THE TROUBLE WITH GOATS AND SHEEP
Joanna Cannon

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Joanna Cannon asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Copyright © Joanna Cannon 2016

Lyrics from ‘Bye Bye Baby’ © Bob Gaudio, Bob Crewe

Lyrics from ‘Knock Three Times’ © Irwin Levine, L. Russell Brown

Lyrics from ‘Crazy’ © Willie Nelson

Lyrics from ‘Save all your kisses for me’ © Tony Hiller, Lee Sheriden, Martin Lee

Map by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperColl‌insPublishers 2016

Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com 2016

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Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780008132187

Source ISBN: 9780008132170

Version: 2017-10-27

Dedication

For Arthur and Janice

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Number Four, The Avenue

St Anthony’s

Number Four, The Avenue

Number Six, The Avenue

Number Three, Rowan Tree Croft

Number Four, The Avenue

Number Six, The Avenue

Number Two, The Avenue

The Royal British Legion

Number Four, The Avenue

Number Eight, The Avenue

Number Two, The Avenue

Number Four, The Avenue

Number Twelve, The Avenue

Number Four, The Avenue

Number Ten, The Avenue

Number Four, The Avenue

Number Three, Rowan Tree Croft

Number Eleven, The Avenue

Number Twelve, The Avenue

Number Eleven, The Avenue

Number Twelve, The Avenue

Number Four, The Avenue

Number Six, The Avenue

Number Ten, The Avenue

Number Fourteen, The Avenue

Number Four, The Avenue

Number Four, The Avenue

The Drainpipe

Number Two, The Avenue

The Drainpipe

Number Eight, The Avenue

The Drainpipe

The Drainpipe

Number Four, The Avenue

Number Three, Rowan Tree Croft

The Drainpipe

Number Ten, The Avenue

Number Four, The Avenue

Number Four, The Avenue

The Drainpipe

Number Four, The Avenue

The Drainpipe

Number Four, The Avenue

Number Twelve, The Avenue

Number Three, Rowan Tree Croft

The Drainpipe

The Avenue

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading …

If you enjoyed this book, read on for an exclusive excerpt from Joanna Cannon’s new novel Three Things About Elsie

About the Author

About the Publisher

Number Four, The Avenue
21 June 1976

Mrs Creasy disappeared on a Monday.

I know it was a Monday, because it was the day the dustbin men came, and the avenue was filled with a smell of scraped plates.

‘What’s he up to?’ My father nodded at the lace in the kitchen window. Mr Creasy was wandering the pavement in his shirtsleeves. Every few minutes, he stopped wandering and stood quite still, peering around his Hillman Hunter and leaning into the air as though he were listening.

‘He’s lost his wife.’ I took another slice of toast, because everyone was distracted. ‘Although she’s probably just finally buggered off.’

‘Grace Elizabeth!’ My mother turned from the stove so quickly, flecks of porridge turned with her and escaped on to the floor.

‘I’m only quoting Mr Forbes,’ I said, ‘Margaret Creasy never came home last night. Perhaps she’s finally buggered off.’

We all watched Mr Creasy. He stared into people’s gardens, as though Mrs Creasy might be camping out in someone else’s herbaceous border.

My father lost interest and spoke into his newspaper. ‘Do you listen in on all our neighbours?’ he said.

‘Mr Forbes was in his garden, talking to his wife. My window was open. It was accidental listening, which is allowed.’ I spoke to my father, but addressed Harold Wilson and his pipe, who stared back at me from the front page.

‘He won’t find a woman wandering up and down the avenue,’ my father said, ‘although he might have more luck if he tried at number twelve.’

I watched my mother’s face argue with a smile. They assumed I didn’t understand the conversation, and it was much easier to let them think it. My mother said I was at an awkward age. I didn’t feel especially awkward, so I presumed she meant that it was awkward for them.

‘Perhaps she’s been abducted,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it’s not safe for me to go to school today.’

‘It’s perfectly safe,’ my mother said, ‘nothing will happen to you. I won’t allow it.’

‘How can someone just disappear?’ I watched Mr Creasy, who was marching up and down the pavement. He had heavy shoulders and stared at his shoes as he walked.

‘Sometimes people need their own space,’ my mother spoke to the stove, ‘they get confused.’

‘Margaret Creasy was confused all right.’ My father turned to the sports section and snapped at the pages until they were straight. ‘She asked far too many questions. You couldn’t get away for her rabbiting on.’

‘She was just interested in people, Derek. You can feel lonely, even if you’re married. And they had no children.’

My mother looked over at me as though she were considering whether the last bit made any difference at all, and then she spooned porridge into a large bowl that had purple hearts all around the rim.

‘Why are you talking about Mrs Creasy in the past tense?’ I said. ‘Is she dead?’

‘No, of course not.’ My mother put the bowl on the floor. ‘Remington,’ she shouted, ‘Mummy’s made your breakfast.’

Remington padded into the kitchen. He used to be a Labrador, but he’d become so fat, it was difficult to tell.

‘She’ll turn up,’ said my father.

He’d said the same thing about next door’s cat. It disappeared years ago, and no one has seen it since.

*

Tilly was waiting by the front gate, in a jumper which had been hand-washed and stretched to her knees. She’d taken the bobbles out of her hair, but it stayed in exactly the same position as if they were still there.

‘The lady from number eight has been murdered,’ I said.

We walked in silence down the avenue, until we reached the main road. We were side by side, although Tilly had to take more steps to keep up.

‘Who lives at number eight?’ she said, as we waited for the traffic.

‘Mrs Creasy.’

I whispered, in case Mr Creasy had extended his search.

‘I liked Mrs Creasy. She was teaching me to knit. We did like her, Grace, didn’t we?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘very much.’

We crossed the road opposite the alley next to Woolworth’s. It wasn’t yet nine o’clock, but the pavements were dusty hot, and I could feel material stick to the bones in my back. People drove their cars with the windows down, and fragments of music littered the street. When Tilly stopped to change her school bag to the other shoulder, I stared into the shop window. It was filled with stainless-steel pans.

‘Who murdered her?’ A hundred Tillys spoke to me from the display.

‘No one knows.’

‘Where were the police?’

I watched Tilly speak through the saucepans. ‘I expect they’ll be along later,’ I said, ‘they’re probably very busy.’

We climbed the cobbles in sandals which flapped on the stones and made us sound like an army of feet. In winter ice, we clung to the rail and to each other, but now the alley stretched before us, a riverbed of crisp packets and thirsty weeds, and floury soil which dirtied our toes.

‘Why are you wearing a jumper?’ I said.

Tilly always wore a jumper. Even in scorched heat, she would pull it over her fists and make gloves from the sleeves. Her face was magnolia, like the walls in our living room, and sweat had pulled slippery, brown curls on to her forehead.

‘My mother says I can’t afford to catch anything.’

‘When is she going to stop worrying?’ It made me angry, and I didn’t know why, which made me even angrier, and my sandals became very loud.

‘I doubt she ever will,’ said Tilly, ‘I think it’s because there’s only one of her. She has to do twice the worrying, to keep up with everyone else.’

‘It’s not going to happen again.’ I stopped and lifted the bag from her shoulder. ‘You can take your jumper off. It’s safe now.’

She stared at me. It was difficult to see Tilly’s thoughts. Her eyes hid behind thick, dark-rimmed glasses and the rest of her gave very little away.

‘Okay,’ she said, and took off her glasses. She pulled the jumper over her head, and when she appeared on the other side of the wool, her face was red and blotchy. She handed me the jumper, and I turned it the right way, like my mother did, and folded it over my arm.

‘See,’ I said, ‘it’s perfectly safe. Nothing will happen to you. I won’t allow it.’

The jumper smelt of linctus and unfamiliar soap. I carried it all the way to school, where we dissolved into a spill of other children.

*

I have known Tilly Albert for a fifth of my life.

She arrived two summers ago in the back of a large, white van, and they unloaded her along with a sideboard and three easy chairs. I watched from Mrs Morton’s kitchen, whilst I ate a cheese scone and listened to a weather forecast for the Norfolk Broads. We didn’t live on the Norfolk Broads, but Mrs Morton had been there on holiday, and she liked to keep in touch.

Mrs Morton was sitting with me.

Will you just sit with Grace while I have a little lie-down, my mother would say, although Mrs Morton didn’t sit very much at all, she dusted and baked and looked through windows instead. My mother spent most of 1974 having a little lie-down, and so I sat with Mrs Morton quite a lot.

I stared at the white van. ‘Who’s that then?’ I said, through a mouthful of scone.

Mrs Morton pressed on the lace curtain, which hung halfway down the window on a piece of wire. It dipped in the middle, exhausted from all the pressing. ‘That’ll be the new lot,’ she said.

‘Who are the new lot?’

‘I don’t know.’ She dipped the lace down a little further. ‘But I don’t see a man, do you?’

I peered over the lace. There were two men, but they wore overalls and were busy. The girl who had appeared from the back of the van continued to stand on the pavement. She was small and round and very pale, like a giant white pebble, and was buttoned into a raincoat right up to her neck, even though we hadn’t had rain for three weeks. She pulled a face, as though she were about to cry, and then leant forwards and was sick all over her shoes.

‘Disgusting,’ I said, and took another scone.

*

By four o’clock, she was next to me at the kitchen table.

I had fetched her over because she had sat on the wall outside her house, looking as though she’d been misplaced. Mrs Morton got the Dandelion and Burdock out, and a new packet of Penguins. I didn’t know then that Tilly didn’t like eating in front of people, and she held on to the bar of chocolate until it leaked between her fingers.

Mrs Morton spat on a tissue and wiped Tilly’s hands, even though there was a tap three feet away. Tilly bit her lip and looked out of the window.

‘Who are you looking for?’ I said.

‘My mother.’ Tilly turned back and stared at Mrs Morton, who was spitting again. ‘I just wanted to check she’s not watching.’

‘You’re not looking for your father?’ said Mrs Morton, who was nothing if not an opportunist.

‘I wouldn’t know where to look.’ Tilly wiped her hands very discreetly on her skirt. ‘I think he lives in Bristol.’

‘Bristol?’ Mrs Morton put the tissue back into her cardigan sleeve. ‘I have a cousin who lives in Bristol.’

‘Actually, I think it might be Bournemouth,’ said Tilly.

‘Oh,’ Mrs Morton frowned, ‘I don’t know anyone who lives there.’

‘No,’ Tilly said, ‘neither do I.’

*

We spent our summer holiday at Mrs Morton’s kitchen table. After a while, Tilly became comfortable enough to eat with us. She would spoon mashed potato into her mouth very slowly, and steal peas as we squeezed them from their shells, sitting over sheets of newspaper on the front-room carpet.

‘Don’t you want a Penguin or a Club?’ Mrs Morton was always trying to force chocolate on to us. She had a tin-full in the pantry and no children of her own. The pantry was cavernous and heaved with custard creams and fingers of fudge, and I often had wild fantasies in which I would find myself trapped in there overnight and be forced to gorge myself to death on Angel Delight.

‘No, thank you,’ Tilly said through a very small mouth, as if she were afraid that Mrs Morton might sneak something in there when no one was looking. ‘My mother said I shouldn’t eat chocolate.’

‘She must eat something,’ Mrs Morton said later, as we watched Tilly disappear behind her front door, ‘she’s like a little barrel.’

*

Mrs Creasy was still missing on Tuesday, and she was even more missing on Wednesday, when she’d arranged to sell raffle tickets for the British Legion. By Thursday, her name was being passed over garden fences and threaded along the queue at shop counters.

What about Margaret Creasy, then? someone would say. And it was like firing a starting pistol.

My father spent his time stored away in an office on the other side of the town, and always had to have the day explained to him when he got home. Yet each evening, my mother still asked my father if he had heard any news about Mrs Creasy, and each evening he would sigh from the bottom of his lungs, shake his head, and go and sit with a bottle of pale ale and Kenneth Kendall.

*

On Saturday morning, Tilly and I sat on the wall outside my house and swung our legs like pendulums against the bricks. We stared over at the Creasys’ house. The front door was ajar, and all the windows were open, as if to make it easier for Mrs Creasy to find her way back inside. Mr Creasy was in his garage, pulling boxes from towers of cardboard, and examining their contents one by one.

‘Do you think he murdered her?’ said Tilly.

‘I expect so,’ I said.

I paused for a moment, before I allowed the latest bulletin to be released. ‘She disappeared without taking any shoes.’

Tilly’s eyes bulged like a haddock. ‘How do you know that?’

‘The woman in the Post Office told my mother.’

‘Your mother doesn’t like the woman in the Post Office.’

‘She does now,’ I said.

Mr Creasy began on another box. With each one, he was becoming more chaotic, scattering the contents at his feet and whispering an uncertain dialogue to himself.

‘He doesn’t look like a murderer,’ said Tilly.

‘What does a murderer look like?’

‘They usually have moustaches,’ she said, ‘and are much fatter.’

The smell of hot tarmac pinched at my nose and I shifted my legs against the warmth of the bricks. There was nowhere to escape the heat. It was there every day when we awoke, persistent and unbroken, and hanging in the air like an unfinished argument. It leaked people’s days on to pavements and patios and, no longer able to contain ourselves within brick and cement, we melted into the outside, bringing our lives along with us. Meals, conversations, discussions were all woken and untethered and allowed outdoors. Even the avenue had changed. Giant fissures opened on yellowed lawns and paths felt soft and unsteady. Things which had been solid and reliable were now pliant and uncertain. Nothing felt sure any more. The bonds which held things together were destroyed by the temperature – this is what my father said – but it felt more sinister than that. It felt as though the whole avenue was shifting and stretching, and trying to escape itself.

A fat housefly danced a figure of eight around Tilly’s face. ‘My mum says Mrs Creasy disappeared because of the heat.’ She brushed the fly away with the back of her hand. ‘My mum says the heat makes people do strange things.’

I watched Mr Creasy. He had run out of boxes and was crouched on the floor of his garage, still and silent, and surrounded by debris from the past.

‘I think it probably does,’ I said.

‘My mum says it needs to rain.’

‘I think she’s probably right.’

I looked at the sky, which sat like an ocean above our heads. It wouldn’t rain for another fifty-six days.

