hanging up.
Stretching back under the duvet, I flipped onto my front, intending to sleep. My eyes closed, I became aware of how the edge of my nightie had ridden up, leaving the silk hem to rest against the curve of my bottom. I shifted slightly and the material moved higher. My thighs were warm against the sheet. Turning my head to the side, I flexed my feet and, digging my toes into the mattress, I pushed my hips forward. Slipping my hand down underneath the weight of my body, I began to move, slowly at first and then faster, greedy for the end. My breath grew shallow. As soon as I came I burst out laughing: a strange, high giggle that seemed to suggest both delight and horror in equal measure.
Now wide awake, I got out of bed and stood in front of the mirror. One of my nightie’s spaghetti straps had fallen away and was dangling low on my arm. I gave my other shoulder a shrug, releasing the strap that hung there, and my nightie fell to the floor with a swoosh. Stepping out from the silky pile at my feet, I moved in close to the mirror and turned on the light.
After studying the faint purpling on the front of my hip (the last of the van bruising) I turned side-on, trying to imagine my body through Tommy’s eyes. My arms were scrawny and pale blue thread veins speckled the backs of my thighs. I poked at my breasts. They weren’t too bad: high and round, even after I’d lost all the weight. I wondered how they’d fare were I ever to have another baby.
I pinned my hair into a bun, put on my dressing-gown and went in search of breakfast. Dousing the cornflakes in milk, I cupped the bowl in one hand, grasped a spoon in the other and began to wander around the house, slurping cereal as I went. It wasn’t long before I found myself outside the door to the spare room.
I spooned in another mouth of cornflakes. Less than ten feet away from where I stood, sitting in the dark, were five lever-arch files’ worth of Jason’s case notes. Case notes that might contain something to connect the off-licence or the man that ran it to Barney’s disappearance.
I felt my hand press down on the door handle.
The filing cabinet stood in the corner, next to the desk, its polished steel dulled by the grey morning light.
Managing to resist its pull, for the moment at least, I veered to the opposite side of the room and the world map stuck to the wall. Positioned next to the line-up of Barney age-progression photos, the map’s continents and countries were pierced with hundreds of multi-coloured drawing pins. Stepping over Jason’s old bag of welding tools, I moved closer and ran my finger over the pins he’d clustered everywhere from Thailand to Tobago. It was odd. While the police had conceded it was entirely possible Barney had been trafficked abroad, they had no definite theories either way and, as such, had continued to plough just as much manpower into domestic leads. Still, the longer Barney was missing, the more international sightings there were. Every now and then there would be a flurry of people claiming to have seen Barney in a Madrid petrol station, Moscow supermarket or at the front of the queue for Disneyland’s Thunder Mountain. And, when the fancy took them, the twenty-four-hour news channels were just as bad. Reporting on ‘a blond-haired boy seen with a group of older men at a Gibraltar ferry port’, they would go on to pick over the details with sound bites, outside broadcasts and graphic reconstructions for days on end. Sightings of Barney in the UK meanwhile, continued to dwindle.
My eyes roamed over the map of far-flung and familiar places before eventually coming to a stop on the United Kingdom. Ours was a strange-shaped island. Like a foetus turned on its side, its too-short hands seemed to be poking out into the amniotic Irish Sea, its toe dipped down into the English Channel. Was Barney out there, somewhere in the big wide world, or was he still here, in the UK, less than fifty miles from where he was last seen?
I stepped back into the middle of the room, my eyes once more drawn to the filing cabinet and the prospect of what lay within.
Placing my cereal bowl on the desk, I curled my fingers round the top