Mind the Gap Read Free

harder as she turned and glanced downstairs. There was no one at the bottom of the staircase looking up, but she could still hear their voices elsewhere in the house.
    What have you done to my mother?
she thought, touching the handle, opening the door, stepping inside, and
seeing
what they had done. And also smelling and tasting it, because so much blood could not be avoided.
    Her legs began to give way. She grasped the handle and locked her elbow so she did not fall. Then she closed her eyes.
    But some things can never be unseen.
    Her mother lay half on the bed, her upper body hanging down so that her head rested on the floor. A line had been slit across her throat, a dark grin gaping.
    I saw to it myself,
the woman had said.
    Jazz felt strangely numb. Her heart hammered in her chest, but her mind was quiet, logical, already plotting out the next few minutes. Back to her room, the phone, the police, up into the attic to await their arrival, listen to the Uncles and that Blackwood woman panicking as the sirens approached…
    And then she saw the writing on the floor. At first she thought it was a spray of blood, but now she could see the words there, and she imagined the determination her mother must have had to write them while blood spewed from her throat.
    Jazz hide forever.
    She bit back a cry, steeled herself against the tears.
    Her mother stared at her with glazed eyes.
    Jazz looked at the words again, then glanced at the staircase to her left and started backing away.
    As she reached her own door, she realized that she’d left her mother’s bedroom door open. They’d notice, know she’d been here.
    She darted back across the landing and closed the door. Her last sight of her mother was bloodied and smudged with tears.
    The words on the floor shouted at her even when the door was closed.
    Jazz hide forever.
    She had always listened to her mother.
    Lifting herself back through the ceiling hatch in her bedroom, Jazz wondered what kind of life those words had doomed her to.
             
    They were sitting together in the park, watching as ducks drifted back and forth on the pond, squabbling over thrown bread and scolding the moorhens.
    “Pity there aren’t any swans,” her mother said.
    “I love swans,” Jazz said. “So graceful and beautiful.”
    “They may look gentle, but they’re hard as nails.” Her mother shuffled closer to her on their picnic blanket. The remains of their lunch lay beside them on paper plates, already attracting unwanted attention from wasps and flies. “If there were swans here, we’d have a full hierarchy. Swans would be the rulers of the pond, ducks below them, moorhens below them. Then there’d be the scroungers, the little birds, like that wren over there.” She pointed to a tiny bird hopping from branch to branch in a bush that grew out over the water.
    “So what are we?” Jazz asked. Even then she was a perceptive girl, and she knew that this conversation was edging toward something.
    “We’re the little birds,” her mother said. She smiled, but it was sad.
    “I think you’re a swan,” Jazz said, flooded by a sudden feeling of complete love.
    Her mother shrugged. “Maybe you,” she said. “One day, maybe you.”
    The wren dropped to the grass and hopped across to the edge of the pond. It started worrying at a lump of bread that the other birds seemed to have missed, but the movement brought it to the attention of the mallards. A duck splashed from the water and came at the wren, wings raised and head down, bill snapping. The wren turned and hopped away slowly, almost as though it was trying to maintain its dignity. The duck took the bread.
    “Wise thing,” her mother said. “If you’re on the run, you
never
run unless you know they’re right behind you.”
    “Why?”
    “You never call attention to yourself.” Her mother lay back on the blanket, looking around the park as though waiting for someone.
             
    Never run unless you know