St Anthony’s
27 June 1976

On Sunday, we went to church and asked God to find Mrs Creasy.

My parents didn’t ask, because they were having a lie-in, but Mrs Morton and I sat near the front so God could hear us better.

‘Do you think it will work?’ I whispered to her, as we knelt on the slippery cushions.

‘Well, it won’t do any harm,’ she said.

I didn’t understand much of what the vicar was talking about, but he smiled at me from time to time, and I tried to look sinless and interested. The church smelt of wax and old paper, and gave us shelter from a fat sun. The wooden ribs in the roof arched over the congregation, soaking heat and sweat into cool, dry stone, and I shivered under a cotton dress. We had divided ourselves out in the pews, to make it look full, but I edged towards Mrs Morton and the warmth of her cardigan. She held out her hand and I took it, even though I was too old.

The vicar’s words rumbled on the stone like distant thunder.

‘I will be found by you,’ declared the Lord, ‘and I will bring you back from captivity.’

I watched a bead of sweat make a path down Mrs Morton’s temple. It was easy to drift off in church if you angled yourself properly.

‘I will pursue them with the sword, famine and plague. For they have not listened to my words.’

That caught my attention.

‘Those who love me, I will deliver; I will protect those who know my name and when they call to me, I will answer them.’

I stared at the thick, gold cross on the altar. It reflected every one of us: the pious and the ungodly; the opportunist and the devout. Each of us had our reasons for being there, quiet and expectant, and secreted between the pages of a hymn book. How would God manage to answer us all?

‘Lamb of God,’ said the vicar, ‘who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.’

And I wondered if we were asking God to find Mrs Creasy, or just asking Him to forgive her for disappearing in the first place.

*

We walked outside into buttery sunshine. It had spread itself over the graves, bleaching the stones and picking out the names of the dead. I watched it creep up the walls of the church until it reached the stained-glass windows, where it threw splinters of scarlet and purple into a cloudless sky. Mrs Morton and her hand had been absorbed by a clutch of efficient women in hats, and so I wandered around the churchyard in careful, horizontal lines, in case anyone was to be accidentally stepped upon.

I liked the feel of the ground beneath my shoes. It seemed safe and experienced, as though all the bones that were buried there had made wisdom grow in the soil. I walked past Ernests and Mauds and Mabels, now beloved and remembered only by the dandelions which grew across their names, until a neat gravel path brought me to the chancel. The graves here were so old, lichen had eaten into who they used to be, and rows of forgotten people stared back at me from headstones that stooped and stumbled like drunks in the earth.

I sat on newly mown grass, behind a grave which was patterned with whorls of green and white. I knew the women in hats were inclined to be time-consuming and I began to make a daisy chain. I had arrived at my fifth daisy when the chancel door opened and the vicar appeared. The breeze caught the edge of his surplice, and he billowed like sheets on a washing line. I watched him march across the graveyard to retrieve an empty crisp packet, and when he returned to the doorway, he took off his shoe and banged it on the church door to get rid of the grass cuttings.

I didn’t realize something like that would be allowed.

‘Why do people disappear?’ I said to him, from behind the gravestone. He didn’t stop banging, but slowed down and looked over his shoulder.

I realized he couldn’t see me. I stood up.

‘Why do people disappear?’ I said again.

The vicar replaced his shoe and walked over to me. He was taller than he had been in church and very earnest. The lines on his forehead were carved and heavy, as though his face had spent its entire time trying to sort out a really big problem. He didn’t look at me, but stared out over the gravestones instead.

‘Many reasons,’ he said eventually.

It was a rubbish answer. I’d found that answer all by myself and I didn’t even have God to ask.

‘Such as?’

‘They wander from the path. They drift off-course.’ He looked at me and I squinted up at him through the sunshine. ‘They become lost.’

I thought about the Ernests and the Mauds and the Mabels. ‘Or they die,’ I said.

He frowned and repeated my words. ‘Or they die,’ he said.

The vicar smelt exactly the same as the church. Faith had been trapped within the folds of his clothes, and my lungs were filled with the scent of tapestry and candles.

‘How do you stop people from disappearing?’ I said.

‘You help them to find God.’ He shifted his weight and gravel crunched around his shoes. ‘If God exists in a community, no one will be lost.’

I thought about our estate. The unwashed children who spilled from houses and the drunken arguments that tumbled through windows. I couldn’t imagine God spent very much time there at all.

‘How do you find God?’ I said, ‘where is He?’

‘He’s everywhere. Everywhere.’ He waved his arms around to show me. ‘You just have to look.’

‘And if we find God, everyone will be safe?’ I said.

‘Of course.’

‘Even Mrs Creasy?’

‘Naturally.’

A crow unfolded itself from the roof of the church, and a murderous cry filled the silence.

‘I don’t know how God can do that,’ I said. ‘How can He keep us from disappearing?’

‘You know that the Lord is our shepherd, Grace. We are just sheep. Only sheep. If we wander off the path, we need God to find us and bring us home.’

I looked down at my feet whilst I thought about it. Grass had buried itself in the weave of my socks and dug sharp, red lines into my flesh.

‘Why do people have to die?’ I said, but when I looked up, the vicar was back at the chancel door.

‘Are you coming for tea at the church hall?’ he shouted.

I didn’t really want to. I would rather have gone back to Tilly. Her mother didn’t believe in organized religion and was worried we’d all be brainwashed by the vicar, but I had to agree, or it would have been a bit like turning down Jesus.

‘Okay,’ I said, and picked the blades of grass from my knees.

*

I walked behind Mrs Morton, along the lane between the church and the hall. The verge was thick with summer: stitchwort and buttercups, and towering foxgloves which blew clouds of pollen from rich, purple bells. The breeze had dropped, leaving us in a razor of heat which cut into the skin at the tops of my arms and made speaking too much of an effort. We trudged in a single line; silent pilgrims drawn towards a shrine of tea and digestives, all strapped into Sunday clothes and decorated with sweat.

When we reached the car park, Tilly was sitting on the wall. She was basted in sun cream and wore a sou’wester.

‘It was the only hat I could find,’ she said.

‘I thought your mother didn’t want you to be religious?’ I held out my hand.

‘She’s gone to stack shelves in the Co-op,’ Tilly said, and heaved herself down from the bricks.

The church hall was a low, white building, which squatted at the end of the lane and looked as though it had been put there whilst someone made their mind up about what to do with it. Inside, it rattled with teacups and efficiency. Sunday heels clicked on a parquet floor and giant, stainless-steel urns spat and hissed to us from the corner.

‘I’m going to have Bovril,’ said Tilly.

I studied Mrs Morton, as she ordered our drinks on the other side of the room. Early widowhood had forced her to weave a life from other people’s remnants, and she had baked and minded and knitted herself into a glow of indispensability. I wondered who Mrs Morton would be if she still had a husband – if Mr Morton hadn’t been searching for The New Seekers in the footwell of his car and driven himself head-first into the central reservation of the M4. There had been a female passenger (people whispered), who appeared at the funeral in ankle-length black and crimson lipstick, and who sobbed with such violence she had to be escorted from the church by an anxious sexton. I remembered none of this. I was too young. I had only ever known Mrs Morton as she was now; tweeded and scrubbed, and rattling like a pebble in a life made for two.

‘Bovril.’ Mrs Morton handed a cup to Tilly. We all knew she wouldn’t drink it, but we kept up the pretence, even Tilly, who held it to her face until steam crept over her glasses.

‘Do you believe in God, Mrs Morton?’ I looked up at her.

Tilly and I both waited.

She didn’t reply immediately, but her eyes searched for an answer in the beams of the ceiling. ‘I believe in not asking people daft questions on a Sunday morning,’ she said eventually, and went to find the toilet.

The hall filled with people. It was far more crowded than the church had been, and pairs of jeans mixed with Sunday best. It appeared that Jesus pulled a much bigger crowd if He provided garibaldis. There were people from our avenue – the Forbeses and the man who was always mowing his lawn, and the woman from the corner house, who was surrounded by a clutter of children. They clung to her hips and her legs, and I watched as she slipped biscuits into her pocket. Everyone stood with newspapers in their armpits and sunglasses on their foreheads and, in the corner, someone’s Pomeranian was having an argument with a Border Collie. People were talking about the water shortage and James Callaghan, and whether Mrs Creasy had turned up yet. She hadn’t.

No one mentioned Jesus.

In fact, I didn’t think anyone would have noticed if Jesus had walked into the room, unless He happened to be accompanied by an Arctic roll.

*

‘Do you believe in God?’ I asked Tilly.

We sat in a corner of the hall, on blue plastic chairs which pulled the sweat from our skin, Tilly sniffing her Bovril and me drawing my knees to my chest, like a shield. I could see Mrs Morton in the distance, trapped by a trestle table and two large women in flowered aprons.

‘Probably,’ she said. ‘I think God saved me when I was in hospital.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘My mum asked Him to every day.’ She frowned into her cup. ‘She went off Him after I got better.’

‘You’ve never told me. You always said you were too young to remember.’

‘I remember that,’ she said, ‘and I remember it was Christmas and the nurses wore tinsel in their hair. I don’t remember anything else.’

She didn’t. I had asked – many times. It was better for children if they didn’t know all the facts, she’d said, and the words always left her mouth in italics.

When she first told me, it was thrown into the conversation with complete indifference, like a playing card. I had never met anyone who had nearly died, and in the beginning the subject was attacked with violent curiosity. Then it became more than fascination. I needed to know everything, so that all the details might be stitched together for protection. As if hearing the truth would somehow save us from it. If I had almost died, I would have an entire speech to use at a moment’s notice, but Tilly only remembered the tinsel and something being wrong with her blood. It wasn’t enough – even when I connected all the words together, like a prayer.

After she told me, I had joined her mother in a silent conspiracy of watchfulness. Tilly was watched as we ran under a seamless August sky; a breathless look over my shoulder, waiting for her legs to catch up with mine. She was protected from a baked summer by my father’s golfing umbrella, a life lived far from the edges of kerbs and the cracks in pavements, and when September carried in mist and rain, she was placed so close to the gas fire, her legs became tartanned in red.

I watched her without end, inspecting her life for the slightest vibration of change, and yet she knew none of this. My worries were noiseless; a silent obsession that the only friend I had ever made would be taken from me, just because I hadn’t concentrated hard enough.

*

The noise in the hall drifted into a slur of voices. It was a machine, ticking over in the heat, fuelled by rumour and judgement, and we stared into an engine of cooked flesh and other people’s feet. Mr Forbes stood in front of us, sailing a cherry Bakewell through the air and giving out his opinion, as warmth crept into the material of his shirt.

‘He woke up on Monday morning and she’d gone. Vanished.’

‘Beggars belief,’ said Eric Lamb, who still had grass cuttings on the bottom of his trousers.

‘Live for the moment, that’s what I say.’ I watched Mr Forbes sail another cherry Bakewell around, as if to demonstrate his point.

Mrs Forbes didn’t speak. Instead, she shuffled her sandals on the herringbone floor, and twisted a teacup around in its saucer. Her face had worried itself into a pinch.

Mr Forbes studied her, as he disappeared his cherry Bakewell. ‘Stop whittling about it, Dorothy. It’s got nothing to do with that.’

‘It’s got everything to do with that,’ she said, ‘I just know it.’

Mr Forbes shook his head. ‘Tell her, Eric,’ he said, ‘she won’t listen to me.’

‘That’s all in the past. This will be about something else. A bit of a tiff, that’s what it’ll be,’ said Eric Lamb. I thought his voice was softer, and edged with comfort, but Mrs Forbes continued to shuffle, and she trapped her thoughts behind a frown.

‘Or the heat,’ said Mr Forbes, patting his belly to ensure the cherry Bakewells had safely arrived at their destination. ‘People do strange things in this kind of weather.’

‘That’s it,’ said Eric Lamb, ‘it’ll be the heat.’

Mrs Forbes looked up from her twisting teacup. Her smile was very thin. ‘We’re a bit buggered if it isn’t, though, aren’t we?’ she said.

The three stood in silence. I saw a stare pass between them, and Mr Forbes dragged the crumbs from his mouth with the back of a hand. Eric Lamb didn’t speak. When the stare reached his eyes, he looked at the floor to avoid taking it.

After a while, Mrs Forbes said, ‘this tea needs more milk,’ and she disappeared into a wall of sunburned flesh.

I tapped Tilly on the arm, and a spill of Bovril escaped on to blue plastic.

‘Did you hear that?’ I said. ‘Mrs Forbes said they’re all buggered.’

‘That’s not very church hall-ey, is it?’ said Tilly, who still wore her sou’wester. She wiped the Bovril with the edge of her jumper. ‘Mrs Forbes has been a little unusual lately.’

This was true. Only the day before, I’d seen her wandering around the front garden in a nightdress, having a long conversation with the flower beds.

It’s the heat, Mr Forbes had said, as he took her back inside with a cup of tea and the Radio Times.

‘Why do people blame everything on the heat?’ said Tilly.

‘It’s easier,’ I said.

‘Easier than what?’

‘Easier than telling everyone the real reasons.’

*

The vicar appeared.

We knew he had arrived even before we saw him, because all around the room, conversations began to cough and falter. He cut through the crowd, leaving it to re-form behind him, like the surface of the Red Sea. He appeared to glide beneath his cassock, and there was an air of stillness about him, which made everyone he approached seem overactive and slightly hysterical. People stood a little straighter as they shook his hand, and I saw Mrs Forbes do what appeared to be a small curtsy.

‘What did he say in church then?’ said Tilly, as we watched him edge around the room.

‘He said that God runs after people with knives if they don’t listen to Him properly.’

Tilly sniffed her Bovril again. ‘I never knew He did that,’ she said eventually.

Sometimes I struggled to take my gaze from her. She was almost transparent, as fragile as glass. ‘He said that if we find God, He’ll keep us all safe.’

Tilly looked up. There was a streak of sun cream on the very tip of her nose. ‘Do you think someone else is going to disappear, Gracie?’

I thought about the gravestones and Mrs Creasy, and the fractured, yellow lawns.

‘Do we need God to keep us safe? Are we not safe just as we are?’ she said.

