The light behind her looks strange. Soft and peachy. Not bright and blue as it had been earlier. What has changed?
I try to sit up and the woman, the mother, lays a hand on my arm, and says, “Don’t move too quickly. Take it slowly.”
My gaze goes to the window. It’s evening. Dusk. It’s June. Dusk comes late in June…
I sit up fast then, feel blood rush to my head and make my vision blur. “What time is it?” I ask, and my voice sounds wrong. Thick. Slurred.
“It’s nine o’clock.”
“Am I in your house?”
“Yes. You’re in my house.”
“I don’t remember.”
“No. You don’t. You had a turn. You passed out. We brought you in. To cool down. You slept. We thought maybe…” The woman purses her mouth into a moue of disapproval. “Maybe you’d taken drugs?”
I blink. “What?”
“I don’t know—we just theorized. We couldn’t think why a perfectly healthy young woman would suddenly collapse like that, in a stupor.”
I touch my cheek. It’s hot and sticky. “I don’t…” I’m about to say I don’t take drugs, but that’s not true. But on that day, I had not. Not that day. That perfect June day when I’d woken up in such high spirits, seized it, done the things.
I had already planned what I was going to say when I got to the pub, about my special day, about meeting the weird family in the amazing house, with the huge garden, right on the Heath, being invited in and given lunch and even a slice of homemade cheesecake and the boy with the T-shirt with a squirty flower on it, and the mum who had definitely had a facelift, and the daughter who was kind of cool.
I had so much I was going to share with my friends about my little adventure and I knew what they were going say, they would say: “That could only happen to you,” because it was the sort of thing that only happened to me, the sort of experience that I somehow always invited onto myself, I don’t know why or how; my friends would say that I’m an open book, no sides, no corners. And maybe that’s it.
But now the thing feels soured, curdled, the moment at that table, my fork in that cheesecake, thinking: This is it, this is the one life, the beautiful gift, this is everything, I’m here, I’m in it; that moment has gone bad. Really bad.
“I need to go,” I say, searching for my bag with my eyes. “I was meant to meet my friends. They’ll be wondering where I am.”
“I think,” says the woman, “you should take it easy. Drink some more water. Wait until you’re feeling properly better.”
“I am,” I say. “I’m feeling better. Where’s my bag?”
I can hear my blood pounding in my ears.
“It’s downstairs. Don’t worry. Please.” Her voice is wheedling, childlike, annoying. Her smile reveals tiny white teeth, but no warmth. “Just be a good girl. Just stay.”
Be a good girl. Stay.
“I’d love to, but I can’t,” I say. “I have to get home.”
There is a gentle knock at the door. The woman turns and says, “Come in.”
I watch the handle of the door turn, slowly. The man walks in, the boy in front of him, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. The boy looks awkward, a rosy flush on his cheeks, his gaze averted from mine. He is still wearing the weird clown T-shirt, but now he is also wearing clown shoes and a sort of tailcoat in black with a lime-green lining. His face is made up with oily paints: red circles on his cheeks, a blue line around his mouth.
“Go on then,” says the man.
The boy smiles shyly. He has a big fabric bag slung over his shoulder that he unhooks and lays on the floor by his feet.
Then he crouches to his haunches and puts his hands inside the bag. He brings out a piece of rope and my breath dies inside my lungs. But then he puts his hand back and pulls out a set of stacking plastic tumblers, some colorful rubber balls. He pulls out a small horn and squeezes its bulbous bottom. It emits a piercing squawk that makes me jump. Then he pulls the rope through his hands, once, twice, three times, all the while performing a strange dance. Behind him his parents stand watching, his mother impassive, his father entranced.
The fourth time he pulls the rope through his furled hand it reappears as a string of multicolored silk handkerchiefs.
chapter forty-eight
Jane narrows her eyes at the woman in the park behind the circus and says, “He disappeared? Jasper?”
