Girl On Fire

7

The next day was Saturday and I breathed out.

I woke up to sunlight pouring through the bedroom skylight and the best sound in the world.

Stan was snoring on the pillow next to me, his left ear a silky curtain falling across his eyes. As I sat up he stirred in his sleep, smacked his lips, but did not wake. I stared at his face, noting how the black smudge under his nose extended across his mouth to his chin before giving way to the smudge of white on his chest, like a tiny tuxedo shirt. Everything else about his fur was a shade of red, from the strawberry blond feathers of his tail and legs to the deep russet of his coat and ears and head.

I once looked at a sleeping woman in this much adoring detail.

But now it was a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

It had been a long march for Stan to reach that pillow. At first he had been kept in his cage at night. Then he was allowed to roam the loft after lights out. And now he had made it all the way to my bed.

He shrugged with irritation in his sleep as I threw back the duvet, got down on the floor and pumped out a brisk twenty-five press-ups. When I stood up to flex my leg, feeling how time and Fred were slowly but surely healing it, Stan opened his large round eyes and considered me impassively.

He did not move as he watched me stretch and then do another twenty-five press-ups – slower this time, thinking about form now, the pain in my knee a steady but distant throb. Then I stretched again, and as I did the third set of twenty-five press-ups Stan closed his eyes, sighing contently as he slipped back into deep sleep.

By the time I did the final set of twenty-five press-ups – the hard set, the one where the lactic acid burns in shoulders and arms, the set that actually does you some real good – the dog was snoring loudly once more.

I went into the main room and turned on the TV to see what was happening in Borodino Street.

And there was the by-now familiar vantage point of the street viewed from a news helicopter, but where the road should have been there was nothing but flowers. It was early Saturday morning, and the crowds, kept on the pavement by two long lines of uniformed officers were already out in force.

The picture cut to a close-up of the crowd. A small child, a girl, was being led by the hand as she laid her bouquet with all the rest. The camera pulled in tighter on one of the photographs placed among the flowers.

DS Alice Stone was smiling for all eternity. The image had become one of the favourite shots of Alice, taken on holiday in Italy just after the birth of her first child. She looked giddy with happiness. And now the crowds came to mourn her.

I understood their grief because I felt it too. But the outpouring of emotion for Alice Stone was still bewildering. This was one woman who was being mourned by people who had never met her in a way that the forty-five victims of Lake Meadows were not mourned by total strangers. Perhaps the loss of all those people was simply too much to comprehend, I thought. All those lives stolen in a moment. All those lost fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives. All those families torn apart, all that grief that would echo through generations. It was too terrible to grasp.

But we all understood what had been lost in Alice Stone. The death of this one police officer who had lost her life because she sought justice for what happened at Lake Meadows – this tough, smart and beautiful woman, a wife, a mother and a daughter – had come to represent all the innocent victims of the summer. The loss of Alice Stone was like an ache in the heart of the nation.

When the camera cut back to the helicopter’s eye to take it all in – the sea of flowers, the grim-faced crowds, the house hidden behind huge white screens where the CSIs and search teams were finishing their work – I saw him for the first time.

He was at the end of the street, just beyond the police perimeter, a lean, long-limbed young man in a suit and a bow tie who appeared to be standing on some kind of small box. He was addressing a section of the crowd and I noticed them because they had their backs turned to the flowers, and the house and the spectacle of Borodino Street.

The young man on his box was not the only speaker. Further back, at the very edge of the crowds, a black priest was addressing a small makeshift congregation of perhaps a dozen people. Even from this distance, you could make out his dark clerical robes, the white dog collar. But when he knelt to pray, half of his flock turned away, and wandered towards the young man on the box.

It was impossible to know what he was saying and why he had them rapt. It looked like he was giving his own kind of sermon. And the priest could not compete.

I called Edie Wren, not taking my eyes from the TV screen.

‘Edie, are you watching this on TV?’

‘Max?’ I had woken her.

I felt bad about that but I needed to understand what I was looking at in Borodino Street. Who was this guy?

‘Turn on your TV,’ I said. ‘There’s some guy talking to the crowd outside the Khan house. It looks like – I don’t know – it looks like he’s preaching to them.’

‘Max.’ She was awake now.

‘Are you watching it?’

‘Max – forget about it all for a while, OK? I know you were in the middle of it when that Air Ambulance came down. I know you saw Alice Stone die. I know you will never forget any of it. Of course I bloody do. But none of it is our investigation. Let it go, Max.’

