Perfect Little Children

by Sophie Hannah

  He smiles. “Remember the two-thousand-pound changing room, in Corfu? That’s something I’ll never forget.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me they’d moved to Florida.”

  “Why would I? I deleted the message and forgot about it. We hadn’t seen them for years.”

  “Since Thomas was five and Emily was three.” I can’t help shivering as I say it, despite the heat. “Which they can’t still be.”

  “No, they can’t.”

  “But, Dom, they are. I saw them. I heard Flora call them by their names, I saw their faces. Emily was wearing her ‘Petit Mouton’ T-shirt. You won’t remember it, but . . . Thomas’s clothes were the same too. It was them—today, but exactly as they were twelve years ago. And other things were wrong, too.”

  “Like what?”

  I’m grateful that he hasn’t laughed in my face, and even more grateful when he sits down next to me and says, “Tell me from the beginning, the whole story.”

  * * *

  It’s several hours later, and I haven’t woken up yet, so I guess it wasn’t a dream.

  Dom, Zannah and I are sitting at our kitchen table. They’re eating Italian food from our favorite local restaurant, Pirelli’s. I’m trying to persuade myself to take a mouthful of the spinach and ricotta cannelloni Dom bought for me. I haven’t felt hungry since this morning. Ben is staying overnight at his friend Aaron’s house, and is the only member of the family who doesn’t yet know what I saw, or what I cannot have seen, depending on your point of view. Zannah knows nearly everything, mainly from sneaking silently downstairs and listening at the living room door.

  After wolfing down a shrimp and red pepper pizza, she pushes her plate aside, reaches for her notebook and pen and pulls them toward her. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s list all the possibilities.”

  “I had a funny turn because it was hot, and I didn’t see what I think I saw.”

  “When Dad suggested that before, you said, ‘I know what I saw.’”

  “That’s true.”

  “Mum, you’re not making sense.”

  “If we’re listing all the possibilities, we have to include me being . . . wrong. Deluded. However sure I am that I’m not.”

  “All right.” Zannah makes a note. “That’s possibility one.”

  Shouldn’t we break it down a little further? A) There was no one there, and I hallucinated three people. B) I saw three people get out of a Range Rover, but they weren’t Flora, Thomas and Emily Braid. There’s probably a C) and a D) but I can’t think what they might be.

  “What are the other possibilities?” Zannah looks around the table, like a manager in a meeting waiting for her team to make helpful suggestions. “I can think of one.”

  “Go on,” says Dom. I find it hard to believe we’re having this conversation.

  “Thomas and Emily, the ones you knew, died. Lewis and Flora then had two more kids, a boy and a girl, and gave them the same names, as a way of honoring the memories of Dead Thomas and Emily.”

  “Very, very unlikely,” says Dom. “Though not impossible, I suppose. It’d explain a lot—the clothes, for example. Lots of families keep clothes their oldest kids have outgrown, and then, if you have more kids . . .” He turns to me. “If the two children you saw today were also Lewis and Flora’s, there could well be a strong facial resemblance to Older Thomas and Emily.”

  “If Thomas and Emily Number 1 are dead, whatever killed them might have killed Georgina as well,” Zannah points out.

  “There should be an easily found record of it online if they’re dead,” says Dom.

  “No, you’re wrong,” I say, realizing with a small jolt of shock that I’m supposed to be part of the conversation. This isn’t some kind of weird play and I’m not the audience. Dom and Zan are jumping from one thing to another too fast. “If Thomas and Emily had died, then yes, Flora might have wanted to have more children, but there’s no way she’d give them the same names. No one would.”

  Dom shakes his head. “There’s always somebody who’d do the bizarre thing you think no one would do.”

  “Not Flora. And . . . I’m not sure anyone would do it. Wouldn’t you feel like you were trying to replicate your dead children in a sick way?”

  “I would, yeah,” says Dom. “But I’m not them. Lewis Braid’s a weirdo. Always was. Flora wasn’t, but . . . if she really did lose her children in some terrible accident, and she’s traumatized, who knows what she might do?”

