“It’s all right,” I say. “There’s no one else. Just me. It was just a bad dream, that’s all. You’re OK. Let’s get you some dry jim-jams and get you sorted out.”
I carry her into the bathroom, clicking the landing night light on with my toe as we pass.
“Cover your eyes for a minute, Daisy.”
She does as she’s told, burying her face in her muslin cloth, and I snap on the bathroom light. Squinting against the glare from the bare bulb, I put her down carefully, wet a flannel, and clean her up a little, wrapping a towel around her waist to dry her before fetching fresh pajamas from the wardrobe in her bedroom. While I’m there, I strip the duvet cover off, ball up the sheet and the mattress protector, and bring it all back to dump into the shower cubicle. It can wait until the morning.
She’s still crying softly to herself, face still buried in the soft cotton of her muslin against the brightness of the bathroomlight. In the middle of the high-ceilinged room she looks tiny, like a baby bird that has fallen from the nest, and I kneel down to help her with the new pajamas. Groggily, she puts them on, her little shoulders still hitching with each sob.
“It’s OK,” I say, shushing her. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all OK now—I’m here.”
“Don’t like the new house,” she mumbles as she pulls the T-shirt top over her head. “Want to go back to the old house.”
“Do you want to sleep in the big bed with me and Mummy?”
She nods enthusiastically, eyes peeking out from behind her cloth. I pick her up and she clings on like a monkey, skinny arms and legs wrapping around me, head on my shoulder as I make my way carefully across the dimly lit landing.
“Want to go in the middle,” she mumbles into my neck.
Back in the master bedroom, I lift the duvet and let her climb in. Wordlessly, my wife lifts a sleepy arm and Daisy curls into her like a kitten, thumb in her mouth, and cloth still gripped in her little fist.
Within minutes, my youngest is fast asleep, the soft purr of her breathing slow and regular again.
But despite the hour, I can’t drift off. The strange noises of a new house, the soft creaking of old wood, the cadence of air moving through unfamiliar rooms. The question I’d been asking myself for the last two weeks: whether we had bitten off more than we could chew. The biggest mortgage we’ve ever had. The biggest debt, biggest commitment, biggest step we’d ever taken. And the other thing—the piece of bad news—that I still hadn’t shared with my wife. Hadn’t shared with anyone.
Don’t think about it. Everything always seems twice as bad in the dark, in the silence, in the middle of the night.
Daisy’s words are still catching in my thoughts too, snagging, like wool pulling on barbed wire. The words she’d been repeating over and over when I first went into her room.
“Don’t let him get me, Daddy.” Her voice had been a trembling whisper. “Don’t let him get me.”
Don’t let him get me.
7
MONDAY
For a not-quite-five-year-old, Daisy has an amazing ability to occupy space while she sleeps. Somehow she manages to take up a large proportion of our bed, her arms flung wide in the way she used to when she was a baby. Jess and I have rolled away in our sleep and now cling onto the edges of the bed like two bookends, the duvet half pulled off me, and a draft cooling the skin on my back. There is also a warm weight pinning my left foot in place—the cat curled into a slumbering ball at the end of the bed, purring softly in his sleep.
I study Daisy’s peaceful features for a moment in the pale morning light, strands of blonde hair falling over her face, the nightmare that had woken her in the small hours seemingly long gone. Of our three children, she had been the one who objected most strongly to the house move—which was strange because she had spent the least amount of time in our last place. Sixteen-year-old Leah had been glad to get a bedroom twice the size of her old one, more room for her overflowing collection of clothes, bags, books, shoes, and everything else. Callum, who was nearly nine, had objected at first but came around to the idea when he realized he wouldn’t be too far from his friends, his school, and would still be able to play for his football and tag rugby teams.
But Daisy had been at first confused, then defiant, and finally tearful at the prospect of leaving the cramped shared bedroomwhere she’d had her first proper bed, her first toy box, her first Christmas stocking from Santa. Perhaps the bed-wetting was just another manifestation of that.
Half an hour later, we’re both eating toast spread thickly with strawberry jam while Callum spoons Rice Krispies into his mouth as if he has not eaten for days. Jess is grabbing a quick shower and Leah has yet to surface, but she tends to cut it as fine as possible when it comes to school.
The kitchen is still a chaos of moving boxes, of appliances on the floor, tins and packets and bottles crowding the worktops. It needs to wait until we have the chance to give all the dusty old shelves and cupboards a thorough going over with bleach spray and disinfectant—one of the many jobs on our to-do list.
Chewing on her toast at the kitchen counter, Daisy seems untroubled by last night’s bad dream. With any luck, she will have forgotten all about it.
Callum takes a slurp of his orange juice. Like his sister, he’s dressed in the gray and dark green of their school uniform.
“Why was Daisy crying?” he says. “Last night?”
“It doesn’t matter, Cal.”
“I heard her,” he persists. “She woke me up.”
“She had a bad dream, that’s all. It doesn’t matter.”