‘I’m not sure that I know any more.’

I watched her, and threaded my worries like beads.

*

The vicar completed his circuit of the room and disappeared, as if he were a magician’s assistant, behind a curtain next to the stage. The engine of conversation started again, small at first, and uncertain, then powering up to its previous level, as the air filled with hosepipe bans and stories of vanishing neighbours.

It probably would have stayed that way. It probably would have run its course, and continued until people wandered home to fill themselves with Brussels sprouts, had Mr Creasy not burst through the double doors and marched the length of the hall past a startled audience. Silence followed him around the room, leaving only the click of a cup on a saucer, and the sound of elbows nudging each other.

He stopped in front of Mr Forbes and Eric Lamb, his face stretched with anger. Tilly said afterwards that she thought he was going to hit someone, but to me he looked as though all the hitting had been frightened out of him.

The words stayed in his eyes for a few seconds, then he said, ‘You told her, didn’t you?’

It was a whisper that wanted to be a shout, and it left his mouth wrapped in spit and fury.

Mr Forbes turned from their audience, and guided Mr Creasy towards a wall. I heard him say Christ and calm down and for heaven’s sake, and then I heard him say, ‘We haven’t told her anything.’

‘Why else would she up and leave?’ said Mr Creasy. The rage seemed to immobilize him, and he became a furious effigy, fixed and motionless, except for the flush which crept from beneath his shirt and into his neck.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Forbes, ‘but if she’s found out, it’s not come from us.’

‘We’re not that stupid,’ said Eric Lamb. He looked over his shoulder at a sea of teacups and curiosity. ‘Let’s get you out of here, let’s get you a drink.’

‘I don’t want a bloody drink.’ Mr Creasy hissed at them, like a snake. ‘I want my wife back.’

He had no choice. They escorted him out of the hall, like prison guards.

I watched Mrs Forbes.

She stared at the door long after it had closed behind them.

Number Four, The Avenue
27 June 1976

The roads on our estate were all named after trees, and Tilly and I walked home from the church hall along an alley which separated Sycamore from Cedar. On either side of us, lines of washing stretched like bunting across deserted gardens, waiting for the whisper of a breeze, and as we walked, drips of water smacked a tune on to concrete paths.

No one realized then that, in many years to come, people would still speak of this summer; that every other heatwave would be compared to this one, and those who lived through it would shake their heads and smile whenever anyone complained of the temperature. It was a summer of deliverance. A summer of Space Hoppers and dancing queens, when Dolly Parton begged Jolene not to take her man, and we all stared at the surface of Mars and felt small. We had to share bathwater and half-fill the kettle, and we were only allowed to flush the toilet after what Mrs Morton described as a special occasion. The only problem was, it meant that everyone knew when you’d had a special occasion, which was a bit awkward. Mrs Morton said we’d end up with buckets and standpipes if we weren’t careful, and she was part of a vigilante group, who reported anyone for watering their gardens in the dark (Mrs Morton used washing-up water, which was allowed). It will only work if we all pull together, she said. I knew this wasn’t true, mind you, because, unlike the brittle yellow of everyone else’s, Mr Forbes’ lawn remained a strangely suspicious shade of green.

*

I could hear Tilly’s voice behind me. It drummed on the parched, wooden slats of the fences either side, which were beaten into white by the heat.

What do you think? she was saying.

She had been turning Mr Creasy’s words over since Pine Crescent, trying to fit them into an opinion.

‘I think Mr and Mrs Forbes are in on it,’ I shouted back.

She caught up with me, her legs fighting with the sentence. ‘Do you think they were the ones who murdered her?’

‘I think they all murdered her together.’

‘I’m not sure they look the type,’ she said. ‘My mum thinks the Forbeses are old-fashioned.’

‘No, they’re very modern.’ I found a stick and drew it along the fence. ‘They have a SodaStream.’

Tilly’s mum thought everyone was old-fashioned. Tilly’s mum owned long earrings and drank Campari, and only ever wore cheesecloth. In cold weather, she just wore more cheesecloth, layering it around herself like a shroud.

‘My mum says Mr and Mrs Forbes are curious people.’

‘Well, she’d know,’ I said.

Back doors were propped open in the heat, and the smell of batter and roasting tins escaped from other people’s lives. Even in ninety degrees, Brussels sprouts still simmered on stoves, and gravy still dripped and pooled on heavy plates.

‘I hate Sundays,’ I said.

‘Why?’ Tilly found another stick and dragged it alongside mine.

Tilly didn’t hate anything.

‘It’s just the day before Monday,’ I said. ‘It’s always too empty.’

‘We break up soon. We’ll have six weeks of nothing but Sundays.’

‘I know.’ The stick hammered my boredom into the wood.

‘What shall we do with our holidays?’

We reached the end of the fence, and the alley became silent.

‘I haven’t quite decided yet,’ I said, and let the stick fall from my hand.

*

We walked on to Lime Crescent , our sandals sending loose chippings dancing along the road. I looked up, but sunlight shot back from cars and windows and punished my eyes. I squinted and tried again.

Tilly didn’t notice, but I saw them straight away. A tribe of girls, a uniform of Quatro flicks and lip gloss, with hands stuffed into pockets, making denim wings. They stood on the opposite corner, doing nothing except being older than me. I saw them weigh out our presence, as they measured the pavement with scuffed market boots and chewed gum. They were a bookmark, a page I had yet to read, and I wanted to stretch myself out to get there.

I knew them all. I had watched for so long from the margins of their lives, their faces were as familiar as my own. I looked over for a thread of acknowledgement, but there was none. Even when I willed it with my eyes. Even when I slowed my steps to almost nothing. Tilly walked ahead, and I grew the distance between us, as stares filled with opinion reflected back at me. I couldn’t find anything to do with my arms, and so I folded them around my waist and tried to make my sandals sound more rebellious.

Tilly waited for me around the corner.

‘What shall we do now?’ she said.

‘Dunno.’

‘Shall we go to your house?’

‘S’pose.’

‘Why are you talking like that?’

I unfolded my arms. ‘I don’t know.’

She smiled, and I smiled back, even though the smiling felt unquiet.

‘Here,’ I said, and took the sou’wester from her head and put it on my own.

Her laughter was instant, and she reached for it back. ‘Some people just can’t wear hats, Gracie,’ she said. ‘It should stay where it belongs.’

My arm linked through hers and we walked towards home. Past matched lawns and carbon-papered lives, and rows of terraced houses, which handcuffed families together through chance and coincidence.

And I tried to make it enough.

*

When we got home, my mother was peeling potatoes and talking to Jimmy Young. He sat on the shelf above her head, and she nodded and smiled at him as she filled the sink with soil.

‘You’ve been gone a while.’

I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to Jimmy.

‘We were at church,’ I said.

‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘Not really.’

‘That’s nice,’ she said, and fished another potato from the mud.

Tilly’s laughter hid inside her jumper.

‘Where’s Dad?’ I took two cheese triangles from the fridge and emptied a packet of Quavers on to a plate.

‘He’s gone to get a paper,’ said my mother, and she drowned the potatoes with a little more certainty. ‘He’ll be back soon.’

Pub, I mouthed at Tilly.

I unwrapped a triangle and Tilly took off her sou’wester, and we listened to Brotherhood of Man and watched my mother fashion potatoes.

Save all your kisses for me, said the radio, and Tilly and I did the dance with our arms.

‘Do you believe in God?’ I said to my mother, when the record had finished.

‘Now, do I believe in God?’ Her peeling slowed, and she stared at the ceiling.

I couldn’t understand why everyone looked towards the sky when I asked the question. As though they were expecting God to appear in the clouds and give them the right answer. If so, God let my mother down, and we were still waiting for her reply when my father appeared at the back door with no newspaper, and the British Legion still smeared in his eyes.

He draped himself around my mother, like a sheet. ‘How is my beautiful wife?’ he said.

‘There’s no time for that nonsense, Derek.’ She drowned another potato.

‘And my two favourite girls.’ He ruffled our hair, which was a bit of a mistake, as neither Tilly nor I had the kind of hair that could be ruffled very successfully. Mine was too blonde and opinionated, and Tilly’s refused to be separated from its bobbles.

‘Are you staying for some lunch, Tilly?’ my father said.

He leaned over to speak and ruffled her hair again. Whenever Tilly was there, he became a cartoon parent, a surrogate father. He swooped down to fill a gap in Tilly’s life that she never realized existed, until he highlighted it so exquisitely.

She started to answer, but he had his head in the fridge.

‘I saw Thin Brian in the Legion,’ he was saying to my mother. ‘Guess what he told me.’

My mother remained silent.

‘That old woman who lives at the end of Mulberry Drive, you know the one?’

My mother nodded into the peelings.

‘They found her dead last Monday.’

‘She was quite old, Derek.’

‘The point is,’ he said, unwrapping a cheese triangle of his own, ‘they reckon she’d been dead for a week and no one noticed.’

My mother looked over, and Tilly and I stared at the plate of Quavers in an effort to be unremembered.

‘They wouldn’t have discovered her even then,’ my father said, ‘if it hadn’t been for the sme—’

‘Why don’t you girls go outside?’ my mother said. ‘I’ll shout when your dinner’s ready.’

*

We sat on the patio, our backs pressed into the bricks to keep us in a ribbon of shade.

‘Fancy dying and no one misses you,’ Tilly said. ‘That’s not very Godly, is it?’

‘The vicar says God is everywhere,’ I said.

Tilly frowned at me.

‘Everywhere.’ I waved my arms around to show her.

‘So why wasn’t He on Mulberry Drive?’

I stared at the row of sunflowers on the far side of the garden. My mother had planted them last spring, and now they stretched above the wall and peered into the Forbes’ garden, like floral spies.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Perhaps He was somewhere else.’

‘I hope someone misses me when I die,’ she said.

‘You’re not going to die. Neither of us are. Not until we’re old. Not until people expect it of us. God will keep us safe until then.’

‘He didn’t keep Mrs Creasy safe, though, did he?’

I watched bumble bees drift between the sunflowers. They explored each one, dipping into the centre, searching and inspecting, until they reappeared in the daylight, dusted in yellow and drunk with achievement.

And it all became so obvious. ‘I know what we’re going to do with the summer holidays,’ I said, and got to my feet.

Tilly looked up. She squinted at me and shielded her eyes from the sun. ‘What?’

‘We’re going to make sure everyone is safe. We’re going to bring Mrs Creasy back.’

‘How are we going to do that?’

‘We’re going to look for God,’ I said.

‘We are?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we are. Right here on this avenue. And I’m not giving up until we find Him.’

I held out my hand. She took it and I pulled her up next to me.

‘Okay, Gracie,’ she said.

And she put her sou’wester back on and smiled.

Number Six, The Avenue
27 June 1976

It was Are You Being Served? on a Monday, The Good Life on a Tuesday, and The Generation Game on a Saturday. Although for the life of her, Dorothy couldn’t see what people found funny about Bruce Forsyth.

She tried to remember them, like a test, as she did the washing-up. It took her mind off the church hall, and the look on John Creasy’s face, and the spidery feeling in her chest.

Monday, Tuesday, Saturday. She usually liked washing up. She liked to watch the garden and idle her mind, but today the weight of the heat pressed against the glass and made her feel as though she were looking out from a giant oven.

Monday, Tuesday, Saturday.

She could still remember, although she wasn’t taking any chances. They were all circled in the Radio Times.

Harold became very irritable if she asked him something more than once.

Try to keep it in your head, Dorothy, he told her.

When Harold became angry, he could fill a room with his own annoyance. He could fill their sitting room, and the doctor’s surgery. He could even fill an entire supermarket.

She tried very hard to keep things in her head.

Sometimes, though, the words escaped her. They hid behind other words, or they showed a little of themselves, and then disappeared back into her mind before she had a chance to catch them.

I can’t find my … she would say, and Harold would throw choices at her like bullets. Keys? Gloves? Purse? Glasses? and it would make the word she wanted disappear even more.

Cuddly toy, she said one day, to make him laugh.

But Harold didn’t laugh. Instead, he stared at her as though she had walked into the conversation uninvited, and then he had closed the back door very quietly and started mowing the lawn. And somehow the quietness filled a room even more than the anger.

She folded the tea towel and put it on the edge of the draining board.

Harold had been quiet since they’d got back from church. He and Eric had deposited John Creasy somewhere, although Lord knows where, she hadn’t even dared ask, and he had sat down and read his newspaper in silence. He had eaten his dinner in silence, and dropped gravy down his shirt front in silence, and when she asked him if he wanted mandarin segments with Ideal milk for afterwards, he had only nodded at her.

When she put it down in front of him, he said the only sentence to come out of his mouth all afternoon. These are peaches, Dorothy.

It was happening all over again. It ran in families, she’d read it somewhere. Her mother ended up the same way, kept being found wandering the streets at six in the morning (postman, nightdress) and putting everything where it didn’t belong (slippers, breadbin). Mad as a box of frogs, Harold had called her. She was around Dorothy’s age when she first started to lose her mind, although Dorothy always thought losing your mind was such a strange phrase. As if your mind could be misplaced, like a set of house keys, or a Jack Russell terrier, as if it was more than likely your own fault for being so bloody careless.

They’d put her mother in a home within weeks. It was all very quick.

It’s for the best, Harold had said.

He’d said it each time they went to visit.

After he’d eaten his peaches, Harold had settled himself on the settee and fallen asleep, although how anyone could sleep in this heat was beyond her. He was still there now, his stomach rising and falling as he shifted in between dreams, his snoring keeping time with the kitchen clock, and plotting out the afternoon for them both.

Dorothy took the remains of their silent meal and emptied it into the pedal bin. The only problem with losing your mind was that you never lost the memories you wanted to lose. The memories you really needed left first. Her foot rested on the pedal, and she looked into the waste. No matter how many lists you wrote, and how many circles you made in the Radio Times, and no matter how much you practised the words over and over again, and tried to fool people, the only memories that didn’t leave were the ones you wish you’d never made in the first place.

She reached into the rubbish and lifted a tin out of the potato peelings. She stared at it.

‘These are peaches, Dorothy,’ she said to an empty kitchen. ‘Peaches.’

