and shapes to cut out. He’d been so excited when she’d given it to him after their trip to the zoo, she’d decided to leave it with him. It wouldn’t hurt him to browse it under the softly undulating theme of his night light, and he deserved a bit of a treat after being so brave about the injury to his knee, which had turned out to be not as bad as it looked, thank goodness.
Yawning herself, she snuggled into Steve as he wrapped his arm around her. She’d been the tiniest bit annoyed with him for agreeing to let Sarah pick Ollie up early tomorrow. She and Joe wanted to take him out for a meal, she’d said. Ollie would no doubt love it, but Laura was concerned about disrupting his visiting schedule. Steve had an arrangement: Saturday morning to Sunday evening. Yes, Sarah had agreed to swap weekends, but still, Laura didn’t want them to take him off early. She didn’t want them to take him at all. She loved being with him, getting into his mindset, where the troubles of the world drifted away and everything was magical, and all things were possible.
A smile curved her mouth as she pictured the giraffe he had painted so vividly in her mind. His big blue eyes sparkling, his trip to the zoo fuelling his imagination, he’d told her a story at bedtime, in which the superhero had been Mr Giraffe, whose neck ‘growed and growed and growed until his head was poking above the clouds’, he’d said animatedly, stretching his own neck.
‘Grew.’ Laura had laughed and gently corrected him. ‘Mr Giraffe’s neck grew and grew and grew.’
‘Grew,’ Ollie repeated, his brow furrowed in concentration.
‘That’s right. Good boy.’ She beamed, delighted – and wondered whether Sarah bothered to correct him. She really ought to. Laura would hate to think of him struggling verbally when he started school. ‘And then what did Mr Giraffe do?’ she’d prompted him.
The furrow in his brow deepened. ‘He looked down from the clouds and saw some people were crying.’
‘Oh no.’ Laura had widened her eyes in pretend alarm. ‘Why were they crying?’
‘Because they’d lost their friends,’ he went on, with a sad shake of his head. ‘So he growed … grew … some more and said hello to the little stars.’
Because that was where all the lost people went. Laura had gleaned what he meant. Steve had told him that was where his grandad had gone after he’d died; that he was a twinkling star, looking down on him from the night sky. She’d thought Ollie’s story was quite lovely. Snuggling closer to Steve, she forgave him for not being as assertive as he should be. She couldn’t stay angry with him for feeling compromised. How could she when he’d brought her Ollie?
Hearing Steve’s breaths slow, she listened for a while to make absolutely sure Ollie had settled, and then, her eyes growing heavy, her thoughts drifted. His small hand in hers, she was walking with Ollie through a pleasant woodland, where bees buzzed happily pollinating wild flowers and big red butterflies fluttered breathtakingly from petal to petal.
And then her mind shifted. The dream grew darker. Woods turned to bricks and mortar. His hand had slipped from hers. He was no longer with her. Nowhere to be seen. Not safe. Her throat caught as she heard them twisting and grinding, wild vines as thick as giraffe’s necks, snaking their way up the walls as she moved silently around the objects that were there, yet not. Through the house that was familiar, yet not. Her dream hazily superimposed over reality, she negotiated the stairs, her tread soft, determined, unfaltering. She didn’t flinch as a spider as big as the palm of her hand scurried across the wall a hair’s breadth from her cheek. It was huge, hunch-legged, obviously escaped from the zoo, but there was none of the petrifying fear she’d felt as a child when faced with such threats, no thudding heartbeat, nothing but the urge that drove her, placing her feet blindly, steadily, one in front of the other as the voice in her head persisted. You have to find him. You have to save him.
The lounge was her lounge, but different; brighter, like an overexposed photo. The furniture was solid, yet ill-defined; blurry, jagged edges, like the memories that floated on the periphery of her mind, day and night, night and day. Her one abiding recollection was that of his trusting little face,