‘Finn! Come here!’
Straight away I assume the worst when Mia yells my name from upstairs. Our consultant’s warning about her high blood pressure flashes in my head and I hurry up the staircase and meet Mia halfway.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask and look to her stomach. She’s holding it and I panic. We’ve never even come close to reaching the seven-months mark with any of our other pregnancies but I thought we were home and dry with this one. Not now, I say to myself.
‘I need you to look at something,’ she says. ‘Should we call an ambulance?’
‘What?’ She’s confused. ‘Oh God no, no, I’m sorry, it’s not the baby.’
I let out a long breath. ‘Jesus, you scared me to death.’ She apologises again. ‘I found something in the nursery,
words carved into the skirting board.’
Mum and Dad have joined us now, having heard her cries.
‘Is she okay?’ Mum directs this to me, and I nod. ‘Words? What are you talking about?’ I ask Mia.
‘Someone’s etched something into the skirting board behind the door: “I will save them from the attic.”’
‘It’s someone’s idea of a joke,’ Dad says dismissively.
‘I’m not so sure,’ Mia adds. ‘What does it mean? Who are “them” and why are “they” in the attic?’
I shrug.
‘If the last people living here had kids,’ continues Dad, ‘it’s probably one of them with an overactive imagination. Remember what you were like when you were young, Finn? You convinced yourself you had an invisible sister and insisted we bought her Christmas and birthday presents.’
I cringe. Tan-Tan. I’d forgotten about her.
Mia’s expression tells me she’s not convinced this message is as innocent as my make-believe sibling.
‘Finn,’ Dad says, ‘we need to get back to plastering before the wall starts drying out.’ He starts to head back downstairs, but stops when nobody joins him.
I follow Mia into what will be our son’s nursery. ‘See?’ she says and points to the skirting board. I lower myself to my knees and wipe away a little more of the dust. I read it aloud – it says just what she said it did – and turn to her.
Mia is clutching her belly again as if protecting our baby from an unknown threat. I need her to stay calm. I know what she can be like when she winds herself up. Last month she watched a documentary on YouTube about a brother and sister who went missing from their garden years ago and were never found. It was all she could talk about for days. ‘How are we going to keep our baby safe?’ she kept asking, but nothing I said assured her.
‘What do you think?’ she asks now.
‘Dad’s right,’ I say. ‘It’s just kids messing around.’ I look to Mum. She’s usually as cool as a cucumber but even she looks a bit spooked by this.
‘We need to go up there and look,’ Mia says determinedly.
‘The attic?’ says Dad. ‘There’s only a couple of packing cases up there, isn’t there, Finn?’
‘Packing cases?’ she repeats. ‘What was in them?’
Dad shakes his head. ‘We didn’t look. There was no need to.’
‘Until now.’
‘Whoever wrote that is probably just talking about some old toys they didn’t want their parents to get rid of,’ Mum says. ‘I put Finn’s Buzz Lightyear and cars in our loft when he grew out of them. They’re still up there somewhere. We should dig them out for the baby.’
‘So Buzz and Woody are leaving messages for us on skirting boards, are they?’ Mia snaps. ‘Finn, I’m not going to rest until I know what’s in those cases.’
And if I know my wife like I think I do, she won’t.
