by Polly Crosby
The bus took a slow, circuitous route, winding through country lanes I had never been down before. Throughout the journey, I held onto the pink feather, running it through my anxious fingers until it lost its silky feel. My head pounded, radiating out from the stitches on the top of my scalp, pulsing through me until my whole body ached.
Was Stacey home by now: had she discovered I was gone? Let her worry, I thought savagely. A part of me hoped she would find the pillows wedged under my duvet, plumper than the real shape of my body. A part of me quailed at the thought of her anger on my return.
As the bus continued onwards, I thought about the day Dad and I got hurt.
It’s strange, but I don’t remember the blood or the violence or the pain. I don’t even remember the man that touched me.
I remember green oak leaves floating silently down. I remember huge, velvet paws padding away. And I remember Dad’s fingers tenderly stripping the stalks off the reeds, the pieces sighing to the ground, where they stayed, like a trail marking where we had been.
Perhaps silence was what my father had craved when he hurt himself on that wall: a reprieve from the constant twisted assault of memories in his mind.
Eventually, the bus dropped me off at the end of a long driveway, and I began to trudge between the leafy hedges. The stillness and silence suited my mood, and I wanted only to continue walking here forever, knowing as I did that each step was taking me closer to my dad.
I stopped walking. Briar View loomed ahead of me. My first impressions were of a sad, tired place. It looked like the house of someone quite grand who had passed away. It was vacuous and yawning. All the windows and doors were closed, and yet a smell – something between the brine of tinned tuna and the grease that coats old carpets – leeched out from between the bricks. Its smell seemed to diminish the hope that had sprung up in me on the bus journey here, and I wondered for a brief moment if my mother lived in a similar building; if that was why she was so unhappy.
I tucked the feather away and looked up to the first floor where Dad resided. The windows glinted darkly in the sun. Here and there I could see the snowy heads of patients sitting within. It looked as if to live at Briar View you must be grey-haired. I started walking up the ugly concrete steps.
A care worker showed me to a large day room with a selection of white-headed men in it. I recognised two that I had seen from outside, sitting in wipe-clean chairs near the large windows, their hands occupied with knitting, the sharp needles sitting lifeless in their loose grip.
I looked for my dad, searching out his salt-and-pepper hair in a sea of white. He wasn’t there. I turned to the carer, and he pointed out a man sitting regally in a chair in the corner. I blinked. It was Dad. He sat proudly, his back a little straighter than the others, his chin a little higher. His hair was almost completely white.
A chair had been left for me. I walked over to him, unable to take my eyes off his hair. His face was paler than I remembered too. He had lost that ruddy glow, his skin taking on a damp pall instead. Someone had shaved him badly, missing a patch of stubble on his upper lip and nicking his chin. His cheeks looked virginal in their whiteness. I wondered if they had given him a tablet to change the colour of his hair so that he might feel more at home amongst the white-haired men.
Because that was the sad thing; he did look like everyone else in there. I looked around the silent room. They all had the same look in their eyes; a look that made you realise they could see things you couldn’t, a common shared film playing in all of their heads. It was such a good film that one or two of the patients’ jaws hung open, saliva pooling behind their bottom lip, occasionally spilling over onto their chins and their necks and the grey bibs that they all wore.
I sat down in front of Dad, thankful at least that he didn’t have a heap of knitting in his lap.
‘Hi,’ I whispered, leaning forward so that my chair creaked. He looked up sharply at the sound, and I knew today was a day of fog. A gleam of sunlight caught the wound on his temple. The dressing had been taken off, and the newly formed scar tissue glowed red and concave through his grizzled hair, as if a slice of his head had been scooped out.
His eyes sought mine for a moment before settling on something just to the right of my face, near my ear. I moved slightly, willing him to look at me again, but his eyes dropped downwards, breaking the spell, and I let out a breath of frustration.
Gazing round the room, I took in the wheelchairs, the oxygen cylinders. I let the tinny sound of Glen Miller wash over me as an orderly fiddled with a CD player. A man in the corner was sitting in a chair, his overlarge skull in his hands. A nurse crouched by him, supporting him as he rocked backward and forwards.
