Cathy knows he smokes, of course. She can smell it on him when he comes in from days out with his friends, has even found tobacco and a suspicious baggie of what she reckoned to be weed in his bottom drawer, but she knows better than to try to punish him. Danny is too like her. It would send him the other way.
She knows her friends disapprove of her parenting. They have always described Cathy as a slack mother, too lazy to implement punishments, too flexible with rules. Although they’ve never said as much, Cathy always gets the feeling they see Danny’s behavior as a direct consequence of her parenting, and they judge her for it.No wonder he’s the way he is, no father, no discipline. She’s never there, always working. You know why she came back from New York, don’t you?
“Hey.” She ruffles his hair as Scout totters past with his mittened hands full of snow. “I’ll blow it in your direction, all right?”
Danny laughs and scuffs his trainer against the ground, hands thrust into his pockets. “Did you watch my video yet, Mum?”
“Ah, I’m sorry, kiddo. I just haven’t had any time. I’ve got my hands full with Scout and after what’s happened with Hazel—”
“Do you think she’s dead?”
The tone of the question is a shock. A blunt instrument to the chest, knocking the air out of her.
She looks at Danny, horrified. “That’s an awful thing to say!”
He shrugs. His face is hard and set. “I don’t know why you’re so bothered, anyway. Didn’t she kick you out of her wedding?”
Cathy sucks smoke into her lungs. She feels flustered and ill at ease, her skin wrapping tightly round her bones.
She points to a spiderweb strung between the leaves of the rhododendron, now laced with frost. “Do you know about spider silk, Danny? It looks so fragile, and you can snap it with just a finger, but pound for pound it’s five times stronger than steel. Me and Hazel are a bit like that. From the outside, the things that bind us look like they’re fragile, and easily broken, but they’re stronger than they look.”
“Wow, Mum. I think that’s the corniest thing you’ve ever said.”
They both laugh, watching as Scout grins at them, showing the stubs of his baby teeth gleaming in his gums.
Danny sighs, his shoulders sagging. “Scout does my head in sometimes, but I can’t imagine him not being my brother. If anything happened to him, it would break my heart.”
Cathy thinks again of that boot print on the windowsill, the smell of him that morning so strange and unfamiliar.A changeling, she thinks, and shivers.
“You didn’t by any chance get your brother up this morning, did you, sweetie? Maybe picked him up out of his cot and changed him out of his clothes?”
Danny frowns. His cap is pulled low over his eyes, but she can still see the bafflement in them. “Course not. Why?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugs. “So much weird stuff has happened recently, and I can’t get a handle on any of it. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
“It’s the snow. You know that Joseph Bray lost his mind because of the Idless winters, right? It’s something about the way the light fades so early. Look at this. Nearly dark at four o’clock. That’s enough to freak anyone the fuck out.”
“Bad word,” Scout says solemnly, wiping his hands on Cathy’s jeans. “Annee said the bad word.”
“Yes, he did, didn’t he?” Cathy points at Danny. “Mind yourlanguage round him. He said ‘shit’ at the childminder’s earlier. I tried to laugh it off, but it’s embarrassing.”
Danny giggles at that, and Cathy once again marvels at how like his father he is. Always laughing, full of energy. Bouncy, like a puppy. She used to call him fidgety when he was younger. Used to tell him he had ants in his pants, and that would make Danny laugh so hard he got the hiccups. Then the school started sending home bad reports and behavior slips—Danny is a concern, he appears unable to keep still, he lacks focus, distracting others—and she’d stopped joking about it then. She’d had to. He’d become aconcern.
“I’ve got to go and get some food, Mum. There any more of those noodles?”
“Sure. Just wait—wait a minute.” She has a good feeling, the three of them out here together, in the little yard she built to be beautiful, even if the house is not, even if it’s cold and getting dark, their feet damp from the melting snow. She doesn’t want to break the spell, not yet. Let it last a little longer. “You got your phone on you? Why don’t you show me that video of yours?”
“Now? Here?”
“Why not?”
Danny shakes his head, more in surprise than anything else, and pulls his phone out as Cathy pitches her cigarette into a bucket by the back door. “Here. Just press Play.”
“And this was part of your school project, was it?” She takes the phone from him, frowning at the screen. “What was the subject?”
“History. We had to research and make a video about a historical event in our town.”
Cathy presses Play, turning the phone sideways. At first there is nothing but a shaky slice of blue sky, the tops of the trees.