Finally, Barry was gone.

PC Yorke’s phone rang and rang. As Mira waited, she picked at a semi-circle of dirt under her fingernail.

‘Hello, PC Yorke speaking.’

‘Hello PC Yorke, it’s Mira Entwistle from Virginia Close. I wanted to talk to you about little Rosie Bradley.’

PC Yorke had listened quietly. After she had finished, his chit-chatty tone of before had disappeared. He turned officious and cold with her, as though Mira had been the one to hit Rosie. PC Yorke had then told her that a response team would be called out to speak to her about what had happened.

‘But I have to go to work.’

‘I’ll send them over to Woodlands,’ he said, knowing exactly where she worked. He had been a boy at Woodlands Primary himself, fifteen odd years ago when she had first started at the school as a dinner monitor.

When she hung up, she was a little annoyed that he hadn’t at least given her any credit for getting the information out of Rosie. Goodness me, she thought, if I’d left it to that whippersnapper PC Yorke – who had eaten with his mouth open at school – Rosie might have continued to suffer alone!

In between each poof of a pillow, she glanced out of the bedroom window into the Bradleys’ garden.

She wondered how long it would take the police to call Gemma after they had interviewed her at Woodlands.

When the safety of a child was at stake, the response would have to be swift, Mira knew this much.

She worried that Rosie would be cross with her for breaking her confidence and upsetting her mummy. However ironic, this troubled Mira greatly.

There was something about her newfound attachment to this girl that had shifted her attention away from her charges at Woodlands Primary, away from her little Alice with the lisp, shouty red-headed George and Olivia who wet her pants every day. Having doted on them from the moment they had started in Year Two, she didn’t feel engaged with them in the same way. None of them seemed to be as compelling as Rosie.

This didn’t sit well with her. She knew she was letting them down in small ways every day. Like when she smelt the dry urine on Olivia at the end of Monday, realising that she had failed to spot the accident. And on Tuesday George had been given a red warning card by Sally – Mrs Edwards to the Year Twos – for hitting Humphrey. This would not have happened if Mira had recognised the escalation of George’s shouting and intervened in the altercation sooner.

Today she would try to work harder for her Year Twos, she thought, before remembering that the police response team would interrupt them.

Her stomach crunched, sending her hurtling for the toilet.

She needed something to take her mind off things and so she allowed herself a cup of tea before work and settled herself at the dining room table. She didn’t have to be at school until nine-thirty that morning.

As she sifted, she noted that there weren’t any photographs of her much beyond 1983, the year she had turned sixteen. The older photographs with their square white borders were plentiful. The snaps from her early teenage years were larger matt prints, but there were fewer of them. By her mid-teen years, there were only a handful of larger, glossier prints.

Not that there were that many of Deidre either, not until the later years, when there was a flurry of her with her husband, Doug, and then when she was pregnant, and then with her son, Harry, when he was a baby.

Mira found a brown envelope to store these ones away. These were not going to make the album.

As she popped them into the envelope, one by one, she stopped at the one with Harry sitting on Deidre’s lap. Before putting it in, she noticed that Harry was chewing a baby-blue toy rabbit.

The room began to spin with a whoosh of love.

She pressed the photograph into her chest as though hugging it. She rocked back and forth on the chair as she held it to her, steeling herself before she peeled it away from her body to look again at the blue rabbit.

So that she didn’t pass out, she rested her forehead onto the table. The wooden edge dug a line across her skull; she pressed harder, a pleasing pain. She closed her eyes and pushed the chair back, bending over further until her head was between her knees. Something plastic in her fingers. Not a photograph any more. A stick. White and long. A blue line. No, a blue cross. A faded blue cross. She was on a toilet, in a bathroom with black and white tiles. Craig’s voice came to her.

‘Let me see those instructions,’ Craig had said, grabbing them from where Mira had left them at her feet by the toilet.

Her head was between her knees. She couldn’t look at him.

The instructions crackled in his hands.

She noticed how his big toe curled up from the floor tiles as he read. It was twice the width of his second toe. It was square and hairy and she didn’t like it. Would her baby have his toes? she thought, before laughing.

‘What’s so funny?’ He scrunched up the instructions and chucked them at her head playfully.

