Burnt Paper Sky (28 page)

John drove me home, and came inside with me, guiding me past the three or four journalists who remained doggedly outside my door.

They should have seen me at the police station, I thought. That would have got them going.

For now, they were loitering a few lampposts away from my house and they called out to us in a desultory way, trained like Pavlov’s dogs to know that neither John nor I would talk.

They still frightened me, but not as much as their colleagues who were probably piecing together juicy commentary on our lives for their Sunday supplements, making me into a Comment On Society, doing it just as John and I unlocked the front door of my home and contemplated the absence that was our son.

Inside, John kept shooting surreptitious glances at me, which made me feel like he was assessing me, gauging my stability.

I let him go up to Ben’s room alone, and he was there for a long time. I expected he was doing what I did: touching objects, remembering, smelling bits of clothing, holding things that Ben had held.

When he was down, I asked him a question that had been on my mind since Nicky had gone.

‘Why did you tell the police that Nicky was worried about me after Ben was born?’

He was surprised, but he had a quick answer. ‘Because she was. She phoned me a lot.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘At the time? I didn’t think you needed to know. You were so tired, and trying so hard. I thought she was being neurotic. It would have upset you.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘I just forgot. She stopped, and it didn’t seem important. Why are you bringing this up now? Did the police mention it?’

‘I just wondered,’ I said, and I realised that he didn’t know yet, about Nicky, about our family. And I kept the news folded up like a piece of paper I’d tucked into my pocket, because I didn’t know how to say it, and didn’t want to admit that there was a part of me capable of distrusting my own sister.

Later on, John said he should go home. I wanted him to stay, but I didn’t trust myself to admit it out loud, for fear of how it would make me sound. I was aware of my own instability by then, I could feel it seeping out into my speech and my actions, and I didn’t want that look from John again. The one that evaluated me, worked out how to handle me.

He saw I didn’t want to be alone, he saw that at least. ‘Should I phone Laura?’ he asked and I said, ‘It’s OK,’ but he began to insist and I didn’t know what to do apart from to nod mutely because I couldn’t tell him about her either. About how I’d shooed her away too.

It took her a while to answer the phone and when she did he immediately frowned and he left the room. I listened, my house was too small for secrecy, and heard him say, ‘Are you drunk?’ in an incredulous tone.

I knew he’d have thumb and finger pressed to his temples, as if trying to hold his thoughts together, I knew he’d look as if his weariness was falling off him in pieces.

His end of the conversation was mostly listening noises, murmured words of agreement or appeasement. He spoke very little; she must have been speaking a lot.

‘Rachel will understand,’ he said after a while, ‘I’m sure she will.’ And then, ‘I think it’s best if she calls you tomorrow.’

‘She’s drunk?’ I asked when he reappeared.

‘She’s been drinking all afternoon as far as I can tell. You don’t want her round here.’

‘What’s she saying?’

‘She’s not making much sense. She says to tell you she’s sorry. That the thing is too big for her, whatever that means. That she just wanted to support you. She’s not in a fit state to be coherent. What happened?’

‘It’s my fault,’ I said, but it was a whisper and he didn’t hear. He asked me again.

‘I don’t know if I trust her,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know who I trust.’

‘I’ve never trusted her.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know, I’ve just never liked her. I thought she used you.’

‘You never told me.’

‘You never asked.’

I was absorbing this when my phone rang.

‘Can you answer it?’ I said. It was still in his hand.

The phone call was short, it furrowed his brow, but I couldn’t decipher it from hearing his responses.

After he’d ended the call with a thank you, he said, ‘That was a DC Justin Woodley calling to say that DC Zhang isn’t our family liaison officer any more.’

‘What? Why not?’

‘He just said she’s had to step away from the post, didn’t give a specific reason, and that they’d appoint somebody new as soon as they could, Monday at the latest, but in the meantime we should speak to him. Have you met him?’

‘I don’t think so. What could possibly have happened? Did you ask?’

‘It’s very odd,’ said John, ‘because I thought they said she was in the office this morning.’

‘They did.’ I curled my legs up onto the sofa, wrapped my arms around myself and felt the disappointment keenly. I minded very much that DC Zhang was gone because I’d got used to her, started to trust her, and I knew I would miss her. I didn’t like the idea of having a man as our liaison officer, however temporary. It wouldn’t be the same.

‘I really liked her,’ I said.

‘I’m sure DC Woodley or whoever they appoint will be fine.’ John wasn’t as perturbed as me; he had Katrina to lean on. He looked at his watch.

‘Look, I can stay here a bit longer, but I have to go home later tonight. You could come to our house.’

