by Kate Hamer
‘We owe it to him to stay steadfast in that belief and to continue with our studies in the diligent and thoughtful way that he always did his very best to impart to his students.’
The murmuring grows louder. Someone cries out and there’s a high-pitched laugh, gratingly nervous and stifled immediately. I turn around and crane my neck. In the back two rows people have mobile phones in their hands. They are ignoring the strict no-phone policy in class and assembly and they’re reading off their lit-up screens. ‘Oh my God,’ someone gasps.
‘What on earth is going on?’ demands Mrs Reid from the stage. ‘Stop it at once. It’s most disrespectful.’
But she can’t quieten it; it’s unstoppable, the roll of information sweeping across the assembled people, jumping from one to another like lightning. Soon it reaches our row in trembling whispers. In shocked and horrified reports. In giddy excitement, with people turning their heads this way and that to either hear what’s being said or to pass it on to their neighbour. Soon I piece together what it is. Mr Jonasson’s decomposed and whitely bloated body has been found. It floated down the River Avon and right under Pulteney Bridge before anyone could stop it. People gathered on the bridge and stared with their hands over their mouths. Children were hustled away quickly. The sight of it was like a white whale floating past. Police boats came out of who knows where and surrounded it like it was a monster drifted in from the sea. They fished it out of the water and took it away.
43
Phoebe
I’m foggy with nightmares.
Before his body sailed down the river I hung onto the idea something could be done and that tending to my witch light could save me.
I went back to them. The soothsayers. The contrivers. To Hecate, the old goddess of the crossroads. To the three Fates that can smell the future on the wind like people sticking their heads out of the window and reading the weather. But when I looked to my own future I saw only blasted landscapes or swirling mists so I retreated back into myself and thought again.
I saw how I was too easily sidetracked and how quickly I descended into the pit, into the fear – days and nights spent in it. Every time I tried to order my jumbled thoughts and decided to take some positive steps, I became distracted and time would spin out too fast. Despite my plans, when I came to out of my trembling fugue, the library had shut again and there was no chance to go and retrieve all the books and go through them line by line like I’d been intending. Plus, I couldn’t remember properly the things that pussy-cat face taught me about controlling thoughts. How could she be believed anyway? Thought; that winged thing; that wind; that spirit; that snake that winds itself through the coils of the brain. Simple tricks would never be enough to control it. I realise that now. It almost makes me want to see pussy-cat face again to tell her how she was wrong.
Remember, I tell myself. You read about the thing called necromancy; the raising of the dead. You don’t need the books because you’ve studied it already; you know what to do. Trace a circle on the ground with the knife; there will be a special sort of potency in that. This should have been done in a cavern underground but I didn’t have time for that. The bare boards in my room that still showed the scars where Orla smashed the doll’s teacup had to suffice. I placed the ritual objects inside the circle: the shaving mirror from the bathroom, some perfumed oil and of course … the two copies of Macbeth. It was with trembling hands I retrieved them from the drawer, where they had lain buried under old jumpers, and placed them in the centre of the circle, where their battered bodies glimmered in the weak afternoon light. I sat cross-legged and called for Mr Jonasson to be raised up from the dead, from the watery depths where he lay, stirring all the lost Roman coins washed down from the baths with his fingers.
He came back all right.
First, in my sleep. Every night he stood over my bed and used his index finger to push back his lolling tongue inside his mouth so he could speak. Then I experienced being burned by speech as if engulfed in flames but on waking I could barely remember a single word he spoke. One thing I definitely predicted correctly, I think to myself bitterly, is that sleep is no longer sleep. I don’t even know what to call it any more.
This surely is the descent into hell that, looking back, I believe I started to glimpse weeks ago. I remember seeing it in the boiling water writhing its way out of the centre of the earth, in the poisonous frogspawn, in the jokey faces staring out of the wall.
He didn’t stop coming back, though. That was just the first phase. The second was when he stepped out of my dreams and truly returned.
