and pulled me into an awkward embrace. I felt the fragile bones beneath her skin.
‘I’m not that person any more. I would never harm …’ She held me at arm’s length, her palms damp on my shoulders. ‘Just find Sunny and make sure she’s okay. That’s all I ask.’
For the first time since she entered the café, Karen smiled. It looked genuine to me, but what do I know? Moments before she’d told me of her attempt to murder her daughter I’d been warming to this woman. I didn’t speak until we reached the door. Something was bothering me. I had to fight against the Wellington wind to be heard.
‘Seven years is a long time to serve, even for the attempted murder of a child.’
Karen stalled with her back to me. ‘I had two children,’ she said. She turned her head but kept her body facing away. ‘It was Falcon’s fifth birthday. He thought we were going to The Warehouse to buy a PlayStation.’
She walked away down Cambridge Terrace in the direction of the Basin Reserve. Her heels made the lightest of clicks on the pavement.
Chapter 2
EASTER 2005
Sunny
Dad puts his key in the lock and pushes the door open with his shoulder. It makes the same screech it always makes but inside the house is bigger than it was before. Like a house we’ve visited but not lived in. The furniture is placed perfectly like in a TV programme. Falcon’s toys are still on the mat. Pearl looks like someone else’s budgie. Even though I know she likes it when I make kissy sounds through the bars, I don’t do it. Dad puts the jug on. I don’t know what Mum does. I go straight to bed without asking if I can watch TV. Dad says he’ll come in later and tuck me in and then Mum says goodnight but she isn’t looking at me when she says it.
My room isn’t my room any more either, even though Baby Bear is still on the pillow exactly where I’d put him. Mum says I’m too old to be taking a teddy bear with me everywhere, but I don’t take him everywhere, not to school, anyway. The night is very dark and it goes on forever. I can’t stop shivering from the cold of the sheets. I feel as if I’m drowning in the darkness.
In the morning it’s still the weekend so I don’t have to get dressed for school. The house is very quiet like its holding its breath under water. My feet are huge with cold but I stand in the same place, not moving, just listening. Whiskey is waiting to see what I do before she moves her fat bum off the warm place she’s made for herself. She’s a lazy arse. I only tell her she’s a lazy arse when Mum can’t hear me or she would smack my bum for swearing. When I pull my old jersey over the top of my pyjamas my skin feels crumpled and itchy but I stop shivering. My feet are still freezing. There are no socks in the undies drawer but it doesn’t matter. The flappy slippers from the hospital wait for me beside the bed. Dad must have put them like that when he tucked me in. It can’t have been Mum. She would have put Whiskey out the window and shut it again tight so the rain wouldn’t leak in and fill up the whole room.
Mum is staring out the kitchen window with her arms crossed under her titties, making them stick up like an advertisement for a chicken going into the oven. Dad is drinking his tea from the yellow mug with the happy face on it that someone from work gave him. Falcon’s favourite red chair is pushed up against the wall beside the fridge. His T-shirt with the plastic pony on the front is scrunched up on it. There are globs of banana from yesterday on the seat and the sparkly rainbow sticker on the leg from when he was just a baby. I wonder what it will feel like to miss him. Will the feeling go on forever?
Dad says some things while I’m eating my cornflakes. He only says them so it’s not so quiet. Mum doesn’t turn around. My cornflakes taste funny. When I have to stand beside Mum to put my bowl in the sink she slides her eyes sideways at me. My stomach feels sick. I go outside to play the ‘knife