*
I’m standing on the first-floor landing. The bowling ball is gone, as are both of the Charleses, and now the fox that has flattened itself into the wall by my feet is trying to get my attention.
‘What now, genius?’ hisses Indigo.
‘Don’t move,’ I say, because I’m beginning to get a feel for how this works. Something, which I decide to call the House – capital H – grabs people . . . Not people, because we haven’t seen any elders. Grabs young people and makes them play out . . . what? Scenes from the past, maybe? It has to be real scenes because they’re too fricking boring to be fiction. So, hypothesis – the scenes are triggered when you move into different locations in the house. So, don’t move. At least not yet.
I look around slowly. The hallway runs the length of the house, with the staircase doubling back to head for the next floor up. I think I’m back in reality because the walls have been stripped and the electrics ripped out. The three internal doors on the left are missing – beyond them is shadowed space. At the far end is a sash window with the view blocked by dirty white plastic sheeting.
Downstairs I can see the hallway and the front door, the fantail window above a splash of colour in the gloom.
I tell Indigo that I’m going to move slowly down the stairs and she’s to watch me go and tell me what she sees and hears.
‘Whatever you do,’ I say, ‘don’t follow me.’
‘Don’t leave me,’ she says in a squeaky voice.
‘Hold tight, Indigo,’ I say. ‘I will not leave you in this house.’
Five steps down, the stairs go from bare wood to brown cut pile carpet with black and tan stripes running up and down each side. I freeze and ask Indigo whether she sees anything, but she says no.
Another step down, and the light from the fantail below is dimmer and there is a group of people milling around, only they’re featureless transparent shapes like the graphics they use to illustrate mandem23 in the computer simulations of building projects.
‘Anything?’ I ask Indigo.
‘There’s people,’ she says. ‘Only sort of faded.’
Interesting, the same view but from further up. If I was moving into a different frame of reference, a different zone, Indigo wouldn’t see the change except maybe I’d blur out. So, not like pushing through a curtain. More like activating a recording. Unless Indigo being a fox changes how the rules work. Once I get out of here I’m going to have to deep this. Get into the Folly’s library and see what all those dead white wizards have to say. But first I have to get out.
Another step – the fanlight dims but the people get thicker and their movements more realistic, like what you see with motion capture animation. Indigo confirms what I see, and I take another step and then another.
I’m halfway down when the figures resolve into a bunch of kids.
I recognise Nerd Boy, but the other three I don’t know. I wonder if maybe Mr and Mrs Fed had their pictures on their clipboards. Nerd Boy is still in his Save Our Seas T-shirt and red canvas shorts, and the others look like they hit Topshop with a limited budget.
Indigo confirms she’s seeing the kids now.
Another step and I can hear them talking – it’s like watching a school play where everybody is pretending to be elders by making their voice deep, except for one girl who is squeaking.
One more step and I can hear the actual words – or at least some of them. Nerd Boy is still playing Julias with a joke Czech accent, but when the kids playing the Hungarians talk to each other it sounds like made-up noises. Like people trying to sound like they’re speaking a foreign language.
‘I don’t like this,’ calls Indigo from the top of the stairs.
I’m six steps from the bottom, so I take the next one in slow motion. As my foot touches the next step, there’s a ripple like heat haze and when it passes I can see the clunky wooden coat rack hung with thick woollen coats, scarves and umbrellas. Now Nerd Boy looks like an elder, and way more buff than he is in real life – Julias is bare peng and I can see what I saw in him when I was somebody else earlier.
Confusing, isn’t it?
Cautiously I rock more of my weight onto my descending foot . . .
*
The refugees arrive in the middle of a downpour. A man and a woman with a girl in tow. Julias embraces each in turn as if they were long lost family rather than people he knew from the war. I’m so far gone now that I have to feel my way slowly down the stairs – only the child has spotted me. There’s something desperately queer about her appearance. She seems oddly deformed, as if she has been squashed down into her present height . . .
23 A loan word from Caribbean English. Probably a combination of ‘man’ and ‘them’ and used to indicate a group of men or people. ‘Galdem’ is the equivalent used to describe a group of women or girls.
26
Girls Can Do Anything
And I rock back onto my back foot – out of the illusion. I go back up slow and steady, watching the refugees become play-acting kids, then shadows and then nothing. I sit down at the top of the stairs and Indigo climbs into my lap.
‘What did you see?’ I ask her.
‘Everyone changed appearance.’
‘What about me?’
‘You too.’
‘Who did I change into?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Indigo. ‘You got all fat and your bottom got really wide.’
If I had a bit of string and Indigo was wearing a collar I’d send her down the stairs next to see if she triggers a scene, or whether it’s only me. I should probably have crept downstairs myself again to see whether the scene happens the same way twice, but I was too prang to risk it.
‘What’s the plan?’ asks Indigo.
