Something Might Happen (28 page)

Now, of course, she’s kicking herself. All afternoon she’s been in tears and can’t concentrate on anything, not till she knows
that little girl’s safe.

The trouble with Darren, she says, is he’s always coming home with these strange stories and I’m used to it. They never amount
to anything, I swear they don’t. I’ve learned over the years that the best thing really is just to ignore them all.

Livvy is crying and crying and won’t settle. I take her upstairs and change her. In her nappy is the first poo made of formula
milk—hard, brown, solid, of the real world. As I fold the nappy away and put it in a bag and clean her, she
goes quiet and still and fascinated, following my movements with her clear, dark eyes.

Someone phones the squad to say a young girl has been seen getting into a blue van at Leiston, but from the description she
is older than Rosa and Mawhinney says they’re not going to follow it up, not at the moment anyway.

The six o’clock local TV news has Lennie’s funeral on it and this is immediately followed by a report about Rosa. The picture
they use is a school portrait, an awful one, in which Rosa—a smooth and alien child—smiles smugly at the camera against a
sky-blue plastic background, her hair smooth, her collar down, her cardigan neatly buttoned.

You gave them that? I say to Mick.

It was the only one I could find.

From the tray in the hall?

Yes.

It was supposed to go back to school. You hated it, remember.

Oh, he says. Oh well.

I go and sit on the steps of The Polecat. I don’t bother unlocking it and going in, I just sit there in my coat. It’s all
I’ve come for, just to sit.

It’s dark. Seven o’clock. Seven or maybe half past. I don’t know. I’m very calm now, unafraid. I sit there and I stare and
stare at the rolling mass of the sea till the darkness comes up inside my head and I think maybe I can see right into it.
As you can see into anything if you look at it for long enough.

I feel weightless, invisible, and in a strange way everything is clear to me now. I even think that maybe if I stop breathing
and remember where to look, I might be able to see my Rosa.

Eventually Lacey comes to find me, as I knew he would.

Oh, I say quietly. Hello. I thought you’d come.

He stands on the prom with his hands in his pockets. There is a strong wind blowing, a wind I must say I hadn’t noticed till
he arrived. But I do see it now, it’s impossible not to, because of how his clothes flap, how he has to hold his coat closed.
His big coat, the one he’s wearing, makes him seem very far away, just a tiny speck really, though I wouldn’t of course tell
him that.

I do want to tell him that his face looks terrible, just daunted and upset and worse than I’ve ever seen it look, but my heart’s
fighting so hard with my mouth that I can’t get the words out.

Tess, he says.

I shut my eyes. I can’t look at him. I daren’t.

I’m sorry, he says. Oh Tess, I’m so sorry.

He puts his hands on my shoulders, which makes me feel a little sick, but I don’t stop him.

No, I start to say but already it’s too late.

Come on, he says. Come on.

No, I tell him, pulling away now, suddenly frantic.

I’m sorry, he says. I’m sorry. I have to take you back now.

ROSA’S BODY IS FOUND BY A MAN OUT WALKING HIS DOG
on Covehithe Cliffs. He spots her down at the edge of the water as he walks along the gorse path above.

He says he isn’t really looking down at the beach at all, but his eye is caught by the bright purple of her sweatshirt. She
is floating, face down, nudged against the rocks by the tide. At first he wonders if it’s perhaps an adult, in a wetsuit,
swimming. But soon he realises the body is far too small to be out there bobbing around in the water alone.

He scrambles down the steep cliffside using his stick to help him, but the dog gets to the body before he does and starts
barking furiously. He never goes in, the man says, but he always gets excited when he sees people in the water.

He is still hoping at that point that he has it all wrong
and it’s someone swimming. But as he gets closer, he sees it’s a child, a girl. And that she has long fronds of seaweed grasped
in her hands, he tells the police, her fingers wrapped tight around it, as if she’s been trying to hold on.

A jutting rock is the only thing stopping her being washed back out to sea again, since the tide has finished coming in and
is already on the turn. With some effort, the man pulls her out of the water and onto the beach. He turns her over. Her eyes
are open and her mouth is blue. He feels for a pulse and thinks about trying to resuscitate her, but he’s scared. He doesn’t
really know how to go about it. He can’t quite catch his breath himself.

