Promise
Authors: Sarah Armstrong
About
Promise
When a new family moves in next door, it takes Anna just two days to realise something is very wrong. She can hear their five-year-old daughter Charlie crying, then sees injuries on the little girl that she cannot ignore. Anna reports the family to the police and social services, but no one comes to Charlie’s aid.
So when the girl turns up at her door asking for help, the only thing Anna can think to do is take her and
run
.
Raising deeply felt questions about our responsibility for the children around us,
Promise
asks: if Charlie were my neighbour, what would I do?
SARAH ARMSTRONG
For my beloved mother,
Marion Armstrong.
All the lost children slipping like stars
into a midnight sea.
Catherine Bateson,
The Vigilant Heart
I
t was after midnight when the big van pulled into the driveway next door. Anna stood in her dark kitchen, getting a glass of water. The van’s headlights blazed up the driveway, and two men stepped into the light: one was slim, jangling a set of keys, and the other looked like a thick-necked football player and stood with his legs wide.
Great
, Anna thought.
My new neighbours are thugs
.
She
stayed at the sink to watch as the men put on head torches and rattled open the back doors of the van. They worked silently and efficiently, propping open the wire gate and ferrying bulging garbage bags and cardboard boxes up the path. The football player carried a big mattress single-handedly, scuttling sideways along the path, only his legs showing, the mattress jiggling.
Anna tipped the last of her water down the sink and dried her hands. A good neighbour would go and give them a hand, even if it was the middle of the bloody night. A good neighbour like her mother would carry a few cardboard boxes and show herself to be a friendly, pitching-in type, someone who didn’t judge people by their looks.
The house next door had been empty for two months, and Anna was surprised how unsettling she’d found the quiet. She saw now what comfort there had been in the sounds of Helen pottering about; the two cottages had thin timber walls and crappy insulation, so Anna could hear Helen walking from room to room. She knew there was someone close by, living a busy, contented life, but Anna wasn’t required to interact with her all the time. They waved over the fence and had a few friendly words, and once a month or so sat down for a cup of tea. It was companionable in the best possible way.
She skirted around the kitchen table in the dark, glad the house would have people in it again, but not sure that these two would have been her choice.
The man’s voice was loud through the open window. ‘You just need to put out some bait. That’ll wipe them out in a few days.’
She looked out. What was he talking about. Mice? Cockroaches?
The slim man crossed in front of the headlights, balancing a bar fridge on his shoulder like it was an empty box. He stopped halfway up the path and turned to look straight at Anna, his head torch glinting at her. He couldn’t actually see her in the dark kitchen, could he?
‘So, are you the kind who brings the new neighbours a homemade cake?’ His tone was friendly enough but he stood there, as if waiting for a reply, his body lit up in the headlights, his face shadowed by the fridge. She stepped back from the window, her cheeks hot, and by the time she found her voice, he’d disappeared inside and she heard laughter and doors banging.
She used to think that everyone was a bit of a voyeur but her dad said he didn’t think so. He said
he
was, but only because cops were always anticipating what could go wrong. Whenever they went out with her brother Luke for Saturday-night Chinese or to the Ex-Services, her dad sat with his back to the wall and scanned the room.
‘Always identify your exits,’ he said to them. ‘Know how you’ll get out if you have to leave in a hurry.’
Anna never particularly worried about things going wrong, and she made a point of
not
identifying her exits. Watching other people on the bus or at a café simply gave her a sense of being invisible, of clocking out for a while. A bit like watching television. Reality television.
She climbed into bed and kicked the sheet away. It was only the end of November and already the nights were way too warm. She listened to the men walking around next door, and thought about dinner with Dave’s kids tomorrow evening. Actually, this evening; it was past midnight. She wasn’t ready to meet them. Surely it was too soon. She couldn’t bear the thought of a couple of hours sitting across the table from his kids, trying to make small talk while they examined her, as well they should. There was something about the scrutiny of children, especially teenagers, that was particularly difficult. She remembered being a teenager and silently dissecting her dad’s friends.
Finally, she felt herself drifting to sleep, the men next door still banging around in the truck.
•
She woke to the sound of a baby crying, a thin bleat drifting over from next door. She checked the time – 3 am – and got up to go to the toilet. Eyes closed, she made her way through the dark house; successfully navigating her way around the furniture was a small, ridiculous triumph she allowed herself.
