Page 9 of 59 Minutes
MRS DABB
Why today? Has her family not suffered enough on this date?
She closes her eyes and knuckles her temples, as if she might find her daughter hiding in the dark there.
Think.
There is only one other person who would have bought Bunny a phone … aka the softest touch in town. Bunny’s grandmother. Back in the hallway, she picks up the handset and presses the programmed number for ‘Mary Dabb’. Nothing happens. She tries, ‘Mary – mobile’. Nothing.
This is not totally unexpected, especially today.
Mary pulls the landline out from the wall on difficult days, throws her mobile across the room, pulls the curtains and doesn’t answer the door.
On the most difficult days of all, Mary switches her hearing aids off and powers down, just outright rejects the world.
And this is definitely a difficult day. Does Mary know what’s happening? Can she even hear the siren?
If she bought Bunny this phone in secret, what else might she know about her granddaughter?
Does she know about the fake note? God, did she write it ?
No, that’s insane. She’s an indulgent grandmother, not a partner in crime.
But maybe she knows something that explains where Bunny might have gone.
Maybe she knows something without realising its importance.
Sometimes, secrets skip a generation.
Outside, an old injury tingles like a warning for rain but the skies are still a solid moonlit grey. Fog slowly closing in on the world out here. It’s bizarrely dry for November but bizarre weather is nothing new here.
The air is crisp and smoky from the pump-out of the stoves, almost festive.
Along the garden hedge, Christmas trees are lined up in size order like the von Trapp children.
Each one an aide-memoire. An archive of Christmas past that mirrors the different heights of a growing girl, whose notches are immortalised on the inside of the cellar door.
At ten, she was as tall as her grandmother.
At eleven, she caught up to her mother, who will soon have to stand on a stool to score the line across the wood.
Despite her height though, she is still a little girl.
‘We’re cosy girls, Mum,’ Bunny likes to say.
Both homebodies, preferring to be bundled up from top to toe.
Most evenings after school, homework diligently done despite the mess she does it in, Bunny will appear in the living room swathed in flannel pyjamas and an ancient dressing gown.
Her feet are usually in rabbit slippers whose soft ears droop towards the floor.
They’ll each curl themselves into a corner of the sofa and watch old films and comedies they’ve seen eight, ten, twenty times already.
It’s a small and peaceful life. So why isn’t Bunny here living it?
On the gravel drive, an ancient Land Rover sits next to a newer, much smaller, electric car. The former can cover all terrain but it’s unreliable and the last thing she needs is to break down in the middle of nowhere, the threat growing closer and no sign of Bunny.
She climbs into the small car and looks back at their home as she pulls away. The cottage seems tiny and vulnerable. Over a mile from its neighbour in one direction – a holiday cottage often empty. And Mary the other way, herself tiny and vulnerable.
She stamps on the accelerator, pulling herself forward towards the windscreen and squinting out into the fog as she goes faster still.
The car whistles along in near silence, no growling engine to warn people she’s coming.
The roads will be treacherous enough for people not used to them, but she only cares about one person.
And if anyone on these roads gets in her way, she’ll drive straight over them.
The television said to stay home but the television does not have a daughter out here. Loose, unprotected and maybe totally unaware of what’s happening.