by Kate Hamer
Upstairs I take my place on the sofa.
‘You have a new clock,’ I say.
She turns and smiles. ‘Yes, what a good memory you have. The old one stopped. It just one day refused to tick any more.’
By the way she’s smiling she seems to think this is funny. I don’t. I think it’s sad and terrible.
‘Bit like your patients then.’
She ignores this. ‘Tell me a little about what’s been happening since I last saw you.’
‘Well, we’re moving.’
‘Where?’
‘To York. My sister will be furious.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s where she goes to uni. Now my mother’s following her and we’ll all be camped on her doorstep and she’ll think she can never get away.’
The announcement of the move was sudden, unexpected. Dad was moving to new chambers and Mum giving up her job to keep an eye on me. A prospect that filled me with such awful dread it felt like it was choking me. When they told me, I remembered his blue eyes on me that day he picked mu up from school – shrewd and kind, knowing – and I guessed we were running away. All I could think of, though, was that I’d have to dig up all Lucas’s stuff and smuggle it up with me and get rid of it again. It being down there never left my mind. Sometimes I thought I’d forgotten to switch the phones off and I could hear them ringing beneath the ground.
Was the move because of Dad’s suspicions? In the end I had to do a police interview and he was there, present and watching me carefully. It was weird, I didn’t feel nervous that time; I was sleepy. I had to keep forcing my eyes open because I truly thought I was going to fall asleep on the disgusting ripped chair mended with gaffer tape.
‘Now then.’ Pussy-cat’s serious face comes down like a shutter. ‘Would you like to tell me what’s brought you back here?’
‘I think you probably know already.’
‘Perhaps. But I want you to tell me what you think it is.’
Oh, the charade of it all.
‘I suppose.’ My throat tightens. ‘I suppose it’s because my mother has told you there’s a recurrence of the old behaviours.’
I remember her saying that perhaps my mum had some sort of personality disorder and truly these days I’m wondering if I’m getting one too. I’d like to confide in pussy-cat face about it but I’m too scared that she’ll go down and tell Mum what I’ve just said, even though I know she can’t do that with ethics or whatever. It doesn’t take the fear away.
‘Phoebe, I’d like to hear it in your words.’
Don’t make me, I think. Mum looked at me one day and said, ‘You’re at it again, aren’t you? I can tell by the look in your eyes.’ The cut was in such a secret place I thought no one would ever know. So foolish of me. Nothing can be kept private. Every inch of me is monitored and inspected. I stay resolutely silent. If I don’t speak, perhaps the hour will go without the cat and mouse. Perhaps I will be able to leave before it gets to the bit where I am torn apart.
‘Phoebe?’
I tilt my head back against the sofa and curl my legs beneath me. I’m falling. Something inside my chest is trying to get out and the pain is unbearable.
‘Phoebe, dear. Are you all right?’
She’s never called me ‘dear’ before and somehow the word sets up such a welter of longing and pain it nearly kills me.
‘Phoebe, please. Tell me what’s wrong.’
I close my eyes. ‘I think I’m responsible for someone having died.’
I want to tell her how hard it is sometimes to be a girl. That we are drawn by forces that are mysterious to us. We are alone, set apart. When we stop being sweet little girls and our bodies grow hot and difficult, our feelings become too raw and dangerous. Our friendships are too driven by desire. Our menstruation begins and our interiors leak onto the outside. We find it hard to know what’s real. How can I explain to her that I’ve dreamed of flying, of sorcery, of having that flashing power in my fingertips, my eyes turned into hard diamonds. At certain times I feel I really am capable of sailing in a sieve, like the witches of Macbeth say. Other days I have a soft and dreamy longing for a cocoon. It’s only yesterday I remembered with a shock that when Rapunzel pulled up her plait, the witch was dangling on the other end. Rapunzel didn’t have the power. She got it all wrong and it was the other way round and the witch got into the tower easily. It’s a kind of birth and if it goes badly, if the midwives and doctors are negligent or worse, all sorts of terrible things can happen. All sorts of terrible things have happened and go on happening.
