Page 57 of Clever Little Thing

I prowled the gloomy back garden. A plastic table and chairs stood in the middle of a square of concrete paving stones. A mass of brambles hid the back fence. I checked the back door: locked of course. As I turned away, I stubbed my toe on a broken concrete paving stone and cursed as pain shot through my foot. My midriff squeezed, tighter and tighter, and I crouched on hands and knees, a moan escaping me. I had to get into the house. I had to get this done quickly so I could get to the hospital. I dug my fingers under the broken paving stone, and a chunk came away. I scrabbled and scraped until I’d worked it loose.

I took off my jumper and wrapped it around my right hand. I picked up the chunk, and went to the back door. The glass shattered decisively. I dropped the concrete and pushed away enough glass with my jumper-covered hand to reach my hand through, feel for a key inside. The key wasn’t in the lock, because what idiot leaves their key in the back door? I picked up the rock again and bashed at the lower pane of the door until I’d got rid of most of the glass. I laid my jumper on the floor on the other side so I had something to protect my hands from the dagger-strewn floor.

I got down on my hands and knees. It wasn’t a big space to squeeze through, but even with my pregnant belly, I was a small woman. I crawled forward. I felt pinpoints of brightness on my scalp and knew that glass had fallen into my hair and cut me, andthen pain flashed in the meat of my right palm as glass poked through the sweater. Then I was through. I was in the kitchen, and I almost felt safe for a moment. I could use the lights: who would know I wasn’t Irina? I found a tea towel and pressed it against my bleeding hand.

I went through to the living room. Photos crowded the mantelpiece, pictures that were either new or that I hadn’t noticed before. Wait—was that Stella? Half a dozen photographs of a round-faced, solid little girl in ugly long dresses, hair tightly braided, face unsmiling. I grabbed the nearest one: a vast grey lake in the background, a pebbly beach. When had Irina taken Stella to visit such a lake? Then I blinked and saw of course it wasn’t Stella. It was Blanka as a child. No photographs of Blanka looking older than eighteen. But hadn’t she been in her thirties when she died? It was like Irina didn’t want to acknowledge that Blanka had grown up.

Could Irina be the person Blanka hated so much?

A door off the hallway led to a bedroom with a double bed with a patchwork quilt, like someone had made it using all the ugliest possible clothes; a bureau with a mirror; a huge, heavy wardrobe; lace curtains dimming the light; a crucifix on the wall: Irina’s room. Where had Blanka slept? Surely not in the front room, on that tiny velour sofa?

I went back out to the hallway. Then I spotted a smaller door. I hadn’t noticed it because it was under the stairs. I opened it, and concrete steps led down. Cold air streamed out, a whiff of damp, of the earth itself. An iron fist squeezed me, and I had to stop for a moment. When the fist let go, warm wetness trickled down my leg. But I couldn’t pay attention to that now. I was too close todiscovering something at last, I could feel it. If I was ever going to rid my daughter of Blanka, I had to go down those stairs.

They led to a basement bedroom with a small window at ground level, a carpet smelling of mildew. A chair piled with clothes. A child’s bed: maroon sheets with a white arrow on a yellow circle that I thought was a Star Trek logo. It was a child’s room, for a grown woman.

On the wall hung aDoctor Whoposter: the TARDIS floating in space, a door open, light beaming from within.“Allons-y,”it read. “Let’s go.” I studied it, desperate for a clue. Was that what lay behind her dull expression: dreams of adventures to the fringes of the universe?

“Get out.” Irina’s voice was matter-of-fact, but her anger was like a wall of heat. Something trickled down my leg, and for a second, I thought I’d wet myself in fear, and I was ashamed. But of course, it wasn’t that, there was too much of it, splashing onto the carpet, soaking my shoes. I needed to get to the hospital, but she blocked the stairs. She was perhaps twenty years older than me, in her late fifties. But she was tough, a survivor, and I was an emaciated pregnant woman whose water had broken ten weeks early.