With sudden inspiration, I pulled Monty’s bell from my pocket and, leaning forward, placed it in Dad’s lap. His breath rattled in his throat, inflating his cheeks as he lifted an overlarge hand and let it rest precisely over the bell. It chimed quietly beneath the skin of his palm. He jumped imperceptibly and looked up suddenly, almost lucidly at me.
‘Romilly?’ he said, his voice unsure. His breath quickened, little flecks of snot shooting from his nostrils, his eyes flashing from left to right, from the bell to my face.
I smiled and opened my mouth to speak, but before I could say anything, he stood quickly. His body unwound, his shrunken frame expanding, growing upwards, no longer cramped by the clinical armchair. He towered over me, his head whipping one way then another like a bear disturbed in hibernation. The wound on his head flashed like a beacon, and then a huge bellow erupted from the bottom of his lungs, his eyes rolling backwards, and his arms began to lift and swipe at the air. I jumped back in my chair, staring up in horror. Workers came running over, white-aproned and mechanical in their movements. They calmly pulled him down into his chair, where he sat, moaning to himself, little breaths of air puffing from his nostrils.
I stood up shakily, watching as the nurses worked their magic, stroking his leathery hands until the trembling began to slow.
‘I think I ought…’ I whispered lamely, pointing to the door, but no one turned to me. No one cared. I walked quickly across the room, my heart beating fast. At the door I looked back. My father was sitting in his chair. He looked at peace, almost as if it had never happened. He mouthed something as he stared at the wall. I turned to go.
As I walked back along the driveway, I imagined the tall hedges drawing together behind me, Briar View disappearing behind them like some mystical fairy tale tower, holding my poor broken dad captive.
It wasn’t until I was halfway home, sitting on the bus, lost in thought, that I realised I hadn’t picked up the bell. I scanned my memory for it, trying to remember it falling onto the floor, but all I could see as I thought back to that room was my father’s great yellowing hand closing over it, and the sad echo of its chime as it was swallowed beneath his skin.
Thirty-Five
At the beginning of August, I was woken by the slow whir of Dad’s carved box kicking into life.
I struggled to surface from sleep, trying to understand how a year could have gone past already when I had no memory of autumn or Christmas or spring.
‘Is it broken?’ Stacey said, stretching next to me. She had taken to watching me fall asleep each night. Often I would wake in the morning and she was still there, propped up on one arm, her eyes travelling over the shape of my body under the sheet.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. The ticking was deeper than when it had last ticked, two months ago on my sixteenth birthday; the day of the attack. I lifted the box into my lap and sat, watching it warily. Perhaps it was beginning to go wrong, just like Dad’s brain.
‘What do you think it will be this time?’ Stacey asked in excitement. She had never seen it open before.
I looked at her, curled up next to me, and shrugged. I could feel her body heat radiating towards me.
We took the box, still ticking, to the lake with us. The grass within the circle of trees had grown and collapsed with its own wei
ght, forming clumps of golden hay. There was a hum in the little glade, a cacophony of heat and insects and dragonflies dancing over the water.
The box’s ticking felt quieter outside, as if it were listening beneath the chirrups of birds for a less complex language it could understand.
After our first, freezing swim, I walked around the edge of the lake, my hands brushing the velvet bulrushes that ringed the water as I watched Stacey collecting flowers for our potion.
‘Do you think we’ll do this every year?’ I asked, indicating the swirl of petal-water in the jar.
‘You mean, when we’re a hundred?’ Stacey said, and we giggled at the thought of us both, naked and wrinkly, descending into the lake with wildflower-water on our wrists.
Stacey stretched out on the grass and dipped her toes into the water. I was beginning to get used to the curve of her bare skin now, but my eyes were still drawn to the buttery shadows beneath her breasts and the gentle swell of her stomach.
‘I’m so glad we have this time,’ she said, ‘just the two of us. It feels special, doesn’t it? Important.’
