He sat on the floor in the corner of the room and hugged his knees. He stayed in that position for a long time, too drained to do anything else. He watched dawn entering the room and thought about Irina’s sightless eyes, never seeing the light come. A cockroach ran across his foot. He heard the first tram taking to the street. He waited for the builders, imagined them climbing up the scaffold, looking down and seeing the woman lying like a discarded doll. He wondered if he would hear their cries of discovery from his room.

He heard a massive engine, gears grinding, and crawled over to the window. The dumpster was swinging in midair, like a child’s toy from this distance. Somehow he had hoped that in the inter-vening hours she might have disappeared, but she was still there, broken and limp. The dumpster was swung onto the back of the enormous pickup lorry and settled with a great metallic clunk that echoed through the cold air. The lorry drove away, Martin followed its progress along the road, watching it move slowly, turning onto a bridge over the Neva. At the end of the bridge it turned and disappeared from sight.

He had thrown a human being away like rubbish.

At the airport, going through passport control, he waited for one of the terrifying officials to put a hand on his chest and feel his racing heart, to stare him in the eyes and see his guilt. But he was waved through with a sullen gesture. He had thought retribution would be swift, but it turned out that justice was going to be measured out slowly, rolling him flat until he simply didn’t exist.

In a small duty-free shop, he bought a fridge magnet for his mother, a little varnished wooden matryoshka. On the flight home the grocer sat with the couple from Gravesend, squeezed into a seat that was too small for him, and told them that he had ticked off another item from his to-do-before-I-die list. The in-flight meal was served, a sorry concoction of congealed pasta. Martin wondered if Irina’s stall remained boarded up or if someone had already taken it over. The grocer took ill as they came in to land. An ambulance collected him on the tarmac. Martin didn’t even look.

There was a woman he recognized from the book signing earlier in the day. He had no idea why she was here. She was clutching a copy of The Monkey Puzzle Tree and screaming. He thought about making a joke, saying to her, “It’s not that bad, is it?” but he didn’t. There was a blond girl who shouted something in Russian at the crazy Honda driver. The Honda driver was going to kill the blond Russian girl, and then Jackson stepped in to save her, to sacrifice himself. The Honda driver was engorged with rage. There was something wrong with the minds of people like that, people who threw dogs through windows and stuck guns to their wives’ heads. Bad brain chemistry. If Nina Riley had been here, she would have said, “Lay down your weapon, you dastardly scoundrel.” But she wasn’t here. It was just Martin.

Time slowed down. The Honda driver raised the bat in the familiar arc of annihilation. The Russian girl turned to face him. Her features changed. Her blue-doll eyes stared at him unblinking, her little rosebud lips said, “Shoot him, Marty.” So he did.

48

Apregnancy-testing kit.

Jackson had run (literally) back to the flat, dropped his blood-stained clothes on the bathroom floor, jumped in the shower, and washed awayTerence Smith from his life. For a mad second he had contemplated running all the way from the Hatter house to Julia’s venue, but he could see that it might look a little too dramatic to arrive covered in blood. Save it for Macbeth.

He had been multitasking (as they said), pulling on clothes, phoning for a taxi, regarding his harrowed face in the steamy mirror, when he happened to glance down and see it.

He plucked the pregnancy test out of the wastebasket and stared at it as if it were an object from the moon. It was the last thing he was expecting to find, and yet why not? It had never happened in the two years they were together, but here it was. Blue. It was blue. Everyone knew what that meant. It explained everything, her mood swings, her loss of appetite (for sex and food), her odd diffidence. Julia was pregnant! What an extraordinary idea-Julia was having a baby. His baby. We’re having a baby. A baby for Julia. There were a lot of different ways of saying it, but it all came down to the same thing, there was a microscopic new life inside Julia, a small creature nestling inside a burrow inside the woman he loved. He wondered if it was a boy. Wouldn’t that be something, to have a son, to be the father his own father never was. He still had the little peanut baby doll in his pocket, he shrugged his jacket on and felt for it, like a talisman, a rosary bead, turning it over and over in his hand.

A baby would heal Julia. The lost Olivia would somehow be re-born in Julia’s own baby. A baby would make everything right for Julia, and for the two of them. A couple. If they were going to be parents, then one way or another she was going to have to come to terms with that word. A baby would heal Jackson too, close up some of his wounds. What had Louise said? “Sperm meets egg and bam. It can happen to the best of us.” And it had happened to Julia.

Not a new path, but a new world to walk in.

49

Louise could hear classical music playing in the living room. The house lights were off and instead a scented candle was burning in the hearth. He had put Classic FM on the radio. Her heart broke for the way he had tried to deal with everything. She could see the back of Archie’s head above the sofa. Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts, shut not up thy merciful ears to our prayers. She must have made a noise because he turned his head slightly and said, “Mum?” She could hear the tearful tremor in his voice.

“Archie?” She approached the sofa slowly. She bit down hard on her lip to try to stop the howl that was trying to escape from some deep, deep place inside. Archie looked up at her and said quietly, “I’m sorry, Mum.” His eyes were rimmed with red, he looked ghastly. In his arms he was cradling Jellybean as if he were a newborn baby, but he was deflated and shrunk, the life all gone from him. He was wrapped in an old sweater of Louise’s. “I thought he’d like to smell you,” Archie said. Another turn of the corkscrew. Her heart in shreds. “It’s okay to cry, Mum,” he said, and the pain finally forced its way out-a terrible wail of lamen-tation, a high-pitched keening that sounded as if it belonged to someone else.

She hadn’t been present at her cat’s birth, and now she had missed his death. “But you had everything in between,” Archie said. It was disturbing how like an adult he sounded. “Here,” he said, carefully passing his sad, swaddled bundle over to her. “I’ll make a cup of tea.”

She unwrapped the cat and kissed him on the head, the ears, the paws. Even this shall pass.

When Archie came back with the tea it was sweet, he must have heard it somewhere on television, hot, sweet tea in times of crisis. She had never taken sugar in tea in her life, but there was something unexpectedly comforting about it.

“He had a good life,” Archie said. He wasn’t old enough for it to be a cliché to him.

“I know.” Love was the hardest thing. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.