Chapter 5
Some time during dinner, Mother must have decided to attend the meeting after all, because she told Tom to get ready.
Mother used the car to go into town, not because Tom’s bike had flat tyres—he’d fixed them—not because she didn’t have a bike, but because she said things would surely be back to normal soon, and people were just panicking for nothing.
Besides, it was pouring.
Tom sat next to her, clutching the towel with its spiky content and a bottle of milk on his lap. He’d found the bottle in the cupboard. He asked if Mother had used it to feed him when he was a baby, but Mother didn’t answer. A tear ran over her cheek, and Tom guessed the bottle had been Jacqui’s. He hardly remembered Jacqui, a pink baby that always screamed, until towards the end, when she was thin, her
