Promise (3 page)

‘Hello? Gabby? It’s Anna from next door. I have Charlie.’

Anna made herself step into the dim hallway.

‘Hello?’ she called again. She groped for the light switch and prepared something to say if the man appeared:
Your daughter knocked on my door. I was worried. What’s going on?

In the kitchen, dirty dishes were stacked in the sink and on Helen’s old formica table sat a couple of bulging black garbage bags. Anna walked up the hall, Charlie trailing behind her, the carpet strangely spongy underfoot. They passed Charlie’s room where there was a single mattress on the floor and clothes strewn everywhere. A night-light glowed pink on the floor.

In the living room, the massive television was on mute, showing a shopping channel. Anna glanced into Helen’s old bedroom. Her wardrobe and dresser were still there but the bed was gone. There was a double mattress on the floor, the bottom sheet half off, revealing a grubby mattress cover.

Where on earth was Charlie’s mother? Had she just ducked out? Had something terrible happened? Anna resisted the curling dread in her gut. She remembered the story of two toddlers who’d survived for days in their apartment after their single father nicked out to the shops and was hit by a car and killed.

‘Which is your room?’ she asked Charlie, although she already knew.

The girl pulled on Anna’s hand. ‘Come.’

In the bedroom, Charlie knelt and grinned up at Anna. ‘This is my fairy castle.’ The bright pink plastic castle with pointed turrets and triangular flags was the kind of thing Anna would have loved as a kid. ‘Mummy gave it to me.’

‘Wow.’ Anna knelt and touched a turret. A sweet, synthetic smell reached her. Could the plastic be perfumed? Surely not. ‘How old are you, Charlie?’

Charlie wound a small handle to lower a purple drawbridge. ‘Five.’

‘Right.’ She looked quite a bit younger than the five-year-old daughter of Anna’s friend, Emily.

Charlie looked up. ‘How old are you?’

‘Thirty-seven.’

The girl nodded matter-of-factly, a small plastic princess in each hand. She pointed one over Anna’s shoulder. ‘That’s your window.’

Anna turned. Through Charlie’s window she saw her own kitchen, with the new paper lightshade and blue bottle on the windowsill. She hadn’t realised the view was so very clear.

‘Did you see me there tonight, cooking my dinner? Is that why you came over?’

‘I saw you eating something red.’

‘Capsicum.’ A car throttled down the street. God, she hoped that Gabby or the man weren’t about to come home and find Anna there. What the hell was she doing in some stranger’s house?

Charlie put the princesses down and lifted some clothes off the floor. ‘I put myself to bed.’ She sounded on the verge of tears. ‘And I
need
Bunny.’

‘What does Bunny look like?’

The girl glanced at the ceiling. ‘Grey. A rabbit.’

Anna lifted the quilt off the bed and the ammonia smell of urine hit her.

It was an uncharitable thought, Anna knew, but if the girl’s room was on the other side of the house, and her window looked out to the other neighbours, then the girl would have gone there – to the elderly couple that Anna sometimes saw out walking their two small dogs – and they’d be the ones dealing with the mother’s disappearance. And undoubtedly better qualified to do it.

Anna saw something grey and fluffy under a piece of pink clothing. ‘Is that Bunny?’

Charlie snatched up the toy and hugged it to her chest. The girl looked small and fragile in the chaos of clothes and toys. She gazed at Anna with a fixed smile, and disquiet flowered in Anna’s gut again.

Anna made her voice light and cheery. ‘I’m going to write a message for Mummy and let her know you’ll be at my house. Okay?’

‘Ohh . . .’ She chewed her lip.

‘Yes,’ said Anna firmly. ‘I’m not leaving you here by yourself.’

She might be irritated that she’d been dragged into this, but she was not irresponsible. Anna led Charlie out the front door and scribbled a message on Helen’s notepad that was still in the meter box. She wedged the note into the screen door.

By the time Anna settled Charlie onto her couch, the girl’s eyes were drooping. She ate two more Iced VoVos and a handful of dried apricots. The toy rabbit tucked under her arm smelt of beer.

Anna sat beside her but didn’t try to make conversation. What did you say to a child whose parents have disappeared? If the mother or father didn’t turn up by morning, Anna guessed she’d have to call the police. Charlie fell asleep, a half-eaten apricot in her hand.