Pussy-cat face clears her throat. ‘Well, I’m sure that’s not the case but let’s examine what you mean by that. What was that person’s name?’
‘Orla,’ I manage to say. ‘Her name was Orla Connor.’
It’s not him, not Lucas that breaks my core. It’s my beautiful Orla. My girl. I fought it all the way through when I knew she loved me. I let myself get bothered by him and now they are both dead.
‘Her name was Orla Connor,’ I say. ‘And I loved her.’
*
Later, I take my coat from the cupboard at home and slip out. I won’t even tell Mum and Dad where I’m going. We’ve got beyond all that, the three of us. The cold wind lashes at my cheeks and tosses my hair about. I head down the hill into the slanted park set on a hill. I look at the tree where Orla and I had our kiss, and I jump when I see Grace walking up the path, each boot step thumped onto the asphalt, her head down, mowing like a bullet. I think of fleeing but she’s seen me, fixes me with her eye, and even at this distance there seems no option but to meet her. Is it luck or bad fortune that we move towards each other and end up underneath the tree when we join up?
‘How are you doing?’ she asks, and it’s then I know she’s checking up on me. Orla told me she did the same with her, ‘testing out the defences’ as she put it.
‘I’m OK,’ I say carefully, then start crying.
‘We must stay safe,’ she says. ‘I’m counting on you. If ever you feel weak, you must remember about my mother and you must think what would happen to her if anything happened to me, and you must come straight to me to talk it over. Are you listening, Phoebe?’
I nod but I can’t stop crying and a bubble blows out of my nose. I wipe it on my sleeve like a three-year-old. ‘What’s happened is so awful, though, Grace,’ I whisper. ‘It’s unbearable.’
And then she says this thing that damn near finishes me. It makes me sink to my knees the force of it’s so great, and I always thought she wasn’t listening, never taking anything in – certainly nothing from that cancerous, murderous, hellish play – but she must have been because she turns to me and quotes those terrible words:
What’s done cannot be undone.
47
Grace
THIS MORNING
Wipe that smile off your face, you stupid bitch.
Except I can’t.
He needs to sleep. His tiny eyelids came down in a second, making two pods of his eyes. His cheeks have turned sleepy pink from the warmth of the cot. I know he needs to sleep yet I cannot quite draw my fingers away from stroking his soft hair and feeling the hard nut of his skull beneath. And I still haven’t wiped the silly-bitch smile from my face. It comes unbidden, stretching my cheeks.
I wind up the mobile above his cot. Not to soothe him, because he is deep and fast asleep now, but for the pleasure of seeing the constellations of stars and planets whir around the room and across his face. The music it plays is such a soft tinkle it barely stirs him. There are carrots and potatoes on the breadboard downstairs, chopped ready for tonight when Daniel will be home. There are sheets flapping on the line in our tiny garden. What a good little housewife I’ve turned out to be. I grin some more and twirl the mobile with my finger. In our tight compact new build it’s easy, really easy, to keep everything clean. It comes naturally to me, caring for a baby. I’m always mindful. On the coffee table downstairs are the accountancy books I will study once Sam is
asleep, then at the first sign of his cry I will mark my place in the book and go to pick him up. For the moment, though, I linger, smiling and stirring the mobile.
Then, reluctantly, I quietly gather the dirty laundry from the floor and bundle it under my arm. I hesitate when pulling the door to and end up leaving it ajar, not wanting to be cut off completely from his sleeping form.
I’m still smiling on my way downstairs to the kitchen, the babygros for the laundry packed under my arm.
In this house I have known such moments of perfect joy that I didn’t think were possible. The baby tucked into the crook of Daniel’s arm at the breakfast table, steam from the coffee fogging them over slightly, is an image for me that no masterpiece of Italian art, no piece of music or chunk of carved marble could ever even get near.
All this love, but what was that …?
