A Gingerbread House

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Champagne!’ Kate said, pouring three glasses. She lifted one and held it out. So Ivy lifted another and clinked. ‘Welcome home!’ Kate said.

  ‘It’s a very unusual house,’ Ivy said, when she had taken a drink. She managed not to shudder, but it wasn’t very nice wine. It tasted as if it had had an aspirin tablet dissolved in it. Beecham’s maybe.

  ‘Through there is the kitchen,’ Kate said, pointing. ‘Well, scullery. And across the hallway …’ She went clip-clopping back through the two rooms, the sound of her high heels ringing out in the emptiness. Ivy thought she could hear the droplets on the chandeliers setting up an answering tinkle as Kate passed underneath. Certainly some of the dust motes came showering down in the disturbance, swirling like snowflakes or fireflies against the light until they fell below the level of the windowsill and passed into shade again.

  ‘The card room,’ said Kate, opening a door at the far side of the vestibule. This room was carpeted in rich red and panelled in wood so dark it was almost black. There were three green baize tables set up with chairs around them and packs of cards and dice laid out as if a party was about to start. Against the back wall, a chaise, made up as a single bed with a white counterpane and a nightdress case on the pillow, lent an odd note.

  ‘I use this room to sleep in,’ Kate said. ‘And the gentlemen’s cloakroom is just behind. It doesn’t have a bath, of course, but it has a lavatory and a nice big basin. Lots of hooks for my clothes.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ivy, politely.

  ‘Gail has the ladies’ withdrawing room,’ Kate said, going back out into the hall and opening another door farther along the passageway. ‘And the ladies’ powder room adjoining.’

  ‘Should we disturb her?’ Ivy said. Then: ‘Oh, isn’t this pretty?’

  The ladies’ withdrawing room was painted blue and white with a pale carpet and two more chaises, both made up as beds, with pillows in striped cases and wool blankets. One of them was untrammelled but the other one had its covers pushed back as though someone had just climbed out. Ivy could see the neck and stopper of a hot-water bottle amongst the covers.

  ‘Is that …?’ Ivy said, pointing to the neat chaise. ‘That’s not … for me, is it?’ Surely the two sisters, the two lifelong sisters, would share this room and she would have the single in the card room. Surely.

  ‘No!’ Kate said. ‘That’s not your bed.’

  There was a long silence while the echo faded. Kate had spoken very loudly.

  ‘Well, thank you for giving up your room,’ Ivy said, at last.

  ‘The powder room through here really is pretty,’ Kate said, throwing open a frosted-glass door. She was carrying on with the tour as though nothing had happened. Ivy followed her and peeked in. The room was quite large, although broken up by toilet cubicles set across the far end. Around the other walls, gilt-framed mirrors sat above little bandy-legged dressing tables with powder-puffs in glass bowls and bottles of coloured liquid Ivy could only guess about.

  ‘It is,’ she agreed. ‘Has Gail got up and gone straight out?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Kate. ‘Sleeping or awake, she’s downstairs.’

  Ivy hadn’t been aware of the knot in her shoulders until it loosened. ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘Have you got a flat down there?’ Of course. They didn’t really live in this … what would you even call it? A museum? They kept it as a showpiece and lived in a basement flat. But why would they be staying here tonight? Why would she?

  ‘Not really,’ Kate said. She hesitated.

  Haltingly, Ivy asked: ‘What is this?’

  ‘The house?’ said Kate. ‘You mean the house?’ Ivy hadn’t meant the house, but Kate sailed on. ‘It’s on the feu as “Doctor’s Ballroom”. That tickled our father. We girls always called it our fairytale cottage. But really it’s an annexe. The doctor’s house – the old doctor’s house, I should say because he’s been dead a hundred years and none of our family have ever been doctors, but these things stick, don’t they? – well, it’s next door.’

  Ivy’s shoulders dropped away from her ears again. The big stretch of blank wall that this little fairytale cottage was joined on to was the real house where they actually lived. They just used this as an escape. Or maybe they’d always played here, from when they were girls together.

  ‘I’ll go and bang on the floor for Gail,’ Kate said and left the room, almost trotting.

  Ivy looked around again. If the hospital hadn’t made the mix-up, she would have spent her childhood playing here. She would be at ease here. At home.

