by Eve Chase
She’d knocked once, twice, on Jeannie’s bedroom door, and when there was no answer, she’d asked quietly, “Jeannie, is everything okay?”
No answer. Her mind flung to awful places: Jeannie dead on the rug; Jeannie tossed from the window, lying like a rag doll across the rampaging hydrangea beneath. She was turning the doorknob, ready to enter, when Jeannie replied cheerfully, “I’m fine! Go back to bed.”
She’d retreated, mortified, wondering if she’d mistaken passion for fighting. After all, what does she know of the former? But at breakfast this morning Jeannie came downstairs alone in her tortoiseshell sunglasses, which didn’t quite hide the mark on her cheekbone.
Jeannie didn’t chat or fuss over the baby. She halfheartedly stabbed toast soldiers into the boiled egg until it became a mess of broken shell and dripping yolk that seemed horribly symbolic of sex and violence and babies in a way Rita didn’t quite understand. After that, Rita couldn’t stomach an egg. As she pulls into Foxcote’s drive, she’s not sure she ever will.
* * *
“The short-arse woodsman called for you when you were at the shops, Rita,” Don says, leaning up against the table, gulping coffee, rubbing the dark wiry hairs on his belly with his free hand. He’s wearing nothing but shorts. Rita drops the shopping bags by the kitchen dresser and starts to unload them. “Wondered if you fancied a stroll,” he adds goadingly.
Heat prickles around her collarbone, rises up her neck.
Don’s merciless. “Oh, look at Rita! There I was thinking you might bat for the other side.”
“Shut up, Don,” says Jeannie, walking into the room with Teddy, the baby dozing over her shoulder. No longer wearing sunglasses, she’s troweled Pan Stik over her cheeks, which gives her complexion a strangely chalky appearance. “Teddy, give Rita a hand.”
Leaning down to the bags, Rita smiles at him. Teddy grins back from under his curls, adoringly, a reminder of why she stays.
Afterward, Rita can’t stop Don from taking Teddy shooting. When she inquires as to Hera’s whereabouts, Jeannie tells her Hera’s gone “off roaming, in one of her funny moods.” Rita feels a skewer of worry. She’d like to go after Hera and check she’s okay: she’s sure Hera will have noticed the bruise beneath Jeannie’s eye too. She misses nothing. But the baby’s nappy is heavy as a bag of frozen peas. No one has changed it all morning.
Rita lays the baby in the living room on a towel, pin in her mouth, and starts changing her while Jeannie watches from the sofa, lost in her thoughts, nibbling a bit of shortbread. The phone rings in the library. Neither of them moves.
“I can always tell when it’s Walter calling,” Jeannie whispers. “Don’t even think about answering it, Rita.”
The phone rings again, five minutes later. It feels like Walter’s banging on the front door. They both hold their breath, waiting for the noise to stop.
The baby, delighted to be free of her nappy, to have her bottom in the air, rocks back and forth with a gurgle. But Rita doesn’t smile or pull a silly face, like she normally does. She feels scared and stuck. The world outside Foxcote is closing in.
“I’m sorry if we disturbed you last night,” Jeannie says.
Rita doesn’t know what to say or where to look. Neither does Jeannie. Now the phone’s stopped ringing, it feels like the deafening silence that follows a scream.
“I’ll do the nappy.” Jeannie jumps off the sofa and rolls up the crepe de chine sleeves of her pale blouse. “Take a break, Rita. A walk? If you see Hera, will you send her back to the house?”
Rita hesitates. She’s never seen Jeannie change a nappy. Does she even know how to do it?
Jeannie picks up one of the new pink Babygros. “I won’t prick her with the nappy pin, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Closing the heavy front door behind her, Rita wishes she hadn’t missed Robbie and feels a pang for the walk they could have had. There’s something reassuring and solid about Robbie. She can be silent with him, neither of them speaking a word, and feel like they’re having a conversation. That she’s not entirely alone here.
But she is alone. And the forest’s never felt more alien.
