The House on the Lake

by Nuala Ellwood

  8

  Soldier Number 1

  Rowan Isle House, September 2003

  I feel bad because I haven’t written in this journal for such a long time, though the truth is I haven’t felt like there was much to report and what’s the point of a journal if it’s full of boring stuff. But when I saw it on my shelf this morning I decided it was time to start writing again. Maybe if I do that then the exciting stuff will start to happen.

  Sarge hasn’t given me any missions to carry out for months, not since the last one. Instead I’ve been carrying the bulk of the housework which I don’t really mind but can get rather tedious. I try not to think about what happened on the lake because when I do my heart goes all shaky. Sometimes I have nightmares that I’m under the water and Sarge is holding me down. But in the nightmares he doesn’t pull me out, he lets me sink and I go down, down to the very bottom of the lake where everything is black. I wake up feeling all sweaty and breathless but I never tell Sarge about the dreams. I just get up and get on with things because that’s what a good soldier does.

  Right now it’s harvest time, always a busy few weeks for Sarge and me. Still, despite the hard graft it’s my favourite part of the year. After months of living off oatmeal and boiled water with a bit of meat every now and then the thought of fresh vegetables makes my mouth water. For weeks I’ve been dreaming about the crunchy orange carrots with their parsley-like stems that I’ll pull from the earth, their sweet smell filling my nostrils as I shake the soil from them and place them in my basket. The green peas that I’ll pop out of their pods with the back of my thumb, and the sharp white onions that smell so good when Sarge roasts them round a saddle of rabbit. I feel hungry just thinking about it, though Sarge says only some of the produce will be for the pot. The rest will be sold and the money will see us through the winter.

  Today was the start, and we spent hours digging up potatoes and carrots and picking green beans. Sarge put me on to scrubbing the potatoes and bagging them up. It was a dull job and I told him I’d rather dig up the rest of the vegetables but he told me that part of being a good soldier is learning to put up with boredom. ‘War’s not always about action,’ he told me. ‘It’s about standing in the scalding heat for hours on end, repeating the same task over and over again, scrubbing your boots until you can see your face in them. Once you can cope with boredom then you’re ready to fight.’

  It’s annoying that Sarge has kept me away from soldiering these last few months. Instead of heading up the crag together or into the woods rabbiting, he’s declared that I need to be in the house more, to help with the cooking and cleaning and gardening, make sure the stove’s got enough wood and the bog’s slopped out. I don’t mind doing all that but I’d much prefer to be out hunting with Sarge. He goes into the woods alone now and he stays out much longer too. One time he came back with blood all over his face and I was freting fretting he was injured or something. But it wasn’t his blood, it was the blood of the rabbits he was carrying under his arm. It wasn’t like Sarge to make such a mess. He always makes a clean kill and he’s proud of that fact. I wanted to ask him how he got the blood on his face but he had that look, the one that comes over him when he hears the voices, so I just stayed quiet and set about skinning the rabbits.

  Being stuck with the chores made me feel like I’d done something wrong, that I wasn’t cut out to be Soldier Number 1 after all, but when Sarge said that thing today, that boredom is part of being a soldier, I understood what he’d been doing all these months. I’ve still been in training, I just hadn’t realized it. So now I feel better. It doesn’t matter that I’m bagging spuds rather than doing target practice, Sarge still believes in me and he has a plan. And that, for me, can only be good news.

  Anyway, when I’d finished bagging and pricing the veg, Sarge handed me a stack of cardboard boxes and told me to go and collect the eggs from the cages. I don’t really like this job as those chickens can be vishous vicious. When I was a kid one of them pecked a hole in my sock and made my ankle bleed. Sarge used to go out and collect the eggs after that because I was too scared. But today he asked me to do it and I knew it was another test that I had to pass so I took the boxes, opened up the latch on the first cage and carefully stepped inside.

