The Child Who

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She trails, though she knows she is expected to lead. It is not, she imagines, what the boy is used to: this salesman, essentially, who every day must put up with being sold to. Look here, young man, at the flooring. And here, in the bathroom – we put that in ourselves. Megan, in comparison, must seem almost hostile. Uncaring, at least, though she does not mean to be. It is uncertainty. Bewilderment, rather. She is in a barrel, it feels like, on a hill – aware that she has set things in motion but too dazed to wonder where they might stop.

‘Cracking kitchen,’ the boy says. His head bobs as he surveys it. ‘Large,’ he says and he makes a note.

Megan moves from her position in the doorway. Her toast is rubble on the worktop and some instinct, at the sight of it, reasserts itself. ‘Sorry,’ she says. She stacks the honeyed knife on the plate and slides the plate to the side of the sink, the half-full ashtray too. With her hands she makes an attempt at sweeping up the mess.

‘The units.’ The boy points with his pen. ‘Are they new?’

‘Um.’ Megan considers them. They are not. They came with the house. But the boy, before she can answer properly, has moved on.

‘What’s through here?’ he says, disappearing into the utility room. ‘Cracking!’ comes a voice and the boy emerges with his pen working in unison with his head. ‘Great space,’ he says. Then, earnestly: ‘Useful.’ He looks to Megan for agreement and she makes a noise like she should probably have spent more time thinking about it. She gestures for the boy to lead into the hallway.

‘So what’s the story?’ the boy asks as he bounds up the stairs. His head is turned to the ceiling and his mouth, between words, swings unhinged. He is like a tourist beneath the dome of St Paul’s.

‘The story?’

The boy has stopped to make another note and Megan, reaching the landing, is grateful for the chance to draw breath.

‘The house. Have you got something else lined up? How soon would you be ready to push the button?’

It seems an apt turn of phrase. Megan thinks of the films Leo always used to like to watch, of buttons controlling bombs.

‘Soon.’ She realises, as she says it, that she means it. ‘Immediately, actually.’

The boy turns. ‘Oh,’ he says. He smiles. ‘Cracking.’

‘Would that be a problem?’

‘No. Not at all. It’s just… when we spoke on the phone…’

‘I know. But, well. Circumstances have changed.’

The boy, finally, exhibits an expression that does not employ his teeth. In half a morning? he is thinking.

She did not follow the boy into her daughter’s room but she returns there once he has left. She perches at the foot-end of the single bed, a notepad on her knees and Leo’s antique Casio beside her. She taps, reckons, taps. The calculator is straining in the dim light, displaying figures as faded as the pattern on the bed sheets. She has deducted all she needs to, though, and the important thing is that there are numbers still showing. Enough to pay off what she owes. Enough for rent. Enough, if things work out, for something permanent. And this, if the estate agent is to be believed, is worst case. Best case is… She taps the keys again. She shakes her head. Why on earth, she wonders, has she been deaf for so long to her own advice?

The answer comes unbidden: circumstances have changed. Isn’t that how she put it? I have awoken, she might have said. Or, I was caught in a barrel on a hill and it has shattered, finally, and thrown me into glorious freefall. She laughs. She thinks she is laughing but it turns out she is crying. Worst case, best case. The money has nothing to do with it. Or perhaps it did, when she did not think she had enough. The point is, it does not any more. The money, now, is the least of things.

She drags a hand across each eye and she stands. She straightens herself, as though there were someone there to straighten herself for. She glances around her daughter’s bedroom and she gathers her things as though to leave.

She lingers.

A shrine, her mother called it. She did not mean it in a good way. You can’t mourn forever, darling, she said. You should clear things away. I could help. It would be less painful. Wouldn’t it? To take down the curtains and box up the CDs and cover the wallpaper with just plain white. But Megan would not let her, so a shrine it remained: one Megan worshipped at, in the earliest days, but only ever visits now to clean. Or so she tells herself.

She sets down her notepad and the calculator on the bed. She lets her hand graze the bed sheets. She would grip them, hold them, clutch them tight to her face and inhale – but she has done it before and it has never helped.

Her eyes sweep the bookshelves and the CD spines, ordered to a code she has long since cracked. The music, by mood: melancholy, for the most part, through angry and then outraged and thinning, at the furthest end, towards joy. The books, by worth. Not simply most preferred, a teenager’s top forty, but by her daughter’s estimation of their content. On the top shelf, in prime position, To Kill a Mockingbird, the creases on the spine repaired to black with a Magic Marker. Beside it, T.H. White, L.M. Montgomery and L’Etranger by Albert Camus. A school copy, it looks like, read and re-read and requisitioned. There is more Montgomery on the bottom shelf, alongside C.S. Lewis and Enid Blyton and a re-issued hardback of The Catcher in the Rye, which for some reason her daughter took against. Also, beside it, Lord of the Flies, which to Megan has also never seemed quite right. Her daughter, though, was categorical: only a Beverly Hills, 90210 annual has been afforded a less esteemed spot.

