ANNA BUCK WAS crazy. Anyone could see.
Every morning she sat in the street. Not against the wall like a homeless person, but right in the way, where commuters had to split around her with their phones and iPods plugged into their ears, and children circled her idly on their bikes like little Apaches.
Once a day, come rain or shine, Anna opened the grubby front door in the Victorian terrace and edged outside. No sooner had she opened the door than she slipped through and closed it again, fast, checking behind her as if she were trying to keep a cat in the house.
She always wore the same thing: a big blue waterproof, with sleeves that covered her right down to the fingertips. She kept her eyes down and the hood up, so that her face had an undersea pall. Head covered and bowed, Anna didn’t need to look up to know exactly where she was going – diagonally across the wide pavement and on to the cement of the garage forecourt.
There she sank slowly to her knees and started to clean.
Every day, Anna Buck brushed the cement with a toothbrush, wiped it down with a cloth, and then polished it to a gemstone shine.
Nobody stopped. People were busy and had other places to be. If they looked they just glanced, and only if they glanced again might they have noticed what it was that she was cleaning.
Five footprints in the cement.
Five little footprints leading away from the sooty houses to who-knew-where …
Today was dry and the prints were dusty, and Anna used the toothbrush to clear the grit and dirt from the little rounded indentations where the toes had been. When the large pieces had been brushed away, she pressed her forefinger into the big toe-print, to lift away the dust. She thought of Daniel’s toes – so small and pink and wiggly.
This little piggy went to market …
Pink and wiggly-giggly. She’d only had to start the rhyme to make him squirm with anticipation – his eyes made sparkling crescent slits by his chubby cheeks, and his small white teeth showing top and bottom with his squeals of laughter.
Her finger fitted cosily into the next toe-print.
This little piggy stayed at home.
She was still on the second toe – the tip of her forefinger fitted the second toe perfectly, all snug and cosy.
This little piggy stayed at home.
Daniel hadn’t stayed at home. Daniel had gone and he hadn’t come back.
No roast beef, no none, no weee-weee-weee all the way home.
Just.
Gone.
Anna pressed her pinkie into the third indentation, then the fourth.
The fifth – the little toe – was too small even for her pinkie, and she lowered herself like a supplicant to blow the dust from it, before wiping the rest of the footprint clean – careful along the inner arch because Daniel was so ticklish, and then around the heel, dabbing the last of the dust out with the cloth. As she did she could feel his heels in her hands again, cupping them in her palms during all those long-ago nappy changes, making his little legs pedal bicycles in the air, as he giggled to the scent of talcum powder.
He would laugh and she would laugh and James would laugh. It seemed impossible now – the very idea of laughter.
He’ll be a sprinter – look at those thighs. He’ll be a dancer, pointing his toes. He’ll play for Spurs – what a kick!
Daniel had been easy to potty train. They said boys were harder than girls but Daniel had been out of nappies by his second birthday, and loved his big-boy jeans and his Batman pants. He called them his Bad Man pants and she and James had never corrected him because it was just so cute, and gave them a ridiculous level of pleasure every time he said it.
Anna sobbed. It happened sometimes without notice and she didn’t try to stop it. She couldn’t. Her tears were like breathing; there was no way of damming them. She’d tried in the early days, but it hadn’t worked. Now she bent to her work and sobbed openly and didn’t even care where she was or who saw her.
One tear plopped into the footprint and she cursed in her head and quickly soaked it up with the cloth. Salt and acid rain were death to cement and concrete.
After she’d got all the soot and dirt out of the prints, she opened the wax and started to polish them, to protect them.
Further up on the edge of the forecourt someone called Big Mike had written his name in the same wet cement. But nobody had ever cared for Big Mike, and already the shallow letters were starting to wear and fade, the edges softened by rain and passing feet.
That wasn’t going to happen to Daniel’s prints.
Never.
The fierceness of the thought stopped Anna’s tears for a moment and she wiped her nose on a blue sleeve and drew a deep new breath, enlivened by her own determination to keep her son’s last known steps as fresh and clean as on the morning they were made, exactly four months ago.
She couldn’t stop people walking across them – not once she returned to the flat, at least. But she could make them shine, and she did every day that it wasn’t raining. When it was raining, she just came out and sat leaning over them for a while, head down, like a dying squaw – saving the footprints from wear for a short while, before hurrying back indoors before the baby could wake up.