‘What’s she left you?’ I asked Becky.
‘Those,’ she said, pointing to a collection of old-fashioned china ladies in full skirts, holding baskets and balloons.
‘What’re you going to do with them?’ I asked.
‘Keep them,’ said Becky. ‘I loved coming here when I was small. I used to ask Mrs Berry if I could live with her.’
‘Why?’
‘She made me feel safe.’
‘I always thought that you had the ideal family,’ I said.
Becky laughed. ‘That’s the trouble with the grass, Jaz. It’s always greener in someone else’s backyard. Just ’cause there’s money, it doesn’t mean there’s happiness. Mrs Berry used to say, “These will be yours when I’m gone,” but she isn’t gone and all this stinks. She’s been removed by uncaring, greedy relatives.’
There wasn’t a lot to say to that. I looked around the cottage. Two bedrooms upstairs, bathroom next to the kitchen. I went into the garden. Mrs Berry had green fingers – grew roses and all her own veg. The last place she needed to be in was an old people’s home. It seemed to me that she had a full set of marbles. I was thinking that she wouldn’t live long if she couldn’t come home to this, when I noticed a small, blacked-out, mesh-covered window, which I didn’t remember seeing inside the cottage. I went back in but there definitely wasn’t a room that lined up with the window. I looked again and was even more puzzled. Why, in such a small cottage, would you want to block off a room?
‘Shall we go?’ said Becky. She’d found a cardboard box and some newspaper for the china ladies.
‘Come and look at this,’ I said.
We went into the garden and I pointed out the window.
‘It looks as if it comes off the kitchen,’ said Becky, going back in. ‘It must be behind this dresser.’
The dresser was jammed full of china and all sorts of stuff.
I looked at Becky. Becky looked at me.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it.’
It took a good hour to take off all the breakables and to budge the thing out of the way. We were rewarded with the sight of a door covered in cobwebs and dust. My heart started to dance the fandango. Don’t know why – intuition, maybe.
Becky tried to open it but it was taped and painted shut. We both pushed and finally it gave way and we tumbled into a pantry. Before us stood a waxwork of a young man, illuminated by the morning sun. His face was white, his eyes closed, he had a piercing through his nose and small numbers tattooed in a band around his forehead, his hair shaved into a Mohican. He was wearing a leather-studded jacket and a torn T-shirt held together with safety pins. His arms were too long. His feet were bare.
‘That’s weird,’ said Becky. ‘Why would anyone wall up a waxwork dummy?’
‘It gives me the creeps,’ I said.
That’s when I saw the waxwork’s big toe move.
‘Oh, shit! Oh, holy shit!’ said Becky.
His eyes opened and stared straight at us. They weren’t human, Mr Jones. His irises had no colour.
I don’t think I’ve ever moved so fast. We slammed the pantry door shut and were trying to push the dresser back when the pantry door exploded. Shards of wood rained down. We cowered behind the dresser in terror. The dummy backed into the kitchen, arms outstretched, bathing, or so it appeared, in the sunlight.
Mr Jones, I know you’re being polite, listening to all this crap and most probably thinking what a load of cobblers. Everyone else has said so. What would make you different? It doesn’t matter how many times I tell it, I’ve never been believed.
You do? Well, you’re one in a million, Mr Jones. Does it make any sense, the idea of a dummy coming to life? But we haven’t got to the part that gives me nightmares, that makes me sleep with the lights on. I was accused of fabrication, but I don’t think I have the imagination to make up this stuff.
It was the back of his head that made me ache with fear, that made lolly sticks of my legs. It was transparent; you could see through his skull to the wires in his brain. It sounds crazy, but it looked like he was half flesh, half something else. When he moved, lights flickered on and off in his head. We weren’t breathing when he turned to face us. I remember thinking: oh no, oh no, we’ve really had it. We’ve really, really had it. And this is no clockwork dummy.
His eyes now had colour to them. They were red. He walked towards us, he grinned, stuck out his tongue and licked his dry lips.
Becky swallowed a scream as he put his finger on her forehead.
