Help the Witch

by Tom Cox

  It all made her want to take advantage of Alice’s visit by asking her more about the house. Alice said she mostly just remembered it as very dark, small windows. A dingy hollowed-out slice of land, where it rained significantly more than it did even a mile away. She loved the north coast of Cornwall, but not that house. Helen knew that had been the place where Alice and her dad had broken up and she was aware that it was tainted by that for Alice, so she didn’t press her for too many details.

  ‘Did I have any friends there?’

  Alice took a drag on her roll-up. ‘No, and I always felt bad about that. It was another reason I was glad to move. But you were a very self-sufficient child. You always found ways to amuse yourself. I let you wander for miles on your own. Well, not miles, but far. People probably wouldn’t do it now or they’d think I was a bad mother. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but I always had a strange confidence in you to come back safely.’

  Helen delayed introducing Rob to Alice for a long time, not because of any uncertainty she felt about him, or their future as a couple, but because of the weight of similar introductions from the past, and the anxieties and disappointments attached to them. She needn’t have worried. When she and Rob finally ventured west together the following January, it was less reminiscent of the uneasy encounters between boyfriends and her mum in the past and more reminiscent of the times in her teens when platonic male friends had come over to the house and hit it off instantly with Alice: Jason McMaster from next door, maybe, or Warren Stafford, whose band she’d played a bit of violin for. That was not to say there was anything platonic about Helen and Rob’s relationship. She still felt a pleasant cube of warmth open up in her chest in the moments before she saw him, even if she had only last seen him a few hours previously. There was no terror in the excitement that went with discovering each other because the excitement soon began to feel underpinned by a realisation that when it faded, it would be replaced by something else, something different, but no less rewarding.

  Some parts of him, she was sure, would never stop amazing her. One was his astonishing lack of geographical savvy. He was a man who, faced with a choice of three footpaths, could be guaranteed to choose the one that made no logical sense. A non-driver from a landlocked town, he sat in the passenger seat looking as guileless as a plump, recently birthed woodland creature while Helen negotiated the last few miles to Alice’s beneath inverted waves of black metal rain. ‘So that’s the sea over there, right?’ he asked, pointing to the countryside to the left of the road, entirely overlooking the elevated horizon to the right, with its rim of cracking light, which to Helen’s mind in every way possible screamed, ‘Ocean!’

  He put his trust in her totally, like a child, on the three long walks they took that week: only one of them in the additional company of Alice, who was struggling with a trapped sciatic nerve. Unassisted, it was a little tricky for Helen to navigate the two of them to the old house between the steep cliffs, especially since she ambitiously chose not to go the road way, and the footpaths here, a mile or two inland from the coast path, were little trodden and barely marked at all. They scrambled down a near-vertical bank of copper-green ground, finding it impossible not to break into a half-run, and emerged at the end of a lane with grass up the middle.

  Helen recognised the first house immediately: the old knobbly walled place that had been empty back then but, while still knobbly, now had the neat look of a holiday cottage. Clean linen curtains, a front garden of trimmed cordylines and sharp-edged beds. Alice and Helen’s old place, sixty yards further down the hill, was less welcoming. Dark brick stained darker by weather. Grouting equipment piled on a small window ledge. Piles of broken propagation trays on a wet and untidy winter lawn. The sweet sound of running water filled the air and in her mind’s eye Helen could pinpoint where the stepping stones were but, disappointingly, they were not visible. They could smell a faint bark perfume from the woodyard a quarter of a mile further down the hill, where the village properly began. As a whole the area was smaller than in Helen’s dim memories, which she’d anticipated, but it was also less accessible, more hemmed in by dead foliage. There was no public access to the stepping stones and, even when Helen climbed the wall, she could not quite see them. The well, meanwhile, was only a rumour.

  Alice was right: it was an unusually dark area. On top of the hill behind the cliffs, the sun had been having a ding-dong battle with the clouds, coming back to set a cold sparkle on rooftops and damp walls every time it looked like it had been defeated. But here it couldn’t break through. The ravine had been carved out by nature in such a way that there was a barrier on all sides. Helen now, for the first time, had a sense of how difficult that final winter, after her dad left, must have been for Alice, in a dark place like this, in a house that let in minimal natural light, looking after a child alone, with an only intermittently functioning car. But in the rush of memory that the place provoked in Helen, loneliness was not the central characteristic. She did not recall it as a sad place. Just as the foliage was blocking her route to the terrain where she’d done most of her playing as a child, her memories were frustratingly out of reach. She had new recollections: two ponies a little further down the hill where the light came in and there were always oxeye daisies in summer, a no-longer-existent village post office where every morning her mum collected a newspaper with her name on it from a small pile. A jellyfish sting. Spotty images. The wood smells helped nudge her mind into the past, but they weren’t enough to take away the blotted edges of any mental photos she possessed.

  ‘I’ve only just fully realised what a bumpkin you are,’ said Rob. ‘Can we have a pint? I’m gasping.’