She felt the tears before she even knew they had happened.

*

‘The problem, Dorothy, is that you think too much.’ Harold’s gaze never left the television screen. ‘It’s not healthy.’

Evening had tempered the sun, and a wash of gold folded across the living room. It drew the sideboard into a rich, dark brandy and buried itself in the pleats of the curtains.

Dorothy picked imaginary fluff from the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘It’s difficult not to think about it, Harold, under the circumstances.’

‘This is completely different. She’s a grown woman. Her and John have probably just had some kind of tiff and she’s cleared off for a bit to teach him a lesson.’

She looked over at her husband. The light from the window gave his face a faint blush of marzipan. ‘I only hope you’re right,’ she said.

‘Of course I’m right.’ His stare was still fastened to the television screen, and she watched his eyes flicker as the images changed.

It was Sale of the Century. She should have known better than to speak to Harold whilst he was occupied with Nicholas Parsons. It might have been best to try and fit the conversation into an advert break, but there were too many words and she couldn’t stop them climbing into her mouth.

‘The only thing is, I saw her. A few days before she disappeared.’ Dorothy cleared her throat, even though there was nothing to clear. ‘She was going into number eleven.’

Harold looked at her for the first time. ‘You never told me.’

‘You never asked,’ she said.

‘What was she doing going in there?’ He turned towards her, and his glasses fell from the arm of his chair. ‘What could they possibly have to say to each other?’

‘I have no idea, but it can’t be a coincidence, can it? She speaks to him, and then a few days later, she vanishes. He must have said something.’

Harold stared at the floor, and she waited for his fear to catch up with hers. In the corner, the television churned the laughter of strangers out into their living room.

‘What I don’t understand’, he said, ‘is how he could stay on the avenue, after everything that happened. He should have moved on.’

‘You can’t dictate to people where they live, Harold.’

‘He doesn’t belong here.’

‘He’s lived at number eleven all his life.’

‘But after what he did?’

‘He didn’t do anything.’ Dorothy looked at the screen to avoid Harold’s eyes. ‘They said so.’

‘I know what they said.’

She could hear him breathing. The wheeze of warm air moving through tired lungs. She waited. But he turned to the television and straightened his spine.

‘You’re just being hysterical, Dorothy. All that’s over and done with. It was ten years ago.’

‘Nine, actually,’ she said.

‘Nine, ten, what does it matter? It’s all in the past, except every time you start talking about it, it stops being in the past and starts being in the present again.’

She gathered the material of her skirt into folds and let them fall between her hands.

‘Would you stop fidgeting, woman.’

‘I can’t help myself,’ she said.

‘Well, go and do something productive. Go and have a bath.’

‘I had a bath this morning.’

‘Well, go and have another one,’ he said, ‘you’re putting me off the questions.’

‘What about saving water, Harold?’

But Harold didn’t reply. Instead of replying, he picked at his teeth. Dorothy could hear him. Even over Nicholas Parsons.

She smoothed down her hair and her skirt. She took a deep breath to suffocate her words, and then she stood up and walked from the room. Before she closed the door, she looked back.

He had turned away from the television, and was staring through the window – past the lace of the curtains, across the gardens and the pavements, to the front door of number eleven.

His glasses still lay at his feet.

*

Dorothy knew exactly where she’d hidden the tin.

Harold never went into the back bedroom. It was a holding place. A waiting room for all the things she no longer needed but couldn’t bear to lose. He said the thought of it gave him a headache. As the years turned, the room had grown. Now the past pushed into corners and reached to the ceiling. It stretched along the windowsill and touched the skirting boards, and it allowed Dorothy to hold it in her hands. Sometimes, remembering wasn’t enough. Sometimes, she needed to carry the past with her to be sure she was a part of it.

The room trapped summer within its walls. It held Dorothy in an airless museum of dust and paper, and she felt the sweat bleed into her hairline. The sound of the television crept through the floorboards, and she could picture Harold beneath her feet, answering questions and picking at his teeth.

The tin sat between a pile of blankets her mother had crocheted and some crockery left over from the caravan. She could see it from the doorway, as though it had waited for her, and she kneeled on the carpet and pulled it free. Around the edge were photographs of biscuits to tempt you inside, pink wafers and party rings and Jammie Dodgers, all joining cartoon hands and dancing with cartoon legs, and she held on to them as she lifted the lid away.

The first thing she saw was a raffle ticket from 1967 and a collection of safety pins. There were Harold’s tarnished cufflinks and a few escaped buttons, and the cutting about her mother’s funeral from the local paper.

Passed away peacefully, it said.

She hadn’t.

But beneath the pins and the grips and the buttons was what she had come for. Kodak envelopes, fattened with time. Harold didn’t believe in photographs. Mawkish, he called them. Dorothy didn’t know anyone else who used the word ‘mawkish’. There were very few pictures of Harold. There was an occasional elbow at a dinner table, or trouser leg on a lawn, and if anyone had managed to capture his face in the frame, he wore the expression of someone who had been the victim of trickery.

She searched through the packets. Most of the photographs were rescued from her mother’s house. People she didn’t know, held within white, serrated edges, sitting in gardens she didn’t recognize and rooms she had never visited. There were Georges and Florries, and lots of people called Bill. They had written their names on the back, perhaps hoping that, if their identity were known, they would somehow be better remembered.

There were few photographs of her own – an infrequent Christmas gathering, a meal with the Ladies’ Circle. A photograph of Whiskey fell to the carpet, and she felt her throat fill.

He had never come home.

Just get another cat, Harold had said.

It was the closest she had ever come to losing her temper.

The photograph she wanted was at the bottom, a weight of memories pressed upon it. She had to see. She had to be sure. Perhaps, over the years, the past had become misshapen. Perhaps time had stretched their part in it, and bloated her conscience. Perhaps, if she could see the faces again, she would recognize their harmlessness.

They looked up at her from a table at the British Legion. It was before everything happened, but she was sure it was the same table – the table where the decision had been made. Harold sat next to her, and they both stared into the lens with troubled eyes. The photographer had caught them by surprise, she remembered that, someone from the town paper wanting pictures for an article on local colour. Of course, they never used it. John Creasy stood behind them, his hands pushed into his pockets, looking out from under a Beatles fringe. Sitting in front of John was that daft clown Thin Brian, with a pint glass in his hand, and Eric Lamb was opposite Harold. Sheila Dakin was on the end – all eyelashes and Babycham.

Dorothy looked at their faces, hoping to see something else.

There was nothing. They were exactly as she had left them.

It was 1967. The year Johnson sent thousands more to die in Vietnam. The year China made a hydrogen bomb, and Israel fought a six-day war. The year people marched and shouted, and waved banners about what they believed in.

It was a year of choices.

She wished she had known then that one day she would be staring back at herself, wishing that the choice they had made had been a different one. She turned the photograph over. There were no names. After all that had happened, she was certain none of them would care to be remembered.

‘Whatever are you doing?’

Harold’s footsteps weren’t usually so discreet. She turned away from him and tucked the photograph into her waistband.

‘I’m going over a few things.’

He leaned against the door frame. Dorothy wasn’t sure when it happened, but Harold had become old. The skin on his face had thinned to a lacquer, and his posture was bowed and curved, as though he were slowly returning to the womb.

‘So, why have you buried yourself in here, Dorothy?’

She looked straight into his eyes and saw his mind stumble.

‘I’m making …’ she said, ‘I’m making …’

‘Headway?’ Harold peered into the room. ‘A mess? A nuisance of yourself?’

‘A choice.’ Dorothy smiled up at him. ‘I’m making a choice.’

And she watched as he wiped sweat from his temple with the sleeve of his shirt.

*

When Harold went back downstairs, Dorothy walked on to the landing and looked at the photograph again. The smell came to her first, a smell that seemed to live on the avenue for weeks afterwards, held in a bite of December frost. Sometimes she thought she could still smell it now, even after all this time. She would be walking along the pavement, wandering around in her own thoughts, and it would creep up on her again. As if it had never really disappeared, as if it had been left there on purpose to remind them all. That night, she had stood where she was standing now, and she had watched it all unfold. She had replayed that scene to herself so many times, perhaps hoping something might change, that she would be able to let it go, but it was a night that had nailed itself to her memory. And she had known even then, even as she’d watched, that there would be no going back.

21 December 1967

Sirens hammer into the road, drawing the avenue from its sleep. Lights fizz and tick, and aquariums of people look out into the night. Dorothy watches from the landing. The banister digs into her bones as she leans forward, but this is the window with the best view, and she leans a little more. As she does, the bells of the siren stop and the fire engine empties men on to the street. She tries to listen, but the glass dulls their voices, and the only sound she hears is air moving through her throat, and the stamp of a pulse in her neck.

Ferns of ice grow at the corners of the windows, and she has to peer around them to see properly. There are hoses twisting across pavements, and rivers of light shining into the black. It feels unreal, theatrical, as though someone is staging a play in the middle of the avenue. Across the road, Eric Lamb opens his front door, pulling on a jacket, shouting back before he runs on to the street, and all around her, windows catch and push, spilling breath into the darkness.

She calls to Harold. She has to call several times, because his dreams are like cement. When he does appear, he has the frayed edges of someone who has been shocked into consciousness. He wants to know what’s going on, and he shouts the question at her, even though he is standing three feet away. She can see the skin of sleep in the corners of his eyes, and the journey of the pillow across his cheek.

She turns back to the window. More doors have opened, more people have appeared. Above the smell of the house, above the polished windowsills and the Fairy Liquid sink, she imagines she can sense the smoke, sliding in through the cracks and the splinters, and finding its way through the bricks.

She looks back at Harold.

‘I think something very bad has happened,’ she says.

*

They reach the garden. John Creasy calls across the avenue, but his voice is lost in the churn of the engine and the punch of boots on the concrete. Dorothy peers through the dark towards the bottom of the road. Sheila Dakin is standing on the lawn, feeding her hands into her face, the wind whipping at her dressing gown, smacking the material against her legs like a flag. Harold tells Dorothy to stay where she is, but it feels as though the fire has a magnetic field, and everyone is pulled closer, drawn along paths and pavements. The only one who is still is May Roper. She stands in her doorway, held there by the light and the noise and the smell. Brian catches her as he rushes past, but she barely seems to notice.

The firemen work like machinery, forming links of a chain which drags water from the earth. There is an arc of sound. An explosion. Harold is shouting to Dorothy to get back inside, but she moves a little closer instead. She watches Harold. He is too interested in what’s happening to notice, and she edges her way next to the wall. She just needs to see for a moment. To find out if it’s really happened.

She reaches the far end of the garden, when a fireman begins sweeping the air with his arms, forcing them back like puppets, and they collect in the middle of the avenue, knotted together against the frost.

The fireman is shouting questions. How many people live in the house?

They all answer at once, and their voices are smeared, taken by the wind.

The fireman scans their faces and points at Derek. ‘How many?’ he says again, his mouth shaping around the words.

‘One,’ he shouts, ‘just one.’ Derek looks back at his own house, and Dorothy follows his gaze. Sylvia stands at the window, Grace in her arms. Sylvia watches them, then turns away, holding the child’s head against her skin. ‘His mother lives in a nursing home, but he’s taken her away for Christmas,’ Derek says. ‘So it’s empty.’ The fireman is already running back and Derek’s words are wasted to the darkness.

A roll of smoke unfolds towards the sky. It loses itself against the black, whispering edges caught against a bank of stars before it feathers into nothing. Harold finds Eric’s eyes, and Eric shakes his head, a brief movement, almost nothing. Dorothy catches it, but looks away, back to the grip of the noise and the smoke.

None of them notice him, not to begin with. They are too captured by the flames, watching the darts of orange and red that fasten and catch in the windows. It’s Dorothy who sees him first. Her shock is soundless, static, but still it finds each of them. It stumbles around the group, until they all turn from number eleven and stare.

Walter Bishop.

The wind slips inside his coat and lifts the collar. It takes spirals of his hair and tries to cover his eyes. His lips are moving, but the words aren’t yet ready to leave. There is a carrier bag. It falls from his hand and a tin skittles across the pavement and into the gutter. Dorothy lifts it back and tries to return it to him.

‘Everyone thought you’d gone away with your mother,’ she says, but Walter doesn’t hear.

There are shouts from the house, carried across the avenue, and one fireman’s voice lifts above the rest.

There’s someone in there, it says. There’s someone in the house.

They all turn from the fire to look at Walter.

‘Who’s inside?’ It’s the question in everyone’s eyes, but it’s Harold who gives it a voice.

At first, Dorothy doesn’t think Walter has even heard the question. His gaze doesn’t move from the slurry of black smoke, which has begun to pour from the windows of his house. When he finally replies, his voice is so soft, so whispered, they all have to lean forward to listen.

‘Chicken soup,’ he says.

Harold frowns. Dorothy can see all the wrinkles of the future pinch together on his forehead.

‘Chicken soup?’ The wrinkles become even deeper.

‘Oh yes.’ Walter’s eyes don’t move from number eleven. ‘It works wonders for the flu. Terrible thing, isn’t it, the flu?’

They all nod, like ghostly marionettes in the darkness.

‘We’d only just got to the hotel when she took ill. I said to her, Mother, I said, when you’re under the weather, what you need is your own bed. And so we turned around and came home again.’

And all the marionette eyes stare at Walter’s first-floor window.

‘And she’s up there now?’ says Harold, ‘your mother?’

Walter nods. ‘I couldn’t take her back to the nursing home, could I? Not in that state. So I put her to bed and went to ring for the doctor.’ He looks at the tin Dorothy handed back to him. ‘I wanted to explain to him I was giving her the soup, as he advised. They put so many additives in these things now. You can’t be too careful, can you?’

‘No,’ says Dorothy, ‘you can’t be too careful.’

The smoke creeps across the avenue. Dorothy can taste it in her mouth. It blends with the fear and the frost, and she pulls her cardigan a little closer to her chest.

*

Harold walks into the kitchen through the back door. Dorothy knows he has something to tell her, because he never uses the back door unless it’s an emergency or he is wearing his wellington boots.

She looks up from her crossword and waits.

He moves around the work surfaces, lifting things up unnecessarily, opening cupboard doors, looking at the bottom of crockery, until he can’t hold on to the words any longer.

