My house is dark when I get there. Ma and Dad are out looking for Sukey. I stand in the front porch, trying to find my keys, checking my bag and each of my pockets twice. The keys aren’t there. My stomach seems to float into my chest, and my heart beats against it. I breathe carefully in, and turn out my pockets, shaking everything on to the ground. The rattle of the contents hitting concrete is mixed with that old familiar sound of my front door opening. The click of the latch, the heavy creak of the hinge. Someone, who isn’t Ma and isn’t Dad, is opening the door. It’s a man, youngish, small and fair, who stops just inside and stares at me. He seems startled, as if he didn’t expect me home. He doesn’t look like a burglar. I stare back, disbelieving. I don’t think I recognize him, but I don’t trust myself. “Douglas?” I say.
“No, I’m Sean,” he says, backing into the house. My house. “Stay there,” he calls.
But I’ve no intention of waiting outside while he does God-knows-what inside, and so I follow him into the dark hallway. There’s something funny going on: everything’s different. The shelf above the radiator’s gone and there’s a bike propped against the wall. I can’t think where I am. There’s a smell of vinegar, and the man is on the phone. He smiles at me, showing off, just like Mrs. Winners.
“Do you need to sit down?” he says, covering the mouthpiece with his hand.
“They won’t be able to hear you like that,” I say.
He nods and takes his hand away, says something into the phone and puts it down. “Would you like to come into the kitchen? We’ve just had fish and chips. Lots of chips left.”
A small child slinks up the steps, keeping close to the wall, and studies me from behind her father.
“Poppy,” the man says, “this is the lady who used to live here.”
“Don’t you live here any more, then?” I ask.
The girl squirms into laughter.
“Well, shall we go through?” He walks down the steps, and the girl twists away and runs down before him.
I’m not sure what to do. I can see a light on in the kitchen, but I can’t think how to get there. It all seems so familiar, as if it should call up memories, but I can’t reach them. There’s a layer of other people’s lives on top. I look at the front door, still open. It’s just like mine—the same glass in the windowpanes—and it makes me think I should be getting home, only I’m stranded on this bit of carpet and there’s no way out. I feel in my pockets for notes, but there’s nothing there, just a few threads and emptiness. I’ve no notes at all. The lack makes me feel sick; I’m cut loose and whirling about in the wind. I wring the fabric of my coat, scrunching up and down in panic. And then, inside the ripped lining, I find one small blue square with my writing on it: Where is Elizabeth?
“Elizabeth is missing!” I shout. I shout so the part of my brain that forgets will stop forgetting. “Elizabeth is missing!” I shout it again and again. When I look over my shoulder there is a small girl holding on to the banister, half hidden under a mass of those things for winding round your neck. Wool and silk, long and deadly, they hang limply over the newel post, like clever snakes, pretending to be asleep. The girl widens her eyes at me and then shoots up the stairs. I shout in her direction.
And then I feel a hand on my shoulder. The weight of it makes me hunch into the front door.
“Mum?” someone says.
It’s Helen. She rushes to put her arms around me, pressing my face against her collarbone. She smells like wet soil. When she stands back she gives me a little shake with one hand. Her phone is in the other.
“Who were you shouting at?” she says. Her eyes run over my face, and the hand on my shoulder squeezes. “Mum, you don’t live here any more. You know that, don’t you?”
“Elizabeth is missing,” I whisper, looking up at the house. It’s familiar, but I don’t know whose it is. I put a hand to my throat.
“No, Mum, she’s not. You know where she is. And you have to accept it. Or you have to let it go, and either way, you have to stop telling people that.” She speaks very low and starts to lead me away towards the road.
“Telling people what?” I ask.
“Elizabeth is missing.”
“You think so, too?”
Her face freezes into a closed-eyed smile. “No, Mum. Never mind. Let’s get home, shall we?” She opens a car door and helps me in and then goes back to the house to gather some things that have been strewn over the path. A man bends to help her.
“Thank you so much,” I hear her say. “I was only out ten minutes. I thought it would be okay.”
He says something I can’t catch.
“I know. I know it isn’t the first time. She’s still adjusting.”
I try to make sense of it, but it’s impossible. There’s such a jumble in my head. My house and strange people and Katy on the stairs and fish and chips for dinner and Sukey gone and Elizabeth gone and Helen. Gone? But, no, Helen’s here, getting into the car and driving me off somewhere. I look back the way we’ve come. “Helen,” I say. “I moved house, didn’t I? I moved in with you.”
“Yes, Mum,” she says. “That’s right.” She reaches a hand out for me, but has to take it back to change gear.
“Well,” I say, “at least I’ve got one thing right today.” I watch the road swerve about in front of me with satisfaction, and Helen doesn’t stop me reading the signs aloud. I concentrate very hard on them: they are solid and unjumbled and I don’t have to understand what they mean, because I’m not driving.
A man wavers ahead of us, thin and fragile-looking. I think at first he’s hovering on a single slender leg, but soon I see it is one of those things to move about on: two wheels, handlebars. Not a wheelbarrow. We catch him up and pass very close, and for a moment I think he will be pushed off centre, we’ll make him topple, one touch on a spinning top. My insides go tight.
“Helen!” I say. “You nearly knocked him down.”
“No, I didn’t, Mum.”
“You did. You nearly got him. You ought to be careful. People can die from that.”
“Yes, I’m aware, but I was nowhere near him.”
