by Polly Crosby
‘It works!’ Dad said with a clap of delight. ‘The ticking will start again next year, just before your birthday.’ He stood up and laid his hand on my head for a moment. Then he turned and left swiftly, climbing down the stairs before I had time to ask for an explanation.
I lifted the ball, and I realised it wasn’t a ball, but a bell. It was small – about the size of my thumbnail, and it was attached to a shred of blue velvet. It chimed as it moved. Monty pricked his ears up, and I knew instantly where I’d heard the sound before.
‘It’s yours,’ I whispered to him, letting him sniff it, and wondering where it had been all these years.
I woke with a start late into the night, the remnants of the familiar hushed voice lingering in my ears. It brought with it a swathe of memories: my bedroom in London, a pair of shoes with a red bow, a silvery toy hare staring, staring, seeing all.
‘What do you want?’ I whispered back, and the voice stopped, as if listening. I could sense something, an intangible presence floating just above me, so close that if I breathed in I might inhale it, silencing it forever.
I lay in bed, gazing into the dark, dwelling on the sound. It was a child’s voice, much younger than me, quiescent and breathless, happy, even. Who were they? Why did they keep appearing, waking me from my dreams? I tried to understand the words they had whispered, tried to make sense of the strange, familiar language. I closed my eyes and I could see a soft, pink mouth like a little bow hanging in the dark behind my eyelids, just like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, without a face to call its own.
In the dark, I looked for my birthday box on the window sill, the bell placed mutely beside it. I got up and pulled the curtain aside to let the moonshine in, and there was Dad, running past the beech tree towards the house, completely naked, his stomach and testicles bouncing up and down. As if he sensed me, he looked up, and seeing me there, raised his hand before turning and running back towards the mobiles, his bare bottom flashing in the moonlight.
Twenty-Two
As the summer reached its peak, the garden awoke from its green slumber. The delicate scent of soft pink roses and the stronger, fresher fragrance of the buddleia mingled over the moat, drifting up to my bedroom window, their combined smell at once sickly and comforting, reminding me of Stacey’s Parma Violet sweets.
A group of people had started camping out on the common land that bordered our garden, and during the day I took to lying out on the beech tree, hidden from sight by the high hedges, listening to their treasure hunt discussions. Stretched out on the tree’s sun-warmed surface, watching the armies of ants scaling its smooth trunk, I spent much of the summer dozing, half listening to their far-fetched theories.
The beech was getting soft in places, the wood eaten away by insects until here and there it had begun to look like lace. I listened half-heartedly to someone singing tunelessly round the camp fire, and pushed my thumb into the soft wood, making holes across its once beautiful trunk. How I would love to be out there, swigging from bottles of cider and discussing the mysterious Kemp Treasure, not trapped in here with no one – not even Stacey – to keep me company.
Dad didn’t like me staying outside after dark. As soon as the light began to dim, and the flicker of the campfire was visible through the trees, I climbed down from the tree trunk and slipped into the soft hollow at the base of the tree where the roots had tipped over in the hurricane years ago. It was soft and mossy, and I could lie there, warm and dry, the roots curving round me like the arms of a chair, completely hidden from view. When Dad came out to find me, he did a quick scan of the garden, then went back inside to continue his search. If it rained, I would crawl right inside the hollowed-out trunk, watching with a bored sort of pleasure the hypnotic splash of water as it hit the bramble leaves and nettles outside.
This hideout worked for weeks until one evening, when Dad was calling my name (much to the excitement of the people on the common), and Monty found me, meowing so loudly that Dad was soon on his tail, escorting me angrily back indoors.
Eventually, Dad decided it was best if I didn’t spend any time outside on my own at all. The summer holidays were in full swing, and with them had come hordes of treasure hunters, desperate for knowledge of when the next book – about which I knew nothing – was due out. I took to sitting each day, curled up on the window seat, gazing out at the forbidden garden. I wrote to Beatrice, demanding to know why she had pretended to send presents from my mother, but she didn’t reply. When a month had gone by and I still hadn’t heard from her, I tried telephoning her house, but the ringtone rang on for minutes before I finally put the phone down with a feeling of unease. I asked Dad if there was any way of reaching her, and he shut himself in his study and made some calls.