‘It’s awful in there,’ he says, as he replaces a mug on the mug tree. ‘Awful.’

‘You’ve been inside?’ Dorothy puts down her pen. ‘Are you allowed to go inside?’

‘The police and the fire service haven’t been there for days. No one said we couldn’t go inside.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘We didn’t go upstairs.’ He finds a packet of bourbons she had deliberately hidden behind the self-raising flour. ‘Eric didn’t think it was respectful, you know, under the circumstances.’

Dorothy doesn’t think it’s respectful rummaging around in the downstairs either, but it’s easier to say nothing. If you challenge Harold, he spends days justifying himself, like turning on a tap. She had wanted to go in there herself. She even got as far as the back door, but she’d changed her mind. It probably wouldn’t be wise, under the circumstances. Harold, however, had the self-discipline of a small toddler.

‘And the downstairs?’ she says.

‘That’s the strangest thing.’ He takes the top off a bourbon and makes a start on the buttercream. ‘The lounge and the hallway are a mess. Completely gone. But the kitchen is almost untouched. Just a few smoke marks on the walls.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Not a thing,’ he says. ‘Clock ticking away, tea towel folded on the draining board. Ruddy miracle.’

‘Not a miracle for his mother, God rest her soul.’ Dorothy reaches for the tissue in her sleeve, then thinks better of it. ‘Not a miracle they came back early.’

‘No.’ Harold looks at the next biscuit, but puts it back in the packet. ‘Although she wouldn’t have known a thing. The flu had made her delirious, apparently. Couldn’t even get out of bed. That’s why he’d gone to ring for the doctor.’

‘I don’t understand why he didn’t take her back to the nursing home.’

‘What? In the middle of the night?’

‘It might have saved her life.’

Dorothy looks past Harold and the curtains, and out on to the avenue. Since the fire, it had slipped into a quiet, battleship grey. Even leftover Christmas decorations couldn’t lift it. They seemed dishonest, somehow. As though they were trying too hard to jolly everyone along, to pull their eyes from the charred shell of number eleven.

‘Stop over-analysing things. You know too much thinking makes you confused,’ Harold says, watching her. ‘It was a discarded cigarette, or a spark from the fire. That’s what they’ve settled on.’

‘But after what was said? After what we all decided?’

‘A discarded cigarette.’ He took the biscuit and broke it in half. ‘A spark from the fire.’

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘Loose lips sink ships.’

‘For goodness sake, we’re not fighting a war, Harold.’

He turns and looks through the window. ‘Aren’t we?’ he says.

Number Three, Rowan Tree Croft
28 June 1976

‘Do you not think people might be a tad suspicious, two little girls knocking on their door and asking if God is at home?’ Mrs Morton put a bowl of Angel Delight on the table.

‘We’re going undercover.’ I carved my name in it with the edge of a spoon.

‘Are we?’ said Tilly. ‘How exciting.’

‘And how do you propose to do that?’ Mrs Morton leaned over and pushed the bowl a little nearer to Tilly.

‘We’ll be doing our Brownie badges,’ I said.

Tilly looked up and frowned. ‘We’re not in the Brownies, Gracie. You said it wasn’t our cup of tea.’

‘We’re going to be temporary Brownies,’ I said. ‘Ones who are more casual.’

She smiled and wrote ‘Tilly’ in very small letters at the edge of the bowl.

‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear any of that.’ Mrs Morton wiped her hands on her apron. ‘And why this sudden fascination with God?’

‘We are all sheep,’ I said. ‘And sheep need a shepherd to keep them safe. The vicar said so.’

‘Did he?’ Mrs Morton folded her arms.

‘So I want to make sure we’ve got one.’

‘I see.’ She leaned back against the draining board. ‘You do know that this is just the vicar’s opinion. Some people are able to manage quite successfully without a shepherd.’

‘But it’s important to listen to God.’ I sank my spoon into the bowl. ‘If you don’t take any notice of Him, He runs after you.’

‘With knives,’ said Tilly.

Mrs Morton frowned all the way up her forehead. ‘I expect the vicar told you that as well.’

‘He did,’ I said.

The clock on the wall ticked away the silence, and I watched Mrs Morton’s mouth trying to choose words.

‘I just don’t want you to be disappointed,’ she said eventually. ‘God isn’t always easy to spot.’

‘We’ll find Him, and when we do, everyone will be safe and Mrs Creasy will come home.’ I slid a spoonful of Angel Delight into my mouth.

‘We’ll be local heroes,’ said Tilly, and she smiled and licked the tip of her spoon.

‘I think it might take a little more than God to bring Mrs Creasy back.’ Mrs Morton leaned over and opened another window. I could hear an ice-cream van drift through the estate, drawing children from their gardens like a conjuror.

‘We’ve decided she probably isn’t dead after all,’ I said.

‘Well, that’s something.’

‘And now we need God to find her. You have to remember that God is everywhere, Mrs Morton.’ I waved my arms about. ‘So He can quite easily find people, and bring them back from captivity.’

‘Who said that?’ Mrs Morton took off her glasses and pinched at the marks they had left.

‘God,’ I replied, in a very shocked voice, and I made my eyes as wide as I could.

Mrs Morton started to speak, but then she sighed and shook her head, and decided to deal with the drying up instead.

‘Just don’t raise your hopes,’ she said.

‘It’s nearly Blue Peter.’ Tilly slid from her chair. ‘I’ll put the television on to warm up.’

She disappeared into the front room, and I unpeeled my legs from the seat and took my bowl to the sink.

‘Where are you going to begin?’ said Mrs Morton.

‘We’ll just work our way round until He pops up.’ I handed her the bowl.

‘I see.’

I had got as far as the hall when she called me back.

‘Grace.’

I stood in the doorway. The ice-cream van had travelled further away, and broken notes edged into the room.

‘When you go around the avenue,’ she said, ‘you’ll make sure that you miss out number eleven.’

I frowned. ‘Will I?’

‘You will,’ she said.

I started to speak, but her face didn’t suggest that it wanted to have a conversation.

‘Okay,’ I said.

There was a beat before my answer. But I don’t think Mrs Morton heard it.

Number Four, The Avenue
29 June 1976

The policeman was very tall, even after he took his hat off.

I had never seen a policeman close up before. He wore a thick uniform, which made him smell of material, and his buttons were so shiny I could see our whole kitchen reflected back at me as he spoke.

Routine inquiries, he said.

I thought I would like a job where inquiring about everyone else’s private business was considered perfectly routine.

I watched the cooker dance around on his chest.

There had been a knock on the door in the middle of Crossroads. My mother was all for ignoring it, until my father looked out of the window and saw a police car parked on the other side of our wall. He said Shit, and I laughed into a cushion and my mother told my father off, and my father nearly fell over Remington on his way into the hall.

Now the policeman stood in the middle of our kitchen, and we stood around the edges, watching him. He reminded me a bit of the vicar. They both seemed to be able to make people look small and guilty.

‘Well now, let me see, well,’ my father said. He wiped the sweat from his top lip with a tea towel and looked at my mother. ‘Can you remember when we last saw her, Sylve?’

My mother gathered the place mats up from the kitchen table. ‘I can’t say as I do,’ she said, and put them all back again.

‘It could have been Thursday,’ my father said.

‘Or Friday,’ my mother said.

My father cornered a glance at my mother. ‘Or Friday,’ he said into his tea towel.

If I had been the shiny policeman, I would have taken one look at their behaviour and arrested them on the spot for being master criminals.

‘Actually, it was Saturday morning.’

Three pairs of eyes and a tea towel turned towards me.

‘Was it now?’ The policeman crouched down and I heard the material creak around his knees.

It made him smaller than me, and I didn’t want him to feel awkward, so I sat down.

‘It was,’ I said.

His eyes were as dark as his uniform. I stared into them for a very long time, but he didn’t appear to blink.

‘And how do you know that?’ he said.

‘Because Tiswas was on.’

‘My kids love Tiswas.’

‘I hate it,’ I said.

My father coughed.

‘So what did she say when you saw her, Grace?’ the policeman creaked again and shifted his weight.

‘She knocked on the door because she wanted to borrow the telephone.’

‘They don’t have one,’ said my mother, in the kind of voice people use when they have something that someone else doesn’t.

‘And why did she want to do that?’

‘She said she wanted to ring for a taxi, but I didn’t let her in because my mother was having a lie-down.’

We all turned to my mother, who turned to her place mats.

‘I’ve been told to never let strangers into the house,’ I said.

‘But Mrs Creasy wasn’t a stranger, was she?’ The policeman finally blinked.

‘She wasn’t a stranger, but she looked strange.’

‘In what way?’

I leaned back in the chair and thought about it. ‘You know how people look when they have really bad toothache?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, a bit worse than that.’

The policeman stood up and put his hat back on. He filled the whole room.

‘Will you find her?’ I said.

The policeman didn’t answer. Instead, he went into the hall with my father and they spoke so quietly I couldn’t hear a word they said. Even when I held my breath and leaned all the way across the kitchen table.

‘I don’t think they will,’ I said.

My mother emptied the teapot. ‘No,’ she said, ‘neither do I.’

Then she filled the kettle very violently, because I don’t think she meant the words to come out.

*

I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter how many times people asked me.

Even when Mr Creasy burst into our sitting room and stood between my mother and Hilda Ogden, I still didn’t know. His face was so close to mine, I could taste his breath.

‘She didn’t tell me where she wanted to go, she only asked if she could borrow the telephone,’ I said.

‘She must have told you something?’ Mr Creasy’s words crawled across my skin and crept inside my nostrils.

‘She didn’t. She just wanted to ring for a taxi.’

His collar was frayed at the edges, and there was a stain on the front of his shirt. It looked like egg.

‘Grace, think. Please think,’ he said. He put his face even closer to mine, waiting to snatch the words as soon as they appeared.

‘Come on, old man.’ My father tried to edge between us. ‘She’s told you everything she knows.’

‘I just want her home, Derek. You should understand that, surely?’

I saw my mother start to get up, and then hold the arms of the chair to keep herself still.

‘Perhaps she was thinking of going back to where she used to live.’ My father put a hand on Mr Creasy’s shoulder. ‘Walsall, was it? Or Sutton Coldfield?’

‘Tamworth,’ said Mr Creasy. ‘She hasn’t been back for six years. Not since we got married. She doesn’t know anyone there now.’

His breath still fell into my face. It tasted uneasy.

*

‘Where’s Tamworth?’ Tilly dragged her school bag along the pavement.

It was the last day of term.

‘Miles away. In Scotland,’ I said.

‘I can’t believe you were interviewed by a real policeman and I wasn’t in on it. Was it like The Sweeney?’

Tilly’s mother had recently given in to a television set.

I thought about the smell of material, and how my words were recorded in a small, black notebook by the shiny policeman, who made notes very slowly with a pencil, and licked his lips as he wrote.

‘It was exactly like The Sweeney,’ I said.

We threaded through the estate. Around us, the temperature loosened and stirred. Milk was rushed from doorsteps, car doors were pulled wide, and people hurried dogs along pavements before the day was stolen away by the heat.

‘Is the policeman going to look for her?’ Tilly’s bag scraped the concrete and clouds of white dust held the air. ‘What did he say?’

‘He said that Mrs Creasy is officially a Missing Person.’

‘Missing from what?’

Thinking made my feet slower. ‘Her life, I suppose.’

‘How can you be missing from your own life?’

I slowed a little more. ‘Missing from the life you belong in.’

Tilly stopped to pull up her socks. ‘I wonder how you know which one that is.’ She spoke with an upside-down head.

I realized I had stopped moving, and I turned away from Tilly so I could frown.

‘You’ll understand when you get older,’ I said.

Tilly looked up from her socks. ‘Your birthday’s only a month before mine.’

‘Anyway, God knows exactly where you belong.’ I marched away from the questions. ‘So it doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks.’

‘Where do we start looking for Him?’ Tilly still pulled at her socks, trying to make them the same height.

‘Mr and Mrs Forbes.’ My hand followed the hedge as I walked. ‘When we’re singing hymns, they never have to look at the words.’

‘But we won’t find Mrs Creasy if she’s gone to Tamworth, even with God,’ Tilly shouted.

A cat began following us. It padded along the top of a fence, marking its journey with careful paws. I watched it stretch to the next wooden post and, for a moment, we had matching eyes. Then it jumped to the pavement, folded itself into the hedge and disappeared.

‘Was that next-door’s cat?’

But Tilly was too far away. I turned back and waited for her to catch up.

‘She hasn’t gone to Tamworth,’ I said. ‘She’s still here.’

Number Six, The Avenue
3 July 1976

‘Go on then.’ Tilly elbowed me with the edge of her jumper.

I stared at the doorbell. ‘I’m working up to it,’ I said.

Mr and Mrs Forbes’ house was the kind of house which looked as though no one was ever at home. All the other houses on the avenue seemed bewildered by the heat. Fingers of weeds crept along garden paths, windows were dimmed by a film of dust, and long evenings lay abandoned on lawns, as if everything had forgotten what it was supposed to be doing. The Forbeses’ house, however, remained smug and determined, as though it was setting an example to all the other, more slovenly, houses.

‘Perhaps no one is in,’ I said, ‘perhaps we should try tomorrow.’

I slid the toe of my sandal along the edge of the doorstep. It was brushed smooth.

‘They’re definitely at home.’ Tilly pressed her face against a slice of stained glass in the door. ‘I can hear a television.’

I put my face next to hers. ‘Perhaps they’re watching a film,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we should come back later.’

‘Do you not think we owe it to Mrs Creasy to ring the bell as soon as possible?’ Tilly turned to me and adopted her most serious face. ‘And to God?’

Sunlight reflected from the brilliant white of Mrs Forbes’ Cotswold chippings, and I creased my eyes against the glare.

‘As a Sixer, Tilly, I have decided to assign ringing the doorbell to you, while I prepare my speech.’

She looked up at me from under her sou’wester. ‘But we’re not actually in the Brownies, Gracie.’

I gave a small sigh. ‘It’s important to get into character,’ I said.

Tilly frowned and stared at the front door. ‘Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps no one is at home.’

