Gone too long

"Things v quiet round here," Vicky texts me.

"Too damn quiet," I text back.

It's three days later and there's a palpable sense of tension in the air - palpable, though, only to Vicky and me.

Ra's unnerving intensity has earned her few close friends on the school run, though she has a lot of casual acquaintances who tend to hide behind trees when they see her coming, thus avoiding the danger of being shaken out of their default stand by mode and, instead, subjected to intellectually rigourous conversation first thing in the morning.

So they either don't notice or don't care that Ra seems to have mastered the art of teleporting her children to school and back again - one minute they're in the playground, as usual being pelted with chocolate chip brioche rolls - stones are so declasse, my dear - as they attempt, unsucessfully, to woo a crowd of mixed infants with 'Greensleeves' arranged as a recorder duet, the next, gone, leaving just the faintest echo of the most delicate of demi-semi-quavers hovering in mid air.

Lindy, too, has been unnervingly absent. There have been no giblet texts. In fact, there have been no texts at all. Even her house, which normally has the air of a structure under severe strain, seems to have breathed out and settled down on its foundations for a nap.

"Wot next?"

"Sleeping dogs?"

It's not easy. Even the vet's looks different without Lindy. The animals are palpably more cheerful and less apprehensive and so, to an even greater extent, are their owners.

Then Vicky turns up on my doorstep.

"Look!" she says, pointing dramatically at her phone.

"Got him!" says the text from Lindy.

My phone starts to ring. "It's Ra," I mouth at Vicky.

"He's gone," she sobs down the line.