As it passed her road she saw the Bulloughs on her path. Charmaine and her offspring strode to meet her at the lamp. “Brad says you lifted our Keanu’s flowers.”
“Then I’m afraid he’s mistaken. I’m afraid—”
“You should be,” said Arnie, the biggest and presumably the eldest of the brood. “Don’t talk to my mam like that, you old twat.”
Dorothy had begun to shake – not visibly, she hoped – but stood her ground. “I don’t think I’m being offensive.”
“You’re doing it now,” Arnie said, and his face twisted with loathing. “Talking like a teacher.”
“Leave it, Arn,” his mother said more indulgently than reprovingly, and stared harder at Dorothy. “What were you doing touching Keanu’s things?”
“As I was trying to explain, they weren’t his. I’m not accusing anybody, but someone took a wreath I’d bought and put it here.”
“Why didn’t you?” demanded Angelina.
“Because they were for my husband.”
“When are you going to get Kee some?” J-Bu said at once.
“She’s not,” Charmaine said, saving Dorothy the task of being more polite. “Where were these ones you took supposed to be?”
“They were in my house.”
“Someone broke in, did they? Show us where.”
“There’s no sign of how they did it, but—”
“Know what I think? You’re mad.”
“Should be locked up,” said Angelina.
“And never mind expecting us to pay for it,” Arnie said.
“I’m warning you in front of witnesses,” said their mother. “Don’t you ever touch anything that belongs to this family again.”
“You keep your dirty hands off,” J-Bu translated.
“Mad old bitch,” added Brad.
Dorothy still had her dignity, which she bore into the house without responding further. Once the door was closed she gave in to shivering. She stood in the hall until the bout was over, then peeked around the doorway of the front room. She didn’t know how long she had to loiter before an angry glance showed that the pavement was deserted. “Go on, say I’m a coward,” she murmured. “Maybe it isn’t wise to be too brave when you’re on your own.”
Who was she talking to? She’d always found the notion that Harry might have stayed with her too delicate to put to any test. Perhaps she felt a little less alone for having spoken; certainly while weeding the garden she felt watched. She had an intermittent sense of it during her meal, not that she had much appetite, and as she tried to read and to quell her thoughts with television. It followed her to bed, where she wakened in the middle of the night to see a gliding strip of light display part of a skinny silhouette. Or had the crouching shape as thin as twigs scuttled across the band of light? Blinking showed her only the light on the wall, and she let the scent of flowers lull her to sleep.
It took daylight to remind her there were no flowers in the room. There seemed to be more of a scent around her bed than the flowers in the house accounted for. Were her senses letting her down? She was glad of an excuse to go out. Now that they’d closed the post office around the corner the nearest was over a mile away, and she meant to enjoy the walk.
She had to step into the road to avoid vehicles parked on the pavement, which was also perilous with cyclists taking time off school. Before she reached the post office her aching skull felt brittle with the sirens of police cars and ambulances in a hurry to be elsewhere, not to mention the battering clatter of road drills. As she shuffled to the counter she was disconcerted by how much pleasure she took in complaining about all this to her fellow pensioners. Was she turning into just another old curmudgeon weighed down by weary grievances? Once she’d thanked the postmaster several times for her pension she headed for the bus stop. One walk was enough after all.
Although nobody was waiting outside her house, something was amiss. She stepped gingerly down from the bus and limped through gaps in the traffic. What had changed about her garden? She was at the corner of the road when she realised she couldn’t see a single flower.
Every one had been trampled flat. Most of the stalks were snapped and the blossoms trodden into the earth, which displayed the prints of small trainers. Dorothy held onto the gatepost while she told herself that the flowers would grow again and she would live to see them, and then she walked stiff as a puppet into the house to call the police.
While it wasn’t an emergency, she didn’t expect to wait nearly four unsettled hours for a constable less than half her age to show up. By this time a downpour had practically erased the footprints, which he regarded as too common to be traceable. “Have you any idea who’s responsible?” he hoped if not the opposite, and pushed his cap higher on his prematurely furrowed forehead.
“The family of the boy you were trying to catch last week.”
“Did you see them?”
“I’m certain someone must have. Mrs Thorpe opposite hardly ever leaves the house. Too worried that clan or someone like them will break in.”
“I’ll make enquiries.” As Dorothy started to follow him he said “I’ll let you know the outcome.”
He was gone long enough to have visited several of her neighbours. She hurried to admit him when the doorbell rang, but he looked embarrassed, perhaps by her eagerness. “Unfortunately I haven’t been able to take any statements.”
“You mean nobody will say what they saw,” Dorothy protested in disbelief.
“I’m not at liberty to report their comments.”
As soon as he drove away she crossed the road. Mrs Thorpe saw her coming and made to retreat from the window, then adopted a sympathetic wistful smile and spread her arms in a generalised embrace while shaking her head. Dorothy tried the next house, where the less elderly but equally frail of the unmarried sisters answered the door. “I’m sorry,” she said, and Dorothy saw that she shouldn’t expect any witness to risk more on her behalf. She was trudging home when she caught sight of an intruder in her front room.
Or was it a distorted reflection of Keanu’s memorial, thinned by the glare of sunlight on the window? At first she thought she was seeing worse than unkempt hair above an erased face, and then she realised it was a tangle of flowers perched like a makeshift crown or halo on the head, even if they looked as though they were sprouting from a dismayingly misshapen cranium. As she ventured a faltering step the silhouette crouched before sidling out of view. She didn’t think a reflection could do that, and she shook her keys at the house on her way to the door.
A scent of flowers greeted her in the hall. Perhaps her senses were on edge, but the smell was overpowering – sickly and thick. It reminded her how much perfume someone significantly older might wear to disguise the staleness of their flesh. Shadows hunched behind the furniture as she searched the rooms, clothes stirred in her wardrobe when she flung it open, hangers jangled at her pounce in the guest room, but she had already established that the back door and windows were locked. She halted on the stairs, waving her hands to waft away the relentless scent. “I saw you,” she panted.
But had she? Dorothy kept having to glance around while she cooked her dinner and did her best to eat it, though the taste seemed to have been invaded by a floral scent, and later as she tried to read and then to watch television. She was distracted by fancying there was an extra shadow in the room, impossible to locate unless it was behind her. She almost said “Stay out of here” as she took refuge in bed. She mouthed the words at the dark and immediately regretted advertising her nervousness.
She had to imagine Harry would protect her before she was able to sleep. She dreamed he was stroking her face, and in the depths of the night she thought he was. Certainly something like a caress was tracing her upturned face. As she groped for the cord, the sensation slipped down her cheek. The light gave her time to glimpse the insect that had crawled off her face, waving its mocking antennae. It might have been a centipede or millipede – she had no chance to count its many legs as it scurried under the bed.