  Zannah taps her pad with the pen. “All right, so, option one: Mum had a funny turn and didn’t see or hear what she thinks she did. Option two: Mum saw a new, different Thomas and Emily who were named after their dead older siblings. What else?”

  I don’t feel that option two is in any way a possibility, but I don’t have the energy to protest. Flora wouldn’t do that. No version of her, past, present, future, however freaked out, would do it.

  “Do we want to include a supernatural possibility?” asks Zannah.

  “No,” Dom and I say together.

  “How about: Mum did see Thomas and Emily Braid, the same Thomas and Emily Braid she knew twelve years ago, and they’re now teenagers, but they look like little kids because they’ve got some messed-up genetic disease?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say.

  “There are definitely some conditions that make you age faster, or slower,” Zan insists. “If Lewis and Flora both had some kind of recessive gene that was a really bad fit with the other one’s recessive gene . . . or something like that. See, Mum? A teacher at school actually taught me something—recessive genes. It might explain who Chimpy is, too.”

  “How?” asks Dom.

  “If Thomas and Emily have both got this genetic thing, chances are Georgina has too. Chimpy might be her nickname. Maybe she needs to live in a home, which would obviously upset Flora, which explains why Mum said she looked and sounded so upset.”

  “No. This is stupid.” Zannah looks hurt, and I feel guilty for cutting her off. I can’t stand to think about Flora’s children dying or having genetic diseases. I don’t want to imagine every possible grotesque scenario. “The two children I saw looked perfectly healthy and normal. There’s no—” I break off and start again, trying to sound less dogmatic. “I don’t believe there’s any medical condition that could make two teenagers look like healthy, normal, much younger versions of themselves.”

  “Agreed. Overwhelmingly unlikely, verging on impossible,” says Dom. “Still, it would explain why they suddenly dumped us as friends. Lewis was obsessed with perfection. He wouldn’t have wanted us around to witness the non-growing phase of his children’s lives.”

  “I’m still putting it on the list as option three,” says Zannah. “Same Thomas and Emily, genetic condition that makes them look younger. What do Lewis and Flora do? What are their jobs?”

  “They’re both scientists by training,” Dom tells her. “He’s been working in IT for years, inventing systems that do all kinds of fancy things. She did the same kind of stuff. They worked together for years, until they had kids, and then Flora gave up her job and became a full-time mum.”

  “Scientists?” Zannah chews the lid of her pen thoughtfully. “No. Even if a science genius invented a drug that stopped people aging, they wouldn’t freeze their kids in time at three and five. Those are pain-in-the-arse ages. You might freeze your kids at, like, nine and eleven.”

  “Trust me, if Lewis Braid had invented a way to halt the aging process, he’d have patented it, publicized it widely and made millions from it,” says Dom. “He wouldn’t keep quiet about it.”

  It ought to be possible for me to listen to this jokey back-and-forth and feel comforted. Instead, it’s making me feel lonely. No one but me saw what I saw. No one saw how wrong it was. Flora wasn’t okay—she didn’t look it and she didn’t sound it. Nothing about it was right.

  “Mum, you’ve not eaten anything,” says Zannah.

  “I’m not hungry. You can have it if you want.
”

  “Flora’d be what age now?” Dom asks. “Forty-three, like us?”

  “Forty-two,” I say. “She could easily have had two more children.”

  Zannah says, “What about this possibility: Flora did have two more kids after her first three. The youngest two look very similar to young Thomas and Emily, because they’re siblings, and you saw them and freaked out, Mum. That’s why you thought you heard Flora call them Thomas and Emily, but actually she called them by their real names, whatever those are—Hayden, Truelove, whatever.”

  “No. I heard her say, ‘Thomas, Emily, out you get’ before I saw their faces.”

  “Truelove?” Dom raises his eyebrows.

  “That’s what me and Murad want to call our first baby. Boy or girl.”

  “Truelove Rasheed?”

  “Rasheed-Leeson—I don’t know why you’d think I’m ditching my surname, Dad. Think again.”

