The Silence

by Daisy Pearce

  A voice from behind makes me jump, and I have to stifle a scream.

  ‘I eat them, you know, the birds. I kill them and cook them. What do you think of that?’

  It’s the woman who had shown me her bloodied hands – an ancient little figure with a tiny, nipped-in waist and clouds of silvery hair like wire wool. Her skin looks like parchment. She is wearing a dirty apron and scuffed house slippers. One of her yellowing eyes is running thick tears.

  ‘I break their necks.’

  She steps closer to me, and smiles. Her teeth are tobacco-coloured, soft-looking, pulpy.

  ‘I’m sorry about my dog—’

  ‘I know who you are,’ she whispers, coming close enough that I can smell cloves on her breath. ‘You’re a dead woman.’

  I’ve managed to grab Blue by the scruff of the neck and am hauling him towards the door but when I look up I see there is someone blocking my way. Another woman, slightly younger, her face carefully made-up. She has her hair in a chignon but there are crescents of black beneath her fingernails and her lipstick is smudged, just the tiniest bit. I haul Blue to my side, hearing myself apologising again. She darts her eyes over me without smiling.

  ‘You’ll have to mind my mother-in-law,’ she says flatly. It’s hard to place her age. As she steps into the light I can see that she is older than I had previously thought, in her sixties at least. ‘She has good days and bad days. This is one of her bad days. We have more and more of those as she gets to the end. Come on, Beverley. You’re scaring Stella.’

  I blink at the sound of my name.

  ‘Ellie?’ the little woman says to me, lifting one knuckled hand to my cheek. I back away. I don’t like to be touched. It makes me clench my teeth.

  ‘Not Ellie, no.’ The woman looks at me over her mother-in-law’s head.

  ‘How did you know my name?’

  ‘Oh, we all know who you are, Stella Wiseman. Since you moved into the cottage up there the town has talked of nothing else. A star, however faded, is still a star.’

  ‘Oh, well, I wouldn’t say—’

  ‘You know they say that the light you see is from stars which are already dead? That explains why it’s so cold.’

  I am standing with Blue between my legs, holding him in place with my knees. She puts her hands on her mother-in-law’s shoulders and smiles.

  ‘I’m Penelope Dalton. This is Bev, but don’t bother introducing yourself, you’ll only have to do it again the next time you see her. How are you finding it up at Chy an Mor? It’s been a while since I’ve been up there.’

  ‘Yes, it—’

  ‘Of course you’re probably still settling in, aren’t you? It must be very boring for you here, with all of us old folk and nothing to do. I expect you’re desperate to get back to the city. You’re bleeding.’

  I look down at my hand, where hair-thin scratches are already growing into welts dotted with blood, criss-crossing my pale skin.

  ‘Ellie,’ Beverley says to me again, lifting a finger, which shivers slightly. She points at my chest.

  ‘No—’ I begin, and Penelope cuts me off.

  ‘That’s the Nilsen house, isn’t it? The one you’re in. You’re with Marco, I suppose. Will he be joining you soon?’

  ‘He – uh . . . He has some work to finish abroad. Look, I really need to go.’

  ‘Of course. Come on, Mother, let her pass.’

  ‘You mustn’t worry about her,’ Beverley says to me quietly as I squeeze past. ‘She’s always been a bitch.’

  Penelope barks a strangled laugh and squeezes Beverley’s shoulders. ‘Good God, are we going to be forced to do this in front of our guest? You’ll frighten her off! Come on,’ she says to me, ‘I’ll walk you to the door.’

  As we go down the hallway I hear Beverley say something else, but I don’t quite catch it as the kitchen door closes on her. The last glimpse I have of her, she is standing beneath a hanging rack bristling with chickens, her sallow face hangdog and worried-looking. She is mouthing something at me, but the door closes before I can see what she is saying.

  ‘Dementia is very cruel,’ Penelope tells me. ‘Sometimes I wonder who suffers more. I do hope you aren’t struggling too much up there on your own. They say all these old places are full of ghosts.’

  I am instantly cold.

