by Polly Crosby
‘What will you do with him?’
‘He’ll go to a zoo. He’ll want for nothing.’
‘But he won’t be free.’
‘No, he won’t. But he’ll be safe and looked after. He’s elusive, this one. We’ve been hearing about him for years.’
Between them they lifted the lifeless body into a cage and carried him back to the van. I stayed, crouched on the ground, my hand stroking the imprint of the panther’s body, the empty tranquiliser dart discarded on the ground next to me.
That night, despite the first frosts outside, my bedroom felt claustrophobically hot. Stacey and I lay without clothes, the thinnest sheet over our bodies.
With a flick of her wrists, Stacey lifted the sheet above us, the cotton billowing in a huge arc and floating down gently onto our skin. As it fell, I caught a glimpse of our bodies lying together: the hills and valleys of Stacey’s warm skin, her dark pubic hair rooted and twisted like vines in a musky woodland. I turned to look at her, and saw she was looking at my body in the same way. She took my hand in hers as the cold sheet came to rest over us like a coating of frost. We lay in the middle of the huge bed, facing each other, our foreheads touching.
‘All these years I dreamt of this,’ she whispered. ‘We’re so lucky, to have each other.’
I squeezed my eyes closed, and felt a fat, oily tear run down my nose onto the pillow.
‘Why are you crying?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said in a small voice. I laced my fingers deeper into hers under the sheet. ‘Everything is changing,’ I whispered, my voice breaking as the words left my lips.
‘No it’s not, it’s staying the same,’ she said. ‘All our memories are here, watching over us, keeping us safe.’ She sighed and turned to look up at the cavernous ceiling. ‘I’ve always wanted to live here,’ she said, ‘in this house, in this bed. And now I do. With you.’
I pulled the sheet up under my chin, suddenly cold. She had always understood me, but it felt as if that link, that connection, were loosening. It was coming unstitched as surely as the edges of the old, frayed sheet around us.
I closed my eyes and felt the memory of the panther’s soft fur under my fingers, his poor torn ear against my lips.
Stacey lifted her hand and wiped my tears away with her thumb.
‘You’ll get through this,’ she said, pushing a half empty bottle of pink liquid into my hand. It had my father’s name on the label. I put it to my lips. It tasted of cough mixture. A warmth spread from my shoulders down to my stomach, and I shivered and stopped crying. We passed the bottle between us, Stacey taking little sips that stained her full, ripe lips, while I dozed fitfully, my eyes fixed on her softly sucking mouth.
‘I’ll look after you,’ she said, exhaling the words, her breath whispering over me like perfume.
I sipped at it greedily.
Thirty-Seven
In late December, the snow came. The small amount of traffic that passed by Braër’s windows stopped altogether, and drifts of snow banked up against the house, muffling the outside world.
I rarely saw Stacey. I don’t know where she went during the time of snow. Her mother might have needed her at home, or perhaps she was hidden away in one of Braër’s many rooms, avoiding me. I wondered if she was sorry for burning my hand; if at last she had understood how much pain she’d caused me.
One chill evening, when the snow outside was covered in crystals of sparkling ice, I went to check on the fire before going to bed. I stopped in the doorway. Dad’s old chess board had appeared in the drawing room, set ready for a game. I gazed at the black and white squares for a moment, then I sank down onto the rug and lifted a pawn.
We played, Stacey and I, just as Dad and I used to – never together. Each time I came into the room she had made a move, and so I countered it with my own. At first it was comforting, reminding me of games with my dad, but as the game went on I began to feel that there was something else to this contest; its result would have consequences that reached much further than the confines of the house.
And outside, the snow continued to fall.
I liked the snow, it felt as if the world had stopped. Somewhere out there, I thought, Dad was sitting propped up in his wipe-clean chair, frozen in time, a dewdrop turning to an icicle at the end of his nose. Somewhere far away, my mother was wrapped in a stiffly frozen jumper, her eyes staring out of a window at a different skyline. Only in Braër was there movement: chess pieces slowly playing out an important game, a cat slumbering next to a fire, a teenage girl walking from room to room, her misty breath preceding her.