A chill descends the back of my neck. I stop halfway down the stairs with my foot poised in mid-air. It’s the love that over the years has made me like a hunter. It was either that or to feel everything I cared about could be hunted down and slain without a thought. I had to turn the tables to survive, so now I strain my ears. That’s how it’s got me through the years. The hyper-alertness. A bird pecking on the window will have me suddenly sitting straight up, the trill of the phone sends a bolt of electricity through me, my hands tremble as they open any letters that look official. I’m always thinking I’ve heard something when it’s just the wind or the house settling in on its foundations or a shouted greeting two streets away. Since Sam was born it’s got more acute to the point where sometimes I actually put up my head and sniff the air. I do this now and finally the stupid grin gets wiped off my face in an instant.
What alerted me? Had it been an imperceptible cough from the kitchen? I can’t be sure but I know my skin is crawling.
I run my hand over my scalp, over the short and bristling hair.
‘Who’s there?’
It may be my imagination but it’s like something has gone stiff and silent. I drop the baby things and clatter down the rest of the stairs.
I recognise Phoebe straight away. She’s aged more than you’d expect in the two decades since I’ve seen her but I know who it is, sitting at my kitchen table.
I look at the open window, the soft breeze blowing through, and I don’t bother asking how she got in. I imagine her scissoring her way in one long leg at a time while I was upstairs folding the blankets over Sam, and it makes me think of the snake coming into the Garden of Eden. Did I sense something upstairs? A momentary darkness shivering over me, or am I only thinking now that I did?
I sit opposite her. ‘Can I make you some coffee?’ I ask, like she is a normal visitor.
Her long fingers flutter at her eyes for a second. ‘No thank you.’ Then, ‘You don’t look very pleased to see me.’
I force a smile back onto my face.
For years I kept some hemlock in a plastic bag wedged behind the boiler, ready for just this eventuality. I’d foraged it myself and dried it out. Those were the years of fear that could sometimes overtake me and having it seemed like some witch talisman against her; the thought I could give it to her to drink if she ever turned up again somehow soothed me. Then Sam came along and it worried me having it in the house and I threw it away. Would I have really done anything with it anyway? I doubt it. When it was gone I was left with addled fantasies, the kind you have just before sleep, which curdle and break apart, that I could possess a special gun meant just for witches, for Phoebe, and she would disappear in a puff of smoke when I shot her. That perhaps she was dead already and lying rotting under the ground.
There’s silence. We examine each other’s faces, with our hands on the table. It reminds me of prison visits I’ve seen on the television. She’s lost her beauty, that’s the first thing that strikes me. It’s become pinched and unlovely. The undertow of fear has left a mark on her face and sharpened all the lines. Her baggy stylishness has gone too, the days when she could simply throw on an old man’s long coat and look beautiful and dashing. Now, it looks sloppy and unkempt. Her dark curls have become fizzy and worn, cut shorter so they slump on her shoulders.
I ask her, ‘Where do you live now?’
She shrugs. ‘Still in York. Dad left – he’s living in Hong Kong now but Mum’s still around. I’m her carer, like you used to be for your mother, Grace.’
So, her mother got her in the end then. It doesn’t surprise me.
‘What about your mum?’
‘She died. It was fine, it was peaceful.’ It’s true – she died as she lived, I guess, surrounded by people and by love. Grateful to the end. Gracious, like the name she gave me.
‘When my mum dies I’ll have the house,’ she says in such a flat way that I can tell this is a mere echo, a reflex desire that’s dwindled over the years to become almost meaningless.
I want to know, why now? Why has she chosen to come here now? I need to get in there gently.
‘And you, how have things been for you?’ I ask softly.
She shrugs. ‘I have the same dreams but they don’t bother me any more.’
I force myself not to glance upwards, towards the bedroom where Sam is sleeping.
‘What dreams?’
