Tana French - Broken Harbour

A wan, bitter half-smile. “God, that. I forgot I said that. I didn’t want you thinking we were… It should’ve been true. We used to do that, back before. But no: I washed the kids, Pat stayed down in the sitting room-he said he had ‘high hopes’ for the hole by the sofa. He had such high hopes, he hadn’t even eaten dinner with us, in case the hole did something amazing meanwhile. He said he wasn’t hungry, he’d get a sandwich or something later. Back when we were first married, we used to lie in bed and talk about someday when we had kids: what they’d look like, what we’d name them; Pat used to joke about how we’d all have family dinner round the table together every night, no matter what, even when the kids were horrible teenagers and they hated our guts…”

Jenny was still staring up at the ceiling and blinking hard, but a tear escaped, trickled down into the soft hair at her temple. “And now here we were, with Jack banging his fork on the table and yelling, ‘Daddy Daddy Daddy come here!’ over and over, because Pat was in the sitting room, still in his pajamas from last night, staring at a hole. And Emma with her fingers in her ears screaming at Jack to shut up, and me not even trying to make them both be quiet because I didn’t have the energy. I was just trying so hard to make it through the rest of the day without doing anything else insane. I just wanted to sleep.”

Me and Richie, on that first torch-lit walk-through, spotting the rumpled duvet and knowing someone had been in bed when it all turned bad. I said, “So you bathed the children and put them to bed. And then…?”

“I just went to bed too. I could hear Pat moving around downstairs, but I couldn’t face him-I couldn’t handle hearing all about what the animal was doing, not that night-so I stayed upstairs. I tried to read my book for a while, but I couldn’t concentrate. I wanted to put something in front of the drawer where the pin was, like something heavy, but I knew that would be a crazy thing to do. So in the end I switched off the light and I tried to go to sleep.”

Jenny stopped. Neither of us wanted her to go on. I said, “And then?”

“Emma started crying. I don’t know what time it was; I was dozing off and on, waiting for Pat to come up, listening out for what he was doing downstairs. Emma’s always had nightmares, ever since she was tiny. I thought that was all it was, just a nightmare. I got up and went in to her, and she was sitting up in bed, totally terrified . She was crying so hard she could barely breathe; she was trying to say something, but she couldn’t talk. I sat down on the bed and I hugged her-she was clinging on to me, sobbing her poor little heart out. When she calmed down a bit I said, ‘What’s wrong, sweetie? Tell Mummy and I’ll fix it.’ And she said…”

Jenny caught a deep, openmouthed gasp of breath. “She said… ‘It’s in my wardrobe, Mum. It was going to come get me.’

“I said, ‘What’s in your wardrobe, sweetie?’ I still thought it was just a dream or maybe a spider, she hates spiders. But Emma went, she went, ‘ The animal. Mummy, the animal, it’s the animal, it’s laughing at me with its teeth-’ She was starting to go to bits again. I said, ‘There’s no animal here; it was just a dream,’ and she wailed , this awful high noise that didn’t even sound human. I grabbed her, I even shook her-I’ve never done that before, ever. I was scared she was going to wake Jack, but it wasn’t just that. I was…” That great gasp again. “I was scared of the animal. That it would hear her and come after her. I knew there was nothing there. I knew that. But I still-the thought of it, Jesus, I had to make Emma shut up before… She stopped wailing, thank God, but she was still crying and clutching at me, and she was pointing at her schoolbag-it was on the floor by her bed. All I could make out was ‘in there, in there,’ so I switched on the bedside lamp and dumped everything out of the bag. When Emma saw that…”

Jenny’s finger hovered over the drawing. “This. She went, ‘ That! Mummy, that! It’s in my wardrobe!’”

The gasping was gone; her voice had stilled, slowed, just a small pinpoint of life scratching at the thick silence of the room. “The bedside lamp’s only little, and the paper was in a shadow. All I could see was the eyes and the teeth, in the middle of black. I said, ‘What is it, sweetie?’ But I already knew.

“Emma said-she was starting to get her breath back, but she was still doing that hiccuppy thing-she said, ‘The animal. The animal Daddy wants to catch. I’m sorry, Mummy, I’m so so sorry-’

“I put on my sensible voice and I went, ‘Don’t be silly. There’s nothing to be sorry for. But we’ve talked about that animal before. It isn’t real, remember? It’s just a game Daddy plays. He’s just a bit confused. You know that.’

“She looked so wretched. Emma’s sensitive; things she doesn’t understand, they just rip her up inside. She knelt up in bed and hugged me around the neck, and she whispered-right into my ear, like she was scared something would hear her-‘I see it. For days and days now. I’m sorry, Mummy, I tried not to…’

“I wanted to die. I wanted to just melt into a little puddle and soak away into the carpet. I thought I’d kept them safe . That was all I ever wanted. But that animal, that thing , it had got everywhere. It was inside Emma, inside her head. I would have killed it if I could have, I’d have done it with my bare hands, but I couldn’t do that because it didn’t exist . Emma was going, ‘I know I wasn’t meant to tell about it, but Miss Carey said draw your home and it just came out, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’ I knew I had to get the kids away, but there was nowhere I could take them. It had escaped; it had got outside the house, too. There wasn’t anywhere left that was safe. And nothing I could do was worth anything, because I couldn’t trust myself to do things right any more.”

Jenny laid her fingertips on the drawing, lightly and with a kind of bleak wonder: this tiny thing, this slip of paper and crayon that had changed the world.

“I kept so calm. I said to Emma, ‘It’s all right, sweetie. I know you tried. Mummy’s going to make it all OK. You go to sleep now. I’ll stay right here so the animal can’t get you. OK?’ I opened her wardrobe and looked in all the corners, so she could see there was nothing there. I put all her things back in her schoolbag. Then I switched off the lamp again and I sat there on the bed, holding her hand, till she fell asleep-it took a while, she kept opening her eyes to double-check that I was still there, but she was exhausted from getting so freaked out; in the end she went off. And then I took the drawing and I went downstairs to find Pat.

“He was on the kitchen floor. He had the cupboard door open, this cupboard where he’d made a hole at the back, and he was crouching in front of it like an animal, like this great big animal waiting to pounce. He had one of his hands in the cupboard, spread out on the shelf. In the other hand he had this vase, this silver vase, it was our wedding present from my grandmother-I used to put it on the windowsill in our bedroom with pink roses in it, like I had in my bouquet, to remind us of our wedding day… Pat was holding it by the neck, holding it up like he was about to smash something with it. And there was this knife , one of these really sharp cooking knives that we bought back when we used to do Gordon Ramsay recipes, it was on the floor right next to him. I said, ‘What are you doing ?’

“Pat said, ‘Shut up. Listen.’ I listened but I couldn’t hear anything, there was nothing there ! So I said that: ‘There’s nothing there.’