even lift his head. When he did manage to look up, the baby had slumped down too, in her chair, and she was watching him with her head cocked sideways.
He sat up, then covered his eyes with his hands.
The baby did the same.
He waved his hands, and the baby waved her hands.
She watched him, without blinking, to see what he would do next.
Then someone said ‘Ssshhhh’ suddenly and loudly from behind the wall.
The baby opened her eyes wide. ‘Ssshhh,’ she said.
‘Ssshhh,’ the voice came again from behind the wall.
The baby looked around the room, then back at Jay. ‘Ssshhhhh,’ she said.
Jay shook his head. ‘You don’t need to do that,’ he told her.
‘Ssshhhh,’ the baby said again.
Jay got up and went over to her. ‘Don’t do that.’
She looked at him with her wide, dark eyes.
The sound came again from the wall.
Jay went over and knocked on it, once, twice, loud and hard.
Above him, on the roof, a tile slipped and grated in the wind.
‘Sshhhh,’ the baby said, quieter this time.
There was a swing tied to a branch of a tree at the back of the house. It was small and sturdy, with high sides for a child. Jay had tested it, and tested again, pulling down with all his strength to see if anything gave.
He put the baby in her coat and opened the back door. The misty rain had finally stopped. It was good to feel the wind against his face.
He put the baby in the swing and pushed gently. The chains creaked as they moved against the tree. He pushed and pushed and it was cold and quiet and he thought of nothing except pushing the swing and the wet, salty smell of the fields behind him.
When he looked up at the house, there was someone standing in the window.
He fumbled with the swing, missed the middle of it, and ended up pushing the baby sideways. The swing lurched outwards, rocked, then righted itself.
Jay steadied the chains. It was just his wife, wearing her coat and carrying her bag ready to leave for work. He didn’t know how long she’d been standing there; he thought she’d already gone. She was wearing the green scarf he’d bought for her just after they’d first met. He hadn’t seen her wearing it for a long time. He raised his hand and waved. Lorna’s mouth moved but he couldn’t tell what she was saying.
He realised he’d been pushing the swing quite high, and probably harder than he should. The baby was laughing and kicking her legs with each push but now he slowed it down, keeping it low, feeling himself making a show of how careful he was being.
The baby screamed indignantly, but he kept pushing the swing very gently. The next time he looked up, the window was empty, except for the blurred reflection of the swing moving backwards and forwards slowly across the glass.
A phone rang next door. It rang, then cut out, then rang again. No one answered it.
Jay strapped the baby in the pram and pushed her hat further down over her head. She looked up at him and her face creased. Her eyes were exactly the same as Lorna’s – sometimes it seemed like she was right there, staring out at him. When Lorna and the baby looked at each other, it was as if something secret passed between them, something that he wasn’t allowed to know.
‘Ha fa ma?’ she asked. Her cheeks were already red in the cold.
‘We need to get out of the house,’ Jay told her.
‘Bada shlam.’
‘Yeah, I know. It’s bloody cold, but we need to get out of the house.’
He put another blanket over her. She stared out sternly from under all the layers. He tucked the blanket in, then started walking down the road. The pram’s wheels sent up spray from the wet tarmac. The road was steep and narrow, with high hedges on both sides. If a car came, there would be nowhere to go. They would have to turn and walk all the way back. But he needed to get out of the house. It had rained for three days in a row – heavy showers that didn’t stop. The gutters had spilled over and poured down the windows. They’d stayed in and turned the heaters up high. Small noises had come through the wall: murmurs, footsteps, low laughter. Sometimes he was sure it was just the pipes, or the rain.
There was a thin, raw mist, as if the ground couldn’t absorb any more water so the wetness had moved into the air itself. Soon his nose was numb and dripping and his fingers were stiff against the handle of the pram. The road sloped down and small trees twisted on either side, their trunks bright with moss.
It got colder the lower he went into the valley. He could hear the sea somewhere in the distance. Water ran down the road and splashed up his legs. It looked orange, like it was leaking through rusty iron.
The mist thickened into drizzle and he shivered. He crouched down and tucked the baby in tighter. She was making cooing sounds at the gorse, trying to reach out and grab it. He showed her the prickles but she grabbed at it anyway. There was gorse everywhere, like lamps in the hedges. It gave out a sweet, heavy smell.
The drizzle came in waves, sweeping across the tops of the trees, and hanging there like curtains. The road narrowed again. Something moved in the dead leaves under a tree. He walked slowly, checking every bend before carrying on. He came to the bottom of the road and it forked: one way turned into a track that followed a stream, the other seemed to bend inland. He took that one and kept going. There were no road signs, just hedges and fields and the valley below him: the trees huddled like a herd of animals escaping the weather.
‘Sa?’ the baby asked.
He stroked her damp cheek with his finger.
There was the sound of a motor in the distance, coming closer, and he walked forward to find a wider bit of road. Whatever it was, it was moving fast, the engine revving. He smelled the petrol before he saw it. There was no wider bit of road. He walked back quickly, away from the bend. He crammed the pram in sideways against the hedge, mounting the wheels up on the bank and pressing it in as far as it would go.
It was a dark blue van. It came careening round the corner of the lane and revved past him before he could see who was in it. The wing mirror brushed against him as it went.
Jay jumped out and shook his fist at the back of the van. ‘You arsehole,’ he shouted. ‘You irresponsible son-of-a-bitch arsehole.’
He got the pram out of the hedge. The baby had a handful of dried leaves in each fist and was chewing on a stick. He took the stick out of her mouth and crouched down to check she was OK.
‘Don’t
