The front door of the house next door opened then shut with a bang. Jay sat upright in the kitchen chair, where he’d been slumped over a cup of coffee, on the edge of sleep. It was mid-morning the next day. He glanced over at the window. There was a man crossing the road further up, heading towards the dishes. Jay glimpsed the back of his coat before he disappeared through the gates.
An hour later there were footsteps behind the wall, someone ran up the stairs and there was a strange rattling, which might have been curtains closing across their runners.
It was misty again, and too cold to go out. He brought the baby into the living room and turned on the electric fire. Soon the room was warm and fuggy and smelled like burned dust. He brought out a box of toys and emptied it onto the floor. He put the rattle and the fraying bear in front of the baby, then found the spinning top, spun it up, and let it go. It whirled and clinked out tinny music. He spun it up again.
When he got bored he styled the baby’s hair into a Mohican.
At lunchtime, someone drove up near the house. The engine revved, idled for a moment, then finally stopped. Jay glanced out. There was a dark blue van parked by the side of the road, in the lay-by in front of the terrace.
He strapped the baby in her chair and put her food in a pan to warm up. ‘Mashed peas and potato,’ he told her. ‘A classic choice.’
‘Forofoo,’ the baby said. She’d twisted her bib up into her mouth and she was chewing on it.
‘It’ll be ready in a minute,’ Jay told her. ‘I just want to make sure it’s warm.’
He went over to the sink to wash his hands. He washed them twice, then scrubbed under his nails. He’d read something somewhere about how easy it was to contaminate a baby’s food and since then he’d started washing his hands more and more every day. The skin around his nails was sore to the touch.
He dried his hands and filled the baby’s bowl with food. He sat down next to her and blew on it to cool it down. ‘I just heated this up, now we have to wait for it to cool down,’ he said.
‘Forofoo,’ the baby said, trying to grab the spoon. She took a handful of food and aimed at her mouth, but most of it ran down her wrist and back into the bowl.
After a while the voices started up behind the wall. They were louder this time, closer, although he couldn’t make out any actual words. One was deep, the other sounded like a woman’s voice. There was a lot of low, drawn-out laughter.
Jay spooned the food into the baby’s mouth. He wiped around her lips, then hooked his finger gently inside her cheek to make sure she wasn’t storing any of it in there. She’d gone through a stage of doing that – he would find bits of food that she’d kept hidden all night.
She squirmed and sucked at his finger.
‘I’m only checking,’ he said. ‘You have previous, remember?’
The voices came again through the wall. He got up and went over to the window. The van was still there. ‘I’ll be back in a second,’ he said.
He went outside and knocked at next door. He waited, checking his hands for mashed-up peas. What would he say? He didn’t know. All he wanted was to speak to someone and not have them say forofoo, or whatever the hell it was, back. But there was no sound from inside. Nothing moved. There were no lights on. Upstairs, the curtains were all drawn. Downstairs, there were net curtains that were frayed and yellowing. He would have to go right up and stare in to see past them. He turned round and looked at the road. The mist had almost covered the dishes. He could only see the one closest to the fence. The metal was dripping. The antenna was tilted towards the road. It almost looked like it was pointing at him. Was it pointing at him? He took a step towards it, then stopped and shook his head. It was pointing upwards, above the houses, like it always did.
He knocked once more, then turned and went back into his own house.
He sat down at the table, spooned up the last bit of the baby’s food and put it in her mouth.
The voices started up again, and someone laughed.
He got up so quickly that his chair tipped over. He went back outside and stood there, looking around. There was no one. The van was still parked by the side of the road. It was dusty and there was sand on the tyres.
When he looked out again later, the van had gone.
At night, he watched his wife sleeping. She slept straight away, as soon as she’d checked the baby and got into bed. There were dark smudges under her eyes, as if soot had gathered in a fireplace.
Sometimes she murmured and rolled away from him to the other side of the bed. Sometimes she rolled onto his chest and buried her face in his ribs. She mumbled things he couldn’t really hear. ‘What?’ he would ask her. ‘What?’ He smoothed back her hair and rubbed her shoulder blades to settle her back into sleep.
‘What do you do over there all day?’ he asked, but he knew she wasn’t allowed to answer.
Often, the pillow would have creased the side of her cheek, and the creases would run into the fine lines that had started to gather around her eyes. When her nightdress rode up, there were lines across her stomach and the tops of her legs, the skin puckering like clay. He couldn’t take his eyes off them.
Finally he would fall asleep, but after a few moments he would jolt awake and freeze, sure that he’d been muttering, talking. What had he been saying? What if Lorna had woken up and heard him saying something?
It was only once, it had only happened once. The doorbell had rung and he’d opened it and Lorna had been working, she was always working, and he’d been on his own for such a long time.
The baby had been in the other room. He’d put music on, and afterwards he’d checked and she was deep in sleep, her arms and legs flung outwards, her hand clutching her rabbit, and that warm, sour, milky smell clinging to her which reminded him of the corridors of school many years before; how he used to get lost in the twisting maze of them.
He pressed his ear closer to the kitchen wall. The van had arrived at midday, while Jay was changing the baby. There’d been no sound from next door all morning, and he’d started to think that the van was probably there to do repairs to one of the houses further along the row. Now and again, drilling and hammering would reverberate down the terrace like a heartbeat.
But then someone had run up the stairs. The banister had creaked. A door somewhere further back seemed to shut softly.
He turned away from the wall and back to the baby, who was tipping herself backwards in her chair, trying to get out. She’d been restless all morning – crying whenever he went out of the room and throwing down toys, but if he picked her up she would go rigid and try to twist out of his arms. Her cheeks were hot and she kept scratching at her belly, and when he rubbed it for her, she just cried again. He offered up her favourite toys – the rabbit, the jangly ball – but she batted them away.
He looked around; saw only the road, the mist, the cliffs, the dishes.
He slumped down in a chair and rested his head on