I’ve imagined his face emerging from the water so many times I’m nearly convinced I witnessed it myself. It’s like one of the ancient masks that have been found there in that place, but pale and bloated. It emerges in the same way as the coins, the statues, the brooches and the clasps of sandals that pop out of the river like figments from a dream.
He’s come to get us. His rotten tongue wants to tell everything.
*
Now they want to talk to us all. Mrs Reid has organised it and presides, her eyes misting over continuously. She’s dressing it up as a chat, as if their main concern is our welfare and they simply want to check out that we are all right after the trauma we’ve been through. I am not so easily fooled, though. She’s as nosy as hell and enjoying playing amateur sleuth.
Before it was my turn to go into the classroom where they are having their interviews that they are not calling interviews, I actually thought the electric circuitry of my brain was so charged it would surely kill me. I expected any moment to fall down dead on the red and black tiles just outside the classroom. I considered taking off home but I’m frozen to the spot. I know I can’t draw attention to myself like that anyway.
When it’s my turn Mrs Reid says, ‘Now, don’t be nervous, dear. Miss Atkinson and I simply want to know how you are feeling about what happened. Anything you want to tell us at all?’
Things flash through my brain. His sweating face heaving above mine. The knife stuck into his throat. The white foot waving about in the water. I put curtains around the pictures and look over at Miss Atkinson. She’s new and I notice the fine gold chain around her neck and how she’s writing down what I say; I think it could be a form she’s filling in. Her green eyes look up and, bam! I see it.
There’s pussy-cat face. There’s her.
There’s the one that can see deep into your dreams. I know the type from long experience. I think I actually grab onto the collar of my cardigan. Then the interested look comes into her eyes.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I manage to squeeze out. ‘I don’t think I know anything.’
‘Mmm,’ says Miss Atkinson. ‘Anything that occurs to you, it could help. For example, did you ever see him outside of school?’ she asks.
For a minute I think my heart is actually going to leap out of my chest and flop around in its own blood on the desk between us, but she continues, ‘For example, at any of the pubs or nightspots you go to – and yes, I’m fully aware you’re underage but I want to reassure you in this instance it really doesn’t matter. It’s more important that you tell us if you’ve seen him with someone.’
I shake my head. ‘I saw him in town once, no, maybe twice, but it was daytime and he was with his family. I think his wife was buying sandals.’
She smiles and I see she’s not really a pussy-cat face. It was my panic making me think that. She actually looks quite bland and just sort of tired, like she has to grind through her day and when she gets home there’s children or elderly parents or something else she has to look after and she’s sick to the back teeth of it all. I feel a spark of my witch light returning. It’s such a relief, like a warm fire after being frozen to the bone for days on end. I pray it doesn’t get extinguished again.
‘He was a nice teacher,’ I say. ‘We’re all sorry he’s gone. I had the same favourite play as him – Macbeth – and we were going to carry on studying it this term.’
Favourite pl
ay! That cancer, that holocaust, that time bomb, that warhead, that curse, that Book of Hate. I was doing so well and now I’ve uttered its name. I don’t know why I did. It was that that probably made him come back in the first place, when I placed it in the circle and tried to raise the dead. It was just that right now I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and I know any minute, very, very soon, I am going to crumble and say something stupid. I can feel myself unravelling and the moment hangs suspended and doesn’t seem to want to move, however long it goes on for.
Just as I really am unravelling, the door to the classroom opens and my dad pops his head around.
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ he says, putting his hands out and smiling. ‘Didn’t mean to interrupt but I’ve been looking for this one here. Bit of a thing at home and she’s needed, I’m afraid. So sorry – are you done?’
I have never, ever been so pleased to see anyone in my whole life.
His grey hair, the patches on the elbows of his jacket. He wears his QC’s air of authority lightly but it’s there and they know it too. They sense it straight away and draw back into their seats.
