by Daisy Pearce
I am not expecting her to answer the door, beady eyes looking me up and down, taking in every detail. The hallway floor behind her is littered with feathers, white and delicately speckled brown.
‘You again.’
‘Hello, Beverley.’ I speak slowly, so she can understand. ‘I’m looking for Penelope. Is she here?’
She looks at me blankly. I notice she is wearing lipstick, bright red. It bleeds into the cracks at the edges of her lips. Her cheeks are rouged, her hair pinned. It looks like she is getting ready to go somewhere. I wonder what it is like to be in her head.
‘Penelope has sent me some quite disturbing things in the post. I’d very much like to speak with her about it.’
‘Penelope didn’t do that. I did that.’
For a moment I am silent, my breath caught.
‘But the boy said—’
‘Oh, that boy, that troublemaker. All the Tallacks are troublemakers. He told you Mrs Dalton, did he? You should have asked him which one. You should have been more specific.’ She drops me a wink. ‘My daughter-in-law is in Plymouth for the day. On a date. It’s a wonder she found a man willing, but life is full of mystery, is it not? Meanwhile, in her absence I am enjoying the peace and the box of truffles she thinks I don’t know about under her bed.’
‘Why did you send me those things?’
Her smile broadens to reveal yellowing dentures.
‘You’d better come in, Stella.’
We walk together into a little room nearest the front door. Inside it is astonishing. Velvet-draped curtains of a deep fungal red hang beneath a gilded chandelier. A series of oil paintings positioned along the far wall. I recognise ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’ by Édouard Manet in a gilt frame. There is a daybed in the corner, piled high with blankets, quilts and throws against a mound of cushions. I realise this is where she sleeps. The room has a chemical smell, like a hospital. Sickness.
‘I think we need to talk . . .’ I begin, watching as Beverley moves to a roll-top desk of chestnut wood. She peels back the lid to reveal a kettle, sugar bowl and a quarter-pint of milk in a glass bottle. Beside the desk is a sink cluttered with toiletries, above it a shelf piled with plates, cutlery and condiments. I can count five different types of mustard. A dressing table is littered with perfume bottles and powdery cosmetics, bags of medicine, syringes. From the mirror hang long strings of pearls and brightly coloured silk scarves. She notices me staring and smiles.
‘It’s a big house.’ Beverley is pouring water into the cups. ‘And like me it’s falling apart. Far better to move everything I need into the one place I like best of all in the whole house and let the rest of it rot. Besides, I have much better things to do with my time than clean it. God knows I did enough of that when I was married.’
‘When were you married?’
‘For about ten days in the sixties. Terrible idea. Terrible choice of husband.’
‘Did it not end well?’
‘I shot him,’ she says mildly, easing herself into the daybed.
I pause for a moment before picking up a teaspoon and stirring the tea.
‘I don’t mean I killed him, of course,’ Beverley continues. ‘Two sugars for me, Stella, dear. I just injured him enough to know not to come crawling back if the mood took him. He was a terrible crawler.’
I pass Beverley her cup, noticing the oxygen mask hanging on the bed post.
‘He died in the end. His next wife ran him over with her car, a big one. Killed him outright.’
‘Did she go to prison?’
‘Pah! Not a jury in the world would convict her of murdering that bastard. They should have given her a medal. Couldn’t get away with it nowadays, of course, more’s the pity.’
Beverley looks over the rim of her cup with a mischievous smile. She is having what Penelope would describe as a very good day. I remember seeing it in my own grandparents, the mental decline, the confusion which comes in waves. Some days my grandmother would call me by her dead daughter’s name, asking me over and over where the best china was kept, why I thought I was better than anybody else, even though we all knew I was a little bitch. Other days she was lucid and generous, charming even, but those days shrunk very fast and soon she barely had any of those days at all.
But there the similarity between Beverley and my grandmother ends. Beverley is small and fierce-looking, like a little bullet. Today her eyes are luminous, looking me up and down with plain curiosity.
‘I’m sick,’ she says. ‘I suppose you know that. But I’m glad you finally came to me. It’s been so hard to get your attention.’