‘You speak. You speak my message. Say, he should never have abandoned me. Tell Icarus – I will find him, kill him.’
Becky was shaking. Then, in a blur of speed, he vanished.
There was a bright red mark on her forehead where his finger had been.
‘What have we done?’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘Jaz,’ said Becky. ‘Wait. Look what’s in the pantry.’
The light from the kitchen shone directly onto the back wall, where hung a portrait in a simple frame. It glimmered like a jewel. It was the kind of thing you would see in an art gallery, not hidden away in a blacked-out room. There was no question of who it was. Icarus, a life-sized head.
We stopped dead. Someone was knocking on the front door. We sank onto the floor.
‘Hallo, dears, it’s me,’ came the unmistakable voice of Mrs Sunshine.
You know that expression – between a rock and … death?
We froze, watching a mouse scuttle along the skirting board while Mrs Sunshine kept knocking. I crept along the floor to the back door and locked it just in time, for there she was again.
‘Becky,’ called Mrs Sunshine. ‘Are you there, dear?’
By the time she’d finally taken her nose out of the keyhole, it felt like we had crouched there for a whole day.
Becky hurriedly wrapped up her figurines and put them in a cardboard box.
‘Hold this,’ she said.
‘Why?’ I said, taking it like a muppet as she slipped back into the pantry.
‘We can’t leave this behind,’ she said, bringing out the portrait and putting it in the box.
We closed the front door as quietly as we could and Becky posted the keys back through the letterbox. We heard them thud onto the mat.
We found Mrs Sunshine waiting for us by the garden gate. She had on gardening gloves and held a pair of secateurs. She reminded me of a crab.
‘Oh, Becky,’ she said. ‘Good. You’ve taken what you wanted? Left the keys under the stone?’
‘Oh dear,’ said Becky, sounding artificially bright. ‘I completely forgot. I posted them through the letterbox. Is that a problem?’
You could see by the lightning flash of annoyance that crossed Mrs Sunshine’s face that she was miffed. I watched, fascinated, as she made a visible effort to muster all her features into a regiment of a smile.
‘Never mind, dear. It must have been all the sadness,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to collect the spare set from Mrs Morris.’ She made it sound as if she would have to dig a tunnel to Outer Mongolia via Birmingham to collect them.
She turned to me and pointed across the street. ‘The house on the corner. That’s where I live.’ She said it as if it explained everything. In the front garden was a hedge made out of a tortured tree. I could see all the plants were living under the martial law of Mrs Sunshine’s secateurs.
Becky and me were doing our level best to look as if we were characters in a Jane Austen novel. Though, come to think about it, I can’t remember there being that many girls like me in her books.
Mrs Sunshine started to talk about Mrs Berry and how terrible it was that her relatives had gone back to Australia. On and on she went. How was Ruth? How was Simon? By the glint in her eye I had a feeling that the bad news had spread through the village faster than a flying kipper. She stared at Becky’s forehead.
‘You have a red mark, did you know?’ said Mrs Sunshine. ‘Is it paint?’
‘Yes,’
said Becky. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Well, of course. I’d better be bobbing along if I’m ever going to retrieve those keys.’
Yes, I thought, and double yes.
When we got home, the first thing we did was go round the whole house and check that every door, every window, was locked, making sure old red-eyes hadn’t broken into the house. Though seeing what he could do to doors, I doubted he would have much of a problem with ours.
‘You don’t think we just imagined all that? I mean, think about it. It couldn’t have happened, could it?’ said Becky.
‘Not unless we were on drugs, and we weren’t. Sorry, Becky, but he seemed pretty solid to me.’
‘I’ve got a terrible headache,’ she said as she propped up the painting on the kitchen table.
‘He looks like someone out of a Georgette Heyer novel,’ I said. ‘I wonder who painted it.’
‘The minute Mrs Sunshine gets into the cottage,’ said Becky, ‘she’ll think we did all that, and then what?’
‘All hell and all bells will break loose,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to tell the truth.’
‘You’re joking. Who will believe us?’ She went to look in the mirror. ‘What is this?’ She tried to rub off the red mark on her forehead.
