Mariam didn’t have any lectures on Monday morning, so she was the only one both in and awake when the doorbell rang.  She put down her book and went into the hall to see who it was.  Most of the time, the only people who used the bell were the pizza delivery guys, so Mariam didn’t know what to expect.  After Friday night, though, she was wary enough to look through the letterbox to see who it was.

She saw a short, scrawny woman with grey hair tied back in a ponytail.  Not an army of rampaging housebreakers, then.  Mariam relaxed a little, and opened the door.  “Hello?”

The woman grinned.  “Hi!  Are you a friend of Alex’s?”

“Um…”  Mariam hadn’t expected that question, and took her a moment to work out what to say.  “Yeah, I’m Mariam.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mariam.”  The woman nodded in acknowledgement, but didn’t take her hands out of her coat pockets.  “I’m Alex’s mother.  Can I speak to him, please?”

Mariam had never met any of Alex’s family before.  She had no way of knowing whether or not this woman was telling the truth.  True, she had brown eyes and a small nose like Alex’s, but so did a lot of other people. 

Luckily, though, Mariam remembered that she had a way out.  “Oh, I’m afraid he’s in Amsterdam this week.  He should be back the Monday after next.”

The woman’s grin didn’t change.  “I’d really like to speak to him, please.”

Mariam shrugged.  “I could give you his mobile number…”  It wasn’t until the words were out of her mouth that Mariam stopped to wonder why Alex’s mother didn’t have his mobile number in the first place.

The woman (Mrs Rudd?  Should she call her that?) chuckled.  “Look…  Mariam, is it?  I know you’re just saying what he told you to say, but this really is important.  Could you let me in so I can speak to him, please?”

Mariam lowered her eyebrows.  “Saying what he told me to say?”

“You’re not the first one he’s drawn in.  Believe me, you’re not.”  The woman sighed.  Her eyebrows went up in the same way Alex’s did when he was in a reflective mood.  “Please.  Let me in.”

“Look, at this point, even if he was in…”

The woman’s elbow jabbed into Mariam’s side.  It was more surprising than painful, but the result was the same- Mariam flinched backwards, and that gave the woman enough space to shove past her and dart up the stairs.

 Didn’t look like an army of housebreakers, eh? thought Mariam, while she steadied herself enough to follow her up.  At the last second, she remembered to shut the front door behind her.  There was already one intruder in the house- no sense in inviting any more.

Mrs Rudd, if that’s who she was, had stopped at the first door after the stairs, hammering on it and calling through the keyhole.  “Alex.  Alex, I know you’re in there.”

Mariam reached her side.  “For the third time, he’s in Amsterdam.  Not here.  Now can you please…?”

“Alex!” Mrs Rudd shouted, drowning her out.  She carried on pounding on the door.

“That’s not even his room,” said Mariam.  It was Natalie’s, and she wasn’t in, either.  Alex’s room was further down the hall, on the other side of the bathroom, but Mariam wasn’t about to tell her that.

 She wasn’t frightened.  Part of her thought she should be, but Mrs Rudd looked thirty years older and three inches shorter than her.  Even if she got really nasty, she didn’t look like much of a threat.  At the moment, it looked like all Mariam had to do was wait patiently until Mrs Rudd finally got it through her head that Alex wasn’t around, then escort her out of the house so that she didn’t break anything on the way.

“Alex!” yelled Mrs Rudd.  She turned to her left, finally noticing Mariam was there.  “Do you mind…?”

“I mind.  And he still isn’t in.”

 Mrs Rudd made a dismissive tutting sound, and hammered at the door all the harder.  At that point, one Miss Rosalyn Pepper appeared on the second-floor landing, drowsy and rumpled-looking.  She was all pinks and reds, her hair sticking up in a way that reminded Mariam of copper wiring and her face still warm and flushed from being pressed into her pillow for the last seven hours.  Peps caught Mariam’s eye and mouthed, “What’s going on?”

All Mariam could do was shrug.

“Alex!” snapped Mrs Rudd one last time before giving up.  She seemed to sink against the door.  “He’s not answering.”

“Because he’s not in,” Mariam reminded her.

Mrs Rudd gave her a dirty look, then spotted Peps at the top of the stairs.  “I don’t suppose you could tell me where I might find him?”

“What, Alex?”  Pepper blinked in confusion, then looked at Mariam.  “I thought he was in Amsterdam this week?”

