She ducks. Then forces her body deeper inside the tunnel, scrabbling over the shrine, destroying it as she pushes blindly through what’s left of the aperture. She is driven by the slaps and shrieks of the bird behind her and then upon her back. As the terrified creature struggles past her face, the bird’s wings beat against her mouth. Its claws tangle in her hair, scrape her scalp like pins. She can stand it no more and bursts up and onto her feet, using the back of her shoulders to force her body upwards and through the first crevice that allows electric light to shaft into this darkness. She rises through a gap between stacked furniture and a grubby window pane – an aperture she enlarges with the upward thrust of her body, disinterring dust-furred and cobwebbed boxes filled with crockery and glass.

Jess snatches at the window latch, her fingers frantic until she thrusts the old window wide. Instantly, her face is buffeted by a shock of cold night air.

The bird noisily rises from her head, the din of its wings bewildering her until it is free.

* * *

Grasping her phone to her chest, Jess retreats and stumbles up through the vicarage to the master bedroom. And stops dead at what she is forced to behold.

Withered Flo smiles in her sleep. An old frail woman who hasn’t walked in years, who could never clamber out of the vast bed without the same assistance that is required to get her inside it. Nestled against her thin back is little Izzy, sleeping and clutching her panda.

18

Like an evacuee awaiting embarkation, Jess fidgets in the hallway. She checks her watch twice without paying attention to what she reads. The third time she scrapes back a sleeve to seek the correct time, her attention moves no further than Izzy’s school bag abandoned on the hall floor.

And sure enough, when she looks down the hall and through the frame of the living room doorway, there is her daughter standing beside Flo’s wheelchair. Just enough of the meagre silhouette of her client is visible, dwarfed by the wheelchair. But like two figures in the background of a dark oil painting, a young girl and an elderly woman share an enigmatic fascination that remains a mystery to the onlooker. Whispers pass between them.

‘Izz!’ Jess calls. When her daughter doesn’t respond, she raises her voice. ‘Izzy!’

Izzy reluctantly turns her smiling face from Flo to offer her mother a sullen glare. ‘Why can’t I stay with Flo today?’

‘Cus you bloody can’t. You got school! How many times I have to tell you?’