Page 34 of Insomnia

I scramble out and see what made him find me. A mug of chamomile tea, cold, sitting on the floor by the door.

“It’s okay.” I kiss his face, my hands freezing against his hot skin. “Don’t be scared.” He looks past me to the cupboard beyond. I force myself to smile. “Don’t tell anyone, but that’s Mummy’s secret hiding place.” His eyes come back to me. “It can be your secret hiding place too, if you like,” I say. I sit cross-legged on the floor and pull him onto my lap. His little body is so warm, and I wrap my arms around him, holding him like I used to when he was a toddler, a happy lively boy. I rock us backward and forward.

“But the thing about secrets,” I whisper, “is that you can’t tell anyone about them. Not even Daddy. Okay? It has to be just us. Our safe space. Our special place.” He nods, so serious, like an old man, and I want to shake this quietness out of him, to get my funny little boy back.

“Are you okay, monkey?” I push his hair out of his eyes. “I’m so worried about you. You can’t sleep either? Did Auntie Phoebe scare you?” He doesn’t say anything, but licks his lips. He always does that when he’s thinking hard about something. “Is that why you did those drawings in your book? Did she say something to you?”

He chews the side of his bottom lip. I know that tell too—he’s feeling awkward. He doesn’t know what to say. His body has stiffened and he’s picking at the skin around his fingers, just like I do.

“It’s okay, baby. I just need to know. What were you drawing?”

He wriggles away from me, knocking over my mug of cold chamomile tea and vodka as he gets to his feet.

“Will, wait!”

He gets to the bottom step and then stops dead, one hand on the banister, and looks at me.

“You, Mummy,” he says eventually. “It’s you.” And then he’s gone, running up the stairs as if a monster is chasing him.

Me.

I’m half up on my feet but now I crumple back to the floor. How can he be drawing me? Yes, I check on him at night. But that’s all. I want to keep him safe.Safe from what?My mother is whispering in my head again.They think you killed me. You’re not even entirely sure you didn’t yourself, are you? You don’t remember whispering my numbers into your Dictaphone. You don’t remember much of the hospital after I grabbed you, not until you were running. Maybe you don’t remember scaring him either?

I stay on the floor for a long time after that.

28.

FOUR DAYS UNTIL MY BIRTHDAY

I’ve spent the night worrying about Will and what he might say to Robert about finding me in the cupboard—why the hell was I in the cupboard?—but it’s Chloe who finally lets rip over breakfast. I’m making a second double espresso in the coffee machine we rarely use and Robert is doing something on his iPad—avoiding me basically. The atmosphere is unbearably tense and probably not helped by all of us trying to act as if everything is normal.

“I’m the teenager,” she says as she gathers her stuff together, ready to leave for school on time for once. “I’m supposed to be the dysfunctional one.”

I haven’t gone in to work early. I finally fell asleep at nearly five and didn’t wake until Robert got up at 6:45, and anyway, I wanted to see Will, to make sure he was okay, but it’s as if he’s forgotten that last night ever happened. He’s playing with a toy truck on the breakfast bar, makingbrrmmm brrmmmsounds while eating his cereal and spraying quite a lot of milk down his chin. He’s so much closer to normal than he’s been for a few days that neither Robert nor I have asked him to stop.

“What’s wrong with this family at the moment?” Chloe continues. “It’s like everyone’s gone mad.”

Mad.There’s that word again. My mother in among us.

“Everything’s fine,” I say.

“Fine?” She half laughs. “You’ve got these secrets you’ve been keeping from us—I had a grandmother who was alive all these years for one—and you’ve been acting weird and looking like complete shit for about a week, and now the police have been here clearly thinking you’ve done something wrong, and we’re all acting as if that’s perfectly normal.”

“Chloe, listen—”

“On top of that, Will has totally shut down and no one seems to be doing anything about that, and you, Dad.” She glares at Robert. “You’re not normal either. As soon as I get home and can look after Will, you go out. Neither you nor Mum are ever in the house these days. Will’s my brother, not my child. It’s not my job to look after him. And maybe if you were both here more, you’d see that something is really bothering him.”

“I’m not out all the time. Don’t exaggerate.”

Robert looks pissed off. Guilty. Caught out. Is this why he’s been so shit at doing things around the house recently? He’s been out. Has he been skating in just in time to feed Will and get him to bed and make it look like he’s been home all day? I don’t care if he’s out doing stuff, but I care that he’s not telling me. Is this all part of this buying a bar midlife crisis plan? Or is it something else?

Chloe looks at us, from one to the other. “Are you getting a divorce? Because if you are, just say so.”

“God no,” I say, when she finally pauses for breath.

“Of course not,” Robert adds, a few seconds after me, as if hesitant. “We’re just working through a few things.”

“Are we?” I look at him, surprised. “I wasn’t aware that we were.”

---