Page 21 of 59 Minutes
MRS DABB
She looks at the time and thinks of people streaming through cities, fighting for space.
She thinks too of strangers offering kindness, of perfect strangers gripping hands and bracing for their worlds to end.
She thinks of dogs howling, pets bundled into cars that then slam into traffic, of families sheared in two by distance.
Parents at work with no hope of getting home in time, children stuck at school.
People jumping in crowded boats, motorway pile-ups and house-breaking.
She can barely breathe, her lungs stuffed with thoughts of all the desperate people doing things they would never normally do.
As she whips faster into the grey air, she thinks guiltily of Mary.
Will Mary really be okay getting herself to the cottage?
Can she even carry all that food? She could have come along after all, secured in the passenger seat, knees blanketed, strapped in place.
Today, of all days, she should not be on her own.
She did tell Mary not to open the door to anyone once she got to the cottage, didn’t she ? To lock it tight and wait for only her and Bunny?
I’m not a child. Mary’s voice chides her, and she isn’t.
She’s not old and batty either, which would be the easy thing to suggest. But she is riddled with holes.
She wears the moth-worn fabric of the grieving, and sometimes those clothes are so heavy that all Mary can do, all anyone grieving can do, is curl up in them, close their eyes and opt out.
And when that happens, mistakes are made, risks are taken or creep in unseen.
There is no room for more risk today, the atmosphere is already crackling with it.
It’s been an hour and twenty minutes since Bunny should have been home.
Over four hours since she was last seen at school.
Out there, with a secret phone, but one she hasn’t used to call home, to reassure her mother.
Why? Surely she knows that even though she’s broken multiple rules in lying, sneaking and using something she’s banned from using, being safe trumps all that.
Unless someone has stopped her making that call.
She shakes her head, it is simply not the time for thinking the worst. ‘Picture a time that you thought something bad was going to happen but everything turned out for the best,’ she hears her therapist, Miranda, say in her head. Oh, Miranda, you do not know what can of worms you’re hacking into.
Light floods the road ahead of her, turning the fog atomic white. She sucks in a breath, squints and slows, just slightly, Overhead, the roar of a helicopter shakes the car’s outer skeleton as her own organs seem to liquefy inside it. Stay on track, don’t let them scare you off course.
Whoever they’re looking for from up there, they’re unlikely to find them in this weather, among all these knotted hedgerows draped with fog.
The last time these big beasts flew around here in any number was during the floods, not that long after they’d moved into the cottage.
Terrified, she and Bunny had taken refuge upstairs in her bedroom, bringing up the old TV and DVD player that came with the place, watching cartoons from decades earlier and eating food she’d shoved into a picnic basket, imagining the rest of the kitchen would be lost to the filthy water.
She’d laced the lower floors with sandbags, buckets at the ready.
‘We will just have to learn to sail,’ she’d said to Bunny, who didn’t fall for the fake jollity but pretended not to be scared for her mother’s sake.
The two of them, locked into mirror acts of fear and denial.
They’d been spared, too high above sea level to be affected, just as Mary had reassured them they would be. She couldn’t explain to Mary that it was the helicopters, and not the water, that scared her the most.
The helicopter swings away, apparently happy that her little car needs no further investigation, dimming the air again. She breathes out, slowly, but even with the helicopter gone, there’s plenty to fear.
Oh, Bunny, why today?
She hardly gets given any pocket money, so if Mary didn’t buy her a phone, who did? Surely not a boyfriend?
Thoughts of cars and trucks squealing around, no seat belts.
Zitty chins and greasy fingers. Men five, ten, fifteen years older, too immature for women their own age, too gross, too demanding.
Creeps. Older creeps. Slipping their arms around narrow young waists, convincing girls they’re women, that they’re lucky to have been noticed.
When these beautiful young girls shine brighter than they ever could.
But she’s only thirteen, and a young thirteen at that.
Still so loving. Resting her chin on her mother’s head, already so much taller, her laughter reverberating through both their skulls.
She still sucks her thumb, hooking one finger over her nose, eyes glazing over as she watches the screen.
Still the milk drunk baby she once was. Still my baby.
Should I go to the police?
The thought makes her press harder on the accelerator.
Don’t be ridiculous. They have enough on today. Christ.
She pulls onto a little-known track that will take her via a back road to Chagford, just showing as a hazy glow through the fog. The streets will be full already. Faces she might see often at the produce exchange or the community beehive contorted in anguish.