by Shelley Day
Stella gets on the bus, pays the fare, goes straight up to the top deck and lights up a Number Six from Frank’s packet using Grandpa Worthy’s Zippo. She smiles to herself as she flips the lighter shut and exhales. She blows some smoke rings, watches out the window. As the bus goes by the pork shop, Stella sees Frank just going in, going for the ham and the pease pudding, the Co-Op package with the buns and butter under his arm and a bottle of Brown Ale sticking one out of each jacket pocket. Stella could just fancy a nice ham sandwich. But she doesn’t fancy all what goes along with it. She never wants to set eyes on Frank Fanshaw again. But this Number Six, it’s good. Thanks, Frank.
Stella rummages in the suitcase and pulls out the keys from the boarding house, both lots. A Yale on its own, on a bit of baler twine – boarding house, front door, she recognises it. She unzips her purse and stuffs it in. Hopes she won’t need it again. But just in case. The second bunch has six keys in all, including two deadlocks. Stella has no idea what these are for. She fingers them one by one. Padlocks, maybe. The garage, the netty, can’t be the coalhouse. Stella looks at them again before dropping the bunch back into the suitcase and clipping it shut. She might as well hang onto them. Just in case.
Stella lights another cigarette, she blows some more smoke rings and she watches through the window. There’s a funny little sense of freedom, just for a moment. Even a bit of sun is coming through. People. Ordinary people, doing ordinary morning things – cycling to work, dragging kids to school, queuing up at Greggs to buy stuff for their bait. Stella could murder a hot sausage roll. She’s out now. She can do as many ordinary things as she pleases. Ordinary things suddenly look strange, odd and peculiar, not quite of this world, as though Stella is seeing them for the first time, like she’s an alien just landed. She’ll have to get used to this. Disorientation. Marcia had warned her coming out wasn’t a bed of roses and had advised her just to focus on the practical things when the world started looking weird, which it would, inevitably, Marcia said. You’re right, Marcia, the world’s looking really weird but it’s as it’s meant to be – there’s nothing actually weird about it.
Focus on the keys, Stella, think about the keys. The Beach Hut. These are the keys for the Beach Hut. Stella fishes the bunch out of the suitcase again. Has she got the guts to go to the Beach Hut? Probably not – certainly not now, maybe not ever. Quite apart from slimy Frank Fanshaw evidently desperate to get her there… Well, Frankie boy, you can go and whistle. Stella Moon is going to the Probation, and she’s going to get proper accommodation sorted. From now on, she’s going to do everything by the book. And she’s avoiding that Beach Hut like it was housing the plague.
Stella hasn’t been back to the Beach Hut, not since the day Muriel died. She thought she could say that without flinching – ‘the day Muriel died’ – thanks to Marcia’s coaching. ‘The day my mother died.’ She’d repeated those words again and again for Marcia – she thought they’d lost their force. ‘The day Muriel died.’ Marcia says they’re just words and shapes – letters of the alphabet. Stella had felt a small sense of triumph as she’d reeled the words off for Marcia, almost chanting. She’d smiled and smiled afterwards, a massive sense of pride. But now, ‘the day my mother died,’ the very thought of those words, and Stella’s smile stops before her muscles move. She’s not sure any more that trying to empty words of their meaning is altogether a good thing. And the words are in fact no longer empty, if they have ever been. And now she notices there’s a strange feel to the keys she’s turning over in her hands, a tingling feeling, a vibration, a kind of current. She must put the keys away, put them away now. Put them in the case and leave them there and don’t touch them. Stella fumbles to get the little case open, her thoughts crowding in. The case won’t open. The clasps are stuck.
The keys belong to Muriel.
Muriel is dead.
You killed her, Stella.
You killed your own mother.
Oh, yes, you’ve done your time for it, you might well have paid your dues. But time is never going to be enough, is it? You’ll never pay the full price for what you’ve done, not ever. The guilt and the shame of it will be yours for always, Stella Moon. It will shrink you, make you smaller, smaller, smaller and smaller till you are no more than the size of a lentil.
Under Stella’s shaking hands, the clasps on the suitcase suddenly ping open. She stuffs the keys in and clamps the suitcase shut again. She’s sweating. Nauseous. She’ll have get off the bus.
Stella presses the bell and gets off the bus. She sits down on Byker Bridge, her back against the wall. It’s better out in the air, even if it is cold and damp and noisy and stinks of traffic fumes. As soon as she feels a bit better, she’ll walk the rest of the way into town. She’ll be alright in a minute. People are passing, all looking like they’re going somewhere with a purpose. No-one so much as casts a glance at Stella. She must look a sight. People must think she’s a beggar. She should get up and start walking. But in a minute. Just a few more minutes and she’ll be alright. Everyone is avoiding looking at her, like she’s not there at all.
The police hadn’t been interested in the whys and wherefores, only in the fact that Muriel was dead and that Stella had killed her. Stella had confessed, she’d made the voluntary statement, she’d told them everything she could remember. She’d signed her name at the bottom. And that was that.
Her eighteenth birthday. No longer a Ward of Court, Stella had come to the Beach Hut straight from the Children’s Home. No Muriel. She’d panicked, run along the cliff path, the darkness closing in. Afterwards, night, she’d come back to the Beach Hut – she must have done – because that’s where they came for her – a hand on her shoulder, a voice asking her what had happened, asking if she was alright. She’d been sitting by the stove, how long she’d been sitting by the stove she didn’t know, the only light the glancing beam of the lighthouse on the Farnes, swing, swing, swinging through the black, diagonally across the walls.