When he came out, his usually animated face was still and waxen, and I knew what he was going to say.
I ran to my bedroom and shut the door, throwing myself on my bed and soaking the duvet with my tears. I refused to come down to eat, going through her letters one by one, remembering our conversations as if she was perched on the bed with me, chattering away.
Late that evening there was a quiet knock on my door, and Dad climbed in through the little space. He had an envelope in his hands.
‘I was just going through the fan mail from the last month. I found this. It must have got caught up in it.’
He handed me the envelope, the familiar writing even more loose and wavy than I remembered.
Inside was a photograph. It was old and cracked, as if it had been looked at repeatedly. It was a picture of Mum and me. I looked about four years old – around the time we went our separate ways – and I was sitting on her lap, clutching a toy hare, gazing up at her with rapt attention. She was pressing her lips into my hair, her eyes closed, and while she didn’t look happy, she looked content, as if she was in the exact place she needed to be, right at that moment.
She may be ill, Beatrice had written, but she is your mother. She loves you, Romilly, and that love will go on, long after I’m gone, long after we are all gone. Never forget that.
When Dad came up later to say goodnight, he sat on my bed and brushed away my tears.
‘She was very old,’ he said, ‘you met her at the end of a long and interesting life. She was so pleased to have got to know you again. There’s a lot of her in you, you know.’
I remembered when I had first met her two years before, how I had envisaged her as part of the late summer garden; a flower that had already bloomed. I had known she wouldn’t live forever, but still it was hard to take in.
In the bathroom mirror as I got ready for bed, my eyes were shrouded in dark circles. The whispered voice had become louder recently, keeping me awake. Each night it began around midnight, pulling me from my dreams, whispering to me deliciously, almost as if it were there beside me. Sometimes I felt a small, soft hand in mine and heard the soft drip, drip of water, but when I turned on the light, there was nothing there. When the voice left early each morning, whispering away like smoke, I felt it like a physical thing, tearing at my chest, pulling me in two, and I lay awake, not daring to sleep, desperate to hear it again.
That night as I lay there, waiting for the voice to visit me, I stared at the ceiling and wondered if Beatrice knew she was dying when she wrote me that final letter. I wondered if she was alone when she died, how long it was before anyone realised she was gone.
The child’s voice didn’t visit me that night.
The weeks after Beatrice’s death shimmered by in a blur shrouded by lack of sleep. I no longer minded that I wasn’t allowed outside. I was content just to sit in my bedroom. I didn’t even have the energy to look at the treasure hunt books any longer. I sat at my window, gazing out at the reeds in the distance, thinking of the escaped panther. Sometimes I thought I imagined him stalking sleekly across our garden, bending his noble head to drink at the moat. More and more I preferred to live in the world of stories in my head, where nobody dies, but nobody is really alive either. I think thing
s would have continued in this way, but for something that happened one evening towards the end of summer.
I could hear Dad downstairs, tinkering with the telephone. Someone had leaked our number a few days before, and we’d had a constant flurry of phone calls since. After one particularly vicious caller, I was no longer allowed to answer the phone.
With both Stacey and Beatrice gone, I felt like my whole world had shrunk down to the size of my bedroom. I lay, looking up at the little painting Dad had given me five years ago for my ninth birthday. It felt like a lifetime ago: before Mum had come to stay; before Stacey left. Back then, Dad had been full of colour and vibrancy, just like his paintings. Now, he was a spectrum of grey, and I didn’t have the paints or the ability to put him right.
I wondered what Stacey was doing this evening. Probably stomping over the fields with a torch in her hands, sods of earth clumped around her shoes. And what of my mother? I didn’t even know where she was living. What did her bedroom look like? What paintings hung on her walls? What mug did she drink from? These were things a daughter should know. Did my mum know these things about Bea before she died? Did she yearn for her own mother in the same way that I was yearning for mine, right now?
