The Illustrated Child

by Polly Crosby

  I looked at the Christmas tree and the roaring fire in the painting in front of me. In the past few years, Dad often painted copies of his original pictures, versions of old paintings, as if his brain would no longer allow him to come up with anything new. Sometimes I found seven or eight sketches scattered across a table, all exactly the same. Was the painting he had made that night in the snug the start of it: an image dredged up from a part of his brain that still remembered?

  I looked at the painting on the floor. The girl was reaching up to wrap tinsel around the tree. I could make out the mole on her left cheek: it was definitely me. The tree was covered in decorations, amongst them, a tiny pair of shoes with red bows – shoes I now remembered had once belonged to my sister – and the crimson bauble I had rescued after Dad’s outburst, just before he told me he had dementia. Perhaps it was this bauble that was locked inside my wooden box, one of the clues to Feena’s name.

  I looked closer at the tree. Hanging among the decorations were all the other clues, too: the silver bell on a strip of blue velvet, the pink feather, the forget-me-not, and the little glass salt cellar. The painting was so large that everything in it was magnified to ten times the size I was used to, and in the sparkling glass of the red bauble I saw my sister, reflected back at me, gazing into the room.

  I stood up and walked around my bedroom, finding the original paintings from all of the books. I lifted and sifted them until they were grouped together in two equal piles: one pile contained me, with a mole on my left cheek, and the other, Feena, with a mole on the right. And now I could see differences between myself and my twin, things that only a man who had lived with us and loved us both would see: my lips were slightly fuller, my hair straighter. Feena’s eyes sloped down at the corners more than mine did, and the freckles on her nose were more pronounced.

  But there was more. In each picture that Dad had painted of me, I found Feena, tucked away, invisible if you didn’t know where to look. He had hidden her at the centre of a flower; in the pattern of Monty’s fur, and even – most confusing of all – in the pendant of a necklace hanging from my own neck. She was there, hidden in plain sight, gazing out at me everywhere I looked: my lost sister.

  There was a knock on my bedroom door, and Dad poked his head round.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘It looks like you’re already in.’

  He climbed into the room, and I noticed how his hand shook as he tried to pull himself up, his joints creaking. He looked around at the paintings, nodding at the way I had divided them.

  ‘It’s why Mum left us, isn’t it?’ I said, looking down at the face in the bauble in front of me. ‘Because Feena died.’

  Dad sat down heavily on the bed. ‘It is,’ he said.

  ‘I wasn’t enough for her,’ I said, staring round at all the pictures of me and my sister, ‘I wasn’t her favourite, and every time she looked at me, she saw her dead daughter. I get it.’

  ‘It wasn’t that, Romilly. Your mother had been ill for years. Your sister’s death sent us all off on different tangents. Even you.’

  I began to object, but he lifted a hand to silence me.

  ‘Yes, even you.’

  I looked down at my hands, not daring to look at him, in case the expression on his face made me cry.

  ‘You went into yourself. You became – all of a sudden – just like Feena, as if you missed her so much you were trying to be her. I think it was this that got to your mother so much. She would come into a room and encounter a vision of her dead daughter.’

  ‘So it’s my fault then.’

  ‘It’s nobody’s fault. Your mum stayed for a while. We tried to work our way through, but in the end we weren’t strong enough. And so we had to find a new way.’

  ‘Without Mum.’

  ‘It was her choice to go, Romilly, and I believe it was the healthiest thing to do. She gets the help she needs where she is. And she does need help, more than you or I.’ He stood, walking over to the little painting that was hanging on the wall, the one he had given me when I was nine years old.

  ‘I wanted to show you something,’ he said, lifting the picture off the wall.

  ‘What are you doing with that?’ I asked nervously. Dad had been known to snap paintings in half before.

  ‘I just…’ he trailed off, shaking his head, then he stumbled over to the window, and held the painting up to the glass so that the light shone through.

