Sarah May - The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls

‘I don’t mind getting the bus,’ Ruth put in.

Saskia drifted slowly towards the ice cream van. ‘You sure?’

Ruth nodded as Grace turned back to Tom. ‘How are you getting home?’ she asked over the soft rhythmic beat of the ball on the road.

‘We’ll get the bus—it’s fine,’ Ruth said again, trying not to look at Tom, who didn’t comment on this.

Saskia got up into the front of the van, excited. ‘Can we put the music on?’

The boy didn’t respond—he was too busy watching Grace standing beside the van with her bike.

Tom stopped bouncing the basketball.

‘I think I’ll walk back.’ He paused, looking at Grace. ‘You feel like walking with me?’

She didn’t say anything; within seconds was standing beside him.

‘What about your bike?’ the boy said, quietly devastated, and trying not to sound frantic.

Tom turned to Grace. ‘We can lock it to the roof rack and I’ll take it home with me when I come back for the car later. You’ve got a lock for it?’

Ruth’s momentary decisiveness was gone, and its departure left her looking stranded.

‘Ruth,’ Saskia called out from the ice cream van, and the next minute, Ruth was climbing up beside her as Tom started to bounce the basketball again.

The van pulled away, the boy glancing in the rear view mirror at Grace.

Grace and Tom stood in the road and watched the van disappear, a canned version of Au Clair de la Lune starting up the moment it was out of sight.

At the sound of the music, they smiled suddenly at each other.

Feeling immediately lighter, Tom kicked the ball hard, into the forest.

‘Why did you do that?’

He shrugged, still smiling, then lifted her bike onto the roof of the car. Grace chained it to the roof rack.

After checking the doors to make sure they were locked, he jumped down into the ditch the deer had vaulted earlier.

‘You coming?’ He watched her, waiting for her to change her mind.

‘Which way are you going?’

‘Shortcut.’

She jumped down into the ditch beside him. ‘I’m wearing flip-flops.’

‘You’re not in a hurry for anything?’

She shook her head.

‘So we’ll go slow.’

She hesitated then followed him into the woods.

—autumn—

Bill Henderson woke at 5:15 just like he did every morning, including weekends, only at the weekend he didn’t have to get up. Today wasn’t a weekend, and the world was even more silent than usual due to the heavy fog October had pushed over Burwood during the night. Bill didn’t know about the fog yet, but the silence was so intense he woke with the sound of a low pitched hum in his ears that he thought was the under-floor heating they’d had installed downstairs until he remembered that the central heating wasn’t programmed to come on until seven because Vicky said the sound of it woke her up. It was the same sort of humming he heard Scuba diving that summer because of water pressure.

Still puzzled, he executed the neat sideways roll he’d perfected over the years, which enabled him to vacate the marital bed in the early hours without waking Sylvia. Landing softly on the carpet in a stress position, he moved silently out the room. He then crept downstairs to the loo where he peed in the dark because switching the light on triggered the extractor fan.

They’d been in the house over two years, but in the dark mornings, half awake, the layout sometimes caught him out. He aimed his pee as best he could in the glow from the sitting room sidelights that were on timer switches and programmed to come on at five in the morning. Not flushing the chain was also part of the morning’s silent routine, one that contributed to the sometimes overwhelming feeling in Bill that he had in fact died without realising it, and was haunting rather than living in his home.

He padded through to the kitchen, put the cooker hood light on and poured himself a glass of milk, which he drank standing in front of the fridge where there was a diary kept up with magnets that had survival maxims for life as a woman written over them—that Sylvia, drunk, read out to him like he hadn’t heard them a million times already.

He checked the diary every morning, with a fledgling curiosity at this early hour for the insight it gave him into the lives lived by his wife and daughter during the week. There in front of him was a list of cryptic biro scrawls that held the key to everything happening in this house he’d paid for and that he felt like no more than a squatter in. It occurred to him that all he would ever need to surmise about these two people—one to whom he was bound because of a religious ceremony, and the other through genes—was contained here in this diary.

Today’s list was long:

5km / hair @12 / POKER / flowers—Panino’s / Tel. Tom re. nxt w/e—Ali coming?

Then, in caps, with an asterisk either side:

* POKER PARTY *

Then, in lower case and without asterisk:

rem. Bill

It was strange seeing his own name written in the diary. Puzzled, but not particularly concerned, he put his empty glass down on the surface and stared around the kitchen. He was forgetting something. He’d stood in this exact spot the night before and Sylvia had asked him to do something first thing in the morning when he got up; something important, and now he couldn’t remember.

He went through to the sitting room, still trying to recall what it was, and attempted to operate the pulleys that opened the curtains—curtains that had cost them more than a month’s mortgage payment.

They swung heavily apart, not responding to his touch as they did Sylvia’s, and there he was all over again in the pyjama bottoms and T-shirt he wore to bed. The T-shirt infuriated Sylvia, who couldn’t understand why he refused to wear both parts of the two-part sets she bought him. Even when he explained that he didn’t like to end his day in the same way he began it by doing up a row of buttons. She still didn’t understand.

He enjoyed observing himself hovering above the lawn’s dark outline while simultaneously suspended in a fragile replica of the sitting room.

This morning he looked like he was standing in a cloud and it took him a while to realise that nothing untoward had happened to the outside world; it was only fog.

He waved at himself and smiled, then, suddenly embarrassed, went back upstairs to the spare bedroom where he kept his minimal wardrobe of mostly suits, clothes to play golf in and a couple of outfits he wore when they went out socially as a family. These were the outfits he stood in while listening to people whose names he forgot as soon as they told him, talking about operations they’d had or cars they drove. Sylvia’s people.

He dressed without looking at himself in the mirror, shaved in the downstairs bathroom where he kept his shaving soap and cologne, then left the house, tiptoeing across the gravel that marked the threshold between him and the dawning day.

Two Fridays a month he went up to London to do a day’s auditing at Pinnacle Insurance’s Head Office.

Today was one of those Fridays.

Sylvia Henderson was between diets, and sleeping badly. She woke about thirty minutes after Bill Henderson left for work, and couldn’t see anything when she opened her eyes because of the black-out blinds she’d bought to ease her irregular but persistent bouts of insomnia. She knew, instinctively, that Bill wasn’t there. The smell of him in the bed was always stronger once he’d left it. After unconsciously processing this fact about Bill—that he’d left for work—she stopped thinking about him.

They’d been married too many years for her to think about him when he wasn’t physically present.