  After thirty-six years, Helen was still finding more out about Alice. Rob’s presence was perhaps a factor in that. It was as if Alice suddenly had two children, which gave her double the reason to reveal information they might not have known about her. He helped her get an old music centre out the loft and a few dozen LPs. The three of them drank two and a half bottles of wine and Alice and Rob danced to ‘Strange Brew’ and ‘The White Room’ by Cream. Alice told them what a huge part of her life dancing had been before Helen was born, how her dad had stifled it, the revelation she’d felt when she did it again, twenty years later, at a salsa class in Bude – all new facts to Helen. Helen found out exactly why Alice had quit her teaching job in Launceston. The caretaker had been making suggestive comments to some of the female teachers, being particularly relentless with Alice’s friend Christy Noll, and once cornering her in the store cupboard. Alice had finally lost patience and reported this to the headmaster, who had shrugged it off, offering the opinion that it was a sad situation when a man was judged for expressing his appreciation of a woman with honest words. ‘He was a hideous dickbag,’ said Alice.

  When Helen was out at Sainsbury’s, Alice told Rob about the time Alice had got lost in Cheltenham on the way to meet her friend to see a band, then spotted a man carrying a flute case across a square in the town, who offered to walk her to the venue, since he was going there too. It was only later that Alice realised he’d been the lead singer of the band who were playing. Their name was Jethro Tull. ‘Why has she never told me that?’ Helen said to Rob, offended.

  By March, Helen and Rob had made the 360-mile trip west again to do some gardening for Alice, who was now struggling a lot with her leg. It was the beginning of another alternative new year and Helen recognised herself only in segments from thirteen months ago. She’d always been a quietly self-assured person, but her sense of self was different now from what it had been then, reflected back at her solidly by a few people who knew her, rather than flimsily by a lot of people who didn’t.

  The dreams about the house in the dark valley continued: not every night, and not every dream featured Peter, but some did, or some simulacrum of a Peterish figure. Once, walking past the Sweetland Meditation And Yoga Centre, tipsy on wine, she came within a whisker of mentioning him to Rob, but decided no good could possibly come of it.
In June, on an events-management training course paid for by work, she recognised a large-haired, serene woman as Andrea from the meditation course, and the two of them ate lunch together in a small courtyard where blackbirds flitted. Andrea said she’d not really kept in touch with anyone from the course and asked Helen if she had, and Helen said no.

  ‘What about the quiet guy you used to talk to? Paul?’ asked Andrea.

  ‘Peter.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the one.’

  ‘I don’t know. We did hang out for a bit. He sort of vanished. I was actually wondering if you might know what happened to him.’

  ‘No. I think you were the only one he ever really spoke to.’

  Helen did not think of herself as self-obsessed or dominant in conversation but, remembering the few weeks she had known Peter, she found herself questioning this. She was amazed at how little she had known about him. They had never become friends on a social networking website; she only knew that he’d lived on the ‘east side of the city’ and worked ‘with wood’. Now the fright of what he had said to her that night at her house had faded, what was left over was an unusual and confusing low-lying guilt. After her encounter with Andrea, the guilt made itself more apparent. She went on Facebook and scanned the friend lists of groups and people affiliated to Sweetland. She tried Peter’s number, but it was out of service, as she’d predicted it would be.

  One day she took a detour on the way to Rob’s, going via Sweetland. At reception, she announced that she was trying to find the contact details for a man she’d met on a course there, because she had some important personal news she needed to get to him. The lady on the desk – another leaflike person with excellent posture – explained that she shouldn’t really do this sort of thing, but, perhaps seeing something trustworthy, or marginally desperate, or both in Helen’s face, retrieved a red-spined A4 book from a drawer and flicked through it until she found the appropriate section.

  ‘You say you don’t know his surname?’ she said. ‘We have a Peter Brook listed here, from that course. Would that have been him?’

  ‘I guess it must. I don’t think there was another Peter on the course.’

  ‘Oh, that’s weird: we don’t have any address listed for him. But we do have a mobile phone number.’

  She wrote down the number for Helen, who thanked her, then, out on the street, checked and discovered with no surprise that it was the disconnected one she already had. Schoolchildren were out, giddy with the imminence of summer term’s end. Rob had texted. He was already at Helen’s, cooking. He asked if she could stop on the way back and get salad and a bottle of wine.

  Alice died in October. It wasn’t a recurrence of the cancer, and Helen would be able to look at the situation philosophically one day because of that, but not for a long time. Alice had done something she tried to avoid at all costs, due to the problems with her eyes: driven at night. She’d been heading back from her friend Marie Reyes’s place along the Atlantic Highway and had swerved to avoid a car overtaking from the opposite direction, skidded, and slammed into a tree. It was all very instant, the police assured Helen.

  At the funeral Helen was reminded of her mum’s immense popularity: her curious combination of solitude and sociability. People poured in, many more than Helen had anticipated. Gardeners, café owners, farmers, artists. The rough stone of the church was stained in a particular dark, large way, which made it appear more matter-of-fact about death’s harsh realities than most churches. Outside, the late afternoon was just a long road made of winter. Rob made six different types of pasty. Only he and Helen ate the vegetarian ones, but people asked if he was a professional chef.