  With a shiver I saw the shadow on the wall appear in the picture, darker than before. I stepped closer. It was a silhouette, the delicate shape of a person, but with the light passing through it I could see that muted colours were painted into it too: a pair of eyes looked out at me, a little hand clung to the hand of Romilly in the picture. There was nothing shadowy about this person. It was my sister, standing in the picture, holding my hand.

  ‘She was always here,’ Dad said, ‘watching over you.’

  I leant closer, looking at Feena. She had been covered by a layer of paint so that she was only visible when a strong light shone through her. ‘I thought she was a ghost,’ I said, ‘she only appeared at night.’

  Dad moved as if to hug me, then stopped himself. ‘The last thing I meant to do was scare you,’ he said, ‘I wanted to give you comfort: it was the only way I knew how.’

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the painting. We were holding hands, and she was looking at me and smiling. Dad passed the picture to me, and the further it got from the light, the fainter she became until she disappeared once again, and I was alone. I stared at the blank stretch of wall, unseeing. When I looked up, Dad had gone.

  I placed the painting on the window sill so that Feena appeared again, and I went to the bed, where Dad’s early sketches lay, mottled with mould and curled at the edges. These were the drawings of us together, when we had been too small to crawl away. In one, our eyes were open and we were staring at each other as if looking in a mirror. I studied it for a long time, my eyes blazing, and then I scrunched it into a ball and held it to my chest, feeling the tears come.

  I went and stood over the Christmas painting on the floor, seeing in my mind Dad standing at his easel, a paintbrush in his hand, carols blaring out of the cassette player. I kicked hard at the frame, but it just creaked, a flake of wood chipping off, so I lifted my foot and stamped, hard, right at its centre.

  My shoe went through the canvas, and a rip seared across the pine tree, through the painted reproduction of me, through the bauble that held my sister’s face. I kicked and I kicked until the painting lay in tatters, an implosion of multicoloured paint curling like a dying flower at the centre of my bedroom.

  I crept into the kitchen. Dad was standing by the sink, his hands submerged in steaming washing-up water. He was gazing out at the garden. I watched him for a moment, caught by his stillness, waiting for him to turn. His hands reached blindly for the hot tap, injecting a bit more warmth into their bath.

  As he stood by the window in the pool of light, he appeared to grow younger, his hair gleaming, his skin changing until I convinced myself that he had become the dad who used to carry me over his shoulder up the stairs to bed, the dad who made toffee apples so hard and sugary that I broke a tooth on their curved golden shell.

  Perhaps the warm, sudded water was sustaining him, flowing up through his fingertips to tenderly massage the follicles of his scalp, turning him into the father I remembered, the father I wanted him to be again.

  I was the same height as him now, I realised. Not just because I was growing, but because he was shrinking. His back had begun to curve, the arc of the spine visible under his shirt. If I stretched up I could just make out a tiny bald patch on the top of his head, hidden by a fine layer of hair. Where had the jolly, impish man from my childhood gone? Maybe this man wasn’t my father at all, but a clever imposter, a wicked uncle.

  As I watched him, he stirred the water with his hands, gazing not at the garden, I realised, but back into the past, watching himself long before his twins
were born, long before one of them died, to a time when he was happier. I drunk him in and my stomach squirmed. I wanted to cry out, to run up to him and hug him and kiss that tiny patch on the top of his head. I wanted to tell him that everything was going to be all right.

  But I didn’t. I stayed where I was, feasting my eyes on the pale, stubbled skin beneath the beard, and his wrinkled, hairy hands as they splashed back and forth in the soapy water, wishing that this quiet, nostalgic version of my father would turn and see me and smile with love in his eyes.

  ‘She was so cold,’ he said suddenly, startling me out of my reverie. He turned his head, catching my eye for a moment.

