* * *

Petra stood watching the closed red door for a minute, as if it was going to do something remarkable. It was an English door, like you see on TV – a heavy, panelled and bevelled townhouse door – but it was freshly lacquered in good-luck red. At first glance the knocker set in its middle was like the others on this gentrified terrace of Victorian solid-brick abodes, but Petra noticed that it wasn’t a stylised lion or bull holding the iron ring in its mouth, but a mean-looking goat-horned imp – Pan, maybe. It looked at her, grinning, and she looked back until a man hurried past along the pavement towards town and Petra started to move off, not wanting to look like she was loitering.

For a moment she’d forgotten where she was going. Oh, right – to the MyHealth to check in on her mother. But now, jolted off her path, the idea of a surprise visit to her mother before a scheduled routine day procedure seemed odd and invasive – much the same as a surprise drop-in to her changing room or gynae appointment.

Just after Petra had finished university here, her father had died, and they’d agreed that Helena should come to England to be closer to her only child ‘in case anything happened’. Rod, her father, had been an Englishman – a Staffordshire mining engineer deployed to the Witwatersrand goldfields in the seventies – and they had all the requisite documents. At first Petra worried about the effect Helena’s arrival would have on her social life, but she needn’t have. Helena had always been able to look after herself, and made friends easily. Helena didn’t seem to need Petra’s looking-after – in fact, she didn’t need much of anything from her.

There were only twenty-five minutes left of her lunch break. Suki wouldn’t care if she was late back, of course, but Petra would. Keeping her dignity and sticking to her contracted hours in that mercy job was akin to a depressive getting dressed every morning – proving she still had some purpose in the grander scheme of things. The problem was, reality often didn’t match her expectations. She was self-aware enough to know she tended to drift through everyday life with her mind in a soft fantasy of what things should be: work, love, duty, fairness, belonging. Her fancy was far more compelling than mundane reality – she liked to hope, she liked to feel worthwhile, she liked to feel needed; she liked to wait for inspiration, which didn’t hit her all that often. This tendency to impracticality, she knew, didn’t make her a prime candidate for a career in anything. Bless Suki – she’d saved Petra from post-arts-degree destitution, and Petra wasn’t going to abuse her kindness.

Twenty-five minutes, now twenty-four, may not be enough to visit her mother, but it was enough to do something impetuous. She spun on her heel and strode back to Brook Street. At the red door, she tried to lift the knocker, but it was welded down, ornamental. An electronic keypad on the left side of the frame spoke subtly of the modern world. Before thinking too much, Petra pressed the buzzer button at the bottom and heard it sound loudly in the hall. A few heavy clatters and a volley of hammering answered her. No footsteps.