by Darren Payne.
Jem caught a movement in the corner of her eye. She looked up towards the open door to the hallway, cocked her head to one side and smiled. She said, “Hello, Abigail,” and then returned her gaze to the luminescent screen of the cell-phone that she cupped in her left hand. Abigail stood motionless in the doorway, her black, patent leather sandals pressed neatly together on the shiny hard-wood floor. A pair of white, cotton socks rose neatly up her skinny legs to a point just below her knees and a few inches below the hem of her sky-blue print dress that matched the sparkling blue of her eyes. Her hands rested gently, one cupped behind the other, just below her waist, and a red ribbon perched high atop her head, gathered locks of curly blond hair into a pony tail that fanned out behind her and poured down her back.
“Mummy?”
“What is it, Sweetness?” said Jem, keeping her eyes focused on the screen. Peter had bought her the new phone just the week before and Jem loved it. She loved the way it felt in her hand with a weight that spoke of the power it imbued. She loved the bright, crystal-clear screen that wrapped around the edges and which presented everything with such clarity it seemed crisper, more vibrant and more exact than reality could ever achieve.
Jem also loved the way it always seemed to be one step ahead of her, anticipating her next action almost before she knew it herself. As she glided her fingers across the on-screen keyboard, for instance, the device seemed to know exactly what she wanted to say. It even seemed to adjust its sentence completions according to the person she was texting with. When she texted Peter or her mother, the device’s suggestions were pragmatic, down-to-earth, but with her girl-friends or with Emmanuel, it somehow became more light-hearted, flamboyant, at times even sensual.
Jem’s fingers danced over the phone. She laughed a little at a text that pinged onto the screen, and then started sliding her fingers over the glass again as she, and the mysterious intelligence that was the phone, crafted a response.
Abigail remained perfectly still in the doorway. “Mummy,” she said. “It was Samuel that made me do it.”
“Do what, Sweetie?” Jem said, without lifting her eyes from the screen.
“Put Evie in the black hole.”
“Oh, that’s nice, darling. I expect Evie liked…” Jem looked up. She paused, and then, “What do you mean, darling, when you say you put Evie in the black hole?”
“Samuel made me do it. He…”
“Samuel?”
“Yes, Mummy, he said that if I didn’t do it, he wouldn’t play with me anymore”.
Samuel, had come into Abigail’s life about six months ago. At first Jem and Peter were concerned, but they learned from other parents that imaginary friends were common in children Abigail’s age, even in such strange form as a large, rotund, piebald pig—as Abigail had described Samuel. As time went by, and Samuel pervaded more and more of Abigail’s life, Jem and Peter grew used to the pig. They even boasted to their friends about their daughter’s imagination and the stories of adventure she invented about the pig. “As Einstein said,” they loved to say. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Samuel slept in the corner of Abigail’s closet. At night, Abigail would slide open the door and follow the animal with her eyes as it trotted to a pile of blankets in the corner. Then, in the morning, when Abigail climbed from her bed, she would coax Samuel from his cozy sty. From there on, throughout the day, the pig was always present. Whenever they drove anywhere, Samuel traveled in the car with them, Abigail insisting every time that they not depart until Samuel had been securely buckled next to her on the back seat. At every meal, Jem, or Peter, when he arrived home early enough to prepare dinner, had to lay a place setting for Samuel and serve him up a healthy portion of their meal. Neither Peter nor Jem minded all that much. The extra helping gave Peter his lunch the next day at the office.
Jem looked out of the window next to the couch on which she sat. Early that morning, as the sun crested the hilltop to the east and chased the morning dampness and shadows from the valley, Jem had opened all the windows in the cottage. The previous few days had been gray and dreary with a veil of constant drizzle, so that the air in the cottage had become stuffy and stale with the smells of boiled vegetables and roasted meat. Now, the tepid air coming in through the window made Jem feel a sense of excitement in anticipation of the long summer days soon to come and carefree walks with Emmanuel in the secluded woods near the common. Bird song floated in to her on the breeze and occasionally Jem caught the sweet scent of the rose bushes just outside the window.