“That poor woman got knocked down in front of our house. When was that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. She was standing over my bed and then she ran away and you knocked her down so she wouldn’t come back.”
“I have never knocked anyone down.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I say. “I wasn’t in the car at the time.” I was in Douglas’s room, playing the “Champagne Aria.”
I heard the sudden screech of car brakes over the deep laughter of Ezio Pinza, and then my mother’s voice, calling. I couldn’t make out her words as I banged through Douglas’s door and followed the shouts out on to the street, but I soon saw the huddled shape in the middle of the road. It was the mad woman. She lay on the ground, her head bleeding, her arms and legs at funny angles. Ma was kneeling over her, a hand on her cheek. Mrs. Winners must have heard the noise, too, as we arrived at the same time. She hurried back inside to use her telephone to call an ambulance and Ma sent me for blankets to cover up the misshapen limbs.
After that I didn’t know what to do, so I just knelt by Ma and held the mad woman’s hand. Her eyes rolled about and she whispered things I couldn’t catch, but she didn’t seem so frightening now, crumpled up and tiny on the tarmac. She didn’t even have her umbrella. There were bits of plants lying by her sides, things she’d had in her hands when she fell: stripped hawthorn twigs, red nasturtium flowers, brooklime and dandelion leaves, honeysuckle, watercress and lemon balm. They lay scattered about her so she looked like an old Ophelia who’d mistaken the road for a river.
“It’s all stuff for eating, look,” Mrs. Winners said. “Dandelion leaves, nasturtiums. Making herself a salad. Not so daft, after all.”
When I began to gather up the leaves and flowers, the mad woman made a harsh noise in the back of her throat. Ma bent to hear her words and the woman, with her eyes on my face, found my hand and pushed something against my palm. I took it, unresisting, feeling the thing, small, delicate, and crisp, but not looking down at it.
“Birds?” Ma said, trying to catch the low words. “What birds? Whose head?”
But she couldn’t seem to get any sense from the woman and so we just made soothing noises while Mrs. Winners paced about, wondering loudly where the ambulance had got to and asking whether we thought she ought to make use of her telephone again.
“How old d’you think she is?” Ma said to me, adjusting the blanket so it lay as lightly as possible over the mad woman’s jagged form.
I told her I didn’t know. “Does it matter?”
“I don’t suppose it does. Only, she’s younger than I thought. Might even be my age.”
By the time the ambulance arrived the mad woman had stopped whispering, her mouth had stretched open, and her cheeks had turned concave. There was a moment when she seemed to come round; her eyes met each of ours in turn and she closed her jaw once as if trying to say one last thing. But then a dark trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth and she faded back.
“She died in my arms,” Ma said, as the men took away the small figure, still wrapped in one of our blankets.
We, all of us, stared down the road for several minutes, long after there was anything to see, and Mrs. Winners was the first to shake herself and rub her hands and glance up at the sky to decide if it looked like rain. Eventually she ushered us into her house for tea.
“Was bound to happen,” she said, settling us into her front room. “Always in the road that one. Jumping in front of buses.”
“It wasn’t a bus that got her,” Ma said. “It was a Morris.”
Mrs. Winners said she didn’t see how that made a difference. She switched on her little electric fire and put a shawl round my mother’s shoulders before pouring the tea, and I realized Ma was shivering. I asked her what the matter was, but Mrs. Winners made a face and waggled her head and I knew to shut up.
“What you got there?” she said, nodding at my closed fist.
I put down my cup and finally opened the hand that held the mad woman’s gift. It was a flower from a squash plant, dry and faded and falling apart, like an old gramophone horn.
“From the woman, was it? Summer squash flower by the looks. A real treasure, I don’t think. What did she give you that for?”
“You can eat squash flowers, can’t you? Same as nasturtiums. But I think it might be because she dug up some squash in a man’s garden,” I said. “He nearly caught her digging them up. I was passing, and she knew I’d seen her.” I thought of the man shouting to his neighbours in the dark and running his hands over the pebbles on the wall.
“And that’s her confession? Blimey, she was barmy. Oh, I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, and she was honest, I suppose, in her own way. I’m fairly partial to a summer squash myself.”
“It was Frank who helped plant them,” I said to Ma, thinking she might react if that was significant, but she only nodded, cradling the warmth of her cup, but not drinking.
“She said all the little birds were flying round her head,” Ma said. “Like one of those cartoon films at the pictures. And then she talked about her daughter. Told me we’d both lost our girls. I s’pose she meant Sukey. I didn’t think she knew anything about me; you wouldn’t expect her to be aware, somehow. But she kept talking about our girls.”
“Sounds like ravings to me,” Mrs. Winners said.
“No,” Ma said. “She knew me.”
“It’s just for the weekend, Mum. I’m sorry, but I’ll be back on Monday morning to take you home. Mum?”
I don’t say anything. We’re in a small room with plain blinds and pretend flowers in a vase, there’s a strong smell of cheap gravy coming from somewhere, and disinfectant. Helen is crouching by the bed I’m sitting on; she says she’ll be back, but I know she’s lying. I know she’s going to leave me here for ever. I’ve been here weeks and weeks already.
“It’s only two nights. And they’ll let you do some gardening.”
“I don’t like gardening,” I say, and then am annoyed at myself for answering.
“Yes, you do. You’re always asking about planting vegetables, and you certainly seem to enjoy digging things up when we’re at home.”