On the day I took Stacey’s king, the snow stopped. At the precise moment its crown hit the chequered board I felt a soft whoosh in my eardrums and I looked up to see stillness settling outside. It settled inside the house too. Dust that had been floating in the air landed. Dripping taps stopped. Even Monty’s purrs dropped like frozen pebbles onto the floor.
‘I’ve won,’ I called out, but the house was silent.
On Christmas morning I was awoken for the second time by the unexpected tick of Dad’s box. The house was freezing, and my breath clouded into the rafters as I scooped the duvet around me and walked to the window, shivering. Stacey hadn’t slept in my bed for days, and I peeped through the curtains, wondering where she was.
The box’s tick on the window sill was more melodious than when it had ticked for my sixteenth birthday. It was slower too, as if it was growing tired of having to work so hard. I pulled the curtains open properly. The world was obscured by swirls of ice, fractals distilling across the glass. I touched my fingertip to it, and the cold ran through the bones in my hand like a shock of electricity. I rubbed my finger and picked up the box, returning to bed.
I turned it over in my hands. It was smaller than I remembered. Less significant. Was this to be my only Christmas present? I tried to conjure the excitement I always felt when I first heard the tick, but it didn’t come today. I looked at the box: it wasn’t as pretty as I remembered. It was gnarled and old. Dust had caught in the cracks and joints, and suddenly I didn’t want it anywhere near me. I threw it across the room and it hit the wall. The ticking slowed and stopped.
We had no tree this year, but I had gone out and cut boughs of fir and ribbons of ivy, trailing them along the banisters and over the mantelpiece above the fire. I had found some fresh holly trembling with red berries, and I placed sprigs in jars all over the house, recalling something my father had once said about dwellings and holly and safety.
As I climbed carefully down my stairs, the duvet still wrapped around me, I paused to listen for Stacey. The house was cold, holding itself still as if any movement would crack the thin layer of frost that bound it together. Once downstairs I pulled on my trainers and stepped out into the garden.
Everything was white, but not the white of a Christmas card, an ethereal translucence that held onto echoes of the colours beneath. The moat had a layer of ice over it, thick enough to trap the fronds of pondweed so that it looked like a green willow pattern. I stood by its edge squinting my eyes, trying to read the future in its jacquard whirls. I put my foot tentatively on the ice. It creaked ominously, the first sound I had heard since the box’s tick. It felt good to my ears.
I stopped at the remains of the beech tree on my way back inside. It was part of the garden now, sunk into the earth, overtaken by cables of bramble. And yet, as I crouched down and pulled at a piece of ice-coated wood, a whole world of teeming insects beneath it skittered away from the light. Heat emanated from the rotted trunk, rising into my nostrils in a vegetative waft, warming my hands against the chill of the frozen garden.
Back inside, I tiptoed down the hallway. In winters past we had barricaded ourselves in the snug, the little space getting warm quickly, but now the room felt synonymous with Dad’s Christmas book, and the memory of him telling me he was ill. The door remained firmly shut. I crossed instead to the drawing room and knelt to light the fire. It was still smouldering from last n
ight, wisps of smoke curling into the chimney.
‘Merry Christmas.’ The melancholy of her voice belied the words she had spoken, and my heart sank. This was how it had been for weeks on the rare occasions we saw each other: the first words she spoke would set the mood for the day. Today was to be restive, I could feel it already.
She was sitting by the window, the cat on her lap, one hand encircling his throat. There was something threatening in the way she did it, a sign of ownership; of power over him, and with a wash of guilt it reminded me that I had done the same, the day the social worker came to visit.
Monty began wriggling beneath her grip, and at last she let him go. He jumped down, skidding under the sofa and peering out, his eyes huge.
Stacey lifted a hand and trailed her finger over the ferns of ice on the glass. The warmth of her skin melted a line through them, patterns and zigzags blooming within the swirls.
