by Sanjida Kay
It was a nipple, pink and protruding, the breast hard and full and stiff with veins like a cow’s udder. A naked woman with lifeless blonde hair, her lips sticky with red lip gloss, her legs spread wide apart, her vulva waxed smooth. She stretched her labia open, crinkled and fleshy as an amorphous sea creature. Laura put her hand over her mouth. Now the woman was on all fours, her giant breasts bouncing painfully, moaning flatly as a man with chiselled abs, nude apart from a dark-grey tie around his neck, penetrated her from behind.
Laura pressed the ALT and Delete keys and the Off button. She pulled out the socket at the back. It didn’t make any difference. The woman continued to moan. She sucked one finger. The man grunted and thrust and there was a rhythmic sticky slap as his thighs hit her bottom. He started to take his tie off. For a horrible moment Laura wondered what he was going to do with it. And then the screen went black.
Laura pressed the On switch. She put the plug back in again. Nothing. The laptop was completely lifeless. Before she could talk herself out of it, she phoned the local police. The voice at the other end was young, bored.
‘Hello, this is Natalie. How may I help you?’
‘The hard drive on my laptop has just been wiped,’ she said shakily. ‘I know who did it. An IT repair man…’
‘If you’ve got a computer virus, you need to seek help from an IT company. It’s a civil matter, not police business,’ said the woman.
‘It wasn’t a virus. It was deliberate. He’s an IT consultant. Aaron Jablonski. He fixed my computer last week and installed a kind of remote device so he could access my laptop and that’s how he’s done it. It was full of porn. And then everything just vanished. Completely. I can’t even turn it on. There’s nothing left.’
She thought of all those photos, nine years of her daughter’s life, eradicated in a few seconds, and made a strangulated sob.
‘Have you spoken to your IT consultant?’ asked Natalie more kindly.
‘He’s sent a Trojan to everyone in my email account. It’s malicious.’ She was beginning to sound hysterical. ‘Of course I can’t speak to him about it.’
‘And have you got a back-up of all your files?’ The woman’s voice had a soft Bristolian burr.
‘No. Only of a few documents.’
Laura closed her eyes and silently swore at herself, at her stupidity.
How could I have been so careless?
The list of what had been lost was growing in her mind: not just the photos, but all her notes about the horticulture course, her designs and the research she’d done as preparation for Ruth’s garden, and for her own. Music; playlists from happier times; her dissertation on Emily Dickinson that she’d been so proud of; the poetry she’d attempted to write.
‘I’m sorry, love,’ said Natalie, ‘but we don’t have the resource to deal with this kind of thing. I suggest you take it to a decent IT specialist, see if anything can be salvaged.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, wiping her eyes, and was annoyed at herself for muttering platitudes when she didn’t feel the slightest bit grateful.
It was as she put the phone down that it suddenly hit her. Aaron had installed a program to give him access to her machine. But it was worse than that. He’d set the password to her Internet, which meant he knew it too – Ode to Autumn, she’d said, and Aaron had changed it himself! With a sinking feeling she realized that it would not be long before the Internet would no longer be accessible through her phone or the TV.
She’d told him her password! It was the same password for Skype as well as for her email, which is why he’d been able to hack into them. It was obvious to anyone who knew her what it might be: AutumnWild. How terribly unoriginal. And what was so dreadful was that it was the same password. For everything. She rested her head in her hands. Skype. Email. Facebook. Netflix. Amazon. Her bank account. Her bank account.
‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ she said out loud.
How very, very stupid of her. No bloody wonder Aaron had caused so much damage so swiftly. No wonder she hadn’t been able to use her debit card.
She blew her nose and tried Lucy’s mobile number again. It went straight to voicemail. Could she be away on a shoot? Her mind felt foggy, as if retrieving the tiniest fragment of information would require the expertise of an archaeologist. This time she left a message, trying to sound less despondent and desperate than she actually felt.