  ‘She had been asleep for so long when it happened, you both had. I hadn’t checked on you – I was enjoying the peace. Your mother was out shopping. It was the first time she had dared leave Feena since she got ill, but she had been getting better, so…

  ‘I went to your bedroom and you were both there, curled around each other, and she was blue.’ He stopped and breathed in sharply, his face a frightening grimace. ‘I scooped her up and rubbed her skin, just like they tell you in the books and at the hospital, just like they did when she was born.’ He let out a long, painful sigh that disturbed the foam on the water. ‘There was a breath. A tiny, rattly breath, and then, nothing. Oh, her blue lips!’ Dad lifted his wet hands and covered his face, water streaming down his wrists.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘I tried to cover her mouth with mine, blow my own soul into her, but it was too late, she was gone. My poor little darling doll.’

  ‘Dad,’ I crept forward and placed my hand on his wrist.

  The effect was immediate – his arms flew up and he slapped me across my face, his eyes heated. I jumped back, my cheek flaring with pain.

  ‘Get away from me,’ he said, watching me as I held my sore cheek. Turning back to the sink, he said, ‘You stayed asleep throughout, of course.’

  ‘Dad, I—’

  He reached out a hand to me again, and I tried not to shrink from his touch. ‘You look just like her,’ he whispered, stroking my cheek, ‘and yet you’re not her. You’re a copy.’ He touched the red mark he had made, his finger moving on to the mole that defined me from my sister. ‘You were born first, did you know that? You always pushed in front. And she always followed you in everything you did. She would have been like you now – tall and beautiful. But far sweeter. She was always so much more thoughtful than you.’

  He dropped his hands, suds dripping to the floor and returned to the sink, staring out of the window as if nothing had happened. Cautiously I took a step forward and followed his gaze, looking at the garden, my cheek still stinging.

  The shed door stood open, as if it were screaming silently at me, its mouth wide open. Pieces of paper drifted across the grass, stirred by the breeze.

  ‘We’ll sort this out, you and me, Romilly,’ he said, ‘we’ll find our way through.’

  The sinkwater sloshed over the side, covering our feet as we stared out into the garden together.

  Thirty

  If you had stood outside Braër House and looked at it, really studied it, in the year that followed, you might not have thought that anyone was living there at all. The door remained unanswered to knocks, the curtains remained closed, the grass in the garden grew long and barbed. A window pane at the front of the house was broken by an over-enthusiastic fan who threw a stone at it. It stayed that way for months, cracked and splintered, until I eventually boarded it up with layers of cardboard.

  When the final book had first been published nearly two years before, back when Dad had been well enough to care about it, there had been an excited buzz from fans and press alike. People believed that once the last book came out, everything would slot into place and it would only be a matter of time before the treasure was revealed.

  But as the months wore on and nobody was able to crack the code, the fans became disillusioned, becoming interested in other things; new fads to get their teeth into. The treasure hunt obsession began to wane, and people started to forget.

  With the decline in sales came a reduction in royalties. The cheques that used to come regularly from the publishers dried up, and things that we used to buy whenever we needed them became luxuries. The money I had stashed in the beech tree started to run out too, and I spent the daylight hours digging a vegetable patch in the garden, and foraging for food and firewood in the countryside. I grew potatoes and carrots, things that would sustain us over the winter, filling us up and keeping us warm.

  In the spring, the trickle of money from the publishers dried up completely. I searched the beech tree for the last remaining notes, but they must have rotted along with the tree trunk, or else been blown across the garden in a winter gale. Life became even harder. I took to rummaging in bins, stealing milk left on doorsteps, taking eggs from our neighbours’ hens, hunger driving me onwards.

  I think Braër existed for other people only as a shell at that time, a prop where the lives of the girl and her cat had their adventures. I don’t think they believed we were actually still in there, trying to survive. We were growing smaller and smaller in their memories until eventually we shrank from their minds altogether.

  On the morning of my sixteenth birthday, I could sense the box beginning to tick before I became fully aware of it, rather like a hard to reach itch that I desperately needed to scratch. I luxuriated in the space around me, my feet stretching in the coolness of the sheets until my toe touched the tip of Monty’s nose at the bottom of the bed. He gave a shake of his head, and purred, waiting impatiently for the early morning sun to curl round the corner of the window and lick at his ears.

