Thicker Than Water

‘The day you touch him,’ Jean said, her quiet voice sounding very distinct after Tom’s little tirade, ‘will be the last day on this earth that you have a family. I’ll go out that door and they’ll go with me.’"

"Tom blinked. I saw a guy once get hit in the eye with a piece of a car tyre, when the tyre exploded after he overfilled it. That was how Tom Daniels looked, more or less: as though some mechanism whose workings he was sure he knew had just blown up in his face and left him bloody.

‘John,’ Jean Daniels said after a strained pause.

‘Go and wait on the street for that ambulance. Tell them where to come. They could waste ten minutes traipsing around this place.’

John protested half-heartedly, but gave it up on the second repetition and did as he was told. Jean crossed the room to close the door behind him. Tom stared at her with troubled eyes, clearly aware that there’d just been a coup d’état and - it seemed to me - not wanting to put a foot wrong before he’d had the new constitution explained to him.

‘There’s things that have been going on,’ Jean told me, with a catch in her voice.

‘You never saw very much of her,’ Mrs Daniels said. ‘Mrs Seddon. Did you, Tom?’

We were talking in the kitchen so as not to disturb Bic - or perhaps because we were talking about things that Jean didn’t want her son to hear. It was a cramped, functional little galley: there was room for the three of us in there, but not a lot left over. The kitchen knife that Jean had been wielding when I first saw her lay in the sink, protruding from a plastic bowl full of unwashed dishes.

My eyes kept straying to it as I listened.

‘Hardly ever saw her at all,’ Tom agreed. ‘Only she did the shopping, some days. You’d see her coming up the stairs with her bags. Never had a word to say to anyone.’ He was pathetically eager to please: a willing collaborator with the new regime of Jean the First.

‘And once . . .’ his wife prompted.

‘Once she had a black eye, and a sort of a cut on her lip.

It looked like someone had given her a bit of a hiding. If it had been anyone else, I’d have asked them if they were all right, but I didn’t feel like I could. Not to someone I’d never even spoken to. It would have felt like nosing.’

I thought of Jean’s monologue at the door the other day. Nobody said a thing, did they? Nobody ever does. ‘Did you tell anyone else?’ I asked. ‘The police?’

Tom rolled his eyes and Jean scowled bleakly.