Bad Little Girl(30)

She knocked a glass off the kitchen table, and, thoughtlessly, reached to pick it up with her bare hands. Little shards of crystal were driven deep into the cushion of her palm. It took her half an hour to prise them all out with a darning needle.



* * *



The next few days turned into the next few weeks, and for the first time in her life, Claire didn’t want to go to work. Her obliging doctor told her that he was happy to sign as many stress-related sick notes as she required, and so she drifted about most days, standing blank-faced before books in the library, and buying over-packaged meals for one from Tesco. Sometimes she’d find herself on the other side of the town, with no memory of having walked there, wandering about unfamiliar housing estates and sitting on squat little benches in dirty recreation areas, trying to get her bearings.

It was an odd, dreamlike time. She felt lobotomised, tranquillised. Nothing mattered. She was wiped clean, hollowed out. The only time it lifted was when she allowed herself a drink or two before bed. That seemed to give her some sense of the ground beneath her feet, some feeling of attachment to the world. She could care about what she saw on TV at least. She didn’t drink during the day, but sometimes wondered why she didn’t.

On one of her blank perambulations around the city, she found herself on a dimly familiar street. It was early September, now, but still warm. Most of the white, pebble-dashed prefabs had a window or two open, and music, TV and conversation pooled in the streets. St George’s Cross flags drooped out of upper windows, and the streets seemed to go on for ever, curving round to form yet another line of identical houses, identical flags. Very faintly, Claire could make out fields in the distance, as the estate petered out into scrubland. Now she knew where she was: this was the Beacon Hill estate, and Claire had seen it only once, the evening she’d driven Lorna home. Strangely, the thought that she was near Lorna made her happy, lent her some small strength.

She passed a group of men sitting on a sofa in the front yard of one of the terraced houses, watching football on a TV propped up on a wheelie bin. They called out to her, but she nervously ignored them and kept walking. At the end of the street she turned right, saw that it ended abruptly with a row of lock-up garages, so she turned back, walking quickly now, determined to find her way out of this maze. But all the streets were so similar, and there were no landmarks, pubs, phone boxes – anything – to remind her of where she’d been before.

An ugly, wiry dog started trotting beside her, pausing when she paused, matching her pace exactly; an absurd accompaniment. She was near to the house with the men in the yard again, and she crossed over the road, so as not to pass too closely, but the dog chose that moment to run across and bark continuously at a terrier curled at the base of the bin. A Staffordshire cross charged out of the open door and propped itself up on the front gate, snarling. The men in the yard – large men, in strained T-shirts – shouted, frustrated at the interruption, and all eyes turned towards the interloper dog, and, by extension, Claire, frozen with self-consciousness on the opposite pavement.

The angry dogs snapped at each other, and another huge beast hurled itself against the inside of the house window, making the wheelie bin judder. The TV was only just saved from falling.

‘Get that fucking dog out of the road!’ shouted one of the men.

‘It’s not my dog!’ Claire managed.

‘Well move the thing!’

Claire snapped her fingers at the dog. Incredibly, it stopped barking and trotted placidly over to her side of the street, but then the Staffordshire cross vaulted the gate and ran towards them, all teeth, saliva and purpose. Claire let out a tiny moan of terror as it collided with her shins, knocking her to the floor, and ran over her to get to the small dog, hiding behind her, but still yapping bravely. She curled herself up into a ball, trying to protect her face, feeling the dog's breath near her hair, certain that she was going to die. But then, suddenly, it choked, and a glob of spittle landed on her closed eye. A slim man with an oddly protruding pot belly had the dog by the collar, and was heaving it off her, calling, ‘Carl! Carl! Come here and get your fucking animal!’

Claire felt the dog being lifted, and heard its angry chokes as it resisted. The smaller dog, finally seeing sense, had run away.

‘Carl!’

There was a whistle and a series of sharp claps. The dog froze, still choking. Then it twisted towards the sound.

‘Carl, come and get him!’ someone shouted.

The small boy loped across the road, touched the dog’s collar as if activating a hidden release switch; the dog sat down placidly on the floor, facing away from Claire, blinking at its master for more instruction. The boy pointed at the house and it bounded away.

Hands helped Claire to her feet. All the men in the yard were silent. She was ushered across the road, put in a deckchair and given water. An umbra of slack faces haloed the TV, staring at her. She stared back. Lorna’s house; although she’d only seen it in the dark.

‘You should keep your dog on a lead,’ a man said shakily. Pete?

‘It’s not my dog. It just followed me,’ she said

‘It’s Mervyn Pryce’s dog, from up the road,’ said an older man in a baseball cap.

‘Oh, that thing. Needs training.’ The slim man - Pete, it had to be Pete - shook his head at the ground. ‘Needs training, or tying up.’