Dappled moonlight streamed into the room, muting the colours of the painting above me so that it looked like a negative of a photograph. The moonlight was so crisp that even from here I could see three or four versions of myself holding onto Monty, stretching back into the painting, getting smaller and smaller as if I was in a hall of mirrors.
The clouds outside shifted, and the moonlight trickled brighter over the painting. I sat up. A pair of eyes had appeared in it, hovering on the blank wall as if they belonged to a disembodied ghost. Quickly, I stood up and went to the painting, but as I got closer, the eyes disappeared. Instead, where there was usually just a blank stretch of bedroom wall, a shadow had appeared on the canvas. It looked almost like damp, creeping across the picture. I took the frame down and laid the picture on my bed to look at it better. The dark patch was indistinct, but it mirrored the posture of Romilly in the painting so exactly that I thought it might be her shadow. I flicked my bedside light on. The dark patch disappeared, as if it had never been there at all. I turned the light off, and it appeared again, skulking next to the smiling nine-year-old as if it were about to envelop her and her cat completely. With a shiver I thought of the faceless woman in Dad’s books: the same shapeless form; the same lack of features, and fear overwhelmed me. I turned the light back on and quickly hung the painting back on the wall.
I ran down the stairs, not daring to look back in case the shadow had peeled itself from the painting and was sliding across the floor, following me.
I found Dad muttering to himself in the small bathroom, the telephone in pieces in the empty bath. He was tapping the bell on it, an insistent ping ringing out each time.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Hmm?’ He looked up. ‘Ah, Romilly. Just the girl, come here and hold this.’
I edged into the tiny space and knelt beside him, replacing his finger with my own to hold a wire in place. I looked back into the hallway, my eyes searching for shadows that shouldn’t be there.
‘What did you girls get up to today? Anything nice?’
I bristled, stung that Dad had already forgotten Stacey didn’t come around anymore.
‘I’m not doing anything,’ I said caustically.
But Dad was humming under his breath, concentrating on what he was doing, not listening to me.
‘Is a bathroom the best place to do this?’ I eyed the leaky tap sending droplets of water over the telephone’s components.
‘Yes, yes it’s fine.’ Dad’s voice was muffled, a fat screwdriver in his mouth. He was still tapping the bell, cocking his head to listen as if tuning a piano.
He had a familiar twist of concentration to his face. I had seen it a few times recently, usually when he was so absorbed in doing something that he didn’t notice I was there. It made him look different, not like my dad at all, and each time I saw it, my stomach gave an unpleasant lurch, as if I had just encountered a stranger in the house.
A few weeks ago, I hadn’t seen or heard him for some time, and, like a mother searching for a naughty toddler, I went and spied at the crack in the study door. Dad was leaning over his desk, counting out some money. But the sheer amount of it made me catch my breath. Tens, twenties, even fifty-pound notes. Piles and piles of crisp, clean banknotes. I knew he must have earned some money from the books, but I had assumed it was frittered away on expensive feasts back when the first book came out. I thought about Stacey stealing the sanitary towels for me a few weeks ago; about measuring out sugar for my cereal so that I didn’t use too much, and anger rushed through me. Why wasn’t the money safely in a bank, for goodness’ sake? I watched him put it away in a desk drawer, making a mental note to explore further when the opportunity revealed itself.
The sound of Dad tinkering with the phone brought me back to the bathroom, and I watched as that same twisted expression of concentration trickled over his face. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked again.
‘Fixing the phone.’
‘Was it broken?’ It had certainly been ringing enough earlier.
Dad stayed silent, trying to screw the shell of the phone back together. When it was done, he lifted the telephone ceremoniously out of the bath and took it, dripping, to the hall where a phone cable lay waiting. Plugging it in, he lifted the receiver and a smile spread across his face.
‘Fixed,’ he said, walking off, lifting the screwdriver to his mouth like a victory cigar.
I knelt down and picked up the handset. Silence.