  “Truelove? Really?”

  “Did the Braids dump you as friends?” Zannah asks me. “Why?”

  I look at Dom.

  “What?” he says.

  “I’m waiting to hear your answer.”

  “I’ve no idea what happened. All I know is, one minute they were our friends and then we never saw them again.”

  “Wait, what?” says Zan. “Dad, a minute ago you said they dumped you.”

  “Well, I assumed . . . Was it us who dumped them?” he asks me.

  “By ‘us,’ do you mean me? You’d remember if you’d been responsible for ending the friendship, presumably.” Why am I pushing this? It’s the last thing I want to think or talk about.

  I need to get away from this for a while.

  “Have I done or said something wrong?” Dominic looks at Zannah, then at me. In a different frame of mind, I would find this endearing. Of the four of us, he’s always the most willing to accept that something might be his fault.

  “Dad has no idea why our friendship with the Braids ended,” I tell Zannah, on my way out of the room.

  3

  I wake up. The curtains in our bedroom are open. It’s dark outside, in that thorough way that looks like the night trying to tell you it hasn’t finished.

  I reach out and pat the top of my bedside cabinet but my phone’s not in the place it always spends the night, plugged into the charger. And I’m still in my clothes, lying on the bed, not in it. That’s right: I left Dom and Zannah in the kitchen and came in here, when I couldn’t stand to hear any more stupid, outlandish theories. I must have closed my eyes . . .

  I hardly ever remember my dreams but this time I’ve dragged a vivid one out of sleep with me: Dominic and I found three new rooms in our house that we’d never noticed before, and were really excited about having more space.

  Maybe it was real. Maybe if I looked now, I’d find those three extra rooms. It’s no more implausible than what happened in Hemingford Abbots.

  Now that I’m less tired, my certainty has returned: I saw them. I saw five-year-old Thomas and three-year-old Emily. Not different children with the same names. I saw the same Thomas and Emily Braid, the ones I knew twelve years ago.

  Except that’s impossible.

  “Dominic?” I call out.

  The house responds with silence. I get up, take a sip of stale water from the glass by my bedside that’s still half full from God knows when, and go upstairs to where Zannah and Ben’s rooms are, and Dom’s office. Our bedroom is on the ground floor, with what the estate agent called a “dressing room” attached to it. It’s a large, modern room that the previous owners added on. I knew as soon as I saw it that I could add an extra door to make it directly accessible from the hall and it would be the perfect treatment room. Who would want to waste a brilliant space like that on getting dressed?

  I told the agent how I planned to use the room. He blinked at me, and continued to refer to it as the dressing room for the rest of the viewing. His final words of wisdom before we left were: “People worry about curb appeal, but bear in mind, the inside of the house is the bit you’re going to be seeing day in, day out.”

  “What a dick.” Dom laughed as we drove away. “Does he think we’re going to blindfold ourselves every time we get out of the car and walk to the front door? He basically told us he thinks the house is hideous.”

  I can’t understand how anyone could think Crossways Cottage looks anything but beautiful from the outside. Unusual, yes, but lovely. As soon as I saw it, I adored the strange, two-buildings-stuck-together effect. It seemed so perfect for a house on a village green. Half of it’s a white-fronted traditional cottage with a thatched roof and the other half is a joined-on barn conversion: black-painted wood. The two completely different roofs meet in the middle, and are different heights—one around a foot lower than the other. The overall effect is charming, not ugly. Unlike all the houses around it, which face the green head-on, ours stands at an angle, hence its name. If we ever have to move, I’ll show people around myself instead of leaving it to a useless estate agent. I’ll say, “Look how stunning it is—you’ll be lucky if I agree to sell you this house at any price.”

  On the first floor, Zannah and Ben’s bedroom doors are wide open. Both of them close their doors whenever they’re in their rooms, to remind intrusive parents to stay out. Dom’s office door is closed, with a sliver of light visible underneath it. I can hear his fingers tapping at the keyboard.

  I push open the door and find him slumped at his computer. “Sit up straight. Your back,” I remind him.

