The Night You Left

by Emma Curtis

  It had nothing to do with money – Cassie Morgan, for instance, was as poor as a church mouse – it was all to do with bonding at a certain time of life, and that time was when the mother still had the power to dictate her children’s friendships and develop her own off the back of them. Kai was perfectly capable of finding his feet at school. He didn’t need her help with that.

  Grace had called the school office in advance, so Kai and Lottie knew about the arrangement. They ran over when they saw Anna. She felt a surge of pride and made a great to-do about checking they had everything, then strolled to the gate with the two of them at her side. Soon enough, she thought, these women would come round. She had made a mistake at the first evening event she’d been invited to, flirting with the husbands. But she had been expecting Grace and Nick to be there, and when they hadn’t showed up and she heard someone bemoaning the fact that they had gone away for the weekend, she had been so disappointed, she had drunk too much.

  Lottie was fascinated by what Anna did. She stood in the conservatory taking it in, inspecting the rustic wooden signs hanging on hooks waiting for the next craft fair. They said things like Home Sweet Home, Eat Laugh Love, and Love Me Love My Mess. She had sold thirty of the things at the Christmas Fair at Kai’s old school last year.

  ‘It’s cold in here,’ Lottie said.

  It was true. The conservatory was distinctly chilly. Anna was used to it, but she had to wear fingerless gloves when she was working. She couldn’t afford to have the heating on all day, so it went off as soon as Kai left for school. Embarrassed, she spun the thermostat until it clicked, then jacked it right up to 21 degrees. No half measures.

  ‘Can I make one?’ Lottie said, indicating the signs.

  ‘Sure,’ Anna said, even though the bits of naturally sanded and weather-bleached driftwood that she and Kai scavenged from the Dorset beach close to where Ben’s parents lived, were sacrosanct. Apart from being integral to her work, they also gave her a reason to be out of the house and away from her in-laws. They’d been hinting lately that Kai was old enough to stay with them on his own. She was beginning to think it might not be such a bad idea.

  Anna picked out a small one. ‘Paint the background first, then do the writing in pencil.’

  ‘I know,’ Lottie said, as though it was obvious.

  Anna and Kai watched her, Kai eating a piece of toast and strawberry jam. Lottie was painstaking, anxious to get it right, her tongue caught between her teeth, her blonde hair tucked behind her ears. It had gone dark outside and Lottie was reflected in the curtain-less window, a skinny child with her mother’s delicate bone structure. When she’d finished the background she left it to dry while the two of them played a computer game. Anna expected her to forget all about it, but far from it; she went back to her artwork, picking it up and turning it both ways before setting it down and picking up the stencils.

  ‘What do you want to write?’ Anna asked.

  ‘I’m thinking about it.’

  Lottie chewed her bottom lip and sat back, contemplating the space before making her first mark. She worked slowly, carefully lining up each letter, spacing them out. Once that was done she dipped her brush into a pot of grey-green paint and began to fill them in. I Love My Dad.

  ‘That’s sweet,’ Anna said. ‘You’ve got two dads, haven’t you? Is that for your real one?’

  Lottie turned her china-blue eyes on her. ‘They’re both real. They’re just different sorts of dads.’

  ‘That’s a lovely way of putting it.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s for my birth dad. For his birthday.’ Then she wrinkled her nose. ‘I don’t really think Nick would appreciate this sort of thing.’

  She was an oddity, Anna decided. A typical only child, like Kai, precocious in a way that manifests in a greater articulacy than their peers. Thoughtful, too. She had a pensive face.

  When Lottie had finished, Anna picked the piece of wood up and laid it carefully with the others on the shelf against the painted brick wall to dry.

  ‘Can you turn it round so Dad doesn’t see it?’ Lottie said, suddenly anxious.

  ‘Of course. You wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.’

  She wondered what time Lottie’s father was intending to pick her up. It was gone six thirty, and she wanted to kick back with a glass of wine.

  ‘Mum!’

