‘What are all these files?’ I wondered.
‘Student records,’ Abi said. ‘Can you believe these were left behind? There’s a couple of other offices dotted around, with all sorts of shite in them – tenders for building contracts, stuff like that.’
I wasn’t that surprised. There hadn’t been much of an exit strategy when the junior seminary finally closed. Apparently it was a minor scandal at the time. There were grumbles even now by people who thought the diocese was negligent in safeguarding the fabric of the building. A new ‘youth centre’ had been built by Hexham & Newcastle, used by schools for summer retreats for Years 7, 8 and 9, and it was always around this time you would hear the most complaints, accompanied by little waves of nostalgia for the junior seminary. Not from our dad, though, it must be said.
‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we found Dad’s record?’ Abi asked.
I stared at her. ‘Do you think it’s here?’ ‘I imagine so. I haven’t found it, though.’ ‘You’ve been looking for it?’
‘Yes, of course. Aren’t you curious, Leah? He never talks about it.’
A section of the room had been disturbed; some files on top of the cabinets looked like they’d been moved recently.
‘Priest or Dad, he was always going to be a pisshead,’ I said.
‘Something must have made him that way. Why doesn’t he love us, Leah?’ Her voice was matter-of-fact, as if she were asking if it was raining out, or what the time was.
I snorted. ‘He loves you, Abi. It’s me he has a problem with. Or are you going for the “nobody loves me” strategy?’ It’s something she used to say when we were small, to escape punishment. Anytime she was told off she’d start wailing ‘nobody loves me’ and Dad or Miranda would instantly melt into giving her hugs. I never dared try.
I had a sudden thought. ‘Is this about Dad, or about our mam?’
We hardly ever spoke about our mam. Neither of us could remember her, although we’d seen pictures. She came to the UK from the Philippines as a nurse, recruited to help plug the shortage of British nurses, and was dumped in the arse-end of Northumberland on the geriatric ward of the local hospital, with patients who asked if they could have someone local instead. Dad met her at the hospital when he was volunteering on the ward, reading to patients. He was eighteen, she was ten years older.
‘I don’t care about Mam,’ Abi said. Yeah, sure.
Mam had left the day after Abi turned one. I didn’t feel like there was any great mystery to Dad’s bitterness. It was all in plain sight, not hiding in a filing cabinet in an abandoned building.
‘You know everybody loves you, Abi.’ ‘Do you?’ she asked.
‘You’re my sister,’ I said.
*
We left the admin office and Abi led me through a corridor to the chapel.
The destruction was magnified here and made worse by the fact that I could still see it must have been beautiful once. Paint peeled off the surfaces in a mildewed riot of blue, red and gold. The pews had been ripped from the floor and, instead of being taken for the wood, wantonly discarded. Gothic doors weighed heavily on the floor like fallen grave-stones. A statue of Our Lady with the baby Jesus had been desecrated, obscenities spray-painted over the Virgin’s dress, and genitals carved into the baby Jesus’s forehead. It must have been recent: not that long ago I’d seen photos of the statue from an Urbex account, without the graffiti.
‘This is horrible,’ I said.
The small tabernacle door set into the wall of the sanctuary had been ripped away, probably for its metal, and someone had squashed a beer can and an empty crisp packet into the space where the reserved sacrament would have been kept.
Abi pointed to the window. ‘That’s quite pretty,’ she said.
Rainbow light filtered through an incongruously intact stained-glass window behind the altar, illuminating the sacrilege.
There was more graffiti on the table altar. Someone had taken red spray paint and scrawled across it: ‘Luke 17:36’.
Abi came and stood next to me. ‘That was here last time. I looked it up,’ she said. ‘“Two men will be in the field. One will be taken and the other will be left.”’
‘That’s a bit cryptic,’ I said. There was something very familiar about the loop of the letters. The ‘7’ had a horizontal line through the downward stroke, exactly the way Abi writes her sevens.
‘Yeah, no doubt the product of a disturbed mind,’ she said.
My mouth was dry. ‘Abi, what are we doing here?’