The new teacher looks back over at me, her final tentacle withdrawing, its eye forgetting what it saw, moving onto the next thing, perhaps going home and looking at what needs to be done there, already feeling weary about it.
Dad leads me out to the car. ‘What’s happened?’ I ask him. ‘Is it Mum? Is she ill or something?’
‘No, Phoebe. I just heard on the grapevine this was happening and I thought I’d come and rescue you. They really shouldn’t be doing it. It should be done formally as it could mess up any investigation if information comes out like that. Don’t do it again, will you? If anybody asks you to, call me straight away. You promise?’
I nod and he does too, like something has been explained and settled.
‘Now, let’s get you home,’ he says. ‘Look, you’re soaking. Get in quick.’
But I stay put and we stare at each other over the roof of the silver car, the rain streaming down on us and running down my neck. His hair is soaked through and flattened to his head, water drips from the keys in his hand and his blue-eyed stare appraises me. It is not without kindness but it is nevertheless a lawyer’s stare. His lawyer’s brain suspects something. I don’t know how. Maybe the smashed house that night, or something else or maybe just an instinct. He’s always said that using his instinct is how he’s got so far.
At home, water twirls from my coat onto the golden boards of the hallway. Each window is sheeted outside with a curtain of running water. I take off my coat and hang it in the utility room and put my shoes underneath the radiator to dry. I bring the mop and bucket and wipe away the water from behind the front door.
I look up at the staircase twisting away above me.
If it’s true they know, or at least suspect, that means I am bound to them as tightly as if I was locked in chains to them. This house with all its polished surfaces, its mirrors and its sweet waxy smell may as well be my prison. There never will be any escape into a gilded future of my own making and far away, ever.
As I ascend the stairs I feel I have a disease I once read about and must have stored in my mind ever since, a disease where you bleed from every cell of your body. I bleed invisible blood into the dark corners and into the very fibres of the stair carpet. I can’t seem to get away from blood. In my room I take out the first copy of Macbeth and sit on the bed and stare at it. Of course, I realise now, the awful book foretold it all. How many times have I thought about our wishing bowl and lain in bed in an agony of fear, thinking I didn’t clean it properly and the rust-coloured tell-tale traces still remain? Or I examine the kitchen knife, turning it over and over in my hands, holding it up to the light, fetching the magnifying glass from the study (one of the few objects that remains intact after Grace smashed them that night) and examine the joint between the blade and the hilt to see if a speck has been trapped there.
I put Macbeth to one side and take out my diary and write in it a single word:
Save.
What? she might puzzle. Save money, save time, save buttons in a tin?
Of course, only I know this means I have to save myself. I will talk to Orla and convince her to come forward and tell everyone that Grace stabbed Mr Jonasson and swore us both to secrecy. I know I can make Orla do this because she loves me still, and if I don’t I will be trapped with her forever like a beetle she’s caught inside a bottle so all I’ll ever see are her eyes, magnified by the glass and staring at me caught inside. I don’t need to divine the future to know that.
44
Orla
We have to go. Everybody was told they had a choice if they wished to attend the funeral or not, but they all said yes, so for us three to be the only absences would look horribly suspicious. We might as well announce what we did in the paper.
The funeral is in church; we all troop in out of the fine, misting rain outside and umbrellas hooked over the ends of pews drip onto the floor. The instructions were not to wear black but instead our favourite fun-loving clothes as a celebration of his life, and for some reason this seems to make it all sadder, more pathetic than if we wore black lace veils that came down to our waists. The sight of his wife with her pale strained face in a purple tulip-sprigged dress and bright red shoes with straps and buckles, which look like they should belong to an elf, nearly finishes me off. The older child has clearly been allowed to choose her own clothes and wears the same party dress with pink skirts of gauzy downward-pointing petals that we saw her wearing on the street. The boy is in a tiger romper suit.
