‘What will you do?’
‘I’ll take photos, maybe even use video, and I’ll follow him – find out where he lives and who he is.’
She saw me to the door. I motioned to the array of locks and bolts. ‘You’ve made the house secure – that’s good. But he’s not likely to hurt you,’ I tried to reassure her. ‘I realise it’s an awful strain but it’s very unlikely he’ll use violence against you.’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘that’s what Mrs Henderson told me. But it doesn’t change what it feels like. I’m really scared; he’s hurting me already, it’s messing my life up.’ I could hear that panic again. Then she whispered: ‘I’m so frightened.’
Yeah, so would I be, I thought, and I would take great satisfaction in running the little creep to ground.
‘Mummy,’ Maddie stood in the kitchen doorway, hands on her hips. ‘There’s a gigantic slug in the sandpit.’
‘Is there?’ I emptied the washing machine. Too late to peg it all out now but the forecast for the morning looked promising.
‘Come and get it out now.’
‘And slug poo,’ Tom shouted from outside.
‘It’s nearly bedtime,’ I warned them.
I scooped the brown and orange slug onto a trowel. It shrunk to a glistening lump of muscle and I dropped it into one of the beer traps I’d got dotted round the garden. At Tom’s insistence I removed the slug poo too and put that on the soil.
While Maddie carefully sculpted a mermaid’s house in the sand I wandered round dead-heading the pansies and the petunias, tidying up the tubs and baskets. Tom trundled the toy wheelbarrow round after me. Although there was only a year between Tom who was four, and Maddie, five going on six, he was still very much a little boy, short and stocky, hardly more than a toddler, while Maddie, in the midst of a growth spurt, looked lanky and skinny. Her body had assumed the proportions of a child now and she scorned anything she regarded as babyish.
It took me an hour and a half to get them both bathed, dressed and into bed, stories told and books read.
Ray was out. He’d gone for a drink with some of his fellow students from the computer course he’s doing at Salford University. He earns his living as a joiner but he wants a change. He says he’s had enough of manual labour and lousy working conditions.
It was barely warm enough to sit out but it was light and dry. And after all, this was the only summer we’d get. I put on an old fleecy top, found a blanket and the book I was reading, and fetched a lager from the fridge.