  I closed my eyes and tried to get back to sleep. There was no hurry to get up, it was still so early. But as I lay there, my mind began to wonder what the day would bring. No longer did Dad make a special effort on birthdays. No longer did we feast together on quirky banquets laid out on the kitchen table. Dad’s appetite had shrivelled up. He seemed to survive on watery tea and the apples that I had stored in the pantry from last autumn. I knew not to expect a present from him, let alone a birthday cake. I fantasised about the giant Victoria sponge Beatrice had brought for my fourteenth birthday. Even last year’s pink cupcake from Lidiya seemed far beyond the realms of possibility now.

  At six o’clock, Monty and I left the box in my room to tick alone, hoping that when we came back it would have revealed a new gift, nestled on my quilt like a freshly laid egg.

  Dad was already sitting at the kitchen table, a milky coffee in his hands. He smiled at me as I sat down warily, the cat winding his way around my legs.

  ‘Now, I know you. Remind me again?’

  I sighed and picked up a piece of bread, buttering it before placing it in front of him. ‘I’m Romilly.’

  His frown melted into understanding, and he nodded. I touched his coffee mug. It was stone cold. Lumps of coffee powder floated on the surface.

  Dad lived now in a world of smoke and mist, lumbering through it until he strayed into a pool of lucidness, and there he would try to stay, his hands clinging to the edges of the fog to keep it at bay. Sometimes I was able to anchor him there for minutes, hours, or even days, speaking gently, reassuring him that everything was all right, but always in the end the mist evaporated between his fingers, and he would be powerless to stay, sucked back into a world of shifting thoughts and memories.

  Today was a day of thick fog. I could see it swirling in his eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, nodding slowly, ‘that’s right, we’ve met before. You’re my daughter, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And there’s something special about today, isn’t there?’ He was looking at me quizzically. My heart leapt.

  ‘There is,’ I said, beaming.

  ‘That’s right. Stars in their Eyes is on later, I think. Shall we check?’

  I swallowed painfully. ‘Actually, I was thinking we could go for a birthday walk. And then…’ inspiration struck me,
eyeing the last remaining egg on the kitchen worktop, ‘maybe when we get home I could bake a birthday cake.’ There might still be enough flour in the pantry, I thought hopefully, as long as the weevils hadn’t got there first.

  ‘A birthday stroll, what a marvellous idea. Is it my birthday?’ His face was childlike in his excitement.

  ‘No, Dad, it’s mine.’

  ‘Of course it is.’ He ran his twinkling eyes over me and placed his huge hand over mine, smiling warmly. ‘Where shall we go, daughter-mine?’

  We stomped over the fields, crossing the little bridge under which Stacey and I had found our magical brooch oh so long ago. Condensation trembled on the wooden balustrades, and my bare arms tingled from the cold morning air. In the distance, the quarry that Stacey had shown me two years ago glimmered, full after unseasonable July rain.

  We made our way out onto the boardwalk that wound through the field of reeds. Far away I could see the tips of the windpump’s sails, moving assuredly in the breeze. Dad marched on ahead, stopping now and again to pick a gently swaying reed. He had developed a fascination with collecting things. At first it had been conkers, but now his pockets were always brim-full of stones and leaves and snails’ shells, just like a schoolboy’s.

  I caught up with him and took his arm, noticing the reeds he had collected were falling from his grasp like a trail of breadcrumbs.

  ‘Stacey and I used to walk here when we were younger,’ I said, ‘when we used to go exploring.’ I remembered how she had purposefully stepped off the planks and into the petrol-sheened mud, grasping the reeds for support as the mud sucked at her trainers.

  A line of drool hung from my father’s bottom lip. He snapped off a stalk and examined the tip of a reed. As I watched, he edged his overlong fingernails under the layers so that pale husks floated down onto the wooden planks. A piece got caught deep in his nail and a flush of blood bloomed. He didn’t seem to notice.