The stone caught Mum just above her right temple. She stumbled, slipped, and crashed to the ground. Someone screamed, I still don’t know who. Jas tumbled down from Zach’s shoulders, but he caught her in his arms before she hit the pavement. A man pushed through the crowd of people coming out of the church saying he was a doctor, and knelt beside Mum, who was lying with her head in Dad’s lap.
“I’m all right,” Mum murmured. Her head was bleeding.
“My wife is pregnant!” Dad cried.
The doctor leaned over to take Mum’s pulse. For a minute, because he smiled at her, I thought everything was going to be all right. Then he looked at Dad and told him to call an ambulance.
MONDAY, JANUARY 20, EARLY IN THE MORNING
No one saw who did it, but I know. And I’m not the only one.
It’s so obvious.
Dad went to the hospital in an ambulance with Mum last night, while Zoran drove us home in our car. Zach sat with him in the front, with Flora and the others in the row behind them. I sat in the back.
Jas was crying and asking questions. “Why would anyone do that? Why Mummy? Why here, why tonight, why now?”
“I don’t know,” Flora answered.
I thought about the baby, the feel of its head under my hand on Mum’s tummy, the jab when it kicks, Mum saying “imagine how it feels for me?” Mum on Christmas Day, snoring on the sofa, and playing charades on Boxing Day. I wanted to say something but I couldn’t speak. Literally. It was like the connection between my brain and my mouth was broken.
If anything happens to them . . . I clenched my fists till my nails dug into my palms. If I wasn’t writing this, I’d still be clenching them now.
“Who would do that?” Jas sobbed, and Flora said again that she didn’t know. But I know, and Zoran knows, and Zach knows who threw the stone at Mum.
Neither of them talked the whole way home, but at one point Zoran reached out to squeeze Zach’s shoulder again, like he did before. I was too far away to hear what he said but it sounded like a question. Zach shrugged and looked out of the window. He looked like he wanted to cry, and I thought “good.”
I wish we’d never met him and his stupid mother. I wish Zoran had never agreed to look after him.
Zoran dropped Zach off first before taking us home, and then he said he’d stay with us until Dad got back. Flora told him he didn’t have to, but he said he wanted to.
We didn’t go to bed. Instead we brought our duvets down to the living room, where we huddled together on the sofa and waited. It was after two when Dad got home. Everybody was asleep except me and Zoran, sitting together in the dark, still not talking. Dad sat down with us on the sofa. The others woke up and we all crawled over to him.
“How’s Mum?” Twig asked.
“All right, but they’re keeping her under observation.”
“What about the baby?” asked Flora.
“We’ll know more tomorrow.”
I pressed in closer to him. I was vaguely aware of a hand on my shoulder, Zoran murmuring, “I’ll call in the morning.” I thought he might tell Dad then, but he didn’t say a word, and neither did I.
We all went upstairs, but once the others were in bed I crept back down again. I found Dad in his study, sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, surrounded by papers.
“I thought I’d try to work,” he said. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”
I moved a stack of books from the armchair in the corner and curled up in it.
“How is your book going?” I asked.
“Badly,” Dad said. Then he said that it hardly mattered anymore.
“I swear to God, if anything happens to them . . .” His voice was shaking. He pressed his hands down on his desk, like doing that was the only thing stopping him from throwing everything on the floor or ripping up all those precious sheets of paper.
“I know,” I said.
“If anything happens to your mother or that baby,” he said in a steadier voice, “I will find the person who did this thing and I will make him pay. I will rip him to pieces. I will tear off his head.”
“Dad,” I said.
“I will pull out his heart and stamp on his guts and . . .”
“Dad, you’re scaring me!”
He was prowling around his study now, punching his right fist into the palm of his left hand. He stopped right in front of me and looked at me like he hadn’t seen me properly until then.
“I’ll kill him,” he said.
I can’t talk to him when he’s like this. I spoke to Flora instead. I found her sitting on her bed with her arms wrapped round her knees, staring at her phone. I sat next to her, but she didn’t look up.
“I think it was Zach’s mother,” I whispered.
She carried on staring at her phone.
“It has to be,” I insisted. “Who else would do something like that? She’s mad, Flora. Zoran says she killed her own mother.”
“Zach’s gran died of cancer.”
“You saw her in the park,” I went on. “Remember? I’ve seen her too. I’m sure I have. She’s been watching us, Flora. She’s jealous and she hates us.”
“I’m not even sure it was her I saw,” Flora said tonelessly. “And even if I did, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not proof.”
“Flora, Mum’s in hospital!”
She looked up at last, and I saw that she had been crying. “Does it matter?” she asked. “You heard what Dad said, Mum’s all right. I don’t want to fight with Zach again.”
“So you do think it was her!”
She didn’t answer for ages.
“We have to do something,” I said. “What if she does it again?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She lay down and pulled the duvet over her head. I waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t and I left her too.
I don’t know what to do.
MONDAY, JANUARY 20 (CONT.)