  They made such a racket, those chickens, flapping their wings and shrieking. I tried to grab the eggs as quick as I could before I got pecked but that only made them go even more crazy. I just wanted to get out of there but I knew Sarge was watching from the back door so I took a deep breath and stepped across them. They all went running towards the back of the cage then, like a big ball of feathers, leaving the rest of the cage clear. One of the chickens was dead. It was lying at the front. Its legs and body were in the cage but its head had been pulled out of a gap in the wire and was all mangled. It didn’t scare me. Dead chickens are a regular part of life. I just knew that we needed those eggs to sell so I kicked the dead chicken aside and collected the rest.

  When I’d finished I closed the cage and went over to tell Sarge what had happened. His reaction wasn’t what I was expecting. Instead of shrugging it off like he usually did, he got mad as anything and started raging about the ‘bloody foxes being the ruin of him’ and how he was going to set a trap that night for them. I thought of my friend the vixen with the eyes like the dead mother in the desert and I went cold. I don’t care about a dumb chicken or a rabbit or a dozy old sheep getting killed, but the vixen is different. If she died, I don’t know what I’d do. I didn’t tell Sarge any of this because I didn’t want him to think I was getting soft. But I started to put a plan together in my head.

  Early evening we set up the produce out the front. Sarge says that’s the best time to do it as folk are on their way home from work and they’re hungry. But in the end the only custom we had was from the vicar. He pulled up in his shiny red car at about 7.30, just as I was about to put the stall away. Sarge must have seen him coming because he came out of the house and asked the vicar what he could get him. He bought a few bags of veg – carrots and potatoes – and a dozen eggs. I was watching him while Sarge bagged the stuff. He was an odd-looking fella. Very short with narrow shoulders and pale-blue eyes that looked like the glass china Sarge brought from the bungalow in Middlesbrough. They were cold eyes and looking at them made me feel cold too. He didn’t speak much, just muttered and handed over his cash. As he scurried back to his car, I realized what he reminded me of. With his cold eyes and his white collar he was the spit and double of a wood pigeon.

  I was about to share this observation with Sarge when he suddenly spat on the ground. ‘Scum,’ he muttered, shaking his head. ‘Scum, the lot of them.’

  Here was my chance. As we cleared away the produce I asked him why he dealt with the vicar, why he took his money, if he hates religion so much. He stopped for a moment, frowned, wiped his forehead then looked at me. ‘I’ve got nothing against taking his money,’ he said, fixing me with that glare he usually keeps for staring at a target. ‘In fact, it makes a change for folks like us to get something out of the likes of him. It’s usually the other way round.’ I asked what he meant and he started going on again about how when he was little he was sent to a Catholic school where he was taught by priests. He said every last one of them was a sadistic bastard. But he was tough too and he could handle that. What he couldn’t handle were the weekly visits from the parish priest. Every Saturday morning he’d come downstairs and see Father Hugh sitting in the kitchen drinking tea and eating cake with his mother. Cake they couldn’t afford but his mother always got in to keep up appearances, Sarge said, to make the priest think that they weren’t like the rest of the people on the street, the ones with dirty windows and dog shit in their yard, that they were good people, respectable people, who kept cake in Tupperware boxes and drank tea out of china cups. The priest would ask how they were doing – Sarge and my gran, it was just the two of them because my granddad had died when Sarge was five – and he’d make out like he cared. He’d listen to my gra
ndmother’s complaints about the condition of the houses round about and say how wonderful it was that Sarge was doing so well at school. But then just before he was leaving he’d casually mention the little matter of the church roof that needed fixing or the Christmas boxes for the elderly that needed filling, and if Gran had a bob or two to spare it would be gratefully received. Sarge said they had no money whatsoever to spare. They were poor. Dirt poor. But the priest played on her good nature, told her that all the parishioners were pitching in, made her feel guilty. ‘Cos that’s what they do, lass,’ Sarge said as we lifted the trestle back into the house. ‘They play on your conscience.’ And my gran would fall for it. She’d go to the little teapot she kept on the dresser and take out her last couple of bob to give to the priest. Then she and Sarge would live off bread and marge for the rest of the week.

  ‘They have no conscience,’ Sarge said. ‘Parasites, the lot of them. That’s why I have no problem taking their cash off them now.’

