After Anna. Alex Lake

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СКАЧАТЬ criticized her or she criticized him and they argued. Right or wrong didn’t come into it. Not giving in was what mattered. You didn’t give an inch. You stood your ground. Sometimes she felt like Tom Petty singing ‘I Won’t Back Down’.

      But not this time. What could she say? It’s not my fault? It was her fault, at least partially, and partially was enough. Maybe she had an excuse. Maybe she’d been unlucky. Maybe she could have been late a thousand times and each time Anna would have been sitting there with Mrs Jameson, eating a biscuit, and telling the teacher about her favourite place to go on the weekend. All those things could be true, but they didn’t alter the only truth that made any difference: if she had been on time, Anna would be asleep in her bed right this minute.

      So Brian was right. Cruel to point it out, but right. Perhaps if they’d been happily married, perhaps, even if they’d been unhappily married but planning to stay that way, he would have been the one to support her, to make her feel less wretched, but she had told him she wanted him out of her life, and with that she had given up any right to his support.

      She reached for her car keys. Her hands struggled to pick them up. She wiped her eyes clear of tears.

      ‘I’m going out,’ she said.

      He didn’t reply. He just leaned on the kitchen counter and looked out of the window and sipped his scalding tea.

       iii.

      Reminders of Anna were everywhere.

      Her booster seat in the rear-view mirror. A thin summer raincoat in the footwell. Biscuit crumbs on the backseat.

      Brian had told her off for letting Anna eat in the car, for making such a mess.

      Who cares now? Julia thought. Who cares about crumbs or mess or late bedtimes? We spend so much time worrying about the little things, when they don’t matter. And we let the things that do matter slip.

      When she turned the ignition a CD of kids’ songs came on. She sat back and listened.

       Do your ears hang low?

       Do they waggle to and fro?

       Can you tie them in a knot?

       Can you tie them in a bow?

      Anna had found that song particularly amusing, and had developed a dance in which she rocked from foot to foot and mimed tying her dangly ears in knots and bows.

      Julia pulled into the street. There was a light on in the house next door, and she saw the upstairs curtain twitch. Mrs Madigan: a village stalwart in her nineties, who had an opinion on everything, and who expected, by virtue of her age – as though age conferred wisdom – that people would listen to it. She was known to be both ‘formidable’ and ‘quite a character’ and widely surmised to have a heart of gold beneath her tough exterior. People often commented on how it must be ‘interesting’ or ‘fun’ or ‘quite something’ to have her as a neighbour. Julia didn’t tell them what she really thought: it was a pain. Once you got to know her you realized that Mrs Madigan’s public persona of forthright grumpiness did not, in fact, hide a beneficent and kindly old woman; it hid a sour and angry old woman. She didn’t like it when Anna was noisy in the garden and she thought nothing of shouting at her over the fence, or of complaining to Julia or Brian about their hooligan child. She would ask Brian to help when something broke in her house, and then, when he finished whatever DIY task she had assigned him, she would complain that he had done it wrong, and then ostentatiously get a tradesman in to redo the work. Above all, she complained incessantly to Julia about her two children and many more grand- and great-grandchildren, and how they were selfish and lazy and ignored her.

      Julia didn’t blame them. She would have ignored her too, had she been able to do so.

      The neighbours on the other side – a childless couple in their late-forties – were much better. They didn’t have much to do with them, which Julia was becoming convinced was the key to good neighbourly relations. Good fences make good neighbours, the saying went, and it was true.

      Julia wasn’t sure where she was going, but she found herself heading for the local playground. It was a pretty unprepossessing place: just a set of swings, a slide, and a roundabout on a patch of grass at the end of a residential street, but Anna and she went there often when they had an hour or so to fill. The police had checked it, but it was possible that, since then, Anna had found her way there.

      Possible. Not likely.

      She kept her headlights on full beam and drove slowly, scanning the streets for any sign of her daughter.

      At the park, she switched off the engine and the lights cut out. She was glad; she’d found that the yellow pools disturbed her. They illuminated only a portion of the world and it reminded her of the futility of this search. Anna could be anywhere, but Julia, like the beams of light, could look in only one place at a time.

      She was reminded of a conversation she’d had with a friend, Prissy (short for Pricilla, a boarding school nickname used only by her intimates, and retained as the name had a certain irony: Prissy had shown herself to be anything but, a reputation sealed by an affair with a young teacher, Sarah, who lost her job over it). The conversation had taken place a year or so back, just after a teenage girl had been found in the basement of a house only a few streets away from her home in some dusty Middle-American city. She’d been there for a decade; Prissy had declared that, if her son (she had a son the same age as Anna) went missing there was no chance he could be hidden for so long so close to home, because she would search every house in the vicinity from top to bottom, whether the occupants and police liked it or not. Julia had agreed. She would do the same. It was an easy thing to say, fired by indignant parental fervour, and it carried with it an implicit criticism of the mother of the American girl. Why hadn’t she done that? A good mother would have.

      A good mother would have been there to pick up her daughter, as well.

      It wasn’t as easy as she and Prissy had imagined, however. Firstly, there were a lot of houses, and secondly, it seemed that the police and occupants had more say over who entered them than expected.

      But at least she was doing something.

      ‘Anna!’ she called. ‘Anna!’

      She did not have a torch, so she used the one on her iPhone and swept the park. The swings were empty, the slide a silhouetted dinosaur.

      ‘Anna!’ she shouted. ‘Anna!’

      ‘Who’s Anna?’ a voice said, the accent strong: ooze Annoh?

      She jumped and pointed the beam in the direction of the voice. Two teenage boys were sitting on the roundabout. What the hell were they doing out here at this time? One of them was holding a bottle. He took a swig from it and passed it to his friend, then lit a cigarette.

      She smelled the smoke: make that a joint.

      ‘My daughter,’ she said.

      ‘Is she cute?’ the boy with the joint asked.

      ‘Yes,’ Julia said, then realized her error. ‘I mean, no, not in the way you mean. She’s five.’

      ‘You’re cute,’ the boy said. ‘You’re all right, anyway. Want to suck me cock?’

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