‘Someone is very much at home.’

Mrs Forbes appeared on the path which ran down the side of house. She wore the kind of clothes my mother saved for doctor’s appointments, and under her arm was a large roll of dustbin bags. She snapped one free, and a small group of pigeons tumbled from the roof in shock.

She asked us what we wanted. Tilly stared into the chippings and I folded my arms and stood on one leg, and tried to take up a very small amount of room on the doorstep.

‘We’re Brownies,’ I said, as soon as I remembered.

‘We’re Brownie Guides. We’re here to lend a hand,’ said Tilly, although she managed to stop herself from singing.

‘You don’t look like Brownies.’ Mrs Forbes narrowed her eyes.

‘We’re being casual.’ I narrowed my eyes back.

I said that we needed help from our neighbourhood, and Mrs Forbes agreed that she was, indeed, our neighbourhood, and suggested we might like to come inside, out of the heat. Behind Mrs Forbes’ cardigan, Tilly waved her arms around in excitement, and I waved my arms around back again to try and calm her down.

We followed Mrs Forbes’ heels down the side of the house, as they clicked a neat path on the concrete, and our sandals smacked and squabbled behind her in a tangle of keeping up. After a moment, she turned, and as Tilly and I were both still waving our arms around, we almost fell into her.

‘Does your mother know you’re here, Grace?’ she said. She held her hands up, as though she were directing traffic.

‘We told her, Mrs Forbes,’ I said.

Her hands dropped back, and the tap of her heels began again.

I wondered if Mrs Forbes realized that telling my mother something and my mother knowing about it were usually two very different things, that my mother’s fingers would often fly to her throat and she would strongly deny ever being told anything of the sort – even when my father presented her with witnesses (me) and a word-by-word account of the entire conversation.

‘She never asked about my mum,’ Tilly whispered.

Tilly’s mother was usually considered too unpredictable to ask after.

I straightened the back of her jumper. ‘It’s all right. Asking about my mum will cover both of us. You are always welcome to borrow her.’

Tilly smiled and linked her arm through mine.

I sometimes wondered if there was ever a time when she wasn’t there.

*

Mrs Forbes’ carpet was the colour of cough syrup. It ran along the hall and into the sitting room, and when I looked back, I saw it climb all the way up the stairs. There were still lines where the vacuum cleaner had sailed across, and as we walked into the sitting room, there was an extra square of syrup, just in case you were to discover that a whole houseful wasn’t quite enough.

Mrs Forbes asked if we’d like some cordial, and I said yes, and I wouldn’t say no to a custard cream, and she’d made an oh shape with her mouth, and left us to sit on a dark pink sofa, which had twisty arms and its own set of dimples. I decided to balance on the edge. Tilly had sat down first. The seats were so deep, her legs didn’t reach the floor, and they stretched out in front of her, like a doll.

She rolled across and peered into the gap between the sofa and the wall.

‘Can you see Him yet?’ she said, from near the carpet.

‘Who?’

She rolled back, her face crimson with effort. ‘God,’ she said.

‘I don’t think He’s simply going to pop out of the sideboard, Tilly.’

We both looked at the sideboard, just in case.

‘But shouldn’t we make a start?’ she said. ‘Mrs Creasy might be in peril.’

I stared at the room. It looked as though someone might have served it into the house with an ice-cream scoop. Even the things that weren’t pink had a mention of it, as if they hadn’t been allowed through the door without making a firm commitment. There were twists of salmon rope holding back the curtains, fuchsia tassels on each of the cushions, and the pot dogs guarding the mantelpiece had garlands of rosebuds around their necks. Between the pot dogs was a line of photographs: Mr and Mrs Forbes sitting on deckchairs at a beach, and Mr Forbes standing next to a motor car, and Mrs and Mrs Forbes with a group of people, having a picnic. Right in the centre was a girl with her hair pinned into waves. All the people in the other photographs looked away from the lens with serious eyes, but the girl stared straight into the camera and smiled, and it was so honest and so unprotected, it made me want to smile straight back.

‘I wonder who she is,’ I said.

But Tilly was examining the space behind the settee. ‘Do you think He’s down here somewhere?’ She lifted a cushion and peered at the back of it.

I looked up at the champagne teardrops which spilled from the light fitting. ‘I think it might be a bit too pink, even for Jesus,’ I said.

*

Mrs Forbes returned with a tray and a selection of biscuits.

‘I’m afraid I don’t have any custard creams,’ she said.

I took three fig rolls and a garibaldi. ‘That’s all right, Mrs Forbes. I’ll just have to manage.’

I could hear the noise of a television in the room next door, and Mr Forbes’ voice shouting instructions at it. It sounded like a football match. Even though the sounds were just the other side of the wall, they seemed very far away, and the rest of the world played itself out beyond the pink insulation, leaving us wrapped in Dralon and cushions, protected by china dogs and cellophaned in an ice-cream silence.

‘You have a very nice house, Mrs Forbes,’ said Tilly.

‘Thank you, dear.’

I bit into my garibaldi and she rushed a paper doily on to my knee.

‘The key to a tidy house is anticipation. And lists. Lots of lists.’

‘Lists?’ I said.

‘Oh yes, lists. That way, nothing ever gets forgotten.’

She pulled a piece of paper from the pocket of her cardigan.

‘This is today’s list,’ she said. ‘I’m up to the dustbins.’

It was a long list. It crossed over two pages in loops of blue ink, which thickened and smudged where the pen had stopped to think. As well as vacuuming the hall and putting out the dustbins, it had entries like clean teeth and eat breakfast.

‘Do you put everything on your list, Mrs Forbes?’ I started on my first fig roll.

‘Oh yes, best not to leave anything to chance. It was Harold’s idea. He says it stops me being slapdash.’

‘Could you not remember things without writing them down?’ said Tilly.

‘Heavens, no.’ Mrs Forbes shrank back in her chair, and she faded into a pink landscape. ‘That wouldn’t do at all. Harold says I’d get in a terrible mess.’

She folded the piece of paper exactly in half, and returned it to her pocket.

‘So how long have you two been in the Brownies?’

‘Ages,’ I said. ‘Who’s the girl in the photograph?’

She frowned at me and then looked over at the fireplace and frowned again. ‘Oh, that’s me,’ she said, in a surprised voice, as though she had temporarily forgotten all about herself.

I studied Mrs Forbes and the girl in the photograph, and tried to find something that matched. There was nothing.

‘Don’t look so shocked,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t born old, you know.’

My mother used this saying quite frequently. I had learned from experience not to say one word in reply, and I sipped my cordial to avoid having to make a comment.

She walked over to the mantelpiece. I always thought of Mrs Forbes as being solid and blustery, but close up she became diluted. Her posture was a slight apology, the folds of her clothes measuring out the end of a story. Even her hands looked small, trapped by arthritis and livered with time.

She ran her finger around the frame of the picture. ‘It was just before I met Harold,’ she said.

‘You look very happy.’ I took another fig roll. ‘I wonder what you were thinking about.’

‘I do, don’t I?’ Mrs Forbes took a cloth from her waistband and began dusting herself. ‘I only wish I could remember.’

On the other side of the wall, the football match ended rather abruptly. There was creaking and grumbling, and the click of a door, and then the sound of footsteps across the syrupy carpet. When I turned around, Mr Forbes was standing in the doorway, watching us. He wore a pair of shorts. His legs were pale and hairless, and they looked as though he could easily have borrowed them from someone else.

‘What’s going on here, then?’ he said.

Mrs Forbes put herself back on the mantelpiece and spun round.

‘Grace and Tilly are Brownies.’ Her eyes were so bright, they were almost enamelled. ‘They’re here to lend …’ she faltered.

He folded his forehead into a frown and put his hands on his hips. ‘A book? Money? A cup of sugar?’

Mrs Forbes was hypnotized, and she wrapped the duster around her fingers until they became mottled with white.

‘To lend …’ Mrs Forbes repeated the words.

Mr Forbes continued to stare. I could hear his dentures click against the roof of his mouth.

‘A hand,’ said Tilly.

‘That’s right. A hand. They’re here to lend a hand.’

She unwound the duster, and I heard the air leave her lungs in little pieces.

Mr Forbes grunted.

He said as long as that’s all it is, and does Sylve know she’s here, and Mrs Forbes nodded so vigorously the crucifix around her neck did a little dance on her collarbone.

‘I’m going to post my letter,’ said Mr Forbes. ‘If we wait for you to do it, I’ll miss the second collection. I just need to find out where you’ve hidden my shoes.’

Mrs Forbes nodded again, and the crucifix nodded along with her, even though Mr Forbes had long since disappeared from the doorway.

‘My teachers do that to me all the time,’ said Tilly.

‘Do what, dear?’

‘Throw words at me until I get confused.’ Tilly picked garibaldi crumbs from the carpet and lifted them on to the plate. ‘It always makes me feel stupid.’

‘It does?’ said Mrs Forbes.

‘I’m not, though.’ Tilly smiled.

Mrs Forbes smiled back. ‘Do you enjoy school, Tilly?’ she said.

‘Not really. A lot of the girls don’t like us very much. Sometimes we’re bullied.’

‘They hit you?’ Mrs Forbes’ hand flew to her mouth.

‘Oh no, they don’t hit us, Mrs Forbes.’

‘You don’t always have to hit people,’ I said, ‘to bully them.’

Mrs Forbes reached for the nearest chair and lowered herself into it. ‘I expect you’re right,’ she said.

I was about to speak when Mr Forbes came back into the room. He was still wearing his shorts, but he had added a flat cap and a pair of sunglasses, and he was carrying a letter. He reminded me of my father. Whenever it became hot, he swapped his trousers for shorts, but everything else he kept exactly the same.

Mr Forbes placed his letter on the sideboard, and sat on the sofa with such force, the aftershock almost suspended Tilly in mid-air. He began tying his shoes, tugging at the laces until little fibres of fabric hovered in the space above his fingers. I stood up to give his legs more privacy.

‘So you can cross this off your list for a start, Dorothy,’ he was saying. ‘Although there’s plenty more to be getting on with.’

He looked over at me. ‘Will you be staying long?’ he said.

‘Oh no, Mr Forbes. Not long at all. We’ll be gone as soon as we’ve lent a hand.’

He looked back at his feet and grunted again. I wasn’t sure if he was approving of me or the tightness of his shoelaces.

‘She gets very easily distracted, you see.’ He nodded at Mrs Forbes with the brim of his cap. ‘It’s her age. Isn’t it, Dorothy?’ He made a winding motion at the side of his temple.

Mrs Forbes smiled, but it sat on her mouth at half-mast.

‘Can’t keep a thing in her head for more than five minutes.’ He spoke behind the back of his hand, like a whisper, but the volume of his voice remained exactly the same. ‘Losing her marbles, I’m afraid.’

He stood, and then bent very theatrically to adjust his socks. Tilly edged to safety at the far end of the settee.

‘I’m off to the post box.’ He marched towards the hall. ‘I shall be back in thirty minutes. Try not to get yourself in a muddle whilst I’m gone.’

He had vanished from the doorway before I realized.

‘Mr Forbes.’ I had to shout to make him hear.

He reappeared. He didn’t look like the kind of person who was used to being shouted at.

I handed him the envelope. ‘You’ve forgotten your letter,’ I said.

Mrs Forbes waited until the front door clicked shut, and then she began to laugh. Her laughing made me and Tilly laugh as well, and the rest of the world seemed to creep back into the room again, as if it wasn’t quite as far away as I thought.

Whilst we were laughing, I looked at Mrs Forbes, and I looked over at the girl on the mantelpiece, who laughed with us through a corridor of time, and I realized that they were a perfect match after all.

*

‘I didn’t know we’d actually have to do actual housework,’ said Tilly.

Mrs Forbes had left us tied into aprons up to our armpits. Tilly stood on the far side of the room, rubbing Brasso into a sleeping West Highland white terrier.

‘It’s important that we don’t arouse suspicion,’ I said, and took the last garibaldi back to the settee.

‘But do you think God is here?’ Tilly peered at the dog and ran the duster over its ears. ‘If God keeps everyone safe, do you think he’s keeping Mrs Forbes safe as well?’

I thought about the cross around Mrs Forbes’ neck. ‘I hope so,’ I said.

Mrs Forbes returned to the room with a new packet of garibaldis. ‘What do you hope, dear?’

I watched her empty them on to the plate. ‘Do you believe in God, Mrs Forbes?’ I said.

‘Of course.’

She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t look at the sky or at me, or even repeat the question back again. She just carried on rearranging biscuits.

‘How can you be so sure?’ said Tilly.

‘Because that’s what you do. God brings people together. He makes sense of everything.’

‘Even the bad things?’ I said.

‘Of course.’ She looked at me for a moment, and then returned to the plate.

I could see Tilly beyond Mrs Forbes’ shoulder. Her polishing had become slow and deliberate, and she willed a whole conversation at me with her eyes.

‘How can God make sense of Mrs Creasy disappearing?’ I said. ‘For example.’

Mrs Forbes stepped back, and a mist of crumbs fell to the carpet.

‘I’ve no idea.’ She folded the empty packet between her hands, even though it refused to become smaller. ‘I’ve never even spoken to the woman.’

‘Didn’t you meet her?’ I said.

‘No.’ Mrs Forbes twisted the packet around her ring finger. ‘They only moved into the house a little while ago, after John’s mother died. I never had the chance.’

‘I just wonder why she vanished?’ I edged the sentence towards her, like a dare.

‘Well, it was nothing to do with me, I didn’t say a word.’ Her voice had become spiked and feverish, and the sentence rushed from her mouth in order to escape.

‘What do you mean, Mrs Forbes?’ I looked at Tilly, and Tilly looked at me and we both frowned.

Mrs Forbes sank on to the settee.

‘Ignore me, I’m getting muddled.’ She patted the back of her neck, as if she was checking to see that her head was still firmly attached. ‘It’s my age.’

‘We just can’t understand where she’s gone,’ I said.

Mrs Forbes smoothed down the tassels on one of the cushions. ‘I’m sure she’ll return in good time,’ she said, ‘people usually do.’

‘I hope she does.’ Tilly untied the apron from under her arms. ‘I liked Mrs Creasy. She was nice.’