  She studies me carefully as she opens the front door. ‘It’s funny,’ she says, wrapping her cardigan around her bony shoulders, ‘I never thought of Marco as having a “type” but now I’ve seen you, well – maybe he does after all.’

  While I stand there staring, wondering what she means, Blue squirming beside me, she closes the door.

  I’ve arranged to meet Frankie for tea in the café. As I’m crossing the car park my phone rings in my pocket. I call Blue to heel and answer, turning my back to a wind which dusts fine grains of sand against my bare legs. The stinging sensation is almost pleasant.

  ‘Stella? It’s me, Marco. Can you hear me all right?’

  ‘You’re a bit fuzzy.’

  ‘I’m just at the airport. Heading back to London. I should be down with you by the weekend. I’m sorry it’s taken so long.’

  ‘I’m so pleased you called, I—’

  ‘Listen, I don’t have long. Are you okay? How’s the house?’

  I hesitate. I don’t want to worry him. Everything’s fine, darling. I’ve started seeing shapes in the walls.

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Yeah? You still taking the pills?’

  ‘Sure!’ I say so brightly I have to grit my teeth. I’m sabotaging myself, flushed them all away. Buh-bye, sanity. ‘Up and down, you know? Peaks and troughs.’

  ‘You sound tense. Are you sure you’re all right? I shouldn’t have just left you.’

  ‘It’s fine, I promise. It’s good for me. This space. Like a retreat.’

  ‘Okay, baby girl. I have to go. It’s boiling here. I’d love to bring you one day, although we’d give the bullfighting a swerve. I’ll call you when I land, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  He hangs up and I am left staring at my phone. Bullfighting? I think. Before, Marco had said he was in Zürich. Hadn’t he? That tangle of confusion knots tighter, making my skin itch. I scramble in my bag for a pen and a scrap of paper and write on the back of it ‘Zürich/Spain??’. My handwriting looks a little better, not spidery and shaky as it has been these last few weeks. I fold the paper and slip it inside my pocket and go and meet Frankie.

  He listens as I tell him the story of the hand at the window and the strange woman I’d met in the ruined house.

  ‘Do you want to keep Blue for another night?’

  ‘Yes, I think I’d like that, I really would.’

  ‘Have you heard from the police? The coastguard? Anything on the news?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘You still worried that someone’s been in your house?’

  ‘I’m more worried that – what if it’s in my head, Frankie?’ I feel absurdly close to tears. For the millionth time I wish I had my pills. ‘That’s what worries me. I’m hoping they’ll find a body just so I can be reassured that this person existed. Is that an awful thing to say? That I hope they find them dead?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ he replies. ‘Listen, Stella. Are you quite sane, do you think?’

  I check his face to see if he is laughing at me, the way Marco does sometimes.

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘You wouldn’t. But if it helps, you seem quite sane to me. A little fragile’ – he pronounces it fradge-ill, smiling as he says it – ‘but not mad. Not yet, at least. But you – you’re all on your own up there. Are you taking the pills this “doctor” gave you?’

  ‘Why do you say it like that?’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘“Doctor”. Like I’ve made him up.’

  He looks down, smiling, although when he lifts his head again the smile has disappeared and I’m wondering if I ever saw it at all. ‘I don’t doubt you, Stella. Please don’t thi
nk that.’

  ‘I’m not – thank you, I mean. I just feel a bit out of my depth at the moment.’

  ‘Sharks under you, yeah?’

  I must have looked puzzled because Frankie laughs. ‘It’s a family thing, I guess. My grandmother used to say I was always getting out of my depth and the sharks were circling. It was her way of saying I was always getting into trouble.’

  He studies my stricken, sleepless face and puts his hand very carefully on top of mine. ‘Tell you what, why don’t I come over one evening, keep you company for a bit. We could play backgammon.’

  ‘I don’t know how to play backgammon.’

  ‘Well, then I’ll teach you. I’m the best backgammon player in four counties. We’ll have hot chocolate. You just need to get the fire going. How does that sound?’

  ‘Can you come over tonight?’ I don’t want to sound desperate but I am, I am desperate. Don’t leave me alone in that house of ghosts. I look down to see that I am gripping his arm.

