Alarm Girl by Hannah Vincent Page A

many other places – stunning places, full of colour and noise and heat; how had they had ended up in a damp holiday cottage where dreams become clogged in deposits made up of strangers’ skin cells?
    The wind shrieked and she was afraid the flimsy walls might crack and topple, afraid she herself would crack and topple. She imagined plaster and bricks tumbling around them, burying her and the children. The weight of the debris compressing her head from all sides would be a relief, balancing out the heaviness inside her mind.
    Or perhaps the ferocious wind would catch the cottage and fling it into the sky. A powerful funnel would whisk all four of them into a vortex, swallowingthem whole. Or else it might explode, the owners of the cottage having planted a bomb timed to go off at precisely this moment, combusting outwards, windows smashing, bright splinters of glass piercing her from all sides, slicing her skin and spiking her eyes, gashing the palms of her hands, stabbing her. The bedroom came back into focus. Her skull tightened; imagined wounds throbbed. The eiderdown on Robin’s bed was one of the old-fashioned kind, its shiny, silken material cool under her fingertips. Its barely-thereness was intolerable. She knew what she must do. What she must do was go downstairs and drop a glass on the stone floor of the kitchen, lacerate herself. It would release her, if just for a while.
    She stood up quickly from the bed, heard what must be her voice say goodnight.
    ‘Why do we have to live here?’ Robin asked.
    ‘We don’t live here,’ she replied, speaking slowly, as if to a foreigner, or as if she was the foreigner.
    ‘Are we going back to our old house?’
    ‘Of course.’ She made her way to the door. ‘This is a holiday, isn’t it? We’re just staying here for a little bit.’
    ‘Why?’ Indy’s voice came from the other bed.
    ‘Why?’ She hesitated. Glass shards waited for her. ‘To see what it’s like.’
    She switched off the light. Her children were two humps in the dimness of the strange room.
    ‘To see if we like it?’ Indy asked.
    ‘Yes.’
    There was another shape in the room too, indistinct in the gloom but vivid in its malignancy.
    ‘I don’t like it,’ Robin said.
    Her mood was infectious. She was infecting them all with it. She mustn’t wait for the house to explode or a storm destroy it or a tornado carry them all off into blissful oblivion; better for her to leave now, or when it grew dark. She could walk across the headland to the edge of the cliff, throw herself on the rocks.
    ‘Dad says if the weather’s better tomorrow we can go to a beach where there’s lots of sand,’ she said. The words were so thick in her mouth she had trouble moving her tongue around them.
    ‘I don’t like sand,’ Indigo said.
    ‘We’ll be going home soon,’ she said, trying hard to make her voice sound like it should.
    She went back downstairs.
    ‘How were they?’ Ian asked, coming into the kitchen.
    ‘Okay.’
    ‘Christ knows, I’m trying,’ he said.
    She stared at a glass she held in her hand, willing it to fall from her fingers.
    ‘I get nothing from you,’ he said.
    Her fingers remained tensed. She couldn’t seem to loosen them. The glass remained whole. She couldn’t even summon up the will to break something.
    ‘You know what,’ he shouted before he managed to control his voice, ‘if you don’t feel like talking or being part of this family, just let me know.’
    He reached for the cardboard sign he’d made for Indy’s shop. It hung on the back of one of the dining chairs and had the word
Closed
written on one side,
Open
on the other. He yanked it off the chair and looped it around her neck with
Closed
facing outwards. ‘Closed for business, right? Let me know when you’re open.’
    His earnestness was gone, and his handsomeness, too. His voice was loud and his short hair made him look like a thug. He left the room and she remained, feeling like a dunce, in the corner. She