So he calls 999 on his mobile phone and then he goes a bit wobbly and has to sit down. He says it’s very lucky he has the
phone with him. He never normally brings it when walking the dog as he worries about losing it or leaving it somewhere. But
as it happens he’s expecting a delivery from Wrentham and grabbed it at the last moment, in case they arrived when he was
out.

He lives up on Holly Lane, he says. Twenty-eight Holly Lane, Covehithe. That’s the address. His name is Fitzgerald. The mobile
phone is his daughter’s but he sometimes borrows it. He wouldn’t have one himself, he thinks they’re a waste of money. How
ridiculous, that he never learned to do mouth to mouth. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forgive himself. He feels terrible.

The paramedics assure him that Rosa has been dead some time—that no amount of resuscitation would have made a difference.
But the man won’t listen. He is terribly
agitated and upset by the time they get to him and has to be given a hot sweet drink to calm him down. He keeps on repeating
the detail about the phone to the police, even when they tell him they’ve got the point.

It’s hard to tell how long Rosa has been in the water exactly but police believe it’s close on twenty-four hours. It has to
do with skin colour, how much water is in the stomach, how distended the lungs are. It’s easier to tell with children apparently,
because the changes happen more quickly and are more dramatic.

That night Lacey takes me all the way back from The Polecat to the kitchen at home.

It seems like the longest walk in all the world, that distance from the beach hut to our kitchen. Sometimes I don’t think
I’ll make it. I walk and walk but my legs don’t seem to touch the ground. But Lacey keeps his arm around me all the time,
all the way up the street as we walk there in the dark, in the howling wind, the salt, the silence.

Even when we get in the kitchen, he keeps his arm around me. No one says anything. Everything’s shifted and the rules have
changed. There are no rules—there’s only a phone call from Covehithe.

Mick is sitting there, crying. He is shaking all over and crying very hard, harder than I’ve ever seen him cry. Except for
once—the time when Nat was born and for about half an hour we didn’t think he was going to be OK and I was too out of it to
care, and then once it turned out he was fine, Mick wrapped his arms around me and just sobbed.

Just like this.

Mawhinney is there and two female police officers I’ve never seen before. One of them is gently holding Mick’s arm, touching
his shoulder. The other’s got Livvy who’s holding her floppy monkey and gazing around at all the people.

They’re bringing her, Mick says. In the ambulance. After the police have finished with her. They were going to take her to
the hospital, but I said not to, I said of course we’d want her brought here right now. I told them we’d want to have her
with us at home. I knew you’d want the same.

I look at him and tell him that I do and then I open my eyes and my mouth and I scream.

I had Rosa at home. Second baby, easy birth. So easy that I remember laughing all the way through it. My memory is of a high,
hot summer morning, a perfect cup of tea and an even more perfect, fuzz-headed seven-pound child. And Mick having to shampoo
the carpet where I, forgetting the waterproof sheet, simply bent over, crouched and slipped my daughter out, easy and certain
as a flower opening.

We carry her up and lay her on her bed, surrounded by all her soft toys and her Walkman, her private diary with the padlock.
Maria the kitten comes and settles at the foot of the bed, ponching and ponching at the duvet with her claws just as if it
was a normal bedtime.

In the end, Mick pushes her off and shuts her out. I don’t blame him but I know Rosa would have been furious.
What’d you do that for? She’d have sulked. What’s Maria ever done to you?

With a pair of sharp scissors that I normally use for cutting the kids’ hair, we snip off the wet clothes she’s wearing. Then
I get the bowl the children use when they feel sick at night and Mick fills it up with warm water and together we wash her
with a flannel and soap.

I wish her small, brittle fingernails weren’t all broken and torn, but at least they are clean for once. Bleached, almost,
like tiny shells—I’ve never seen them so white. I take her coldish blue hand in mine and try to slot my own hot, trembling
fingers in among hers but I can’t. Already they’re getting stiff and hard—and the soft pad of flesh beneath her thumb is starting
to feel different and not like flesh at all but like something more solid.

Now and then, the room fades and I think I doze, but Mick nudges me awake.

