‘Hazel, you can’t,’ I whispered. ‘It’s… you just can’t. The police won’t let you.’
‘I’m going!’ she said defiantly.
What could I say? ‘Oh, Hazel, I can’t think what you’re going through, but I have to make sure you’re all right. Do you want your clothes? I’ll lend you some.’ She looked at me, then suddenly broke away and ran out the door. She was in such a state of distress that I was worried what she would do. ‘Hazel!’ I shouted, as I grabbed my purse and keys from the table and chased after her along the smog-filled road. I caught up with her after twenty paces and pulled her, struggling, to the side of the pavement. ‘You can’t go there. It’s not safe!’ I insisted. I was becoming almost as wild as her. I held her tightly and she tried to fight me off. ‘Hazel, that’s enough. It’s not safe for you or for your dad.’ She kept tugging away from me, but with less fervour.
‘I need to get something,’ she said to the ground.
‘What? Tell me.’
She wiped her face. She was trying to remain defiant but it wasn’t really in her. ‘Something of Mum’s.’
She stopped again. Charles was walking towards us. ‘I’m going to see what I can find out,’ he said.
‘All right,’ I said, exasperated by his interruption.
‘You should go inside. Both of you. Wait until I come back. Don’t do anything else.’
‘Charles, he’s my husband.’
‘I’m as concerned as you are. But we have to understand that the state takes precautions when it feels a citizen may be endangering society.’ He had changed his tune.
A fury hit me. ‘Is that what you think he’s done?’ I demanded. ‘Put the state in danger?’ It seemed so absurd. He seemed absurd. I saw the curtains of the house beside ours twitch.
‘It doesn’t matter what I think. It is what the state thinks that matters. And that is precisely what I’m going to find out.’ He stalked away without another word. I had no time to argue with him too.
Hazel had composed herself. ‘Please, can I go?’ she said.
‘No.’ But there was clearly something she was keeping to herself, and I softened. ‘Hazel, whatever it is, you can tell me. I only want what’s best for you and your dad.’ She hesitated, unable to decide whether to tell me. But the girl was fourteen and her need to trust someone was winning. ‘Hazel?’
‘I think…’ she stammered. She lowered her voice and I had to lean in to hear her properly. ‘I think Mum was hiding something. In my room.’
I glanced around. ‘What do you mean?’ But already my mind was racing on. It made some sense out of a situation that seemed inexplicable: the Secs wouldn’t normally attend a domestic death; their work was political – subversives, plots against the state. So what had Lorelei got herself into? ‘Is that why NatSec was at your house?’ I asked, with some trepidation. She nodded, and I began to understand why the girl was so desperate. I gripped her hand in mine and stared straight ahead as my mind worked double speed. ‘Hazel, what was she hiding?’
She was about to answer but halted at the sight of a young couple walking past, wearing worker’s caps with Spartacist badges on them. They were probably off to a meeting in advance of Liberation Day. Hazel waited until they had gone before she spoke. ‘I’m not sure.’ She put her hands to her cheeks. ‘She did it even before Mum and Dad split up. They didn’t know I knew about it.’
‘Where is it?’
She hesitated. ‘In the ceiling. You can take the light fitting out and there’s a sort of hole you can put things in. Mum put them there when she thought I was asleep.’
It wasn’t unusual for people to have hiding places – for fake food coupons, foreign currency or pro-American samizdat leaflets surreptitiously circulated among the most trusted friends. But somehow this sounded different.
‘What was she hiding?’ I made her look at me. ‘It’s important.’
She glanced nervously at the backs of the Spartacist couple as they disappeared into the smog. ‘I’m not sure. It was boxes, white boxes made out of card. This big.’ She held her palms about thirty centimetres apart.
Card boxes that size, well, that could be anything. ‘Do you know what was in them?’
‘I never looked. I thought Mum might catch me.’
‘I’ll get them,’ I said.
I had no idea if Lorelei’s house had been searched. If it had been, the police or the Secs might have found whatever it was she had been storing. They might have thought Nick was involved and that was why they had taken him. On the other hand, if the house hadn’t yet been searched, I felt that I had to get there before it was, or that evidence could be held against Nick and he might never be released. Perhaps if I hadn’t felt so guilty for suspecting him earlier, and desperately needed to make penance for it, I wouldn’t have had the courage. It just wasn’t the sort of reckless thing I would do.
‘Will you?’
I pulled together as much resolve as I could find in myself. ‘Yes.’
We talk of love as such a powerful driver of what we say and do, but sometimes guilt is just as strong.
It took me half an hour to walk back to Lorelei’s house over Blackfriars Bridge, past the bombed-out shops and even an old Victorian doss house where the destitute once slept in coffin-like boxes for a few pence per night.
I had lived through the hunger of the Depression and the sheer brutality of the War, and I would never shake those memories; yet from that massed rubble we would create something to be proud of. I was certain of that. Ending the slum poverty was the first step, and all those new tower blocks were proof of our intention. No, our new nation wasn’t spotless – people talked quietly of NatSec’s visits during the night; and it felt low after five hundred years of parliaments to have a government choose itself – but the free hospitals and schools we were promised had to count for something. Soon there would be no more private healthcare; it would all be provided by the state, with the same for everyone; and education for the sons of bricklayers would be as good as for the sons of dukes. Sometimes to get out of the wood you have to pass through the brambles. That’s what I told myself any time I began to doubt.
There was a police notice on the front of Lorelei’s house, warning people not to enter, but no one was around to enforce it. Once again, I stole in through the back gate. In the dusk the garden seemed different – thicker and danker as I trod through finger-like tugging weeds and over mounds of earth to the kitchen door.
I didn’t dare turn on the lights when I got in, so the house stayed hidden from me, until, slowly, my eyes adjusted to the weak glow from the streetlights outside. I slipped silently through the hall and up the damp stairs, and I couldn’t help but open the door to the bathroom, to see stagnant pools of water on the floor. Even though I knew Lorelei’s body was long gone, my stomach twisted when I gazed at the copper bath, before my eyes rose to the gilt mirror on the opposite wall. And then, as my heart began to beat faster, I tried to picture someone in the dark glass, to bring the memories back. Something began to form.
A sound made me stop: creaking from somewhere in the house. I froze, nervously trying to hear; all I could make out, though, was the wind outside and a draught through the cracks. After a while, not moving a muscle, I decided that it had only been the house settling, but I knew I shouldn’t spend any longer here than was necessary, so I hurried out to find Hazel’s bedroom in order to collect what I had come for.
One of three on the upper floor, Hazel’s bedroom was pleasant and airy despite the gloom. She liked books, I could see from her shelves. They were filled with a mixture of classics – Dickens, the Brontës, Louisa May Alcott – and the sort of girlish romances that I used to read at her age. If I had been there any other time, seeing this would have made me smile – to know that, when it came down to it, each generation was just like the last. But the circumstances hardly allowed for sentimentality.