‘Fixed,’ I agreed. I glanced behind me, sure I had seen the edge of the shadow move. I put my ear to the phone again, a creeping feeling of dread filtering out of the handset and into my ear, as I listened to the sound of nothing where a dial tone had once been.
The incident with the telephone was the catalyst that awoke me from my malaise. Since long before Bea’s death, it had felt as if a creeping fog was clinging to me, hampering my movements. In some ways it had been a comforting blanket, shrouding me from everything bad, but the ringing silence of the telephone brought me sharply back to reality.
Dad was a mystery I needed to unravel, and I tried to connect the incidents of his odd behaviour together, attempting to solve the puzzle that was Tobias Kemp in the hope that it would in turn help me to solve the treasure hunt.
As August gave way to September, and the people camping out on the common drifted back to their lives, my curfew lifted at last, and I was allowed to roam free. With my newly opened eyes, I spent every moment applying myself to the treasure hunt. It felt as if time was running out somehow: as if Dad’s strange behaviour was part of a huge, unseen clock, winding down until eventually there would be no time left to find out the truth.
Sometimes I thought I glimpsed Stacey in the distance when I was out walking, but when I called her name she never turned. It was more likely just one of the village kids, people I didn’t know any more and didn’t want to befriend. I hadn’t seen Stacey since our argument at the quarry almost two months ago, and in her absence, the books began to take up all of my time, the pictures whispering to me as I pored over the pages, trying to solve the clues.
I quite liked being on my own. There was more room in my head to think without Stacey’s constant chatter. But occasionally, when the space around me was so quiet that it hurt, I missed her dreadfully. It reminded me of when we’d been younger and she’d disappear for weeks, even months. Back then I’d always known it was only a matter of time until she came back, but this time I wasn’t so sure.
Downstairs, Dad was in one of his moods, racketing around Braër like a bear with a sore head. I locked myself in the bathroom with my books and my carved box, trying to block out his roars.
I opened up the latest book, Romilly and the Picnic. I raked my eyes over the picture of the picnic laid out on the rug, trying
to find clues to something, anything that would tell me where the treasure was. I had done this so many times before, that it was hard to see it afresh. I tried to see what the fans saw when they looked at these paintings, and for the first time the illustrations seemed to glow, to take on a life of their own. They were colourful and bold, yet a second look revealed tiny details: brown mice climbing the reeds by the lake; half eaten cakes sitting on crumby plates; a pair of chattering false teeth biting into an apple. On one corner of the rug sat two hares, their noses twitching at the smell of cake. I began to appreciate Dad’s talent in a way I hadn’t when I was younger, and yet, as I turned the pages, I found myself looking, not at the beautiful paintings, but at the tiny silhouettes of me being chased by various animals at the top of every page. It still hurt to think that Dad saw me as someone who would run away from a challenge rather than turn and face it head on. With just a few drops of ink he had turned me into a slapstick comic strip for everyone to laugh at, and it stung.
I looked away from the little drawings, my eyes settling instead on a strange-looking brass contraption standing on the rug in the main picture. It was emitting little puffs of steam, and it had a handle and a spout, like an overlarge, ornate kettle. I wondered where Dad got his ideas from, which objects were important, and which were just there to put you off the scent. I so desperately wanted to believe there was a treasure hunt hidden in the pages, and I held the objects in my mind, analysing and dismissing each one before moving on to the next.
Sitting on the bathroom floor, my back to the bath, I picked up Romilly and the Kitten and turned to the picture of Monty as a kitten in my father’s hand, the bell hanging round his neck. I was sure now it was the same bell that Dad had given to me, hidden in the box: the real bell had a shred of blue velvet attached to it, just like Monty’s collar in the pictures. I picked it up, letting it roll around my palm.
I studied the box. What other objects were in there, hidden deep inside? I imagined myself small enough to climb in, and I crept through its carved walls into countless tiny rooms, worming my way through Dad’s mind. Inside the box, all was ornate and glowing. Minute paintings hung on walls and rich red rugs kept my feet silent as I padded through. It was like a museum of my father, a memorial to a man I didn’t understand anymore, and I didn’t want to leave.