  As if to make it come true she wandered across to the tumbled chaise to straighten the blankets. As she flapped them, a little leather case that had been tucked into the folds dislodged itself and hit the hard floor, its gold clasp falling open. Ivy caught her breath and listened for rushing footsteps, but the house was silent. She bent to pick the case up, praying it wasn’t broken. A drop of wine spilled out of her glass as she stooped.

  It was a double photograph frame, she saw, and it had survived the fall. In her relief she forgot to worry about being caught snooping and opened it right up. On one side was a studio portrait of a couple in the stiff Sunday best of the 1950s. On the other side was a snap of three little girls. They were dressed for church too, in white gloves and white shoes along with their summer frocks. One of them was Kate; it was obvious even down all these years, so Ivy peered at the other two, looking for her own childhood face in either of theirs. They looked vaguely similar to one another but they looked nothing like her. Nothing at all.

  ‘Our cousins,’ said Kate’s voice suddenly behind her. Ivy snapped the photograph frame shut and put it down on the smoothed blanket. ‘Our favourite cousins, actually. They spent every summer here. Gail keeps those photographs of her loved ones with her always. Sleeps with them under her pillow as you see. Our parents. And me. And our favourite cousins.’

  Ivy didn’t have any cousins, and no one had ever stayed a whole season when she was a child. She imagined herself here in the long larky summers, with Gail and their favourite cousins. Imagined Kate in her place, learning to tell Mother’s mood from the sound of her breathing, springing mousetraps in the larder.

  ‘I thought you’d have a cat,’ she found herself saying, the memory putting the thought in her head.

  Kate frowned.

  ‘Because you’re in the Nine Lives League. The branch down here. Not the branch up by me.’ She was prattling. She always did when she was uneasy. But why was she uneasy?

  ‘I didn’t tell you I was in the NLL,’ Kate said.

  ‘Didn’t you?’ Ivy said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ And it didn’t. Nothing much seemed to matter, all of a sudden. She took another sip from the glass and it didn’t taste so bad this time.

  ‘Thank you,’ Kate said. ‘I’m nervous.’ But Ivy would have said, if anything, Kate had relaxed. ‘I want it to go well when you meet Gail. And she’s … I told you she was … I’ve been struggling with her lately, you see. I maybe should have told you more. Been clearer. Talked plainer.’

  More plainly, Ivy thought. ‘Couldn’t your auntie help?’ she said.

  Somewhere else in the house a door opened and closed. And Ivy couldn’t say for sure whether the fixed look suddenly on Kate’s face came as a result of that or whether the blankness had already settled across her beforehand. She found herself thinking, just for a moment, that she could turn on her heel and make it to the front door before Kate in those court shoes could catch her. She could grab at the handle of her shopping trolley on the way. And if she missed it, she could live without a lot of old photos. The moment passed. Don’t be so daft, she told herself. Why are you making trouble where there’s no need? They’re eccentric. So what? Nine out of ten people looking at you would say you’d fit right in.

  Kate spoke again. ‘My auntie,’ she said.

  ‘Your Fraserburgh auntie,’ Ivy said. ‘Is she the mother of your favourite cousins?’

  ‘Yes, I did say I had an auntie, didn’t I? In
case you wondered what I was doing all the way up where you live. Fancy you remembering a little thing like that.’ Kate was smiling, grinning ear to ear actually. ‘Here’s to your excellent memory,’ she said, raising her glass. It was much fuller than Ivy’s. It – after this last slug – was empty.

  Ivy could hear footsteps, soft and shuffling, moving through the house, coming closer. Once again, she thought of the route to the front door, forgetting all about the shopping trolley this time. She thought of the length of the front path and the design of the catch holding the gate shut. She thought of the distance to the mouth of the street, to the nail bar and the newsagent’s.

  ‘Don’t call her Gail,’ Kate said, in a hissed whisper.

  ‘What?’ Ivy’s voice had dried to a croak. She cleared her throat. ‘Why not?’

  ‘In fact, don’t talk to her.’

  ‘What? Why?’ Ivy wished she hadn’t drunk the glassful now. She couldn’t seem to catch the start of the thought she knew was nearby.

  ‘Unless she talks to you.’

  The footsteps were right outside the door now. The handle was turning.

