She’s Not There. Tamsin Grey
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of wine you could get in the Green Shop. Then he saw that a steady stream of ants was heading down into the jug, despite the blanket of corpses. He thought about trying to divert them from their death, but the only thing he could think of would be to empty the jug and wash it, and the sink was too full of plates and pots.
Jonah looked up at the calendar. Yoga Poses 2013. The pose for July was Ustrasana, or Camel, and there was a picture of a woman, on her knees, arching backwards. The pages of previous calendars had always got filled with Lucy’s scrawls, but this one had stayed very bare and clean. He stepped closer, gazing up at the four and a half rows of squares, thinking how each square was a complete turn of the planet on its axis. The first two weeks were all empty. Then, in the middle of the third row, Wednesday the 17th, she’d written two letters, S and D. An acronym. For the rained-off Sports Day. There was a squiggly word beginning with C on the 18th, and then, on the fourth row, she had circled the 26th, and written three letters, P, E and D, in blobby brown felt-tip. PED. Trying to think what they might stand for, he reached up to take the calendar off its nail, and laid it on the table. Using the dark blue drawing pencil, he crossed out the cancelled SD, and wrote a new one in Thursday, the 25th. He thought for a moment. She hadn’t put ‘Haredale’s Got Talent’ on the calendar, even though Raff had been talking about nothing else for weeks. He wrote in HGT, right under SD. A busy day. He paused, and then went over the letters again, because the blue pencil didn’t come out that well on the shiny calendar paper.
Jonah put the pencil down, yawned and looked at the kitchen clock. 5.25. Where had she gone, so early? He turned and tried the back door. It wasn’t locked. Roland used to tell her off about not locking the back door. The backyard had a concrete floor, with brick walls on all three sides, the Broken House rising up behind the far wall. In the middle of the concrete floor was the brown corduroy cushion she’d been sitting on the day before. Yellow-flowering weeds were sprouting from the cracks in the concrete and from between the bricks. Lucy’s plant pots were sprouting weeds too, as well as the things she’d planted. Her dirt-covered trowel was resting against the wall. Her bicycle, which was a heavy, olden-days one, but painted gold, was gleaming against the back wall. Both the tyres were flat and weeds were growing through the spokes of the wheels. It was all looking very beautiful. He saw the watering can, and wondered if Lucy had watered the pots before she went.
A movement made him jump and look up. The fox had appeared on top of the back wall. Again their eyes met, and again he felt scared of her.
His heart banging, he cleared his throat. ‘Violet, are you following me this morning?’
He had tried to sound calm and amused, but his voice sounded thin and silly against the silence. ‘Fear is like a magnet,’ he heard Lucy say. ‘It can actually make bad things happen.’ He wondered if the Raggedy Man was still standing outside, waiting to give him the coin. He turned away from the fox, trying to stop his heart from thudding, and stared at the dip Lucy’s bottom had left in the corduroy cushion. He remembered the loops and the lines and the spatters, blue-black ink on the sunlit white page.
Brighter today.
That’s what she’d written, sitting on the corduroy cushion. He’d squeezed onto her lap, feeling her bosoms squishing against his back, and looked down at the shape of the words. Then a breeze had lifted the pages, and they had fluttered and batted against each other, all covered in her squiggly writing. And she’d reached forward with her dry, brown hand and flipped the book closed.
He checked the pots. They hadn’t been watered but under the surface the soil was still quite moist from all the rain the week before. In the biggest pot, which had honeysuckle growing out of it, and also delphiniums, there was something red and shiny sunk into the soil. A particular red. Definitely an object he’d seen before. A toy? One of his and Raff’s old cars? His fingers closed around it. Not a car. Not a toy, even. He pulled it out, and something caught in his throat, because it was a mobile phone, just like Lucy’s, a snap-shut Nokia. It probably was Lucy’s. But why would Lucy bury her phone in a flowerpot? His heart banging again, he wiped it on his boxers, but it left a dirty mark, so he shook it to get the rest of the dirt off it, and it came apart. The back of it and the battery plopped back into the soil. He retrieved them and carried the three parts of the phone back into the house. He laid them out on the table, and fetched a tea towel to wipe them properly clean, before clicking them back together.
It was her phone. It had to be. No one else had those Nokias any more. He pressed the ‘On’ button. There was a bleep, and the screen lit up. It was showing a very low battery, but it seemed to be working fine. After a few seconds there was another bleep, and a missed call popped upon the screen. DORA. So she had phoned, and maybe she had come round with the wine. The last time they’d been to the Martins’ must be the afternoon they’d taken Dylan round to mate with Elsie. Weeks ago. The phone bleeped again, and died. He weighed it in his hand, wondering where the charger might be, and remembering that chilly afternoon in the Martins’ garden, watching the rabbits.
The charger wasn’t in any of the wall sockets in the kitchen, and it wasn’t in the socket in the hall. In the hall he looked at Lucy’s clogs again. They were wooden clogs, very old, kind of chewed looking, but so comfortable, Lucy said. They were the only shoes she’d worn for weeks. He put his own feet into them, remembering seeing her red toenails through the water. His feet would be as big as hers soon. DORA. The word danced in his head. Maybe they would go round to the Martins’ after school. It would be nice to see the rabbits. And Saviour. He saw Saviour’s warm brown eyes, and heard his friendly, cockney voice. Fancy giving me a hand with the cooking?
He stepped out of the clogs and went upstairs. The charger wasn’t in the socket on the landing. Back in Lucy’s room, it was still quite dark and, instead of continuing his search, he found himself getting back into her bed, half expecting her to be there after all. She wasn’t. Where have you gone, silly Mayo? No, silly Lucy. He closed his eyes, and saw Dora, lying by the pool at the French holiday house, while Lucy, in just her bikini bottoms, walked up and down with her net. ‘Nice to get away from it all!’ Dora’s cheerful voice, her sunglasses, her long, thin body covered against the sun. ‘Nice to get away from it all!’ She’d kept saying it, all the way through the holiday, as if … As if what? He rolled onto his side, seeing Lucy’s net full of wet insects, her bosoms and her concentrating face as she tipped them out onto the paving stones; and got that weird feeling again, the one he got when she was reading the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò poem. That she was separate from him, different, a stranger; and it wasn’t just her grown-upness, or her femaleness, or her Africanness, which came and went with her mood. He pictured the three tiny pyramids on the kitchen table; and then the single, glinting disc on the Raggedy Man’s palm; the stepladder, the red umbrella, the scribble Violet’s paws made in the filth on the white van: and then he must have fallen asleep, because the next thing that happened was the ringing of the Tibetan bells.
The bells were a lovely sound. Jonah listened with his eyes closed, imagining the monks in their monastery in the misty mountains. Then Raff came running in, like a tornado.
‘There’s some guy swearing his head off in the street! You got to hear him, fam!’
Jonah opened his eyes and watched his little brother scamper around the bed, holding up his pyjama bottoms, which had lost their elastic. He realised he was still clutching the red phone, and put it down next to the lipsticky wine glass.
‘What’s that? Where’s Mayo? Why have you got her phone?’ One of Raff’s cornrows had started to come out. ‘Anyway, come on, you got to hurry. You seriously got to hear this!’
Jonah switched off the bells and followed his brother into their bedroom, where he was already leaning too far out of the window. ‘Be careful, Raff!’ He squashed in beside him, putting an arm around his waist. His skin felt very warm and dry.
‘Oh my days! It’s the bloomin’ Raggedy Man!’ Raff leaned even further, and Jonah tightened