“Not after that. Once or twice, just little mentions, but the same way he’d talk about Baloo or Elmo, you know? Not like it was in his actual life. I knew that could be just because he could tell I didn’t want to hear it, but that was OK. Jack was only little. As long as he knew not to act like it was real, it didn’t matter so much whether he knew why. Once everything was over, he’d forget all about it.”
I asked, carefully, “And Emma?”
“Emma,” Jenny said, so gently, like she wanted to cup the word in her two hands and keep it safe from spilling. “I was so scared about Emma. She was still little enough that I knew she could end up believing in this thing, if Pat went on about it enough; but she wasn’t little enough that anyone would figure it was just a game, like Aisling did with Jack. And I couldn’t take her out of school, either. And Emma—when something upsets her, she can’t let go of it; she’ll stay upset for weeks and keep bringing it up over and over. If she started getting sucked in, I didn’t know what I was going to do. When I tried to think about it, my mind just blanked out.
“So when I was putting her to bed, that night in August after I talked to Jack, I tried to explain. I went, ‘Sweetie, you know that animal Daddy talks about? The one in the attic?’
“Emma gave me this quick little careful look. It totally broke my heart—she shouldn’t ever have to watch herself around me—but at the same time I was actually glad, that she knew to be careful. She went, ‘Yeah. The one that scratches.’ I went, ‘Have you ever heard it?’ and she shook her head and went, ‘No.’”
Jenny’s chest rose and fell. “The relief; Jesus, the relief. Emma’s not a great liar; I’d have known. I said, ‘That’s right. That’s because it’s not really there. Daddy’s just a little confused right now. Sometimes people think silly things when they’re not feeling great. Remember when you had the flu and you were calling all your dolls the wrong names, because everything got all mixed up in your head? That’s how Daddy’s feeling right now. So we just have to take good care of him and wait for him to get better.’
“Emma got that—she liked helping me take care of Jack when he was sick. She went, ‘Probably he needs some medicine and chicken soup.’ I went, ‘OK, we’ll try that. But if it doesn’t work straightaway, you know what’s the most important thing you can do to help? Not tell anybody. Not anybody at all, ever. Daddy’s going to get better soon, and when he does, it’s really important that no one knows about this, or they’ll think he was very silly. The animal has to be a family secret. Do you understand that?’”
Her thumb moved on the sheet, stroking, a tiny tender movement. “Emma went, ‘But it’s definitely not there?’ and I went, ‘Definitely definitely. It’s just a bit of silliness, and so we’re not going to talk about it, ever. OK?’
“Emma looked a lot happier. She snuggled down in her bed and went, ‘OK. Shhh.’ And she put her finger up to her mouth and smiled at me, over it—”
Jenny caught her breath, and her head whipped back. Her eyes were wild, ricocheting. I said, quickly, “And she didn’t mention it again?”
She didn’t hear me. “I was just trying to keep the kids OK. That was all I could do. Just keep the house clean, keep the kids safe, and keep getting up in the morning. Some days I didn’t think I was going to manage even that. I knew Pat wasn’t going to get better—nothing was going to get better. He’d stopped even applying for jobs, and anyway who’d hire him, in the state he was in? And we needed money, but even if I could’ve got work, how could I leave the kids with him?”
I tried to make some kind of soothing noise; I don’t know what came out. Jenny didn’t stop. “You know what it was like? It was like being in a blizzard. You can’t see what’s right in front of your face, you can’t hear anything except this white-noise roar that never lets up, you don’t have a clue where you are or where you’re heading, and it keeps just coming at you from every direction, just coming and coming and coming. All you can do is keep on taking the next step—not because it’ll actually get you anywhere, just so that you don’t lie down and die. That was what it was like.”
Her voice was ripe and swollen with remembered nightmare, like some dark rotten thing ready to burst. I said—for her sake or my own, I didn’t know and didn’t care—“Let’s move forward. This was August?”
