about it when I was carrying her.’ She nodded at the baby. ‘I was going to have my own place and make it really nice. I wanted those drape things over the windows, you know, like they have, and I thought all plants and that. And they had such lovely baby stuff, I wanted…’ Cara’s voice faded away as she contemplated the plans she had had. ‘I used to think that no one could say you were useless if you had a baby. You’ve got something to do then. They used to go on at me all the time: “You’ll never get anywhere, you’ve got to work if you’re going to pass any exams…”’
‘Didn’t you want to?’ Eliza had always been successful at school, had enjoyed shining in a system that had never struck her as too challenging. Her degree had taken her to London, and then to Italy and Spain. Education had opened up the world for her.
Cara shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like school. I wasn’t clever and they were always on at me, you know…’
‘So you had a baby?’ Eliza said.
The rain drummed against the window. Cara looked out at the canal and sighed. ‘It wasn’t like that really.’ Eliza wondered if Cara had anyone to talk to. She was a solitary figure, drifting through the gallery, cuddling the baby against her in its sling. ‘But when I got pregnant I thought, well, it would be nice. To have a baby.’ She finished her coffee and smiled at Eliza. She looked round the room again. ‘This is nice.’ She was curled up in the large chair, and the tense, pinched look was leaving her face. She was as thin as a child.
Eliza finished her coffee. She could see that it was doing Cara good to have some company, but Eliza had things to do. She finished her coffee and stood up. ‘Well, I need to get on,’ she said. She saw a look of – what? Apprehension? – in Cara’s eyes. ‘We must do this again,’ she said. There was no harm in the odd half-hour spent talking to Cara.
Cara’s smile was rather strained as she nodded and gathered up the baby. ‘It’s been nice,’ she said.
Eliza saw her out of the flat, then pulled out the sheaf of notes she had made downstairs. If Daniel was coming tomorrow, she wanted to be ready for him. The rain spattered across the window. It was just the night, just the weather for a couple of hours with Brueghel’s macabre vision of the apocalypse.
The road from the cemetery had been dark and wet. Kerry had got lost, taken a wrong turn, and then she had been wandering along dark lanes, like the countryside, where the wet grass slapped at her ankles and green tendrils hung over walls and caught and tugged at her hair. She’d found her way back to the main road eventually, but it was dark now. She looked at her watch.
Lyn would be waiting for her at the café where they always met. She’d be mad if Kerry was late. Lyn was mad at Kerry anyway. They’d had a row about Kerry’s dad the last time they met. They always fought about Dad. But maybe Lyn was a bit sorry for what she’d said. Kerry’s phone was clutched in her hand and she looked at it again as she pressed the buttons. The saved message ran across the screen:…its abut yor dad meet u at the cafy 7 dont b 18… Lyn never said sorry, but Kerry could tell when she was.
There was a bus stop ahead, and she limped up to it, sinking down gratefully on to the wall. She eased her feet out of her shoes – her best ones – and rubbed her toes. Her feet were wet and splashed with mud. She looked up the road, squinting through the rain that distorted the lights and dripped into her eyes. And there was the bus, pulling away from the lights.
She scrambled on board, grateful for the warmth. The driver was friendly and smiled at her. ‘You’re a bit wet, love,’ he said cheerfully. It was almost empty. Kerry pressed her face against the steamed-up window. The bus jolted and rattled, bumping her head against the glass.
She looked at her watch. She should be there by now. She keyed in Lyn’s number, but she got the answering service. She keyed in another message: pls w8. Please wait. Please, please wait!
Lyn never did anything she didn’t want to. She used to try and teach Kerry that as well. ‘You don’t have to do what he says,’ she’d say, when Dad had told Kerry to go to bed, or tidy her room, or do her homework. But Dad wasn’t Lyn’s dad. Lyn’s dad had left. ‘She’s jealous, Kizz,’ Dad used to say. ‘She’ll get over it.’ And he’d tried to be friends with Lyn, but Lyn didn’t want to know. It drove Kerry mad sometimes. Dad would read her a bedtime story, and Lyn would come in and pretend to be looking for something. ‘You’re too old for stories,’ she’d say. Dad would promise to take Kerry swimming. ‘I’ll take her,’ Lyn would say. ‘She’s my sister.’ But then she usually forgot so Kerry never got to go swimming.
And then Lyn had gone.
She pressed her face against the window. They were nearly there. She stood at the door fidgeting with impatience. ‘Can’t let you out here, love,’ the driver said. ‘Got to wait till we’re in the stand.’
And then the doors were open and Kerry was out of the bus and running as the driver’s ‘Take care, love,’ echoed after her. It had stopped raining, but her clothes were wet and her feet were hurting. She ran up the ramp that led to the tram tracks and across the bridge high over the road. That way to the tram and Meadowhall. That way was the old market.
The steps took you to an empty road and a car park, and they smelled of pee. She used to run down those steps with Ellie, both of them holding their noses and laughing, pushing past slower people, excited about the shops and the lights and the people. And Dad used to follow behind laughing at them too, and saying things like, ‘Careful, Kizzy, slow down, remember you’ve got an old man here.’ And he’d get them a burger – Ellie’s mum didn’t like Ellie eating burgers, so it was a secret. Kerry and her dad liked secrets – and…Kerry didn’t want to think about that.
She tried not to think about the afternoon either, about the way the mist made it hard to see as she walked along the path, about the black rectangle of earth, and all the flowers piled up, dead, like the people in the graves. And the names. They were only names, they didn’t mean people, until she saw the stone with the gold letters. Ellie… Ellie and Kerry.
No Ellie now. She remembered the kids walking past her house that last morning, the day after the police had come and taken Kerry’s dad away. They had to walk past that way, there was no other way for them to go, and she waited for them to call out, ‘Hey, Kizz, you coming?’, waited, didn’t run out like she usually did to join the arm-linking huddle on the walk to school, but no one called, and no one looked, not really, just glances that Kerry could see from behind the nets where she was watching, and their faces were tight and frightened, and they said things to each other as they passed and they cast their eyes over the house again, and then they ran off up the road.
And she’d gone to see Maggie. Maggie used to talk to Kerry when Mum was ill. ‘You’re fine, Kerry,’ she’d say. ‘You’re a great kid.’ And she meant it. Or Kerry had thought that she meant it. But Kerry had gone to Maggie and Maggie’s face had been all twisted and blotchy, like Mum’s was, and she’d looked at Kerry as though she hated her. ‘Get away from me,’ she’d said, and she hadn’t shouted it, she’d said it in a cold, dead sort of way. ‘Get away from me, you…’ And someone had come to the door and pulled Maggie inside, and had looked at Kerry in the same way as she pushed the door shut. And all Kerry could hear was the crying.
And Dad had gone to prison. He wrote to Kerry. Once a week, the letters came, and Kerry wrote back. But they couldn’t
