My eyes flit back to the locked door every time hers do, both of us expecting someone to careen in and restrain her, but they do not.
Finally, the woman raises the tissue to the camera.
Help me. My name is Anna Derwent.
She holds it up for a long time, then writes again. I scrub forward to the next note.
I have been here about a year.
And the next.
His name is Simon Hughes.
And the next.
I don’t know where the house is.
I can only see the garden.
The final square says, simply:
Help me.
She lowers it and looks to the door. It does not open.
The woman’s attention snaps back to Blue; I can see him clearlynow that we are not attached to him. He must be meowing; his whole body is shuddering with it.
The woman looks over to a small shelf above the sink, where several small tins of food are stacked.
She fetches one and opens the ring-pull can, placing it in front of the camera on the table. It is tuna.
Blue leaps up in front of us and starts eating.
The woman reattaches us to his neck as he eats.
I scrub forward: the tuna is finished; she lifts us back up to the window and shoos us away.
In the nondescript garden, we watch Anna Derwent seal the small window behind us. She balls up and flushes the tissues, rinses the tin of tuna. We turn away and gambol into the bushes.
Her name is Anna Derwent, and his name is Simon Hughes.
Chapter 26
The Police Station
The police station doesn’t looklike the ones on TV.
Laptop clutched underarm, I wonder if the police stations I’ve seen on TV are just sets, or maybe regional stations, which must be cleaner, newer, with more funding—certainly more than this one, because this police station does not inspire confidence at all. It looks like the kind of place crimes happen, not where they are solved.
The waiting area smells of urine and homeless clothing. It is empty. The front desk is abandoned.
Behind me, back out on the street, through the large motion-sensor glass doors, an older woman is shouting loudly at her fabric shopping cart, as if it were a person. And from the vehemence of her garbled words, it is clear that she is angry with it.
I watch as the automatic doors reopen every time she gesticulates toward the cart.
I turn back to the reception counter, but it is still unmanned. I suddenly feel the tiredness of months inside me, perhaps awoken by the grogginess from the pills I took last night.
The lobby is flooded with bright streetlight through the floor-to-ceiling glass frontage, which no doubt looked impressive when it was first installed, but is now riddled with scratched graffiti tags and smeared.