I was just thin meaningless sounds, yammering at the rim of that blizzard. “I was having dizzy fits—I’d be going up the stairs and all of a sudden my head would be spinning; I’d have to sit down on the step and put my head on my knees till it went away. And I started forgetting stuff, stuff that had just happened. Like I’d say to the kids, ‘Get your coats on, we’re going to the shop,’ and Emma would give me this weird look and say, ‘But we went this morning,’ and I’d look in the cupboards and yeah, everything I thought we needed would be right there, but I still couldn’t remember anything—putting it there, or buying it, or even going out. Or I’d go to take a shower, and when I was taking off my top I’d realize my hair was wet: I’d just had a shower, like it had to be less than an hour ago, but I couldn’t remember it. I would’ve thought I was losing it, except I didn’t have room to worry about that. I couldn’t keep hold of anything except the second that was actually happening.”
In that moment I thought of Broken Harbor: of my summer haven, awash with the curves of water and the loops of seabirds and the long falls of silver-gold light through sweet air; of muck and craters and raw-edged walls where human beings had beat their retreat. For the first time in my life, I saw the place for what it was: lethal, shaped and honed for destruction as expertly as the trap lurking in the Spains’ attic. The menace of it left me blinded, sang like hornets in the bones of my skull. We need straight lines to keep us safe, we need walls; we build solid concrete boxes, signposts, packed skylines, because we need them. Without any of that to hold them down, Pat’s mind and Jenny’s had flown wild, zigzagging in unmapped space, tied to nothing.
Jenny said, “The worst part was talking to Fi. We always talked every morning; if I’d stopped, she’d have known something was wrong. But it was so hard. There was so much stuff to remember—like I had to make sure Jack was out in the garden or up in his room before she called, because I wasn’t about to tell her he wasn’t in preschool, so I couldn’t have her hearing him. And I had to try and remember what I’d said to her before—for a while I used to take notes while we talked, so I could have them there the next day and make sure I got it right, but I got paranoid about Pat or the kids finding them and wanting to know what the story was. And I had to sound cheerful all the time, even if Pat was conked out on the sofa because he’d been sitting there till five in the morning staring at a hole in the bloody wall. It was awful. It got…”
She swiped a tear off her face, absently, like someone batting at a fly. “It got to where I woke up dreading that phone call. Isn’t that terrible? My own sister that I love to bits, and I used to daydream about how I could pick some fight bad enough that she’d stop speaking to me. I’d have done it, except I couldn’t concentrate long enough to come up with anything.”
“Mrs. Spain,” I said, louder, putting a snap into my voice. “When did things reach this point?”
After a moment her face turned towards me. “What? . . . I’m not sure. It felt like I kept on going for ages like that, years, but… I don’t know. September? Sometime in September?”
I braced my feet hard against the floor and said, “Let’s move on to this Monday.”
“Monday,” Jenny said. Her eyes skidded away to the window and for a sinking second I thought I had lost her again, but then she drew a long breath and wiped off another tear. “Yeah. OK.”
Outside the window the light had moved; it fired the whirling leaves with a translucent orange glow, turned them into blazing danger-flags that made my adrenaline leap. Inside the air felt stripped of oxygen, as if the heat and the disinfectants had seared it all away, left the room dried hollow. Everything I was wearing itched fiercely against my skin.
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Jenny said, “It wasn’t a good day. Emma got up on the wrong side of the bed—her toast tasted funny, and the tag in her shirt bothered her, and whine whine whine… And Jack picked up on it, so he was being awful too. He kept going on and on about how he wanted to be an animal for Halloween. I had a pirate costume all made for him, he’d been running around with a scarf round his head saying he was a pirate for weeks, but all of a sudden he decided he was going to be ‘Daddy’s big scary animal.’ He wouldn’t shut up about it, all day long. I was trying everything to distract him, giving him biscuits and letting him watch the telly and promising he’d get crisps when we went to the shop—I know I sound like a terrible mum, but he never gets that stuff normally; I just couldn’t listen to it, not that day.”
It was so homely, the anxious note in her voice, the little furrow between her eyebrows as she looked at me; so ordinary. No woman wants some stranger thinking she’s a bad mother for bribing her little boy with junk food. I had to hold back a shudder. “I understand,” I said.