I sit down heavily and look around, trying to stem the rising panic. The church is a thickly gilded one lit by a red lamp and with stained glass the garish colours of sweet papers held up to the light. It surprises me, all the ornament, for some reason. Since he was Swedish, I thought he’d have a simple funeral in a church with clean lines and clear glass. The lilies are ferocious. They guard the chancel with their open mouths and saffron-coloured tongues. The smell is fleshy sweet and when the coffin is borne inside on the shoulders of six men – tall relatives who’ve all flown in from Sweden – I cannot help but convince myself that’s where the smell is coming from, from the coffin at the front that’s there throughout the service, and not from the mouths of the creamy white flowers framing it on either side.
I try to keep the sickness down but the smell is in my throat. I know for certain the solace of my garden is a dead zone for me now. I’ll never venture out there again. I won’t be able to bear the rottenness inherent in its cycle. The smell of flowers will be like a poison to me. Nature will be something I can never stomach again.
Phoebe, who up till today has been cool and distant, keeps squeezing my hand and turning to me, her face full of concern as if she’s checking out I’m all right. Maybe it’s obvious that I’m not; I’m probably white as a ghost because I felt the blood drain away from my face as soon as the coffin darkened the doorway and its shadow passed over me as it was carried to the front. I keep my eyes averted from his family who all sit in the front row. Seeing them look so broken, so absolutely finished and the thought of the two children growing up fatherless nearly capsizes me.
And, I know it’s selfish, but even though I’m crushed flat by seeing his family I can’t help but give in to a little moment of mourning for myself. I have such a longing for the awkward plump loving girl I was that tears well up in my eyes.
I used to have this game. If I saw an old lady – and being in Bath I had my pick – who looked like she’d had a good life, someone I felt I wanted to be like, I’d follow her. I’d note her clothes, her walk, the way her little claw held her handbag, and wondered how I could learn from her. Often they were like birds hopping along, like they had hollow bones, their skinny legs stuck inside great boat-like shoes. I knew that following old ladies in the street was not a normal occupation so I kept it to myself, but now the thought that I’ll never have that done to me by some gauche and slig
htly lost girl fills me with such grief and rage that tears spill off my chin. By that age I’ll be so bent and twisted, staying in the shadows as I scuttle along, not even able to gaze on the beauty of nature unfurling in the spring, that anyone who looks will cross to the other side of the road to avoid me. The thought chokes me up and to my horror I hear a howl and realise it’s escaping from my own throat. Phoebe grabs my hand and digs her nails hard into my palm in an effort to shut me up, but she can’t. It’s getting louder and people in the row in front of us begin to turn to look.
‘Shut up,’ she hisses. ‘Or I’m going to have to take you out of here.’ I clap my hand over my mouth and nearly gag on the effort to control my sobs.
‘That’s it,’ she says. ‘Come on. Outside.’ She makes to stand but I elbow her in the stomach and it forces her to sit back down, winded. It feels like we’re on the point of really fighting, standing up and grabbing each other’s hair and clawing each other’s eyes out.
‘No,’ I whisper fiercely. ‘I’m not going anywhere. Leave me alone.’
Her nails dig so hard into my palm it feels like she’s cutting the skin. She leans so her lips are very close to my ear. ‘Well, shut the fuck up then. I’ve got a plan to save us both so just sit tight until the end and don’t draw any attention to yourself and everything will be all right.’
I close my eyes. I didn’t think things could get any worse, but the news that Phoebe has a plan is like the final straw. It even stops me crying and the fight goes out of me. Christ alone knows what awful thing she’s cooking up. Any hope, any spark of anything in me dies and I slump back into the pew until it’s all over and people are filing out.
The church empties quickly, like people can’t wait to get away and go home, until there’s only us two and the priest ambling about at the front, tidying up the altar. Grace took off with hardly a backward glance. The coffin is still there, waiting to be taken away, and Phoebe grabs me by the elbow.