‘I just thought we could hang out, Leah. A bit of quality sister-bonding time.’ She clapped her hands. ‘Do you want to see the swimming pool?’
*
The swimming pool was a 1950s addition, dug into the basement a few years before the main seminary and convent closed down. We needed to descend a narrow staircase, and because there were no windows, for the first time we had to use the torches on our phones. Abi’s phone lit her face at odd angles. We were hidden from the sunlight, which I suppose is why it was blisteringly cold down there. It was quiet, too. Until we reached the basement, there had been a steady background noise of birdsong through the gaps in the walls and windows, but there were no cracks for birdsong or light to enter here.
‘Can you imagine anyone swimming down here? It’s so creepy,’ Abi said cheerfully. The pool had been drained long ago but a thick layer of mud had mysteriously built up at the bottom, as if it were a river that had silted. I almost expected to see a shopping trolley embedded in it. ‘There’s nothing here,’ I said. It wasn’t quite true. I felt something. It felt wrong, even more wrong than the destroyed chapel. At least in the chapel I could see the decay. Here, in the dark, the decay was atmospheric pressure, pushing down on us. I could hear our breathing, strangely laboured, even though neither of us had exerted ourselves. I shivered. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.
But Abi had gone over to the far end of the pool, where she sat on the edge, banging her legs against the side.
‘It’s always so strange down here,’ she said, her voice sounding thinner in the space. ‘Can you hear that wind?’ ‘What wind? It’s dead quiet.’ But then, suddenly, there it was.
‘It makes me think of crying babies,’ she said, sounding far away.
‘Fuck off ’ I said, but it did sound a little like babies crying.
‘Let’s go,’ I repeated. ‘It’s freezing in here.’
My sister sat where she was, humming slightly to herself.
I called out sharply, ‘Abi!’
‘Okay,’ she said, in her normal voice, and swung her legs back up.
When we reached the top of the staircase, back in the broken sunlight of the building, I asked her, ‘Why do you come here? No one would just “hang out” in a place like this.’
Abi pulled at some ivy clinging to a wall, startling a fat spider that had been hiding there. It scuttled under the cover of nearby leaves. Abi didn’t reply to that. Instead, she asked, ‘Do you know what Abigail means?’
I did.
‘My father’s joy,’ she said, and laughed.
‘Sounds right,’ I said.
Abi frowned into the ivy.
‘You think everything’s so perfect for me, Leah. You don’t know what it’s like.’
If she gives me the Imposter Syndrome speech, I’ll kill her, I thought.
‘No. Shall I tell you what it’s like, Abi?’
I had been ten when Dad’s bitterness spilled out of him one Christmas, drunk in the kitchen. ‘We’d been watching some crappy Christmas film about orphans and Santa Claus. Suddenly you asked, “Dad, did you want us?” It would’ve been a weird question, right? But it was a big deal in the film, how the children weren’t wanted.’ I paused.
Abi gave me a strange look. ‘I remember.’
‘Do you?’ I was sceptical. ‘Well, later, after dinner, Dad and Miranda were both drunk. I’d gone into the kitchen and Dad followed me. And all of a sudden he said, “It was your mam.” I didn’t know what he was t
alking about. But he went on and on about how he was going out with Mam but he’d tried to break it off, because he wanted to become a priest. And Mam told him she was pregnant, and that she was going to have an abortion. And he persuaded her not to, saying he’d stay with her and all that.’
I’d gone back to the front room and watched the relentless cycle of Christmas television, stony-eyed. ‘I don’t think Dad even remembered that he’d told me later, when he was sober.’
Abi stared at me. ‘Well.’ She let out a breath, and when she spoke again her voice had an edge to it I couldn’t decipher. ‘At least you know Dad made a definite decision to keep you.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ I said.
‘And Mam …’ Her voice trailed off. ‘She stayed for you, Leah. She didn’t stay for me. Do you want to know the real reason I come here? It’s a place for the unwanted.’ She looked at me. ‘That’s how the world divides, Leah: into the wanted and the unwanted.’
