by Kate Hamer
‘There’s been a murder down on Walcot Street. It’s just been on the news. Some poor man squashed by a car against the wall. Did you see anything?’
See anything? I caused it. I want to scream – I thought murder, and murder happened. I thought darkness, and darkness was right there. It was supposed to mark the end of it and it’s begun all over again. However many times that counsellor pussy-cat face told me my thoughts were as insubstantial as a breath of air, that they certainly didn’t have the power to make things happen outside of my own self, in my heart of hearts I never did believe her.
I got there before the emergency services even. The traffic had stopped, zig-zagging this way and that, and people were climbing out of their cars to look or covering their eyes. Car alarms were going off all over the place. You could see exactly where the body had been scraped from the band of blood along the wall. The car that had done it was mounted up on the pavement, the engine still full of roaring threat. It was metallic grey with bull bars on the front. The driver was completely still. He was staring at the body on his front bumper as if he couldn’t believe it was there. The body was so mashed and bloodied I hadn’t even known it was a man.
I think I’m going to be sick. I clap my hand over my mouth to catch it. I sense her straining to hear on the other side of the door.
‘Phoebe? Are you all right?’
I take my hand away. ‘Mum. I’ll be down in a minute.’
‘Tell me what’s the matter. You sound strange.’
‘Won’t be a moment.’
I flush the toilet and with some wet scrunched-up toilet paper I dab at the cut under my big toe, but it’s dried to almost nothing now. I’m a quick healer. Always have been.
When I open the bathroom door I get the shock of my life. She’s still there, waiting.
‘Oh.’ I can’t help it sounding like a cry. At the bottom of the stairs her high-heeled courts lie on their side like some killing has been committed on their wearer.
‘Your shoes.’ I realise I’m not making much sense. ‘What are they doing down there?’
As if puzzled, she follows my line of sight. ‘I don’t want to make marks on the new carpet. Listen, I need to talk to you. Come to the sitting room when you’re done.’ She pauses, frowns. ‘What happened to your tights?’
I look down and realise I have them still balled up in my hand.
Inspiration strikes and I don’t skip a beat this time. ‘Bled through. My period started.’
This is a risky strategy. She’s always asking about my periods, wanting to know the details. Sometimes I feel she’d like to weigh me before and after, and weigh all the blood too, and keep the information in some little secret notebook she’d read in bed at night with her glasses stuck on the end of her nose. If there were any discrepancies I’d have to have an explanation for them. On the other hand, this may just be the right trick to distract her, and my period is just about due so it all fits in. All these things are like coins falling into correct slots one after the other, giving me an enormous sense of relief.
She nods. It’s worked. ‘I’ll see you in a minute.’
I go to my bedroom to put on new tights. I take out the copy of Macbeth from under my jumper and put it on my bed. I’ve held it so hard its shape is malformed. I close my eyes and try to think. I’d liked the beginning, loved it even, the witches with their beards and rags. They’d excited me. They were glamorous in a way. Then came the murders and I’d felt only uncomfortable stirrings, nothing dramatic. Then I’d gone and done the experiment. The one I’d vowed never to do again, the one that pussy-cat face tried to tell me wasn’t real. I said to myself, In the next ten minutes, make something bad happen. Make something as bad as all the killings in Macbeth. If I think hard enough about it, it’s possible it will come to pass. It will be a final conclusive test to see if my thoughts can make things happen. Of course, I’d done it many times before with no real consequences. I was on the point of not needing to any more. Now this. Now I know I’ll have to spend hours and hours trying to control my thoughts and turn them away from bad directions. It will take all my energy.
Dear pussy-cat face, see, thoughts are not just that. I told you so.
I put the torn tights under my mattress. Something else to sort out later along with retrieving the shoe and perhaps burying it all in the garden.
