had only been out for a few seconds, but it felt like he’d come back from another world. Standing in the familiar jumble of the hallway, he could smell their wet swimming things, still in the bag. They’d gone to the Lido the day before, Sunday, on their bikes, early, to avoid the queue. Lucy loved to swim, but had sat on the edge, her wild hair crammed under a big straw hat, gold locket at her throat, her body wrapped in her enormous red sarong. As he’d glided like a manta ray above the slime-smeared floor of the pool, he had looked up and seen her strong brown feet dangling in the water. Why won’t you come in? he had asked her silently. Her toes had rings on them – gold, like the locket – and her toenails matched the sarong.
Her red umbrella was leaning against the wall. He and Raff had taken it to school the day it rained. Next to the umbrella was the stepladder, which she must have pulled out from the cupboard under the stairs, as a reminder to get the curtain in their room back on its rail. Under the ladder was the can of petrol that, weeks and weeks ago, they’d walked all the way to the service station on the main road to get. They’d taken it on the bus, all the way across south London, to where they’d had to abandon the car the evening before. They’d been too late, though – the car had been towed away, so they’d brought the petrol back home. Getting the car back cost lots of money, which they didn’t have. They didn’t really need a car anyway. Next to the petrol was a pile of shoes, among which, Jonah was relieved to see, were her clogs. She must be here after all. He turned and pushed open the sitting-room door.
She wasn’t there. Jonah looked down at her yoga mat, lying like a green lake amidst a jumble of Lego, nunchucks and cheese on toast remains. Part of Raff’s Ben 10 jigsaw encroached upon the mat, like a jetty. He looked up. Through the sitting-room window, he saw the open-lidded wheelie bin balancing on the kerb.
She’d been burning incense in the kitchen, but the smell of the bin was stronger than ever. They hadn’t emptied it for days – maybe weeks. Lucy had been ill for quite a while, off and on. Washing-up was stacked high on every surface, and the dirty clothes they’d collected up to put in the machine lay in piles all over the floor. He kicked through the clothes and went through into the tiny conservatory (if you could call it that), just big enough for the table, the three ordinary chairs and Raff’s old Tripp Trapp ladder chair. The dead flowers had shed some more petals, onto the drawings they’d done of them when they’d got back from the Lido. Lucy had said she didn’t mind they were dead. ‘I prefer them when they get like this. Much more interesting.’ Maybe she had just wanted to make him feel better about them, but she had carried on, her voice low and dreamy. ‘The intricate husks of them, like skeletons, on their way to dust.’ Jonah traced the line she had drawn, a fragile curl of dried-out lily petal. Her book was on the table, too, the book she’d been reading for weeks, even though it was very thin. There was a picture of a mask on the cover, an African-looking mask, with feathers and round empty eyeholes. Ants were crawling over the book and the drawings, and up and down the glass jug she’d made the orange squash in. There was a layer of black on the remaining inch of orange liquid: a floating blanket of drowned ants. The dead ants made him think of their holiday in the house with the swimming pool, and Lucy rescuing insects from the pool all day, using a net on a long pole. It was in France, the house. The Martins had taken them, as a treat, after Angry Saturday, and Roland getting sent to prison.
There were two new things on the table: a green wine bottle, empty; and a yellow mango, fat and ripe. The bottle was green, and the label was white, very white, with a grey drawing of jagged hilltops poking out of a sea of cloud like shark fins. The cloud was stratus, which wasn’t all that interesting to look at from below, but from above it was all misty and rolling. Jonah picked up the mango. Its skin squished under his fingers. ‘A Chaunsa,’ he whispered. The King of Mangoes. The Green Shop Man had introduced them to Chaunsas, which grow in Pakistan, but only in July. Last year, the Green Shop Man had given her three of them, as a present.
Near the edge of the table were three little heaps. When he looked closer, he saw that they were made of the shavings from the coloured drawing pencils, mixed with crumbs and his and Raff’s fingernails. She’d cut their nails after they’d done the drawings, and it had been about time; they’d been long and ragged and dirty, like witches’ fingernails. The heaps were like tiny pyramids. He touched one of them gently, imagining her sitting at the table after she’d put them to bed, all alone, with her too-thick lipstick on, slowly pushing the fingernails and the pencil shavings and the crumbs together with her fingers. Then maybe her phone had rung, and it had been Dora Martin. And then maybe Dora had come round with the bottle of wine.
It would be good if Dora had come. She hadn’t come for ages, and they hadn’t been to the Martins’ house for a while either. They’re still our friends, though. Aren’t they? He noticed how much he talked to her in his head, instead of just having his own thoughts. Did other children do that, to their mothers, or maybe their fathers?
There were no glasses on the table. He looked over at the pile of things on the draining board, and then remembered the wine glass by Lucy’s bed, with the smudge of lipstick. If there was only that one wine glass, then maybe she had decided to pop to the Green Shop and buy a whole bottle of wine to drink on her own. Taken the last glass of it up to bed with her. He looked at the label again. Such a beautiful, soft drawing, and the words Cloudy Bay, in such fine, thin letters, with lots of space in between. It didn’t look like the kind of wine you could get in the Green Shop. Then he saw that a steady stream of ants was heading down into the jug, despite the blanket of corpses. He thought about trying to divert them from their death, but the only thing he could think of would be to empty the jug and wash it, and the sink was too full of plates and pots.
Jonah looked up at the calendar. Yoga Poses 2013. The pose for July was Ustrasana, or Camel, and there was a picture of a woman, on her knees, arching backwards. The pages of previous calendars had always got filled with Lucy’s scrawls, but this one had stayed very bare and clean. He stepped closer, gazing up at the four and a half rows of squares, thinking how each square was a complete turn of the planet on its axis. The first two weeks were all empty. Then, in the middle of the third row, Wednesday the 17th, she’d written two letters, S and D. An acronym. For the rained-off Sports Day. There was a squiggly word beginning with C on the 18th, and then, on the fourth row, she had circled the 26th, and written three letters, P, E and D, in blobby brown felt-tip. PED. Trying to think what they might stand for, he reached up to take the calendar off its nail, and laid it on the table. Using the dark blue drawing pencil, he crossed out the cancelled SD, and wrote a new one in Thursday, the 25th. He thought for a moment. She hadn’t put ‘Haredale’s Got Talent’ on the calendar, even though Raff had been talking about nothing else for weeks. He wrote in HGT, right under SD. A busy day. He paused, and then went over the letters again, because the blue pencil didn’t come out that well on the shiny calendar paper.
Jonah put the pencil down, yawned and looked at the kitchen clock. 5.25. Where had she gone, so early? He turned and tried the back door. It wasn’t locked. Roland used to tell her off about not locking the back door. The backyard had a concrete floor, with brick walls on all three sides, the Broken House rising up behind the far wall. In the middle of the concrete floor was the brown corduroy cushion she’d been sitting on the day before. Yellow-flowering weeds were sprouting from the cracks in the concrete and from between the bricks. Lucy’s plant pots were sprouting weeds too, as well as the things she’d planted. Her dirt-covered trowel was resting against the wall. Her bicycle, which was a heavy, olden-days one, but painted gold, was gleaming against the back wall. Both the tyres were flat and weeds were growing through the spokes of the wheels. It was all looking very beautiful. He saw the watering can, and wondered if Lucy had watered the pots before she went.
A movement made him jump and look up. The fox had appeared on top of the back wall. Again their eyes met, and again he felt scared of her.
His heart banging, he cleared his throat. ‘Violet, are you following me this morning?’
He had tried to sound calm and amused,