The neighboring cottage stood on a slightly higher terrace, so that Jem looked at eye level across its shade-dappled lawn. In the shade of a sprawling oak tree that stood at far end of the lawn, lay Evie in her pram where Tom had wheeled her earlier that morning. A thin mosquito net protected the sleeping baby from the flies and other insects that buzzed about the flower beds. Jem looked back at Abigail in the doorway. She could almost picture the portly pig sat obediently next to the child. “Black hole, darling?” she said. “What black hole?”
“The black hole that Daddy told me about,” said Abigail.
Jem furrowed her brow. She thought back to a bedtime several nights ago. Peter lay across the bottom of Abigail’s bed. Jem was sitting in the nursery rocking chair in the corner. She had been texting Emmanuel, but listening enough to catch the general gist of the conversation Peter and Abigail were having. There had been a story in the news that day about astronomers detecting a pair of neutron stars orbiting about each other in an ever-decreasing spiral. Peter was telling Abigail about it. Jem recalled Peter explaining how they would eventually collide and become a black hole. Abigail had asked lots of questions. Were there any black holes nearby? Could she and Samuel get swallowed up by one? Where did you go if you fell into a black hole? As Jem and Peter turned out the lights and left the room, Abigail could be heard telling Samuel, supposedly snuggled into his corner in the closet, that the next day they would go hunting for black holes in the garden.
Jem looked again at Evie’s pram, and then back at Abigail. “Abigail,” she said. “Did you and Samuel find a black hole?”
“Yes, Mummy. We found one in the lake.”
Jem felt her heart beginning to beat faster. She stood up. “In the lake?”
“Yes, there’s a black hole at the end of the lake. And Samuel said that that is where we should put Evie”.
“Now, Abigail. We don’t joke about this kind of thing. Evie is ok, isn’t she? I mean, you didn’t do anything to hurt Evie? You wouldn’t do anything would you darling?”
“But Mummy, Samuel said to do it. He said that if I didn’t, he would get a phone like yours and then he wouldn’t have time to play with me anymore.”
Jem turned around to the back of the room. A double set of French doors opened onto the lawn at the back of the house, and this fell away to the shore of a small lake, shimmering in the morning breeze. A flock of sheep grazed around its banks and two moorhens swam across the water, heads bobbing back and forth like little tin wind-up toys.
At the far end of the lake, Jem could make out the small black square, like a trapdoor in a mirror, where the lake overflowed into an underground pipe that fed another lake lower down the valley. She knew that the overflow was covered by a loose iron grill which occasionally clogged with weed, and when that happened, one of the estate hands would row out to it in an old wooden row-boat and pull the weed free. Normally the boat rested on the bank, partway out of the water, oars resting in the bottom, but this morning Jem could see that the boat lay close to the bank, fully in the water, oars dangling from the rowlocks. Jem felt her throat tighten. She looked again out of the side window at the pram. Was there movement? Could she see Evie’s little fist waving behind the mosquito netting? She couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was just the shadows from the oak tree dancing over the pram. “Abigail, you have to tell the truth. Where is Evie?”
“She’s in the black hole, Mummy.”
Jem wanted to scream. “Oh no. Abigail. No.”
Again, she looked out of the window, her eyes now filled with tears. Just then, Tom emerged from the cottage, mug in one hand, cell-phone in the other. He walked slowly towards Evie’s pram, eyes cast down at the phone. But before Tom reached the pram, Jem turned away from the window and walked to Abigail standing in the doorway. The child looked up at her mother and smiled. Jem reached down and took her hand. Then they walked into the dimly lit hallway where Peter’s salt-water tropical aquarium cast its luminous blue glow across the floor tiles. As they passed the tank, Jem fumbled open the little feeding hatch on the cover, worked her phone up under it and let go. The cell-phone slid silently into the water, scattering a shoal of tiny green fish. It came to rest in the gravel at the bottom.
“What did you just do, Mummy?” asked Abigail as she pushed open the door to the kitchen. “Nothing Darling,” replied Jem. “How would you and Samuel like salmon and cucumber sandwiches for lunch. You can have a nice cold glass of lemonade too if you’d like.”