dark and stretched from the sun, and sometimes underneath her sunglasses you could see flesh swollen so that it nearly touched the glass of the lens. It didn’t stop her from wearing a green gauze ball gown just to walk down to the shops. She turned up one time with her arm in a sling, home-sewed stitches in her lip.
‘How’s the cake trade, kiddo?’
‘Just fine, thanks, Mrs Shannon.’
‘I’ll have a lamington, please, darl.’ And she held the money in her hand, fragile wrist pointing up, an insistence in the jiggle of her fingers. ‘Go on, take the money. I’ll be bleeding you dry.’
‘What’s the use living opposite a bakery if you can’t have a biscuit for free?’ and he gave her a florentine, not a lamington, because he knew that was what she really liked. He wondered what he would do if Mr Shannon ever came into the shop, but he’d never seen him. He’d never even seen the man walk out of his house.
The rest of the year was wet. The cake shop steamed up on the inside. His mother spent time running errands that involved being out of the shop and he wondered if she was retracing the steps his father had taken all around the city. He didn’t follow her to find out, just waited for something to happen. When she came home, she was pale and thin, and she looked like she would be thrown down in a breeze. She started having the long baths again, but this time there was no steam that filled up the top rooms. He felt the water once as it drained away after she had got out and it was cold.
After the rain came an envelope with his father’s handwriting on it. He watched from the back room while she stood at the counter and opened it gently, unsticking the paper flap, not tearing, looking frightened of what might be inside. She looked at the letter, her face blank, then the door chimed and she was gone down the street, melting between the parked cars. She left the letter on the table, thin blue paper folded once. There was a dot at the top of the page, like he’d been about to write but couldn’t think of what to say. And then there was his signature and beneath that, in place of where there might have been a cross for a kiss, another dot, this one bigger than the first, the ink blooming from the pen nib and staining through to the other side. The postmark read something northern and when his mother returned a few hours later she took that, not the letter, to tuck into the book she kept by her bed.
The next morning Leon put a preserved cherry on top of a cake and smiled. When he looked up, he saw Mrs Shannon walk by, a scarf round her face, pulled low over her eyes. She walked like she was only wearing one shoe and then she was gone. His mother appeared in the doorway, her hat pinned to her head, a grey suitcase in her hand, and even though it was warm out she wore her long wool coat. She put a gloved hand in his hair and there was her wet face again, her nose like a beak. She dropped her arm. ‘And suddenly you’re a grown-up man,’ she said. ‘I have to go away, chicken,’ and even though he’d been expecting something like this, he thought she’d insist on him going with her, thought he might have to put his foot down and explain that someone had to keep the shop running. That maybe he could help her look on a Sunday, call up a few lodging houses and give a description of his father. She took a tissue out of her pocket and rubbed her nose with it. ‘I’ll write, of course, when I find him, and then we’ll see.’ Leon felt the smile that was fixed on his face. It hurt his teeth. ‘You understand, chicken?’ He nodded and really he did understand, he could see it in the lines on her face, that to her it was more important to find a man who’d been missing even when he was sitting beside her in his easy chair.
In bed, Leon lay awake in the empty house. There was the tick of the bedside clock, the beat of his heart and the terrible sound of something coming for him, hoof and claw and