‘I can’t leave here again. I shouldn’t have left this morning.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ And I knew I’d be up all night, fearing for Ben and fearing for myself too, but that I had no choice.

‘If that’s what you want.’

Later John and I warmed up some of the food that Nicky had left in the fridge: wholesome, beautifully cooked food. It should have sustained us, given us strength, but both of us could only pick at it.

It was at the precise moment that we were getting up to clear the table that we heard a powerful crash, high-pitched and violent. It came from the front room and seemed to make the air cave in around us. It was the sound of shattering glass, and it made us motionless for a moment and the dog barked and then whimpered and then all was quiet again except for the noise of footfall, somebody running away.

John was up on his feet in an instant. He ran outside.

I followed him, but by the time I got to the front door it was swinging wide open and he was gone.

A bitter wind blew into the room, not just through the door but also through a gaping jagged hole where the front window had been. The curtains, drawn to shield us from the press, were dancing, flapping and turning in the wind like dervishes. Pieces of glass littered the floor, sharp edges everywhere, and in the centre of the room lay a brick.

There were letters painted on it. It took me a moment to realise that there were two words on its side, the same two that had screamed at me from the back fence: ‘BAD’ and ‘MOTHER’. Small, printed carefully. It couldn’t be easy to paint on brick.

‘John!’ I screamed.

I ran to the door. Glass crunched underfoot. From one end of the street footfall rang out, the sound echoing. I saw John and, just ahead of him, another figure, both running as fast as they could. They were moving shadows and, in an instant, they’d disappeared around the corner.

The street stretched away from me, dark and wet, the glow from the streetlamps looking three-dimensional in the rain, orbs of orange fluorescence. I stood in a shard of white light that spilled out of my house and fell around me, making the slick wet surface of the pavement gleam blackly. Opposite, a neighbour opened their front door just a crack.

‘Help,’ I said. ‘Help us.’

From the corner the men had disappeared around, I heard a scuffle, a thud, a cry of pain, and then I began to run too.

It was John who had cried out in pain. I found him on the corner of the street, fallen, his head smashed open against the side of the kerb, his face damaged too, his ear pulpy. The amount of blood on his face and beneath him was sickening. It was matted in his hair, sticky and dark on the pavement, and it soaked into my knees and covered my hands as I knelt beside him.

He was unconscious; eyes glassy. I peeled off my jumper and pressed it against his head, trying to stem the blood flow. I screamed over and over again for help.

When the paramedics came they moved quickly and worked with a quiet urgency that frightened me. There was no joking, and no smiling. Uniformed police officers arrived too. They lent me a phone to ring Katrina, and I told her and then handed the phone to one of the paramedics who instructed her to meet them at A & E at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

When they were finally ready to move John, they rolled him carefully onto a stretcher and eased it into the ambulance, one of them seated in the back beside John’s inert form. It was shocking, that, the absence of him. That, and the amount of blood.

‘Will be he all right?’ I asked.

‘Head injuries are very serious,’ they told me. ‘Unpredictable. You did well to call us so quickly.’ There were no reassurances.

Part of me didn’t want to let him go on his own, but the police knew Katrina was meeting him at the hospital and they wanted to take a statement from me. As the ambulance disappeared into the night underneath its pulsing halo of blue light, I walked back down the street. A uniformed officer accompanied me. Two police cars were still parked at drunken angles, blocking off the scene.

In the house, they took my statement. More officers arrived and took photographs, and then they put the brick in a plastic bag and took it away. They helped me clear up the glass while somebody they’d organised boarded up my window. They said they’d station somebody outside the house for the rest of the night.

One thing the police all agreed on, and they even had a laugh about it, was that it was ironic that nobody from the press had been there to witness the incident. The three journalists and one photographer who’d had the stamina to stake out the house overnight had wandered down the road to get food.

They’d reappeared, kebabs in hand, shreds of iceberg lettuce falling from them, as the ambulance doors had been slammed shut and John had been driven away.

It was the only thing to be grateful for.

I slept in the front bedroom that night, in my own bed, wanting to know that the police car they’d stationed there for the night was just outside, wanting the security of that. In case I had to shout out. Bang on the window. In case I heard somebody creep into my house, wanting to do me harm.

I took Ben’s duvet and pillow from his bed and brought them with me. I stripped away my own bedding, piling it on the floor, and arranged Ben’s stuff carefully on my bed, with his nunny, and his Baggy Bear.

I listened all night for the sound of footfall again, and I lay rigid when voices loomed out of the darkness. They were the usual Saturday night revellers returning home, but their shouts and their drunken laughter sounded hostile to me now. Every noise I heard that night was laced with menace.