  ‘I’m busy tonight. I’m helping Jim with something. Are you going to be all right?’

  What can I say? I tell him yes, of course, yes, I’m fine, and it is not until he has gone that I realise a small but vital thing. Frankie has taken off his wedding ring.

  Heidi catches me as I walk out of the door. She is sitting in a sheltered spot with a crossword on her lap. She smiles and calls out ‘Hey, Stella!’ Heidi is wearing cut-off denim shorts and tights the colour of cherries. Her hair is in a perfect Dutch braid. Again I feel jealousy, sour and as thin as gruel in my mouth. Heidi is too much, way too much. Too confident, too pretty, dainty like a little doll. Frankie clearly adores her.

  ‘How are you? Frankie says the cottage is beautiful.’

  ‘Yes. It is, yes.’

  ‘You’re lucky to be up there – the sunsets must be awesome.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You taking Blue to the beach?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say again. I feel dumb.

  ‘Listen, I’ve been meaning to talk to you—’

  ‘I really have to go.’ I have had enough for this morning. I just want to be alone. She smiles, open and friendly.

  ‘Sure, sure. How about tomorrow? About eleven?’

  ‘Tomorrow sounds great.’ I have already decided it won’t be because I won’t be there.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay.’

  A fringe of seaweed stretches the length of the beach, stranded by the high tide. At the far end are the giant boulders, grey and ominous like earthbound comets. I take off my wellies and socks, digging my toes into the wet sand. Blue charges into the surf, paws sending up a fine spray. My mind turns back to the conversation with Frankie, the way he’d asked me about Doctor Wilson. Because of course I’d felt the same, hadn’t I? The day of my second appointment. I’d wondered about him, but then I’d simply smothered it with the pills, which he had referred to as ‘drifters’.

  Chapter 19

  When I get back to Chy an Mor, I feed Blue and switch on the computer. The desk is in front of a small window overlooking the garden. Beside me is a notepad and on top of that – and here I blink because I really don’t believe my eyes – is the photograph and the note. I stare at it for a moment and then slowly push my chair back. I go to the bookcase and take down the Reader’s Digest Book of Perennials, opening it at the place where I was sure I had left them. Only they aren’t there. They have been put on my desk where I will see them. Pay Attention. I feel edgy, with a raw nervous energy. I turn and look around the empty room, ask it if I am going mad.

  There is only one person who saw where I’d hidden them. He’d been here when I’d slid them between the pages. I swallow, dry-mouthed. That day on the cliff when he had just happened to be there. He said he’d been coming to give me the key for the woodshed but that could have waited till Marco was here, couldn’t it? Frankie, the only person with a spare key to the cottage. I sit down hard in my chair. I’m shaken by my meeting with Mr Kennecker, the original caretaker. Frankie had told us he was in hospital – ‘gallstones’, he’d said. But Kennecker had said his heart, hadn’t he? And had either Marco or I checked out this little fiction? We’d taken Frankie at his word.

  I’m thinking back to my fan, Uncle, the one who used to write me all the letters, those ragged envelopes containing such strange gifts. Once it had been a bloodied tooth, an incisor. It had rolled out into the palm of my hand. I’d shrieked and dropped it on the floor, where it lay like a pearl on the seabed. And those dogs. I remember now. There is light coming through the cracks of my memories.

  ‘Poison in the meat,’ I overheard my mother say to my father. ‘Someone slipped it in. It’s the third one this year. Police don’t give a damn, but as I’ve said to them, if some psycho can kill an animal what’s to stop him going after Stella next?’

  They’d arrested someone in the end, hadn’t they? An older man, with thick grey hair and bifocals, one of the cleaners. I can remember him being escorted from the building. How old had I been then? Ten, eleven? My mother saying, ‘You’re safe now, Stella’, her hand on my shoulder. They’d found rat poison in his locker. It’s what he’d been giving the dogs. When they’d searched his house they’d found newspaper clippings of the show and signed pictures of me stacked up next to his big television set. I don’t remember what happened to him. My mother kept it all from me.