  ‘Come in, darling,’ Kate called, as the door began to open. It was so quiet Ivy could hear a clock ticking in the hallway. ‘Come and see who’s here!’ Kate said, and it seemed that she spoke extra-loud, ostentatiously loud. The clock stopped.

  ‘Is it her?’ The voice from behind the door was no more than a breath. ‘Is she back?’

  ‘It’s her, darling,’ Kate said. ‘She’s back.’

  ‘Who’s ba—?’ Ivy was asking as the door swung wide.

  Then she screamed.

  SIX

  Martine smiled. If you smile at people it makes them kind. She took the name badge the woman held out stuck to the tip of one finger, and pressed it against the lapel of her jacket. ‘I probably don’t need this,’ she said. ‘I’ve been coming for months.’

  ‘Have you?’ She wasn’t really asking. She was already looking beyond to the next people, an elderly married couple who were waiting to sign in and take their stickers.

  Martine kept smiling. The poor thing was harassed, that was all. Sitting there in a draught at the entrance to the function room, taking subs and ticking off names on a sheet. Not everyone had the right kind of mind. A lot of people, herself included, would far rather stay at home at a screen than come out and deal with the rough and tumble.

  When she got inside, she looked around with her smile just beginning to calcify, just threatening to make her cheeks ache. She recognized some of them and she was sure some of them recognized her. Be funny if they didn’t. She stuck out. In Lockerbie. She was the only Black attendee in this room, like she was the only Black resident on her street, like she’d been the only Black kid in her class.

  One time in year ten, one of the teachers had told the story of how Robert Burns, stranded in Dumfries and working as an exciseman – ‘stranded in Dumfries?’ one of the boys, one of the wags, had said. ‘Bright lights compared to the Locks, Miss’ – but the teacher had shushed him and carried on. Stranded in Dumfries as an exciseman, he said in a letter to a friend that the townspeople would as soon recognize a hippopotamus in their midst, as a poet. And as she said the word, the teacher, young and still earnest, had looked right at Martine. She meant to be kind. Of course she meant to be kind. She was trying to make Martine see that to be different was to be special, like a poet among farmers. But why did she have to say ‘hippopotamus’? Why did he – supposed to be poetic – have to say ‘hippopotamus’ when he could have said ‘bird of paradise’ or even ‘tiger’? The kids had started calling her ‘Hippo’ that very day. And she had smiled and smiled and smiled. Because if you show them they’re not getting to you, they stop.

  ‘Hippoooooo!’

  She turned. She didn’t know who it was but he looked about the age to have been just above her at school. All the boys above her at school looked the same now. At least the ones who were still in Lockerbie did anyway. The ones who were stranded here, headed for forty, no poetry about them. They were balding by genetic accident and actually bald by design. Shaved in denial, the way the girls were dyed in denial, so that instead of a collection of grey and pink, they were a collection of blond and bristles. And all of them were fat too. All the ones still in Lockerbie. The women dressed carefully, their blouses cut away at the shoulders but draped in folds across the front, their control-top trousers boot-cut over high heels to add length to their legs. The men took a different tack. Football tops left untucked and jeans worn low were how they imagined they hid what had happened to the wiry boys, or willowy boys, or even stocky boys they once were.

  ‘Pig!’ Martine said, matching the tone of triumph disguised as pleasure. ‘How are you?’ She had no trouble keeping this smile on her face. It was hard not to let it turn into peals of laughter as he got even more pig-like in his confusion: his pink cheeks flushing and his little eyes, deep in the overhang of drooping eyelids, shrinking as he pinched them up in an effort to understand. ‘Sorry!’ Martine said. ‘I thought you were Pig. But you’re not, are you?’

  ‘Pig who?’

  ‘He wasn’t in our year,’ she said. ‘I knew him from choir. Oh … what was his second name?’

  ‘Can’t believe you’ve forgotten me!’ the man said, back to full strength again, grinning at her. His teeth hadn’t survived the years of smoking and crashing out drunk with bits of kebab still stuck in them. Martine was only guessing, but the spongy texture of those eyelids and the straining belly under the Rangers shirt were strong clues.

  ‘Remind me,’ she said, grinning back, wondering what he’d make of her perfect white top row. ‘I’ll kick myself.’

  ‘Gogs,’ he said, pointing to himself with both thumbs. ‘Gogsie. Gordon Rae.’

