Flo turns her head and smiles sweetly at Izzy in the garden. ‘Isn’t she adorable.’ The old woman’s expression is calm and kind. A benign dementia patient once again. Sunlight washes through the room as if black clouds have drifted from across a glorious sun. Melodic birdsong pierces and enlivens the room, banishing the forbidding atmosphere that so recently reigned here. A startling moment of clarity surfaces in Flo’s expression and her eyes moisten. ‘My little birds have flown, Jessica.’

Jess starts. It is the first time she has heard her client say her name.

Tears break and run down her client’s ancient, anguished face. ‘Did you want to sit in my chair?’

Jess drops her face to the frail sticks of her client’s thighs. She sobs hard, her entire body wracked with shudders. Coming down. Coming down hard from being electrified. Coming down fast from the terrible impact of what she has just done and been consumed by. Her whole body tries to shake itself apart. And yet she extends her arms around her client like a child reaching for its mother.

Flo gently places one hand upon the back of her carer’s head and looks at the window, seeking and finding happy frolicking Izzy upon the lawn, the sunlight out there so bright. Flo strokes Jess’s hair and whispers. ‘They’re everything. Always.’

SCRICK! comes the sound of a key thrust into the front door.

34

Damp, bedraggled, her clothing stained and hair hanging about her face, her mouth bleeding and her ex-husband dead upon the floor with a catastrophic head injury, Jess stands beside Flo’s chair, resigned, if she can even feel that much.

Scowling, put-upon, loaded down with carrier bags, Morag ambles and slouches into the living room. She eyes Tony’s corpse and ponders the crushed skull and terrible glistening stain. And shrugs nonchalantly. ‘About bleedin’ time, you ask me.’

Jess stares at the night worker as if at a traffic accident. An eyelid twitches before she blinks rapidly, attempting to comprehend her colleague’s reaction.

Morag drops her bags. Wasting no time, she seizes Tony’s lifeless ankles and drags his inert form out of the living room, pulling the corpse in a series of jerks, grunting as she moves. Above his lifeless body, her teeth are set in a grimace from exertion, or even satisfaction. It’s hard to tell.

Morag’s retreating form incrementally dissolves to a black silhouette. The sun strikes and illumines the spoked wheel of the stained glass above the front door. A colourful eye.

Tony’s corpse is tugged onwards and to the tunnel in the dining room where Jess discovered the first shrine, the first stick-wheel. His crimson, misshapen head leaks horribly. His arms are cast out upon the old, threadbare carpet but away he goes to the dusty articles of furniture, boxes, bags, books.