“I’m not being rude. He just shouldn’t be hiding.”
I peel back the duvet and smile sheepishly at the girl. The girl recoils slightly at the sight of me and I don’t really blame her.
“Hi,” I say brightly. “I’m Stuart. And you must be Daisy.”
She nods. Her eyes go to her mother, plaintively.
Jessamine says, “Daisy. It’s four in the morning. Please go back to sleep.”
“But I can’t.”
“I’ve told you before that you have to teach yourself how to sleep. You’re going to be eleven in October. You can’t depend on other people to put you back to sleep at your age. You need to find what works for you.”
Her tone is brusque, teacher-like.
“Counting sheep,” I say. “Have you tried that?”
She nods.
“Counting backward from a hundred?”
She nods again.
“Reading?”
She nods.
“I try reverse psychology sometimes when I can’t sleep. I tell myself that I don’t care if I don’t fall asleep. That usually does it.”
Daisy gives her mother another beseeching look and then huffs and leaves the room.
“Fuck,” says Jessamine a moment later. “Fuck.”
Now that I am out of the bag, so to speak, Jessamine has no reasonnot to bring me downstairs for breakfast the next morning. She makes me tea in a small cup on a saucer and offers to fry some eggs. I’m not really a breakfast kind of guy so I say thanks but no thanks and I fuss Hugo under the table.
“Should I go?” I ask. “Before your mum gets up?”
“No.” She shakes her head. She’s wearing a nightdress with socks and a cardigan. Her hair is tied at the nape of her neck with a very big satin scrunchie in pale blue. “Stay. It’s fine.” She pours me another cup of tea from a pot and hands me the milk in a plastic bottle.
“Are you sure?”
“Totally.”
Just then I hear the sound of a throat being cleared, the thud of shoe soles against floorboards. I brace myself.
“Morning, Mum,” says Jessamine.
I turn. The woman standing in the kitchen entrance looks about fifty but has a girlish air about her. She’s dressed in a pair of slim-fitting jeans and a fluffy black sweater, her dark hair in a center parting. She stops when she sees me at the kitchen table and turns her gaze to Jessamine.
“This is Stuart,” she says. “He stayed last night.”
“Stayed?”
She has the same voice as Jessamine, well-spoken with slightly hacked-off North London edges.
“Yes. Stayed the night.”
I watch the woman’s face and see it vividly: the disgust, the horror, the distaste.