When I walk down to the living room, Mum is smoking again. She lets out short sharp jets as she watches the TV screen. This living room must be one of the most beautiful in Bath. It’s on the first floor and we’re high up so you can see the city and the hills that circle around. It’s breathtaking. It has yellow velvet sofas and a lofty Georgian ceiling patterned with paint-encrusted acorns and oak leaves from which a sturdy five-armed brass fitting hangs. Polluting this room with dirty smoke is a criminal act.
It’s as beautiful as Rapunzel’s tower.
When I was little I loved fairy tales and the one I read over and over was Rapunzel. I always felt I’d be fine if I could just live like her for a week or two. I’d have a chance to heal over and face things. What I really envied about Rapunzel is that she had to let her hair down before anyone could get in. She could decide, and her hair was her weapon that kept her safe. As far as I was concerned, Rapunzel in that high tower was living like a pig in shit.
‘I had a call from the school saying you ran off.’
I freeze.
‘What’s going on? Do you know anything about what happened? The traffic was terrible.’
‘Uh-huh.’ I’m thinking, hard. ‘No, I don’t know anything.’
‘Where did you go, then?’
I stay mute, just shrug my shoulders, and she steps closer, coming towards me.
Every time I look at her I realise I’d prefer to see her through something: a honeycomb blanket; a thick sheet of greenish glass; a grille like the one the priest hides behind in a church. When there is nothing between us I have a strong urge to bite her nose.
I let my fringe fall into my face to veil her from me.
‘For God’s sake, push the hair out of your eyes,’ she snaps.
I do, thinking, Well, it’s your nose.
I take a step back to create distance. ‘I thought I heard a crash, so I ran out. I didn’t see anything, though.’ As soon as it’s out of my mouth I feel my story is entirely successful. Her face straightens out and the curiosity is replaced by a look of boredom.
‘Well, you shouldn’t have done. You know how I hate getting calls like that. You can’t just take off whenever you feel like it.’ She eyes me suspiciously. ‘So, you didn’t see anything?’
‘No, no, no.’ I back away with my hands in the air. I sense another visit to pussy-cat face coming on and I’d rather walk over hot coals than that. Breathe. Breathe.
She shakes her head. ‘They’re saying it couldn’t possibly be an accident, that it was murder. Poor man got spread halfway down Walcot Street by the car. Dreadful.’
I think I really am going to be sick now. I put my hands up to my mouth. I’m lying, of course. I saw it all, but I ran away from it as fast as I could.
I wasn’t going to get close to that, was I?
Back in my room I review what I’ve got to do. Before I came up I managed to turn the knives and scissors in the house so they point towards the living room and where she is. Pussy-cat face is the only one who knows about this habit and we worked hard to eliminate it, although sometimes needs must. I still have to dispose of the shoe and tights. Calm down enough to face dinner. The copy of Macbeth is still on my bed, glinting wickedly. Now I know for sure that that book is a curse. If I try to throw it away something else terrible will happen, so I’m going to have to live with it in the same room for now and that’s another burden I’ll have to bear. I try to keep things under control as much as possible, keep this room drained of myself too so there is nothing for her to go on – no clues that she can get hold of to examine or interrogate me. But it’s exhausting just thinking about what I have to
do to keep everything on an even keel. There’s food for a starter. I take sandwiches to school, but they can be put in the bin or flushed down the loo so that’s OK. Whenever the food goes into the bin, I’m so happy because I look at it and think, that could be part of me by now, adding to my hips and thighs and molecules. Sometimes I’ll warm something in a pan, then grind it down the sink in the waste disposal so there’ll be the smell of cooking in the kitchen when she comes back. You have to be forensic about these things. It’s the only way to make them work. If she moans about the breadboard covered in crumbs I actually want to lean over to her and say, ‘Look, don’t you understand? It’s evidence. I’m leaving you evidence.’