From the pen holder on the desk, Megan plucks a pencil. She studies the gnawed end for a moment, then sets it within the cradle of her tongue. She sits, on the floor, and she sucks.

It is where she would often find Ellie: on the carpet, in the space between her desk and the foot of her bed, a pillow against the wall behind her and a book, often, propped on her knees. Other times she would simply be sitting, as Megan is, to a soundtrack perhaps and with her eyes lidded or to the ceiling. What are you thinking about? Megan might sometimes dare to ask from the doorway. Her daughter would rarely answer. Or, if she did, her response would in no way be formulated to reassure a worried mother. Nothing. Just things. Shut the door, Mum – please.

A piece of pencil comes away in Megan’s mouth and she dabs to catch the scrap of sodden wood. It sticks to her fingertip and evades her flick so she uses the handle of one of the drawers beside her to dislodge it. Her grip, once she has, returns to the handle. She hesitates, then pulls, and the drawer expels its contents.

The drawer, the topmost of three, is full of clippings. It was Leo’s idea to save them. He was in the habit, Megan would have said, but he claimed too that they might help. They might, he insisted, yield some clue. That he was wrong gives her no satisfaction. She would have sacrificed any part of her – her pride, a limb, her very life – if it would have meant that Leo was proved right.

She did not read the clippings then and she has no desire to read them now. She makes to shut the drawer but pauses with it halfway closed. Well? she thinks. Why not? She opens the drawer more fully once again and begins taking out the clippings by the handful. She makes a pile. For recycling, is her citizenly instinct, but there are better options, surely. Shredding, say. Or burning.

When the first drawer is emptied she shuts it and opens the next. She shifts herself onto her knees, taken suddenly by the decisiveness of the task. Her daughter’s waste-paper basket is beside her and she hoists the discarded clippings into it and scrunches them down. From the second drawer she takes out a folder and frowns at the absence of a label. She lifts the flap and, swallowing, shuts it again. Posters, a sheaf of them, with the sketch of the suspect beside a picture of Ellie, A4-size and copied by the ream at Leo’s office. They ran out of lamp posts.

Below the folder is another, again unlabelled and this time empty. The ancient cardboard rips easily and she stuffs the pieces on top of the posters and the newspaper clippings. The bin, already, is halfway full.

The next three folders she cannot bring herself to throw away. They are stuffed with letters, removed from their envelopes to save space. Leo counted them once. Megan cannot remember what figure he reached but she knows it was over two hundred. There were others too, less supportive – vicious, in fact; vindictive – but those are elsewhere. The police asked for them, as she recalls. She does not think they ever gave them back. They were welcome to them, as far as she was concerned, though she would take a certain pleasure in adding them to the kindling pile now.

She starts to read and has to stop. The letters were sent to help but they remind her only of how much they made her hurt.

I simply can’t imagine.

It must be awful.

They’ll find her.

They’ll find him.

You must not give up hope.

Platitudes, the least of them. Lies, the worst. Nothing at the two extremes or between them that made anyone feel any better but the person who wrote them. Not that she was permitted to say as much. Not that she was able to voice, at any stage, what she was truly feeling. Even to Leo, as things turned out, which was almost the hardest part.

Sod it. Sod them. She stuffs the letters into the bin and keeps stuffing until the folders are empty and the bin is almost full.

Her momentum regained, it quickly stalls again. She has reached to open the final drawer but her fingers curl from the handle. She has remembered the part she had forgotten. The part she willed herself to forget. They are inside. They must be. The police have the originals but Leo, being Leo, took copies. So surely they are…

They are. She has opened the drawer the way she would peel away a plaster and there, all alone, is a plastic wallet. Inside, sealed as though in an evidence bag, are the notes.

Again Megan hesitates. She dares herself. More than a dare, it would be a penance. Not like reading the newspaper clippings, which would be detestable mainly because they are so emotionally amiss. The notes, in contrast, would drag her through the way she felt. Even just lifting out the wallet, for instance, reminds her of the weight of her shame. At their failure. At her failure. Because she blamed him for so long but who, really, was in a better position to know the truth? To see past the deceit and the misdirection and to act – act – before it was too late?

She can see the first note quite clearly through the plastic and the first note, tame enough compared to what followed, is more than enough. The shame is one thing but she is not prepared to relive the terror. Of the memories. Of her imaginings. Of the sick, morbid fantasies of her masochistic mind. Nor is she prepared yet to reconcile the way she felt with what is to come. Equally terrifying, in a way. Her fresh new start. Her brave new world. Her attempt to rediscover what was lost.

The notes go in the basket. The contents, downstairs, go in a sack. The sack goes in the dustbin and Megan shuts the lid. Before she can stop herself she picks up the telephone. She will call the agent, first, as she promised she would. Go ahead, she will say. Press the button. After that she will call her husband. Not because of Daniel Blake but because she should have called him long ago. She has a confession to make.