Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

Had it gone to court and had Catherine been found guilty, which she almost certainly would have been, as well as being regarded as unstable, Tara’s card would still have been marked indelibly. There would always have been doubts about her thereafter. Suspicions that would have followed Tara up the tiers of corporate television. Rumours would have been whispered in offices and stairwells and media pubs every time she did something unethical. And Tara excelled at the unscrupulous behaviour that people like Tara needed to repeat, everywhere they worked.

Tara probably didn’t have any choice. Urges to undermine and destroy others defined Tara as much as the skinny-fit jeans with high heels, the asymmetrical cut of her designer wardrobe, the Marlboro Light and Charlie huskiness of her upper-class voice, and the long fringe through which her small eyes peered out. And those cold blue eyes were forever searching for weaknesses and diffidence and hesitation and victims. These urges had been in place long before Catherine met Tara. They may have been forged in private school, or before. Tara would always need a perfect victim and she had found one in Catherine.

Within minutes of the incident, Catherine had been sacked and removed physically from the premises of Handle With Care, and Tara had taken stewardship of Catherine’s production, and her contacts and ideas. Those, that is, not already in Tara’s possession. So Tara’s strategy did ultimately pay the intended dividends, but never in the way the woman envisaged.

After the confrontation in the ladies’ toilet, Tara had also deployed damage limitation more quickly than most major cities drowned by floods. Tara had calmly pulled her wet fringe out of her eyes, and wiped the blood off her forehead to only briefly inspect it on her manicured fingertips. And Catherine should have guessed, in those tremulous bright moments of sparkling adrenaline and heavy breaths, that Tara’s reptilian mind had probably made a decision about how to react, or rather how to manage the incident.

Sitting on the floor of the toilet stall, with only a solitary Jimmy Choo remaining on one of her long feet, Tara had called their boss on her iPhone. A man who sat no more than twenty feet from the office toilets. And when Tara said with a familiarity that verged on intimacy, that ‘Jeremy. You need to come to the toilets. Now. There has been an incident.’, Catherine should have known she had not heard the last of Tara. Even after the woman who functioned as human resources in the company, promptly cleared Catherine’s desk into a plastic bag and shoved it into her bruised hand on the mews street outside the Handle With Care offices, the lack of police interest and an arrest should have been adequate forewarning that she had merely taken things with Tara to a whole new level. One that was being actioned now.

Because Tara had come back into her life. Tara had waited nearly two years for an opportunity. Such patience was monumental. Now Catherine was back in the antiques business, Tara must have tracked her down.

But how did she know about Mike? How? How? How? Facebook! Catherine is in a relationship with Mike Turner. Tara must have befriended her under an alias, or befriended Mike, or Facebook had changed privacy settings like they always do, and Tara had then discovered Mike. Or Tara knew people down here and had put her feelers out. However she had done it, Tara had devised a way of meeting Mike and seducing him. The tall, confident, posho from West London had gone straight for the heart. Mike would have been a pushover.

Catherine went cold all over, but was also in awe. You thought you were mad, but you have nothing on this bitch.

And Tara wasn’t afraid of Catherine. She strode up that tiny path and virtually sprang into Mike’s hallway. She was prepared to slum it in the provinces with a no-hoper, a wannabe photographer, for a considerable pay-off. Couple of weekends in Worcester and Putney Bridge and then Mike would never hear from Tara again. Or Catherine, because of the nature of his deception. Mike wasn’t important, no more than a pawn that gets knocked off the board by a marauding queen.

It was Catherine’s turn to sit on the floor of a toilet cubicle with blood on her face, at least metaphorically.

With his arms full of takeaway, wine and a DVD, Mike followed her into the house like a rat smelling carrion. A night in.

Smelly Cathy Howard. Smelly Cathy Howard. Dopted. Dopted.

The children at the new school could read her mind. That’s how they knew the chant from her previous school.

That day in the upper playground the hot pressure of humiliation had blurred her vision. She tried to hide her face from the crowd, but the children would keep appearing wherever her vision settled. The eyes of the children were wild and red. All of their mouths were open. She’d never seen them so excited.

Until something else caught her eye, in the distance. A raggedy boy stood behind the painted metal fence that bordered the top playground. When she noticed him, he raised one small hand into the wavy air above his head.

A skipping rope lashed the back of Catherine’s thighs and the burning sting brought her close to fainting. The rope wound between her legs and bit the back of one knee. She cried out and fell down to the gritty tarmac. The forced laughter of the children in the playground seemed to thin the air so she couldn’t breathe.

Through hot, watery eyes she saw the blurred shapes of the girls attacking her. One of their arms was raised as if to crack a whip upon a horse. She suddenly feared the wooden handle of the skipping rope and clamped her hands across her skull and shut her eyes tight, expelling a stream of salty tears down her cheeks and into her mouth as she did so. But the rope never fell.

Instead, silence came to the playground. Not a voice or slap of foot upon the tarmac could be heard outside of her personal darkness. Even the birds stopped their incessant twittering in the treeline behind the concrete domes she had once been forced inside to nearly suffocate from panic.

When she opened her eyes she found herself looking at the backs of the children closest to her, and saw creased blue cardigans and checked pinafores. Beyond them, the others in the playground faced forward, all stood still as if the headmistress had just walked into assembly. And she saw that all of their noses were bleeding in two bright rivulets that reached their chins.

In the distance, close to the staffroom windows, Miss Quan was the only thing moving in a scene of perfect stillness, and in such a strange way Catherine wondered why none of the children were looking at the teacher as she jerked her white face up and down, and gulped at the air like a fish, while raking her hair out at the sides of her head, tugging it loose from the hair clips with her bony fingers. The iron bell that called an end to dinnertime rolled back and forth close to her feet.

Around the scuffed shoes of the children, leaves began to blow in dusty circles, caught in the current made by the sound of the ice-cream van playing ‘Greensleeves’, but like it was playing the music too quickly through a big metal trumpet.

None of the children were looking at the playground fence beside the main gates either, where the van played the discordant summons. And when Catherine looked up there she saw no van, nor the raggedy boy looking through the fence. That was because the boy wasn’t up there any more. He was now stood between the faded white lines that formed the old hopscotch grid on the top playground.

It was the raggedy boy that all of the children were staring at, because they could also see him now, as he showed them the tiny rounded teeth of ivory in his black mouth, and his wide white eyes in what looked like a painted wooden face.