believe her. Tracing the tooth marks on her arm, just one budding drop of blood where the skin is broken, Diana prays for Valerie to be dead. Can she really do that? She can. Deep down inside, that is what she’s always wanted since Valerie arrived in this world – for Valerie to be gone. Leaning forwards onto her hands, she presses into the grass and pushes herself slowly up onto her heels.
‘Ed,’ she calls over, weakly.
He doesn’t even turn round. ‘Darling! Keep hoping.’
‘Quiet!’ The call went up.
One of the firemen is calling out, he is lying flat on his stomach with his head at a peculiar angle. ‘Valerie? We’re here to help you now, Valerie.’ He is stretching into the bowels of the collapsed tower. ‘I’ve got her wrist!’
The lead officer shouts over abruptly. ‘Keep hold of the boy, it’s not safe.’
Edmund holds the child tight. ‘Wait with me. He’s got her wrist, they’ve found Mummy, we just need to wait.’
‘Mum, it’s me. It’s me, Mikey. Can she hear me?’
‘Do we have a pulse?’
A small scurry of stones slides down the fractured walls of the tower.
‘Stand back, stand back.’
The waiting. For all of them, the cold waiting will never be forgotten. Having been so sure Valerie must be dead, now Diana chews the very real possibility of her living, a piece of meat impossible to swallow or spit out in company. Mikey is so sure she must be alive, his faith makes him jump up and down on the spot, energised by hope and his unshakeable faith in his mother.
Inch by inch, the fireman is sliding out of the collapsed tower, climbing over the rubble slowly, so slowly, two or three others clustering around him. He is shaking his head. They are turning away, tired now, they seem, all action ceased.
Dead then. After all that. Her little Valerie gone. Breath is snatched from Diana, as if death is catching.
Since he has been wound up like a jack in the box, Mikey is still jumping despite the weight of Edmund’s arm heavy on his shoulders, he cannot do anything else. Up and down, round and round he goes, he does not know where to go, which way to turn.
That way is the bronze boy and the wood and a little garden sunk beneath stone walls where you might hide and never be found out; that way, behind the house, just fields and woods and sheep ganging up, and he’s never been anywhere like that in his life, he would not know how to live in a place like that, all on his own; and over there, the woods with the giant Christmas trees where the birds were circling and screaming last night, they were the most frightening of all. But past the coach house, that’s where the drive goes, he can’t remember how it goes or where it goes, but it goes, away from here, all the way to the tall gates and then the road and then the town and then home where she’ll be in the kitchen, feeding the cat or maybe in the bedroom drying her hair or maybe in the yellow sitting room finishing her jigsaw. Where does this bit go? Mikey runs. Edmund is calling after him, but he runs all the same, very fast, faster than he knew he could. It is vital he outruns what has happened to stop it catching up with him. The cattle grid stops him. It isn’t that he can’t balance on the rails or avoid the gaps in between them, it is more that if he does cross it, he doesn’t know who he’d be, if he’d even still have the same name. Behind him Edmund is coming towards him, slowly, with his arms out wide.
‘Fuck off,’ shouts Mikey.
Then he remembers they were the last terrible words he ever said to his mother. Words she said she never wanted to hear him say again in her lifetime. She never will. The stitch in his side is so sharp he wonders if he too will be dead soon. What is dead? He slumps onto the gravel, and with his head in his hands, he feels dead. He has never met dead until his nanna’s funeral and now he has met dead twice in two days, but he still doesn’t quite understand what it is.
It is the flapping of a flock of fat pigeons when the coffin slides out of the boot.
It is made up of crows. Here, one black crow perches on the back of a white sheep, pecking at its wool.
It is to piss and to cry at the same time.
‘Mikey, there was nothing anyone could do. I’m sorry.’
That’s Edmund’s tall shadow above him. He doesn’t mean to lie, but he is lying. Someone could have done something.
Mikey doesn’t reply. There is nothing left to say.
The drive on the other side of the cattle grid goes nowhere that matters.
Behind him, there is nothing left.
The truths are heavy as earth on top of him, all breath blocked, all words buried.
It begins to drizzle. Sullen grey clouds loiter over the park with nothing better to do than make things worse, and a listlessness and tearfulness seep into the scene; everyone moves more slowly, the sense of urgency is gone. People huddle, the man has put his heavy camera down, the rescue dog is back in the van, Grace checks her phone again and goes to her husband. She is desperate to reach her daughter, there’s still no news of Liam, there’s nothing else they can do here. Diana can overhear her quite plainly although the argument with John is conducted in angry whispers.
‘We can and we should go now. After all that’s happened, are you going to put her family before our own?’
Now Edmund joins them. There is a brief muttered debate about whether the boy would be better off going with them. All three of them turn to look at Mikey, picking at the bark on the cedar tree as if there might be something beneath it after all. Privately, Diana is torn: she wants him gone, she can’t bear the way he looks at her; she needs him close when he starts telling everyone, she must be there to translate. She realises she might need to learn to love him, she may be all he has left. Her mind trips over its laces as she moves towards him to claim him.
There is not much that Mikey knows. His mind, which was so out of breath the pain was unbearable, is now out of focus as well, but his instinct tells him he wants to stay with Grace and he wants Grace to stay here at Wynhope. He can’t leave here because here is where his mum is, but he can’t stay here with his aunt, not on his own. His mum always says he’s razor sharp when it comes to people, and he’s razor sharp now, recognising that there is no love lost between Grace and his aunt, and if he has to choose he knows whose side he’s on. Even the dog looks as though he wants to go with Grace, waiting by their car and wagging his tail. When they drive away without either of them, Mikey realises how cold he feels in his socks and his funeral shirt.
‘We need to get you sorted out, young man,’ says his uncle.
Back inside the house, a different sort of anarchy greets Edmund, Diana and Mikey: the detritus of that last supper is everywhere even though the Stafford porcelain figurines are still dancing in pairs on the sideboard and the freesias stand upright on the windowsill, just a few petals fallen, confetti at a funeral. Edmund says he does not understand it, how some things can be destroyed, but others left untouched. As he guides the boy towards the staircase, Edmund picks up the pieces of the smashed china horse and runs his finger over the rough edge of its snapped leg.
‘My father’s, Flash in the Pan he was called. He fell at Hereford and had to be shot. The whole household was in tears over that.’
The boy finds the
