Page 81 of 59 Minutes

MRS CARRIE DABB

TEN YEARS AFTER THE ALERT

‘Bunny!’

She pushes at the bedroom door but it doesn’t open. There’s no lock or bolt; something or someone must be pushed against it.

She presses her ear to the old wood, some part of her expecting it to have a heartbeat. She can hear the scuff-muffle of feet on carpet, the sound of whispering or maybe … maybe a mouth covered by thick, rough fingers, trying to cry out.

I want my mum.

The thought bubbles up from her chest. An ancient well, sprung. But Mum is not here. Dad is not here. Emma is not here. Pepper is not here. I need to save her myself.

‘Is that you, Ashley?’ The name is sour on her tongue, too big for her mouth. He doesn’t reply but she hears Bunny whimper.

‘I think it is you, Ashley. And …’ Her vision is whiting out, her ears roar with fear. She is disposing of a bomb with no training. Her daughter is in there, packed with dynamite.

‘Ashley?’ She waits but he doesn’t reply. ‘Ashley, I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t … I don’t know what to say ’cos you’re scaring me and I think you’re scaring Bunny too. And I … I don’t think you want to scare her or upset her.’

‘You lied to me.’

She has not heard his voice in nearly nine years, and then it was only to confirm his name and his ‘not guilty’ plea.

His legal team hadn’t put him forward as a witness.

She had watched from the corner of the public gallery, huddled with Pepper, trying to understand who he really was, and how she could have ever been intimate with someone who now seemed so monstrous, so gigantic.

She sucks in a breath. ‘I didn’t tell you about … about the baby, yeah. So I guess I lied by omission.’ She braces for a reply but none comes. Even Bunny isn’t making a sound.

Oh god, what is he doing to her in there?

‘And then when you found out, I admit that … I denied it over and over because … because you’d just killed my mother.’

She presses her cheek hard against the wooden door, grinding her cheekbone and desperately trying to find the thread of a sound from inside. A thread she could pluck and follow, that would lead her to Bunny being okay. But there is only silence now. She waits.

‘You never gave me a chance,’ he says, finally. There is a strain in his voice, like it’s costing him to find any volume. ‘If I’d known about her, about my kid, I wouldn’t have … I would have been different.’

‘Do you really believe that?’ She holds her breath; she is dealing with a wild animal and just made too sudden a movement.

Downstairs, Mary talks quickly into the phone.

Above, the flap , flap , flap of metal dragonfly wings moves closer.

He must hear the helicopter too. She is crouching, shrinking from it.

From its ten-year long shadow. She can smell burning, but it’s not real.

This closed door in front of her, that is what’s real.

The door opens inward so fast that she stumbles, nearly falling onto the carpet.

Bunny is sitting on the bed, wrapped in Pepper’s burgundy dressing gown, her beautiful dark curly hair whipped up in a towel, her face scrubbed.

Ashley is still gripping the door handle with one of his big hands.

In the other is the knife she herself grabbed from the kitchen drawer earlier.

She knows how sharp it is but Carrie rushes past it anyway and leaps onto the bed next to Bunny.

She kisses Bunny’s face, puts her own body in front of her and then turns to face him. His own curly hair is greyed and almost gone. He has Bunny’s chin. Her eyes.

‘I don’t care what you do to me,’ Carrie says, ‘but I will not let you hurt her.’

He looks down at the knife, shakes his head and lets it droop but does not put it down. ‘I would never …’ He runs out of words and slumps, scrawny in his clothes. A grey hoodie and what look like suit trousers and black clumpy shoes.

The helicopter is circling, the light flashing through the room and across the bed like a beacon. ‘My lift is here,’ he says, his Devon accent soft. No one laughs.

‘You know I didn’t hurt your granny on purpose, don’t you?’ he says to Bunny, stepping closer so she shrinks back against the wall, squashing the piled duvet, the army of teddies. She is shaking, the slippery folds of the satin dressing gown shimmering with the movement.

‘You’re scaring me,’ Bunny says.

‘My mum told you that already, didn’t she?’ Ashley says. ‘She told you I never meant to hurt your granny and you said you believed it.’

Bunny stares at him, then at her mother. ‘I didn’t … I don’t know …’

‘I believe you, Ashley,’ Carrie says. ‘I think you would have just taken the Hail Mary sentence otherwise.’

‘Everyone wanted me to,’ he says. ‘But then she’d think I really did it.’ He’s pointing the knife at Bunny, but realises what he’s doing and moves it away. ‘And I couldn’t have that.’

He puts the knife on the floor beside him, his knees audibly cracking with the movement. He looks twenty years older than he is, but Carrie probably does too. A whole generation probably do.

‘I heard what you said about me earlier,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘I came in through the kitchen to grab her and take her with me, force her to listen.’ He closes his eyes and sags, he looks exhausted, but Carrie remains rigid.

‘Seeing her in the church like that, it was … it was a really big feeling. And then when she left, I just … I just wanted to have a chance to talk to her, to my daughter. I wanted to make her see I wasn’t the man they all said I was.

The papers an’ that. Some monster. And I wanted her to know why I hated you, Carrie, for keeping her from me … ’

Carrie reaches for Bunny’s hand. It quivers in her own like a mouse.

‘But when I came in, I heard you talking about me and I went onto the cellar stairs to hide so I could listen. And what you said, Carrie … I got it. I got why you’d lied to her.

I would have lied to her. And if I’d grabbed her again, if I’d taken her, I really would have been a monster.

So I just needed to explain, just this one time.

’ He swallows and looks at Bunny, who flinches.

‘What do you want to explain to her?’ Carrie says. ‘Because you have a chance now.’

‘I’m not good with words. You said I looked sad in church, Clementine, but I wasn’t sad, I was proud. I’ve done one good thing in my life, even if I didn’t know it at the time. And I want to say that I’m sorry you got a dad like me but you’re not bad.’

Bunny stares back at him, unblinking.

‘You said earlier you were half of me and that I’m bad but none of you is bad, girl. Any good I have in me came from my mum. I didn’t know that until it was too late, but it’s true. But all your goodness came from your mum.’

He looks at Carrie and sighs. ‘Of course you didn’t want her to know about me.’

Downstairs, the front door opens and boots thump up the stairs.

‘I really am sorry about your mum, Carrie,’ he says, his voice thick. ‘She was just trying to help me.’ He walks slowly towards the noise. ‘It’s okay,’ he calls. ‘You can come and get me.’

Heavy boots crowd the tiny bedroom, scuffing school books and teddy bears. Two of them hold Ashley in place as another handcuffs him, a slick, calm movement. ‘Please don’t punish my mum for what I did,’ he says to Carrie.

Mary has stepped inside the bedroom and stares at him now. ‘It’s always the mums that suffer,’ she says.