“Oh, no,” Bianka said, tears welling in her eyes. “I couldn’t keep it.”
“Why not?” I said, instantly picturing their large, secure garden.
Bianka’s head made a strange jerking movement. “I just couldn’t,” she said. She kissed his little head. “Anyway, we should probably get him to a vet.”
***
At supper that night, which was served in a formal dining room, Bryce asked how our afternoon had gone. Good question, I thought, get this. I sat up and looked across to where Bianka sat in a fresh dress and immaculate makeup, fascinated to know how she might even begin.
“Very good, all things considered,” Bianka said. With a delicate motion, she dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “The weather was perfect for an afternoon stroll.”
“We had ice creams,” Willa said.
I paused, my fork halfway to my mouth, and glanced at Cat. Neither Willa nor her mother were making eye contact with either of us.
Bryce looked back at his plate, then glanced back up. “How d’you get that scratch?”
Bianka touched her cheek with her index finger, running it along the length of a thin red line. “I had a little to-do with some brambles,” she said. “I really must get them cut back.”
***
“Is it just me or did today get really, really weird?”
Cat and I were lying with our heads together in the middle of a bed so vast it needed three sets of pillows to span its width. We were sharing the middle one, our bodies a small island in a sea of bed. I made a little ha sound. Cat raised her eyebrows.
“Say it,” she said. “No one can hear you. We’re in the guest wing.”
I pulled a face.
“Say it.” Cat took the covers and pulled them up over our heads. “How about now?” Our eyes held in the dusky gloom of the sheets. “Say it.”
“God, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know or you don’t like to say?” Cat said. “Don’t tell me you can’t see it, Robyn. Willa’s family is seriously fucked up.”
***
In the morning Willa brought us tea and then sat on the bed with us, taking us through a box chock-full of the newspaper cuttings she’d collected about Laika, stories that ranged from serious pieces of journalism to tabloid reports of clairvoyants who’d wanted money in exchange for speculative titbits and implausible sightings. Later she showed me Laika’s room, unlocking the door to let me into the sad untouched shrine of it, the belongings of a thirteen-year-old left exactly as they were the day she’d disappeared. After a bit I joined her at the window.
“Sorry about yesterday. You probably guessed this,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, “but things aren’t that great between my parents.”
I took a moment to answer, trying to find something tactful to say. “It must have put a huge strain on them when Laika disappeared.”
“In some ways that’s the one thing that keeps them together.”
“You mean they support each other?”
“No.” She turned to face me, then added in a voice so low I could barely make out the words, “I mean Mum won’t leave the house.”
“D’you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head, and I pulled her into a hug.
***
We’d originally planned to stay the whole of Sunday, but instead we invented an excuse that meant we would need to leave after breakfast, and Bianka drove us back to the station, stopping off en route to collect the puppy from the vet. I’d already called my dad and he’d said there was always room for one more dog at theirs, and that if we could get the little floofball to London he’d happily drive up and collect him from ours. It made me grateful to think I had parents I could call in a crisis. I was even more glad to get away from the strange atmosphere of that cold, silent house. I realized I couldn’t wait to get home to our tiny, noisy flat, where the beat of other people’s music pulsed through the walls, and we had neighbors who laughed and shouted and argued and hugged.
We came to love that flat in the end. We lived there far beyond the time we could afford to move out. I asked Cat to marry me in its tiny galley kitchen, and it was the home we went back to after our civil partnership, and after our honeymoon in Greece. Our parents visited whenever they could, our brothers too. We held parties there that gradually became less wild over time, and eventually Cat got to indulge her love of the Scandi aesthetic, buying patterned rugs and vintage furniture with clean lines. It was a good place, a good home. But all the time we were saving like mad.
***
With no small sense of wonder we arrived at our thirties. Both of us registered some deep subliminal change, a growing-up. We were ready for the next stage of our lives, one that had been a long time in the planning. I met Willa at Postman’s Park to tell her our news. I’d moved to St. Bart’s by then and she had a job in a call center that she had repeatedly assured me was the absolute worst. I told her first about the Victorian terrace we’d found to buy in Forest Hill, a proper house, with three bedrooms and a jungle out the back which the agent had said had the potential to be a “perfect outdoor space” with a small amount of work. A doer-upper, I said. Cat would be in charge.
I smiled at her. I’d held on to the best news for last. “I’m pregnant,” I said, “twelve weeks.” Willa’s mouth opened in surprise.
“Oh my God,” she said, each word falling over the next. She buried her head in my shoulder. “I’m so, so happy for you.”
She held me so tight I thought she might not ever let me go. Gently, I pulled away. There were tears brimming over the lids of her eyes. She wiped a hand across her cheek. The tears fell.
“I’m so happy for you,” she said again. She laughed, then cried some more. “Honestly, I don’t know why I’m crying. I’m ridiculously happy for you, so, so happy.”
***
She cried again the day she first met Sophie at the hospital, holding our beautiful, precious daughter in her arms. For a long, secret time she gazed into our child’s face, as silent tears worked tracks over the curve of her cheeks. She was so very far away that eventually Cat looked at me, her face etched with concern. Willa had gone somewhere that didn’t include us. With a delicate finger she touched our daughter’s cheek. Her tears continued to fall, but whether they were tears for a newborn, for Laika, for herself or for a child she didn’t yet have, I didn’t ever ask.
14 Body Parts Willa
I first met Jamie at a bar in St. Paul’s. At that time I was working a three-month contract making props for a low-budget horror movie. My employer was a small, furious Scot in his fifties called Fen Roberts. He had a shock of sandy hair, strung-out eyes, and periodically panicked about our rate of production. After my first couple of weeks I came to suspect that Fen had undercut any other bidders for the job by some considerable margin. Most of the other temps were students from Eastern Europe who spent the day laughing, gesturing with their hands and talking at speed in a language I didn’t understand. They also took regular breaks for coffee and cigarettes, which made Fen apoplectic with rage, something that amused the students to no end. My job was to dob fake blood on various body parts. They needed a lot of dismembered limbs.