‘Are you Jack Frost now?’ I said, trying to keep my voice light. It was Christmas, after all. She didn’t answer, her finger continuing to spiral. ‘You can ignore me if you want, but you’ll have to talk to me eventually, you always do.’
‘Did you open your dad’s box?’ she said.
‘How did you know it was ticking?’
‘I was watching you. When you slept.’ She looked at me for the first time, and smiled. A small, secretive smile. Something about her eyes was different. They were darker, more reticent.
‘I threw it against the wall,’ I said, thinking of the little box, forlorn and broken on the bedroom floor. ‘It stopped ticking.’
‘What would your dad think of that?’ her voice was low, without cadence or emotion.
We sat in the room, an uncomfortable silence growing between us.
The fire was catching, and I knelt back and let the crackle of flames warm my frozen fingers. ‘Let’s call a truce,’ I said. ‘Please, Stacey. It’s Christmas Day. Let’s go for a walk later. We could visit the lake like we used to.’ I got to my feet.
Stacey stood up from the window seat and came over, stopping millimetres from me. I could feel her breath on my skin, threateningly close. She reached for the locket around my neck, and I tried not to flinch as she eased it open and looked at the flower within, a trace of a smile raising the corners of her mouth.
‘He was always ingenious, your dad,’ she said.
Up close, her eyes were even darker. They had a density about them, like coal before it turns to ash, and I had a sudden urge to pull us both outside, to let the sun penetrate her eyes so that I could check it was really her.
Instead, I looked down at the little flower at my neck. The colour had leached out of the petals over the past few months, and it was pale and ghostly as if it had shed its bright summer clothes and dressed instead for winter.
She snapped the locket shut, making me jump, and dropped it so that it knocked against my collarbone, then she settled onto the sofa. And it was then, almost imperceptibly, that I heard it: quiet at first, like the familiarity of my own breathing; a ticking, pulsing gently through the house.
‘Can you hear that noise?’ I asked. I looked around the room, searching for its source. It was like the ticking of my box, but softer, less like clockwork. I went to the window, rubbing my hand against the glass to remove the ice.
‘What noise?’ Stacey said.
‘The ticking.’
‘What ticking? I can’t hear anything.’
‘Can you really not hear it? Listen.’
We both stilled, ears straining. It wasn’t loud, but it was insistent. I spun around on the spot, trying to imagine the sound, to make it solid. It wasn’t the familiar sound my box made, this was a different tick. More of a thump, a beat.
A beat.
I put my hand to my chest, and I could feel it, deep inside me. I tried to slow my breathing, to listen to its rhythm, but the blood was rushing in my ears and pounding through my arteries.
‘It’s in your head, Romilly,’ Stacey said in a bored voice. She hadn’t moved off the sofa. She was looking at me coldly, as if I were an ugly exhibit in a museum.
The beat became louder, filling up my head. Stacey opened her mouth and spoke, but her voice was cancelled out by the clamour in my ears, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. My vision was filled with popping white stars, and there was a roaring in my ears, competing with the sinister pulsing beat that tore through me.
‘Help me,’ I whispered dizzily, and I sank down on the floor, touching my forehead to the cool of the floorboards.
Above me, Stacey’s face appeared. Her skin was milk-white. She was staring at me. She said something, but I couldn’t focus on her words. I clenched my fists, feeling the echo of the burn on my palm, and the pain of it made me focus. I looked at my hand. The remains of the blister were still there, encased in a thick rind, half scab, half new skin. The beat seemed to be coming from within it, rhythmic, like cogs whirring just beneath the surface. The scab was lifting at the edges, begging to be pulled.
I grabbed at the corner of it and, with gritted teeth, I yanked it away.
It ripped from my palm, new skin and all. The pain as it tore away obliterated the beat in my head, and I collapsed back onto the floor, my hand bloody.
The silence that followed was deathly.
I closed my eyes to the room, basking in the calm behind my eyelids. When I opened them, Stacey was standing over me still, eyes narrowed, as if she was seeing me for the first time.