I’m writing this from Zoran’s front doorstep. None of us went to school today.
The police came this morning. There were two of them, a man who didn’t look like we interested him very much at all and a woman who kept calling us “dear.” They said, they were sorry to intrude on us when we must be so preoccupied but they just had a few questions and perhaps the younger children would rather not be present? The way they said it made it obvious they were the ones who had much rather Jas and Twig weren’t there.
“If there is to be a police investigation,” Twig said, “there is absolutely no way I will not be present.”
“Me neither,” Jas whispered. They had been standing by the door but now Jas took Twig’s hand and led him to the sofa, where they sat together, very close, and didn’t let go. The policewoman smiled, like she thought they were impossibly cute. The policeman didn’t.
Dad stood by the door with his coat on, looking anxious.
Flora sat in the red armchair in her tartan pajama bottoms and the old cardigan she always wears when she’s worried or upset, concentrating really hard on trying to answer the police’s questions. She didn’t look at me.
I thought, I have to tell them. Mum is lying in hospital, and I have to tell them what I know. But Flora was talking, saying we had no idea who could have done it and I thought, she’s right, thinking something isn’t proof. Last night I thought I knew, but that’s not the same thing. And the longer Flora talked, the harder it got to say anything.
“Our mother has no enemies,” said Flora. “None of us are aware of any quarrels or arguments she may have had, and nobody saw what happened.”
At the end, the policewoman said they would do their best to find the culprit, but that it sounded like a random attack and that, unless he struck again, the attacker would be difficult to catch. She said that someone from Victim Support would be in touc
h to offer counseling. Dad said that would be great but the person who needed support right now was his wife and their unborn child, and then he pretty much ran out of the house to go to the hospital.
Jas started to cry again.
I love Dad, but I wish he were better in a crisis.
After Dad and the police had gone, I waited for Flora to say something to me, but she still didn’t. And then I thought I don’t care what she thinks, and I came here. Zoran is out. It’s twelve thirty, and I’ve been sitting on this doorstep for nearly an hour. Luckily it’s mild again, and sunny. There’s this big tree outside Zoran’s building, and the squirrels in it are going crazy, chasing one another around and around the trunk. There’s a robin too, hopping about making chirping noises, and a fat old tabby cat sleeping on the wall in the sun. It seems quite incredible to me that all this is going on when Mum is lying in hospital.
Zoran just turned in from the street. Time to stop writing.
I’m clenching my fists again.
LATER
I’m in bed now. Dad called from the hospital this evening. Mum and the baby are both fine, but the doctors still want to keep her in for a few days just in case. He explained that she has been suffering from very high blood pressure and the doctors had worried that it might be something called preeclampsia. It isn’t, which is a good thing because we looked it up on Google and the only cure is to deliver the baby, and if that happened it could die because it is still so small.
“I don’t want the baby to die.” Jas began to cry, and Twig looked like he might too.
“No one is going to die,” I said.
“What if it happens again!” Jas wailed. “What if there’s a murderer stalking her! What if someone is trying to kill her!”
The Jas who tears around obstacles courses on horseback and recites poetry to a packed audience has completely vanished.
“Nobody is stalking us,” I said, but what if that’s not true?
Zoran went to see Mr. Rudowski this morning. That’s where he was when I was waiting for him on his doorstep, and that’s why he didn’t call us this morning like he said he would.
“Where’s Zach?” I asked. Zoran said he was back at school. He said it was important to keep things as normal as possible.
“What news of Cassie and the baby?” he asked. I didn’t answer.
“The police came,” I said instead. “Speaking of normal.”
Zoran was looking for his keys, and he didn’t look at me.
“What did they say?” he asked.
“They wanted to know if Mum had enemies. Flora said no. I wanted to say yes, but I couldn’t, because I wasn’t sure.”
“You weren’t sure of what?”
“If Mum has enemies.” And then I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say and we’d reached the top of the stairs and were going into Zoran’s flat, and I wondered what Grandma or Dodi would do if it was them and I just blurted out, “Was it Zach’s mother who did it?”
Sometimes when you don’t know how to do something it’s easier to pretend you’re someone else.
Zoran sighed and said yes, he thought it was.
I didn’t know what to say next, and I suppose Zoran didn’t either, because he just stood there leaning against a wall with his arms crossed, looking at the floor and frowning.
“She came back just before the show,” he said at last. “We left the house and she was waiting for us outside. She was upset. She’d finally been to the hospital to see her father and they had a fight.”
“What was the fight about?”
Zoran said Wanda wouldn’t say, but Mr. Rudowski told him this morning, and that the fight was about money. “To put it bluntly, Mr. Rudowski said Wanda was in trouble and she came back to get what she could before he died.”
“That’s horrible,” I said, and Zoran agreed but said that there was nothing like the possibility of imminent death of close relatives to bring out the worse in people.
“But if she just came back for the money, why did she want to see Zach?”
Zoran’s face softened for a moment. “He’s her son, Blue.”
“But she’s horrible to him.”