AUTUMN
She saw Levi standing behind her, holding a fragment of her painting between his thumb and forefinger. She felt goose bumps on her skin as she waited for him to reach out and touch her.
She wiped away her tears and climbed out of bed. She hadn’t been able to sleep last night either. Sometimes in the evening when she was doing her homework or painting, or at bedtime, she borrowed her Mum’s iPod. She liked listening to folk songs, but her favourites were her mum’s Classic Chill Out albums or Mozart. Everyone in her old class was into that kind of music too. Cleo’s favourite composer was someone called Bark. But when she’d come to Bristol, Olive had laughed at her. She said no one in Ashley Grove listened to that old stuff. They all liked Rihanna and Beyoncé. And now Autumn felt funny playing Mozart. It had been better when Granny was there, knowing she was just below her and her mum was in the room above. Granny liked Mozart too.
She wrapped her quilt around her. She felt alone and frightened. The house seemed to stir and creak. As if it were sighing. As if it were breathing. Standing there in the middle of her bedroom in the night, in the dark, that was when she became aware of it. A noise she’d been hearing for the past few minutes but hadn’t consciously been listening to. She stopped in the middle of her bedroom. Her clock lit the room with an unearthly blue glow but still there were strange-shaped shadows in the corner of the room, pools of darkness where something could be hiding.
The sound came again. It was a squeaking, grating noise. It didn’t seem to be from inside the house. She listened. It was like a gate, a giant gate rhythmically creaking open and closed. It couldn’t be their garden door. It was too far away and her bedroom didn’t face in that direction: it looked out onto the street.
And then she knew what it was. Her heart started to flutter erratically. It felt like a moth beating itself to death against a glass pane. She walked slowly over to the window and parted the curtains.
The house was built into the hill, with the kitchen a floor below the street. Opposite them, above the level of Wolferton Place, shored up by a high stone wall, was a small park. It might once have been part of the garden of a great house: in the corner nearest to her was a magnificent Scots pine and a Douglas fir, which dropped needles and elongated, twisted cones onto the pavement below. Her bedroom, two floors above the road, looked directly into this park.
There was a small slide for toddlers and two baby swings. There was a much larger slide with a bouldering wall set into a wooden tower and walkway and a metal fireman’s pole. In between were a couple of plastic animals for little children that rocked on springs – a horse and a chicken. There was an odd roundabout – there were only three spaces and you had to stand up on it.
Once she’d seen a boy who only held on with his hands, spinning around, his body stretched out horizontally, as if he were flying. She would never dare do that. Now it moved slowly, as if in passing someone had given it a push. The horse was also rocking, back and forth; obscured by the shadows from the giant trees and half lit by a streetlight, the outsized head cast grotesque shadows on the ground.
The circling roundabout and the rocking horse made no sound. No one was riding them and gradually they started to slow down. The noise she’d heard was coming from the darkness behind the toddler toys: it was the swing for older kids, the unoiled metal hoops grating against one another.
There was someone sitting on it. He had his feet on the ground to push the swing backwards and forwards. As he swung towards her, his face was lit by the orange glow
of the streetlight. He was looking directly at her.
It was Levi.
Friday 2 November
LAURA
Half past three and she had still not reached the school. She took deep breaths to try and calm herself. She reminded herself she was only a few minutes away. It would be okay.
Laura had been working at a new garden in Frenchay. Barney hadn’t let her leave on time and now she was late and the traffic was awful. Normally it was bad at this time of day as people were picking their kids up from school, but today was worse than usual. She was stuck on a particularly busy and narrow part of Frenchay Road. The traffic was at a standstill.
Her mobile, lying on the passenger seat, vibrated and she saw there was a text from Lucy. She snatched up the phone and read it quickly, before the cars could start moving again.
Hi hun, I’m in Canada, filming. Be back in a fortnight. Tagging on a few days in Toronto. Hope u ok. L xxx
Of course, she remembered now. Lucy was making a documentary about dancers, some kind of reality show hybridized with The X-Factor. It was part-funded by the Canadian Film Board and so they had to include some contestants from Vancouver. She’d forgotten that Lucy was taking a few days off afterwards. How like Lucy to remind her so kindly and so subtly.
