“Andrew won’t like this, no sir. Not at all.”
“Don’t think about that,” I tell her as I feel something give, the wire twisting in my hand. There is a soft clunking sound and I sit back on my heels in amazement. I can’t believe how quickly I unlocked the door.Perhaps my luck is changing, I think, and laugh sourly to myself.
“You want me to tell you a story to keep your mind off your brother?”
“I want to hear about Danny.”
I can hear the scrape of the screwdriver through the wood.
“I can tell you about mushrooms. Did you know there is a type of mushroom that glows in the dark? It’s called a—”
“Tell me a story about Danny.”
I sigh, picking at a scab on my knuckles. It’s not that I don’twantto talk about my nephew, it’s just that it’s been so long since I saw him that I barely have a story to tell her. All my recent knowledgeof my two nephews has been gleaned from social media and my mother, the original gossip network. Sometimes she would send me photographs, like the one I kept in my wallet in the hope that it would shake some conscience in me, but mostly she just sent me messages telling me how Danny was doing in school, how advanced Scout was for his age. Every time I read them, I would get a pinching feeling in my chest, like something had caught there.
“Okay, Danny. Let’s see. Why don’t I tell you about the time he nearly knocked me unconscious?”
“Okay.” She sounds out of breath, slightly pained.
I hope she has the strength to do this.
“One summer—I think it must have been about seven years ago now, when Danny was about eight years old—my sister told me that he was getting bullied at school.”
“Bullied how?”
“Well, some of the bigger kids were throwing his lunch box up on the roof of the toilet block. Sometimes they would trip him up if he was walking past. They gave him stupid nicknames—not mean, but annoying enough to get under Danny’s skin—and just made his life a bit rubbish. My sister knew I’d taken self-defense lessons and asked me to teach him some simple techniques. ‘I just want him to know how to look after himself’ were her actual words, and I said of course, no problem. How are you getting on, by the way?”
A pause. “Pretty good. I’ve got two out already. Two more to go. My wrist hurts.”
“I know, sweetie. Just push through, okay? You’re doing a great job.”
“Did he beat them? The bigger boys?”
“I’m getting to that. The day I went to Cathy’s house was hot and sunny, a proper summer’s day. Cathy said she would go and getus ice creams and left me and Danny in the back garden. I started off showing him how to block a punch, then how he could throw me over his shoulder. Danny liked that one. He laughed so hard that snot came out of his nose.”
I’m smiling, sitting in the dark. The memory of it is so clear I can almost feel the sunlight warm on my skin, the way the flower beds had seemed to froth with color. Overhead, the gulls had circled, and we’d chased their shadows over the grass.
“I got carried away,” I say eventually, and there is a hitch in my voice, even though I’m not crying. Not yet. “There was something about Danny’s excitement that was infectious, and I suppose I just got a bit silly. I showed him how to make a stryker. You know what that is, Maria? It’s a cosh. A rock-in-a-sock, only of course I didn’t put a rock in a sock, because that sort of thing can be lethal. I put an orange in there, and then I showed him how to swing it. Boy, Danny just laughed and laughed. That’s when his mum came around the corner and he got her right in the shoulder. She dropped the ice creams, and I suppose I didn’t… I just thought—”
The words muddy like wet clay in my mouth. I can remember Cathy’s face turning pale beneath her summer tan, then two spots of color flaming high in her cheeks. Her features had contracted like screwed-up paper; first in annoyance, and then in anger, eyes switching from Danny to me.
“Danny, inside.”
He’d opened his mouth to protest, or maybe to cry out in dismay when he saw his ice cream turning to a puddle on the ground, but one look from his mother had sent Danny scurrying back into the house without even turning round.
Cathy stepped over that melting ice cream, her voice hoarse with anger, pointing a trembling finger at me. “What thefuckdoyou think you’re doing? Showing him how to make a weapon? He’s eight, for fuck’s sake, Hazel! Eight years old!”
“Okay!” I held my hands up in surrender. “I was just trying to help.”
“A fucking stryker, Hazel? Really?” Cathy stepped toward me, lowering her scratchy voice. “Whose idea was that?”
“I wasn’t thinking, I—”
“If you can’t keep it under control, Hazel, then you don’t come around here anymore. We’ve talked about this. I won’t have my son put in danger.”
I stared at her, open-mouthed in astonishment. “He wasn’t in danger, Cathy. Never. Not once.”
She’d looked over my shoulder then, narrowed eyes moving slowly around the garden like a sniper.