  The shout startled them. Kai was standing by the kitchen sink, looking down at his feet where water was pooling under the units. Anna rushed over and pulled open the cupboards, but the pipes under the sink seemed fine. Something must have happened when she turned up the heating. The plumbing was at least fifty years old and she couldn’t afford to get it overhauled. When she moved there had been no one to ask about things like stopcocks and boilers because the previous owner had died. Unfortunately, because Ben had killed himself, his life insurance didn’t pay out.

  She turned the heating off, but the puddle kept spreading. She ran upstairs to the bathroom, but there was nothing visibly wrong there either. Back downstairs she opened the cellar door and flicked the light switch. Water was dripping through the ceiling on to the washing machine. Within seconds the bulb popped, plunging her into darkness.

  ‘Mum,’ Kai shouted. ‘The lights have gone out!’

  ‘Shit,’ she muttered. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  Back in the kitchen Anna lit candles, to Kai and Lottie’s delight. It was pretty, but she didn’t find it delightful at all. No electricity and no water. She thought about Grace Trelawney, living with Nick, cushioned by money – it was a safe bet her pipes never burst – and felt a deep, deep well of bitter loneliness. Anna had been a beautiful girl, and she was a beautiful woman. She should have had a handsome and wealthy husband. She should not have been living in a poky worker’s cottage eking out a living painting clichés on driftwood and bringing up a child on her own. Nick’s success galled her.

  And Tim. She found it hard to think about him without becoming furious. She had been so young, so naive and so deeply unhappy. What kind of man takes advantage of that? Only creeps. Looking back, she can’t believe it happened. A fifteen-year-old and a forty-five-year-old man she had known since she was two. She would bet her last penny that Tim and Nick would do anything to keep that particular scandal from being made public.

  ‘Pick up your shoes and rucksacks and take them upstairs,’ she yelled as she whisked up her own shoes, handbag and anything else she could manage. She heard them laughing and stopped panicking for a moment to listen. Ice broken, she thought with a smile. Something good had come out of this at least.

  The water had spread across half the kitchen floor and was running between the painted floorboards. If it got into the front room the carpet would be ruined. She needed to turn the water off; something she had never attempted before.

  There was a torch, thank God. It was in the drawer in the dresser, where she kept odds and ends, and it worked. A miracle. She went back down to the narrow, brick-built space with the ceiling that skimmed her head and searched, not sure what she was looking for, but following pipes to their source, and finally, to the right of the washing machine in the space between it and the dusty wall, she found what she hoped was the stopcock. She felt rather proud of herself.

  The gap was too narrow, and her elbow became wedged as she reached in, straining her shoulder. A drip of cold water caught the nape of her neck and trickled under her top, making her shudder. She raised the torch to the dark patch spreading across the dirty plaster then contemplated the bulk of the washing machine. With a huge effort, she managed to shift it an inch, enough to get her arm all the way in and to grip the handle, but it refused to budge, and she was jammed at too awkward an angle to put any welly into it.

  Anna straightened up and cast around for something to help crank the washing machine further away from the wall, but there was nothing. Her cellar was full of stuff that she hadn’t got round to unpacking and probably never would. Her mistake had been to allow Ben’s brother and parents t
o choose what they wanted, but at the time she had been too dazed by events to stop them. They left her to cope alone, and when she finally managed to sell the flat and moved here none of them offered to come and help fix it up. Selfish bastards; they never liked her. If it hadn’t been for Kai, they would have dropped her entirely.

  The doorbell rang. She quickly wiped her face on her sleeve and noticed a rip in the underarm of her shirt, where it had been stretched against the corner of the washing machine. This was not the impression she had hoped to make on Grace’s ex-boyfriend.

  Upstairs, Lottie was hanging off a tall, thin bloke. Anna deflected the torch beam to the floor so as not to blind him and distinguished short salt-and-pepper hair, prominent cheekbones, grey eyes, hard mouth. In the shadowy light, the effect was magnetic and disorientating.

  ‘Douglas Parr.’ He raised his eyebrows in a friendly way and held out his hand. ‘I appear to have come at a good time.’

