I stared. My daughter was, by my reckoning, playing on a dusty wooden floor with thousands of pounds’ worth of diamonds. I’d been assuming that Isobel was some poor unfortunate, cast adrift by a social system that hadn’t been able to care for her, squatting in this wreck of a house, and it turned out that she could have bought the place several times over.
‘Why are you here?’ I blurted out. Then, ‘No, sorry. It’s none of my business, of course. It’s just… this place.’ I waved an arm to illustrate the jumble-sale nature of the room: odd, wobbly furniture with a patina of mould-green and random piles of books, papers and rotting soft furnishings. ‘When you could be living somewhere warm and snug and having proper food and everything.’
Isobel looked at me strangely. Her eyes were small and dark under the grey fringe of hair which looked as though she’d hacked at it with a pair of secateurs from its uneven nature. The look was disconcerting, as though she was summing me up and assessing how much to say. Or write, rather. Eventually she picked up her pen and wrote, haltingly and pressing much harder than necessary:
There is more to life.
I raised my eyebrows and thought of our teeny tiny flat, one bed one chair and the bathroom cubicle. ‘Maybe. But being warm and well fed counts for quite a lot.’
Over in the middle of the floor, Tilly giggled. She was rolling the black stone beads across the boards. ‘Tilly!’
Isobel collected a small metal tray that sat, tarnished and unlovely, on one of the tables and got down on her hands and knees beside Tilly, showing her how to collect the diamonds up and put them all together on the tray to stop them rolling away. Tilly got behind the game very quickly, shouting, ‘’Nother one! ’Nother one!’ each time she found a loose bead. At last they were all assembled and I passed Tilly the cup of orange juice and the digestive biscuit that Isobel had put together.
‘Be careful, don’t spill.’
Tilly solemnly took the cup and sat down again on the floor. She seemed to be admiring her reflection in the metal tray; she kept leaning over it and staring. But she drank her juice mindfully, both hands clasped around the cup.
She’s a lovely little girl
‘She has her moments.’ I watched Tilly for a minute. ‘Do you have children, Isobel?’ It did cross my mind that, if she did, I could perhaps contact them and ask them to remove their mother.
No. No family.
Bugger. Another avenue closed. ‘But you do understand that you can’t keep living here?’ I asked gently. ‘I know it’s hard to leave places. But I really will help you find somewhere to go, somewhere you can take the birds too.’ I knew this was a bit of a rash promise; I could think of several places that would probably take a single elderly lady, but a flock of birds might be a step beyond the ‘one pet’ policy. Or could we count all of them as one unit, like a swarm of bees? ‘Somewhere you can feel safe.’
Isobel gave me the steady look again, then pointed at the window. My flesh clung closer to my bones under a chill sweat as I followed her pointing finger, beyond this dank little room and out to the trees, which were studded with black shapes, like wet washing hanging in the branches.
My birds.
There was a noise, the birds calling to one another and sounding like glass marbles rolling on a sheet of metal.
They know you’re here and they’re upset.
‘Well, I’m sorry about that,’ I said, keeping my eye on that slit of open window, just in case they all decided to rush us at once. ‘But you did invite me.’
So I did.
She was smiling now. Perhaps she could see my terror. I hoped not. I’d adopted the expression I used when Tilly had injured herself, a kind of bland interest. Any hint of my panicking and Tilly would hurl herself into hysterics so I’d learned the blank face and mild ‘oh dear’ went down far better than immediate cries and attempts to console her.
They won’t come in.
‘They were in here the other day.’ I couldn’t help the shudder of revulsion when I remembered opening the door to all those feathers and beaks.
Well yes. But you weren’t.
Tilly had put her cup down and gone back to dropping the diamonds onto the tray one at a time, counting as she went. Her knowledge of numbers was still random, so there was a lot of ‘one, one, five.’ I really must mention it to nursery and do some counting work with her.
The child distracts you. How can you work with her around? Does she have another parent?
‘Of course she distracts me. I have to look after her – I can’t just send her out into the woods to sit in a tree until I’ve got nothing better to do,’ I said, sounding snappish.
Isobel blinked.
‘I’m sorry.’ I felt guilty immediately. My situation wasn’t her fault, after all. ‘No, no other parent. We separated some time ago and I don’t have any family support.’ I glanced at Tilly once more. ‘It’s just me and her,’ I added, quietly. ‘And I really need the money that Ross is going to pay me for getting this place empty.’
Tilly clonked more diamonds onto the tray, which I was beginning to think might be solid silver. Only my daughter could play a counting game with heirlooms.
Beyond, in the trees, the birds all took off, squawking and cawing into a tattered cloud of black above the treetops.
