snail crossings in the night, part something

He rolled home, late evening, in a snake of red light on warmed tarmac. Irritatingly sober, rolled down his street and parked over the neighbours driveway. He would move the car in the morning, afraid that his wife would hear its adulterous growl. He shut the door softly, having laundered his clothes, padded, sock footed, up the drive and slid in the back door. Nobody steals from suburbia. Blind, he waded the darkness to his daughters bedroom, two flights up, four doors along. Her room was bathed in soft jade. She slept, foetal, thumb sucking child. Disney adorned the walls, carbon copies of a thousand children’s bedrooms, purged of originality. He gazed at the motifed wallpaper. Tigger grinned maliciously at him.
He pictured her when she was five, having climbed dangerously high into the fig tree at the wild, unkempt end of the garden, waving her soft toy Tigger at him, smiling, playing houses in the leaves and branches, building A.A. Milne cities eight feet off the ground whilst he paced, agitated, two feet below her on the earth. She told him to turn around for a second, to show him something, so he turned, faced the gravel pitted, ivy covered wall, and waited. He could hear her soft breathing behind him, the fig tree groaning, and then heard a sickening thud onto the earth behind him. He watched the ivy in the silence, breaking it with an ‘are you ready yet?’, but nothing came. “Tell me when you are then”, he told the ivy covered wall, and stayed there, for seven ticking minutes, listening to the music of his own heartbeat.
“Justin?” his wife had appeared at the hole in the hedge. “Oh FUCK! What have you done?”
He counted 11 leaves of ivy, and turned round, slowly. His daughter was lying on a bed of soft earth, her limbs at all the wrong angles, still as his breath. His wife had climbed through the hedge and gathered her child into her pale arms, then disappeared, breathing hysterically, back through the hedge and into the house. He had looked at the crater his daughter had created in the earth. He looked up at the branches she had been playing in. Tigger and his menagerie sat there, smirking at him. Sirens wailed in the distance. He turned back to the ivy covered wall.
Now, in the jade tinted bedroom, he gazed down at his other daughter, now nine, almost carbon copy of her sister, and stroked her ruffled, soft hair. He picked her sister’s Tigger from her arms and held it, softly, to his lips, and then hers, their faces buried alternately in its lurid, acrylic fur.
He put Tigger back into her arms, his face curled against her chest and walked softly across the misted carpet to the door. He turned the handle, knife cold, and stepped back into the night of the hallway. He glanced back into the green. She looked like a sea fairy, swathed in a wave of dusky sheets. Undine.
He slid into bed beside his cream skinned wife, buried his nose in her exquisitely perfumed hair, and drifted into sleep.
Morning, his unconsciousness pierced by sirens, he sat up, gazing through half set eyes at the desert of sheets spread before him. He pulled his flannel robe from the floor and clothed himself, and, wrapped in its soft cotton, lurched towards the door. He took the stairs two at a time, past his daughters bedroom, the light emanating therein now fainter, softer, deadened. He reached opened front door and halted, silhouetted against the day. A hulk of an ambulance sat in the driveway, its back doors flung open, its blue hat of light a flashing, false dawn, the paramedics’ faces cerulean as they swam in their reflective skins around a lone little girl, beginning to wrap her quiet form in a whirl of white sheets, ocean foam, her blonde head a bubble in its surface. Swathed angelically now in a wave of powdered sheets, he wondered whose daughter this dead little girl was. She bore a vague resemblance to his children, but they were safely tucked away in bed, sleeping like carved angels. He watched a tall, blonde haired woman wrapped in a kimono bend over the frozen stretcher and kiss it. The kimono was a deep indigo, almost black, embroidered. It was almost identical to the one he had found and given to his wife as a gift on their honeymoon to Japan. The second day, morning, they had wandered aimlessly around monuments, craft fairs and markets, hopelessly in love, fresh romance warming their skin as they danced, silken footed, across lilied pools and market squares, a CGI masterpiece. It was when they stopped, and the spinning world had stopped its dizzying orbit, that they saw a shining length of indigo fabric ruffling in the breeze by the lake that they had rested at to have lunch. He had started towards it, pulling his wife after him as it caught the air and sailed away from them.
Waltzing after it at an exhilarated gallop, they had followed innocently in its midnight wake as it was caught on dying gusts of wind. Through the dead grass fields they followed it, their soft western skin torn by stems as thick as reeds as it cavorted, tantalising, inches from their polished fingertips. Pursued it, anxious, now obsessively dancing its rhythm of manic beauty and grace, he knew he was going to get it, catch its whispering figure in his hands, yet still it had eluded him and his feet beat hard on the earth and his wife, behind, fragile on the grass, until it snagged on a tree and he captured it, elated, and clothed his wife in it, now limp, muted, a ghost of elegance.
But the woman in the kimono was his wife, and the child was his daughter, and in an active unacknowledgement of this, Justin ran away to his whore.