Laura dropped the phone back on the seat and wiped her clammy hands on her jeans. She gripped the steering wheel.
What on earth is going on?
The cars in front of her started to inch slowly forward and then move onto the opposite side of the road. A silver Audi was stationary in the middle of her lane and cars travelling in both directions were trying to navigate around it. The car hadn’t been hit. And then she saw a small group of people on the sliver of pavement next to the Audi. A man – maybe the driver – was bending over a woman who was lying on the pavement and giving her mouth to mouth. The accident must only just have happened, she thought, because there were no police and the ambulance hadn’t arrived.
As Laura approached, she saw the woman more clearly. She was young, wearing a short denim skirt and no tights. Her smooth legs were askew, splayed out from each other at an odd angle. Her hands, lying so still on her lap, had short fingernails painted bright blue. She couldn’t see any blood. Laura shuddered. She wondered if she should stop, but there were other people there, standing around, watching the man giving the woman the kiss of life. Surely one of them would have called the emergency services? In any case, she was late to fetch Autumn, she couldn’t pull over. It was exactly accidents like this that reinforced her belief cars were hazardous, she thought, trying not to dwell on the girl who’d been hit. It was why she’d been so relieved when she’d discovered that Autumn didn’t need to walk along the road to school if they cut through the nature reserve. Along a path that she now considered dangerous.
Laura pulled into a side street a few blocks away from the school but couldn’t find a space until she was half-way up the street. Leaping out of the car, she started running towards Ashley Grove.
She noticed a small black child across the street. The girl was two or three; her arm was stretched up as far as it would go so she could hold her father’s hand. She was wearing an imitation-leather jacket; beneath the hem was an explosion of pink ruffles. Laura thought of the photo of Autumn in her princess outfit and felt tears prick her eyes. She turned resolutely away from the little girl who was smiling at her and jogged along the gritted pavement to Ashley Grove.
That morning Autumn had been white and the purple shadows beneath her eyes had deepened.
‘How are you feeling, love? Are you ill?’ Laura had asked.
Autumn had shaken her head and said nothing. She’d eaten two mouthfuls of cereal and then pushed the bowl away. The only thing she’d said to Laura had been that she had a headache, but she’d refused the Calpol Laura had tried to give her. Laura had driven her to school since she had to travel to Frenchay afterwards, and had again felt that horrid sense of relief at having to spend less time than normal with Autumn before escaping to work. Plus it meant that she hadn’t had to face any of the other parents. She’d simply pulled over on the double yellow lines, blocking the traffic behind her, and Autumn had clambered out.
‘I love you,’ Laura had called.
Autumn had slammed the car door and trudged off, her stance as bent and resigned as if she were heading down a mine.
Now Laura scanned the yard for Autumn. There were still a few children coming out of the school and others milling around near the play area with its sawn-off tree trunks like stumps of teeth, the chipped red and yellow climbing frame and kidney-shaped sandpit. As Laura walked towards the entrance, a few of the parents looked over at her and frowned before turning away. At least Rebecca and her clique weren’t there, she thought.
There was no sign of Autumn. Laura put her hands in her pockets and her head down and tried to avoid the stares. At the school doors she stopped and looked carefully around the playground again in case she’d somehow missed seeing her daughter. Autumn was definitely not there. The trickle of children filtering out of the school had stopped and the last parents and their offspring drifted out of the gates and down the road. It had started to grow dark and the street lamps flickered into life. A halo of mist swirled around each orange light.
She grasped the cold metal handle of the door and swung it open. Mrs Sibson was bustling down the corridor towards her, her long mustard cord skirt swishing over her boots, her heavy garnet and white necklace swinging in time with her steps. She frowned when she saw Laura.
‘I can’t find Autumn,’ she said. ‘I was a little late but she wasn’t in the playground when I arrived.’
