4
Monday 17 June 2024
Sally
Sally is still in a heap with her back pressed against the front door when she hears Mark’s car drive past their house a few minutes later. Or maybe it’s an hour later; she has no idea how much time has passed. Champ is draped across her legs, asleep on his side, front and back paws stretched out as if he’s trying to mimic three sides of a trapezoid. Sally has stopped crying, which she supposes is something. What she hasn’t done is go to the lounge where her phone is, call anyone, summon help of any kind, look up any useful information.
She will need to move so that Mark and Toby can get inside the house, she thinks. That can be the start of her doing something, of taking decisive action. That will be soon enough. There’s a good chance it’s been less than fifteen minutes since Detective Connor Chantree left, and it takes days if not weeks or months for a situation like this to go from just started to too late. Sally knows she’ll get a handle on it. Mark and Toby’s return is just the catalyst she needs.
And it was definitely them she heard, cruising past the front door on their way to the far end of the development where the twelve parking spaces are separated from one another by neatly planted rows of shrubs: six spots for Bussow Court residents’ cars and six for visitors. Unlike Mark, Sally is no expert on different sorts of engines and the noises they make, but she was nevertheless able to identify her husband’s car from the sound of muffled pounding that accompanied its passing: a song (if you can call it that, which Sally doesn’t think she credibly can) that belongs to a genre her children calldrill. There could be no clearer signal of the proximity of Toby Lambert, Sally and Mark’s sixteen-year-old son, than the whooshing-past-the-front-door of a throbbing racket of the sort Sally just heard. Drill is Toby’s latest obsession, and of course he wants to listen to as many of his favorite tracks as possible on the way back from his Music GCSE exam, which was this afternoon.
Sally is thankful that she couldn’t hear any of the lyrics and hopes none of the neighbors did either. Ree, eighteen months older than Tobes and certain her own current tastes are more sophisticated (love songs aimed at God, written and performed by members of the controversial Hillsong Church, though Ree insists she’s an atheist), has been known to shout-sing a brilliant mockery of a typical Toby number: “Co-caine-up-my-nose/Gonna-give-it-to-my-hoes/Cos-that’s-just-the-way-it-goes.”
No one from Bussow Court has yet complained about Toby’s “music” (“Shouldn’t two years of GCSE-level study have taught him what music is and isn’t?” Mark has grumbled more than once), and Sally has fretted for a while that it’s surely only a matter of time. At home there’s a strict headphones-only rule—all the Lambertsagree that they don’t want to be noise-polluted by the others—but Sally knows Toby always wins the Battle of When to Switch It Off whenever it’s just him and Mark in the car, and today he’ll have won it decisively, as it’s a GCSE day.
Sally can imagine exactly how it went: Mark will have pressed the off switch as he turned right into Swaffham Tilney off the B1102, and Tobes will have turned it back on again, saying, “Can’t I listen while we drive through the village? Pleeeeease? Come on, Dad; I’ve just done an exam.” Reluctantly, Mark will have agreed. Then he’ll have reached out again—a hopeful arm, spurred on by desperate ears—as they approached the turning for Bussow Court. Toby, ready with his next move, will have blocked Mark’s hand before it touched the on-off button. “What difference will, like, ten more seconds make?” he’ll have said plaintively.
All right. Can you at least turn it right down, though?
No, Dad, you fun sponge. Music like this needs to be loud. The windows are shut, aren’t they? Relax your trim.
And later Mark will say to Sally, “I didn’t want to crash the car while arm wrestling with him, and I didn’t have the energy to argue,” and then rant for a full twenty minutes about the inconsiderateness of teenagers, having somehow found the requisite energy for that, and oblivious to whether Sally might in fact rather listen to one of Toby’s awful drill tracks than this rant-liloquy she’s heard Mark perform several dozen times before.