Anna removed the apricot and lifted the girl’s feet to lie her flat on the couch. God, she reeked of cigarette smoke. The poor kid. And her legs were spotted with bruises. What had she been doing? The pyjama shorts rode up her thigh and Anna saw it: a dark purple circle, no, two half-circles that nearly joined. Teeth marks and a small scab. A bite mark.

Anna fell back on her heels, blood thumping in her ears. Was it a human bite? Someone or something had bitten the girl hard enough to draw blood. She gently bit her own forearm and compared the size of the marks. They looked the same.

She pressed her fingers hard onto her eyelids for a moment, her mind whirling. Then she retrieved a cotton blanket from the linen closet and laid it over the girl, and knelt on the floor for what felt like a long time, watching Charlie’s chest rise and fall, wondering if it could really be a human bite.

In fifth grade, Anna had bitten a boy. Gordon Patterson had teased her all year, and one day, as he flicked her cheek, she grabbed his arm and sank her teeth in. There was no doubting the savagery of biting. It was not something that happened accidentally; you had to decide to bite someone, and you had to keep biting for a while to draw blood.

A car door slammed outside, and Anna pulled back her front curtain. A car pulled away and Gabby opened her own gate. Anna stood on the porch and called, ‘I’ve got Charlie here.’

Gabby wore all black, her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. ‘Oh? How did that happen?’ she drawled.

Anna could smell her cheap perfume from a few metres away. Gabby crossed to the low paling fence between them, wobbling on her high heels. Was she out of it? How Anna wished that it was still Helen living next door.

‘She knocked on my door.’

Gabby grimaced and tottered about on her stilettos. ‘Sorry about that.’ A truck’s air brakes blurted on the main road at the end of the street. ‘She’s normally fine on her own for a little while.’

Who the hell leaves a five-year-old on their own? And who the hell bit her?
Gabby must know about the bite; it simply wasn’t possible she’d missed it. What if it was Gabby who’d bitten her? Oh, what a nightmare this was.

‘Is she asleep?’ asked Gabby. Her eyes were heavily lined in black, which made her look even more wan than earlier.

‘Yes.’ Three teenagers walked down the footpath on the other side of the road, laughing loudly.

Gabby scrabbled in her little handbag and moaned, ‘Shit. You haven’t got a cigarette, have you?’ She was definitely stoned.

‘No, I don’t.’

Gabby tried to close her bag. ‘Just pass her over the fence.’ Her voice was flat. ‘Or will I come ’round and get her?’

The air between them felt jangled.

Anna turned back to the house. ‘I’ll bring her out.’

Charlie didn’t stir when Anna picked her up from the couch; she was warm and floppy limbed. As Anna reached the front door, the girl jerked awake and sat up in Anna’s arms.

‘It’s okay,’ Anna said. ‘I’m just taking you to your mummy. She’s home.’

‘Okay,’ the girl whispered. Charlie’s breath was bad, not just sour but slightly rotten. Anna trod carefully down the steps in the dark, Charlie’s arms tight around her neck. She walked in the front gate next door and passed the girl to Gabby. Charlie tucked her face into her mother’s shoulder.

‘Ta,’ said Gabby. As she turned away from Anna, a car passed by, lighting up the pale trunk of the solitary gum tree on the verge. It was such a dismal, lonely sound, a car driving away into the night. Anna watched the woman and child as they disappeared inside and the door closed behind them.

•

She woke at three – insomnia hour – and lay motionless for a moment, listening hard in case it was a sound from next door that woke her. But there was only the drone of traffic from the M1. The air felt thick and soupy. Most people died around 3 am and she understood why; the day was at its lowest ebb.

Her mother had died at 3.30 but Anna didn’t find out until dawn, when her dad woke her by sitting on the side of her bed. Anna noticed that he smelled of mint toothpaste and that he had his clothes on.

‘Mum’s gone,’ he said.

She half sat up. ‘Gone where?’

‘Dead. She’s dead.’

And Anna’s head had ballooned until it seemed to fill the room, blood pulsing in her ears.

She’s dead.

From that moment on, for years, everything around her was slightly off-kilter: the shape of the front door, the smell of her bedroom. Even the way the water shot out of the kitchen tap was wrong. And she couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Luke had ten years with their mother while Anna had only eight. She would never ever get those two extra years.

A
nna leant on an elbow, doodling. She was supposed to come up with a new logo for an IT company, and she’d covered the page with circles, all versions of her laptop’s ‘on’ button.