This is an old house and, like I said, these memories are true, because I doubt Natali had a humanities stroke history teacher like Miss Redmayne who loved to teach you one subject by talking about another. In this case, refugees, by looking at case studies from throughout history – including Hungary 1956.
‘There are three doors to three rooms,’ I say.
‘Four doors,’ says Indigo.
‘Where’s number four?’
‘Over our heads,’ she says, and I stand to check. Real thing – there’s a pair of small doors at shoulder height hidden behind a layer of old wallpaper. When they stripped the house, someone pulled enough away to confirm their existence and then left them – a patch of dark wood peeking out of a hole and a rectangular depression outlining their shape. They can’t be serving hatches because they’re set into an outside wall. I knock on them and get a hollow sound.
‘It’s a dumb waiter,’ I say, and lift Indigo to have a look.
‘What’s it for?’ she asks.
‘It’s a small lift so people in the kitchen can send food upstairs quickly,’ I say.
‘I could climb down,’ says Indigo. ‘So could you – possibly.’
I put Indigo down and try to get my fingers into the seam between the hatches. There’s some give, but not enough. I wish I could carry a crowbar in my rucksack, but they’re too heavy – and hard to explain in a stop-and-search scenario.
‘A trowel,’ I tell Indigo. ‘Or a screwdriver. And if I get stuck in the shaft we’ll be well fucked.’
I have a sudden image of myself being dug out the wall in twenty years’ time as an inexplicable cold case. Obviously she was trapped in the dumb waiter, the investigator would say, but where did the fox come from?
Or would Indigo eat me?
‘Leaving out this hatch,’ I say, ‘there are three doors to three rooms – and rooms are where most good events take place.’
‘Why good events?’ asks Indigo, which is a good question – why did I say that?
‘Never mind that,’ I say. ‘Events is what the House uses to control us.’
‘Not you so far, fam,’ I say. ‘Maybe it just hasn’t noticed you yet.’
‘That’s because I possess excellent tradecraft skills,’ says Indigo. But she’s scared, too. ‘If we avoid the rooms, that leaves the stairs. Up or down?’
‘Neither,’ I say. ‘We go out the far window – bypass the rooms and their memories.’
‘Can you make the jump down?’
‘You forget,’ I say. ‘In real life there’s scaffolding all the way around – what do you think is keeping up the plastic sheeting?’
‘Oh, clever,’ says Indigo. ‘When do we do it?’
‘Now,’ I say.
*
Papa has brought me the most marvellous present back from America, a model aeroplane all made out of balsa wood. It came in pieces in a box and we spent the morning in the study assembling it piece by piece on Papa’s desk. I know it sounds strange, and I do miss him when he is away on business, but missing him just makes me more happy when he returns. It took us all morning to assemble the aeroplane, but when we finish it’s still raining. But he says never mind because we can test it in the hallway. The rain is hammering against the windows as Papa shows me how to turn the propeller to wind up the elastic band. I smell the clean linen and tobacco smell of his shirt, and love that he is home with me and Mama again. I tell him that I wished I could fly and he says why shouldn’t I? Because you need lessons, I say, but he laughs and says that if I want he can arrange lessons. He has a friend with a flying school. I’m so pleased that I fling my arms around him and kiss him soundly on the cheek. Shall we have a test flight? Papa says, and I hold the little aeroplane up with one hand while I hold the propeller with the other. I can feel that blade pressing against my finger – straining to be free. Gently does it, says Papa, we don’t want it to fly too far. But can girls learn to fly? I ask him, and he squeezes my shoulder and says that girls can do anything. I see Charles standing in the door to the study – he’s come out to watch, a big smile on his face. I take my finger off the propeller, it spins and I feel the model pull against my other hand. I let go, it drops, then rises and picks up speed, whirring down the hallway. I run after it.
*
‘Shit,’ I say, even though I’m still all weirdly tingling from the memory of somebody else’s happiness. It was Grace when she was my age, and her father’s and her joy has worn me out. I was lucky she chased the model plane or I’d still be in there – whatever in there means. I’m back in what I’m calling the ‘real ting house’, although I’m beginning to think that the hallucinations may be real too. Sort of.
I sit back down against the wall underneath the dumb waiter.
‘House has us pinned down,’ I say. ‘We need to deep this out.’
Indigo climbs back into my lap and looks up at me.
‘What do you think the House is?’ she asks.
‘I think it’s a genius loci,’ I say. ‘You get concentrations of magic and it can make things take on a personality.’
And change things around them. There’s a whole chapter in one of Kingsley’s monographs that claimed that genii locorum could change the physical environment. I thought he’d been smoking something, but now I’m not so sure.
‘We know all about those,’ says Indigo. ‘Everything used to be like that – before man gave away all his gifts. It’s one of the oldest stories.’
‘Tell me, then,’ I say, but Indigo pokes her snout into my belly and says she’s hungry. I rummage around in my rucksack. I find a Mars bar, which Indigo isn’t allowed. but luckily there’s a couple of slightly squashed cheese puffs in a cheap plastic sandwich container. I offer one to Indigo, who noms it up in two bites.