She drifts for twenty minutes or so—neither Hera, Teddy, nor Don to be seen—then returns. Unable to face going back into the house, she sits on a rusty iron bench in the garden, under a canopy of wild roses. She rests her chin in her hands and closes her eyes. Her skin feels numb, like it belongs to someone else. She can smell the throaty tang of smoke. It reminds her of something, and she has the peculiar sense of being tugged back in time. A memory surfaces, like a splinter working its way out of the body and up through skin, then another: thick smoke and thicker heat; the numbness in her little-girl legs; hands yanking her out of the car window; looking back, over her rescuer’s shoulder, and seeing her parents’ car engulfed in a hellish ball of flame, her mother’s hands banging on the wrong side of the glass. With a groan, Rita bends over and is sick into the geraniums, just missing her shoes. As she looks up and wipes her mouth, she realizes the smoke smell doesn’t belong to a distant memory, after all. It’s twisting, like a sheer black stocking, from Hera’s bedroom window.
32
Hera
I didn’t expect my little fire to make so much smoke. Or for Big Rita to see it. She throws back my bedroom door and just stands there, mouth parted, staring at the terrarium on the window seat. The water dripping down the glass. The black smoke still curling from the little pile of sticks that I’d arranged to look like the log pile outside, as a nice surprise.
“There was a gust through the open window. The dry bark just went u-up,” I stammer, then stare down at the floor and wait for her to yell.
But Big Rita doesn’t yell. She stands there for years, then walks slowly toward me and hugs me so her chin is resting on my head. She smells of the baby. Good things. I smell of smoke. And I suddenly know I always will.
“I’m sorry.” I start to cry and keep apologizing, but this does not remove the soot from the glass or the burning taste on my tongue, or make me a nice girl. She’ll leave us now.
“Hera.” She pulls back, holds me by the shoulders, her fingers sinking into my disgusting fleshiness. “You think Dot and Ethel will expire at a whiff of smoke? They’re tougher than that. A bit of vinegar on a cloth will clean the glass too. Hey, look at me.” I raise my gaze slowly, daring to believe it might be okay. “Why, Hera? Why did you light those sticks?” she asks, like this question matters more than anything else. More than the fire itself, even.
But I don’t know how to explain that the urge began last night, when I heard Mother and Don shouting, and it grew this morning, after I saw the bruise on Mother’s face. And then the urge was bigger than me.
“You could have started a proper fire. Burned down the house.” Rita pauses. Something in her eyes is scared. “Is that what you wanted?”
“No.” I study the empty glass rolling on the rug. The beads of spilled water on the wool. And I wish I could thread them together into a necklace and give it to Big Rita, make everything right again. And I hear her say, “Are you sure?”
And the way she asks it makes me not sure at all, so I don’t answer.
“And London?” Her voice goes strange and raspy. “Did you light that fire, Hera?” Her big sandy-brown eyes run over my face.
I consider lying. But it’s Big Rita, so I whisper, “I thought it was out.”
She takes a sharp breath. Outside the open window, birds start clacking in the trees, and it sounds like slow clapping, getting faster. After a while she says, “You’ve told me something big. Something that makes me worried.”
“I won’t do it again.” I’m not sure she believes me either.
“Tell me what happened. That night in London.”
I press my lips together. My mouth is full of too many feelings. They all have different flavors. None of them nice. “Will you tell my mother?”
A frown quarrels between her eyebrows. “I should.”
“Don’t, Big Rita. Please.”
“Just tell me what happened.”
It suddenly feels easier to be truthful. Like, if I tell, the worry of it might leap from me to Big Rita, like a nit. “Everyone was asleep and . . . and I sneaked downstairs to get something to eat.”
She almost smiles. “Right.”
“Those pink wafer biscuits. I wouldn’t have bothered for anything else. I wanted to eat them on my own in the dark.”
She nods, like she knows this already. “How did you light the fire?”
The question is like a jab of a needle. My body flinches. “I only singed the edge of the curtain on the lightbulb, just to see what would happen. I squashed the scorchy bit between my fingers.”
She cocks her head to one side and looks at me in the same concentrated way she does at newspaper crosswords. “But it must have hurt?”
