Burnt Paper Sky by Gilly Macmillan Page B

there it was silent, and I was able to sit, and breathe, and focus on the placid ticking of my kitchen clock.
    Zhang stayed with us for a short while. The scenes of crime officers had visited the house while I was being interviewed. She wanted to check that they’d left everything in order upstairs, in Ben’s room.
    She pulled the curtains in the sitting room tightly shut, so that the journalists couldn’t see in. She advised us not to answer the door without checking who was there, and not to speak directly to the press.
    ‘It’s good that they’re here though,’ she said. ‘It’s all good publicity because it means that as many people as possible will be aware of Ben and will be looking out for him.’
    She made sure we had her card with her number on it and then she left us alone. Part of me didn’t really want her to leave. She was more approachable than Clemo by miles. I felt nervous of him, of the authority he exuded, of his matter-of-factness and of the power he suddenly held in our lives. But Zhang was different, more of a kindly guide who might be able to help me navigate this horrendous new reality, and I felt grateful for her.
     
    Everything on the kitchen table was as Ben and I had left it: a snapshot of our last few minutes in the house together.
    There was a hat that Ben had refused to wear, a packet of bourbon biscuits that he’d raided just before we left, a much-loved Tintin book and a Lego car that I’d helped him build.
    His school report, received in the post the day before, lay on the table too. It had been a pleasure to read, full of effusive praise from his teacher about how hard Ben tried, how pleased she was that he was finding the courage to speak up more in class, and how he was gaining confidence in his schoolwork.
    And it wasn’t just the kitchen. There was nowhere in this house that wasn’t imprinted with traces of my son, of course there wasn’t. It was his home.
    Even outside, down the short, uneven garden path, I knew that there would be signs of him too: in my garden office my computer would be sleeping, its light blinking unhurriedly. If I went out there and brought it to life I knew the internet history would show a game that Ben had been playing online on Sunday morning. It was called Furry Football and the aim was to play games and earn points to buy different animals, which would form a football team. Ben loved it. I had a daily battle to limit his time on it.
    I looked at everything, took it all in, but felt only blankness. All of it was meaningless without Ben. Without him, my home had no soul.
    Nicky got busy, typically.
    She’d always been like this. She was never still. If there was nothing to do, she would organise an outing, or make an elaborate meal. Activity was her way of relaxing.
    When I was younger I could happily spend an afternoon in Esther’s cottage doing nothing more than sitting on the window seat in my little bedroom. I would trace outlines in the condensation on the glass, gaze at the frosty trees outside, and the shapes they carved against the open sky behind them, and watch the birds on my aunt’s feeders fighting for seed. The sharp yellow flash of a goldfinch’s wing was a sight I longed for in the monochrome of a snowy rural winter.
    Eventually, driven by the cold, I might make my way downstairs to seek the heat of the fire. Nicky would be there with Aunt Esther. Their cheeks would be flushed from the warmth of the oven and the exertions of whatever activity they’d been engaged in. I would admire the freshly baked cake they’d made or smell the stew that was simmering.
    Aunt Esther would take my hands, and say, ‘Rachel, you’re so cold. Have a cup of tea, darling,’ and she would rub them, and I would feel rough gardening calluses on her palm. Nicky would say, ‘Where are your fingerless gloves, Rachel? The ones I gave you for Christmas?’ Then I would slip away from them, their cosy domesticity, and slink into a chair by the fire,