Following Flora (12 page)

“She was amazing!” Dodi yelled when I turned around.

“Amazing!” Jake echoed. I forgot about him being creepy and waved.

A lot of the time my family drive me mad, but tonight wasn't like that. Tonight was absolutely brilliant.

She didn't win, of course, just as Zoran said she wouldn't. First prize went to one of the shawled ladies for a sonnet about cats, and the second prize went to one of the old men for a ballad about the love of his life being like a vampire, which made the young man in the suit cry even more. Afterward, just before the local journalist asked to take a photograph of all of us, the competition organizers gave Mum and Dad and Jas a long lecture about all the rules she had broken, and how she had abused their trust by entering false details, and how this disqualified her from winning. “But your work shows promise,” the lady organizer said, with what I think was the most patronizing smile I have ever seen. “I am sure you will mature into a very interesting young poet.”

Flora blew a raspberry behind her back. We all laughed. Gloria and Bill turned up, Bill still looking like a bum, Gloria stunning in head to toe tight-fitting black. She told Jas her poetry was even better than her riding and Jas beamed even more. Dad and Zoran both gaped at Gloria. Twig sniggered. The local reporter took our photograph, and we all spilled out of the church into the night. Zach lifted Jas onto his shoulders and she screeched for him to put her down, but she was still laughing. Flora stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the lips. Mum leaned on Dad's arm, and they were both laughing.

It was brilliant.

And then everything changed.

The stone caught Mum just above her right temple. She stumbled, slipped, and crashed to the ground. Someone screamed, I still don't know who. Jas tumbled down from Zach's shoulders, but he caught her in his arms before she hit the pavement. A man pushed through the crowd of people coming out of the church saying he was a doctor, and knelt beside Mum, who was lying with her head in Dad's lap.

“I'm all right,” Mum murmured. Her head was bleeding.

“My wife is pregnant!” Dad cried.

The doctor leaned over to take Mum's pulse. For a minute, because he smiled at her, I thought everything was going to be all right. Then he looked at Dad and told him to call an ambulance.

 

MONDAY, JANUARY 20, EARLY IN THE MORNING

No one saw who did it, but I know. And I'm not the only one.

It's so obvious.

Dad went to the hospital in an ambulance with Mum last night, while Zoran drove us home in our car. Zach sat with him in the front, with Flora and the others in the row behind them. I sat in the back.

Jas was crying and asking questions. “Why would anyone do that? Why Mummy? Why here, why tonight, why now?”

“I don't know,” Flora answered.

I thought about the baby, the feel of its head under my hand on Mum's tummy, the jab when it kicks, Mum saying “imagine how it feels for me?” Mum on Christmas Day, snoring on the sofa, and playing charades on Boxing Day. I wanted to say something but I couldn't speak. Literally. It was like the connection between my brain and my mouth was broken.

If anything happens to them . . . I clenched my fists till my nails dug into my palms. If I wasn't writing this, I'd still be clenching them now.

“Who would do that?” Jas sobbed, and Flora said again that she didn't know. But I know, and Zoran knows, and Zach knows who threw the stone at Mum.

Neither of them talked the whole way home, but at one point Zoran reached out to squeeze Zach's shoulder again, like he did before. I was too far away to hear what he said but it sounded like a question. Zach shrugged and looked out of the window. He looked like he wanted to cry, and I thought “good.”

I wish we'd never met him and his stupid mother. I wish Zoran had never agreed to look after him.

Zoran dropped Zach off first before taking us home, and then he said he'd stay with us until Dad got back. Flora told him he didn't have to, but he said he wanted to.

We didn't go to bed. Instead we brought our duvets down to the living room, where we huddled together on the sofa and waited. It was after two when Dad got home. Everybody was asleep except me and Zoran, sitting together in the dark, still not talking. Dad sat down with us on the sofa. The others woke up and we all crawled over to him.

“How's Mum?” Twig asked.