When she got back to the bedroom, the baby was still crying. When had it arrived? She stood at the window, and in the streetlight saw a cardboard box on the front path and a broken plastic chair tipped over by the steps. The van was gone.
Quiet footsteps moved through the house next door, and a light came on in what used to be Helen’s sewing room. Now the baby’s room, where the mother would be jiggling and patting, stroking a soft head. Anna remembered the man spotting her at the window and imagined taking them a cake as a small, friendly joke – the sticky-topped banana cake her mum baked every Sunday to go in their lunchboxes. As a young girl, Anna never questioned the permanence of her home, its comfort and familiarity; she assumed it would always be waiting for her, that it arose effortlessly and organically around the four of them. After her mother’s death, she learnt that it was her mother who made their home, and she learnt how easily it could be dismantled.
She climbed back into bed and rolled onto her side, one ear pressed into the pillow. The baby was still crying.
W
hen she woke it was barely light. She tried to will herself back to sleep but small feet pounded up the hallway next door. Through the window she saw that the cardboard box on the path was sodden and collapsing, and the cement dark and wet. She hadn’t heard the rain; she must have slept more soundly than she thought.
In the kitchen, she slid open the back doors to the garden and bent to the terracotta pot on the top step. At last the chive seeds had sprouted; a dozen tendrils of green poked through the potting mix, some of them bowing slightly under the weight of a tiny black seed stuck like a hat to their tip.
She made a pot of tea and sat on the back step in the first of the sun. A couple of tiny grey skinks scurried into the garden bed at her feet. She and Luke used to call them penny lizards and for a while as a kid, she’d fixated on the fact that they could drop their tail if they were in danger, and grow a brand new one. One of the skinks paused in a patch of sun, and Anna could see the pulse in its neck.
She really wanted to make it work with Dave, and had no idea why he wanted her to meet his children so soon. To reassure them of something, perhaps? Or to reassure himself? But she knew it was too soon. She and Dave hadn’t been together long enough to ride it out if his kids didn’t like her. An uncomfortable meeting could so easily make things go pear-shaped.
She watered her pot plants – the rain had soaked only the first centimetre of soil – and pulled out a few weeds. Dandelion seeds had drifted through the garden and germinated all over the place.
Just after seven, Helen’s back door banged open and a kid – perhaps four years old – bowled down the back steps and dropped onto the long grass, bawling and plucking at the legs of its green pants. Anna couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl.
A woman appeared, young and spectral-thin, wearing an oversized white t-shirt. She slowly bent and picked up a big piece of orange fabric from the ground – perhaps a sheet or a doona cover – and carried it over to the clothesline, where she pegged it up.
The kid flung itself backwards onto the grass and the crying escalated. The woman ignored the child and kept pegging up the cloth. Anna made herself look away and go inside. She dropped two slices of bread into the toaster and cut open an avocado. She should get herself a curtain or just stop looking into their yard. At least the child had stopped crying.
‘Hello?’ A voice came from outside. It was her, the young mother, looking over the fence and smiling up at Anna.
Anna went out and down the back steps, then realised she still had the half-avocado in her hand. She smiled. ‘Hello.’
Now she could see the woman properly, Anna saw she had a sweet, heart-shaped face. But her skin was so pasty. Her long, dark hair was pulled up on one side by a dozen hairclips stuck in at odd angles.
‘Welcome to the neighbourhood,’ Anna said. Cigarette smoke drifted up over the fence.
‘Thank you.’ A trembly smile passed over the woman’s face. ‘Sorry to bother you, but do you have a glass of milk? I don’t have a car this morning and she really wants some milk.’
The child sat wide-legged on the grass, watching them. She had scruffy blonde hair that stuck out at all angles.
‘That’s what the tantrum’s about.’ The woman’s voice was high and a bit raspy.
‘Yes, of course. Hang on a tick.’
Inside, Anna pulled the plastic milk bottle from the door of the fridge. It was more than half full. She poured some into a cup for her tea then hurried down the steps. As she passed the bottle over the rickety paling fence, she felt a small flush of pleasure at being helpful, but also worried that she might be encouraging the woman to keep asking for things.
‘Thank you. I don’t need all that, though.’ The woman smiled and dragged on her cigarette. Anna thought how amazing it was that she had grown a child in that bird-like body.