Page 9 of Mad Mabel

The woman and I both startled at my father’s voice. He stood at the bottom of the staircase, his shirt unbuttoned, his cheeks red from the wine.

“Go to bed, Mabel,” he said, dismissing me with a flick of his wrist.

I turned and ran up the stairs.

“Why were you talking to her?” I heard him say, when I reached the top. I squatted down, straining to hear.

“Why wouldn’t I talk to her?” Susan said. “She’s your daughter.”

My father made a dismissive noise.

For a moment, I heard nothing but the sound of a few people singing. I thought they might have moved away. Then my father spoke again.

“We don’t talk about Kitty. Certainly not with Mabel.”

My father sounded irritated, but not angry. The way he sounded when he talked to my mother sometimes, before he kissed her. Not the way he ever sounded when he spoke to me.

“Didn’t you sense that there was something… not quite right about her?”

There was a short pause.

“I don’t know, Elliott,” Susan said. “We didn’t talk for long. But she seemed like a normal child to me.”

“A normal child?” He made a noise, like a laugh when you don’t actually find anything funny. I couldn’t see him, but I pictured his contorted face, his intense stare that he locked people in with when he was going to have the last word. “The child is mad, Susan.”

They must have moved away from the stairs because I didn’t hear any more after that. But I remained where I was for a long time, shame staining my skin like a handprint after a slap.

There were two things I liked about my father. Yes, it took me a long while to come up with them, but frankly, he’s lucky to get two.

Firstly, a blind man could tell you my father had lovely hair. Thick and dark with the slightest wave that everyone said made him look like Cary Grant, including my father. He tended to his locks with obscene vanity, using specific combs and products and spending an inordinate amount of time in front of the mirror in our foyer, admiring himself. I recall him becoming very upset with my mother when she bought the wrong brand of hair cream from the store. He was partial to Brylcreem.

There was only one other good thing about my father, and that was his socks. The man had an enviable sock collection. Most were purchased from Harrods during visits to London, and they tended to be navy or black or, occasionally, maroon with gray diamonds. Pure wool. The epitome of luxury.

Often, when he sat in his armchair of an evening, his feet on the footstool, I’d see them peeking out of his trouser legs and think,Those are nice socks.On the days I fantasized about murdering him, I always imagined donating his great fortune to charity because I wasn’t interested in any of it.Except for his socks, I’d say. I wanted to keep them. What can I say? They were very nice socks.

6

NOW

On a small street like Kenny Lane, populated entirely by busybodies, the arrival of a paramedic vehicle generates much hubbub. As I stand outside Ishaan’s, talking to the paramedic, every resident appears, huddling around Pete the Greek, who is issuing “facts” about what had happened with enough authority that even I start to question myself.

“Heart attack,” he says. “Else broke in through the window and performed CPR.”

For pity’s sake, Peter. The back door had been unlocked, so there was no need to break in, and as for CPR—even if it hadn’t been clear that Ishaan was long dead, that would have been a stretch for me. I did manage to roll him onto his side and listen for breathing and a heartbeat as I’d seen done countless times on television, and frankly that was ghastly enough. It wasn’t the fact that he was dead so much, more that it was Ishaan. I was okay with death. Ishaan’s wasn’t the first dead body I’d seen. Unlike the last one, there wasno cracked skull or blood-spattered walls. Apart from a trickle of blood that came from one ear, it appeared to be a neat, orderly, natural-causes death.

I left him on the floor and called 000, before opening the door for Daphne.

“Anything else of note?” the handsome young paramedic asks.

His name, he told us a minute ago, is Anthony. Daphne and I had exchanged a meaningful look. He is tall, tanned, and unmistakably buff beneath his uniform. It irks me how young people think we don’t notice this kind of thing as we age. We may be old, but we have eyes.

“What does ‘of note’ mean?” Persephone asks. The child has no regard for personal space. Her warm little body presses against me hard enough that it very nearly pushes me off-balance. She smells of something too sweet, like deodorant or cheap perfume or bubble gum. By her side is Ishaan’s demonic dog, barking again.

“It means… perhaps he mentioned something to you—like taking a particular medication or experiencing chest pains?”

“He’s a big fan of vitamins,” Persephone says.

“He’s a big fan of this dog,” Daphne adds.