She shoves her hands in the pockets of her baggy black blazer. ‘It’s always in Bath.’ She stops, then starts again. ‘I’m out and I realise that people are covered in blood. Not loads of it, though, more like it’s a sweat on them, a kind of sheen. But gradually it starts coming from everywhere, gushing out of the downpipes on the houses, swirling across the streets, running down the walls. It comes down the sluice that fills the Great Bath up until it is full, one sticky glistening mass of it, and I know I have to go and swim in it and it terrifies me.’
No guesses for what that’s about then, I want to joke, but I don’t.
She shrugs again.
Then I see it. In a way, she doesn’t care any more. She’s so full up with horror that it barely registers. She’s come to the end of something. That’s why she’s here.
She shakes her head and then stops; she has caught sight of Sam’s bottle, half hidden by the teapot on the dresser.
‘You have a baby? Grace, really? Do you really have a baby?’
I’m thinking of lying but her eyes are clicking all over the room, taking in tiny bits of evidence: the blue plastic spoon with the rabbit handle on the dresser; the jar of puréed food by the kettle; even the special sensitive soap powder on the floor by the washing machine.
She leans forward. For the first time she looks awake. ‘Where is it?’
I dry-swallow. ‘Out. Being looked after by a friend.’
I cannot let on that Sam is sleeping upstairs – not with her here and her hands touching her face in some sort of pattern every few seconds. With the dead look in her eyes. If Daniel came back, who knows how things might spill over. It’s not only that thought that makes me want to get her out of the house. She stinks of the night; there is a darkness about her. I don’t want that smell travelling upstairs and filling Sam’s nostrils.
I pray that he doesn’t wake and start crying.
The thing I remember about Phoebe is that if you don’t agree with her she can go wild, thrashing, unpredictable, like the time she wouldn’t give Orla the coat and I had to slap her. I have to coax her.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I say.
She looks up. ‘Where?’
I widen my eyes at her.
‘What? Really – there?’
‘I go all the time.’ That’s a lie, of course. I haven’t been anywhere near the Spinney since that day.
She thinks it over. ‘Perhaps,’ she says. ‘It’s time.’
We leave the house, leaving Sam asleep upstairs, and I try not to think of that invisible thread between Sam and me getting thinner and thinner and running out. It reminds me of Mum and when I sneaked out of the flat and thought of her as a little breathing insect she was so far away. I think of a pair of scissors and chop the
thread between us.
Our footsteps fall in line with each other. My house is on the edge of town and closer to the Spinney than when we lived in the tower block, so it’s not long before we’re on the path by the river. There’s a sharpness to the day that pricks at my face. The vegetation next to the river stirs.
We reach the fields that lead to the Spinney and I want to cry out. The tall grass and the crops ripple and moan, and the lines of the horizon cut into the sky in a way that is both dreadful and familiar. Phoebe turns into the path that leads to the Spinney. She looks like an ancient scarecrow in this landscape.
‘We can’t go in there,’ I cry out.
She turns sharply and I can see I’m on the point of giving myself away.
‘Why not?’
‘They’ve mended the hole and put barbed wire on top of the wall.’ I’m lying, of course. I can’t bear going near that stinking place with all its dirty magic still hanging in the air. If I breathe it in it could finish me.
She frowns. ‘I thought you said you come here all the time.’
‘I do.’ I nod over to a stand of trees fringing the top of the ridge where the field slopes upwards in a gentle hill. ‘I go up there and look. It’s peaceful. Come on.’
I turn and start walking and hope that she’ll follow without an argument. After a few minutes I hear her footsteps behind mine.
It’s a fair way to the trees and uphill so by the time we reach them we’re both a little out of breath. We stand on the bare brown earth and look out across the fields towards the river and to the other trees that border it.
Over there, I think, among those trees we murdered a man.
I think of the years since, how many times the leaves have wept to the ground and the grasses crumbled and rotted away and then sprung up again in the next year, over and over.
‘It wasn’t you,’ Phoebe says softly, and I can’t help it – I startle.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not sure if it was you. I find it hard to remember now. For a long time I thought it was Orla, but now when I think of it sometimes I see the knife in my hand. It’s all so difficult.’