The kitchen is big and bright. The windows are black mirrors. They spend a lot of time in here.
Mia takes some eggs from the box, cracks them into a Pyrex dish. Marcus goes hunting for the frying pan. He doesn’t find it in the drawer. It’s in the dishwasher, residually warm from this morning’s cycle.
He spritzes it with sunflower oil, puts it on the hob.
Mia grabs a fork and mixes the eggs. The trick is to fold them, not beat them. She sprinkles in a little salt, a good dash of pepper. She likes pepper.
She hears the key in the lock. The front door opens. It’s a sound as familiar to her as the sound of her own heartbeat; Mia was born in this house, in a birthing pool in the dining room.
She’s never lived anywhere else. It’s a big house, a bit messy. But she loves it and never wants to leave. She’s eleven years old, and home is heaven.
Gabriella shovels popcorn into her mouth and watches an episode of The Biggest Loser recorded on Sky Plus.
Gabriella never puts on weight; it doesn’t matter what she eats. Partly because of this, The Biggest Loser is one of her favourite shows. She enjoys watching it while snacking on popcorn or ice cream or, once, a six-pack of doughnuts. The crystals of sugar at the edge of her lips, her fingers sticky with it, while shame-faced, dirigible-sized husbands, wives and daughters took to the scales like prisoners about to be executed.
But Steph disapproves of The Biggest Loser. Steph disapproves of all reality shows. She doesn’t mind if Gabriella watches them, as long as the kids aren’t around.
Gabriella thinks this is bullshit, but she doesn’t have Sky Plus in her room — despite the dropping of some fairly heavy hints on deaf ears.
Steph takes a detour to the KFC drive-through, tries to pay with an expired debit card: she forgot to replace it with the new one that arrived about three weeks ago. So has to hunt round her receipt-stuffed purse to find cash.
They drive the rest of the way in silence, Dan’s shoulders tense with the scale of his mortification, the greasy bucket in its plastic carrier bag balanced on his narrow lap.
Steph doesn’t notice the car driving two or three places behind them.
She’s experienced moments of urban terror: she’s been burgled more than once — most recently less than a year ago. (She thought for a while that her house keys had been stolen. In fact, they turned up on her kitchen table as if placed there by a poltergeist.)
And she’s had a few dodgy phone calls. The most recent sequence of them, she was relieved and strangely chagrined to learn, were from a lovelorn kid called Will who nursed a obsessional crush on Gabriella the Gorgeous.
Steph was distressed, and slightly vexed by young Will’s lovelorn want of imagination. But a few difficult phone calls — first to the boy himself, and several to the police — soon put things right.
She’s passed him on the high street several times since then. He says hello and drops his eyes and moves on. Steph feels sorry for him now, sorry for the embarrassment his uncontrolled love caused him. Letting teenagers fall in love is like letting them drive sports cars. There’s far too much power in the engine.
She parks across the road, relieved to see the house, the lights on. She regrets her spontaneous offer of fried chicken because it smells and because it’s terrible for you and because she loves the chips, dusted with salt and dipped in glutinous, just-warm-enough chicken gravy. And she knows she’ll overcompensate tomorrow, have a tiny breakfast, a salad for lunch. And then, around 3.30, she’ll get cranky and overcompensate again with a fat slice of carrot cake. She’ll be revisited by guilt and she’ll eat nothing for dinner except perhaps some noodles. She’ll go to bed with a headache.
She slots the key in the lock, and turns it. She opens the door a crack.
She turns her head, to hurry Dan along. Even in the rain, he’s dawdling. ‘Hurry up,’ she says, ‘it’s getting cold.’
Two men are walking just behind Dan’s shoulder.
Steph doesn’t know them. But at once, she knows them completely. One of them is young and handsome and scared. The other is compact and strutting, with hair in a neat parting.
Nazi hair, she thinks. That’s what they called kids with hair like that when she was at school.
Both men are wearing backpacks.
Dan turns to follow her appalled gaze. The smaller man swings something. It’s an aluminium baseball bat. He swings it low and vicious, at her son’s knee.
Dan has long, skinny legs and big feet — Steph’s legs. Sometimes at night they still hurt with the growing.
Steph hears bone crack and thinks of ice cubes in glasses.
She draws in her breath but before she can scream the younger of the men rushes forward and shoves the hot, greasy bucket of chicken into her face.
She chokes and panics, stifled by a gorge of fried skin and flesh and hot fat.
The young man punches her in the stomach. Steph falls, gagging, to the ground. The young man starts kicking her.
Patrick turns from the woman and goes to the kid, Dan. He’s howling about his broken leg like a fucking baby. Patrick glances nervously left and right. But no lights come on. Nobody comes to their window. Nobody shouts. Nobody interferes.
Nobody ever does.
Patrick hits the boy with a homemade cosh, a hiking sock filled with AA batteries. It wrecks the teeth in the kid’s head. The kid coughs and cries and spits fragments of tooth all over the concrete path.
The kid grabs at his mouth and makes a weird muffled noise, like somebody trying to say something urgent through a thin partition wall.
Henry drags the woman into the house by her hair. He gets chicken all over his fingers.
Marcus sets down the omelette pan and says to his daughter, ‘Stay here.’
She stares at him with wide eyes as he hurries away. She listens to the omelette burning on the stove. She can’t believe her dad — so orderly, so safety-conscious — has forgotten it. And this thought makes her feel weak and afraid and very small. In its way it’s worse than the horrible noises — the bangs and the crashes and most of all the terrible, terrible screams — that are coming from the other side of the house.
Mia needs to feel big. So she walks to the cooker and turns it off. Then she moves the pan off the hob.
She puts the hot pan into the damp sink. It sizzles, shockingly, like a serpent. She recoils from it.
A man in dark clothes drags Steph through the open door. Steph’s face is smeared in some kind of matter.
Gabriella thinks at first that it must be vomit, that Steph’s eaten her KFC and it’s made her unwell and this man must have brought her home.
But only for a moment.
The man sees Gabriella and grins a wolf’s grin, chop-licking, ear to ear. He kicks Steph in the ribs, then steps forward, raising a baseball bat.
Gabriella steps away. She stumbles over a shoe, one of Mia’s Converse.
The man swings a bat. It connects with the side of Gabriella’s head. She hears it. She falls.
The man stamps on her stomach three times, like he’s putting out a camp fire.
Marcus runs into the hallway.
Steph lies with her eyes open. She’s making strange movements with her right hand.
Dan is fighting with a young man in the front garden. The young man is hitting him again and again in the face.
Marcus makes a move to intervene, then notices the man in the living room. He’s stamping on Gabriella’s belly. He’s only a door away from the kitchen.
Marcus calls out, ‘ Mia, run! ’
Then he races into the living room and punches the man in the back of the head.
He grabs the man’s shoulders and throws him into the wall.
The man drops his baseball bat.
Gabriella drags herself to the far side of the room. She’s making a sound. Marcus hopes he never hears a sound like it again.
He casts around, looking for something to kill the man with. That’s his only thought.