“I didn’t say she was logical. I just said he’s her son. She’s confused but she still loves him. Just as he loves her. He was so sweet with her, Blue. Put his arm around her, tried to calm her down. She was hysterical, kept saying her father had sent her away again—nothing at all about the money, obviously. Zach said he couldn’t let Jas down, and asked her to come with us. He told her he’d love that. He even asked me if she could stay with us.”
“But she didn’t.”
“Of course not. She started crying that Zach didn’t love her anymore, that she’d lost everything and that it was all his and her father’s fault. And then she must have followed us and waited for us to come out. You know what happened next.”
Zoran said that he had wanted to tell Dad last night but Zach had begged him not to, and given what Zach had just been through and what he’d done for Jas, he agreed to wait. And then this morning he decided to go and see Mr. Rudowski.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He begged me not to go to the police.”
“But she hurt Mum! Doesn’t he care?”
“She’s his daughter,” Zoran said gently. “And what are the police going to do?”
“Catch her!”
“She needs medical help, Blue.”
“But what about Mum? What if Wanda comes back and attacks her again?”
Zoran said that he would find her. He said he would never let anything bad happen to any of us, and that was why his biggest priority now was to make sure Wanda got the help she needed from doctors and from her own family.
“We have to tell Dad,” I said.
Zoran hesitated. “If that’s what you want.”
“Of course it’s what I want! Why wouldn’t we tell Dad?”
“He has a lot on his plate right now. And David can get a bit—irrational himself. I wonder if we might wait. For Zach’s sake.”
I thought about Dad last night, how angry he was.
“If you want to do the right thing by one person,” I said, “does it always mean you are doing the wrong thing by somebody else?”
Zoran said sometimes that was the case, but not always.
“Flora knows,” I told him. “But she won’t admit it. She says I’m imagining things, but really she’s afraid of upsetting Zach.”
“Let me find Wanda,” Zoran said.
Jas is sleeping with Twig tonight. I just stopped in Flora’s room on my way back from the bathroom. She hasn’t asked me where I went this afternoon, and I haven’t told her.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 21
We went to the hospital today. Mum is on a ward with four other women. Her window looks out over the railway tracks and her bed is separated from the others by curtains. She says it’s super-cozy and all the women chat to one another and swap stories, but she looked exhausted.
Maybe Flora is feeling guilty for her silence, because she flitted about Mum’s cubicle arranging flowers and plumping pillows and feeding her soup she brought from home in a thermos like she was the sort of nurse you see in black-and-white films who look like nuns.
I read out loud to her from Jane Eyre.
Twig told us about the trains he could see out of the window.
Jas sat on the floor because there weren’t enough chairs, hugging her knees and looking sorrowful. I got to the bit where Jane traipses across the moors, lost and abandoned without a hope in the world, and she started to sniff. Twig stared at her, amazed.
“Are you crying because of the book?” he asked. “Because I think it’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”
“You’re just uncultured,” I told him.
“Let’s not quarrel,” Flor
a murmured, and Jas howled even louder.
I asked her, “Are you really crying because of Jane Eyre?” and she gave a giant hiccup and wailed that NO, OF COURSE SHE WASN’T, and then she threw herself on Mum’s bed shouting MUMMY MUMMY MUMMY and that it was all her fault. Mum said no no no of course it wasn’t and Jas said yes yes yes it was until a nurse came along and kicked us out, telling us we’d be the death of our mum if we carried on like that, which really didn’t help at all.
Jake came around this afternoon. He turned up on the doorstep with a bag full of chocolate bars and before I could even open my mouth to talk he said, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry about your mum,” and I let him in. I wasn’t sure what I should do with him so we sat on the stairs eating the chocolate while I told him what I could, which wasn’t very much.
“It was such an awesome evening,” Jake said. “Until, you know, the attack and everything. Jas and the poetry and Flora’s boyfriend, it was brilliant.”
I couldn’t help smiling. Jake is basically inarticulate, but I always know what he means, and he’s right. Jas and the poetry and Zach were brilliant. Then I wished I hadn’t smiled, because he gazed at me, all hopeful, like he thought my smile meant something completely different.
“I really like you, Blue,” he said.
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. All I could think about was Mum and how she looked this afternoon and Jas screaming MUMMY MUMMY MUMMY as the nurse pushed us out of the room.
“I’m really sorry about Talullah,” Jake went on. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I think I went a bit crazy, remembering the beach and surfing and stuff. Like, even though we were back in England, it wasn’t real life, you know?”
He looked so sorry for himself I almost started to feel sorry for him too. I love Jake in a way, I really do, but he does pick his moments to try and get philosophical.
“Can’t we try again?” he asked. “You’re one of my best friends, Blue. I hate that we don’t talk anymore.”
“You’re one of my best friends too, Jake,” I said, and he beamed.
“That thing you did with the milk shake was wicked,” he said. “I mean, you kind of ruined my hoodie and everything, but the way you just did it was mad. It was like you couldn’t care less what I thought.”
Following Flora Page 12
