Page 54 of 59 Minutes

MRS DABB

It’s not cold but she shivers in her coat, hands shaking on the wheel.

In nine minutes’ time … A moment that spins out into the past and the future, but that pins everyone in place now, sealing them in amber.

Will the survivors ever truly get over whatever they had to do in the last, terrible scramble?

In the far distance, hazard lights throb on the horizon. It’s unusual to see flashing lights like this out here, these are city things. Neon skies and emergencies. That’s what people come here to escape.

Home is in sight and she speeds towards it, pulling silently into the driveway next to the old Land Rover.

The lights are still on behind the curtains and the cottage glows softly like a Christmas decoration.

The kind of gingerbread cottage that fairy tales are written about.

But Bunny’s face is not pressed to any window and Mary’s car isn’t here yet.

She’s probably taking ages wrapping up the food to bring over.

Or maybe all this is simply too much for Mary and she’s run aground.

She rushes to the front door and pats her pockets for the keys, fumbling and nearly dropping them. Shoving the door open, she calls out, ‘Bunny?’

No reply.

She paces down the hallway to the kitchen where the cakes and scones still lie in neat rows, untouched on the cooling rack. The fire has nearly gone out in the living room, a dank smokiness in the air like the day after a bonfire.

She throws off her coat and searches frantically in all the places that haven’t been hidden in for years.

She looks behind the sagging sofa, its back fabric torn like an old jumper, ratty underwear showing through.

She checks in the space next to the bookcase, barely big enough for a human, from where rivers of dust cascade as she struggles back out and knocks into the armchair, sending an abandoned mug spinning.

A trail of cold tea sprays upwards – briefly beautiful and captivating as accidents are – and lands in a beige line across the floor.

The frozen downstairs bathroom is empty.

A relic from decades earlier, its corners encrusted with spiders no matter how many horse chestnuts lace the small windowsill.

Bunny prefers the new bathroom upstairs, they both do.

She runs up to check it now, the most luxurious room in the house, smooth where the other rooms are crumbling.

It’s empty, no misting on the shower door, no trace of bubbles in the bath, no towel dumped on the floor.

God how she misses wrapping up her tiny, wriggling daughter, after a bath.

Rabbit ears on the hooded towel, bubbles sliding off chunky legs.

She’d always been told baths relaxed babies, to include them as part of a bedtime routine.

Not her child. Baths drove her frothy with excitement until she was way too keyed up to sleep. What a relentless joy she was then.

All those promises she made that little kid, while she washed her hair or scooped bubbles from the bath to put on the end of her nose. She meant every one of them. But now look.

She sits down heavily on the toilet lid, head in her hands.

The cottage has never felt more empty. This date has been a day of mourning for so long that she thought it couldn’t get any sadder.

That grief could not hollow her out any more than it already has, because there was nothing left to take.

But there was. Because Bunny is not here.

Nor is she with Jasmine, nor at school. She’s not even at the Curtiss compound.

Today, she’d have been almost too relieved to care.

Now she has no idea where to find her daughter and it’s nearly six o’clock. She has failed her child.

Exhaustion rounds her spine and deflates her lungs. She sags so low she might just slide to the floor, through the tiles, into the dirty creases between the ceiling beams. She might as well just die there.

Loud knocks from downstairs interrupt her thoughts.

Down the stairs, along the hall, towards the kitchen where the bangs are coming from the back door.

‘Bunny?’ she calls, but if it was Bunny, she’d just let herself in. Has that old woman told the Curtiss family already? Is there a mob outside? She grabs the biggest knife from the drawer as she passes it, then pulls back the bolt on the back door.