  After the recent pull she’d felt in a westerly direction, accumulating slowly with each passing month, it was odd to abruptly realise there was no longer anything here for her. Or was it that simple? That was a vast question, and she was far too tired right now for even small questions. She summoned from a small locked compartment inside of her the strength to write to her dad, at the last address she’d had for him. There was no reply.

  Helen and Rob took some time off work and went to Cuba for a fortnight. When they returned, Helen had the house valued. She was surprised at the results. You wouldn’t call it pleasantly surprised, as there was nothing pleasant about it, but she was surprised. Rob said he’d give it a fresh coat of paint. She said she’d seen the paintwork in his kitchen and he should stick to doing great stuff with butternut squash. For the next three months, she did nothing. The house sat there, the bedcovers still unchanged from Alice’s last night in them, a couple of small fragments of moss on the pillow, mementoes of her final day on earth as a gardener. A hole in the conservatory roof reopened in a storm. A couple of young walkers with imaginations leaning to the macabre saw the place from the footpath at the back, became intrigued, looked in the window and spotted a dead mouse and a dead crow on the floor, beneath the hole. On their way back out of the garden they glanced at the garden table and noticed that on top of it was a pygmy-shrew skull that Alice had found on the coast path the previous year. Six miles later, in the pub in the village where Alice and Helen used to live, the walkers told each other stories about the house and decided that somebody, either recently or less recently, had been murdered in it. Then the monthly folk music session started in the pub and there were other subjects, more immediate, to remark upon. When the female walker, who wore a red anorak, went to the bar, a drunk old man ran his hand down her back and made a remark, and they decided to leave.

  When Helen herself thought about the house, she felt sure nobody had ever died in it, or that, if they had, it had at least not been in tragic circumstances. She had always slept well in it, despite the noise of the weather up on that high point behind the cliffs. It had been full of Alice’s positivity and clutter: her art, her car-boot trinkets, her attractive rugs. It wasn’t until Helen had actually booked an estate agent to take the photos that she asked Rob if they could have a chat. There weren’t as many jobs over there, not in the fields that the two of them were trained in, but there were some. She had seen a few in events management. And he had been saying for ages that he wanted a change. The cooking. Why not? They could get by, for a while, until they worked it all out.

  It wasn’t easy at first. They had their first proper arguments, ones that lasted a day or two. She, a born bumpkin, fell guilty of a classic city-to-country relocation misconception: that she’d be taking the easy, relaxed elements of one kind of life and adding them to another set of easy, relaxed elements, rather than replacing one with another. Shopping – especially with one car that they shared, now Rob had passed his driving test – took planning. It rained every day for a fortnight and the lane flooded, making it impossible to get out and into town. The conservatory became a small enclosed lake when the hole in the roof reopened.

  Rob seemed at more of a loose end than her, and he rattled against her nerves. ‘What are you doing?’ he would ask, when the answer, invariably, was that she was doing exactly what she’d been doing the last time he’d asked her, twenty minutes earlier. She wondered if she’d made a mistake, if the isolation would break them. But when he got a job in the kitchen at a café in Holsworthy – not quite the adventurous position he’d been looking for, but with a nice enough boss, and flexible part-time hours – it began to get easier.

  Helen never felt bored here. When she was not working on the house or applying for jobs, she found herself writing about Alice, trying to remember details about her life, for fear some might slip away. She wrote with the speed and freedom of someone writing only for themselves. The house was slowly becoming hers and Rob’s, but there was still so much to go through. In a drawer of bills and old lists in Alice’s workroom she found receipts that showed that Alice had been selling her embroideries of the Cornish landscape to local galleries. Rob spoke to the café, and they agreed to have an exhibition of her remaining work.

  In the loft, in a box containing Helen’s old schoolwork and drawings, she found four d
iaries dating from when they’d lived in the dark house: not hers. Alice’s. The entries were sporadic, often with infuriating gaps of over a month between them, sometimes with references to names with no explanation of who they were and sometimes very mundane, but Helen was transfixed. The voice startled her with its innocence, its uncertainty, and she at times found it hard to equate it with the image of a sixty-something Alice on the clifftop, charging up and down steep paths, shrugging off life’s injustices or laughing throatily into the rain at something scandalous. The very early entries offered little clue into what life had been like with her dad, but those from their last six months at the dark house were more expansive and chatty.

  3 March, 1984

  Walked down into the village with Helen today. Bought milk, eggs, couldn’t find garlic anywhere. Don’t think it’s reached Cornwall yet.

  17 March, 1984

  A wet day. Nothing good on the radio. I think I would like to escape this place and live in Athens, or Sicily. I want to climb hills in stifling heat and get skin like an old handbag and not care. I want to be free, but I don’t know what that means right now.

  20 April, 1984

  Helen said she has been playing with the boy from up the hill again. I don’t know what boy she means and there isn’t one up the hill, because nobody has lived in the house for two years, since Florence died. I suppose her family will sell it, eventually. Helen is such a bright child, it would not be a surprise if she had an imaginary friend. I will ask around. I think she walks quite far on her own, so it could be a boy from the village. She said they play Pooh sticks.