LITMIR.BIZ

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smells beautiful here,’ he says, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. He puts his weekly offering of fresh milk on the table and then pulls from his bag a bunch of early yellow roses, losing their petals and smelling of the piano room at home when I was a child. My mother was a piano teacher. Mrs Alysha Rose. Individual Piano Tuition, Beginners to Grade 8. The card in the newsagent’s was confident, but my main task as her daughter was to tell the little girls clutching brand new, bright pink music cases and their huffing mothers leaning out of 4x4s to go away because she wasn’t well. Again? they would say. Again. She devoted her life and her health to ‘giving me a little brother or sister’ by whatever means science could offer. At least that’s how she framed her quest. My father devoted his life to her and that meant working every hour God sent to finance her dream. It never happened. She died at fifty from an excess of procedures, breast cancer and a lack of meaning in her life beyond the menopause. I like to imagine her reunited with all her unborn foetuses, happy at last. The smell of rose petals and furniture polish . . . that is all it takes to bring back her unmourned absence.

      ‘Don’t roses make people happy?’ he comments. ‘If you look in the mirror you might catch yourself smiling.’

      ‘I smashed the mirror the other night,’ I told him, wiping the cobwebs from a pottery vase and filling it with water for the roses. ‘I kept looking at this gaunt old witch who lives in there. I can’t take my eyes off myself.’

      ‘If you’ll forgive an old man for his forwardness, you’re a good-looking woman.’

      ‘You don’t understand. I was becoming like a budgerigar that spends all day on his perch, pecking at his own reflection in the hope of connecting with his own gene pool. I’ve been thinking a lot about connections,’ I add, leading him out into the orchard to the old bench. ‘Do you use the internet?’

      ‘The internet? Of course.’

      He sits; I stay standing.

      ‘Sorry.’

      ‘I may be old, Ruth, but I’m not totally decrepit. Why?’

      ‘I miss it. I miss it and I don’t miss it.’

      ‘It brought a lot of trouble to your family, I understand.’

      ‘How do you mean?’

      ‘I had my briefing papers coming here, about you and your husband. Maybe they thought the priest needed protecting against the molester for a change, rather than the other way around.’

      I laugh, in recognition of his effort. ‘It was ridiculous. At least I used to think it was ridiculous.’ I pull a bough down towards me and pick some apple blossom. ‘What do you know?’

      ‘That your husband was accused of having viewed child pornography on his work laptop. That he was suspended, fought the allegations and was found to be innocent.’

      ‘I stood by him. I thought the whole thing was ludicrous at the time. Mark, for God’s sake.’ I pulled the pink petals off, one by one. ‘But when everything is stripped away, do we really know anyone, Hugh, or is that just your God’s privilege? Omniscience?’

      ‘There’s no hiding from him in the garden, that’s for sure, unless you happen to have a supply of fig leaves.’ Hugh is doing his best. ‘So why were you asking me about the internet?’

      Taking my place beside Hugh on the seat, I lower my voice. ‘I’d like you to find out some things for me. Will you?’

      ‘Searching is certainly part of the job description. But I’m not convinced the world wide web is a wholly benevolent force, so it depends slightly on what it is you want me to find out.’

      ‘I just want to know about my family. That’s not too much to ask, is it? I need to know if Angie is all right. And Mark.’

      Hugh shifts uncomfortably, fiddling in his pocket for a handkerchief. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, does Angie have contact with her biological father? Might she be with him?’

      ‘No.’ What else was there to say?

      Angie’s father. There was nothing wrong with him, as far as I could remember from the eight hours we had spent together when I was all of twenty-one, but not much right either. By the time Angie came to want to know about him, he was dead and she was angry. We had never pretended, but even so, was that when she changed the vocabulary from Daddy to Mark? Was that the only reason why? She blamed me, of course, although omnipotent as I was for a while I can hardly have been held responsible. Car crash in Kenya, aged twenty-eight. Turns out my one-night-stand nerd was a rally driver, a bit of an adrenalin junkie. Junkie. Maybe that was where she got it from.

      Hugh persists. ‘You have no idea then where either of them might be living?’

      ‘No. But I’m worried about Angie. She could be anywhere, you’ve no idea how low she can get.’ There are nettles now, growing tall alongside the bench. I reach out and grasp one to stop myself crying. ‘Maybe she and Mark are together. I haven’t heard from either of them since . . .’

      He waits to see if I can finish the sentence, then replies. ‘I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t see how the internet would be of much help.’

      ‘You’ll need it because I also want to know what has happened to the Sisters. To Sister Amelia, in particular. Where she is, what she’s doing, anything relevant about her. Would you search that for me? I have to know more about her, Hugh, if only to discount the possibility that it was one of them that did it. You could print things out and slip them in the Bible – or just in your bag. I don’t think they’ll search that again.’

      ‘So we didn’t come out here for the sunshine.’ He hands me a dock leaf to press against my nettle stings.

      ‘No.’

      ‘Because you are asking me to do something which contravenes the rules of your imprisonment and therefore my visits.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘And if they find out, my visits will be stopped.’

      I hadn’t thought it through as far as that. I look down at the bench and peel off the splinters, finding myself surprised at how thrown I am by the idea that Hugh would not come again. Perhaps he won’t come again anyway now I have asked this of him. There is no choice for me. My hair has grown, and as I look up, I pull it back off my face and fix it with a band so he can see me clearly.

      ‘Probably, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. More than that, I’ll risk everything to know the truth.’

      ‘I will pray about it, Ruth. I can’t promise you more than that.’

      Pray for as long as you like, I thought. But Google for longer.

      The relief guard is gone, my boys are back: Three conducting the 7.30 a.m. alarm check which wailed across the valley, a cross between an air raid siren and a call to prayer; Anon slumping in front of the bank of screens playing computer games while ‘Sarge is out’; I find myself hoping to catch sight of Boy. Finally, he knocks on the door and I am so very, very pleased to see him.

      ‘Morning.’

      ‘You’re back. I didn’t even know the other lot were gone.’

      ‘Thieves in the night,’ he said. ‘You must be sleeping better. Actually I’ve brought you something. That’s not strictly true. In fact my mum sent you something.’

      ‘Your mum?’

      ‘Yes. I was telling her and my dad about you and Mum made up a sort of Red Cross parcel for you.’

      Boy hands me a shoebox-sized parcel, taped up. In one corner, in neat handwriting, I read ‘All the best, Andrew and Helen.’

      ‘Shall I open it now?’

      ‘Why not?’

      I sit on the doorstep and take off the lid.

      There

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