“It stopped me feeling anything. That’s why I . . .” I stop. Unable to say it. “Then I went to bed.”
She waits patiently for the next bit. I can hear the woodpecker now. His machiney pecking, like he’s at a typewriter, taking down evidence.
“I thought I’d pulled the curtain clear of the lamp and turned the lamp off,” I explain truthfully. “But I can’t have, because later I smelled smoke. So I ran into your room and woke you up.”
When I shook Big Rita’s shoulders, she went from sleepy to awake in a second. I’ve never seen anyone move so fast. She launched into Teddy’s room and slung him over her shoulder, then grabbed my hand and we ran to the floor below to wake Mother, who was all woozy from the pills. Big Rita pretty much had to carry her down the stairs too. I’m not sure anyone would have survived without her. Other people get medals for this sort of thing. Rita got sent to Foxcote.
“What did you not want to feel?” She won’t let it go.
The question skims too close. I don’t want to risk feeling it again by answering, so I press my lips together and taste the pink wafer biscuits I ate earlier.
Big Rita loops her arms around her legs. “When I was six I saw my parents die in a car crash.”
“That’s really sad.” I’m relieved not to talk about me.
“But I couldn’t remember it for years, even though I was there.” Her face grows sad and a million years old. “It was only today, in fact, I just remembered fully what happened.” She disguises her voice breaking with a cough. An expression I don’t recognize ripples across her face, like a reflection on water. “You’re the only person I’ve told, Hera. And, you know, I feel much better for telling you.”
I rub her arm, glad she feels a bit happier. I wonder if I would too, if I told her what I think I saw when I looked out of my bedroom window at the midwife running down our front steps, the baby in her arms.
“I think if we keep the dark things shut up inside,” she goes on, “they grow big. Like weeds. They smother all the flowers and block the sunlight.” She takes my hand and holds it tight, squeezing all secrets out, like the last bit of toothpaste from a tube. “So what did you want to forget, Hera?”
“My baby sister. Mother and Don’s baby.”
Big Rita’s eyes pop open like umbrellas.
“And when I looked out of the window, the night she was born, and the midwife took her away—” My breath goes all raggedy. “She didn’t have a proper face, Big Rita. Her mouth and nose were . . . like one big hole. And . . . and there’s something else. The baby . . .” The words scratch inside my head, trying to get out. “She wasn’t dead, Big Rita. Her little hand was moving. When the midwife carried away my baby sister, she was still alive.”
33
Sylvie
So this is it. Annie and I are on the motorway, hurtling toward a house that no longer exists, and a place in my heart I’ve spent a lifetime trying to eviscerate. Oh, yes, and the sounds of a forest that we’ll record and play to Mum in the hope of jolting her back to life. This is the original reason for going, I remind myself, although it feels like other forces are pulling me toward the forest now, a whirlpool suck. The provincial suburbs soon peter out, and the landscape—inside my head, out of the window—starts to change: rushing rivers; pea-green valleys; excitement; trepidation; and at the edges, molar-powdering anxiety. It feels like the past is rushing toward me at seventy miles an hour.
The bottles of craft ale drunk on an empty stomach yesterday evening are probably not helping.
After Helen’s unexpected visit, I spent an hour of manic searching on Google Earth; at that point, my head felt tight, stretched, as if it was straining to grasp the tangled mass of recent events. Seeking clarity, I went for a walk along the canal towpath. Jake was on his boat deck, wrench in hand, fiddling with the engine. Admittedly I’d noted this from the balcony already and had punctuated my exhausted-looking face with red lipstick. There was something endearing about his absorption in the task and in the way the complexities of the engine seemed to have beaten him. He didn’t even look up as I passed. Just asked me how it was going from under his hat, as if he could thermally detect my presence. Rather than answering, “Good, thanks, you?”—the only polite answer in London—and walking on, I committed the faux pas of answering the question, as if we were in 1950s rural Ireland. My life—Mum’s accident, Annie’s pregnancy, Helen the psycho mother—tumbled out in a huge messy overshare. He’d put down the tool and said, “No wonder you turned down a coffee. You need alcohol.”