She couldn’t stop the giggling. ‘Nothing.’

‘You’re such a weird kid,’ he smirked, beginning to laugh too.

‘Sorry,’ she snorted, before pulling up her pants and flushing the toilet.

He blocked her way to the sink, pulling her hips into his. The warmth of his skin on her breasts distracted her from the blue cross.

His hand moved down her long hair, over her right breast and down to where it met the top of her knickers. He slipped his hands into the front, and he groaned, under his breath, ‘What I want to do to you now is called statutory rape.’

She let her head roll back, yielding to him and he lifted her onto the sink, pushing her knickers aside.

‘We could go away somewhere together,’ Mira murmured.

He panted, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and he pushed inside her.

How she loved him. She loved him. She loved him so much. ‘I love you,’ escaped from her lips

His movements slowed. She felt a softening of him inside her. He pulled out.

‘Shit, Mira,’ he mumbled, and he left her there on the side of the sink. Unsupported by him, she slipped off. Her ankle gave way and twisted slightly.

In the adjoining bedroom, she had to hobble past him and around his bed to the pine chest, where she had a small drawer for her clothes. She had only meant to stay a few nights, and seven weeks later she was still there.

She clipped her bra around her waist. Her reflection in the mirror showed only her torso. She was headless. Her stomach protruded over her pants, her swollen, sore breasts drooped. What a miracle that Craig had desired that ugly lump, she thought.

Perching on the edge of the bed self-consciously, she pulled her white school socks on, feeling her waistband dig into her belly, and wondered where they would squeeze the cot in this small room.

‘Get off will you?’ he said.

The black and red duvet was pulled from under her.

He shook it out violently before laying it down, whacking at it and smoothing it flat. ‘NHS’ll give you one for free, you know.’

‘Give me what?’

‘You know. A whatsit.’ He mimed sticking an imaginary something up between his legs.

‘Oh.’

‘You’ll have to tell the doc you shagged some spotty fifteen-year-old git though or I’ll be locked up.’

Her ankle throbbed. She thought about pain. She was brave about pain. The pain of childbirth was considered unbearable by even the most hardy of women. She’d cope.

‘You okay?’ he had asked as he crafted his quiff with gelled palms.

‘Yup.’

She turned away from him and took her hairbrush from the drawer.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. She counted in her head, brushing from the widow’s peak at the front and continuing right down to the ends. Seven, eight, nine, ten.

Craig said something else to her, she thought, but she hadn’t heard him. Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven. Her arm had begun to ache at forty. Craig stamped out of the room. Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one. She counted in time to his heavy footsteps, which shook the floor under her feet. Eighty-eight, eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two. Her hair was silky smooth. One hundred. Her mind was calm again.

Dropping the photograph, Mira ran her fingers through her cropped grey hair: wiry and stiff and requiring no brushing, but just as thick as it had been back then. What would she look like with it long now? She had spent her adult life with it short. Thirty-four years ago, she had asked the hairdresser to cut it off. It had been an angry, almost violent self-destruction – a symbolic act – and she wondered whether she should be bothered by the fact that her haircut, all of her adult life, had been a visible representation of that one bad moment in her history. She thought of growing it out. Her image and others’ view of her would be radically altered if she wore long hair again. It was an amusing thought, to open up that side of herself again after so many years of hiding her. It was out of the question, obviously. But amusing all the same.

Cutting into her playful thoughts of swishing her thick hair around her shoulders, came Craig’s vile words again. ‘The NHS’ll do it for free, you know.’ He hadn’t even been able to say the word ‘abortion’.

She went upstairs to find a hairbrush. The only one she could find was in Barry’s shoe rack. One, two, three. She brushed from the widow’s peak and down through her imaginary tresses. Ten, eleven, twelve. Once she got to one hundred, she was calmed all over again, just as she had been at fifteen years old standing in Craig’s bedroom.

---

When Mira arrived at school, little Olivia in Year Two pointed at her and cried, ‘You’re all dirty, Mrs Entwistle!’ Streaks of black shoe polish were smeared down the front of her T-shirt, over her breasts and right down to the top edge of her skirt, like black shadows of her former self.