Death threats?
‘OK. OK,’ Sarah Wilcox says, like this is all as she expected. ‘We’ll go to your office to have a look into all of that tomorrow, but I think that’s all for now. Thanks for your help and, again, I really am so sorry.’
Her eyes flicker again towards Seb and Rosie holding hands before she looks up one last time, at Rosie. Sarah Wilcox’s sharp face is full of questions and suddenly she looks more woman than police officer. Like she can’t believe after everything Rosie is still here, because if her husband had done what Seb has, there’s no way she’d stick around. No way she’d be made a public fool. Rosie feels all of this but still she doesn’t move her hand.
‘OK, then. Well. Thanks for your time. Hope you manage to get some rest. We’ll be in touch tomorrow.’
Rosie shakes their hands and wonders, briefly, if this is just another work night for them. Another family drama. For Sarah, Rosie and her family aren’t so special, not really. Tomorrow trouble will come for someone else in flashing lights and impossible conversation, and so it goes on. How vulnerable they all are. What an extraordinary act of faith it is to keep going, keep living, when at some point, odds are, those blue emergency lights will wail and flash for you or, worse, for someone you love.
Once the police have gone, it’s Seb who starts crying first.
He presses his fingers to his temples.
‘I promised Dad,’ he says to the empty space on the floor in front of him. ‘I promised Dad I’d look after you, Mum …’
Rosie holds his hand tighter as his heart breaks. And even though she looks bone-weary, her body painful, Eva stands and says, her voice gentle but clear, ‘How many times have I told you, min skat, promises are completely absurd.’ But then she moves towards him, to cradle his head in her arms, and bends to bring her mouth to his ear as she starts whispering in Danish. Rosie can’t understand, but that doesn’t matter because the sound of a mother comforting her child is the same in every language. When she’s finished, still with one hand around the back of Seb’s head, she reaches for Rosie with the other.
They stay like that for a while and Rosie feels a strange lightness, a kind of lifting. Because Eva is right. Promises are absurd. They cannot stay the same as everything else changes. They too, in turn, must become dust and blow away. Making them free to choose, if they wish, to try again.
Both Rosie and Seb help Eva upstairs and into Sylvie’s room. They’re all surprised to see the spare little bed made up already.
‘Eddy?’ they whisper to each other, doubtful because it was such a thoughtful thing. Eddy?
They hold each other again before Seb and Rosie quietly close the door behind them. As they gather sheets and a quilt to make up the sofa downstairs they hear Eva start to sob, and it’s the saddest, strongest sound Rosie has ever heard.
They use sofa cushions to make up a kind of bed on the sitting room floor. Seb looks a bit unsure as Rosie starts to get in.
‘You want me to go in Heath’s room, Ro?’
Rosie shakes her head. ‘No, I want you here, next to me.’
They’re too exhausted to say anything else to each other tonight. That will come. Tonight has been about everything they’ve lost, and tomorrow they can talk about what they might be able to save, but right now all she wants is to know that he is there, breathing, warm and alive next to her.
Chapter 23
Abi puts on sunglasses and steps outside with Margot, Lily still in bed. Abi won’t suggest school to her older daughter today. It’s a beautiful morning, the kind that makes everything feel new, transformed – apart from, Abi realizes, a godawful smell, ancient like something’s been burning for a long time. It’s the somnolent smell of an ending, the chemical tang of things that were never meant to burn, burning. Like the cars the joyriders used to set on fire on the estate.
Margot takes Abi’s hand as they walk, chattering about one of the girls in her class who has a swimming pool at home. A parent Abi hasn’t spoken to before catches her eye as she crosses the road to Abi and Margot’s side of the pavement.
‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’ she says, sniffing the air like a rabbit, her tone suggesting that actually what she means is not ‘awful’ but ‘wondrous’.
Abi must look blank because the woman is smiling now, making her green eyes wide, showcasing surprise. She looks to Margot and back up to Abi as she says, ‘You haven’t heard, have you?’
Margot looks at the woman, reaches for Abi’s hand again.
‘What …?’ is all Abi needs to say.
‘Mr Kent – you know, the headmaster who shagged a prostitute? Well, someone burnt down his mum’s house last night!’
‘Oh my God!’
The woman nods.
‘Was anyone hurt?’
The woman shakes her blonde head. ‘Not really, nothing serious. But I have heard rumours’ – the woman moves in, closer to Abi – ‘that it was the prostitute who did it. Have you read some of the stuff they’re saying online about her?’ Then she glances at Margot and starts apologizing for talking about it with ‘small ears around’.
The woman spots a friend soon after, thank God, and pretends she has to cross the road again to get to her.
‘What does “shagged” mean?’ Margot asks next to Abi, watching the woman leave, and Abi squeezes her hand and says, ‘I’ll tell you later,’ and Margot, satisfied, goes back to the more interesting topic of her friend’s pool.
‘They found a frog in it once …’
Behind her sunglasses, Abi manages to avoid eye contact with anyone else at the school gates. Margot runs into school, pausing like always to give Abi a quick thumbs-up, and as soon as she’s gone, Abi walks away. Ignoring the clutches of parents standing in small circles, bouncing the news to each other, like Seb and Rosie’s personal life is their favourite new game.
But still, Abi isn’t immune. She too wants to see what she can smell, wants to know if the rumours are even true. She doesn’t know exactly where Eva lived, but she has a vague idea from when Rosie pointed it out once. As she walks, it becomes obvious which way to go from the people shaking their heads and walking in the opposite direction. She overhears one of them, turning worried eyes towards the man next to her: ‘We’ve got a fire alarm, Harry, haven’t we?’
The road itself is still cordoned off. A policeman, lightly holding on to the plastic tape, answers questions from people standing on the other side. He sounds bored by the questions, but Abi can hear a little thrill, too, like he’s puffed up with responsibility.
‘I can’t tell you any more, no,’ he says to one.
‘Only residents are allowed through,’ to another.
And finally Abi hears, ‘Well, today you’ll have to find another route.’
Abi stays at the far end of the cordon. Eva’s house, once in the middle of the terrace, looks like the stubby, blackened remains of a tooth, rotten down to the gum, in an otherwise healthy mouth. Abi stares and stares, transfixed by the smell, the smoke, the nothingness. Abi has never met Eva, but she remembers Rosie talking about her, that day they walked up to the viewing point.
She’s interrupted by a man next to her who, in a loud voice, enunciates, ‘Is this’ – he points towards the smouldering wreckage of Eva’s home behind him, before turning back to gaze into the blank round eye of a video camera – ‘a random Halloween prank gone wrong, or is it, as we’re starting to believe, an appalling expression of the anger and resentment that has been building in this usually mild-mannered place? This is Sam Beresford for BBC News, Sussex.’ Sam Beresford freezes, holding his sad, benign smile for a moment, before dropping it entirely and anxiously asking the squatting man holding the camera opposite him, ‘How was that?’
Abi closes the door to the flat and calls up the thin stairs, ‘Lil?’