Tana French - Broken Harbour

She said, “And then the new camera didn’t catch anything, either. And a week later the kids and I got back from the shops and there was another hole, in the hall. I went, ‘What’s this?’ and Pat was like, ‘Give me the car keys. I need another monitor, quick. It’s moving back and forth between the sitting room and the hall-I swear it’s deliberately screwing with me. One more monitor and I’ve got the bastard!’ Maybe I could have put my foot down then, maybe that was when I should’ve done it, but Emma was all, ‘What? What? What’s moving, Daddy?’ and Jack was yelling, ‘Bastard bastard bastard!’ and I just wanted to get Pat out of there so I could sort them. I gave him the keys, and he practically ran out the door.”

A bitter little smile, one-sided. “More excited than he’d been in months. I told the kids, ‘Your daddy thinks we might have a mouse, don’t worry about it.’ And when Pat got back-with three video monitors, just in case, when Jack’s wearing secondhand jeans-I said to him, ‘You need to not talk about this around the kids, or they’ll get nightmares. I’m serious.’ He was all, ‘Yeah, course, you’re right as usual, no problem.’ That lasted, what, two hours? That same evening I was in the playroom, reading to the kids, and Pat came running in with one of those bloody monitors, going, ‘Jen, listen, it’s making this mad hissing noise in there, listen!’ I gave him the daggers but he didn’t even notice, not till I said, ‘We’ll talk about it later,’ and then he actually looked pissed off.”

Her voice was rising. I could have kicked myself for not bringing someone, anyone, even Richie, to stand guard outside the door. “And the next afternoon he’s on the computer and the kids are right there , I’m making their snack, and Pat goes, ‘Wow, Jen, listen to this! Some guy in Slovenia, he’s bred this giant mink, like the size of a dog, I wonder if one could’ve escaped and-’ And ’cause the kids were there I had to go, ‘That’s really interesting, why don’t you tell me about it later on,’ when inside I was just like, I don’t care! I don’t give a fuck! All I want is for you to shut up around the kids! ”

Jenny tried to take a deep breath, but her muscles were too tense to let her. “So of course the kids figured it out-Emma did, anyway. A couple of days later we were in the car, her and me and Jack, and she was like, ‘Mum, what’s a mink?’ I went, ‘It’s an animal,’ and she went, ‘Is there one inside our wall?’

“I went, all casual, ‘Oh, I don’t think so. If there is, though, your daddy’s going to get rid of it.’ The kids seemed OK with that, but I could’ve hit Pat. I got home and told him-I was yelling, I’d sent the kids out to the garden so they wouldn’t hear-and Pat just went, ‘Oops, shit, sorry. Tell you what, though: now they know, maybe they could help. I can’t keep an eye on all these monitors at once, I keep worrying that I’m missing something. Maybe the kids could hang on to one each?’ Which was just so wrong I could hardly talk . I just went, ‘No. No. No bloody way. Don’t you ever suggest that again,’ and he didn’t, but still. And of course even though he said he had too many monitors he got nothing out of the hallway wall so he made more holes, he set up more monitors, every time I looked around there was another hole in our home !”

I made some meaningless reassuring noise. Jenny didn’t notice. “And that was all he did: watch those monitors. He got this trap -not just a mousetrap, but this massive horrible thing with teeth that he put in the attic-I mean, I guess you’ve seen it. He acted like it was some big mystery , he was all, ‘Don’t worry about it, babe, what you don’t know won’t hurt you,’ but he was totally over the moon with it, like this was a brand-new Porsche or some magic wand that was going to fix all our problems forever. He would’ve watched that trap twenty-four-seven if he could’ve. He wouldn’t play with the kids any more-I couldn’t even leave Jack with him while I took Emma to school, or I’d come home and find Jack, like, painting the kitchen floor with tomato sauce while Pat sat there, three feet away, staring at these little screens with his mouth open. I tried to get him to turn them off in front of the kids, and mostly he would, but that just meant the second the kids were in bed Pat had to sit in front of those things all evening long. A couple of times I tried making a fancy dinner, with candles and flowers and the nice silver, and dressing up-like a date night, you know?-but he just lined up the monitors in front of his plate and stared at them the whole time we were eating. He said it was important: the thing got hyper when it smelled food, he had to be ready. I mean, I thought we were important too, but no, apparently not.”

I thought of the frantic message-board posts, She doesn’t understand, she doesn’t get it… I asked, “Did you try telling Pat how you felt?”

Jenny’s hands flew up and out, the IV line swinging from that great purple bruise. “ How? He literally wouldn’t have a conversation, in case he missed something on those fucking monitors. When I tried to say anything to him, even just asking him to get something off a shelf, he’d shush me. He’d never done that before. I couldn’t tell if I should give out, or if that would make Pat blow up at me, or pull away from me even more. And I couldn’t tell why I couldn’t tell-whether it was because I was so stressed out I wasn’t thinking straight, or whether there just wasn’t a right answer-”

I said soothingly, “I understand. I wasn’t implying-” Jenny didn’t stop.

“And anyway, we practically didn’t even see each other any more. Pat said the thing was ‘more active’ at night, so he was staying up late and sleeping half the day. We always used to go to bed together, always, but the kids get up early, so I couldn’t stay up with him. He wanted me to-he kept being like, ‘Come on, I know tonight’s the night we get a look at it, I can feel it’-he was always having some idea that was definitely going to catch the thing, like some new bait, or some tent-type thing over the hole and the camera so the animal would feel safe . And he’d be like, ‘Please, Jenny, please, I’m begging you-all it’ll take is one look and you’ll be so much happier, you won’t be worrying about me any more. I know you don’t believe me, but just stay up this one night and you’ll see…’”

“And did you?” I kept my voice low and hoped Jenny would take the hint, but hers looped higher and higher.

“I tried ! I hated even looking at those holes, I hated them so much , but I thought if Pat was right then I owed it to him, and if he was wrong then I might as well be sure, you know? And either way, at least we’d be doing something together, even if it wasn’t exactly a romantic dinner. But I was getting so exhausted, a couple of times I thought I was going to fall asleep when I was driving; I couldn’t do it any more. So I’d go to bed at midnight, and Pat would come up whenever he got too tired to keep his eyes open. At first it was like two o’clock, but then it was three, four, five, sometimes not even then-in the morning I’d find him crashed out on the sofa, with all the monitors lined up on the coffee table. Or in the chair by the computer, because he’d spent the whole night online reading up on animals.”

I said, “‘If he was right.’ By this point, you had doubts.”

Jenny caught a breath and for a second I thought she was going to snap at me again, but then her spine sagged and she slumped back against the pillows.