She disconcerts me with her comings and goings. Dad is a high-flying barrister so he’s out nearly all the time, but Mum’s job hours as a part-time speech therapist are wholly unpredictable and I never know quite when she’s going to appear. It took ages for her to give me a front-door key, but it was getting ridiculous, the amount of times she came home and I was sitting on the doorstep in the rain, waiting for her. I know she was reluctant. Sometimes I wonder about her clients and feel so sorry for them, being forced to speak and having words dragged up out of their throats by her. I understand how they must feel. I know for a fact she’s read my diary for many years. Every day I pluck a hair from my head and insert it in the page, only to find it on the floor on my return. How many thousands of hairs have I pulled from my head over the years for this purpose? Enough to make ten headfuls. The diary has become a kind of game between us. I’ll have a thought, a real thought, then I’ll translate it into my diary as something either puzzling or without meaning. So, for today, my real thought is, I made murder. It was that play that made me think to do it. Now I suspect again that my thoughts have consequences and everyone was lying about that. But I’ll translate it in my diary as something like, ‘Studied Macbeth today. The themes of regicide and the gradual descent into madness after committing an evil act are fascinating. As is the role of the witches who predict that Macbeth will be king, which actually prompts him to kill the King in the first place so without them he may never have done it. Looking forward to hearing more.’
I mean, what’s she going to do with that?
I’ll even spend time injecting that girlishly naïve tone to it for a measure of authenticity.
My mobile rings and makes me jump. It buzzes across the bed towards the copy of the mangled book.
‘Phoebs?’
It’s Paul. I know the Cockney edge to his voice straight away. It’s so different from the country burr around here.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve got some more— Bloody hell, you don’t have to shove.’ He must be talking to someone over his shoulder.
‘Paul?’
His voice sounds far away. He’s taken the phone away from his mouth.
‘Leave me out of it,’ I can hear him saying. ‘You can’t swing a frigging cat in here, let alone that.’
I curl my hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Paul, Paul,’ I whisper urgently.
He comes back, like he’s been off swimming and has just popped to the surface. ‘Listen, Phoebs, I gotta go.’
The line goes dead. I go to calls logged and press delete. Two seconds later it rings again and I jab the answer button without looking at the number.
‘Paul …?’
‘No, it’s Orla.’
‘Oh. Hello.’ I can’t keep the disappointment from my voice.
‘Listen,’ her voice is tinny, eager. ‘I’ve got your bag. It was dumped in a shop doorway. What were you thinking of? Phoebe, are you there?’
‘Thank you, thank you.’ It’s warm and very, very heartfelt the way I say it. I can picture the sticky warmth of it spreading down the phone and flushing her round cheeks a deep pink and making her speckled hazel eyes shine. I lean my face against the cold wall beside the bed. ‘I’d completely forgotten about it.’
After I’ve got rid of her I lie back. I’m exhausted to my bones. I have the sense of disasters averted, one after the other. I’ve had to work so very hard to keep them at bay, and now I’m battle-weary from them and from the day. I let the softness of the pillow absorb the back of my head and just for a few moments allow myself to give in to a swelling tide of absolute relief.
4
Grace
‘You are such a good, good girl, Grace,’ Mum says.
No I’m not, I think. I’m a horrible bitch who often feels tired and resentful, but one thing I will say to my credit is that I know what needs to be done, and I usually manage to plaster a smile on whatever.
This morning it was getting Mum ready for her big day with her friends who are coming round. It was getting her up early and taking her to the bathroom and pretending not to look at strategic moments while at the same time I washed and dried her, then levered her into her white polyester dress with the matching hat that looks like a garlic bulb. A hat, despite the fact she will be entertaining her friends Rosa and Averill inside. They have hats and she doesn’t want to miss out. Now, the cups and saucers are set out ready, the bread is buttered and the Battenberg cake is sliced.
I look over the table, anxious I’ve missed something because things get on top of me sometimes and it can make me forgetful.
‘Cheer up. It may never happen,’ Mum says, and we both have a hollow laugh at that.
