Perfect Little Children

by Sophie Hannah

  There’s a second building, long and low, standing between the house and the high wall, separating the two. Most likely it’s a double or triple garage. If there’s this much space at the front, there must be three times as much at the back, at least. I picture a long, striped lawn, alternating shades of lush green, and a smooth stone patio area, complete with top-of-the-range outdoor chairs and sofas: dark brown with plump cream cushions.

  I wipe beads of sweat from my forehead. One open window isn’t enough. How has it become so hot, suddenly? I open my door slightly, to let more air in.

  Could I . . .

  No. Absolutely not. I can’t ring the bell and smile and say, “Hi, Flora. I was passing, and I thought I’d pop around on the off chance.” Not after twelve years.

  Is that why I came here, really? Not only to see the house but because I’m secretly hoping to rewrite the story?

  The Braids and the Leesons were best friends. Twelve years ago, they did not have any sort of argument, nor did they exchange harsh words. The last time they saw each other, everybody smiled and laughed and kissed and hugged good-bye. They talked about getting together again very soon—maybe next week, maybe taking the kids to the summer fair on Parker’s Piece. As they enthusiastically agreed to ring each other to arrange this outing, Flora Braid and Beth Leeson both knew that there would be no phone call in either direction, and no trip to the fair. Dominic Leeson and Lewis Braid did not know this, because no one had told them that the two families would never meet or speak again.

  On the face of it, it makes no sense. Only Flora and I understand what happened—and I’ll never know whether our understandings of it are the same. I’ve tried to explain to Dominic what happened from my point of view, and I suppose Flora must have told Lewis something, though perhaps not the truth . . .

  This is ridiculous. I should be watching Ben play football, or finding a supermarket. I really do need to get something for dinner. Who cares where the Braids live now? I’ve seen everything there is to see—cream curtains at the upstairs windows, fat, square redbrick gateposts topped with large balls of gray stone, perfectly smooth and round, clashing horribly with the red brick.

  I should go.

  I’m about to start the car when I notice one coming up behind me: a Range Rover driving extra slowly. Wyddial Lane is a twenty-mile-an-hour zone, and this car’s going at no more than ten. I’m watching it, willing it to speed up, when I notice a movement from another direction.

  It’s Flora’s gates—they’re opening.

  The silver-gray Range Rover slows still further as it approaches the Braids’ house. It inches forward, now almost level with my car. That’s where it’s heading: through the wooden gates, into the grounds of number 16. Of course: there’s no way Lewis and Flora would have gates that you have to get out and open; they’d have some kind of remote-control setup.

  I see glossy dark brown hair through the Range Rover’s half-open window. It could well be Flora. It’s bound to be.

  Shit. Why did I think I could get away with this? She’s going to see me.

  No, she won’t. No one looks at a random parked car. She’ll drive in through the gates and then they’ll close again, and she won’t think about what’s beyond her property.

  I turn my face away, making sure to lean close to my open window in case there’s anything to hear.

  There’s nothing for a few seconds. Then a crunch of tires on gravel, and the sound of the Range Rover’s engine cutting out. A car door opens. Feet land on gravel and a woman’s voice, halfway through a sentence as it emerges into the open air, drifts across to me: “. . . said I’m ready now. You can start. Yes. Start.”

  It’s Flora. Unmistakably. She doesn’t sound happy. She sounds . . . I don’t know how to describe it. Afraid, resentful, prepared for the worst. Is something horrible about to happen?

  Don’t be ridiculous. You heard, what, six words?

  I listen for a response but I hear nothing. Flora’s probably on the phone.

  I’ve never heard her sound like that before.

  I can’t not look. I have to risk it. If the worst happens and she spots me and I decide I can’t face talking to her, I can just drive away, fast. That’d give her twenty-mile-an-hour-zone neighbors something to talk about. They could lobby to have Wyddial Lane sealed at both ends so that no one who doesn’t live here can enter in future.