  There was humour in his voice, but also a certain authority that immediately reassured her. Help had arrived.

  Douglas took charge, first switching off the electricity, then addressing himself to the washing-machine problem. He squatted, pressed his shoulder against the wall and shoved. It resisted, then gave. Anna shone the torch into the space. Douglas reached in, twisted the stopcock, then straightened with a grunt, brushing a spider’s web from his sleeve. He grinned, his head cocked to one side, his hand pressed against the ceiling, as if he was hoping to create more space.

  ‘There you go.’

  ‘Thank you so much.’

  He switched the electricity back on and, from upstairs, Lottie and Kai shouted, ‘Hey! Switch it off.’ There was a peal of laughter.

  Douglas grinned and Anna’s whole body responded. ‘At least someone’s happy.’

  ‘I know. I think they’ve bonded.’

  ‘Do you have a plumber you can call?’

  ‘No, but I can ask Grace. She must know loads in her line of work.’

  He took out his mobile, scrolled through his contacts and asked her for her phone number so that he could send her Grace’s plumber’s details. Anna hesitated then thought, what the hell? And gave it to him.

  The plumber promised to come by eight o’clock the next morning. They could cope till then. While she mopped the kitchen floor, Douglas stayed out of the way, in the conservatory. He had broad shoulders and a rangy, loose-limbed elegance. She found his bandy legs both funny and sexy.

  ‘Cottage industry?’ he said.

  ‘It puts food on the table.’

  ‘You’re very talented.’

  She wrung the mop out, twisting it hard, and started again. ‘I make a lot of that stuff. You get better with practice.’

  He picked up one of the larger pieces and read it out loud. ‘Did I say I wanted children? I meant to say chocolate!’ He laughed. ‘Where do you sell?’

  ‘Craft fairs mainly, but I’m negotiating with Not On The High Street. If they agree to take me on, my orders should increase. Can I get you a drink? I feel I owe you. I’ve got wine. No beer, though, I’m afraid.’

  He hesitated and in doing so acknowledged that she had signalled that there wasn’t a man in the house, possibly in her life. She had only met him twenty minutes ago, but the effect he was having on her was unsettling. For the first time in ages she felt her sexual power; it crept through her, filling her veins, tweaking her body language, bringing a smile to her lips.

  ‘A glass of wine, if I’m not putting you out.’

  ‘Putting me out? You’ve saved me.’

  She raised her eyes to his face. He was looking intently at her, as though he was examining her for flaws. Heat rose into her cheeks.

  ‘You’re divorced?’ he asked.

  ‘Widowed.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine. It’s been five years now.’

  I’m moving on, open to offers.

  I find you extraordinarily attractive.

  What do you see when you look at me, Douglas Parr?

  She swept her fingers through her hair, smoothing it out, a gesture that wasn’t lost on him. They eyed each other like two animals, circling, wondering if what they felt was worth pursuing. Anna felt light-headed, ready to say something idiotic if only to release the tension, then Lottie came in, skirted the wet section of floor and put her arms around his waist.

  ‘Can we go now, Dad?’

  ‘Sure. Get your coat on. Sorry, we’ll have to take a rain check,’ he muttered to Anna. ‘Are you going to be OK?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ She hid her disappointment. ‘The insurance should cover the damage, and it’s not as if I have expensive flooring or anything.’

  She didn’t tell him that stripping the varnish and painting the old boards took her the best part of two weeks, that it gave her splinters in her hands, that her knees had felt bruised for ages, but she sensed that he’d guessed at least some of that. He understood.

  Anna closed the door and hugged herself, euphoria spiralling through her. She hadn’t felt like this for a very long time.

  Not since she was fifteen. Her happiness curdled.

  Look where that had ended.

  GRACE

  Saturday, 5 May 2018

  KAI’S VOICE BREAKS. I JUMP OUT OF BED, TUCKING THE phone between my shoulder and my ear as I pull on my jeans.

  ‘I’m on my way. I’ll be with you in five minutes. Don’t worry. Stay in your room and don’t answer the door without checking it’s me first.’