‘Jaz,’ she said, her voice panicky. ‘It won’t come off.’
Chapter Nineteen
I like a good story, Mr Jones, but I like it when things make sense, and that dummy becoming live didn’t make any sense.
Once Becky had calmed down about the red mark on her forehead and had a cup of tea she said, ‘Hungry?’
‘I don’t think I could eat a thing,’ I said. ‘My stomach has gone to glue.’
‘Even with a headache I’m famished,’ said Becky and she took out a jar of peanut butter and started to eat it by the spoonful.
Becky eating.
She ate, staring at the painting, trying to be Sherlock and not succeeding. Finally, Becky pushed the jar aside and picked up the phone.
‘Who are you calling?’
‘The Beeches Retirement Home,’ she said. ‘I want to go and see Mrs Berry.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Wait, we should think this through.’
But as usual Becky had gone right ahead. There was no reverse gear to any of her actions. The deed was already done.
‘Hello,’ said Becky. ‘Yeah, I wonder if you could tell me what time visiting hours are? Oh, I see … Mrs Berry. My name is Becky Burns. Will you tell her I’ll be there this afternoon?’ She hung up and turned to me. ‘You up for this?’
‘You want me to come?’
‘Of course. She’s the only person who might be able to explain that thing in the pantry.’
‘What if that thing, as you call it, comes back?’
Becky didn’t answer and dialled the minicab number.
Nothing happens fast in the country. London time didn’t register at that distance from the city. We waited an hour before the minicab arrived. The driver, a woman, had nothing to say. Dull worked well for me.
The retirement home was up a gravel drive, a large red-brick gothic house with a conservatory sticking out of one side. It was there in the goldfish bowl we found Mrs Berry sitting in an ugly chair. Why do old people have to live out their last days in such hideous chairs? She was heaped into it, staring out the window at a dull, green, endless lawn where a rambling rose would never dare to stray.
She appeared to be made of bread dough, more flesh than bone – she sort of spread into her cardigan. She was wearing slippers with pom-poms on them. That was about the only cheery thing that afternoon, the word pom-pom.
Mrs Berry’s face burst into a cherry-pie smile when she saw Becky.
‘Have you come to take me home?’ she said. ‘Good girl. I’ll just get my hat and scarf.’ Making no effort to move from the chair, she dropped her voice. ‘I don’t like it here.’
‘Tea, Edith?’ said a carer. ‘And some of that coffee cake you like?’
Mrs Berry nodded. ‘Shop-bought,’ she whispered to us. ‘Do you remember my coffee cake, Rebecca?’
‘Yes,’ said Becky. ‘It was special. And you’d let me lick the bowl.’
‘You always said that was the best bit.’ She waved in the direction of the carer. ‘I don’t like her calling me Edith. You would think I’m on her Christmas card list.’
‘They don’t mean any harm by it,’ said Becky, but Mrs Berry had gone back to staring out of the window at the rain that was now trickling down the glass pane in front of her.
‘When I was little,’ she said, ‘me and my sister would put bets on which raindrop would arrive at the bottom of the window first.’
I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake and Mrs Berry hadn’t the full set of marbles after all. Becky found two footstools and we sat either side of her.
Becky took her hand and said, ‘We went to your cottage today.’
Mrs Berry seemed not to hear. ‘He promised he wouldn’t leave me here,’ she said. ‘He told me I had to be patient and he would know when he was needed. I want to go home, now that he hasn’t come as he promised.’
‘Who promised? Your nephew?’ said Becky.
‘No, not him.’
‘Then who is it you’re waiting for?’
‘That would be telling, dear,’ said Mrs Berry. ‘And I said nothing would pass my lips. I don’t have a loose tongue and I don’t feed off gossip, either.’
The carer returned with a china teapot and mismatched cups and saucers that would have looked cool anywhere but there.
‘My daughter wouldn’t have let this happen,’ said Mrs Berry. ‘Phoebe would have had it out with that nephew of mine. I don’t belong here. I want to go home.’
‘Where is she?’ I asked. ‘Your daughter.’
