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RACHEL
Zhang phoned me mid-morning. She’d just parked on my street, she said, and no they hadn’t found Ben
but could I let her in? She wanted to speak to me.
I listened at the front door for her footsteps, reluctant to open it until I knew she was there. A peek
from my bedroom window had told me that overnight the numbers of journalists had dwindled to just
two or three, but I didn’t want to give them a photo opportunity.
When I heard her footsteps, and I heard the journalists call out to her, I began to undo the latch, but
the expected ring on the bell didn’t come. Instead I heard her curse. I opened the door a crack.
My doorstep was awash with milk. It covered the front door and dripped down onto the doormat at
my feet. It pooled onto the short front path and it was littered with broken plastic. A pair of two-pint
bottles, my twice-weekly delivery from the milkman: full fat for Ben and his growing bones, semiskimmed
for me. Smashed to pieces.
I pictured hands throwing them, feet kicking them, the impact, the explosion of white liquid, the
dirty, messy aftermath, and I knew I was meant to understand it as a rebuke, that it labelled me as a
woman with a filthy doorstep: such an old-fashioned taint that marks you out as the worst, sluttish
kind of woman. I read it as snide vigilante justice, the domestic equivalent of a white feather through
the door.
You can see how my mind was rampaging, now that I was cornered, and alone.
‘Rachel, go back in,’ Zhang snapped. ‘I’ll deal with this. You go in.’
I did as I was told. She borrowed a mop and a plastic bag to gather the debris, and when she came
in after cleaning up I said, ‘Do you think somebody did it on purpose?’
‘I can’t say that for sure. It might have been an accident.’
‘You know it wasn’t.’
‘I don’t know anything.’
‘Did they see who did it?’ I gestured towards the journalists.
‘They say they didn’t. They say it was like that when they arrived this morning.’
‘They’re liars.’
‘Rachel, it’s nothing. It could have been an accident. Don’t let it get under your skin.’
But it was too late for that.
We went down to my studio, taking the dog. I couldn’t bear to be near the front door, with its smeary
residue of vandalised milk that shamed and frightened me.
In the studio I put the heater on this time, embarrassed in front of Zhang to indulge in the pre-dawn
masochism that had compelled me to sit in the cold while I looked online.
Zhang told me about the letter then, and about the dawn raid that had turned up a dying hoaxer.
‘He was a broken person,’ she said. ‘His child died during surgery, when Mr Finch was operating.’
‘Was it John’s fault?’
‘No. It was a very risky operation. The father had been informed of that, and the child would have
died without it. John wasn’t at fault. Nobody was.’
‘Was it a boy or a girl, the child?’
‘I don’t know. Apparently the death drove the father mad. He’d been bringing the child up alone
anyway because the mother had died. Also to cancer. He wrote a series of letters to the hospital
threatening legal action, but he had no case against them, so it was hopeless. And now he has terminal