Ross Ventriss
‘You’re Ross Ventriss?’ I asked. I vaguely remembered the name from the emails but my mental image of a Ross Ventriss was someone older, more put-together and, to be frank, someone who didn’t look as though their entire being was held together by work tension and too much coffee.
‘Yes. You have a problem with that?’
‘You don’t look like a Ross, that’s all.’ I remembered the agony of choosing names, poring over books, eagerly snatching at anything unusual or that resonated. The memory was haunted.
Ross – name befitting or not – sighed and slumped back into his chair as though his legs had had enough. ‘Please,’ he said, from between his hands, ‘please, just make sure it’s empty. I’ve only got a month.’
I folded the paper and slid it into my pocket. There wasn’t much else to say, and he was already turning back to his screens with a weary resignation that seemed to be pressing on his head like a hat full of sand.
I left quietly and walked back through the flower-studded garden to my car.
3
I was late to nursery. Of course I was, I wasalwayslate, and if I wasn’t the staff still managed to fill me with a generalised sense of guilt, although I was certain they didn’t mean to.
‘Mummmeeeeee!’ Tilly launched herself at me, hair flying and arms full of a ridiculous number of cereal boxes covered in an inadequate layer of poster paint. Which wasn’t, contact revealed, quite dry yet.
‘Hello, darling. What have you been making?’
Tilly stared at the cereal boxes, which had been glued together to form a random shape. It could have been anything from a house to a scale model of the space shuttle, it was impossible to tell. ‘Box,’ she said firmly.
I smiled apologetically at her named worker, whose name was actually Ashlee. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘See you tomorrow. Say goodbye, Tilly.’
‘Bye, Tilly, see you in the morning!’ Ashlee trilled, sounding way too perky for someone who’s spent the last ten hours in the company of tiny children. I had no idea how she did it, because after two hours in the company of one small child I was reduced to monosyllables and a terrible desire to smash the TV.
Tilly did not say goodbye. She stared at the heap of blue boxes she was carrying, then pressed them firmly up against me, transferring most of the damp paint to my shirt. ‘Box,’ she said again and then, more hopefully, ‘Ice cream?’
Quadruple pay. That would mean ice cream. Maybe even a visit to the soft play centre that Tilly loved so much. Swimming and proper Christmas presents. ‘We’ll see,’ I said, and she skipped a couple of steps. ‘Did you have a good time at nursery today?’
Tilly’s little face creased for a moment. For a two-year-old she had a very wide range of expressions; she seemed to have come pre-programmed for non-verbal communication. ‘Rupert bites,’ she said, after a moment’s deep thought. ‘No biting, Rupert!’
‘No,’ I agreed, trying to remember which one of her cohort was Rupert. Or rather, since I saw more of the parents than of the children, which of the mothers and fathers I encountered looked like the sort of people who would call their son Rupert. ‘Did Rupert bite you, Tilly?’
Her blonde curls swung as she shook her head definitely. ‘I bites Rupert,’ she announced proudly. ‘Box, Mummy.’ She held her arms out and I thankfully decanted the awkward box heap back into her grasp again, making a mental note to have the ‘no biting’ talk with her again before bed and to ask Ashlee to keep an eye on both Tilly and the masticatory Rupert.
‘We’ll have to put them in the boot,’ I said, blipping the Skoda open. ‘Go and get in your seat and I’ll come and strap you in.’
It hit me again, then, as powerful as the concentrated smell of paint and glue from the model, that this was my life now. Every so often it caught me by surprise, almost as though my mind believed that I was just playing at motherhood, only pretending to be balancing caring for my daughter and trying to scratch a living, and that I could just slam the car shut, say ‘bollocks to it’, hand the child to her real parents and head back to my actual life. A life where I could lie in the bath without having a small person tearing off their clothes to join me in a flailing of warm skinny limbs. A life where I could read a book or have a cup of tea without having to pretend to be a horse or a dog and I could wear clothes that suited me rather than clothes that just didn’t show the porridge stains.
But that life would mean being without Tilly. And, quite honestly, Tilly was the only thing that made any of this almighty shit show worth carrying on with. Almost reflexively I checked my phone. The screen was blank, no messages, no missed calls from unknown numbers. Good. It had been weeks now. Perhaps he’d forgotten about us or decided to let us go. Or found someone else to terrify and decided that we were too much trouble to try to track down.
Good. Yes.
Later that night, when Tilly was in bed and breathing softly through her nose with a faint whistling sound, pink and clean and rosy like a storybook image of the perfect child, the phone rang.
I stared at it for a moment before I answered. It was from a number I’d called previously but hadn’t put a name beside. ‘Hello?’ Cautious, always cautious. It could be anybody. It could be Him.
‘Is that Libby? Libby Douthwaite?’
‘Er.’ Not ready to commit yet.
‘This is Ross. Ventriss. You’re sorting out Elm Cottage for me?’
Suddenly the voice clicked into place with the mental image of the man. Wiry and edgy, but not in the way of so many of the men I’d met, trying to look hard because the alternative was to be a target, while strung out on drugs or psychosis, fidgety and wild. Ross had had the look of a man trying to keep his life together with paperclips and watery glue, and I knew how that felt.
‘Yes, I’m Libby. Hello.’