She was alone in the office; Russell and Monica were in the meeting room with a new client and Clay had the flu. She kept doodling and came up with a clichéd version of the company’s initials. She clicked through to their website to look for inspiration, then, before it finished loading, she typed in a Google search:
child bitten
. She tried another search, and another, until her huge screen offered up a photo of a child’s face: a dark, bruised bite mark on a plump cheek, the eyes obscured with a black box. The child’s skin was grey, and with a cold wash of horror, it occurred to Anna that it might be an autopsy photo. She closed the tab and walked away from the computer, her chest tight.

At the window, she let her eyes rest on the red brick building across the lane, reassuringly mundane and solid. The horror in the photo was implied, those moments when the bite happened. She imagined small legs thrashing about, small hands. If the child in that photo was dead, how did he or she die? Not from the bite.

A delivery van beeped backwards up the lane and a gust of laughter came from the meeting room. Russell and Monica emerged, folders in their arms, flashing big, energised smiles for the client. Anna returned to her desk, to the sloppy pencil doodles.

‘Coffee, Anna?’ called Monica from the doorway.

‘No, thanks, Mon.’ She glanced at her screen, and it was as if the image of the child was still there, burnt into the gel.

•

That morning she’d been watering her back garden when a dark-haired man called over the fence. ‘Hi there.’

It was the scrawny guy from the night they moved in. He had a high-cheekboned, handsome face, but tight, as if the muscles had been immobilised. He rested his hands on the fence and spoke quietly, like he was taking up a conversation that had been interrupted. ‘So, how are you going?’

‘I’m well, thank you.’ She imagined saying back in the same conversational tone:
So, do you bite your daughter?

‘That old bathtub . . .’ he said and lifted his chin towards the back fence and the rusted yellow tub where Anna had planted waterlilies. He smelt of aftershave and had that shiny-skinned look of someone just shaved.

‘Yeah?’

‘Can I have it?’ He looked ready to climb over the fence and pick it up.

‘It belongs to my landlord. And he wants it.’ She had no idea if Jack – who lived in Shanghai – wanted the bath. But Anna wanted it. A green tree frog had moved in recently, and every day she found it perched on a different part of the bath, ridiculously glossy and healthy looking, its little feet suckered to the yellow enamel.

‘Ah.’ He smiled and looked her up and down, theatrically examining her t-shirt and boxer shorts and bare feet. ‘I took you for a homeowner and all.’

‘Maybe I
am
a homeowner but I don’t happen to live in my own home.’ Who the hell did this guy think he was?

‘Who wouldn’t live in their own home if they had one?’ He smiled at her but it appeared more mocking than friendly. ‘I hear you were good friends with the old lady,’ he said. ‘Some of her stuff is still here, you know.’ The way he looked at her was too confident, too intimate. Charlie had something similar about her.

‘What sort of stuff?’ She moved the hose onto the irises.

‘Papers and books. It’s as if her kids just walked out and left half her gear behind.’

‘Papers?’

‘Old bills . . . medical stuff. I’m going to throw it all out. Unless you want to come and get it.’

Helen’s house had been unrecognisable a few days after her death. Her son, Oliver, left random piles of books and folded linen on the front porch, and told Anna to take anything she wanted. So swiftly he had undone all the small decisions Helen made over the decades, all the subtle ordering of possessions that represented Helen and her sensibilities.

‘You should talk to Oliver about that,’ she said.

The man glanced at her back door. ‘Do you live here by yourself, then?’

She didn’t want to tell him. ‘Yes.’

‘No kids?’ He raised his eyebrows.

None of your damn business
, she wanted to say. ‘No.’

He nodded slowly, looking at the back of her house. ‘A lot of room for one person.’ He smiled. ‘I hear you rescued Charlie, came in on your charger.’

She refused to engage. ‘Sorry, but the bath’s not available.’

He nodded. ‘Let me know if you change your mind.’

‘Alright.’ She turned back to the irises.

•

It baffled her that perfect strangers felt entitled to inquire about her reproductive plans and fertility.
Do you want kids? Better hurry up, love, if you’re going to do it!
The question most often came from people who had children, as if that gave them some special dispensation to pry. Her dad never asked the question, bless him. In her twenties, Anna had simply assumed she’d end up with babies. But she’d had only three relationships that lasted longer than six months and only one of those three men wanted babies. Ben and Anna had even tried to get pregnant for a few months, the sex especially thrilling, and then he came home from a surfing holiday and told her it was over. And so it was.