  I look down at the photograph next to my elbow, the one with the woman in it who looks so much like me. It’s a threat. I can feel it. I look closer at her and something jolts sharply in my memory.

  I’ve seen that woman before.

  I pick up my phone and call Marco’s office.

  ‘You know I really can’t do that.’ Alice’s tone is clipped, like I am being told off. Perhaps I am.

  ‘Please, Alice. I really don’t know who else to ask. It needs to be a surprise, you see, something special.’

  I close my eyes, open them. Inch my bare feet into a warm patch of sunlight on the floor. She doesn’t believe me and that’s fine. What is more important is that she doesn’t tell Marco that I’m asking her this favour.

  ‘What’s it for again?’

  ‘A surprise. I want to make him something. I’m collecting old photos together and I’m doing a collage.’

  ‘Right.’

  It is the screensaver I’m thinking of, the one on Marco’s computer. The day I’d lost my purse and had to wait in his office while Alice called a taxi, there had been that series of photos sliding across the screen.

  ‘It’s a particular picture – um – Marco and a woman, arms around each other, in front of a fountain. Looks like it could be Italy. Can you see it?’

  ‘Nope, but if not I can find it in the file. I know the one you mean.’

  ‘Can you email it to me without him knowing?’

  Alice hesitates, and I say quickly, without thinking, ‘Please, Alice. I really want to do this for him.’

  ‘Give me your email address. I’ll have to think about it.’

  I’ve had to set up a new account so I give her the address, reading it carefully.

  ‘Thank you, thank you so much.’

  ‘I can’t promise anything, Stella. It certainly feels too much like snooping.’

  ‘Can I ask you one more thing?’ I ask, smoothing the crumpled piece of paper I’ve taken from my bag in front of me. ‘Marco called me earlier from the airport and I wanted to track his flight. He’s flying from Zürich, right?’

  ‘Uh—’ For the first time Alice does not sound composed. ‘I’m not currently at my desk but I think it’s Madrid. Gets into Gatwick at seven thirty tonight. Do you want the flight number?’

  ‘No. Just send me the photo, please.’ Madrid? ‘I must have misheard him.’

  I can picture Alice standing in Marco’s office, with its view over Fitzrovia towards the BT Tower. The smells of coffee and printer ink, new carpets, paint. His beautiful chair behind the desk, an antique carved in oak with a leather seat the colour of dried blo
od. Hadn’t I straddled him in that chair one late afternoon in August, after everyone had left the building? I had, and had sunk my teeth into the wood as I’d orgasmed. As far as I know, the teeth marks are still there. ‘You’ve always been a biter,’ he’d said to me afterwards, and I’d laughed, but something in those words now makes me feel strange. You’ve always been a biter. Have I? I think of asking Alice to check, to run her hands over the hard material to see if the little indentations are there, where my incisors met the wood.

  ‘Are you still there, Stella?’

  I pause. I’ve been staring at a framed picture hanging to the left of the window. It is a watercolour of the sea, gilt-framed. But the painting isn’t what I am looking at. I can see the room reflected in the glass; the dark shapes of the sofa, the coffee table, Blue lying on the floor. Beyond that, silhouetted in the doorway, I can see the shape of a figure, a woman.

  ‘Yes,’ I whisper. ‘Yes, I’m still here.’ I swallow, a dry click. ‘Alice. There’s someone in my house.’

  I am watching the milky glass. I can make out no detail in the figure, just a suggestion of thinness and cold. The shoulders are slumped, skinny arms hanging loosely.

  ‘What – Stella, what do you mean?’

  ‘I can see someone behind me, in the glass. I’m so frightened.’

  I am whispering now. Blue approaches me, shivering, a whine trembling in his throat. He pushes his skull against my leg, needling. I can hear the steady drip, drip, drip of water onto the floorboards. I know if I were to turn my head I would see water pooling there.

  ‘Is the door locked? Can you call for help?’ And then, after only the slightest pause, ‘Are you sober?’

  ‘I have to go, Alice. Send me the photo. It’s very important.’