Come on, he says. Clothes.

We can’t decide what to dress her in. Eventually we agree that her blue jersey nightie and Gap hooded thing are best.

I don’t want her to be cold, I tell Mick and I know how it sounds, but I still have to say it. All through this, he doesn’t
speak except when necessary and he doesn’t look at me. I watch as he struggles to do up the bottom of the zip on her hooded
thing.

I know Rosa likes the Gap thing, but I’m not so sure about the nightie. Being Rosa, wouldn’t she have preferred jeans? Except
that trousers would be almost impossible to
get on her right now. Her legs are terribly swollen and no longer move so easily.

We leave the dolphin pendant round her neck. It’s her favourite piece of jewellery, the only one she’ll wear. Dolphins have
magical powers, she says, it’s like a talisman, a protection against, well, against all sorts of things.

There’s a tiny graze on her forehead and another larger one on her chin—probably from the undertow of the shingle, the paramedics
said. There’s also a huge bruise on her shoulder but you can’t see that now. Her eyes are shut, her eyelids dusted with mauve.

Before they closed her eyes, I looked. I insisted. What I saw was that they were already darkening, losing the spark and shine
that is Rosa. I know she believes that your soul goes somewhere when you die. Obviously hers had already gone to that place.
Knowing her, it would have rushed there, eager to be first. You could see this on her face—that her soul had spilled out of
her far too quickly, leaving her somehow startled and bereft.

The police say we can keep her till morning but that then she will have to go to Ipswich so a proper post-mortem can be carried
out. Though, based on the pathologist’s initial examination, her death is not being treated as suspicious. She almost certainly
just fell in the sea and drowned, they say.

But she was a good swimmer, I insist. I say it again and again to anyone who’ll listen. But you can see they just daren’t
tell me what I already know: that it doesn’t matter how far you can swim. Anyone can drown in a rough sea on a dark night.

* * *

We sit there all night with our Rosa. Sometimes we hold hands, Mick and me, and sometimes we hold onto each other, our whole
bodies moving under waves of sobs, but mostly we just sit there in our separate silences. I see him gazing at his daughter,
snatching his last hungry looks. I watch him doing this and I don’t know what to say or how to feel.

As dawn comes and a greyish light moves over the chest of drawers, the bookshelves, the collection of ornamental cats and
duck feathers, the pink dried-up glitter pens with their lids left off, Rosa’s face seems to change again. It looks almost
alive. A trick of the light, I tell myself—or else it’s just that we’ve got used to it, to her, to this.

We both lean in and kiss her, first him then me, then both of us wanting to go again. Our girl. She doesn’t smell bad—just
of our family and of our soap and, slightly, of Rosa. Then we fetch the boys in to say goodbye. Mick says that’s important,
letting them see. Nat and Jordan look at her so carefully, as if the wrong sort of look could damage her. I feel almost proud
of them, that they can look at their sister so gently.

Can I touch her? Jordan whispers.

Of course, I tell him and he reaches out and puts a hand on her cold, white forehead, on her smoothed hair.

Can she feel that? he says and my heart jumps as I tell him, No.

Yes, but if she was alive, could she? he says.

Yes, I whisper. If she was alive, yes.

He stands there and looks at her and thinks about this. I look at Mick. He is shuddering with sobs, his whole body moving.
No noise, just shaking silently.

There is a time—I think so, it comes back to me later—when we all just stand and cry in the room together. That’s the feeling
I have anyway, though the moment has long slunk away, out of memory. I remember Jordan’s small knuckles pressing on my face,
the empty hungry smell of his breath. I remember Nat, the dark top of his head wrapped inside Mick’s arms.

And when the ambulance comes, the men are so good. They creep up the stairs so quietly and carefully, as if a million babies
were asleep in our house, instead of just Liv with her mouth wet and hands flung up in her cot. Fletcher barks as they come
and then again as they go but I shush him and straightaway he shuts up.

As I stand there by the front door, I think I will never be able to let them take her, never be able to let her—that small
blonde fast-asleep baby from that long ago summer morning—go. But in the end I surprise myself and it all happens quite easily,
and I do, we let her, we do.