Mum’s decline was a slow and rambling one. I must’ve noticed it first when I was about nine. It didn’t seem anything then. The eye that slipped sideways, momentarily, then righted itself. The stumble on a stone in the road that, when I looked clear-eyed to the ground, wasn’t actually there. It took a long time to get over the magic of the idea that really there had been an obstacle, something to stumble over, until my nine-, ten-, twelve-year-old eyes had to finally admit that there really was no stone in the road and never had been. Yet all these things were just part of the texture of our lives, like the loosened threads in the weave of my favourite green and black Welsh blanket. We slipped slowly into it. No shocks. No alarms. So by the time her diagnosis of MS came through, it was like it had happened long ago, and they were giving us old news that had already been dealt with.
My father leaving went along the same lines. He was there, or should I say more accurately his presence was there – because he came and went more or less as he pleased – through my early childhood. Then the presence got gradually less, like mist thinning. I think it’s because of this, that there was nothing more definite in terms of a traumatic event – a huge row, a slammed door, a suitcase by the door – that I think of him as slightly ghostlike, as if something of him still lurks behind the framed photographs and the dusty display of artificial daisies and poppies on the sideboard.
The buzzer to our flat goes and I pick up the phone on the intercom.
‘Come up,’ I say to Rosa and Averill.
I buzz them through the main doors downstairs, help Mum into her wheelchair and wheel her through to the living room where the table is set out. Mum starts panicking a bit as I try to help her onto the dining chair, so we tuck the wheelchair under the table instead. She fusses around with the cups and saucers.
‘Don’t worry. It takes an age for Averill to persuade Rosa to get into the lift anyway. You’ve got loads of time.’ They both dislike the lift, especially Rosa; she always says she thinks she’s going to have a fit in it. Plus they both say it smells bad, which it does, but as we live on the top floor of Bath’s only tower block it’s a bit awkward otherwise. Mum and I both sit looking at each other over the tea things.
‘What’s taking them so long?’ she asks eventually. I haven’t said but I was beginning to wonder myself. Then the buzzer sounds in the hallway again.
‘Hang on a tick,’ I say and go to answer it.
‘We’ve had to come back outside, Grace,’ says Averill. ‘The lift’s broken.’
‘OK, well, you’ll have to take the stairs. I’ll put the kettle on.’
‘Are you kidding?’ I can hear Rosa�
��s voice behind Averill’s. ‘You know how I am with heights. It’s bad enough going in the lift.’
I sigh. ‘Wait there. I’ll be down now. Mum,’ I call out. ‘The lift’s broken. I’m going to rescue them from outside.’
I run all the way to the ground floor and they’re both standing in the weak sunshine, peering through the glass for me from under the brims of their hats.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘She’s expecting you. You know this will be the highlight of her week. You can’t let her down – you’ll be fine.’
‘Yes. You’re right, dear,’ says Rosa, tucking her handbag under her arm and hitching up her dress like she’s about to scale the Andes. ‘I will do my very, very best.’
The first two flights go quite well, then on the third I look behind me and she has frozen, her hand gripping onto the rail and the tuft of her white hanky poking out from underneath.
‘Listen, dear.’ Her mouth has gone strangely rictus-like. ‘I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to do this. I don’t want to let you down but …’ She looks up, her eyes wide. ‘I’ve had a bad week. That murder really upset me. It was a jealous rage, you know. Did you hear about it? A lad had been seeing this man’s missus and the man found out – I’m not sure how, they didn’t tell you that bit – and he went out looking all over Bath for him in this huge car of his, and when he eventually found him he went absolutely crazy and drove into him and ended up dragging him all down the wall in Walcot Street. Killed him. It was all over the news. Oh Lord, you did hear about it, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah, Daniel told me.’
‘Are you still on with your lad?’
I suck in my cheeks. ‘It’s better not to watch the news, Rosa. You know it doesn’t agree with you.’
‘Yes, but …’ Her hand grips tighter. ‘It’s hard not to when it’s on your own doorstep.’
I don’t point out it’s not only when it’s on her doorstep. The Twin Towers was almost two years ago and it still terrifies her. She really does need to stay away from the news.