My heart beat harder at the very thought of it. He was so secretive. He’d been so weird that night when he took me there. But I just wanted to see the pram again, maybe take a look at the replica house in the workshop next door, just to set my mind at rest. I wasn’t checking to see if there really was a computer in there. Why would he lie to me about that anyway?
I hunched into the collar of the coat as I passed the cottage, sure that if he looked out the window he would see me and know where I was going. Know that I was spying on him. Then he’d ask me to leave and I’d be back to my lonely wee flat-with Kazek, of course. I shouldn’t be snooping round after Gus. I should be 1471-ing Ros and telling her to get her arse in gear and help her friend. But since I was here…
Which side would I look in? Pram was in one and House was in the other. I’d seen Pram. I hunched over the padlock on the other door and started searching for the right key. It took a while, and then once the door was open, it took me a while to find the string that pulled the light on too. At last my fingers fastened round it and I tugged. Blinked, stepped back, nearly stumbling. The wall was right in front of my face, less than two feet away. A breezeblock wall right to the ceiling and all the way to both sides. It filled the space completely. How would he ever get it out? And where were the windows? The door? It was supposed to be a copy of the cottage, but it was just a block. It made me think of a tumor, sitting there inside the byre. Solid and ugly. No wonder he didn’t want me to see. And no bloody wonder he couldn’t face coming here and working on it. It was monstrous. It made me feel queasy. Or it and the smell of the cattle drain combined. I wanted to lock the door again and run away.
But, I told myself, on the other hand, here it is. Okay, he’d embellished a bit about how far he’d got. He hadn’t skimmed over the blocks or done the windows, but still. There it totally was. And no wonder the other room was such a mess. There was no room in here for anything else besides this. Nothing in the two-foot-wide passageway between the front of House and the byre wall. Nothing, that is, except for a sack-an old-fashioned hessian sack, tied shut with string, leaning against the corner. I couldn’t help myself. I tiptoed towards it. There was a bit of a smell coming off it, hard to say what kind of smell, but it stirred some kind of troubled feeling in me. I bent over and touched it. It gave and resisted both. It was squashy but there were wiry little points too. I knew I’d felt that before, the give and resist. What the hell was it? I pulled a bit at the string around the neck and peered inside.
Then I was out, banging off the stone and the breezeblock, ricocheting like a pinball, back out into the dark of the field.
A sack of them. A whole brown sackcloth bag of them and I had felt them. Put my hand right on them and felt the curled ends give and the spike ends squeak and prickle. I retched and bent over, but my heart was thumping too fast and my throat was too tight. I had touched them! I had pulled the string. And it might have come loose and they’d all have burst out and I’d have been trapped in there with them flying around me. I’d never have got them back into the bag and Gus would know and-
Gus.
I was drenched in sweat but as cold as a corpse as I stumbled back, pulled the light switch, and closed the door. I locked up and dropped the keys back into the pocket of my borrowed coat.
Why would Gus have nothing at all in the same workshop as the piece except for a sack full of them? How could that be innocent? How could that just happen to be?
It couldn’t. He must have collected them and put them there deliberately. He must be keeping them there as a way of scaring me if I ever stepped out of line. He’d tie me up in there with them, or he’d go to the workshop in the night and get them and empty them all round the room while I was sleeping and tie me down and…
I could hear a voice, and it was Lauren’s voice, telling me to breathe in and breathe out. In for four and out for five. In for five and out for seven. In for six and out for nine and catch a hold of my racing thoughts and start to fold them up and put them away.
Of course he collected them. He didn’t want me to walk on the beach and see them. It was just the kind of thing Gus would do. And they were in a sack in his workshop because… he didn’t want to put them in the wheeliebin and upset me. He’d even taken the very first one-off the end of the novelty pen-he’d taken it out of the wheeliebin, taken it right away. That was last Tuesday night. A week ago today. I stopped short. Why did that thought bother me?
Or. Maybe he had a sack of them like he had all that other stuff lying around. Maybe he’d had it for years, lying about with the light bulbs and lamps, but last week when he knew I was coming, he moved the sack to the other room in case I saw it. And that was why he didn’t want me to follow him through when he went to get Pram. Maybe that was the whole reason why he was so peculiar that night. Poor Gus. Worrying about me. I was glad I’d had that fright before I could look for a computer; he didn’t deserve me spying after all he’d done for me.
I let myself in at the cottage door and went to find him. He was in the kitchen eating pasta with the children. He looked like he hadn’t a care in the world. The same way he’d looked in Marks and Sparks with Ruby that day, before he smashed his phone. I smiled at him.
“I was just going to send out a search party for you,” he said. “You okay?”
“Party!” said Dillon. “Happy Birthday!”
“Your pasta’s cold,” said Ruby. “And we ate all the top bit with the crispy cheese.” She waved her fork at the dish in the middle of the table, a wodge of pasta and, right enough, no top bit at all.
“I don’t mind,” I said, sitting down. “I’m just happy to be here. I’d eat anything so long as I could eat it with here with you.”
Gus screwed up his nose and laughed. “Oh, kids,” he said. “This is too good to be true. What will we give Jessie if she’ll eat anything, eh?”
“Liver,” said Ruby.
“Yum, yum,” I said.
“Rice pudding and gooseberries,” said Gus.
“Rice pudding and bogies!” said Ruby.
“Bogies,” said Dillon. And then he went straight for the big one. “POO!”
“No, no, don’t make me eat poo,” I said. Gus leapt to his feet and went rummaging in the larder, came out with a jar of Nutella. He opened it, put in a finger, and then came towards me waving the brown goo like a snake’s head, to and fro.
“Jessie eats POO!” said Ruby. I took a tiny nibble, no way I was going to suck his finger in front of the kids.
“Yum, yum,” I said.
“Not poo, not really,” said Dillon, troubled now by the thought of how often he’d had toast and Nutella maybe.
“Not really, baby,” I said.
“I’m a baby too,” said Ruby. “Dillon’s the second baby. I’m the first one.”
“You’re a beautiful baby, baby,” I said.
“But I’m a big girl,” said Ruby. “Bigger than Dillon.”
“Oh Ruby, I love you,” I said. “You’re just brilliant.”
“I am actually,” said Ruby. “That’s okay for you to say that. That’s actually true.” Under the table Gus had reached out both his feet and grabbed one of mine between them. The pasta was lukewarm and under-salted-for the kids, probably. But I’d never tasted anything so good in my life. And when we bathed the kids together, me washing Ruby’s hair and Gus playing subs with Dillon, I felt as if my heart had steel bands round it, it ached so much from wanting this to be my future. It was the happiest night of my life. Before or since. It was the best, most hopeful, most innocent moment I’ve ever had or ever will.
It lasted about half an hour. And it was my own fault. I pulled it to pieces single-handed.
“My turn,” said Gus, once the kids were in bed. “If you don’t mind.” He had his coat on, the same one I’d borrowed, and his wellies too.