At the top end of Prendergast Road - beyond the crossroads with Whateley Road - Arthur Palmer, aged four and three quarters, woke up screaming. His mother, Jessica Palmer - only half awake - stumbled automatically into his room, tripping over a garage and farmyard, until her hand grasped the foot of Arthur’s bed where Arthur was sitting screaming, still asleep. He was having a night fright, the extremist form of a nightmare.
Even in the half-light, Jessica could make out the muscles on his neck as his body took the strain of fear. He looked like he did when he was having one of his bad asthma attacks and she grabbed his inhaler off the bookshelves.
As she sat down next to him on the end of the bed, closer than she wanted to, the screaming stopped.
Arthur raised his arms weakly - one hand clutching his favourite Transformer, Burke - before sinking untidily back onto the duvet.
Jessica waited, then yawned and got slowly to her feet, creeping out of the room.
In the hallway, eyes nearly shut again, she walked into her sixteen-year-old daughter, Ellie.
‘Everything okay?’ Ellie asked.
‘Oh - everything’s…yeah, it was just Arthur, one of his…one of his…you go back to bed.’
They eyed each other uneasily and, after a moment’s hesitation, Ellie walked unsteadily back into her room on her spindle legs.
‘See you in the morning,’ Jessica called out after her, hoping it sounded natural, then went back to bed herself, thinking she’d fall straight to sleep again; only she didn’t. She rolled around in the big empty bed that seemed to get bigger and emptier every night, then listened to the central heating coming on and - realising that she wasn’t going to get back to sleep until it got dark again in twelve hours’ time - got up.
Downstairs in the kitchen, she stared at her day, plotted out in blue marker pen on the whiteboard next to the fridge.
Her neighbour, Kate Hunter, was picking Arthur up from nursery at 4.30 and taking him to Swim School with Findlay then bringing him home, because Jessica had viewings booked throughout the afternoon. She yawned again as the wind changed direction outside and the fan in the kitchen window started to clack unevenly in its broken frame. When would she get round to mending that? Probably never.
Turning round, she saw the pot of chrysanthemums on the windowsill that she’d bought because she liked the colour pink they’d been in the shop. When she got them home the pink seemed different, and she couldn’t work out why she’d bought them when she’d never liked chrysanthemums anyway. Now they were half dead, the leaves and petals shrivelled.
She went over to the sink, filled an empty milk carton, and was about to water the plant when she stopped, suddenly pouring the contents of the milk carton back down the sink and lighting a cigarette instead.
She stood by the windowsill, smoking and staring at the chrysanthemums, not thinking about anything much.
When Kate woke up again, an hour later, the edge of her pillow was wet, and for no reason at all her first thought was that Robert had been crying. Only Robert wasn’t even in the bed.
‘Robert?’ she called out, anxious.
‘Here,’ he mumbled.
Then she saw him, kneeling on the floor in front of the chest of drawers, the bottom drawer open.
‘I didn’t hear you get up.’ She didn’t like to think of Robert awake while she was asleep.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said and carried on digging around in the drawer.
Neither of them mentioned last night’s row; the sun was shining, a new day was beginning, and there just wasn’t room for it.
‘You’re wet,’ she observed.
‘Yeah—I showered.’
‘Already? I didn’t hear the shower.’ Kate carried on watching him.
Robert scratched at his armpit then stood up suddenly.
‘What is it you’re looking for?’
‘I don’t know—I’ve forgotten. Christ…’ he added, ambivalently.
On the other side of the bedroom door they could hear Margery, who was staying with them at the moment while she had her Leicestershire bungalow repainted, irritably attempting to make a pot of tea. Everything about No. 22 Prendergast Road irritated Margery—primarily because she couldn’t believe what Robert and Kate had paid for a terraced house with neighbours on one side who weren’t even white.
The kettle started shrieking on the hob. The kettle irritated Margery—why didn’t they get an electric one? Even the water coming out through the tap irritated her, and the irritation was so intense that Kate, lying upstairs in bed, could feel it as Robert walked towards her through bars of early morning sunlight.
‘I heard someone screaming last night,’ she heard herself saying as the smashing sounds carried on downstairs. ‘I thought it might have been your mum.’ Why had she said that? She hadn’t meant to say anything about the scream in the night.
Robert, who had been about to sit down on the side of the bed and kiss her, stayed standing instead.
‘She used to do that when I was a kid,’ he said, suddenly remembering.
Still propped on her elbow, which was sinking deeper and deeper into the pillow, Kate waited for him to carry on, but he didn’t. Unexpectedly, at 6.10 on a Thursday morning, the clouds had parted and Robert had given her a picture of a small child standing outside a shut bedroom door on a cold landing in the early hours of the morning, waiting for the woman on the other side to stop screaming; hating himself for not having the courage to open the door and walk in and comfort her when he knew he was all she had.
Kate and him stared at each other, momentarily stunned. Robert never talked about his childhood. He never talked about it with Margery or other people who had been there, so why talk about it with people who hadn’t? For him, it was time that had passed—and anyway, now he was healthily involved in the direct manufacture of his own children’s childhoods.
He shrugged uncomfortably at his own transgression, then said cheerfully, ‘So—what’s on for today?’
‘Today’s the day.’
‘For what?’
‘Robert—you can’t have forgotten.’
‘What?’
‘St Anthony’s. Today we find out…whether Finn’s got a place at St Anthony’s.’ That’s what the row had been about last night—now she remembered and, pulling the pillow out suddenly from under her elbow, threw it at him.
Robert ducked and the pillow went crashing into the already broken blind, breaking another three slats.
‘God, I hate those fucking blinds.’
Kate was trying to decide whether he was genuinely angry or not when she heard Flo, on the other side of the bedroom wall, starting to cry.
‘Princess is up,’ Robert said.
Ignoring this, Kate hauled herself automatically out