Peter got into the driver’s seat and slammed the door, and Ailsa stood and watched as he struggled with the engine. When he finally got it started, he pulled away angrily, leaving filthy exhaust fumes clouding the air. The car looked like a wreck but it could still get up speed on an open road, especially when Peter was cross and put his foot down too hard.
By the time he returned, Ailsa was sweeping the hallway with a dustpan and brush.
“What’s that?” asked Peter, pointing at the baby’s bedroom door.
“It’s a padlock,” said Ailsa.
Peter opened his mouth; he shook his head. He followed Ailsa into the kitchen, watched her as she emptied the dustpan into the bin beneath the sink and put the dustpan and brush away in the cupboard. She undid the locket around her neck, with her mother in one half and her father in the other, both of them in black and white; she threaded the padlock key onto the chain and returned the locket to its place around her neck.
“This has to stop,” said Peter.
“Yes,” said Ailsa, looking up at the ceiling, at the grubby marks around the light fitting.
When Ailsa had put the baby to bed and locked the bedroom door, she ran herself a bubble bath and then went to bed herself. She felt terribly tired and yet found it difficult to settle and slept lightly until she was woken by an eerie quiet.
She got out of bed and went into the hallway. At the baby’s door, she had to bend down so that the key on the chain around her neck could reach the lock. As she entered Bella’s room, she snapped on the overhead light, so that nothing could hide in the dark; nothing, she thought, could sneak unseen beneath the furniture.
She approached the sleeping baby, and saw—in spite of the lock—filth on the bars of the cot. She carried the baby to the chair in the corner of the room and sat awake all night while Bella slept in her arms.
Peter found her there in the morning, with the bulb still burning. “What are you doing there?” he asked. “How long have you been sitting there? You look awful, Ailsa, absolutely awful.”
“This is your fault,” she whispered. The baby stirred on her chest. “He’s out and I can’t put him back—there’s nowhere for him to go back to.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Peter.
“The portfolio,” said Ailsa. “I needed that portfolio but you threw it out.”
“I haven’t got time for this,” said Peter. “I’ve got work.” He went into the kitchen and ate a bowl of cereal standing up in front of the fridge. It was still dark outside when he left. The door slammed behind him.
Every morning Peter drove north for twenty miles, and every evening he drove south again. Ailsa thought he drove too fast, always a little bit faster than the road allowed, overtaking everyone else as if he had more of a right to the road than they did. He would arrive home in a temper, fuming over some bad driver, some cyclist, always something, something that wasn’t his fault, fuming at Ailsa as if it were her fault, as if she had cut him up, as if she had overlooked his right of way.
Ailsa washed the dishes and wiped the table, scrubbing at a stubborn stain that had got into the grain of the wood. She looked for the place mats. Peter disliked them—he thought them feminine—but they protected the table. She found them in the pile in the hallway; and right at the bottom, in the middle, just where she imagined the hedgehogs used to hide in the bonfire, Ailsa found the grey ring binder that she had used for evening classes in the years between her father going into the home and the baby being born. She sat and leafed through it, singing a tune that she’d learnt to play on the piano a long time ago.
“It’s not too late,” said Ailsa. “We can explain to the people in the house that we want it back, that the flat is too small for us, that we miss our garden. We can’t possibly be happy here.”
Peter, taking off his shoes, said, “But we can’t afford the house any more.”
“There might be some money, though,” said Ailsa. “He might have left me something in his will.”
“And he might not have done,” said Peter. “There might have been nothing left to leave. The home might have sucked him dry.”
Ailsa looked at Bella playing with her toys in the narrow hallway. “But the flat is just too small,” she said, “for the two of us and a baby.”
“Bella hardly counts,” said Peter. “She’s only little.”
“For now,” said Ailsa. “But she’s going to grow. She’ll grow big. She’ll be a young woman with size six feet and a will of her own.”
Peter looked down at Bella. He said to her, “Is my baby going to have size six feet? Is she? Is she? I don’t think so! No, I don’t think so! Daddy loves her little feet! Little itsy bitsy feet! Yes, he does!”
“He keeps interfering with things,” said Ailsa.
“Who does?” asked Peter.
Ailsa did not know what to call him, and she’d rather avoid naming him anyway, for fear it would somehow make him more real. But he was real enough: he’d been tampering, so that things that had worked when they’d first moved in had become temperamental or had broken down altogether. First the boiler had gone, and then the television: while Peter was down at the pub, getting to know the locals, Ailsa sat down to watch something and the screen went black. He tampered with the electrics, so that sometimes the lights did not work and she had to make do with what little daylight came in through the mean windows. And she kept finding—down at knee-height and underneath things and in tight corners that she had to peer at with a torch—those sooty streaks, those grey-black smears. The thought got into her head that if those dirty marks appeared on Panda’s black limbs, she would not be able to see them. She put Panda into the wash, just to be sure that all the baby’s things were clean.
He was just concerned about her, he said; she could do with a little rest, a few days without Bella to take care of. His mum would have her for the weekend; it was all arranged. In the morning, she should pack a bag of baby things, and when he got back from work he would drive Bella over to his mother’s.
“But your mother’s flat is even smaller than this one,” said Ailsa. “She only has one bedroom.”
“Mum will manage just fine,” said Peter.
“But Bella needs more space,” said Ailsa.
“Perhaps,” said Peter, “while Bella’s at Mum’s, you could go and see the doctor again.”
At night, while Ailsa slept ever more lightly and woke ever more frequently, Peter slept soundly, unless his own snoring or struggling to breathe woke him up. Only Ailsa was ever up and about in the night, in the baby’s room, or sometimes out at the front of the flats, in between the flats and the road, looking at the moon or at a moonless sky, or at one of the very few people walking by, or at the cars that zipped past, and at their own car parked by the kerb. She stood there smoking the roll-ups that she was not supposed to have any more because of the baby, but which she liked because they cleared her head, they helped her to think.