I nodded, looking out at the lake, at the damselflies flitting over its surface. ‘It’s a shame it can’t last forever,’ I said.
Stacey turned her head. The sun shone straight into her eyes so that all I could see was a reflection of blue. ‘But it could,’ she said. ‘There’s no reason we can’t carry on like this. We don’t need anyone, else Romilly, we have each other.’ She reached over and touched my hand. ‘It’s like we’re linked somehow,’ she whispered, ‘like twins.’
Next to us, the box’s tick was a metronome, providing rhythm to her voice. I lay back on the grass, staring at the sky, trying to unpick the meaning in her words.
The box continued to tick, dictating the soporific rhythm of the day.
‘Do you ever think what it would be like to drown?’ she asked suddenly.
I turned my head so that I could see the line of her eyelashes against the sky. ‘Not much fun, I shouldn’t think.’
She picked a thick blade of grass, and held it above her to block out the sun, pressing it into the pad of her thumb.
‘You’d think it would be easy to swim up to the sunlight,’ she said, ‘to kick at the weeds and escape.’ She swiped the sharp edge of the grass across her thumb, and the skin parted. Bright red blood bloomed around the stalk. She put the cut to her lips.
‘Death is just veiled from view,’ she said, turning to me, her lips crimson. She touched her thumb to my mouth too, and without thinking I leant forward and pressed my lips to hers.
We had forgotten the box. In the loud silence, I sat up. The mechanism had wound down. Right at the centre, where the top came to a smoothly curved peak, a circle of wood had swung open. I dipped my finger into the waiting hole. Cold links of metal tickled my skin, fine as gossamer. I pulled out a golden chain with a locket dangling from it.
‘If that’s not treasure, I don’t know what is,’ Stacey said, a trace of jealousy in her voice.
The locket was tiny, and my fingers stumbled over the catch. It swung open with a delicate click. Inside, a pale blue flower was set behind a sliver of glass.
‘It’s the forget-me-not,’ I said, thinking of Bea, of her kindness and friendship, her welcoming acceptance of me after so many years.
My breath misted the locket so that the flower was hidden for a moment, and as the fogged glass caught the light, I thought I could see vestiges of Dad’s fingerprint on it, but then the moisture cleared and it was gone.
It struck me that the box might not be broken – perhaps Dad had set it deliberately to open now because he knew I would need him. But how could he have known?
‘Let me put it on for you,’ Stacey said, taking it and lifting my hair so that she could hang it around my neck. I looked down at the little locket resting on my bare skin.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, replacing my hair.
We got dressed slowly, separately, and began the walk back to the house in silence. Stacey reached for my hand and we walked, deep in thought, our shoulders brushing occasionally, our fingers linked.
Braër was bathed in sunlight as we approached from the road, but as we entered the garden, the sun was cut off immediately by the house. We stood in the shade, looking at the house’s towering walls, at the opaque depths of the moat. I thought of the dark rooms inside, so like my dreams of Dad’s box, and I shivered, the locket cold on my skin.
Down on the edge of the moat, almost submerged by the water, a snippet of blue flashed at me. I stooped to look. It was the last of the summer’s forget-me-nots, a tiny pinprick of bright blue in the dark shadow of Braër. I turned to point it out to Stacey, feeling the ghost of her fingers slip in mine, but she was already walking away from the house, down towards the meadow and into the sunshine.
In early autumn I woke up late and wandered downstairs to find Stacey cleaning out the pantry. Jars and bottles were cluttered on the kitchen table, rusty lids and faded labels written in a hand I didn’t recognise.
‘I don’t think those are very fresh,’ I said.
‘Thank God. I wasn’t looking forward to a lunch consisting entirely of vinegared produce,’ she said, spearing a piece of pickled beetroot with a fork and wrinkling her nose at it. ‘Fancy a cuppa?’
