Girl A(78)

No Judases at his table.

That was when the Binding Days began.

I followed Noah’s mother through the village. There were spindly stone cottages craning to see the road. The bells were ringing at the church, but there was no one around. There was a cafe with a queue of walkers, and dogs lapping at water bowls outside. There was a noticeboard advertising the choir and Kittens For Sale. I passed a sprawl of teenagers at the cenotaph, sucking on ice lollies, their limbs entwined. The hills were speckled with mountain bikers and sheep.

Noah’s mother walked fast, with the chair in one arm and the other arm swinging. Her legs were scrawled with varicose veins, but otherwise, I could have been following a child. We crossed a stream, subdued by the summer and busy with ducks, and turned down a new road. Here, the houses were bigger and further apart. She stopped at the third one on the street and propped the chair against the wall.

‘Mrs Kirby?’ I said, and she turned around, with her face open. The front of her T-shirt said Bondi Lifeguards.

‘One of them,’ she said. ‘My wife isn’t home.’

‘I think you have a son,’ I said, ‘called Noah?’

‘I just left them,’ she said. ‘Is everything—’

She looked at me properly, then. She had the door unlocked, but she didn’t open it.

‘No,’ she said.

‘I’m not—’

‘Please,’ she said. Her mouth was clenched in one straight cut, and as she shook her head, the sun-ruined skin at her neck went from taut to slack. ‘Please.’

‘I just need a minute,’ I said.

‘Tell me who you are. And tell me what you want.’

‘My name’s Lex,’ I said. ‘I’m his sister.’

I shrugged.

‘Girl A,’ I said.

She slumped against her house. I thought that she didn’t know whether to plead or to gut me. I took a step away, back onto their lawn. I had been holding up my hands, but I realized how stupid I must look, and dropped them.

‘Early on,’ she said, ‘I expected this every day. Every time the door went, or the telephone – I’d think: This is it. Then a bit of time goes past, and you start to think it might be all right. The press, the family – they might never look for you. You start to think you’ve got away with it.’

She closed her eyes.

‘Sarah always said that someone would come,’ she said. ‘But the last few years – I didn’t think about it at all.’

‘I’m not looking for him,’ I said. ‘I don’t need to see him. It’s just – administration.’

‘Administration,’ she said. She laughed.

‘I just need a signature. For our mother’s estate.’

‘Your mother,’ she said.

She opened the door and entered the house. ‘You can’t be here,’ she said, ‘when they get back.’ In the hallway mirror I saw the two of us together. My face looked sunken and stunned. A whole different species. She stepped onto the side of her trainers to take them off, and I reached for my shoes.

‘Don’t,’ she said.

She walked barefoot through her home. There was one great white room, with the garden behind it. Along the back windows was a wooden table, with two benches, and a scatter of belongings: keys, envelopes, something half knitted. She wrestled with the patio doors, and heat fell into the room. A cat padded after it. I sat slowly, expecting her to tell me to stand. Instead, she handed me a glass of water and sat opposite me. Her eyes twitched across my face. She was looking for her son, I thought. Like there were parts of him I’d already stolen.

‘You might have seen,’ I said, ‘that my mother died.’

I laid the documents across the table, and I explained them to her the way I would explain them to a client. I talked with a performative precision, a notch louder than usual. It was one of the few times I could hear my own voice. Here was a photocopy of the will. Here were our applications. Here was where she should sign.

‘Give me a minute,’ she said.

She collected reading glasses from between the cushions of the sofa. Above the mantelpiece, there was a dreamcatcher and a photograph of my brother’s family. I tried not to look at them. While she was reading, I checked on Evie’s flight. She was mid-air, bouncing towards me every time I refreshed the map. The cat hopped onto the table and surveyed me with great disapproval.

‘Don’t worry,’ Noah’s mother said. ‘She looks at everybody like that.’

She tightened her ponytail.

‘How are the rest of you?’ she said.

I thought: How long do you have?

‘We’re doing well,’ I said. ‘All things considered.’

‘And do they know,’ she said, ‘where to find us?’

She dug a pen out of the fruit bowl and clicked the end of it.

‘No. They don’t.’

‘When we first brought him home,’ she said, ‘Sarah would have visions. Nightmares, really. Cameras in the cradle. Your mother, driving down from Northwood in the middle of the night. She bought a bespoke alarm system. The ones with lasers, like in the films. A badger would come up the side of the house, and she’d be out there, with a torch and the Stanley knife. It took years, for her to sleep the way she used to.’