Becky gave me a look that made it quite clear I hadn’t asked the right question.
‘She was such a lovely girl, my Phoebe – a lot like you, Rebecca.’ She patted Becky’s hand. ‘You always reminded me of her – the same curious expression. She never could leave a stone alone. No, that’s not right … I mean upended. Never leave a stone upended.’
Becky said, ‘We found the pantry.’
Mrs Berry’s face lost its smile.
‘You shouldn’t have done that. No one should go in there.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because of the man with the red eyes. His mind’s all twisted, wired wrong. Now you’ve let him out, he’ll find him, kill him.’
So, I thought. Not so many screws missing from this self-assembly bookcase.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Becky.
‘You are to have the Doulton figurines,’ said Mrs Berry. ‘I told you they’d be yours when I’m gone.’
‘You’re not gone,’ said Becky.
‘I will be soon. He will come for me. I haven’t given up believing.’ She gazed out of the window again. ‘He said he would.’
‘Do you mean Jesus?’ asked Becky and then, seeing that Mrs Berry was not going to answer, she changed the subject. ‘Who painted the portrait?’
Mrs Berry took a bite of cake and crumbs fell onto her cardigan. ‘That monster will find him, he blames him.’
‘Blames who?’
Silence.
Becky tried again. ‘The painting,’ she said. ‘Who was the artist?’
‘It was the last thing my daughter ever painted,’ said Mrs Berry. ‘Phoebe thought we would trick him.’
‘Who?’ said Becky. ‘Trick who?’
‘She said that it would explain everything, it would be her witness. Now, be a good girl, Rebecca, find my coat and my handbag and take me home.’
I stood, longing to be out of there. Mrs Berry turned and looked up at me.
‘You didn’t say your name, dear,’ she said.
’Jazmin. Jazmin Little.’
‘You’re a beauty,’ she said. ‘Lovely eyes – dark and alive. Gems, your eyes are. Not like the man in the pantry. He walks wrong, looks wrong. No shoes. Red eyes.
He shouldn’t be here.’ Her voice became loud and querulous. ‘You should never have let the sunlight in.’
The carer came and bent over her.
‘Edith, would you like to go back to your room?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Berry. ‘I want to go home.’
‘It happens,’ said the carer to us. ‘It can take a little time for some of our guests to settle in. Early days, isn’t it, Edith?’
It was still raining when we went outside, and I tipped my head to the sky and took gulps of breath. May I not end my days in a cardigan and a dreadful chair eating shop-bought coffee cake.
‘Let’s go,’ said Becky.
She let the rain run down her face but I could see she was crying.
‘You all right?’ I said. Goodness knows why, as it was as obvious as the red spot on her forehead that Becky was far from all right.
‘I feel weird,’ she said.
‘Since when?’ I asked. ‘Since we arrived here? This place would suck the life out of the living. No wonder you feel odd.’
‘No, since this red mark.’
It wasn’t far to walk to Shingle Street. I’d never been there before. It was a long, stony beach with a row of houses on it. I really liked it and I remember thinking I wouldn’t mind living there, until Becky told me about the locals who had set the sea on fire when the Germans tried to invade in the Second World War.
‘That night, fishermen saw ghosts walking along the shore,’ she added.
‘Great,’ I said. ‘There goes another dream.’
‘I want to show you something,’ Becky said.
She took a white stone from her pocket and handed it to me. It was soft and radiated a gentle heat.
‘Where did you get that from? A joke shop?’
‘Icarus gave it to me when I saw him in prison. Look – it can do this.’
She threw it in the air and for a moment it disappeared then reappeared and she caught it.
That stone worried me. Alex had talked about white stones dropping from the alien craft in Rendlesham Forest.
So many things worried me. Becky’s voracious appetite, for starters. No one gets cured from anorexia that easily. No one. My sister Kylie took years to recover from bulimia and still, if things went wrong, it would kick off again. Here was Becky, eating better than me, as if she’d never had a problem with food. Every mealtime I’d wait for her to go back to the not-eating game. How could one meeting with Icarus have cured her of anorexia?
My Side of the Diamond Page 7