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‘Where are you off to?’ I called after her. ‘Your plate won’t get clean if you put it next to the dishwasher, you know. Cake doesn’t bake outside the oven, does it?’
‘Oh my God,’ she shouted back, already at the foot of the stairs. ‘I’m doing my contouring tutorial.’Bang bang bangwent her feet. ‘I told you, like five thousand—’Slamwent her bedroom door.
Contouring, I thought. Didn’t that have to do with maps?
That night, my clothes stood up on their own like the Invisible Man. A kitchen knife floated in the air at the end of a sleeve, the steel blade glinting in the dark. Daggers pierced skin. Blood oozed. Sirens wailed. My own face came in and out of the fog: moonlit and pale and weeping.
In the early hours, I broke from those troubling dreams salt-crusted as a fat white slab of cod. I was shivering, exhausted, sweat running down my cleavage, bottom sheet soaked through. I hadn’t sweated like that since I was breastfeeding Kieron, and that too had gone hand in hand with the visions. Except back then they happened in the day as well. I’d be chopping onions for tea and next thing I’d see myself throw the knife at Kieron as he lay sleeping in his Moses basket. It’s not something I talk about to anyone. Only Mark and Lisa knew about it at the time, and I don’t even talk to them about it anymore. Blue Eyes will have read it in my notes, if she’s requested them from my GP, which she’s bound to have done. It was Lisa who phoned Mark, Lisa who phoned for an ambulance. The NHS were amazing. The right diagnosis, the right drugs and the right person to talk to, and they got me back on track within the year. I can still remember the doctor, how kind she was when I cried into my hands and told her I was mad, mad, mad.
‘I prefer not to call it madness,’ she said. ‘It’s really just love. Love on steroids, if you like. The love we have for our children particularly can be terrifying.’
I’ll never forget her saying that. It helped me so much at the time, and I still often think of it and her. Love on steroids. My first baby, I was overwhelmed by love. Made mad by love for my little boy. I’d thought I loved Mark, and I did, but this! It was the most petrifying thing I’d ever experienced. It was beyond any kind of control. It took some strong meds and a kind psychiatrist to help me understand that my fears were manifesting themselves in frightening fantasies of my own making. The fear of anything bad happening to my baby was so deep in me it became a reality in those moments. My love was a knife sailing through the air. And it was me throwing it.
Downstairs, the pink pre-dawn filtered through the patio doors. I sat with a cup of tea and trawled through the local news sites.
One dead and several injured in knife attack outside McDonald’s in Birkenhead.
Young lads, as per. One arrest. The usual statistics. At least they’d charged someone this time. The related links had an article about weapon checks in primary schools after a four-year-old was found carrying a knife. Police seized knuckledusters, swords and a meat cleaver. One child had adapted a fidget spinner with a spike and made it into a weapon.
I made another brew and cleaned the kitchen, put a wash on and made sandwiches for work for Mark and myself before I sent the story and the article to the printer, slid both into plastic sleeves and clipped them into my file. I was saying a few words for the victims, their families and friends when the doorbell went.
On the step, a lanky blonde stood shivering in a silk dressing gown. Seven o’clock in the morning. I was cold just looking at her.
‘I’m Ingrid Taylor,’ she said, as if she were apologising. ‘I’ve just moved into the flats opposite and in all the upheaval I’ve mislaid the teabags. I wondered if you’d have a spare one. I’ll find them eventually so I can pay you back.’
‘You don’t have to pay me back for a teabag, love,’ I said. ‘The Edwards family will still eat.’
Her forehead wrinkled. I smiled to show I was joking, and she opened her mouth in an O of relief.
‘Oh my God, thanks. That’s really kind of you.’
She struck me as quite posh for round here, from the way she spoke, the out-of-proportion gratitude posh people have when they talk to the hoi polloi and her silk dressing gown – which I didn’t dream might be actual silk; she only told me that later. Shoulders hunched, she appeared fragile but glamorous. A bit Blanche DuBois, if you know what I mean. I felt sorry for her in the way normal people do for a certain kind of vulnerable but beautiful woman, do you know what I mean? Men, especially.
Blue Eyes is nodding, but I suspect she’s humouring me. ‘So, you gave her a teabag?’Get on with it, woman.
‘I invited her in, actually. She looked like she was about to burst into tears.’
I can picture soppy Ingrid as if it were last week. The silk robe was olive green with flowers embroidered down the front, the ties knotted around an impossibly skinny waist. She was almost leaning backwards, as if waiting for a second invitation.
‘Come in then if you’re coming,’ I said. ‘It’s chilly out. Kitchen’s through the back.’
‘Thank you.’ In a whiff of perfume I didn’t recognise, she scurried through to the kitchen and stood with her fingertips pressed together at her waist, shoulders still round her ears.
‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘Don’t stand on ceremony.’
‘Thank you. It’s kind of you to let me in.’ She sat, looked around her as if doing a recce for a film shoot or something. ‘You were filing?’
I followed her eyes to my clip file, which I quickly picked up and took over to the dresser. ‘Just bank statements. A very exciting household is this.’
She forced a brief laugh.
Before Blue Eyes asks me anything about the file, I tell her that Ingrid was a funny mix. Obviously not a hugger or a smiler. Not a great sense of humour either, apparently.
‘So how’re you settling into the street?’ I asked her once I’d got us some coffee.
‘It’s early days. I’m still unpacking.’ She gave a sad smile, a half nod. She pushed her thumb to her mouth and tore off a strip of thumbnail, picked it out of her mouth and rolled it between her thumb and forefinger. She patted at her robe.
I recognised the gesture, saw the rectangular bulge in her silk pocket.
