inside me and my blood buzzed in my veins for a minute.
No. No no no no. I cannot fancy Ross Ventriss.
I am a single mother, I have no idea where my next penny is coming from and I have a track record with men that puts me somewhere ahead of Mrs Genghis Khan.
Rational thought stamped its foot hard on my feelings.
I’m also lonely, he’s the first man, apart from the man at the council, who’s been nice to me and he’s not dreadful looking.
It’s just biology, that’s all. Good sense is having a day off.
Fortunately for all concerned, at this point Tilly ended our conversation by being noisily sick on Ross’s shoes.