  “I wondered why it was aching.” He stays in the same position, staring at the screen, which is full of different versions of the same logo: three letters twisted artfully around one another, a well-known local company’s initials. “Which do you think’s the strongest?” Dom asks. “I mean, obviously no one apart from the woman who commissioned them will notice the difference or care, but I have to pretend to have a strong opinion by next week.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Five to . . . uh . . . twelve. Shit. It’s nearly midnight.”

  For the first time since seeing what I saw in Hemingford Abbots, I wonder: could something be wrong with me? I’ve slept through the whole evening.

  No. I’m fine. I needed to recharge, that’s all.

  Is it? What about seeing the impossible?

  “Where’s Zan?” I ask.

  “She went to Victoria’s.”

  “Is she staying overnight?” It’s not unheard of for lifts home to be requested as late as 2 a.m.

  “Yup. We can go to bed with no fear of chauffeur duties.”

  “I’ve just been asleep for three hours. I’m not tired.”

  “Well . . .”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re more exhausted than you realize, Beth.”

  “Dom, I’m wide awake. I’ve just—”

  “I’m not saying come to bed now if you don’t want to, but . . . what happened to you today, and then sleeping all evening . . .”

  “For God’s sake, Dom. You have naps all the time.” I’m unreasonably annoyed with him for having the same worry I just had; it makes it harder to dismiss.

  “I think you’ve been stressing out and pushing yourself too hard for too long. You have clients from 8 a.m. till 6 p.m. five days a week. You never take a proper lunch hour—”

  “That’s a normal working week. We have a huge mortgage to pay off, university costs coming up in a few years . . .”

  “I know. I just . . . it’s evenings too. You’re doing chores and admin till midnight, sometimes.”

  I wish I could deny it, but I can’t. And there’s no point saying that he’s the one who’s working late tonight; we both know that if I hadn’t fallen asleep, we’d have spent the evening talking and Dom wouldn’t have considered coming up here to work on logos. He’d have gone to bed at half past ten or eleven and . . . yes, I’d then have done a couple of hours of admin. Is there any woman with a full-time job and a family who doesn’t need those hours between 11 p.m.
and 1 a.m. to catch up and stay afloat? Probably. I don’t know any.

  Dom has a great talent that I lack: the ability not to give a toss about most things. He regularly announces that some project or other has been delayed, and seems amused by his colleagues’ panic over missed deadlines. We’ve had the conversation dozens of times: me saying that if his work bores him, he should do something else, him telling me I don’t understand, and that not caring about his career is his favorite hobby.

  He reaches for my hand, squeezes it and says, “I also think you’re stressing out about Zannah and Ben more than you realize.”

  “Zan and Ben are fine.”

  “I agree. But they’re teenagers, and more demanding than they used to be, and you let it get to you in a way that I don’t. Is their school good enough, is Zannah too cheeky and rebellious, is it our fault?”

  “No, yes and yes, in that order.” I sigh.

  “Beth, everything’s fine. You know my life’s great guiding motto.”

  “I don’t, actually.”

  “Let it wash over you.”

  I smile. “You’ve never told me that before.”

  “That’s because I just made it up.”

  “But you’re right: that is your life’s guiding motto.”

  “I wonder if maybe it’s not a coincidence,” Dom says.

  “What?”

  “This idea of Thomas and Emily Braid, who are teenagers the same age as ours, being suddenly little kids again.” He looks nervous. As if he knows he’s taken it too far.

  “Wait, are you saying . . .” I laugh. “You think I have a secret desire for Zannah and Ben to be little again, and it made me hallucinate five-year-old Thomas and three-year-old Emily?”

  Dom looks suitably embarrassed. “That’s crazy, isn’t it?”

  “Totally. Whatever I saw, whatever happened, it’s not that. I think—” I break off, too proud to say it: I think I’m handling the challenge of parenting two teenagers really well. My kids like me. I like them. How bad can it be?

  “Was Zan . . . okay?” I ask. “When she left, I mean.”

  “Fine.”

  “She wasn’t worried by . . . any of it?”