Tilly looked up too, now. ‘Bird, Mummy,’ she said happily, without a trace of the fear that was clotting in my throat. ‘Big bird.’
‘Yes,’ I said tightly, keeping my eye on the bird as though the weight of my stare could stop it from advancing.
Isobel turned her head and noticed the bird, which twitched its head sideways. One very dark eye seemed to scan the room, but I was mostly focused on the huge beak, which jutted menacingly and almost seemed to reach me. I was sweating.
Isobel raised an arm. The paper bearing her beautiful writing dipped and flapped and was suddenly and horribly joined by the scoop of wings as the black bird crouched and sprang from the window, soaring in lazy flight to land on her outstretched wrist, claws groping up and down for a grip.
My nerve broke. Sod the quadruple pay. Sod Ross Ventriss and his nervous energy. Sodeverything. I swept around behind me until I encountered Tilly and grabbed her into my arms in a protective hug that made her squeak. Then, without worrying about the lost boot but verymuchworrying about what might be following me, I ran back out of that room and that house, kicking the front door closed behind me as I went.
7
I made it halfway into the bushes before I stopped, bent forward and hyperventilating, with Tilly rotating in my arms. I wasn’t quite sure whether I was going to be sick, faint or whether I should lie down and have the kind of tantrum that would have had Tilly in awe at my loss of control but, of course, I did none of those things. I breathed very, very deeply and tried to stop my heart from clambering up my lungs and out of my throat.
‘My boot goed,’ Tilly said, very matter-of-factly.
‘Went, your boot went,’ I corrected automatically. ‘It can stay gone. I’m not going back in there.’
The hand on my shoulder almost caused my bladder to join in on the giving-up-control party although my voice box couldn’t manage more than a brief squeak and I’d not got the adrenaline left for anything other than a quick jerk sideways.
‘Have you got my paper?’
It was Ross Ventriss, still looking more strung-out than a 1980s pop star after an all-night drugs binge.
‘Paper?’ I said, my voice so high that bats were probably bouncing off trees above our heads and dropping stunned to the ground.
‘The page I gave you that you were bringing to give back to me? Today? Here at ten?’ Ross looked at the phone in his hand. ‘It’s ten o’clock now.’
‘Right, right.’ The dreadful panic was subsiding now but it left me with a weak feeling in my head and my knees had lost all strength. ‘Tils, I’m going to have to put you down.’
‘Boots gone,’ she said again and waggled her socked feet. She was right, we’d left one boot behind in that dreaded room and the other had come off at some time during our flight.
‘Look, sit on here.’ Ross pointed to a tree stump festooned with pockets of moss and roped with ivy stems. ‘Then you don’t need to put the child down.’
‘“The child”,’ I said, icily, but sagging down onto the stump with relief, ‘is called Matilda.’
‘Well I didn’t know that, did I?’ he pointed out.
‘I’m a queen,’ Tilly said proudly. I’d drummed it into her that she was named after the Empress Matilda, one of the protagonists of the first English Civil War, in the hope that it would make her grow up with some of the same attributes. So far all that was evident was the desire to argue and a certain ability to escape captivity. If I’d called her Elizabeth I’d probably be worrying about my head even now.
‘Do you have the paper?’ A hand reached out in my direction and I could see how badly bitten the nails were. The skin around his cuticles was ripped and torn as though he’d been pulling up grass, and there were patches of eczema on the back.
‘There’s a woman living in there,’ I said. ‘And she doesn’t want to leave.’
‘Oh. Ah.’ The hand fell away and he tucked it into a pocket as though he were ashamed of its presence. ‘Did you tell her the place is being knocked down?’
‘Yes I did. But she’s got birds in there with her.’ The shudder wouldn’t be suppressed; it crept up the back of my neck and escaped over the top of my head. ‘So we didn’t exactly have an in-depth conversation about it.’ I scrabbled about in my pocket in search of the folded paper that I’d shoved in on my way out of the flat. ‘You’re going to have to go in and explain to her. Oh, and she’s mute, so there’s that too.’
I was sitting on the log with Tilly perched across my lap, so I could see the expressions crossing Ross’s face as he watched me pat myself down. He had one of those long, mobile faces that showed emotions and thoughts as clearly as if they were printed across his forehead, and enormous eyes that reflected that emotion back again like a pair of parabolic mirrors. Right now he was showing extreme horror.
‘Oh, great,’ he said with heavy emphasis. ‘That is just…great.’
From the half glance he gave Tilly I got the feeling that he would have liked to have included a lot more profanity but her presence made him hold back.
‘Why, though?’ I said, finally scissoring the paper between two fingers and pulling it free. ‘I mean, you own the place. Just go in with a couple of police and haul her out.She’s squatting, after all. She’s gotbirdsin there,’ I added, in a tone that seemed to imply that they could then hack her to bits or export her to Peterborough – anything else would be too kind.
Ross sighed very heavily, unfolding the paper to check that his drawing was, in fact, on the reverse. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘It’s complicated.’
Tilly was rocking gently on my lap, humming to herself and sucking her thumb. ‘Man. Daddy,’ she said suddenly, pulling her thumb out in a trail of dribble and staring at Ross. This was the first time she’d mentioned David since we’d left. I’d had a whole load of phrases ready for this moment, from ‘We had to leave Daddy because he wasn’t very nice’ through to ‘If that bastard rots in hell for all eternity it will be too good for him’, but I’d been hoping for more of a run at this discussion. Until she was about sixteen would have been good.