  He spent the rest of the evening ranting about the church and hypocrisy and illegal wars, then he started talking about the desert. ‘There was all this blood. It was everywhere,’ he said, his eyes glazed with beer. That bit startled me because he had never said it before and I wondered what he meant. Had he killed someone? But I knew not to question him when he was in that mood. Also, though I feel terrible saying this, I wanted him to be distracted. While he was talking he drank three large tankards of home brew that I kept on refilling for him. I knew that if he kept thinking about the vicar and the war and kept drinking more booze then he’d forget about the foxes. And I was right. When he finally stumbled off to bed I went to the back door to look out and there were no traps, just a calm, still autumn evening. But I did see my vixen. She was standing in the shadow of the house up by the side, and she was looking at me so intently, so peacefully, like she knew what I’d done for her, like she knew I was her friend.

  9

  Lisa

  Think, Lisa, think, I tell myself as I pace around the musty living room. You’ve made it here. Now what?

  I stand at the grimy window and look out at the lake, remembering her words.

  If you ever need to get away, the house is yours. It’s peaceful there. Safe.

  Yet I feel anything but safe. I feel like any moment now he’s going to knock on that door and find us. Even standing at this window I feel exposed, though I know that it’s impossible for him to know where I am. I’ve made sure I haven’t used my bank card, relying instead on the cash I’ve been saving these last few months, withdrawing ten and twenty pounds here and there so the police wouldn’t be able to track my bank card here. I had planned this escape down to the very last detail yet the one thing I couldn’t have predicted was that the safe house she promised me would be like this. Why did she tell me to come here, knowing the state it was in? Was it a trick? No, I can’t allow myself to think that. She’s my friend and she protected me when I was at my most vulnerable. She would never lead me to danger. I have to believe that. I have to trust that I have made the right decision. For both our sakes.

  I step away from the window and look at Joe. He is sitting on the pile of cushions in the living room, his knees pulled up to his chin, his eyes fixed on the floor in front of him.

  He hasn’t spoken a word in over an hour.

  I’ve tried to coax him out into the garden to play, told him that if we’re lucky we might see some animals, but he’s not interested. It’s like he’s shrunk inside himself. The silence unnerves me so I fill it by singing a song my mum used to sing when she was doing the housework, an old Irish folk tune that my grandmother had sung to her when she was small. But I don’t get as far as the first chorus before Joe starts banging his fists on the floor and shouting at me to stop.

  I look at my red-faced, angry child sitting on a pile of rags in this broken-down house and I feel tears pricking at my eyes. Maybe it was the song and the memory of happy times with my mum. And I realize I’m everything Mark said I was: a girl who never grew up, who never learned how to do what adults do. ‘For fuck’s sake, Lisa, you can’t even change a light bulb.’ I put my hands to my ears to drown out his voice as if he’s here in the room and not in my head.

  When I take them away, Joe is still screaming. Why can’t he just be quiet for five minutes? Why can’t he just stop? Then I look at him and all my rage ebbs away, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of love, so powerful it feels like it might rip me in two.

  Pull yourself together, Lisa, I tell myself. He’s a child, your child, who is miles away from home and all his comforts. He’s confused and hungry and cold. And even after everything, Mark’s still his dad, of course he’s going to be asking for him. I need to step up now and start being a proper mother. Wiping my eyes, I locate the shopping bags that are lying crumpled by the door and dig around inside, trying to find something that could constitute a healthy breakfast. I’m relieved to see that despite my manic state yesterday I still managed to put some fruit into the basket. I take a tangerine from its mesh bag and begin to peel the skin.

  ‘Look what Mummy’s got,’ I say, holding up the fruit for Joe to see. ‘Lovely tangerines.’

  ‘Father Christmas been,’ he says, staring at me with wide, watery eyes.

  ‘Not yet,’ I say, my stomach sinking at the mention of Christmas. ‘But he’ll be getting ready. The elves will be working round the clock to get all those presents finished in time.’

  ‘That,’ he says, pointing at the tangerine. ‘Father Christmas?’