Except it isn’t going to happen like that this time. Nothing that’s part of the Lamberts’ ordinary routine will fit into the rest of this unbearable day. The pattern is about to be disrupted by what Sally will say the second she has someone to say it to, andsoon—really, startlingly soon, she’ll hear Mark’s and Toby’s footsteps any second now—no one will be able to think about anything but the nightmare that came knocking at the door of the Hayloft today, the one that is gone for now but will keep coming back, keep knocking. The one that might get gradually worse and worse until…
No. That cannot be allowed to happen. Can’t be considered, let alone tolerated, as a possibility.I will kill absolutely everyone if I have to,Sally thinks,and very happily go to prison for the rest of my life. It will be worth it. I’ll take the two longest, fattest-bladed knives from the wooden block next to the kettle and plunge, twist, and gouge them into the chests of anyone who comes to the door and…
A crazy idea cauterizes her murderous fantasy: She could leave the house now—take Champ and just go. Why give anybody, close family member or policeman, the chance to turn up and say anything at all? There’s still time to escape. Look how long it’s taking Mark and Tobes to get here. Does this prove Mark’s point? Sally wonders. Like the Gaveys (who bought the Stables six weeks after the Lamberts bought the Hayloft) and like Deryn and Jimmy Dickinson from the Granary, Mark believes that the Farmer positioned the parking spaces for Bussow Court unacceptably far away from the houses. Sally has always been in the other camp, the “How can any sane human believe that between twenty and forty footsteps is too far?” camp, along with Vinie and Graham Skinner from the Barn and Conrad Kennedy from the Byre.
No, she can’t escape. She’d bump into Mark and Toby. Her car is parked in the Hayloft’s visitor space. But what if she were to leave on foot? “Just taking Champ out for a quick walk before I starton dinner,” she can say if Mark’s outside the front door when she opens it.
And then she could go…
Where, without her car? She could ring a taxi if she took her phone, but to whose house or office would she ask to be taken? Who can help her? And why is she fantasizing about escaping from her entire family instead of looking forward to the help and comfort they might give her?
Sally doesn’t need a degree in psychology to know the answer to that last one. She offers a silent hat tip to her late father, who died fourteen years ago.Thanks, Dad. Great work.
She hears a key in the lock and shuffles to one side, trying to disturb Champ as little as possible. He opens an eye but is asleep again by the time Mark and Tobes have come in and shut the door behind them.
“Why are you sitting in the hall?” Mark looks down at Sally and chuckles. “Have our chairs and sofas been repossessed? Bailiffs been?”
She shakes her head.
“Sal?” Mark sounds worried. “Has something happened?”
“Mum, are you okay?” asks Toby.
Another shake. No. She is not okay. Then she tries to smile and says, “I will be.”Don’t wait, though. Like: Eat, have a shower. Watch some telly. It might take me a while.This would be a good joke if only she could make the words come out.
“You don’t look okay,” says Mark.
But does she look strong? That’s more important. Unhappy but strong, shocked but unbeatable—either of those could work. Sheis a mother of four, so she has no choice. She has to be strong, for Tobes, Ree, Champ, and…
Arguably, no deceased Welsh terrier needs his former owner to be strong for his sake, but Sally can’t bear, ever, to think of Ree, Tobes, and Champ without also thinking of Furbert. And she wasn’t just his owner; she was—is—his adoring mother, just as she is to the other three. Furthermore, she isn’t at all willing to think of herself as someone who now has one child fewer than she once had, so, yes, absolutely, she has to be strong for Furbs’s sake too.
Sally only remembers that she heard footsteps thudding down the stairs a moment ago when Ree is bending down in front of her, angry-faced. She’s removed all her makeup since Sally last saw her. “Aren’t you going to tell them?” she says.
Does this mean Ree knows? Did she hear the conversation between Sally and the policeman, and is she here to bring everyone up to speed? If so, maybe Sally won’t need to speak for a few more minutes, by which time speaking will hopefully feel easier.
