After Anna by Alex Lake Page B

impossible.
    The house was still and dark; the witching hour, as her dad had called it. He was a leather tanner and he used to come home smelling of the chemicals they used to clean the leather. Whatever they were they were powerful: the run-off polluted the local rivers and polluted her dad’s body. He died of brain cancer when he was in his early sixties. It happened quickly. A year from retirement he missed his first day of work from illness, then he missed another, and another, laid up in bed with a headache that left him unable to focus. He never went back. The cancer was behind his eye and worming its way into his brain.
    Officially, it was just one of those things. Unofficially, Julia was convinced it was the solvents and acids he spent his days slopping around that stained his skin and fouled his lungs. Even after he had taken a bath – he took one every night, retiring to the upstairs lavatory with a cup of tea and a copy of the Daily Mirror, a ritual which infuriated Julia when she was teenager in a hurry to get ready on a Friday night, leading her to complain to her mum, who would frown and say leave him, love, he works hard – even after that long soak in the perfumed, Radoxed waters of the bath, he still gave off the hard, harsh smell of the tannery.

    When she was a child, he used to lie down next to her, smelling of that smell, and tell her a story every night, a story he had made up during the long days at work. Many of them began it was the witching hour , and for years she had wondered what it would be like to be awake during the witching hour, what amazing events she would witness if she could just keep her eyes open … and then she would wake up and it would be light outside and she would have missed all the fun.
    As she lay there now, the house creaked and groaned. They were just the sounds that a house made, but it was easy to believe that they were the night-time perambulations of the little people. She remembered running onto the landing as a little girl when she heard the stairs creak, and shouting downstairs to her parents.
    I’m scared! What are those noises?
    Her dad clumped up the stairs, bringing with him a whiff of cheap beer mingled with the acid stench of the tannery.
    Don’t worry, petal. Houses are alive. They move around and they settle at night, same as you and me. It’s just our place resting its old bones. It’s saying good night to you, that’s all.
    Anna was one when he died, so at least she’d met him, although she had no memory of it. He loved her, was great with her; couldn’t get enough of nappy changes and messy feedings and clip-clop horsey rides on his knees.
    How she wished he was here now. She wouldn’t want him to suffer through this, but it would make it so much easier to have him here. She missed him. She missed him so much.
    As she did her mum, but in a different way. Her mum was still alive but had suffered her own tragedy, in some ways worse. Alzheimer’s had corroded her brain, eaten her memories, dissolved who she was into a listless, confused shell. She was in a home nearby, in need of constant care. Julia visited often, but it was hard. Her mum rarely knew it was her daughter holding her hand.

    They were gone, her parents, as was Brian. She was going to have to do this herself.
    She checked her phone. Maybe a call from DI Wynne that somehow – although she knew it was unthinkable that she would have slept through it – she had missed.
    She reached out and turned on her bedside light.
    There was a photo frame on the cabinet, split into uneven thirds. Anna had given it to her for Christmas, and they had spent an hour or so leafing through photos choosing which three to put in it. All of them featured Anna: as a newborn, in Edna’s arms on the couch in their old house, and with Brian and Julia outside the blue door of the nursery she had attended.
    God, leaving her there for the first time had been awful. Julia had felt bereft, incomplete, as though she