Mrs Sibson’s frown deepened, making the rash across her chin grow redder.
‘We finished on time. I saw her go out of the classroom.’
‘But you didn’t see her leave the school? Could she still be here?’ Laura’s voice was tight with apprehension.
Mrs Sibson shook her head. ‘No. I looked out of the classroom window just after school ended and I saw her in the playground waiting for you. Actually, Mrs Baron-Cohen, I’m still concerned about Autumn. She looks unwell.’
Laura drew herself to her full height. ‘I’ve repeatedly told you that she’s being bullied. What do you expect? Did you see her leave the school grounds?’
Mrs Sibson ignored her outburst and shook her head. She said quietly, ‘No, I’m sorry, I didn’t. I assumed you’d be there to meet her. Could she have gone home with one of the other girls?’
‘No,’ said Laura. She didn’t want to say that none of the other mothers would speak to her, let alone take Autumn home with their daughters. ‘I’ll go back in case she’s gone to the house on her own instead of waiting for me.’
‘That’s not like her. She’s quite a cautious child.’
Laura was taken aback. She’d assumed from Mrs Sibson’s manner that she didn’t have the slightest understanding of her daughter beyond her academic abilities.
‘Over the last couple of days she’s wanted to walk by herself,’ Laura said. She started to hurry down the corridor, desperate to find Autumn. Over her shoulder she added, ‘I agreed she could go to school on her own if I picked her up at the end of the day.’
Mrs Sibson followed her out and called after her, ‘I’ll ring you at home in ten minutes.’
‘Thanks,’ shouted Laura, running across the playground. For once she was glad she was wearing beaten-up trainers instead of the stylish footwear Rebecca wore.
She jogged back to the car and then drove slowly home, ignoring the traffic building up. The white van directly behind her was so close she could barely see its bonnet through her mirrors. She scanned the pavements as she drove, hoping to glimpse Autumn wearing her new bright red coat, hurrying down the street.
Laura turned into Wolferton Place; Autumn might be waiting outside the house. But the street was deserted, the doorstep
empty. She parked the car and opened the front door. She was shouting, ‘Autumn!’ even as she stumbled inside, dead leaves and pine needles from the fir in the park opposite blowing in with her.
The house was dark and silent. Autumn didn’t know that Laura had hidden a spare key in the back garden under a stone by the strawberry tree but, even so, Laura ran downstairs to the kitchen and then up to the top of the house, shouting her daughter’s name, flinging open every door. She stood in her bedroom, out of breath, and saw herself reflected in the dark window set into the sloping ceiling, her hair spilling out of its bun, her eyes wide. The phone started to ring.
She ran back downstairs and snatched up the receiver in her office. It was Mrs Sibson.
‘I was about to call,’ she said. ‘Autumn isn’t here and I didn’t see her on my way home. I’m going to walk through the nature reserve, in case she went home that way instead.’
‘And no one has rung to say Autumn’s at their house?’
‘No,’ said Laura.
‘I’ve alerted Mr George that she’s missing. Now I’ve spoken to you, I’ll call the police. I’ll make some phone calls to her friends’ mothers and then call you back. I’ll ring on your mobile, shall I?’
‘Yes,’ said Laura, checking it was still in her coat pocket.
She ran back down the stairs, snatching up the keys from the table by the front door and then continued to the kitchen and let herself into the garden. It was dusk and she had to struggle to see the numbers on the key pad next to the garden door. She stepped into the lane, shut it and locked it behind her. It was cold and since she’d driven to and from Frenchay, she wasn’t wearing a scarf, hat or gloves and her boots were still in the car. The damp mist had resolved into a light drizzle.
She pushed open the metal gate into the allotments and started to jog along the path towards the wood. The beautiful, blowsy pink dahlias had dissolved into a dark, wilted tangle of dead stems. In one of the allotments she noticed a curious little apple tree. It was small with cascading branches, like a willow, and still festooned with fruit. They were hard and perfectly spherical, with dull matt skin in a peculiarly even and poisonous-looking red.