  The gates of Newnham House are still wide open. And there’s Flora: twelve years older, but it’s definitely her. Her hair hasn’t changed a bit: same dark brown with no hint of gray, same style. She’s wearing white lace-up pumps, a pale gray hoodie and jeans.

  “Home,” she says, holding her phone half an inch away from her ear. “I’m at home.”

  I tried to push it away but it’s back again: the strong sense that what I’m seeing isn’t an ordinary conversation. There’s something wrong.

  A short silence follows. Then she says, “Hey, Chimp.” She stops, raises her voice slightly and says, “Hey, Chimpyyy!”

  Strange. The words don’t match the expression on her face at all. She looks upset and worried, not in relaxed-greeting mode.

  Is she talking to a new person now? Did the person she told she was ready put a child on the phone? It must be a child, surely. Who else would allow themselves to be called Chimpy? Her change of tone, too, from normal to deliberate, slower, louder . . .

  Suddenly, she turns away and stretches out her arm, holding her phone as far away from herself as possible. Then, a few seconds later, she brings it back to her ear and wipes her eyes with her other hand.

  She started to cry and didn’t want Chimpy to hear.

  “Peterborough,” she says in a more normal tone of voice. “Lucky. I’m very lucky.”

  Tears have filled my eyes. I can’t blink. They’d spill over and then I’d be officially crying, which would be insane. This woman has been no part of my life for twelve years. Why should I care that something about this phone conversation has upset her?

  “Yes. Tomorrow,” she says. “I’ll speak to you tomorrow.” I watch as she puts her phone back in her bag. For a few seconds she stands still, looking tired and defeated, relieved that the conversation is over.

  She opens the back door of the Range Rover, sticks her head in and says, “We’re he-ere!” The deliberate jolly tone is unconvincing. Then she stands back. Nothing happens.

  No surprises there. When the destination they’ve arrived at is their own home, teenagers don’t get out of the car unless nagged extensively. If you’re dropping them at a friend’s house, it’s a different story.

  I hear Flora sigh. “Thomas! Emily!” she says in a singsong voice. “Come on, out you get!”

  “Why are you speaking to them like they’re still toddlers?” I mutter. “No wonder they’re ignoring you.”

  Even when her kids were little, Flora’s speaking-to-babies-and-children tone annoyed me. Thanks to her, I made sure I always addressed Zannah and Ben as if they were proper people.

  Flora stands back as if someone’s about to get out of the car. “That’s it!” she says encouragingly.

  Quit it, woman, unless you want them to run off and join a cult. They ought to be able to get out of a car without a pep talk from their mother.

  A small, bright blue backpack tumbles from the car to the ground. I see a leg emerge, then a boy.

  A very young boy.

  What the hell?

  “Come on, Emily,” says Flora. “Thomas, pick up your bag.”

  A little girl rolls out of the car. She picks up the blue bag and hands it to the boy.

  “Oh, well done, Emily,” says Flora. “That’s kind. Say thank you, Thomas.”

  This cannot be happening.

  I touch the skin of my face with my right hand. Both feel equally cold. All of me feels frozen apart from my heart, which beats in my ears like something trapped in a tunnel.

  I lean back in my seat, close my eyes for a few seconds, then open them and look again.

>   Nothing has changed. The little girl turns and, for a second, looks straight at me.

  It’s her. That T-shirt with the fluffy sheep on it . . . Le petit mouton.

  The girl I’m looking at is Emily Braid, except she’s not fifteen, as she should be—as she must be and is, unless the world has stopped making sense altogether.

  This is the Emily Braid I knew twelve years ago, when she was three years old. And Thomas . . . I can’t see all of his face, but I can see enough to know that he’s still five years old, as he was when I last saw him in 2007.

  I have to get out of here. I can’t look anymore. Everything is wrong.

  My fingers fumble for the car keys. I press them hard, then realize I’m pressing the wrong thing. It’s the button on the dashboard, not the keys. I’m waiting for the engine to start and it won’t because I’m not doing it right, because all I can think about is Thomas and Emily Braid.