‘Why are you always trying to spoil things?’ she said, her face pinched with vitriol, ‘why do you always make everything about you? First the game of chess, and now this.’ She crouched down and I flinched, but she only pushed my hair away from my face. ‘Were you trying to scare me? To give me a taste of my own medicine?’
‘I didn’t mean—’
She grabbed my wrist and began to pull me up.
‘What are you doing?’ I said, scrabbling to stand upright.
‘Your mother did the right thing, putting you in there.’
‘In where?’
She had me by the forearm, one arm round my waist. She was half carrying, half dragging me out of the room. The last thing I saw as I stumbled over the threshold was Monty, his pupils huge, his normally sleek tail erect and bristling.
Stacey dragged me along the hallway. As we got to the kitchen, I grabbed onto the doorframe, the pain from my hurt hand almost whiting me out, but she prised my fingers from the wood and pulled me towards the pantry. She yanked open the door, shoving me towards it. I saw a flash of dark shelves, brown bottles and jam jars with gingham lids.
‘Stacey, no!’ In panic I scrabbled at her face with my free hand and I managed to grab a handful of her hair. For a second, her grip on me loosened a fraction, and in the gap between our flailing limbs I thought that I saw Stacey and myself through the kitchen window, young again, running down towards the mobiles.
I grabbed at her hair again and pulled. She made a noise halfway between pain and anger. We were teetering on the edge of the pantry now, both about to spill over into its dark mouth. Patches of Stacey’s skin flitted in and out of my vision, clouds of her hair choked at my mouth. I could feel our bodies tipping, gravity pushing us both forward.
At the last minute, I spun my body as hard as I could, shoving her across the threshold, and I grasped the edge of the door and slammed it shut, the sound of falling bottles and breaking glass rising up from inside. I rammed the bolt home and took a step back, staring, horrified, at the door.
‘What have I done?’ I whispered, my hand to my mouth. Stacey’s muted shouts strained through the cracks, accompanied by the pummelling of fists on wood. I backed away.
‘What have I done?’ I said to the empty room.
But there was no one left to answer.
Thirty-Eight
I paced across my bedroom. Even from up here I could hear her. There was a crash as more bottles and jars were sent smashing to the floor. Her voice ebbed and flowed through the house like a spring t
ide, bringing with it a jetsam of memories: Stacey, crushing the snails; Stacey telling ghost stories; Stacey, obsessed with the dead and the dying; Stacey, Stacey, Stacey. She was feelings and touches and scents remembered, and as I listened, the anger built inside me like a wall, prohibiting me from running down to let her out.
I waited until morning, listening as the screams finally died. Then the pleading started. The cajoling, the whimpering. As the weak sun began to rise over the distant fields, I tiptoed downstairs and put an ear to the pantry door, listening.
In the cold, dark silence, I thought I could hear breathing. Assured by the sound, I crept away.
That evening, I tiptoed back into the kitchen and knelt by the door.
‘Stacey,’ I whispered. ‘Stacey, are you OK?’
A quiet breath, soft as air over teeth, drifted through the gap under the door.
‘Help,’ she said. ‘Help me.’
I found an open tin of beans in the fridge.
Spoon by spoon I fed her, easing the jellied beans under the pantry door, taking the spoon back, licked clean.
‘Let me out,’ she whispered. ‘Let me out, I promise I won’t hurt you again.’ A thin finger edged under the door, touching my foot and making me jump. The spoon clattered to the floor.
‘I can’t,’ I whispered, backing away. This time I closed the kitchen door behind me too, and turned the key.
On the third day I was so hungry I crept outside and searched for windfalls in the garden, biting into their soft bellies and wincing at the squelch of rotten fruit against my teeth. I foraged for the seed potatoes I had discarded earlier in the year, old and rubbery, and piled them up, wondering how desperate I would need to be before I ate them.
By the fourth day, all was quiet. I sat with my back to the kitchen door, listening intently.