Just dropped in there – another unfortunate event.
‘Poppy died?’
‘He went to sort out the funeral.’
‘When is it?’
‘It was yesterday.’
‘Oh.’ The pot starts to hiss and bubble. I lift it off the plate. ‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘I’m sorry, Connie. It wasn’t up to me. I didn’t go either. I was looking after Agnes.’
‘Agnes didn’t go?’
Hanna shakes her head. ‘Mick didn’t think it was such a good idea.’
‘Right. How do you take this?’
‘Milk.’
I faff around for a while. ‘I would have liked to have been there.’
‘Yes?’
‘I would have gone.’ I never liked Poppy very much but there was something admirable about her. While Dad was tearing himself free and unable to cope with me, she had given me a home. I would have liked to pay my respects.
‘Anyway.’ Hanna takes a seat at the table. ‘He’s stayed on in Sand Lane to sort out her things.’
‘Right. Jesus, Hanna.’
‘I know. It all comes at once, doesn’t it?’
I go and glance round the door. Agnes is on the piano stool, earphones cupped round her head like muffs, bopping away to the piano’s demo track.
I close the kitchen door behind me and sit down facing Hanna.
‘It’s about Agnes,’ she says.
‘I thought it might be.’
‘We were trying for a second child.’
‘I see.’
‘Mick’s found out that he’s not – he can’t have kids. He never could have kids.’
‘She’s mine.’
Hanna stares at me.
‘Yes? Agnes is mine.’
‘You knew?’
‘Of course I knew. Look at her.’
‘Jesus Christ, Conrad, and you never said?’
It’s my turn to stare.
‘You never said a word!’
‘Hanna, I tried. Plus, it’s blindingly obvious.’
‘I don’t believe this.’
‘Hanna, I’m not the one keeping secrets.’
‘I don’t bloody believe you.’
This is probably not the moment to remind Hanna of all the occasions she has slipped from the room, or hung off Michel’s arm, or brought Agnes along ‘for the ride’, or closed the door on me – ‘Goodnight, Conrad.’ Over the years she has deployed the entire arsenal of avoidance against me.
‘You didn’t exactly make it easy for me to say anything.’
‘Anyway.’ She drinks her coffee. ‘Obviously we’re going to need to be together in some fashion. For Agnes. Mick’s a great dad. It’s the last thing I want, to keep him from his child.’
‘I still don’t see why you’re both making such a production out of it.’
She stares at me like I’ve crawled from under a rock. ‘Can you not see . . .?’
‘I can see you playing up to every soap cliché, is what I can see. Agnes is nearly in big school, for crying out loud. Her genes are playing out in the world. They’re her genes now. Not yours, not mine. You’re not telling me Mick can’t see this? I know he has a temper but for Christ’s sake.’
‘It’s not the only problem between us. It’s all come together, is the thing. This. Poppy. When did you last see Mick?’
‘It’s a while.’ Was it as long ago as my interview with Bryon Vaux? ‘A year, easily. He’s always in the summerhouse when I pick Agnes up—’
Catching Hanna’s eye, I realise now that this has been a lie. An excuse. He has not wanted to see me. The business of Agnes’s parentage has been eating away at them a long time.
‘Mick’s been going absent a lot lately.’
‘Is there anyone?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Hanna sounds almost disappointed. ‘I don’t think it’s that. Anyway, I thought you might know where he went.’
‘You don’t?’
‘He says it’s a secret. Something he’s working on. A surprise for us. To be honest, Conrad, I’m not sure he’s well.’
There’s a more practical reason why Hanna has come into town – an appointment at the eye hospital. It’s nothing serious; only that, after years of fighting with uncomfortable contact lenses and a constantly changing prescription, Hanna has decided to have her corneas shaved to a better shape. Since she’s going in for the op, she figures she will have AR layers annealed in at the same time. It’s expensive, but the resolution is very good, far better than anything the unadorned eye can achieve.
‘How do you turn it off?’
‘Oh, Conrad.’
‘How do you turn it off?’
‘They teach you all sorts of ways of controlling the layers. Blinks and glances. You know.’
‘Okay,’ I say, in my most not-okay voice.
‘Honestly Conrad,’ Hanna laughs, ‘I thought this was your kind of thing.’
It was. It really was. First vests, then wraprounds, then lenses, and now this. But there is a difference between a product, something you have to go out and find, and a utility, something sewn in, something so integral to you that you barely notice it unless it goes wrong. AR can only ever work as a utility. Hanna knew this years ago. She teased me about it, practically the day I met her. And she told me that in the end, it was not good, if AR became what it always had to become – a kind of Muzak, smoothing and glamorising the real.
Even as I have come around to her way of thinking, however, she has come around to mine. ‘I just don’t see the harm in it,’ she says.
Agnes is tucked up in my bedroom. Hanna has slipped in beside her. The kitchen-diner’s large; there is a pull-out couch.
Click-clack.
I’m sitting up before I’m even awake.
Click-clack.
I know this sound. I swing myself off the couch, tensed against the slightest sound, a thump, a creak, as I lever my weight from the frame. Silence.
Click-clack.
It’s coming from the bedroom. A shutter sound. Christ. I take a knife from the magnetic strip on the wall and edge towards the door. I open it, lean round. The bedroom door is open. There is a figure at the window, a box raised to her face.
Click-clack.
‘Agnes.’
She turns. She motions, ‘Shh.’
I slip past the bed – Hanna is still sleeping – and up to the window. When they refurbished the building they put in soundproof glass. A fancy kind, and very effective. Below us, a car burns in silence. Kids are dancing round it to a music we cannot hear.
Click-clack.
This is her father’s camera, the bulky one he got the Christmas I stayed with them.
‘Go back to bed.’
‘I want to watch.’
‘Go on.’
‘Is that our car?’
‘Of course not.’
‘It could be.’
‘You’re parked on the other side of the building.’
‘Agnes?’ Hanna’s awake.
Agnes puts down the camera and climbs into bed, snuggling down with her mother.
‘Why are the curtains open?’
I draw them. ‘Goodnight.’
I sit a while with my phone, watching mash-ups, mapping feeds, behaving, in other words, much like every other concerned householder tonight. (The lights are on all over the estate.) The gossip feeds are buzzing, but it looks as though tonight’s action is headed west, away from us. Nothing happens. Nothing much. I see some young men wielding bats, crossing the square below my kitchen window. Vigilantes. Good. We look after our own in here, most of the time.
Agnes has settled back to sleep. I’m impressed. I would have thought the big bad city would have given her nightmares.
Their house is enclaved now. I was there last month, picking up Agnes for a date. (It was a kind of date. A meal, a show. It was fun. It was a glimpse of what the future Agnes ought to be like, unless her parents’ separation ruins things for her.)
I remember I drove up to the house and there was this flimsy plastic barricade across their road. Pointless. A strong gust of wind would rip it off. That or the bull-bars of a speeding 4by4. There was a gatehouse next to it, and a kid slumped there in the uniform, several sizes too big, of a D-list private security company.