Mrs Rudd scowled.  “Fine.  Don’t help.”  And she headed downstairs.  Mariam rushed to follow her in case she tried to check anything else out while she was here, but she needn’t have worried.  Mrs Rudd went straight to the front door.

She opened it, then paused.  “Nothing in life comes free, you know,” she said, looking over her shoulder at Mariam, “You might want to remind Alex of that.”

“Right…”

“I can guarantee you he’s not in Amsterdam.  Most likely everything he’s told you about himself was a lie.”  And before Mariam could ask her what exactly she meant by that, she was gone, with the door slammed shut behind her.

Mariam looked around and saw Pepper, halfway down the stairs, looking as if she’d just been slapped.  “What the hell was that?”

*

Natalie had actually really enjoyed today’s lecture, which had been on 19^th Century poetry and hadn’t involved any necrophilia at all, and she was just about to ask Felicity if she wanted to go down to the pub when she saw Rosalyn and Mariam waiting in the corridor just outside.

“Guess what just happened,” said Mariam, as soon as Natalie met her eyes, “Go on, guess.”

Natalie shrugged, and looked at Rosalyn to see if she could get any clues from her.  “Another Kelpie and Silkie note?”

“I wish,” said Mariam, “No, what actually happened was that some crazy woman knocked on the door saying she was Alex’s mother.”

 “What?”

“And then she wanted to go upstairs and knock on his bedroom door to check if he was really out, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“That was when I woke up,” said Rosalyn, smiling meekly, “I heard banging sounds from downstairs and I thought someone was in trouble.”

Natalie looked from Rosalyn to Mariam, thinking through what she’d been told.  “You managed to get her out in the end, right?”

“Yeah.”  Mariam sniffed.  “She left before she could do any damage.”

“And you told her he was in Amsterdam?”

“She seemed pretty convinced that he wasn’t.  But then, I don’t know if we should trust the judgement of somebody who thinks it’s alright to elbow her way into other people’s houses.”

Natalie tried to remember whether Alex had ever mentioned his family.  Obviously he was a bit older than the rest of them, so he probably hadn’t been living at home as recently, so references might well have been few and far between no matter what.  She remembered everyone else’s parents coming to pick them up for Christmas break, and she was pretty sure she remembered Alex saying he was going to spend the break with his older sister in Cardiff.  But she didn’t think he’d ever mentioned his parents.  Not once in the five months she’d known him.  “Do we know for certain that she is his mother?  Not some random lunatic who just wandered in off the street?”

Mariam shrugged.  “I guess we don’t.  But she did look a bit like him, for what it’s worth.”  She sighed.  “Anyway, I’ve sent Alex a text about what happened, but he hasn’t replied yet.”

“They can take a while to get through, overseas,” said Rosalyn.  (The other thing Natalie remembered about Alex last Christmas was that Rosalyn’s mum had flirted shamelessly with him while Rosalyn had been upstairs getting her stuff.  But she decided not to mention that.)

They’d been standing to the side, against the wall, letting the stream of people pass them by, but then, out of nowhere, one of them broke away and slapped Mariam on the back.  She started, then turned round to look at him.  “Shaun!” she said, with a big grin.

He was one of those tanned, square-jawed guys who always reminded Natalie of a Ken doll.  “Mariam!  How’s tricks?”

She laughed.  “Tricks are OK.”

Shaun the Ken doll nodded, then looked down and behind him as if he felt awkward about whatever he was going to say next.  “So…  Didn’t see you at the meeting on Friday…”

 “Yeah, sorry about that.  Our flatmate announced he was going to Amsterdam for a couple of weeks, and he wanted to take us on a goodbye museum trip.”

“And you couldn’t have done both?”  He said it with a laugh, but Natalie didn’t think that made it sound any less dickish.  If she was Mariam, she’d be congratulating herself on her lucky escape right about now.  “It’s OK.  I know it can seem a bit intimidating, the thought of all these ideas being thrown at you.”  He looked around at the three of them, probably trying to assess how many ideas would be too many for their tiny girly brains to handle.  “But if you do want to come, we’ve got another meeting on Wednesday.  You’re all welcome.”

“And do we have to talk about our favourite spoons?” asked Natalie.

The guy blinked.  “What?”  He looked to Mariam for help.  “Favourite…?”

“Like on the leaflet,” Mariam reminded him.