“All right, but they're keeping her under observation.”

“What about the baby?” asked Flora.

“We'll know more tomorrow.”

I pressed in closer to him. I was vaguely aware of a hand on my shoulder, Zoran murmuring, “I'll call in the morning.” I thought he might tell Dad then, but he didn't say a word, and neither did I.

We all went upstairs, but once the others were in bed I crept back down again. I found Dad in his study, sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, surrounded by papers.

“I thought I'd try to work,” he said. “I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep.”

I moved a stack of books from the armchair in the corner and curled up in it.

“How is your book going?” I asked.

“Badly,” Dad said. Then he said that it hardly mattered anymore.

“I swear to God, if anything happens to them . . .” His voice was shaking. He pressed his hands down on his desk, like doing that was the only thing stopping him from throwing everything on the floor or ripping up all those precious sheets of paper.

“I know,” I said.

“If anything happens to your mother or that baby,” he said in a steadier voice, “I will find the person who did this thing and I will make him pay. I will rip him to pieces. I will tear off his head.”

“Dad,” I said.

“I will pull out his heart and stamp on his guts and . . .”

“Dad, you're scaring me!”

He was prowling around his study now, punching his right fist into the palm of his left hand. He stopped right in front of me and looked at me like he hadn't seen me properly until then.

“I'll kill him,” he said.

I can't talk to him when he's like this. I spoke to Flora instead. I found her sitting on her bed with her arms wrapped round her knees, staring at her phone. I sat next to her, but she didn't look up.

“I think it was Zach's mother,” I whispered.

She carried on staring at her phone.

“It has to be,” I insisted. “Who else would do something like that? She's mad, Flora. Zoran says she killed her own mother.”

“Zach's gran died of cancer.”

“You saw her in the park,” I went on. “Remember? I've seen her too. I'm sure I have. She's been watching us, Flora. She's jealous and she hates us.”

“I'm not even sure it was her I saw,” Flora said tonelessly. “And even if I did, it doesn't mean anything. It's not proof.”

“Flora, Mum's in hospital!”

She looked up at last, and I saw that she had been crying. “Does it matter?” she asked. “You heard what Dad said, Mum's all right. I don't want to fight with Zach again.”

“So you do think it was her!”

She didn't answer for ages.

“We have to do something,” I said. “What if she does it again?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

She lay down and pulled the duvet over her head. I waited for her to say something else, but she didn't and I left her too.

I don't know what to do.

 

MONDAY, JANUARY 20 (CONT.)

I'm writing this from Zoran's front doorstep. None of us went to school today.

The police came this morning. There were two of them, a man who didn't look like we interested him very much at all and a woman who kept calling us “dear.” They said, they were sorry to intrude on us when we must be so preoccupied but they just had a few questions and perhaps the younger children would rather not be present? The way they said it made it obvious they were the ones who had much rather Jas and Twig weren't there.

“If there is to be a police investigation,” Twig said, “there is absolutely no way I will not be present.”

“Me neither,” Jas whispered. They had been standing by the door but now Jas took Twig's hand and led him to the sofa, where they sat together, very close, and didn't let go. The policewoman smiled, like she thought they were impossibly cute. The policeman didn't.

Dad stood by the door with his coat on, looking anxious.

Flora sat in the red armchair in her tartan pajama bottoms and the old cardigan she always wears when she's worried or upset, concentrating really hard on trying to answer the police's questions. She didn't look at me.

I thought, I have to tell them. Mum is lying in hospital, and I have to tell them what I know. But Flora was talking, saying we had no idea who could have done it and I thought, she's right, thinking something isn't proof. Last night I
thought
I knew, but that's not the same thing. And the longer Flora talked, the harder it got to say anything.

“Our mother has no enemies,” said Flora. “None of us are aware of any quarrels or arguments she may have had, and nobody saw what happened.”

