‘Another cup of tea?’ Mira said, and moved out of the room, leaving Deidre talking to the photographs.
Mira had become weary of looking back. Please, no more faces she could not name. No more afterthoughts of a past she could not recall. Why, again, had she wanted to open those bags?
As she stood by the kettle, the screaming next door was ringing in the background like a distant alarm, waxing and waning on the wind. She didn’t know how long she could bear to listen to it.
Chapter Ten
‘Can you show me how to get more jewels, Rosie?’ Noah asked.
‘Sure.’
The jolly bleep of the game filled the car as I drove them home from the bowling alley. I was grateful for five minutes of peace.
But then the chit-chat over the gaming turned nasty.
‘No, not like that.’
‘Give it to me, it’s mine.’
‘I’m just trying to show you.’
‘Give it!’
‘No!
And on it escalated, ruining my five minutes.
By the time I had parked up outside the gates, they were hitting each other.
‘Stop fighting, you two.’
And then Rosie bit Noah’s arm.
I frog-marched her from the car.
In the hall, I was down on my haunches. ‘You never, ever, ever bite anyone, do you understand?’
‘He hit me!’ she wailed.
‘Even so, you don’t bite people. It is unacceptable.’
‘La, la, la, la,’ Rosie sang, dropping the present Charlotte’s mother had given her onto the floor at my feet, and holding her hands over her ears.
My stomach was cramping with Braxton Hicks. I was at a loss. Why was she so impossible? Why did everything end in a fight? Why wouldn’t she listen to reason? That same familiar bubbling anger was rising in my body.
‘Rosie,’ I said, grabbing her by the shoulders, feeling the power of my fingertips, holding back the urge to press away her remorselessness, to make her feel how Noah felt when she bit him. ‘You’d better listen to me, young lady.’
She stuck her tongue out at me and sang louder.
I released her shoulders as though they were burning hot. If I continued holding them, I would have squeezed them too tightly.
Standing up, I took my coat off, wondering how to control my fury. I was a fully-fledged grown-up and I had no idea how to calm myself down, or what to do with my own daughter. I couldn’t just leave it. She had bitten Noah’s hand. More worryingly, she was showing no remorse. There had to be consequences.
‘Okay, if you are rude to me one more time, I am going to confiscate your going-home present.’ I snatched up the scented rubbers and pens from the floor.
She shrugged. ‘So what?’ The sparkles on her black bomber jacket glinted at me.
‘Oh right, so that doesn’t bother you. How about if I confiscate the new bag that I bought you?’
A smile flickered across her lips. ‘I gave it away already.’
‘What?’ I whispered, noticing for the first time that she wasn’t wearing it. At the bowling alley when I had picked her up, it had been too chaotic to notice anything.
‘Charlotte wanted it, so I gave it to her.’
The hurt cut so deep, I reeled back from her, as though she was monstrous.
Quietly, through clenched teeth, I hissed at her, ‘Go to your room.’
‘No.’ She looked over her shoulder, trying to be nonchalant, but I could sense she knew she was pushing me too far.
Louder this time. ‘I said, Go to your room.’
‘I don’t want to.’ She swung her arms at her side like a toddler, testing me to breaking point.
I walked towards her with my finger pointed right into her face. ‘Get up those stairs or I’ll never let you go on another play date with Charlotte as long as you live. Ten minutes! And don’t you dare come out until I get you.’
And she ran. An ear-splitting scream erupting from her lungs as she slammed the door. I could hear her throwing things around in her bedroom. Each thud or crash came with a howl like a wolf at the moon. ‘I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!’ Again and again she repeated it. Each time she said it, I flinched, as though she was throwing something directly at my head.
‘And I hate you too,’ I whispered, dying inside a little as I said it, as if all the troubles in my life were her fault.
‘Noah!’ I called.
I found him at the computer, looking up pop songs on YouTube.
I scooped him up onto my knee and sat where he had been sitting in front of the computer.
‘I think Rosie’s had a little bit too much sugar at the party, don’t you?’ I said, but my voice was wobbling and my breathing ragged. ‘How’s your hand?’
He stuck it under his thigh, hiding it from me. ‘It’s fine, Mumma.’
A tear was still in place on his cheek, a perfect droplet suspended under his eye. I wiped it away.
‘Let’s have another look.’
‘I don’t want you to be more cross with Rosie.’
‘I won’t, I promise.’
My hands were still shaking as I held his; Rosie’s wails were ringing through the house.
There were evil little red teeth marks, but the skin wasn’t broken. I kissed it better.
‘Let’s put some loud music on so we can’t hear that naughty big sister of yours screaming her head off. How about some Luther?’
‘Yeah!’
The sounds of ‘Never Too Much’ blasted out of the computer as I pressed the volume up to maximum. On screen, the eighties New Yorkers were tapping their cowboy boots and white sneakers and busting moves to Luther Vandross on their Walkmans and ghetto-blasters. I felt Noah’s little bottom wiggle to the music. I jumped up, holding his hands, and we bopped and pranced around, showcasing silly moves, throwing our arms and legs about like a pair of monkeys. Knowing I shouldn’t lift heavy things, I threw caution to the wind and swung him up into the air and round and round in my arms, boogying away the blues. Rosie’s screams might as well have been miles away in another country.
A parenting book had told me to ignore tantrums, and so here I was, ignoring her, ghetto-blaster style.
And then, cutting through the cranked up music, I heard a scream from Rosie that set my teeth on edge and my heart pounding. The pitch had changed. It suggested pain rather than attention-seeking. I dropped Noah’s hands. ‘Stay down here, Noah,’ I cried, and bolted up the stairs and burst into Rosie’s room.
She was on her knees in the middle of an explosion of shattered, shimmering glass, holding her bloody fingers up to me, tears streaming down her face.
The large framed photograph that had been hanging above her mantle-piece was on the floor, the glass broken in pointed splinters and shards. The professional shots of Rosie and me in the frame, cuddling and laughing against a white studio backdrop, were smeared in her blood.
‘Oh my God!’ I cried, terror splitting my brain in half.
I tip-toed through the glass to rescue her, reaching under her armpits to lift her up and over the smashed pane and onto the carpet in the corridor.
‘I’m so sorry Mummy,’ she whimpered, holding her palms out.
Frantically, I inspected her hands, back and front, and wrists, up and down her arms, her neck, her legs, back and front, up her thighs, for the source of the blood flow. There were two or three lacerations on her shins, and cuts on the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, and then a deeper cut through the centre of her left palm, which seemed to be the main source of the blood.
‘Oh darling. It’s okay now. You’re all in one piece. That’s all that matters. Come on, let’s get it cleaned up,’ I said, and I carried her to the bathroom, her chest heaving into mine as she cried and clutched at me.
The blood swirled through the running water in the sink like pink ribbons. I worried there was too much blood, that it needed stitches. I had another look to see how deep it was, imagining the five-hour wait at A & E. Peter was due back home any minute. He’d know what to do.