‘I’m sure she was.’ Mrs Forbes fiddled at the cushion. ‘But I’ve never spent any time in that woman’s company, so I couldn’t really say.’

I moved the garibaldis around on the plate. ‘Perhaps someone else on the avenue might know where she’s gone.’

Mrs Forbes stood up. ‘I very much doubt it,’ she said. ‘The reason Margaret Creasy disappeared is nothing to do with any of us. God works in mysterious ways, Harold was right. Everything happens for a reason.’

I wanted to ask her what the reason was, and why God had to be so mysterious about his work, but Mrs Forbes had taken the list out of her pocket.

‘Harold will be back soon. I’d better get on,’ she said. And she began running her finger down the lines of blue ink.

*

We walked back along the avenue. The weight of the sky pressed down on us as we pulled our legs through the heat. I stared at the hills which overlooked the town, but it was impossible to see where they began and where the sky ended. They were welded together by the summer, and the horizon shimmered and hissed and refused to be found.

Somewhere beyond the gardens, I could hear the sound of a Wimbledon commentary drifting from a window.

Advantage, Borg. And the distant flutter of applause.

The road was deserted. The beat of an afternoon sun had hurried everyone indoors to fan themselves with newspapers and rub Soltan into their forearms. The only person who remained was Sheila Dakin. She sat on a deckchair on the front lawn of number twelve, arms and legs spread wide, her face stretched towards the heat, as though someone had pegged her out as a giant, mahogany sacrifice.

‘Hello, Mrs Dakin,’ I shouted across the tarmac.

Sheila Dakin lifted her head, and I saw a trail of saliva glisten at the edge of her mouth.

She waved. ‘Hello, ladies.’

She always called us ladies, and it turned Tilly’s face red and made us smile.

‘So God is at Mrs Forbes’ house,’ said Tilly, when we had stopped smiling.

‘I believe he is.’ I pulled Tilly’s sou’wester down at the back, to cover her neck. ‘So we can say for definite that Mrs Forbes is safe, although I’m not very sure about her husband.’

‘It’s just a pity she never met Mrs Creasy, she could have given us some clues.’ Tilly kicked at a loose chipping, and it coasted into a hedge.

I stopped walking so suddenly, my sandals skidded dust on the pavement.

Tilly looked back. ‘What’s the matter, Gracie?’

‘The picnic,’ I said.

‘What picnic?’

‘The photograph of the picnic on the mantelpiece.’

Tilly frowned. ‘I don’t understand?’

I stared at the pavement and tried to think backwards. ‘The woman,’ I said, ‘the woman.’

‘What woman?’

‘The woman sitting next to Mrs Forbes at the picnic.’

‘What about her?’ said Tilly.

I looked up and straight into Tilly’s eyes. ‘It was Margaret Creasy.’

Number Two, The Avenue
4 July 1976

Brian sang to the hall mirror as he tried to find the parting in his hair. It was a little tricky, as his mother had insisted on buying a starburst design, and it was more burst than glass, but if he bent his knees slightly and angled his head to the right, he could just about fit his whole face in.

His hair was his best feature, his mother always said. Now girls seemed to like men’s hair a little longer, he wasn’t so sure. His only ever got as far as the bottom of his jaw and then it seemed to lose interest.

‘Brian!’

Perhaps if he tucked it behind his ears.

‘Brian!’

Her shouting tugged on him like a lead. He pushed his head around the sitting-room door.

‘Yes, Mam?’

‘Pass us that box of Milk Tray, would you? My feet are playing me up something chronic.’

His mother lay on a sea of crochet, her legs wedged on to the settee, rubbing at her bunions through a pair of tights. He could hear the static.

‘It’s the bloody heat.’ Her face was pinched into lines, the air in her cheeks filled with concentration.

‘There! There!’ she stopped rubbing and pointed at the footstool, which, in the absence of her feet, had become a home for the TV Times and her slippers, and a spilled bag of Murray Mints. She took the Milk Tray from him and stared into the box, with the same level of concentration as someone who was trying to answer an especially difficult exam question.

She pushed an Orange Creme into her mouth and frowned at his leather jacket. ‘Off out, are you?’

‘I’m going for a pint with the lads, Mam.’

‘The lads?’ She took a Turkish Delight.

‘Yes, Mam.’

‘You’re forty-three, Brian.’

He went to run his fingers through his hair, but remembered the Brylcreem and stopped himself.

‘Do you want me to ask Val to fit you in for a trim next time she comes round?’

‘No thanks, I’m growing it. The girls like it longer.’

‘The girls?’ She laughed and little pieces of Turkish Delight swam around on her teeth. ‘You’re forty-three, Brian.’

He shifted his weight and the leather jacket creaked at his shoulders. He’d bought it from the market. Probably wasn’t even real leather. Probably plastic, pretending to be leather, and the only person who was fooled was the idiot wearing it. He pulled at the collar and it crackled between his fingers.

His mother’s throat rose and fell with Turkish Delight, and he watched her dig her tongue around in her back teeth to make sure she’d definitely got her money’s worth.

‘Empty that ashtray before you go. There’s a good boy.’

He picked up the ashtray and held it at arm’s length, like an uncertain sculpture, a cemetery of cigarettes, each dated with a different colour of lipstick. He watched the ones at the edge tilt and waver as he carried it across the room.

‘Not the fireplace! Take it to the outside bin.’ She sent her instructions through a Lime Barrel. ‘It’ll stink the house out if you leave it in here.’

A curl of smoke twisted from somewhere deep in the mountain of fag ends. He thought he’d imagined it at first, but then the smell brushed at his nostrils.

‘You want to be careful.’ He nodded at the ashtray. ‘This is how fires start.’

She looked over at him and looked back at the box of Milk Tray.

Neither of them spoke.

He nudged around, and found the glow of a tip in the ash. He pinched at it until it flickered and the pleat of smoke stuttered and died. ‘It’s out now,’ he said.

But his mother was lost to the chocolates, gripped by bunions and Orange Cremes and the film now starting on BBC2. He knew she would be exactly the same when he returned from the Legion. He knew she would have pulled the blanket over her legs, and the Milk Tray box would be massacred and left to the carpet, and the television would be playing out a conversation with itself in the corner. He knew that she would not have risked moving from the edges of her crocheted existence. A world within a world, a life she had embroidered for herself over the past few years, which seemed to shrink and tighten with each passing month.

The avenue was silent. He pulled the lid from the dustbin and tipped the cigarettes inside, sending a cloud of ash into his face. When he had finished coughing and swiping at the air, and trying to find his next breath, he looked up and saw Sylvia in the garden of number four. Derek wasn’t with her – or Grace. She was alone. He rarely saw her alone, and he dared to watch for a moment. She hadn’t looked up. She was picking at weeds, throwing them into a bucket and brushing the soil from her hands. Every so often, she straightened her back, and gathered her breath and wiped her forehead with the back of a hand. She hadn’t changed. He wanted to tell her, but he knew it would only lead to more trouble.

He felt a line of sweat edge into his collar. He didn’t know how long he’d been watching, but she looked up and saw him. She lifted her hand to wave, but he turned just in time and got back inside.

He put the ashtray on the footstool.

‘Make sure you’re home by ten,’ his mother said, ‘I’ll need my ointment.’

The Royal British Legion
4 July 1976

The Legion was empty, apart from the two old men in the corner. Every time Brian saw them, they were sitting in the same place, and wearing the same clothes, and having the same exchange. They looked at each other as they spoke, but had two separate conversations, each man lost in his own words. Brian adjusted his eyes after the walk down. It was cooler in here, and darker. Summer soaked into the flocked walls and the polished wood. It was swallowed by the cool slate of the snooker table, and fell into the thread of the carpet, worn down by heavy conversation. The Legion didn’t have a season. It could have been the middle of winter, except for the sweat that caught the edge of Brian’s shirt and the pull of walking in his legs.

Clive sat on a stool at the end of the bar, feeding crisps to a black terrier, who stamped his paws and whistled at the back of his throat if he felt the gap between crisps had become too long.

‘Pint, is it?’ he said, and Brian nodded.

He eased from the stool. ‘Another warm one,’ he said, and Brian nodded again.

Brian handed his money over. There were too many coins. He lifted his pint and beer slipped from the top of the glass and on to the counter.

‘Still looking for work?’ Clive took a cloth and ran it across the wood.

Brian murmured something into his glass and looked away.

‘Tell me about it, love. If they cut my hours any more, I’ll have to go back on the game.’ He turned his hand and examined his nails.

Brian stared at him over the top of his glass.

‘It’s a bloody joke,’ said Clive, and he laughed, and Brian tried to laugh with him, but he couldn’t quite get there.

*

He was on his second pint when they arrived. Harold walked in first, all shorts and shouting.

‘Evening, evening,’ he said, even though the bar was still empty. The men in the corner nodded and looked away.

‘Clive!’ Harold said, as though Clive was the last person he expected to see. They shook each other’s hand and put their other hands over the top of the shake, until there was a pile of shaking and commotion.

Brian watched them.

‘Double Diamond?’ Harold nodded at Brian’s glass.

Brian said no, he’d buy his own, thanks, and Harold said suit yourself, and he turned back to Clive and smiled, as though there was a whole other conversation going on that Brian couldn’t hear. In the middle of the unheard conversation, Eric Lamb arrived with Sheila Dakin, and Clive had to disappear into the back to find a cherry for Sheila’s Babycham.

By the time Brian followed them to the table, he found himself wedged against the wall, trapped between the cigarette machine and the mystery of Sheila Dakin’s bosom.

She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘Have you started smoking again, Brian? You smell like an old ashtray.’

‘It’s my mam,’ he said.

‘Maybe think about getting your hair cut as well,’ she said, and dipped her cherry in the Babycham. ‘It looks a right bloody mess.’

There was a radio on somewhere, and Brian could hear a slur of music, but he couldn’t tell what it was. The Drifters, maybe, or The Platters. He wanted to ask Clive to turn it up, but Clive had been standing at the end of the bar for the last five minutes, twisting a tea towel into the same pint glass and trying to listen to their conversation. It was the last thing he’d want to do.

‘Order, order.’ Harold said and tapped the edge of a beer mat on the table, even though no one was speaking. ‘I’ve called this meeting because of recent events.’

Brian realized he was nearly at the end of his pint. He swilled the glass around to try and catch the foam which patterned the sides.

‘Recent events?’ Sheila twisted at her earring. It was heavy and bronze, and Brian thought it looked like something you might find on a totem pole. It dragged the flesh towards her jaw, and pulled the hole in her ear into a jagged line.

‘This business with Margaret Creasy.’ Harold still held the beer mat between his fingers. ‘John has it in his head it’s something to do with number eleven. Got himself in a right state after church last weekend.’

‘Did he?’ said Sheila. ‘I wasn’t there.’

Harold looked at her. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t expect you were.’

‘Cheeky sod.’ She began twisting at the other earring. Her laugh took up the whole table.

Harold leaned forward, even though there wasn’t any space to lean into.

‘We just all need to be clear,’ he said, ‘about what happened.’

The music had finished. Brian could hear Clive’s tea towel squeak against the glass and the hum of the old men shuffling their words.

‘You might as well sit down, Clive, as stand over there.’ Eric Lamb nodded at the empty stool with his glass. ‘You’re as much a part of this as any of us.’

Clive took a step back and pulled the tea towel into his chest, and said he didn’t really think it was his place, but Brian saw Harold persuade him over with his eyes, and Clive dragged the stool across the lino and pulled himself between Harold and Sheila.

‘I deliberately didn’t ask John tonight.’ Harold sat back and folded his arms. ‘We don’t need another scene.’

‘What makes him think it’s anything to do with number eleven?’ Sheila had finished her Babycham, and was turning the stem of the glass between her fingers. It crept towards the edge of the table.

‘You know John. He’s always looking for something to worry about,’ said Harold, ‘he can’t keep his mind still.’

Brian agreed, although he would never say so. When they were kids, John used to count buses. He reckoned they were lucky.

The more buses we see the better, he said, it stops bad things happening. It would make them late for school, walking round the long way, trying to spot as many as they could. Brian would say, It’s made us late, how can that be lucky and laugh, but John would just gnaw at the skin around his fingers and say that they can’t have seen enough.

‘John doesn’t think that pervert’s done her in, does he?’ said Sheila. The glass tipped towards the floor, and Eric guided her hand back.

‘Oh no. Nothing like that, no. No.’ Harold said no too many times, they came out of his mouth like a string of bunting. He looked down at the beer mat.

‘Wouldn’t surprise me if he has,’ said Sheila, ‘I still reckon he took that babbie.’

Harold looked at her for a moment, and then lowered his eyes.

‘The baby turned up safe, though, Sheila.’ Eric took the glass from her hand. ‘That’s all that matters.’

‘Bloody pervert,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what the police said. It’s a normal avenue, full of normal people. He doesn’t belong there.’

A silence unfolded across the table. Brian could hear the Guinness slide down Eric Lamb’s throat, and the tea towel crease and pleat between Clive’s fingers. He could hear the twist of Sheila’s earring, and the tap of Harold’s beer mat on the wood, and he heard pockets of his own breath escaping his mouth. The silence became a sound all of its own. It pushed against his ears until he could stand it no longer.

‘Margaret Creasy talked to my mam a lot,’ he said. He put the pint glass to his mouth. It was almost empty.

‘About what?’ said Harold. ‘Number eleven?’

Brian shrugged behind the glass. ‘I never sat with them,’ he said. ‘They played Gin Rummy for hours in the backroom. Good company, my mam said she was. A good listener.’

‘She was always in and out of your house, Harold.’ Sheila clicked open her purse and put a pound note in front of Clive.

‘She was? I never saw her.’

‘Probably keeping Dorothy company,’ she said, ‘while you were out and about.’

Brian went to put a tower of coins on the note, but Sheila brushed him away.

‘Dorothy saw Margaret Creasy going into number eleven,’ said Harold. ‘She’s just as hysterical about it as John is. She thinks someone’s said something.’

Clive pulled the empty glasses together, catching each one with a finger. ‘What is there to say? The police said the fire was an accident.’

