Looking for Jake by China Miéville Read Free Book Online

room of all the balls, while they stood and waited for the police I’d made them call.
    The ball room was empty. There was a damp patch under the Wendy house, which the assistants must have missed.
    For a few days, I was in no state to come in to work. I was fevered. I kept thinking about her.
    I’d only seen her for a moment, till the darkness covered her. She was five or six years old. She looked washed out, grubby and bleached of colour, and cold, as if I saw her through water. She wore a stained T-shirt, with the picture of a cartoon princess on it.
    She’d stared at me with her eyes wide, her face clamped shut. Her grey, fat little fingers had gripped the edge of the Wendy house.
    The police had found no one. They’d helped us clear up the balls and put them back in the ball room, and then they’d taken me home.
    I can’t stop wondering if it would have made any difference to how things turned out, if anyone had believed me. I can’t see how it would. When I came back to work, days later, everything had already happened.
    After you’ve been in this job a while, there are two kinds of situations you dread.
    The first one is when you arrive to find a mass of people, tense and excited, arguing and yelling and trying to push each other out of the way and calm each other down. You can’t see past them, but you know they’re reacting ineptly to something bad.
    The second one is when there’s a crowd of people you can’t see past, but they’re hardly moving, and nearly silent. That’s rarer, and invariably worse.
    The woman and her daughter had already been taken away. I saw the whole thing later on security tape.
    It had been the little girl’s second time in the ball room in a matter of hours. Like the first time, she’d sat alone, perfectly happy, singing and talking to herself. Her minutes were up, her mother had loaded her new garden furniture into the car and come to take her home. She’d knocked on the glass and smiled, and the little girl had waded over happily enough, until she realised that she was being summoned.
    On the tape you can see her whole body language change. She starts sulking and moaning, then suddenly turns and runs back to the Wendy house, plonking herself among the balls. Her mother looks fairly patient, standing at the door and calling for her, while the assistant stands with her. You can see them chatting.
    The little girl sits by herself, talking into the empty doorway of the Wendy house, with her back to the adults, playing some obstinate, solitary final game. The other kids carry on doing their thing. Some are watching to see what happens.
    Eventually, her mother yells at her to come. The girl stands and turns round, facing her across the sea of balls. She has one in each hand, her arms down by her sides, and she brings them up and stares at them, and at her mother.
I won’t,
she’s saying, I heard later.
I want to stay. We’re playing.
    She backs into the Wendy house. Her mother strides over to her and bends in the doorway for a moment. She has to get down on all fours to get inside. Her feet stick out.
    There’s no sound on the tape. It’s when you see all the children jerk, and the assistant run, that you know the woman has started to scream.
    The assistant later told me that when she tried to rush forward, it seemed as if she couldn’t get through the balls, as if they’d become heavy. The children were all getting in her way. It was bizarrely, stupidly difficult to cross the few feet to the Wendy house, with other adults in her wake.
    They couldn’t get the mother out of the way, so between them they lifted the house into the air over her, tearing its toy walls apart.
    The child was choking.
    Of course, of course the balls are designed to be too big for anything like this to happen, but somehow she had shoved one far inside her mouth. It should have been impossible. It was too far, wedged too