‘You were going to tell me the story,’ I say, but Indigo holds out for the second cheese puff before she’ll tell me.
27
How the Foxes Got Their Voices Back
‘
In the beginning,’ says Indigo, ‘everything could talk.
‘The trees could talk, the dog could talk, the rabbit and the cat, the sky and the river – all could talk. Now, some of the things didn’t like to talk. The clouds and the rain and the rivers and the sea all felt that talking was a waste of time and distracted them from their work—’
‘What was their work?’ I ask.
‘Not important,’ says Indigo, and continues with the story. ‘Some of the things, like the rocks and the mountains and the trees, were indifferent to speech. Yes, it was nice to speak to your neighbours or to hear news and gossip, but was it really important – or even necessary?
‘“Our lives are quite full enough,” they said.
‘Some, like the cat and the raven, liked to talk but only because then they could say cruel things and make others unhappy. Dog and pig liked to talk because then they could boast about how good and clever they were.
‘But, of all the things that liked to talk, there were two that loved to talk above all things – the fox and the man. These two would talk all day and all night, about the sun and the stars and the way the wind sang through the branches of the trees. They talked so much that sometimes they would forget to eat or sleep, and the other things in the world started to hide when they heard them coming. Which they could from quite a long way off.
‘You’ve got to understand that in the way back when, man was different – he had fur and claws and proper teeth and a real tail that was just as bushy and luxurious as anything could want.
‘But, because they loved to talk to each other, the fox and the man never learnt that trouble was brewing with the other things until it was too late. You see, the problem was that if you can talk to someone, you can argue with them. And if you argue, you can get angry. And if you get angry, you can start fighting. Soon everything was fighting everything else, and nobody had time for eating or mating or cheese puffs or any of the good things in life. Then the cat, who loves to sleep above all things, persuaded everyone to stop fighting and convened a grand parliament of everything to discuss a solution.’
‘So talking’s good for something,’ I say.
‘Shush,’ says Indigo. ‘So they discussed the problem for so long that the sun went off to sleep three times and still they were talking.
‘“How can we abandon talking?” said the path through the forest. “It is the one attribute that unifies us all. The mountain is not like the sky, the dog is not like the fish, the sun is not like the moon. But we all share our thoughts.”
‘“But all you ever do is complain that we are walking on you,” said the bear.
‘“I, for one,” said the cow, “am tired of hearing your thoughts on the subject.”
‘And so everything in the world argued amongst themselves – all except the man and the fox, who were over the horizon and practising their sniggering – which they had just invented.
‘Finally, as the sun rose from her fourth nap since the parliament began, the fox and the man wandered up and asked what was going on. The cat and the path through the forest told them the purpose of the parliament, and they laughed and sniggered and guffawed, another new invention of theirs, until they realised that everyone else was serious.
‘“But you can’t be serious,” said the man.
‘“But we are,” said the cat. “And, what’s more, we have reached a consensus – for the sake of peace we have decided to give up talking.”
‘“Fine,” said the man. “You chaps give up talking if that’s what you want, but fox and I will carry on if that is all the same to you. Right, fox?”
‘But fox was troubled, because much as she liked man she also had many other friends as well. She particularly loved the soft earth and the bright moon, and she knew if she kept talking, and they did not, they would grow estranged.
‘“I will give up talking,” she said. “If that is the consensus.�
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‘But the man refused. For even then man thought himself more important than all the other things of the world. And he glowered at the fox for not siding with him.
‘“The parliament of everything wishes this change,” said the moon, who was pro tem speaker of the parliament. “And what the parliament decides applies to all things.”
‘“But,” said the cat, who had always coveted man’s bushy tail, “perhaps we could come to some arrangement.”
‘“Yes, yes!” cried all things. “If you want to retain the gift of speech, you must renounce your other gifts.”
‘Man, even in those days being wise to the ways of the cat, agreed. But only if he could choose to whom he gave his gifts. The cat objected, but everything was wiser back in those days and the cat lost the subsequent motion everything else to one.
‘“I give my thick fur coat to the ape and its cousins,” said the man. And so he lost his fur save for patches here and there to remind him of his loss. He gave his long claws to the dog, who even now never retracts them in his honour, his teeth to the bear, and – to spite the cat – his beautiful bushy tail to the squirrel.
‘“For this insult I will enslave you, you and all your children,” said the cat, but those were its last words.
‘Finally, man had given away all his gifts except his wisdom, which he gave to the fox.
‘“Thank you,” said the fox.
‘“Don’t thank me,’ said the man. “I do this so that you and all your kind will know what a mistake you have made.”
‘Silence closed around the parliament like a noose. But everything hesitated because the ground, upon which everything rests, had a final demand.
‘“I, for one, am sick of the sound of everyone talking,” said the ground. “If you plan to continue, please raise your mouth as far from me as possible.”
What Abigail Did That Summer Page 10