She laughs, and it rapidly turns into a fit of coughing. I hear the rattle of phlegm in her chest and wonder how much longer Beverley has to live. She hunches into the cushions with her ashtray balanced on her bony knees, holding a handkerchief to her lips. When she pulls it away it is spotted with blood. She folds it up her sleeve and fixes me with her watery eyes.
‘Would you murder him if you thought you could get away with it?’
‘No!’
‘I don’t believe you.’ She is talking in a sing-song voice, teasing me. ‘Or maybe you just haven’t reached your limit yet. Not like Ellie. She reached her limit, and’ – her hand lifts and drops like a stone, miming a great descent. I stare at her.
‘She put up with a lot, my granddaughter. But the pain, I think it was one step too far. Pass me that.’
She is pointing to a silver picture frame behind me, propped on the dressing table. I do so, careful not to knock over the rest of the clutter on the table’s surface.
‘This is her, back in the days before Marco. When my son was still alive. That’s what did for her, I think. Losing her dad like that.’
‘How did he die?’
‘He got sick. Cancer. He was only a young man. It broke my heart.’
‘God, I’m sorry.’
‘And he left these two behind him and they both fell apart in their way. Here.’
She passes me the frame. In it is an old photograph taken just outside the front door of this house. The man is tanned, his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow. He has one arm draped around a dark-haired woman – Penelope, I see now – who is flashing a smile at the camera. And standing in front of them both . . .
‘Is this her? Is this Ellie?’ I ask, peering at the glass. ‘She looks so different.’
‘Of course she does. This was before. I mean’ – a fly buzzes by her hair and she swats it absently away – ‘you saw the photo I sent you? Marco Nilsen packed her off to Prague to see a plastic surgeon – a butcher, more like – to correct all the things he found wrong with her. He told everyone she’d been in a car crash – that’s how bad she looked when she came home. All that bruising and broken bones.’
Something clicks into place. ‘He wasn’t beating her up?’
‘Just because he didn’t use his fists doesn’t mean he didn’t hurt her. Between that fat-fingered surgeon and that shady doctor in London I’m amazed she lasted as long as she did.’
Beverley must see something in my expression – a wince maybe, a tightness – because she looks at me with narrowed eyes. ‘You saw him too, didn’t you? That sham “doctor”.’ She spits the word. ‘And of course then there was the gaslighting—’
‘The what?’
‘Oh dear girl, you have to listen to what I’ve got to say because if you don’t know what gaslighting is you don’t know the first thing about what he’s doing to you. He’s been undermining you – he wants you to think you’re going mad. To doubt yourself, to lose it. Until, at the very end, you can’t get by without him.’
She leans closer. I can smell the cigarettes she is smoking, like pepper and cloves.
‘Death follows that man around.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘We tried, Penelope and me. Just once. We tried to get her away from him. This was after the plastic surgery, the day after I’d taken that awful photo of her. We drove up to the house, Chy an Mo
r, two desperate women thinking we could reason with him. Appeal to his better nature, Penelope had said. Ha! We were dreaming. We had no idea of the hold he had on her. He wouldn’t even let us into the house, kept us right out there on the doorstep.
‘When I realised pleading with him wasn’t working I got mad and poked him in the chest. He didn’t like that. He doesn’t like women standing up to him. He started talking about how sad it was when old people lose their faculties. How they often can’t cope and have to go into care homes. How dreadful he thought it was when they had to sell their own houses to pay for it. Penelope had gone pale by this point. This is my house, you see, and if I went into a home it would need to be sold to pay the fees and she’d have nowhere to go. Remember she’d already lost her husband. Being made homeless at sixty would have finished her off. Marco carried right on talking, telling me a story that had been in the news about a care home which had left residents lying in their own waste for days on end. He came right up close to me, barely blinking, like one of those snakes you see that just lie in the long grass, and he said, “I’d hate for Ellie to have to sign her dearest grandmother into one of those places to die alone.”’