  Why are they—how can they be—still three and five? Why are they no older than they were twelve years ago?

  Why haven’t they grown?

  2

  Several hours later, walking back through my front door and closing it against the world feels like an achievement.

  I made it. Me and Ben, safely home. How I was able to concentrate on driving properly, I’ve no idea. I probably shouldn’t have risked it.

  I lean against the wall in the hall, shut my eyes and let the sound of Ben telling Dominic about the match wash over me. His voice broke a few months ago, and we’re still getting used to this new deeper one. His music teacher described him as a “bass” the other day, and it gave me a strange, dislocated feeling. My sweet little boy, a bass—the lowest and most booming kind of male voice there is. How did that happen?

  How do I tell Dominic, or anyone, what I saw on Wyddial Lane?

  I want to be in the living room, in a comfortable chair with my feet up, so that I can think about what to do. This seems an impossible goal. I can’t imagine getting to that chair, even though the living room is only a few feet away. Nothing makes sense anymore, so I might as well stay here in the hall, looking at the clumps of mud from Ben’s football boots that I’m going to need to pick up at some point.

  Where was Georgina Braid? Why wasn’t she in the car with her brother and sister? The last thing I saw before I drove away was Flora aiming her remote-control fob at the car to lock it, and then at the gates of her property, which started to glide shut. Maybe Georgina was inside the car and hadn’t climbed out yet.

  She wouldn’t have been able to climb. She’s only a few months old. Flora would have lifted her out in her car seat and . . .

  I push the thought away, appalled by it. How can I, an intelligent adult woman, be thinking this? Georgina Braid was a few months old twelve years ago. She’s twelve now. Thomas is seventeen and Emily fifteen. These are facts, not something to speculate about. There is no other possible outcome, for someone who was five in 2007, apart from to be seventeen now, in 2019.

  Unless they’re dead.

  That’s not a thought I want in my head either. Thomas, Emily and Georgina Braid are not dead. Why would they be? Two of them can’t be, because . . .

  Because you’ve just seen them? Aged five and three, which we’ve established is impossible? I didn’t imagine what I saw. That’s impossible too.

  Ignoring the mud and the discarded football boots, I walk into the living room and sit down, like someone waiting for something momentous to happen.

  There’s a clattering of footsteps on the stairs, followed by Zan’s voice: “You need to stop blanking Lauren, like, right now.”

  “Blanking? What does that mean?”

  “You’ll never understand, Dad, so don’t make me explain.”

  “I’m not blanking her,” Ben says. “I’m just not replying to her.”

  “Yeah, and she’s been spamming me all morning about it—so please deal with her, so I don’t have to.”

  The living room door bangs open, hitting the wall. Zannah walks in wearing a black sleeveless top and turquoise pajama bottoms with white spots. There’s a lilac-colored towel wrapped around her head and a grainy-textured green substance all over her face. “Mum, can you make him sort Lauren out?” She squints at me. “What’s up with you? You look weird.”

  Great: she’s picked today to notice that I’m someone whose behavior might mean something. She stares at me, waiting for a response. In the hall, Dominic is saying that Gary, Ben’s football coach, must regret taking Ben off at halftime, because the other team scored their two goals within seconds of Ben being replaced by an inferior defender. This irritates me in a way it wouldn’t normally. Dom wasn’t there. How does he know? From my brief exchange with Gary at the end of the game, he didn’t strike me as a man racked with regret.

  “Dad!” Zannah yells. “Come and look at Mum. There’s something wrong with her.”

  The easiest thing would be to say I feel ill. No one would question it. It’s hot. I’m not good with heat. It’s a joke in our house. Ben and I have pale, Celtic complexions, and constitutions that function better in cooler weather. Dom and Zannah are dark, with olive skin, and love stretching out in the sun for hours at a time.

  “Dad, get in here, seriously.”

  By the time Dom arrives, I’ve convinced myself that the most sensible thing is to pretend to be fine in the hope that I soon will be. Maybe by dinner time I’ll have convinced myself that I didn’t see five-year-old Thomas and three-year-old Emily, that the heat made me hallucinate.

