The Shut Eye Read Free Page A

home.
    Daniel hadn’t stayed at home. Daniel had gone and he hadn’t come back.
    No roast beef, no none, no
weee-weee-weee all the way home.
    Just.
    Gone.
    Anna pressed her pinkie into the third indentation, then the fourth.
    The fifth – the little toe – was too small even for her pinkie, and she lowered herself like a supplicant to blow the dust from it, before wiping the rest of the footprint clean – careful along the inner arch because Daniel was so ticklish, and then around the heel, dabbing the last of the dust out with the cloth. As she did she could feel his heels in her hands again, cupping them in her palms during all those long-ago nappy changes, making his little legs pedal bicycles in the air, as he giggled to the scent of talcum powder.
    He would laugh and she would laugh and James would laugh. It seemed impossible now – the very idea of laughter.
    He’ll be a sprinter – look at those thighs. He’ll be a dancer, pointing his toes. He’ll play for Spurs – what a kick!
    Daniel had been easy to potty train. They said boys were harder than girls but Daniel had been out of nappies by his second birthday, and loved his big-boy jeans and his Batman pants. He called them his Bad Man pants and she and James had never corrected him because it was just so cute, and gave them a ridiculous level of pleasure every time he said it.
    Anna sobbed. It happened sometimes without notice and she didn’t try to stop it. She couldn’t. Her tears were like breathing; there was no way of damming them. She’d tried in the early days, but it hadn’t worked. Now she bent to her work and sobbed openly and didn’t even care where she was or who saw her.
    One tear plopped into the footprint and she cursed in her head and quickly soaked it up with the cloth. Salt and acid rain were death to cement and concrete.
    After she’d got all the soot and dirt out of the prints, she opened the wax and started to polish them, to protect them.
    Further up on the edge of the forecourt someone called Big Mike had written his name in the same wet cement. But nobody had ever cared for Big Mike, and already the shallow letters were starting to wear and fade, the edges softened by rain and passing feet.
    That wasn’t going to happen to Daniel’s prints.
    Never.
    The fierceness of the thought stopped Anna’s tears for a moment and she wiped her nose on a blue sleeve and drew a deep new breath, enlivened by her own determination to keep her son’s last known steps as fresh and clean as on the morning they were made, exactly four months ago.
    She couldn’t stop people walking across them – not once she returned to the flat, at least. But she could make them shine, and she did every day that it wasn’t raining. When it was raining, she just came out and sat leaning over them for a while, head down, like a dying squaw – saving the footprints from wear for a short while, before hurrying back indoors before the baby could wake up.
    At other times she placed a tea-light there, and lit it with an old Bic lighter. Once a policeman blew it out and told her it was a fire hazard. Anna had screamed in his face – some crazed incoherence about Daniel and wasting time and catching real criminals – and the policeman had backed off and scurried away. After that he walked his beat on the other side of the street and let her light her candles.
    Now Anna put out her finger and traced the outline of the last footprint. It was her favourite. It was the print where she could tell Daniel had realized he was running across the freshly poured cement and had changed direction. The print was twisted and a little misshapen, and the heel was shallower, and the ball of the foot and the toes much deeper, as though he’d raised himself on to his tiptoes and pushed off at an angle … ‘What are you doing?’
    Anna looked up briefly and saw a girl. She was in school uniform – black trousers, black shoes and red sweatshirt,
St Catherine’s