‘You haven’t turned on your TV?’

I couldn’t pretend I was not disappointed.

‘Enjoy your weekend, Max,’ Edie said, fully awake now. ‘You and Scout and Stan. Try to put Lake Meadows out of your head. Forget about Borodino Street for a while. I know it’s hard. But you’ve done your bit, Max. Now let someone else deal with it.’

And then I heard the man in her bed, his voice thick with sleep, stirring next to her.

‘Who is it?’

I felt embarrassed, humiliated and stupid.

Mr Big. Edie’s married man.

I wondered how he swung this at home, what smooth lie he had told to be given an overnight pass on the night before the weekend. Friday night, Saturday morning. A business trip, I thought. It had to be a business trip.

‘Work,’ Edie said, and somewhere in my thick head I could see it all.

Her face turned away from the phone. The man in her bed.

‘Max?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Sorry. See you Monday.’

I sat down in front of the TV.

It was hypnotic. The sight of a nation in mourning. We mourned the victims of the latest atrocity at Lake Meadows, and we mourned all those who had died in previous attacks, and we mourned all those who would die in the future. And we mourned Alice Stone.

Everyone knew her now. Everyone knew about her copper husband, her two small children, her idyllic childhood in the Lincolnshire countryside. Everyone knew her smile. The country was haunted by that smile.

I watched TV until Scout wandered out of her bedroom. Then I turned it off and I followed her into the kitchen even though I knew that she could make breakfast for herself now – using a step stool to remove the loaf from the cupboard and butter and orange juice from the fridge, growing up faster than scheduled, the way that the children of divorced parents always will.

‘You want me to make some breakfast for us, Scout?’

A sly smile. ‘Today I’m making breakfast for you.’

So I went downstairs to get the mail.

There were the two magazines I subscribed to, Boxing Monthly and Your Dog, and an assortment of bills, junk mail about PPI and flyers offering pizza and Phad Thai delivered to your door. A smiling Gennady Golovkin was on the cover of Boxing Monthly and a grinning Labrador Retriever was on the cover of Your Dog. It was only when I was back in the loft that I realised there was also a card from my ex-wife.

You know handwriting. Even when years have gone by.

Even in this age when nobody writes letters or postcards any more. You still know someone’s handwriting, if they have been close enough. You never forget it.

Anne’s handwriting was neat, small but thick somehow, as if she pressed too hard, as if she was trying to make her point on a world that was not paying her enough attention.

But the card was not addressed to me.

It was for Scout. I didn’t open it. I didn’t tell her about it. I left it between Your Dog and Boxing Monthly and sat down to eat the toast Scout had made for me. It was a bit burned but slathered in lots of glorious New Zealand butter, just the way I liked it.

‘It’s good toast, Scout.’

She was staring down sternly at the dog.

Stan was bug-eyed with longing.

‘Carbs are bad for you, Stan,’ she said. ‘We have to watch your weight or you’ll get sick and die.’

He licked his lips, ready to take his chances.

A light summer rain pattered against the giant windows of the loft.

‘We’re going to have to walk between the raindrops,’ Scout said, and I laughed out loud.

Nobody could make me laugh like my daughter.

‘Scout,’ I said, as casually as I could manage. ‘Your mum has written to you.’

I picked up the card and handed it to her, making her transfer her jam-smeared toast from right hand to left. I didn’t know what else to say. There was nothing else to say.

Scout’s mother had left us before Scout started school, walking out because she was in love with someone else and expecting his child and planning to build a new life. It was as simple and brutal as that. So that was all pretty final. There had been some patchy contact between Anne and Scout at first but it had spluttered out as the new life crowded in.

It might have been a bit different if Anne had not been pregnant when she left – and then quickly got pregnant again – but Scout did not fit easily into this new life. My ex-wife tried to fit her in, but she did not try hard enough. And so she drifted away and Scout and I were left to get on with it. Which we did.

It happens all the time. And when people talk to me as if they have never heard anything like it happening before – a father being left to bring up his kid alone, a mother too wrapped up in her new life to think much about the beautiful child from the old life – I always truly envy them their sheltered, civilised, cosy, middle-class lives.

Adults carry on, I thought, watching Scout hold the card, and children pay the price. And for a mad moment I thought that the card contained an apology to Scout and all the sons and daughters of all the divorced mothers and fathers. Only divorced adults get new lives, I thought. Divorced children are stuck with their old lives – and with their dumb-ass divorced parents – for ever.

Her fingers sticky with butter and strawberry jam and toast crumbs, Scout tore open the envelope.