  “You okay?” Dominic asks me.

  “She’s obviously not okay.”

  “Zan, can you give me and Dad a minute?”

  “What? Why? You’re not getting divorced, are you? If you are, can I hit all the people I’ve been not hitting till now? Callie’s parents are splitting up, and she’s started punching and pushing me—in a jokey way, but, I mean . . . I have bruises! Actually, I’m so done with that girl.”

  “We’re not splitting up,” I tell her.

  “Beth, what’s wrong?” Dom asks. “Should I be worried?”

  From the hall, Ben calls out, “Can you all stop causing drama?”

  “Yeah, when we’re dead,” says Zan. “Life is drama, little bruth.”

  “Zannah, please,” says Dom. “Upstairs.”

  “Mum, why can’t I stay?”

  “Suzannah. We very rarely ask you to—”

  “Uh-oh. Dad’s full-naming me. It must be serious. All right, I’m going.” Zan flounces out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  I still approve of my advice to myself to say nothing and try to pretend it didn’t happen, but I know I can’t follow it. The words are swelling inside me, preparing to burst out.

  “I went to Hemingford Abbots while Ben was playing football.”

  Dom frowns. “Where’s that?”

  “Near St. Ives, where football was.” I take a deep breath. This isn’t the difficult part of the conversation. This bit should be easy. “It’s where the Braids moved when they left Cambridge.”

  “Oh, right. Yeah, I remember—before they moved to Florida.”

  “What? Who moved to Florida?”

  “The Braids did.”

  The door opens and Zannah reappears. “You’re never going to get anywhere at this rate. You need me to interpret.” She performs some invented-on-the-spot sign language.

  “Were you listening outside the door?” asks Dom.

  “Course I was.” She rolls her eyes. “Who wouldn’t?”

  “The Braids didn’t move to Florida,” I say.

  “They did. Something Beach.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  He looks puzzled. “I don’t know. I just . . . oh, I know. It might have been LinkedIn. I’m barely on it, but I think I got a message inviting me to follow Lewis, or befriend him, or whatever it is people do on LinkedIn. I had a look at his profile and he was CEO of some company in Florida.”

  “They might have been in Florida at so
me point but they aren’t anymore,” I tell him. “While I was parked outside their house in Hemingford Abbots, a car drove through in the gates. Flora got out.”

  “I don’t know who these people are, but maybe they’ve split up,” says Zannah. “He’s in Florida, she’s here.”

  “Zan, please, can you let me talk to Dad alone?” If she hears what happened, she’ll either be worried about me or scathingly sarcastic; I want to avoid both.

  She looks disappointed, but, for once, doesn’t argue. We listen as she stomps back up the two flights of stairs to her bedroom.

  “I suppose they might have moved back,” says Dominic.

  “To the same house? It’s the same address they gave us when they left Cambridge twelve years ago: 16 Wyddial Lane.”

  “They could have rented it out while they went to Florida temporarily. Either way, I’m not sure why it matters. To us, I mean.”

  “The children haven’t aged,” I blurt out, aware of how ridiculous it sounds.

  “What?”

  “Thomas and Emily. They should be seventeen and fifteen. Right?”

  “Sounds about right, yeah.”

  “I saw them, Dom. Flora opened the back door of the car and said, ‘Thomas! Emily! Out you get!’ in a stupid singsong baby voice, and I thought ‘Who talks to teenagers like that?’ and then the children got out of the car and they weren’t teenagers. They were little children.”

  Dom looks confused. Then he laughs, but tentatively—as if someone might stop him at any moment.

  “Beth, that’s impossible.”

  “Yeah. It is, isn’t it? I didn’t see Georgina . . .”

  “Who?”

  “Their youngest.”

  His eyes widen. “Shit—you know, I’d totally forgotten they had a third.”

  This doesn’t surprise me. Lewis and Dom were never as close as Flora and I were. Dom probably hasn’t thought about the Braids much since we last saw them.