“No,” said Mum. “We don’t own the village green, and we’ve got no right to tell her what to do with her…eyes. Plus, she’s distraught. If I went out and said anything to her, I’d have to ask her if she’s okay, be sympathetic—”
“Er, what? No you wouldn’t.” Tobes sounded as if he’d never heard anything so outrageous in his life. “Just say, ‘Get away from my house, you nutter.’”
“Don’t be horrible.” Mum flinched. “Could she be the mother of someone from school, or one of your friends? Is anyone…upset with you at the moment?”
“Good try, Mother.” Tobes grinned. “Nice attempt at buck-passing. I promise you, she’s nothing to do with me. So…that just leaves…you!”
Mum got huffy then. “I don’t know why you’re talking as if I’ve got some kind of guilty secret, Toby. The worst thing I’ve done in my entire life is once take some treats out of the treat barrel at the vet’s without permission, one day when Champ seemed really hungry. There was no one behind the counter. I felt bad afterward, and next time I went in, I told them I’d done it. The vet said it was fine.”
“I’m joking, Mum.” Tobes patted her on the back. “Relax your trim. Also, that’s sonotthe worst thing you’ve ever done, but…look, I’m no saint myself, so—”
“What do you mean? What else have I done?”
“Ooh, let’s see. Bitched about Granny, Oonagh, Auntie Vicky—”
“Not true.” Mum was shaking her head. “Close friends and relatives sometimes behave badly and upset you. When that happens, I sometimes talk to Dad about it, or you, or Ree. Everyone does that. It’s allowed.”
Toby laughed. “Everyone does it, yeah, and the ‘it’ that everyone does is called bitching about people behind their backs. Mum, I’m messing with you. It’s just bantz.”
Throughout this conversation, Mum’s eyes and Toby’s both kept drifting to the window. At no point did either of them forget the presence of the sobbing woman.
“If she stays too much longer, this turns into harassment,” said Tobes. “We can ring the police.”
“No! Don’t.”
“Where’s Dad? He’ll deal with this, if you won’t let me do it.”
“What if she knows we’re about to put Shukes up for sale?” said Mum. “What if that’s why she’s here? I know it doesn’t exactly make sense and there’s no ‘For Sale’ board outside yet, but—”
“How could she know?” Tobes asked.
“She might have spoken to someone at the estate agent’s and they’ve told her.”
“What, and she’s interested? Would you act like this in front of a house you might want to buy?” Tobes made a dismissive noise. “Wait, look, here’s Dad, with Champ. This’ll be crease. Watch his face when he spots her. Bet he gets off the green to avoid her.”
I moved closer to the window and saw Dad and Champ in the distance, up by the playground area, still too far away for Dad to have spotted the Weeper. I watched as he stopped a little behind Champ, who was busy sniffing the bushy weeds covering Corinne Sullivan’s front wall. Champ is a very thorough sniffer and likes to approach any flower, plant, or tree from all angles with his “genius nose,” as Mum calls it, before lifting a furry haunch.
“Don’t let him go there, Mark!” Mum was already on her way out of the room. Seconds later, Tobes and I saw her sprinting across the green and heard her shout (because she didn’t bother to close the front door), “Don’t let him pee on Corinne’s wall! Pull him away!”
Too late. Champ was already relieving himself in the prohibited area. I understood why Mum was so dead set on stopping him, but she needn’t have worried. Corinne is far too sensible to think that Mark and Champ Lambert could or would ever be part of the official campaign against her. Yes, there were residents of Swaffham Tilney who—egged on by Michelle Hyde’s husband, Richard, the campaign leader—made a point of training their dogs to relieve themselves against Corinne’s front wall, but everyone knew Mark Lambert was a good sort and not like that.
What worried me far more than Champ’s bathroom break was our open front door. I watched the crying woman carefully to check she hadn’t started gliding eerily toward us without moving her legs.
She hadn’t. Instead, Mum’s bursting out of Shukes and shouting at Dad seemed to jolt the lachrymose lurker into a different frame of mind. She stopped crying, wiped her face, turned, and started to walk at a brisk pace in the opposite direction, toward the Old Post Office and the Rebel of the Reeds.
Around two minutes later, I saw a blue BMW I didn’t know drive too fast past the green on the other side of the road. It whizzed by too quickly for me to get a look at the driver, but I was sure it was the sobbing stalker, leaving Swaffham Tilney. Tobes had muttered, “Bye, nutjob,” when she’d first started to walk away, and returned to the sofa.
Then Dad, Mum, and Champ came inside and closed the front door. Dad was in placating mode, saying, “Fair enough, Sal. You’ve made your point,” to which Mum replied, “And if only me doing that ever resulted in you remembering for more than thirty seconds and, like, making sure it never happens again!”
“Let me make it up to you, my darling wife,” Dad said earnestly, putting his arms round Mum. “Why don’t I go over and ring Richard Hyde’s doorbell right now, and, when he opens the door, just piss all over him?”
“Stop! Urgh. You’re so disgusting.” He’d made her laugh, though.
Champ, curled up in his beige Sound Sleep Donut bed next to Mum’s favorite leather armchair, didn’t quite bark but made his rumbling-engine noise that means, “I can wake up properly if it turns out we’ve got a problem, but I’d rather not.”
The Lamberts didn’t have a problem, not anymore—or so they thought. The woman had gone, and we all assumed she’d never come back.
15