My throat has constricted to a thin pipe. It is the smell in here, I think. The medicines and the sting of disinfectant, the stink of illness. Something else too, lower than that, lower than the chemical air fresheners dotted about the room, cloying jasmine and lavender, synthetic. It is a dead smell, rising from her in waves.
‘My granddaughter was an adult. She made her own decisions. We tried to warn her. But what else could we do?’
She leans so close to me that I can smell her breath. ‘You should know. After all, your friends tried. Didn’t they?’
I stare at her.
She gives me another sick smile. ‘That list of phone numbers was the last thing Ellie ever gave me. She’d hidden it in her locket because she was so afraid of him finding it. She gave it to me to keep it safe. We were friends, Ellie and I. Closer than she and her mother were. She was a Daddy’s girl you see, and after he was gone I was the next best thing. But I had to watch what Marco was doing to her, making her sick, making her think she was losing her mind.’
She is tapping her temple. I am heady, dizzy. I steady myself on the table. She is asking me a question.
‘Are you all right?’ Beverley asks, her face creasing with concern. ‘You’ve gone very pale.’
‘Dizzy spell.’
‘Ellie got those too. She got them a lot. He eroded her, starting with her friendships and her online accounts and finishing with her going into the sea like a rock.’
Something pitch-dark, like grey wings enfolding me. I sway slightly in my seat. Without thinking, my hand has gone to the back of my neck. There is a patch of tender skin there, perfectly circular. When I touch it my nerve endings light up. Beverley sees it, her eyes narrowed against the smoke.
‘You too? Ellie was the same, although I think – now I can’t be sure – but I think hers was a little further towards her left ear.’
Another sick swooping sensation. The ground beneath me heaves violently as though on the deck of a ship, a galleon plummeting down the side of a long, dark wave. I grip my knees with hands which seem very white, very distant.
‘I think I may need some fresh air. I’m feeling very faint.’
‘You don’t look well. Tell me, did he use one of his big cigars on you? He got Ellie with a cigar, you know, because she wouldn’t tie his shoelaces. And when she did, when she stopped refusing and caved in – which she always did eventually – he stubbed it out on the back of her neck as she bent over his shoes. It left a scar as big as a two-pound coin. She always wore her hair down after that, just like you. He likes it long, doesn’t he, your hair? To hide the marks.’
I hang my head between my knees. Shut up, I think, shut up. Leave me alone. Something is coming. I can feel it. It is in the set of my shoulders, bracing for impact. Because that’s how it feels, when you get right down to it. An impact.
Something is coming.
‘You been into the loft yet, Stella? You seen what he’s keeping up there?’
I lift my head. Beverley seems very dim, very far away.
‘That’s where you need to start looking, if you want to see the kind of man you’re really dealing with.’
I gulp and a watery bile rises up my throat. ‘Please stop,’ I say plaintively. ‘Please stop.’
The edges of my vision bleed into soft greys and blacks. Blooms of midnight like Rorschach blots are rising and, just before my eyes roll up to the whites, I remember, and the memory is cruel and ravenous.
It had been the day of the Essex garden party – the one Carmel would have called the Whitest In The World. The tail-end of summer had been filled with a squalid heat which had seemed oppressive; hot, stagnant air. ‘Migraine Fuel’, my mother had called days like that in her sour way.
I had angered him and I can’t remember why. Only that I’d asked to be taken home. My stupid dress itched, and my make-up looked wrong.
‘I don’t look like me,’ I’d told him, when he’d found me kneeling by the pool. ‘I look like her, and I don’t like it.’
Marco had climbed silently into the car, his rage almost tangible. There was a rapid pulse beating in the crook of his jaw like something trapped beneath the skin. I had pushed myself back into the warm leather seat. Dread was building in the hot, airless car and I began to bite my nails with quick, sharp attacks, flaying the skin. He had not spoken to me until we were back in London and had pulled up outside my flat.
‘Marco, please talk to me. Please.’
He leaned back in his seat, hands folded over his chest, eyes closed.
‘Get out of the car.’
I was crying, thick syrupy tears. There was a sound in my throat – wheeeeowahh – that I was barely aware I was making. I was saying please, and I was saying just listen Marco, but he would not look at me. I was gulping air, hiccupping with sobs.