At the end, the policewoman said they would do their best to find the culprit, but that it sounded like a random attack and that, unless he struck again, the attacker would be difficult to catch. She said that someone from Victim Support would be in touch to offer counseling. Dad said that would be great but the person who needed support right now was his wife and their unborn child, and then he pretty much ran out of the house to go to the hospital.

Jas started to cry again.

I love Dad, but I wish he were better in a crisis.

After Dad and the police had gone, I waited for Flora to say something to me, but she still didn't. And then I thought I don't care what she thinks, and I came here. Zoran is out. It's twelve thirty, and I've been sitting on this doorstep for nearly an hour. Luckily it's mild again, and sunny. There's this big tree outside Zoran's building, and the squirrels in it are going crazy, chasing one another around and around the trunk. There's a robin too, hopping about making chirping noises, and a fat old tabby cat sleeping on the wall in the sun. It seems quite incredible to me that all this is going on when Mum is lying in hospital.

Zoran just turned in from the street. Time to stop writing.

I'm clenching my fists again.

 

LATER

I'm in bed now. Dad called from the hospital this evening. Mum and the baby are both fine, but the doctors still want to keep her in for a few days just in case. He explained that she has been suffering from very high blood pressure and the doctors had worried that it might be something called preeclampsia. It isn't, which is a good thing because we looked it up on Google and the only cure is to deliver the baby, and if that happened it could die because it is still so small.

“I don't want the baby to die.” Jas began to cry, and Twig looked like he might too.

“No one is going to die,” I said.

“What if it happens again!” Jas wailed. “What if there's a murderer stalking her! What if someone is trying to kill her!”

The Jas who tears around obstacles courses on horseback and recites poetry to a packed audience has completely vanished.

“Nobody is stalking us,” I said, but what if that's not true?

Zoran went to see Mr. Rudowski this morning. That's where he was when I was waiting for him on his doorstep, and that's why he didn't call us this morning like he said he would.

“Where's Zach?” I asked. Zoran said he was back at school. He said it was important to keep things as normal as possible.

“What news of Cassie and the baby?” he asked. I didn't answer.

“The police came,” I said instead. “Speaking of normal.”

Zoran was looking for his keys, and he didn't look at me.

“What did they say?” he asked.

“They wanted to know if Mum had enemies. Flora said no. I wanted to say yes, but I couldn't, because I wasn't sure.”

“You weren't sure of what?”

“If Mum has enemies.” And then I didn't know how to say what I wanted to say and we'd reached the top of the stairs and were going into Zoran's flat, and I wondered what Grandma or Dodi would do if it was them and I just blurted out, “Was it Zach's mother who did it?”

Sometimes when you don't know how to do something it's easier to pretend you're someone else.

Zoran sighed and said yes, he thought it was.

I didn't know what to say next, and I suppose Zoran didn't either, because he just stood there leaning against a wall with his arms crossed, looking at the floor and frowning.

“She came back just before the show,” he said at last. “We left the house and she was waiting for us outside. She was upset. She'd finally been to the hospital to see her father and they had a fight.”

“What was the fight about?”

Zoran said Wanda wouldn't say, but Mr. Rudowski told him this morning, and that the fight was about money. “To put it bluntly, Mr. Rudowski said Wanda was in trouble and she came back to get what she could before he died.”

“That's horrible,” I said, and Zoran agreed but said that there was nothing like the possibility of imminent death of close relatives to bring out the worse in people.

“But if she just came back for the money, why did she want to see Zach?”

Zoran's face softened for a moment. “He's her son, Blue.”

“But she's horrible to him.”

“I didn't say she was logical. I just said he's her son. She's confused but she still loves him. Just as he loves her. He was so sweet with her, Blue. Put his arm around her, tried to calm her down. She was hysterical, kept saying her father had sent her away again—nothing at all about the money, obviously. Zach said he couldn't let Jas down, and asked her to come with us. He told her he'd love that. He even asked me if she could stay with us.”