  ‘Gordon!’ she said. ‘I will kick myself.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he said. ‘Let me.’ He made a feint, with his fists up, as if he’d threatened a punch instead of a kick. ‘We’re over there,’ he added, jerking his head.

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Me and the missus. Just you, is it?’ He was still jabbing his fists and bouncing on the balls of his feet.

  ‘Well, it was nice to see you,’ Martine said. He dropped his hands again and, after giving her a look she couldn’t decipher, he walked off to join a woman with blonde hair and a slit-shouldered top, who was sitting over a fat lever-arch file at one of the middle tables, a glass of wine at her elbow. That, Martine thought, was Nicole Mackay; Nicole Rae it looked like, these days.

  Nicole gave Martine a look she was used to, up and down, clocking the way her cinched belt told the truth about her waist and her lack of make-up proclaimed that she had nothing to hide about her skin. Martine waved and smiled and Nicole managed half a smile and a crabbed twitch of a hand that might have become a wave if she’d had a gun to her head.

  ‘Hippo.’ Nicole was too far away for Martine to hear it but she saw the glossed lips form the sounds.

  ‘Cow,’ she mouthed back, thinking it was close enough to ‘Nicole’ that the woman would never know. She turned away. Was that a half-hearted sort of a wave, she found herself wondering. Or was Nicole trying to beckon her over? Had she just been invited to come and sit with them and refused? Maybe. But if she went over and found out otherwise she’d just have to trail away again.

  Instead, she chose an empty table at the side, sliding in, facing the room, to unbuckle her own lever-arch folder and start leafing through her slips. She wasn’t there to socialize.

  When she’d decided to do her family tree, she’d assumed – as you would – it was all online, and that suited her well enough, but truth was she spent too much time on her own and most of that staring at a monitor. So when they all started nagging her she didn’t have a leg to stand on.

  ‘It’s more efficient to do it in writing and send the questions to a list where people can search by keyword,’ she had said – or rather typed – to @DescentofMe, one of the most frequent contributors
to the group she’d added herself to.

  ‘Nah, nah,’ came the answer. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. You get stuff in the chit-chat – asides, throwaway remarks – that can turn out to be gold. And it’s not like you have to choose. You can still keep up with your online peeps.’

  ‘If you’re lucky enough to live in a town with a Family Forest and you don’t go, I’m going to get the ferry and the train and the bus to Lockerbie myself and slap you. You don’t know you’re born!!!!!’ @VikingGrl never let any of them forget she was in Shetland and Shetland was quite remote.

  Martine gave them the benefit of the doubt, since they’d been right about the extra excitement you got from original documents. She had even taken to sniffing them, like the total fanatics. She had thought people were praying, in the library, the first time she saw them bending so very deeply over an open register and burying their noses in the valley of the binding. But when she tried it herself, alone in an empty study carrel, checking over her shoulder beforehand to see if anyone was passing, she understood. It was mostly dust, but not all. There was a faint tang of what might be ink, familiar from the days when she’d stooped low over homework, the blots of a cheap biro on the paper inches from her nose. And besides the ink and dust, there was something living. It should be disgusting by rights. Because it could only be the oil and sweat from the hands of whoever had written the entries all those years ago and the oil and sweat from the hands of everyone who had turned the pages in the decades and centuries since. The residue of their sneezes, the smears of fingers used to wipe noses then trace entries, the spit from a licked thumb turning a page. If you thought about it too long, you’d heave. But somehow – she bent again and took a deep breath – it was exciting. It brought them all to life, these people – the hat trimmers and housemaids, the coalmen and cowmen – who would otherwise just be names in a book, ink and dust.

  So, wrong about the documents, she was ready to believe she was wrong about the social club too. And she was more than ready to admit that she had to change something. She wouldn’t go as far as to say she was unhappy, and she’d never let the thought that she was lonely form in her head. ‘Lucky’ was what she said, whenever she took stock: a good job as a freelance grant-writer, her own boss, no overheads except a decent Wi-Fi connection that she’d want anyway and one good black suit for meetings that was so anonymous she’d been wearing it for years, dry-cleaned and hung on a padded hanger between times. She could take holidays when she felt like it, plan her days and weeks around small rewards, go to the gym when it was quiet during the school run, order online knowing she’d always be there to sign for deliveries. Lucky.