The Girl I Babysat Drew Our Street And Put A House Where There Is No House

She was seven and she drew constantly and most of it was fine.

The street drawing was very good for her age. She got the shape of the lamp posts right, and she got our car right, and she put the bins out on the correct day, which delighted me.

Between 14 and 16 she drew a house.

There is no house. There is a garage, a lock-up, an ugly brick thing that has been there since I was a child and that belongs to a man who does not live on our street.

Her house has a red door and two windows, and in the upstairs window there is a woman.

I asked, in a very normal voice, who lived there.

She said, "The lady who waves."

I asked when she waves.

She said, "When I go past. Every time. She waves and I wave and Mum says stop waving at nothing."

Her mother, when I mentioned it — extremely carefully, over a cup of tea, choosing my words like a bomb disposal officer — said, yes, she does that, she has done it for months, it is a phase.

I went to the library. I know how that sounds. I went to the library and I looked at the old maps, because I am a thirty-year-old woman with too much time and a lifelong problem.

There was a house there. It was demolished in 1971 after a fire.

Two people died in the fire. A woman and a child.

I have not told the mother. I have thought about it for a year and I have not told her, and I am not going to, because what exactly am I offering her?

The girl is nine now. She does not wave any more.

I asked her, last summer, as lightly as I could manage, whether the lady still waves.

She said, "She's not there now."

And then, after a moment, without looking up from her phone, she said: "She got what she was waiting for."

I did not ask what that meant. I am ashamed to say I changed the subject and I have never brought it up again, and I have thought about that sentence every single week since.