People LIke Her(61)
She doesn’t even need to turn her head to know what I am doing.
“Anything?”
Not since seven o’clock, when there was another new picture posted (a shot of Coco asleep on the couch in front of the TV, clutching a sweater of Emmy’s like a teddy or comforter), the text accompanying it something about seizing each day as it comes and treasuring each moment with your little one. Ninety-three likes and counting. Almost forty comments.
Every day they’re getting worse. A little more vivid, a little more detailed, more mawkish. Almost the worst of it is, they don’t just have access to hundreds of photos; there are thousands. Pictures of Coco sleeping. Pictures of Coco in the bath. Pictures of her in her swimsuit in the garden. And every day another one enters the public domain. And every day the text accompanying them gets creepier. And any day now, the person posting all this shit keeps reminding us, she and Coco will get those test results back and know the verdict. Keep your fingers crossed, they keep saying. Say a prayer for us and keep us in your thoughts.
I want to kill them.
That’s the thought that comes to me as the Uber is waiting at a light and the driver asks us both again if we want him to put the window up or turn the music down, whether we’ve had a nice evening.
Whoever is doing this, I want to kill them.
Let me make this plain. I’m not speaking rhetorically. I want to kill them in the same way you would want to kill someone in the exact moment that they harmed or nearly harmed your child, in that immediate flash of parental rage you feel when some prick on a modified fixed-gear bike ignores a red light and swoops across the pedestrian crossing about six inches in front of the pram you are pushing. That feeling you get when some dickhead starts reversing their car at speed in your direction as you’re crossing the Sainsbury’s parking lot hand in hand with your toddler.
If I could get my hands on them, I’d strike them down with all the self-righteous fury of a man defending his family, of a good man pushed beyond his limit.
There are times too, when I think I would be slightly less upset, less angry, if I could work out what they were doing all this for. What kick, what satisfaction they were getting out of it. Even if it was just a financial scam, if there was a GoFundMe and they were asking for money for flights abroad and some groundbreaking operation not available on the NHS, that I think I would find less baffling—or perhaps I would be just as angry but in a slightly different way.
Emmy reaches over to pat me on the back of the hand as we’re turning onto our road and she finds that my hand is balled into a fist in my lap.
“I am going to fucking kill them,” I say.
She doesn’t react, except to lean forward in her seat and point out to the driver where it would be best to pull over. Her hand rests on the back of mine.
“I mean it,” I say. “I swear to God I mean it.”
As the car pulls up, the driver puts on the overhead light to help us check we haven’t left anything in the back, and we find ourselves, Emmy and me, face-to-face, abruptly illuminated. She looks tired in the sudden harsh light. Her forehead is lined, her eyes a little puffy. Her expression is hard to read.
“Who?” she asks, quietly but with a note of exasperation and perhaps even contempt in her voice . . . “Who are you going to kill, Dan?”
I stare at her for a moment, then look away.
“Thanks a lot, mate,” she says to the driver.
There is a brief pause at the front door as I locate my keys in the pockets of my coat, our breath hanging in the air, neither of us speaking.
I open the door as quietly as I can, gesture Emmy through ahead of me, wave silently at Doreen as her head appears from the living room, return her smile and her double thumbs-up. I slowly place my keys very quietly on the sideboard in the hall. Did we have a lovely evening? Doreen asks, and Emmy tells her it was fantastic. Wonderful food. Then Emmy sees her out and makes sure to close the door gently behind her. She tells me she’s going to get a glass of water from the kitchen and go to bed.
After she’s gone, I check the windows are locked and then I check the doors are locked and then I go back and check the windows again. I brush my teeth and have a pee and catch myself just before I flush the toilet and wake the baby up (old, clanking pipes). I rattle the front door one more time, just to check it is bolted as well as locked.
By the time I get upstairs, the bedroom light is off and Emmy is under the covers on the far side of the bed with her back to where I’m standing at the door. I rest my hand on the mattress to prevent myself stumbling or tripping over as I slip my socks and jeans off, then wrestle my shirt and V-neck sweater off over my head all in one go.
I fall asleep to the sound of a distantly circling police helicopter, sirens somewhere nearby.
Then the phone rings, and all hell breaks loose.
She seems like a lovely little girl, Coco. A little bit of a show-off at times, perhaps. A little bit headstrong. But basically a good kid, a thoughtful, gentle, good-natured, unselfish one. Goodness knows where she gets it from. I was expecting her to be a little monster. You know the sort of thing—always sucking on a sweetie, always screaming at someone, except when it is time to have her picture taken. A little prima donna. As far as I can see, she is nothing of the sort.
It is Grace that Coco reminds me of, more than anything. The same sweetness. The same kindness. The same generosity of spirit. On the playground, Coco is always the first one there when somebody falls over, helping them up. They even look a little alike. Sometimes as she is playing, as she is going down a slide or kicking her legs on one of the swings or just running around, I catch a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye and it takes me straight back to Grace’s childhood, all those years ago.