She was talking out of her backside. There was no one more wanted than my sister. Our dad and stepmam both loved her, her teachers adored her, the boys wanted her, and her girlfriends wanted to be her. I wanted to be her.
‘I dream about this place, you know,’ she said. ‘It’s always the same dream. I’m down by the swimming pool and the ivy has got in. It climbs up to my heart and drags me into the mud.’
Her full lips trembled and she had to wipe away a perfectly executed teardrop on the lashes framing her mournful eyes. Only the good-looking get away with this kind of rubbish. Everyone else gets told to pull themselves together. ‘Time to go,’ I said. It really was. I grabbed her hand and pulled her along, like we were two small kids again and I was leading her round the supermarket; through room after room, dust floating in the cracked light, over gaping holes while ivy curved beneath the soles of our trainers, and beetles and rats scratched in the walls; past the graffiti and any number of ruined doors until we were back at the toilet block. The chains hanging from the cisterns clinked gently against the damaged porcelain, making a slightly demented sound like off-key wind chimes. I let go of Abi’s hand to clamber out, and stood in the open. I turned and waited for her.
‘What’re you doing?’ I called, after a while. ‘Hurry up.’
The only sound was the woodpigeons somewhere off in the trees beyond.
‘Stop pissing about, Abi.’
I went back in. She wasn’t in the toilets. I retraced our steps. I thought I’d catch up with her soon enough. I called out as I went along, but my voice disappeared into the brickwork. I reached the room with the filing cabinets and peered in, but she wasn’t there. I tried her phone. I walked all the way through until I was back at the chapel and its desecrated altar. One will be taken and the other will be left. I shivered. And then the swimming pool was the only place left to look.
*
I meant to look, but I lost my nerve at the top of the stairs and went home alone. I don’t even remember anything between the staircase and arriving home. The police believed me, eventually.
*
Abi’s disappearance made the national news. The police took away my phone, and both my and Abi’s laptops. They never found her phone. Later, they took away computers and phones from some of the boys she knew, but eventually everything was given back. The diocese was criticised for lax security at the site, and after a few months they sold the buildings and land to a developer for a pound. When the news came that the Mary House had been sold, Dad said, ‘It should have been burned down and the ground sown with salt.’ Other people were more scandalised by the sale than by Abi’s disappearance, and pressure was exerted once more for the diocese to merge with Hexham & Newcastle. It might even happen this time. Abi’s picture was everywhere, but after a time people started to say she had likely run away, and how she’d always had a bit of the wild in her, for all that she had seemed a good lass; like the mother. They moved on to other topics.
I was sent to counselling, but I never had anything to say, and as it was voluntary I stopped going. Dad and Miranda still go to their counselling. I assume they find things to talk about there; they barely speak to me. They blame me, of course. I thought they were going to throw me out, but they haven’t yet.
What is there to say about the tedious aftermath? I abandoned my A levels and got a job at a call centre in North Tyneside. It suits me. I like the distance imposed between me and my surroundings by the headphones. I don’t talk much to my co-workers and they leave me alone for the most part. I should have enough saved for a rental deposit and a month’s rent soon. It would be good to move away.
Abi’s room is kept for her, in case she returns. Miranda tidied it up a bit, but otherwise it’s pretty much as it was when she disappeared. I don’t go in there. I don’t even like going past the door. I do see her sometimes. It’s always the same dream. Ivy twists around Abi’s body and drags her away. I reach out to pull her back but a hand that is not my sister’s grabs hold of me; a soft, tiny hand that curls around my fingers. I can feel its grip exerting pressure. A baby cries out to be comforted, but when I wake up, it’s only ever the wind, and all the tears are my own.
DOORSTEP PICTURES
J. A. MENSAH
Cambois was a place that had no signs pointing towards it until you were on the road that led only to Cambois.
It was as if the people who made the road signs thought that no one who had anywhere else to go would be headed there. Once they were sure that was where you wanted to be, they felt you deserved to know you were travelling in the right direction. Anna Harbottle had lived in Cambois her entire life. All fifty-something years of it. She knew everyone and they all knew her. She had learned to drive on its narrow streets and learned to swim at the beach beyond her front gate. She’d spent summer nights waiting for the sky to turn black, knowing full well that at that time of the year, in her part of the world, the night would never fully arrive. It would be twilight all evening until the sun rose again.