“But he wouldn’t stop. In the shop, even, he was telling the girl at the till about the animal—I swear I would’ve told him to shut up, and I never do that either, only I didn’t want her to see me make a big deal of it. Once we got outside I wouldn’t say a word to Jack all the way home, and I wouldn’t give him his crisps—he howled so loud he nearly broke my and Emma’s eardrums, but I just ignored him. It was all I could do just to get us home without crashing the car. Probably I could’ve handled it better, only…” Jenny’s head turned uneasily on the pillow. “I wasn’t in great form either.”
Sunday night. To remind her of being happy. I said, “Something had happened. That morning, when you first came downstairs.”
She didn’t ask how I knew. The boundaries of her life had been turning ragged and permeable for so long, another invader was nothing strange. “Yeah. I went to put the kettle on, and right beside it, on the countertop, there was… there was this pin. Like a badge, like kids pin on their jackets? It said, ‘I go to JoJo’s.’ I used to have one like that, but I hadn’t seen it in years—I probably threw it away when I moved out of home, I don’t even remember. No way had it been there the night before. I’d tidied up, last thing; the place was spotless. No way.”
“So how did you think it had got there?”
The memory had her breathing faster. “I couldn’t think anything. I just stood there like an eejit, staring at it with my mouth open. Pat used to have one of them too, so I was trying to tell myself he must have found it somewhere and put it there for me to find, like a romantic thing, like to remind me about the good times, to apologize for how awful things had got? It’s the kind of thing he would’ve done, before… Only he doesn’t keep stuff like that either. And even if he had, it would’ve been in a box in the attic, and that stupid wire was still nailed over the attic hatch; how could he have got it down without me noticing?”
She was searching my face, scanning for any particle of doubt. “I swear to God, I didn’t imagine it. You can look. I wrapped the pin up in a piece of tissue—I didn’t even want to touch it—and stuck it in my pocket. When Pat woke up I was praying he’d say something about it, like, ‘Oh, did you find your present?’ but of course he didn’t. So I took it upstairs and folded it in a jumper, in my bottom drawer. Go look. It’s there.”
“I know,” I said gently. “We found it.”
“See? See? It was real! I actually…” Jenny’s face ducked away from mine for a second; her voice, when she started talking again, had a muffled sound to it. “I actually wondered, at first. I was… I told you what things had been like. I thought I could actually be seeing things. So I stuck the pin into my thumb, deep—it bled for ages. I knew I couldn’t be imagining that, right? All day, I couldn’t think about anything else—I went straight through a red light on the way to get Emma. But at least when I started getting scared that I’d hallucinated the whole thing, I could look at my thumb and go, OK, a hallucination didn’t do that.”
“But you were still upset.”
“Well, yeah, obviously I was. I could only come up with two answers, and they were both… they were bad. Either that same person had broken in again and left it there—except I checked the alarm, and it was on; and anyway, how would anyone know about JoJo’s? It would have to be someone who’d been stalking me, finding out everything about my whole entire life, and now they wanted me to know they knew—” She shuddered. “I felt like a crazy person even thinking about it. Stuff like that doesn’t happen, except in the movies. But the only other thing I could think of was that I actually still had my badge somewhere, and I had done the whole thing myself—gone and dug it out, put it down in the kitchen. And I didn’t remember anything about it. And that would mean…”
Jenny stared up at the ceiling, blinking to keep the tears back. “It’s one thing doing everyday stuff, autopilot stuff, and forgetting about it—going to the shop or taking a shower, things I would’ve done anyway. But if I was doing stuff like digging out that badge, crazy stuff that didn’t make any sense… then I could do anything. Anything. I could get up one morning and look in the mirror and realize I’d shaved my head or painted my face green. I could go to pick Emma up from school one day and find the teacher and all the other mums not talking to me, and I wouldn’t have a clue why.”
She was panting, working for each breath like the wind had been knocked out of her. “And the kids. Oh, God, the kids. How was I supposed to protect them, if I couldn’t tell what I was going to do the next second? How would I even know if I’d been keeping them safe or if I’d, I’d—I couldn’t even tell what I was scared of doing, because I wouldn’t know till it happened. Thinking about it made me want to get sick. It was like I could feel the pin upstairs, wiggling, trying to get out of the drawer. Every time I put my hand in my pocket, I was terrified I’d find it there.”