I nodded, and she busied herself in the kitchen, making a fuss of taking out my tea-set and warming the pot. I would have been perfectly happy with teabags plonked in mugs, I thought. I caught sight of a jar of pickled eggs, and I was instantly transported back to the village pub, that night, a lifetime ago, when Dad had tripped and fallen drunkenly on the way home, spilling the bucket of collection money as if it was water. Looking back, it was so easy to see the illness grabbing hold of him, even then. I thought of him as I had last seen him in the care home, and gulped down the shame I felt at having left him there, alone.
‘I know you went to see your dad,’ Stacey said idly, as if she could read my mind. She was rubbing a tea-towel over a cup again and again, not meeting my eyes. ‘Just after I came back. I know.’
‘I am allowed to. He’s my dad.’
‘Did it go well?’
I looked up at her. She was still polishing the cup, running the tea-towel over and over the same spot.
‘Thought not,’ she said, ‘you would have told me if it had gone OK.’ She placed the cup on its saucer and poured an arc of tea into it. ‘Did it feel good, upsetting him?’
A charge of electricity passed through the room, making the bare bulb in the ceiling flare noisily for a moment.
‘That’s not fair,’ I said.
‘What’s not fair? He might have thought you were your twin sister, back from the dead, poor man.’ She poured milk into the cups and took a sip from hers, pushing mine across the table. ‘You should listen to me next time.’
‘I needed to see him, Stacey. To check he was all right.’
‘And was he?’
I thought back to Dad’s cavernous eye sockets, his strikingly white hair. I remembered him standing over me, his eyes thrown back into his skull so that only the whites showed.
‘He’s never coming home,’ Stacey said, ‘you might as well try and forget him.’
The light bulb began buzzing above us, like an angry wasp. ‘Why is it doing that?’ I said.
‘Why does anything in this broken old house ever do anything?’ she said. She took a sip from her cup, draining it. ‘I don’t think you should go and see him again,’ she added, putting her cup down, ‘at least, not without me.’
‘Fine,’ I said, squeezing my teacup so tight in my hand I could hear the porcelain groan.
The bulb above us exploded, showering us with fragments of glass.
As the cold autumn nights drew in, Stacey haunted the downstairs rooms of Braër as if she owned them. I stopped on the threshold of each room before entering, trying to sense her presence on the other side of the door. Often she would sit in silence, waiting for me like a spider waiting for its
prey, and I began instead to light the little fire in my bedroom, preferring to stay high up on the second floor rather than spend time in her company.
On a particularly chilly November night, Monty and I sat in my bedroom, leaning close to the fire’s glow, shivering until the flames took hold. The damp smoke twisted past me up the chimney, and my stomach growled with hunger, remembering the smoky taste of baked potatoes cooked on the bonfire when we were children.
Monty stretched his long body out by the hearth, preening himself, his loosened hairs dancing across the room. I sat down at my desk and opened up Windmill, desperate to feel the spark of happiness that Dad’s pictures used to rouse in me. The phone was on the window sill next to me. I looked at it for a long moment, my hand hovering over it, daring myself to pick it up. But who would I call? I thought. Who would care?
A step on my staircase creaked, and I pulled my hand away from the phone and pretended to be reading the book. Stacey climbed through the little door, not bothering to knock. She looked around the room, taking in the books spread out on my desk and Dad’s box on the window sill. She walked over to it and picked it up, idly running her fingers over its knots and burrs.
‘It seems so long ago that we used to hunt for the treasure,’ she said, ‘something little children do. I wonder if it’ll open again?’ She put it to her ear and shook it hard before dropping it back on the window sill.
She went to sit cross-legged on the bed and began picking at the skin around her fingernails. There was a vase of late roses on the bedside table that I had cut yesterday. They were a dusky pink, veined like butterflies’ wings, just like the ones that wove through every page of Dad’s last book. Stacey reached over and swirled them lazily with her hand, then she took a petal between her finger and thumb and squeezed it so that its moisture spread, darkening to a deep red.
‘Stacey, don’t, I just cut them.’
The liquid, dark as blood, dripped down the flower’s stem. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.