  I scribble a message on the back of an envelope and place it against the kettle where Tim can’t fail to see it, then I hurry out.

  Kai is wearing his pyjamas with an over-sized green hoodie, his hair spiked in opposing directions. I get him to tell me what he knows, but it isn’t much. He’d woken in the middle of the night because he’d had a bad dream. He got up and went to the loo, and peeked in on his mum, but she wasn’t there. He phoned her mobile number, but she didn’t pick up. He kept trying, leaving messages every few minutes, then found the class address list and called me.

  ‘I’m sure she’s fine.’ It’s difficult to think of anything to say that will reassure him. ‘Does Mum have a boyfriend?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kai says. ‘But I think there might be someone, because she’s sometimes whispering on the phone.’

  ‘That’s probably what’s happened,’ I say brightly. ‘She’s out on a date, but she decided not to tell you in case it didn’t work out. She’ll be back soon.’

  He doesn’t look convinced.

  ‘Kai, why did you call me instead of one of the other mums?’

  His lip quivers.

  ‘It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.’

  He wipes his nose on the sleeve of his hoodie. He’s trying so hard not to cry, it makes me want to. ‘I thought she might have gone where Lottie’s stepdad went.’

  ‘Oh, Kai.’

  His reaction is entirely understandable. Lottie’s stepdad vanished, and the police have been here asking questions. And now his mum has gone. I’m not sure whether to hug him or not, but when I put a tentative arm around his shoulder he leans into me. ‘Of course she hasn’t. I expect she’s lost track of time. Please don’t worry.’ I feel his skinny body shaking with tears and draw him closer to me. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’

  ‘I don’t want to be on my own.’

  ‘You won’t be. I’ll stay and look after you till she comes back. Do you think you can go back to bed now? Mum will be here when you wake up. I promise.’

  I feel a trickle of cold slither through my veins. I made that promise to Lottie not so long ago. I should learn from my mistakes.

  Once Kai has plodded back upstairs, I go into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Anna hasn’t tidied away her supper things. There’s a glass on the side, its bowl stained with the evaporated residue of red wine, and her supper plate is still on the table. I almost tidy them away but change my mind and leave them where I find them, in case she think
s I’m making some kind of point. The sort of thing Cora does. I touch the In-Step app on my phone and open groups. Anna’s done two thousand three hundred and sixty-seven steps today. That’s about one and a half kilometres in In-Step-speak. She’s not walking now. Maybe her phone is lying switched off beside someone else’s bed, or in her bag, slung over a chair in someone else’s kitchen. As distressed as I am at the neglect this implies, I hope this is the case.

  I have a look round. She’s finished Thomas’s chair and started on the next one, lightly pencilling in the name ‘William’ with a stencil. I chew my lip. I have an opportunity here. I need evidence that Anna was expecting to see Nick that Saturday night, that she lay in wait for him, and that Nick is the reason she moved here. If someone comes to the door and I’m downstairs I can hit the sofa; if I’m upstairs, I can get into her bed and pretend to be asleep. Anna will be bewildered, possibly cross, but she won’t be able to say anything. She’s the one who’s left her ten-year-old alone because she doesn’t want to pay a babysitter while she’s on a date; I’m almost certain that’s what it is. I expect it’s unusual for Kai to wake up in the night and she thought she could get away with it.

  I start in the kitchen, working my way through the cabinets. I move into the dining area where there’s an old dresser. The drawers contain paper, sketchbooks, crayons and felt-tip pens. Kai likes to draw seascapes full of weird and wonderful creatures.

  The tiny front sitting room is equally fruitless. The shelves are loaded with books and DVDs. It’s an inviting room, mellow and cosy. Upstairs there are two bedrooms and a bathroom, and above the landing a hatch in the ceiling; a pole with a hook on the end leans into the corner. I creep past Kai’s bedroom door and enter Anna’s room, close the curtains and switch on the light, then tackle her bedside table before moving to the wardrobe. A moth flies out as I open the door, and another as I flick through her clothes.