“Oh!”  He chuckled.  “That was just a joke, OK?  I wouldn’t want you to take it too seriously.”  He gave Natalie a pat on the shoulder, which was remarkably brave of him, under the circumstances.  “Anyway, I’ve taken up too much of your time.  Be seeing you, Mariam.”  And he walked off with a little wave.”

Natalie waited until he was out of sight, then turned back to the others.  “We’ve got to go to that meeting,” she told them, “I want to see just how big a trainwreck this can be.”

*

Isaac was cleaning up the seats in the back row when his chest started to feel tight again.  It was a pretty easy job, even after a big performance (the other attendants had told him horror stories about finding dirty nappies and used condoms back there, but he was pretty sure they just made that stuff up to scare the newbies), and that meant that your mind had plenty of time to wander.

It could happen at any moment…  It could happen at any moment…

He powered through, picking up the sweet wrappers and checking for spilled-drink stains on the chairs and carpets, and then, once he’d reached the end of the row, he went through again and double-checked it, because damn it, he had some professional pride. Then he went out into the foyer and fetched those leaflets he’d been told to put on display afterwards.

It could happen at any moment…  It could happen at any moment…

His hands were shaking.  He was trying to put a neat stack of each leaflet into each of the plastic stands, but it was hard to count them out.  It was hard to hold onto them.

Then two things happened, and, even in the moment, Isaac wasn’t sure which one triggered the other.  A voice from behind him said, “Are you OK?”, and he dropped a bunch of leaflets all over the floor.

For a moment, he just stood there looking stupid.  Bound to happen eventually, he thought, and he did his best to smile at the guy behind him instead of curling up into a ball and screaming a lot.  “Yeah- just a bit clumsy today, apparently.”

The other guy didn’t look like he was buying it.  He was small and young-looking (maybe a couple of years younger than Isaac), but he had a crumpled-up look, like a piece of schoolwork you forgot about and then found squashed at the bottom of your bag months later.  Creased clothes, tangled blond hair, and dark circles under his eyes.  “You’re Isaac, right?”

“Yeah.”  He looked for the other guy’s name badge, and saw that he wasn’t wearing one.  “And you’re…?”

“Denny.  I work up in the office most of the time.  Secretarial stuff.”  He pointed downwards, at the scattered My Fair Lady flyers on the carpet.  “I’ll help you with that.”  He crouched down and began to pick them up.

Isaac quickly dropped to his knees, as if he thought he could tidy up the whole thing under Denny’s nose if he moved fast enough.  “You don’t need to.  My mess.”

“It’s OK.”  Denny didn’t make eye contact as he spoke, just stared down at the leaflets and scooped them up as quickly as possible.

Isaac gave up on the idea of talking him out of it.  “How long have you worked here?

“About a year.”  He still didn’t look up.  “I’m not even here officially- I’m just a volunteer.  Helping out family.”

That sounded a whole lot like old Johnny Lambton was scamming him for free labour, but it wasn’t Isaac’s job to point that out.  “Something to look good on your UCAS form?”

“Hm?”  This time, he almost looked up.  Or at least, there was a twitch in that direction.  “Oh.  No, nothing like that.  Not really university material.”

That definitely sounded like a scam.  ‘Not being paid’ plus ‘not really university material’ equalled ‘basically slave labour.’  He didn’t know how Jonathan Lambton had suckered Denny into it.  Maybe that was something they taught you at business school- ‘Hoodwinking Kids into Working for Free 101.’  “Why not?”

Denny gave a bit of a shrug.  “Just kind of missed the boat.  I’m better off here.”

Isaac didn’t want to pry, but he might have done, if his hands hadn’t picked that exact moment to start shaking again and make him drop a whole bunch of leaflets.  Denny darted forward and picked them up.

Isaac watched him place them neatly in the plastic stand where they belonged.  At least someone was being professional around here.  “Look, um…  As a favour to me, can you not say anything about this to anyone else?”

“About what?” asked Denny, glancing backwards.

“You know, the shaking fingers and that.”  Something occurred to him.  “I’m not hungover!  It’s just…”

Denny met his eyes.  “You’re scared of something.”

“I…”  Isaac sighed.  There was no denying it when someone was staring right at him.  “Well, it sounds really stupid when you put it like that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”  Isaac looked around.  He was the one avoiding eye contact now.  “Anyway, I think we’re done.  Thanks for helping.”