  And then I get it. I know what he’s talking about. He’s referring to something I thought was lost for ever, a memory I’d tried to resurrect. When I was young my parents would fill a long red knitted stocking with nuts and sweets, a small present and a tangerine. Then, when they were sure I was asleep, they’d tiptoe into the room and hang it on the end of my bed. All my big presents would be downstairs in the living room round the tree but that red stocking was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes. It was the first taste of the magic that lay ahead that day, the promise of what was to come. I’d wanted to carry on the tradition when Joe was born but Mark couldn’t understand the idea of having fruit and nuts as presents, he dismissed it as ‘1980s North London hippy nonsense’, so Joe’s first Christmas had consisted of expensive, educational toys, all chosen by Mark. The next Christmas was the toughest of my life. I don’t know how I got through it. But despite my heartache I still made sure, with some help from a friend, that Joe got a stocking with a tangerine. Nothing, not even Mark, was going to stop me doing that. The fact that Joe remembers warms my heart. I did do something right, after all, I think to myself as I peel the fruit and feed him it, piece by piece. No matter what Mark says, I did do something right.

  When Joe is finished I wipe the sticky sweet juice from his mouth with my hand.

  ‘Was that nice, beautiful boy?’ I ask, rubbing his soft skin.

  He nods his head.

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’ he says, his eyes boring into mine. ‘Is he coming?’

  ‘You’ll see Daddy in a little while,’ I say, the lie sticking in my throat. ‘But for now, you and I are going to have a little explore. Come on.’

  I scoop him into my arms, step over the carrier bag that is spilling out half-eaten packets of crisps and empty juice cartons, and head into the hallway.

  The smell of damp and must is overpowering, much more so than it was last night. There is green mould pockmarked along the walls and a thick dust covers the floor like a carpet. It rises up into the air as we walk then hangs suspended in the sunlight. Joe starts to cough and I pull him closer to me. We reach the bedroom I was in earlier. The door is still open but we don’t go in. I am determined to find one room that is at least halfway habitable. We walk to the end of the passage and in the gloom I can make out the shape of a staircase.

  ‘Baby, I need you to stay here for two minutes while I go to find a nice bed,’ I say, placing Joe down at the foot of the stairs. ‘Is that okay?’
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br />   He looks at me with a frown then points at the stairs.

  ‘Daddy up there?’

  ‘No, darling, Daddy’s not up there,’ I say, trying to keep the exasperation at bay. ‘But there might be somewhere for us to sleep.’

  ‘Not tired,’ he says, shaking his head furiously.

  ‘No, not now,’ I say, looking up at the stairs where a shaft of light has illuminated a circular plume of dust that hangs suspended at the top of the banister like a halo. ‘For later, when it’s bedtime. Now be a good boy and stay there while I go and have a very quick look.’

  As I climb the stairs I see that the light is coming from a tiny skylight in the ceiling, but as I turn the corner and step on to the landing I’m enveloped in a darkness so thick it almost takes my breath away and an icy chill ripples down my spine. A voice, deep and low, whispers inside my head: You shouldn’t be here. And it is right. There is something rotten and unpleasant up here, something I can’t quite place, though I know I need to leave it well alone. Gripping hold of the banister, I slowly make my way back down the stairs. When I reach the bottom, and Joe, I lift him in my arms and hoist him on to my waist.

  ‘Want to get down.’

  The force of Joe’s voice startles me.

  ‘Let me go,’ he cries, pounding at my chest with his fists.

  ‘Sorry, baby,’ I say, easing him on to the ground. ‘Mummy was just …’ I can’t explain it. I reach out to take his hand. ‘Stay close to me and we’ll see if we can find somewhere to put our things.’

  He stamps his feet and scowls at me. I take a deep breath, then take my hand away and walk back down the passage, passing the open door of the bedroom. I can hear Joe’s footsteps on the stone floor behind me as I stop outside the door at the end of the passage, close to the entrance hall. I try the handle and it opens immediately. I put my hand out behind me to keep Joe back, not sure what I’m going to confront.