‘Oh my God. Scarlett. What have you done?’
Scarlett throws her a look of dismay. ‘He was going to take your baby, Lula! He was going to take your baby!’
‘Yes. But you didn’t need to … oh my God!’ Tallulah gets to her feet and she stares from Scarlett to Zach and back again. ‘Scarlett. He’s dead. Oh Jesus Christ. Scarlett.’
‘You told me you wanted him to disappear, Lula.Youtold me that. Remember? You said you wished he could just disappear. That it would be easier. I heard what he said about the baby and I heard him threatening you and I just …’
They both look up at a clicking noise across the kitchen tiles and see that it is Toby. He looks at them inquisitively, and then pads towards Zach’s body. He sniffs the toes of his bare foot and then sits down and looks at Tallulah. Behind him another figure appears: a middle-aged woman with a silken kimono wrapped around her small frame, a pale pink eye mask pushed halfway up her forehead.
The woman squints and grimaces at the tableau in front of her. Then she peels off the eye mask and says, ‘I just came down to ask you kids to turn down the pool music. What the hell is going on?’
Tallulah can’t speak. She shakes her head.
‘Oh Christ.’ The woman strides towards Zach’s body. ‘Who is he? Who are you? Whoisthis, Scarlett?’ The woman’s eyes go to the object in Scarlett’s hand. ‘Oh,’ she says, sadly, and somewhat theatrically. ‘Not my Pipin.’
Tallulah shakes her head again.Pipin?
The woman leans down towards Zach’s face and says again, ‘Please can someone tell me who the hell this is?’ She places two fingers to the underside of his neck, and peers into his eyes.
‘He’s … Zach,’ says Tallulah. ‘He’s, he’s my boyfriend.’
‘And you are?’
‘Tallulah. I’m Tallulah.’
‘Oh Christ. He’s dead,’ says the woman. ‘Will one of you please tell me what’s going on?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Scarlett, looking from the strange metal object in her hand that her mother called her ‘Pipin’ to the lifeless form of Zach and back again. ‘I don’t know. He was going – he was going to take Noah. And then—’
‘Who’s Noah?’ asks the woman with a sigh.
Scarlett replies, ‘Noah is Lula’s baby. He was going to take him away from her. And then …’ Her eyes drop to the Pipin again and she stops talking.
There’s a black square in Tallulah’s head over the space where the memory of what just happened should be, like a redaction. She can remember chasing Zach into the kitchen. She can remember the dog walking into the kitchen and sniffing Zach’s toes. In between a thing happened. A terrible thing. It flashes through her head like a lightning bolt. She starts to cry. ‘Oh,’ she says in a tiny, tiny voice. ‘Oh.’ She puts her hands over her mouth and starts to rock. ‘Oh.’
‘So, right. Let’s think straight,’ says Scarlett’s mother. ‘The time is …’ She turns to look at the big metal clock on the wall. ‘Just after two a.m. Who else is here?’
‘Just Mimi. Liam and Lexie have gone.’
‘And where’s Mimi?’
‘I don’t know. She came inside a few minutes ago. To charge her phone, she said.’
‘So it’s just us. And this boy, this Zach, was he trying to hurt you?’
Tallulah shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘He was leaving.’
‘Has he ever hurt you?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘No, he’s never hurt me.’
‘And you, Scarlett. Has he ever hurt you?’
Scarlett shakes her head sullenly.
‘And did you think he was going to hurt you?’
She shakes her head again.