To remind her of being happy. Conor, floating in his cold concrete bubble, with nothing to moor him but the bright silent images of the Spains moving across their windows and the thick-twined anchor rope of his love for them: he had never dreamed that his gift might not do exactly what he wanted it to, that Jenny might not react the way he had planned; that, with all the best intentions in the world, he might smash down the frail scaffolding that kept her standing. I said, “So what you told me the first time we met, about that evening being an ordinary one—you and Pat giving the children their bath, and Pat making Jack laugh by playing with Emma’s dress: that wasn’t true.”
A wan, bitter half-smile. “God, that. I forgot I said that. I didn’t want you thinking we were… It should’ve been true. We used to do that, back before. But no: I washed the kids, Pat stayed down in the sitting room—he said he had ‘high hopes’ for the hole by the sofa. He had such high hopes, he hadn’t even eaten dinner with us, in case the hole did something amazing meanwhile. He said he wasn’t hungry, he’d get a sandwich or something later. Back when we were first married, we used to lie in bed and talk about someday when we had kids: what they’d look like, what we’d name them; Pat used to joke about how we’d all have family dinner round the table together every night, no matter what, even when the kids were horrible teenagers and they hated our guts…”
Jenny was still staring up at the ceiling and blinking hard, but a tear escaped, trickled down into the soft hair at her temple. “And now here we were, with Jack banging his fork on the table and yelling, ‘Daddy Daddy Daddy come here!’ over and over, because Pat was in the sitting room, still in his pajamas from last night, staring at a hole. And Emma with her fingers in her ears screaming at Jack to shut up, and me not even trying to make them both be quiet because I didn’t have the energy. I was just trying so hard to make it through the rest of the day without doing anything else insane. I just wanted to sleep.”
Me and Richie, on that first torch-lit walk-through, spotting the rumpled duvet and knowing someone had been in bed when it all turned bad. I said, “So you bathed the children and put them to bed
. And then… ?”
“I just went to bed too. I could hear Pat moving around downstairs, but I couldn’t face him—I couldn’t handle hearing all about what the animal was doing, not that night—so I stayed upstairs. I tried to read my book for a while, but I couldn’t concentrate. I wanted to put something in front of the drawer where the pin was, like something heavy, but I knew that would be a crazy thing to do. So in the end I switched off the light and I tried to go to sleep.”
Jenny stopped. Neither of us wanted her to go on. I said, “And then?”
“Emma started crying. I don’t know what time it was; I was dozing off and on, waiting for Pat to come up, listening out for what he was doing downstairs. Emma’s always had nightmares, ever since she was tiny. I thought that was all it was, just a nightmare. I got up and went in to her, and she was sitting up in bed, totally terrified. She was crying so hard she could barely breathe; she was trying to say something, but she couldn’t talk. I sat down on the bed and I hugged her—she was clinging on to me, sobbing her poor little heart out. When she calmed down a bit I said, ‘What’s wrong, sweetie? Tell Mummy and I’ll fix it.’ And she said…”
Jenny caught a deep, openmouthed gasp of breath. “She said… ‘It’s in my wardrobe, Mum. It was going to come get me.’
“I said, ‘What’s in your wardrobe, sweetie?’ I still thought it was just a dream or maybe a spider, she hates spiders. But Emma went, she went, ‘The animal. Mummy, the animal, it’s the animal, it’s laughing at me with its teeth—’ She was starting to go to bits again. I said, ‘There’s no animal here; it was just a dream,’ and she wailed, this awful high noise that didn’t even sound human. I grabbed her, I even shook her—I’ve never done that before, ever. I was scared she was going to wake Jack, but it wasn’t just that. I was…” That great gasp again. “I was scared of the animal. That it would hear her and come after her. I knew there was nothing there. I knew that. But I still—the thought of it, Jesus, I had to make Emma shut up before… She stopped wailing, thank God, but she was still crying and clutching at me, and she was pointing at her schoolbag—it was on the floor by her bed. All I could make out was ‘in there, in there,’ so I switched on the bedside lamp and dumped everything out of the bag. When Emma saw that…”