‘I can’t do this anymore, Stella,’ he’d said evenly. The calmer he sounded the more agitated I became. I’d always been this way, even as a kid. A biter, a pusher. ‘You’re so ungrateful,’ he continued. ‘I bought you the clothes you wanted, the shoes. You’re still not happy.’
I looked down at my ruffled dress and rounded patent-leather shoes. They were not very ‘me’. I didn’t remember wanting them. But he was looking at me with such weary anger I suppose I must have done. I scratched at my scalp. The hair extensions itched. My hair was longer, blonder. It was almost all the way to my hips. I was barely recognisable. I was her.
‘Get out, Stella. I’m done with you.’
I stumbled out onto the hot pavement, sticky in the heat. I could smell tar. Our road was quiet – middle-of-the-day quiet, the absence of people quiet – and as I stood, brushing myself down, tears dripping from my chin, I wished Carmel was there. She was in Brighton with someone for the weekend. A friend? I hadn’t listened when she’d told me. I’d been struggling. I’d been sick.
It was Marco who caught my hand as I unlocked the front door. I did not hear him coming up behind me. He circled my wrist with his long fingers and half pulled, half dragged me inside. His face was a slack mask, terrifying. In contrast my fear was as sharp and shiny as a new pin.
‘What are you doing?’ He clutched my cheeks in one of his large hands, pushing my lips together into a surprised ‘O’. He leaned his body against me until I was crushed into the wall. His erection pressed against my thigh. I was frightened. The flat was still and dark, the curtains drawn. There was a lit cigar in his hand. He told me I am spoilt, that my parents ruined me, always letting me get my own way. I could smell whisky and his aftershave, and beneath it something musky and sour, my sweat, my fright.
‘What did I tell you, Stella? What did I ask you explicitly not to do?’
‘Embarrassh oo.’ My voice was soft and pulpy.
‘It’s a simple request, isn’t it? You can follow instructions, can’
t you?’
‘Yesh.’
‘Okay, great. Well, here’s an instruction for you. Turn around.’
His breath was boiling out of him in hot gasps, as it did when he was aroused. I shook my head.
He nodded in response. ‘Yes. Turn around.’
His hand tightened on my face. Later I would look in the mirror and see broad strips of scarlet there as though my flesh had been seared.
I shuffled myself around so that I was facing the wall. My legs were watery and weak. He pressed up against the length of my spine, the cigar smoke thick and toxic. It was right by my left ear. His mouth bent to my right, pressing up against the soft fleshy lobe.
‘I want you to remember this,’ he said, and then a searing pain just below my hairline, the nape of my neck. There was a moment of intense heat followed by the rich smell of burning. My skin was burning. It smelt like crisped pork.
I screamed, but I had no strength, and he was pressing against me and, oh God, it hurt, it hurt. When he pulled away, I put my hands there and felt a raised welt where the skin was scorched and tender, weeping a light fluid.
Marco was looking at me like a man awakening from anaesthetic, his eyes seeming to focus and lose their hazy, frightening blur. He crushed the cigar out beneath his foot and clawed for me, pulling me to his chest. I did not resist. The smell of burned skin and hair made my stomach roll. Marco was whispering apologies, stroking my shoulders.
‘I’m so sorry, Stella. Look what I did to you, my beautiful girl. My favourite thing. Look what I did to you. I’m so sorry.’
I let myself be stroked and after some time – surely only a few minutes – I returned his apology, telling him that it had been me, I had provoked him, telling him not to be upset, not to cry. I kissed him and told him we would seek help together. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘we will both get help. I’m so sorry—’
‘No, I’m sorry.’
‘You complete me,’ he’d said, taking my hand, stroking my hair, ‘you complete me.’ Over and over and over and over. And then, like magic, with the swallowing of each little grey pill I had forgotten the crawling, prickling fear, just like I had forgotten the way my flesh had smelled like roast meat as it burned. A week or so later I would lose my own phone, misplace it, just like he told me I had. All these things I had forgotten.