For decades she had looked at the village’s only venue
– the working men’s social club – and wondered what lay beyond its dark wood doors. As the name implied, the club was only for men. But lately, a girl from the council had got the men to agree that women and children should be allowed to go in, once a month, for a special event – a film night. It was on account of there being nothing much to do in Cambois. There were no pubs or cafes, not even a butchers, a grocers or a post office. And certainly no pictures – just houses, the sea and the working men’s club. The one bus that served Cambois stopped at 5 p.m. After that, if you didn’t have a car, you were stuck. Anna had one, but she had nowhere to go and no desire to drive. She didn’t mind staying put, it was the young ones she felt for: now, with the internet and all that, they could see the lives of others and it made Cambois feel a bit more like suffocating. Both of Anna’s children had left as soon as they could. Ryan went to Newcastle and Katy to Glasgow. Big cities where you could fade into the crowd. They came home once or twice a year. Each time Anna had promised that the next time, she would visit them. But Billy wasn’t a traveller, and she couldn’t go and leave Billy by himself.
*
Anna Harbottle did her make-up in the bedroom mirror, preparing for her first night out at the working men’s club. The foundation was too pale and the lipstick too bright for her too-full lips. She rubbed the lot off with a wet wipe, frustrated. Then she spotted them – perhaps Billy had left them out for her. She picked them up and slipped the small dangly jewels into her earlobes. A little touch of sparkle was what the occasion called for – not too much, but not too little. Billy had bought them for her for their twenty-first wedding anniversary, and she’d never got much wear out of them. Tonight was the perfect night to show them off. There was a little flutter of excitement in her stomach as she looked at her reflection. She didn’t look at all like a film star, but there was definitely a glow about her.
She still couldn’t quite believe this was happening, but it had all
been agreed and no one could turn back on it now. Once a month the women and children would have access to the social club to watch a new film on a big screen with a projector. The council had it all arranged
– it would be like having the pictures on your doorstep, the lass from the council had said that. She wasn’t from Cambois, you could tell. She was probably from somewhere like Blyth or Whitley Bay; she had the air of the outside about her. She’d managed to win them all round, but when it came to the final meeting, she hadn’t turned up. That was the problem with the council types and their community development ideas – none of them were from around here, and every six months you had a new face telling you what the neighbourhood needed, but no bugger hung around long enough to finish the thing they’d started. For that final meeting, the council had sent another lass. Anna thought it had been a mistake: the new girl looked even more out of place than the first one. Her difference wasn’t just an air about her, it was a physical thing. It made Anna’s skin tingle. Anna had wondered if that was why Billy had joined the meeting that day: he saw the new lass and was nervous that things might kick off. He was never interested in the council’s community development projects, but he came to this meeting – sat at the picnic table along with everyone else, and he watched and listened, and pretended to care.
The new girl didn’t seem aware of her difference – or maybe she was pretending. She talked to Si, who ran the social club, in the same loud voice the other lass had. Anna wondered whether the council taught them that in a training session when they gave them the job. Speak loudly and confidently like you have all the answers. The girl looked younger than Si, but you couldn’t tell by the tone of voice she used when she spoke to him. When it had all been agreed, the lass made a comment about holding the next meeting inside the club instead of in the car park, then she laughed and touched Si’s upper arm as though they were friends. Anna held her breath and waited for Si’s reaction. He smiled. He said next she’ll be asking him to put out a spread of drinks and sandwiches, and they laughed together like they were in on the same joke. Anna still didn’t breathe out, waiting for it to build. She felt Billy tense up beside her. Si shook his head and said it was a pleasure to be involved in this project, and in fact they had been talking for a while between themselves about how the social club needed to become more – he paused to search for the word – progressive. That word was like a giant jellyfish that jumped out of his mouth and landed on top of the picnic bench. If Anna had tried to go near it, she’d get stung. She tried not to look, in case she drew attention to it or herself.
Test Signal Page 15