‘You know Dorothy,’ said Harold, ‘she’ll tell anybody anything, she doesn’t know what she’s saying half of the time.’

The glasses rattled as they left the table.

‘As long as the police don’t change their minds and start digging everything up again.’ For once, Sheila’s voice was low. She still held on to the purse, and Brian watched her click at the clasp. Her hands were rough from the heat, and the polish on her nails crept away from the edges in ragged lines.

‘For Christ’s sake, Sheila, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.’ There was no one else in the bar. Even the old men had left. Still Harold scanned a room of empty chairs behind him, then turned back and edged himself nearer the table. ‘Stop scaremongering. We agreed back then that we just made our feelings known, that’s all. The rest of it was chance.’

Brian leaned back in his chair. He could feel the edge of the cigarette machine biting into his shoulder. ‘She talked to everyone, though, didn’t she? She went round the whole avenue. You don’t know what she found out. She was smart, Mrs Creasy. Really smart.’

Sheila pushed her purse back into her handbag. ‘I hate to bloody say it, but Brian’s right. Perhaps she knew more than any of us.’

‘It was an accident,’ said Eric Lamb. He stretched the words out, like instructions.

Now his glass was gone, Brian didn’t know what to do with his hands. He pressed his thumb into the drips of beer on the table, pulling them into lines, trying to make a pattern. This was the problem when people had known you since you were a child, they could never quite let go of assuming you needed to be told what to think.

‘We just need to stay calm,’ said Harold. ‘None of this loose talk. We did nothing wrong, understood?’

Brian shrugged his shoulders, and his jacket creaked and crackled in reply. Probably wasn’t leather after all.

*

They walked back through the estate, Sheila linking her arm through Brian’s to steady herself, because her shoes were bloody impossible to walk in. Brian didn’t think her shoes were the problem, but he offered her his arm anyway. It was almost ten. Eric Lamb had gone on ahead, and they’d left Harold at the Legion, helping Clive to close up. It was the best part of the day, Brian thought. The heat had faded into a heavy silence, and there was even a pale breeze, pushing into the quietness and tracing a path through the highest leaves.

As they reached the garages at the end of the avenue, Sheila stopped to pull at the strap on her shoe, and she wavered and swayed, and leaned into Brian to keep her balance. ‘Bloody things,’ she said.

He stared at the road. Light escaped from the sky and pressed against the horizon, taking the familiar and the safe along with it. In the dusk, the houses looked different, exposed somehow, as though they had been stripped of their disguise. They faced each other, like adversaries, and right at the top, set back from the rest, was number eleven.

Still, silent, waiting.

Sheila looked up and followed his gaze. ‘Makes no sense, does it?’ she said. ‘Why would you stay when you know you’re not wanted?’

Brian shrugged. ‘Perhaps he feels the same about us. Perhaps he’s waiting for an apology.’

Sheila laughed. It was thin and angry. ‘He’ll wait a bloody long time for mine.’

‘But do you really think he did it? Do you really think he took the baby?’

She stared at him. Her whole face seemed to narrow and tighten, until the whites of her eyes were lost to hatred. ‘He’s the type, isn’t he? You’ve only got to look at him. You’re not that thick, Brian.’

He felt colour wash across his face. He was glad she wouldn’t notice.

‘Strange Walter,’ he said.

‘Exactly. Even the kids can see it.’

He glanced at the lights in Sheila’s window. ‘Who’s sitting with yours?’ he said.

She smiled. ‘They don’t need no sitter. Our Lisa’s old enough now. She’s sharp, just like her mother. I trained her well.’

He looked over at number eleven again. It was becoming lost to the light, the edge of the roof slipping into an inky black. ‘It’s what kids do, though, isn’t it?’ he said, ‘Copy their mams and dads?’

Sheila’s shoes dragged on the pavement, pulling at the concrete with their heels. ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘And don’t you go feeling sorry for Walter Bishop. People like that don’t deserve sympathy. They’re not like us.’

The rattle of the latch reached across an empty road.

‘Do you really think the police will be interested in the fire?’ he said. ‘After all this time?’

She turned in the half-light. He couldn’t see her face, just an outline. A shadow slipping and shifting against the darkening bricks. When she answered, it was a whisper, but he heard it creep across the silence.

‘We’d better bloody hope not,’ she said.

And her shoes scraped against the step, and a key twisted in a lock, and Brian watched as the last piece of daylight was stolen from the sky.

He crossed over, towards home, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jacket. He thought he’d imagined it at first, but then he felt it again, cardboard rubbing against his knuckles. He stopped and pulled at the ripped lining until it broke free.

A library ticket.

He stood underneath the street lamp, and the name on the ticket was caught in liquid, orange light.

Mrs Margaret Creasy.

He frowned and folded it in half, and he pushed it back against the lining, until it finally disappeared.

*

Brian stood in the doorway and looked into the sitting room. The giant cave of his mother’s sleeping mouth looked back at him, and it made the rest of her face seem strangely trivial. The Milk Tray was disembowelled on the footstool, and the debris of her evening decorated the carpet – knitting needles and crossword puzzles and television pages torn from a newspaper.

‘Mam?’ he said. Not loud enough to wake her, but loud enough to reassure himself that he’d tried.

She snored back to him. Not the violent, churning snore that you would expect, but something softer. A thoughtful snore. His father once said that his mother was delicate and graceful when they first met, and Brian wondered if her snoring was all that was left of that narrow, fragile woman.

He stared at his mother’s mouth. He wondered how many words had fallen out of it and into Margaret Creasy’s ears. She couldn’t help herself. It was as though she used hearsay as a web to trap people’s attention, that she didn’t believe she was interesting enough to hold on to them any other way.

His mother’s mouth widened a little more, her eyes squeezed a little more tightly, and from somewhere deep in her chest came the faint rasp of unconsciousness.

Brian wondered if she’d told Margaret Creasy about the night of the fire. About what she saw, or thought she saw, in the shadowed corners of the avenue.

And he wondered if these had been the magic words that had made Margaret Creasy disappear.

20 December 1967

Brian draws the flame of the match into his roll-up, and watches the tobacco spark and flicker in the darkness.

He can smoke indoors if he wants to. The rooms are painted with the yellow skin of his mother’s cigarettes, but he prefers to stand outside, to feel a bite of winter against his face and stare into the blackness undisturbed.

The avenue is held in a frosted quiet. All the houses are buttoned up against the cold, three bars on the fire, condensation climbing high in the windows. There are Christmas trees peeping through gaps in the curtains, but Brian doesn’t feel very much like Christmas. He doubts anyone does, in all honesty, after everything that’s happened.

The roll-up is thin and quick. It scratches the back of his throat and tightens his chest. He decides to take one last drag and go back into the carpet warmth of the kitchen, when he sees a movement at the top of the road. Somewhere at the edge of number eleven, there is a shift in the darkness, a brief change of light which catches the corner of his attention as he’s about to turn.

He shields the cigarette in his palm to cover its glow, and tries to pull the view into the eyes, but beyond the orange pool of the streetlight, the shapes die away into an inked black.

But there was definitely a movement.

And as he closes the back door, he’s sure he hears the sound of disappearing footsteps.

*

‘You can smoke in here, Brian.’ His mother nods at a bloated ashtray. ‘You could help me string these Christmas cards.’

She is pushing the cards into tiny red and green pegs, like bunting, and coming to the end of a packet of custard creams.

‘I fancied a bit of fresh air, Mam.’

‘As long as you don’t forget your kidneys,’ she says.

He walks over to the window and pulls the curtain a fraction, just enough to stare through an inch of glass.

‘What are you looking at?’ Her voice twitches with interest, and she rests the cards on her lap.

‘Number eleven.’

‘I thought you said he’d gone away with his mother. I thought we’d all agreed there was no point watching the house until he gets back.’

‘There’s someone in his garden.’

She is on her feet. A pile of Christmas cards somersault into the air, and three lowly mangers and a donkey fall to the carpet.

‘Well, if you’re going to do it, do it properly,’ she says. ‘Switch the big light off and pull the curtains back.’

He does as he’s told, and they both stare out into the darkness.

‘Do you see anything?’ she says.

He doesn’t. They watch in silence.

Sheila Dakin visits her dustbin, and the avenue fills with the sound of glass drumming against metal. Sylvia Bennett draws the curtains back in one of the upstairs rooms and stares into the road. It feels as though she is looking straight at them, and Brian ducks below the windowsill.

‘She can’t see you, you daft bugger,’ his mother says. ‘The light’s off.’

Brian resurfaces, and when he looks up, Sylvia has disappeared.

‘Perhaps it was those lads from the estate again,’ says his mother. ‘Perhaps they came back.’

Brian leans into the window. His legs are going dead and the back of the settee is pushing into his ribcage. ‘They wouldn’t dare,’ he says. ‘Not after what happened.’

His mother sniffs. ‘Well, I can’t see anything. You must have imagined it, there’s no one out there.’

As she speaks, Brian sees it again. Movement behind the thin, leafless trees which stand in Walter Bishop’s garden.

‘There.’ He taps on the glass. ‘Do you see them now?’

His mother presses her face against the window and breaths of fascination travel across the view.

‘Well I never,’ says his mother. ‘What on earth is he doing?’

‘Who?’ Brian joins her at the glass. ‘Who is it?’

‘Move your head, Brian. You always get it in the way.’

‘Who is it?’ he says again, moving his head.

His mother folds a pair of satisfied arms across her chest. ‘Harold Forbes,’ she says. ‘That’s definitely Harold Forbes.’

‘Is it?’ Brian risks putting his head near the glass again. ‘How can you tell?’

‘I’d know that hump anywhere. Very poor posture, that man.’

They both stare into the dark, and their reflections stare back at them from the glass, ghostly white and open-mouthed, and painted with curiosity.

‘There are some very odd people about,’ says his mother.

Brian’s eyes adjust to the night, and after a moment he sees the figure, slightly bent and occupied with something he’s holding in his hands. He is moving between the trees, making his way around the front of number eleven. It’s definitely a man, but Brian has no idea how his mother can be so certain it’s Harold Forbes.

‘What is he carrying?’ Brian wipes breath from the glass. ‘Can you tell?’

‘I’m not sure,’ says his mother, ‘but that’s not what interests me the most.’

Brian turns to her and frowns. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What interests me the most,’ says his mother, ‘is who has he got there with him?’

She’s right. Beyond the stooped, wandering figure in the trees, there is a second person. They’re slightly taller than the first, and straighter, and they are pointing to something at the back of the house. He tries to press his face further into the glass, but the image just blurs and distorts and becomes an untidiness of shapes and shadows.

Brian puts forward a number of possibilities, all dismissed by his mother as too young, too old, too tall.

‘So who do you think it is, then?’ says Brian.

His mother pulls herself to her full height and presses her chin into the flesh of her neck.

‘I have my suspicions,’ she says, ‘but of course, it would be wrong of me to speculate.’

There is only one thing his mother enjoys more than gossip, and that is withholding it from an interested party, based on her sudden unearthing of the moral high ground.

They argue. Brian never wins their arguments, his mother is far too practised and far too stubborn, and by the time he gives up and looks back into the avenue, the figures have disappeared.

‘That’s that then,’ says his mother. The cards still lie on the carpet, and she gathers several Virgin Marys on the way back to the settee.

‘What do you think they were doing?’ Brian says.

She takes another biscuit, and he has to wait for an answer until she has prised off the lid of the custard cream and examined its contents.

‘Well, whatever it is,’ she says, ‘let’s hope it involves getting rid of Bishop once and for all. We’ve had too many incidents around here just lately.’

For once, he agrees with her. The last few weeks had seen one disruption after another. The police never used to visit the avenue at all, now it seems as though they’re never away from the place.

‘I know one thing.’ His mother bites into her custard cream, and a spray of crumbs settle themselves down on the antimacassar. ‘It’s a good job you’re here, Brian. I wouldn’t be able to sleep in my bed, otherwise. Not as long as that man’s still at the top of the road.’

Brian leans back on the windowsill, but it digs into his spine, cracking against his vertebrae. The room is too hot. His mother has always kept it too hot. As a child he would stand in this very spot, staring through the window, trying to work out a way of making the heat escape and disappear forever.

‘I’m going for another cigarette,’ he says.

‘I don’t know why you don’t smoke in here, Brian. Isn’t my company good enough for you?’

She has gone back to threading Christmas cards. There is a theme, Brian thinks. She is threading another Baby Jesus on to a row. There are thirteen stars of Bethlehem. Thirteen preoccupied donkeys. A queue of Baby Jesuses to hang across the mantelpiece and watch them eat their Christmas dinner in silent, paper hats.

‘I just fancy a bit of fresh air,’ he says.

‘Well, don’t be gone ages. You know with my nerves I don’t like being on my own for too long. Not until all this nonsense is sorted out.’

Brian takes his tobacco tin and box of matches from the windowsill. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ he says.

And he walks back into the darkness.

Number Four, The Avenue
5 July 1976

It was Monday. The first real day of the holidays. The summer built a dusty bridge to September, and I lay in bed for as long as I could, holding on to the moment before I took the first step.

I could hear my parents in the kitchen. The noises were familiar, a sequence of cupboards and plates and doors, and I knew which sound would come next, like a piece of music. I squashed the pillow under my head and listened, and I watched a breeze press into the curtains, sending them billowing like sails. Still I knew it wouldn’t rain. You could smell rain, my father said, like you could smell the seaside. All I could smell as I lay in bed was Remington’s porridge and a drift of bacon climbing into the room from someone else’s kitchen. I wondered if I could get away with going back to sleep, but then I remembered I needed to find God and Mrs Creasy, and my breakfast.

*

My mother was being very quiet. She was quiet when I walked into the kitchen, she was quiet for the entire time I ate my Rice Krispies, and she was still quiet when I put my bowl in the sink. Although it was strange that, even when she was quiet, she still managed to be the loudest person in the room.

My father sat in the corner, cleaning his shoes on a piece of newspaper, whilst my mother orbited the cupboards. Every so often, he said something very ordinary to see if he could tempt someone into a conversation. He had already tried the weather, but no one had joined in. He’d even spoken to Remington, but Remington just beat his tail against the lino and looked confused.

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