‘One minute it was a microwave, then a box, then it was a boat, then it was a man in a mirror. What does that mean? Do you want to speak to her?’
‘I do,’ said Edward. ‘I want to know about the box and the boat. I wasn’t expecting a boat.’
‘Bear in mind, the Russian guy’s house was divided into four, so you might have had comings and goings from other tenants, and some might even have been Airbnb, so that’s a lot of different names and faces. I reckon the Met gave up trying to get her to remember anything that didn’t sound like a bad dream.’
She did not look like a woman with dementia. She came to the front door alone. She walked heavily, and Edward saw her feet bulged in worn slippers and her ankles were swollen with fluid. She had her glasses on her head, resting in a crown of tightly curled grey hair. She peered at her neighbour.
‘It’s Terry.’
‘I know you,’ she said, her voice rich with Caribbean intonation.
Terry said, ‘She has good days and bad days.’
‘Billy!’ she said to Edward.
‘No, this isn’t Billy,’ said Terry.
‘Who’s Billy?’
‘Her son.’ Terry turned to her. ‘Billy’s not here today,’ he said loudly. ‘I’m your neighbour. We know each other. Can we come in, Gloria?’ He whispered to Edward, ‘Cancer finished him. Went back to Jamaica on holiday, family home, never returned, broke her heart, so sudden, best not to mention.’
‘I can hear you,’ said Gloria. ‘Watch yourselves on the motorway.’
‘She thinks it’s a motorway out here. Two cars an hour,’ murmured Terry.
But Edward was stuck on the awfulness of Gloria’s loss. His mind flapped like loose celluloid, running back over the last few minutes. His brain felt full, the thoughts heavy in his head. Gloria must be far gone, he thought, if she misrecognized this pale stranger as her lost son. But he wanted to reach out and hug her. He had lost Matty, and he imagined himself at her age, eighty and burnt out with grief, misrecognizing everyone as his son, his son come back to him.
They were sitting in the living room now. ‘She’ll go out to make tea, come back without it, just watch.’ Terry’s smile was not cruel, just accepting of a reality he had somehow avoided. ‘They say you avoid the Demondee by playing Sudoku, but who has the time for that many numbers? Thatcher had it.’
‘Demondee?’
‘The demon dementia.Demon D.Catch up, sonny.’
Sonny. That word always did it. Oh God, was it going to be one of those days, where everything led back to Matty? Edward remembered, years ago, on the weekends he had his child, when his ex-wife was busy with her new marriage and new kids, his constant warnings not to kick the football off the edge of the cliff. How many had they lost? At least four. You always saw the white dot bob on the waves hundreds of feet below, a full stop on a huge sheet of blue paper. ‘The sailors will find it and play with it on the decks,’ Edward said, never cross; buying an unstable ruin had been his choice. He always played with his back to the edge, just to stop any crazy moment where his son might run forwards, forget himself, go off the cliff. His ex, Tara, was furious when she turned up early one Sunday, came down the side passage and saw the arrangement. ‘I didn’t think you even came out the back, and now you’re playing football here? Come on, Edward!’
But a smile had played around her lips, he was sure of it. Sudden death, when it took Matty, was never going to be the exotic – off a cliff – but the obvious. Under the wheels of a car.
‘We should turn our chairs to face the window: that might jog her,’ said Terry. The two men took three wooden chairs and parted the curtains completely. The house was in a perfect position for observing number 4, Prince Andrew’s Close. ‘What number are we?’
‘Don’t expect logic,’ said Terry. ‘I’m nine, this is six. They didn’t do a simple parallel count. I think they drew up the plans and then forced a couple more in. Or the person who did the numbering was having a bad day.’
On another occasion Edward might have laughed, but he felt his head bang with a migraine, as if a single word was rattling around inside it.Matty. Matty Matty Ma—
‘You okay, sonny?’
‘Sure.’
‘You look a bit tearful.’
‘It’s the light.’
It’s Sonny.
Gloria came back without the tea. The three sat on their wooden chairs facing the window. The sun was behind Gloria’s house and, low in the evening sky, hit the roof of number four. Edward felt his stomach heave – not so much with physical nausea as with anxiety. What was wrong with him?
‘That’s number one, I’m number two,’ said Gloria.
‘Close,’ said Terry. ‘My darling, Edward is going to ask you a couple of questions.’