‘It’s a party invitation,’ she said.

She showed me the card. There were laughing cartoon animals juggling balloons and cake while driving toy cars. Inside was an invitation to a fourth birthday party.

I couldn’t bring myself to think of the birthday boy as Scout’s brother. Even half-brother was beyond me.

‘Mummy’s little boy,’ Scout said. ‘It’s his birthday.’

‘That’s very nice,’ I said.

‘Is he four already?’

‘I guess he must be.’

Scout frowned.

‘But he’s young.’

I had to smile at that. ‘And what are you? An old lady? You’re only seven, Scout. You’re not getting your free bus pass just yet.’

I took the card from her.

And I saw that she was angry.

If this contact after so many years of silence was strange for me, then how must it be for Scout?

‘You know your mother never stopped loving you,’ I said, and I believed it, despite all the evidence. Or maybe I just could not bear the thought of my daughter not being loved exactly as she deserved to be loved.

‘She’s very busy,’ Scout said.

It was always the default excuse for my ex-wife’s disappearing act. Now, at seven, Scout spat it out with a bit of an edge.

Some absent parents think they can pick it up again when the time is right, when it suits them, and I have no doubt this is true. But abandoned children will not wait for ever for the absent parent to make things right. The clock is ticking.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘You can go to this party if you want or you can skip it if you want. It’s true the other kids will be smaller than you, but I’m sure you will have a good time. But it’s up to you, Scout.’

‘I don’t have to go?’

‘Of course not!’

‘Then I’m not going,’ she said.

‘Fine,’ I said, wanting our Saturday to begin again. ‘Where we taking Stan today?’

‘The big walk on Hampstead Heath. The two-hour walk. Down The Avenue, cut across Parliament Hill, then down to the bathing ponds.’

‘Lunch in the Coffee Cup on Hampstead High Street?’

She gave me the double thumbs-up. We smiled at each other then both stole a quick glance at the party invitation, as if it had strange powers that we could not imagine.

By the time we came back from our two-hour walk on Hampstead Heath and Saturday lunch at the Coffee Cup on Hampstead High Street, I had forgotten about it. I was surprised to see it still lying on the breakfast table. But it had lost its power to hurt us.

We were left to get on with it, I thought.

And we did.

So please excuse us if we don’t give a damn any more.

But on Sunday night I was in Scout’s room laying out her school clothes for Monday morning when, half-poking out of a paint-smeared cardboard folder, I saw a painting that she had done in her first year at school.

MY FAMILY was the title.

At five, they were just starting to make sense of the world and their place in it. All the other children had drawings that seemed to be teeming with life. Stick-figure daddies with their important briefcases, and stick-figure mummies who either had a briefcase or a baby, and lots of stick-figure siblings, larger and smaller. But Scout had only her stick-figure daddy with no briefcase and a four-legged red daub with bulging black eyes.

That was the extent of Scout’s family.

Me and Stan.

The first time I had seen the painting it had torn at my heart. There was too much white space, there was too little life, and there were not enough people in Scout’s world.

And now that old painting tore at my heart again.

Because on one side of the painting Scout had added an extra figure.

A pretty lady with dark hair, hovering on the edge of the little family, the drawing rendered far more expertly two years on. As if drawing something could make it so, as if just wishing something could turn back time to when things were simple and our family was unbroken.

I tucked the drawing neatly into her file, so that she would never know I had seen it.

I had moved on. But it was too much to expect my daughter to do the same.

Scout was lounging on the sofa with Stan, playing a game on her phone.

‘Maybe you should go to that birthday party after all,’ I said, as lightly as I could.

‘OK,’ she said, very quickly, not looking up from the exploding fruit.

So when Scout was tucked up in bed and I was certain she was sleeping, I wrote the RSVP, sickened to my soul at the way the world turns the children of divorced parents into pocket diplomats, negotiating their way between a man and a woman whose love brought them into the world and who later decide to hate each other’s guts.

Then without even thinking about it I turned on the TV and watched the latest news from Borodino Street. As far as I could tell, the young man in the suit and bow tie who was addressing the crowd on Saturday morning had gone. But the flowers were still there, and Alice Stone was still smiling in all her photographs and the sombre crowds were still there, waiting for something to happen.

Moonlight streamed in through the big windows of our loft, thrown open to let in fresh air on a muggy summer night.

The great bell chimed midnight at St Paul’s Cathedral.

Sunday night slipped into Monday morning.

And I breathed in.