As I pulled my headphones on and the familiar theme music started, I heard the bass line of the rock album begin at disconcerting volume from the flat below, and sighed.I can do this. I can make us a future.
Tilly, of course, slept on.
12
The woods were misty when we parked in the now well-worn space beside the road. Small drifts of fog were caught in the high branches, as though the trees were exhaling softly into the cold air and beads of moisture lay along the edges of the vegetation which clung on despite the encroaching winter.
Tilly was fascinated by the fallen leaves and cantered along through the undergrowth picking at the bright colours and random shapes until her hands were full of soggy, snail-nibbled examples, like a really cheap bouquet. ‘More!’ she kept shouting, leaping on another drift. Above our heads a neck-prickling flock of black birds was circling, calling idly among themselves.
‘Stay close, Tils, please.’ I looked up at the birds. Were they watching us? I’d got so used to that feeling of being watched, being constantly under observation, that I almost welcomed it like an old friend. It no longer hung over me; as I’d freed myself from David I’d freed myself from his constant scrutiny and his awful, total, exerting of control and I’d pushed the horror away. It felt almost as though I’d buried the feeling and was sitting on its sunken corpse, alert for any tremblings beneath that showed it re-emerging.
I shuddered again and looked up at the birds. As long as they stayed up there, high in the trees, I was all right. It was up close and personal where I had a problem with birds – birds in general, doing their thing in the sky I was fine with. That phrase ‘murder of crows’ loomed at the back of my mind again and I tried to swerve it with a teaching moment. ‘Do you know that a lot of sheep is called a flock? And cows are called a herd?’ I asked Tilly.
‘Trees!’ she yelled, clearly having no desire to have a ‘learning moment’.
‘A lot of trees is called a wood. Or a forest. Or a copse.’
Tilly, not listening in the slightest, scooped another handful of leaves and then threw them. I think she was trying for the ‘falling leaves’ effect, but the combination of toddler lack of coordination and the damp stickiness of the leaves themselves meant that they hit me as a solid lump in the midriff.
‘Let’s go and see if Isobel is in.’ I tried to peel the soggy mass off my coat, leading Tilly through the bushes along the path, which seemed to come and go as it pleased. There was no sign of Ross. I tried to convince myself that I hadn’t really been looking to see if his car was parked anywhere close or he was walking through the trees. On the one hand I was enjoying the feeling of liking a man again, but on the other I knew it was stupid and not real. Just me attaching myself mentally to the first man to be nice to me in… how long? David had been nice to me to begin with, after all.
The hallway was as hushed as ever, the far door closed, and I could imagine the sound of those dread wings brushing against it. ‘Sssh, Tilly,’ I said, even though she wasn’t making any more noise than that occasioned by the clomp of her boots on the tiled floor.
‘Ssh, Tilly,’ she repeated. ‘Ssssh, Brass,’ she said to her dragon, who was squashed into the pocket of her mac to allow her hands to be available for leaf-throwing.
‘Isobel, it’s Libby, I’ve brought Tilly over too,’ I announced loudly at the door, to give her time to eject any birds that might be there and because it would be rude to throw open the door without any warning.
The door opened from the inside. Tilly stepped back behind me, tugging my arm around so that my shoulder cracked. Isobel stood in the doorway, blocking the light from the window, but apart from her sinister silhouette she didn’t seem to be too scary today. No birds surrounded her and the room behind looked quiet.
Hello
‘Isobel can’t talk, Tils,’ I said, keeping my daughter behind me, just in case. ‘So she writes down what she wants to say.’
Come in. The kettle is on. Does the child like orange juice? Would she like a biscuit?
‘Yes to both, thank you.’ I sidled into the room, towing Tilly like a liner pulling a lifeboat. ‘You would like a biscuit, wouldn’t you?’ I asked her.
‘Mmm.’ Thumb was in mouth now.
I led her over to the pink stripy sofa, shedding stuffing and feathers from between rips in the decaying fabric, keeping one cautious eye on that open window. Beyond it I could see nothing more threatening than the fog-smudged trees but that didn’t mean I was about to let my guard down. Tilly began to wander around the room, peering into containers and prodding things, her shadow in the depths of the corners looking oddly misshapen as Brass bulged from her side.
‘Don’t touch stuff, Tils,’ I said. ‘Look, why not let Brass sit down over here?’
There’s nothing she can harm.
Then Isobel added,
Fairly obviously.
‘No, but there are things that might harmher.’ I concluded that Isobel had never had children, but it seemed too personal a question to ask.
Like birds?
Isobel was looking at me sideways, slightly cheekily, while she poured water into mugs. The metal box contained a carton of orange juice and a packet of digestive biscuits, and I side-eyed those for signs of mouse damage as Isobel got them out.
The box is kept closed.
She’d obviously caught me at it.