“You’ve no idea how much.”
He offered me his hand and held mine firmly as I walked down the gangplank, my eyes locked to his mismatched Bowie ones, feeling a surge of excitement I hadn’t felt for years.
After that time wheeled away, like unexpected perfect evenings do. I learned about boat crankshafts and pistons and rotary motions. How he’s a techie and hot-desks in an office in Kings Cross with an on-site churro machine. Six months single—she wanted kids, he didn’t—he plans to travel the world on his motorbike, “before I’m forty,” he said, as if this was a bucket-list deadline. He’s thirty-one. “You’re a baby!” I hooted.
“And you’re about to be a grandmother,” he replied with a lazy smile, and for some reason this was the funniest, most unlikely thing I’d ever heard, and I laughed so hard the beer came fizzing up through my nostrils in an appalling way, not caring one bit. When I left, he kissed me on both cheeks, disappointingly chastely. He smelled of oil and sweat. He smiled right into my eyes and said, “Sylvie-from-the-balcony, your life is completely mental,” which is man code for Run away, run away, the woman’s a wacko. But the way he said it didn’t make me feel like that. I simply felt understood. And the evening was like a mega-dose of effervescent vitamin C. Unfortunately, the effects are rapidly wearing off.
Caroline’s words repeat in my head. “In what way is this not a bad idea, Sylvie?” she said when I called her last night.
I didn’t even try to describe my strange new craving to see the forest or that I’d been dreaming of it every night, a twisting path through the trees, leading me endlessly forward—even this felt like a sisterly betrayal of sorts—but I said it mattered to Annie, that the pregnancy had sharpened her curiosity, lent it a new urgency and a sense of entitlement to my history, or “her-story,” as Annie corrected. But, of course, the most important thing was recording forest sounds for Mum. As the nurse suggested.
“But you could stand in Hyde Park and record it! You can download birdsong!” Caroline protested.
“Not the same, Caro.” The conversation tautened between our respective continents.
Eventually Caroline said, “I’m worried about you, Sylvie. You seem . . . not yourself.” She paused. “What if it stirs something up? You don’t know how you’ll react. I mean, if it were me . . . if I ever—” She stopped short of mentioning her own provenance. But her breath caught on it. “The whole thing makes me a tad
anxious, that’s all, sis,” she added more warmly, stepping back and refocusing on me, like always.
I was relieved I’d trusted my instincts and not mentioned the folder. With all the worry about Mum in the hospital and everything else Caroline’s got on her plate, it didn’t seem right to throw her a curve ball like that. Not when she’s so far away. “It’s just a place, Caroline,” I insisted. But as I drive toward it, I know this isn’t true.
“Oh, no!” exclaims Annie, interrupting my thoughts. Sitting beside me in the passenger seat, she’s been absorbed in a pregnancy calendar app on her phone for the last half an hour. “I might start getting stretch marks from next month. No way. I’d rather die.”
I laugh and change gears. “I doubt it. You’re so young you’ll ping back to shape like a pair of Falke tights.”
“You didn’t,” she says breezily. She’s in a good place today, excited about this trip. She didn’t believe me at first when I suggested it.
“You weighed in at nine and a half pounds, thank you very much.”
Annie crosses her legs. “Eek. Not hereditary, I hope.”
I say nothing. I don’t know my birth weight. Or my true birthday.
She shoots an apologetic glance at me, realizing the significance too. After that we sit, not talking, like you do when there’s too much to say and a high likelihood of a conversation veering off in the wrong direction, like the car.
* * *
“Turn left at these crossroads!” Annie shrieks two hours later. “Google Maps says follow the signpost for the village of Hawkswell. No, no, left, Mum!”
I turn on to a narrow country road and wonder if my mother made the same journey, decades ago, if she ever drove down this particular road. I like to think she did, that these are ghost routes I’m retreading.
Annie points out of the windscreen and waggles her finger excitedly, as if she’s spotted a herd of elephants. “Forest!”