I placed my hand on the wall to steady myself and realized there were faint lines there. They swam into focus: a swarm of crosses. I blinked. “What are these marks?”

“From when she is little. I tell you this once already. If she is bad, she must stand with nose to cross until I say.”

I shivered. How long did Blanka have to stand there as a child? How harsh was this penalty? Did Irina make her stand there forhours, hungry, needing the toilet? Maybe that was when Blanka began to think, I hate that person.

I sank onto the bed for a rest, but it felt cold and damp. It was the bed Blanka had slept in as a child, the same sheets, even. Irina should have bought her new sheets, or encouraged her to buy them herself. Small things like taking care of your surroundings could make you feel better. “How could you let her be like this?” I said, gesturing at the child’s bed, the posters.

Irina snorted. “Nowadays, you people tell your kids they can do anything. This will not help Blanka. She does not speak good English, bad with people. She does not have big choice of job.”

I looked around the room. The light was dim, I realized, because the recycling and rubbish bins were partly blocking the window, which was at ground level. It would have been so easy for Blanka to move them, but she didn’t do it. She couldn’t. “What did she do all the time?” I whispered. It hurt so much I could hardly talk.

“TV shows. She watches same ones many times. Looks on computer and learns many things about this Doctor Who.” If this was Blanka’s life, then surely, she was depressed. At some point, years before she died, she had stopped living. Did she blame her mother for that?

Irina touched the poster, the TARDIS floating in space with one door open, glowing inside, so inviting, like a kitchen on a winter’s night. “I thought she was happy.” She swiped at her eyes.

Irina could have helped Blanka to lead a bigger life, but Blanka had made choices too. She’d chosen to stay in her basement bedroom with faded crosses on the wall. She didn’t return from the grave because she hated her mother. So who was it?

I felt like someone had taken a stick and was stirring my insides, trying to rearrange them forcibly. My time had nearly run out. I needed an ambulance. I had to be direct.

I tottered to my feet and clutched her hand so hard I could feel the bones scrunching together. “Blanka’s come back. She’s drawing crosses on my wall, writing in Stella’s diary about hating someone. Who did she hate? Tell me.”

Irina shook her head. “If Blanka came back, she would come to me, not to you.”

Then the pain came again, and it was the kind of pain that makes you think you could die, that stops you from thinking. More water gushed from me, soaking the rug. “I need to get to the hospital. I don’t have my phone. Please, call an ambulance.” I wasn’t sure I could get up the stairs.

Irina’s face set and she disappeared, and I sank onto my knees and let the pain out in a groan. I didn’t have the breath for screaming. Of course, she wanted to punish me, even if Blanka didn’t, and there were so many reasons, the simplest being that I had my daughter, and she did not. The pain came again, obliterating thought, drawing forth a deep, animal sound.

When that contraction ended, Irina was back in the room, wearing an apron and holding a pile of things. She closed the basement door. I felt hot panic. Why did she close that door? “No, no. Call an ambulance. Call Pete. Please.” Those were all the words I could get out before the next wave of pain.

I retched as on her knees, she spread out the shower curtain on the moldy rug. “Listen to me. You must be calm. I do this many times.”

“No, no, no,” I said in the space between contractions. “I’m nothaving the baby. I can’t have the baby. I can’t have a baby until Stella is safe. It’s too soon. The baby will die. I’ll die.”

Irina shook her head. “The water is broken. Too late to go back. Too late for hospital.”

“What? No. Please. Get me an ambulance. At least call Pete. Please.” Then the pain carried me away on its wave, where nothing existed and nothing mattered except the pain. Even I didn’t. There was nothing but the pain and groaning. I came out of it and thrashed as I realized she had removed my trainers and was pulling off my maternity jeans. I protested weakly, but when the next wave of pain came, I let her take them, my underwear too.

I was having my baby too early. I would die and so would my baby. I would bleed to death. The baby would be hopeless lumps of flesh that Irina would shove deep into the compost—my baby in exchange for hers. This was what she’d wanted all along.

---