The lighthouse – there for the safety of seafarers. Safety. What safety has there ever been for Stella Moon?
They said she’d phoned Emergency from the Coastguard telephone down by the dune path. Stella doesn’t remember. They said she was hugging a small grey haversack, she wouldn’t let go of it. Stella doesn’t remember. They said all that was in the bag was an empty Kilner jar. They showed her the bag. Was the bag Muriel’s? they kept asking. And the jar. Was that Muriel’s? What was in the jar? Whose was the bag? What was the jar for? Stella didn’t know. But it was important to Muriel and she’d kept it.
It was from the Beach Hut they took Stella away.
She could have kept on running, stumbling among stones, running all angles in the tipping sand. Run as fast as you can, as far as you can, for as long as you can – run away from yourself, go on, Stella, see if you can. Stella had stopped, she’d stood on the beach, looking out through the black to the drop of the cliff shining luminous under the moon, the white cliff that plunges vertical into the sea.
It was from the Beach Hut that they took Stella away.
Now, sitting on Byker Bridge, Stella hears not the sounds of a city coming alive in the morning, but the churning rage of the sea like it was on the day Muriel died.
Stand up, Stella. Stand up tall. You’re on the bridge. Walk across the bridge and go to the Probation Service. They’re expecting you. They will help you. Go on. Do it. Stand up and go.
Stella picks up the case and walks over Byker Bridge towards the city centre.
Marcia said it’s normal for memory to blur and fade, to disappear altogether. Memory disappears for a purpose. Let sleeping dogs lie. What if memories come back? That’s worse than when they disappear. Stella has learned not to listen to the screams of memory. Now it’s memories’ whispers she’s finding it harder to ignore.
Stella may have the keys but she’s not going to the Beach Hut, not with Frank, not with anyone. Frank can whistle.
Stella’s off to the Probation. Marcie will be proud of her, doing things by the book. Getting back on track.
Chapter Nine
It’s strange how a place can become part of you, take root inside you and take possession of you, like an unwanted ghost. A place can, one day, be perfect and be everything you want it to be. But when it turns on you, there’s no relief, no magic formula to exorcise the hold a place can have on you.
The Beach Hut had been in the family all Stella’s life, and much of Muriel’s. There were photographs – one of Muriel and Grandpa Worthy, with their sun hats on, lounging on stripy deck chairs on the veranda of the Beach Hut, grinning for the camera. Muriel is about ten years old, her bare, sun-browned legs swing over the bar of the chair. Whoever stuck that one into the album has written ‘Happy Days’ beside it, white ink on the thick black paper. Sometime after, the words have been scribbled over and then scratched out, but they still show through.
Another photograph – this one loose, creased, faded – Muriel, about fourteen, pouty, wearing a sundress, sitting with a handsome young beau, side-by-side on an upturned boat, the Beach Hut just visible on the dunes behind.
‘Who’s the hunk?’ Stella had asked. ‘Is it my dad?’ She thought it might be because he looked like Clark Gable. From what Stella saw in pictures, a lot of young men in those days had the look of Clark Gable. Muriel had snatched the picture from Stella’s hand.
‘Don’t be daft,’ she said as she straightened the crumpled edges of the photograph. ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid.’ Muriel looked at the photograph for a long time. ‘It’s only my brother,’ she’d said eventually, shrugging and making a tight smile with her lips closed. ‘It’s only our Billy.’ Stella had wanted another look at the picture, but Muriel wouldn’t let her. Instead Muriel slipped the picture inside the back cover of the album and clapped the album shut.
Stella never saw that picture again. The next time Muriel was out and she’d looked in the album, the photograph was gone. Stella knew, though she wasn’t supposed to know, Muriel’s brother Billy had taken his own life when he was only twenty-seven, which must have been not long after the picture was taken. Grandma Willoughby said she would never forgive Muriel, not as long as she had breath in her body.
Then everything went upside down and no-one went to the Beach Hut any more. Grandpa Worthy took to his bed with the bad chest that would eventually kill him. All hands were needed on deck, Grandpa Worthy was not to be left by himself, not even for half a minute, even Muriel was needed to watch him and to help at the boarding house and even Muriel couldn’t be gallivanting off every second minute, shirking her duties and getting up to God knows what. The Beach Hut was left on its own, with Muriel more than content to be near her beloved father.
Then, after Grandpa Worthy passed, the Beach Hut became the sole property of Ruby. She made it known it was hers and hers alone, nobody else’s, and she wasn’t having Muriel or anybody else taking liberties. Nobody was allowed to go there without Ruby’s express permission. Especially not Muriel.
These keys that Stella now has are the keys for the Beach Hut, Stella’s sure of that now – they used to hang in that secret place in the cupboard under the stairs where no-one but Ruby was supposed to set foot.
When Grandpa Worthy died, he left behind a whole basement full of materials and ledgers relating to his healing, his herbalism and his taxidermy – specimens in jars, and glass domes and locked tin boxes, instruments, chemicals, a dusty old manual of Practical Taxidermy bound in crumbling brown leather, which had belonged to his father and his before that. The whole lot was, by Grandpa Worthy’s last Will and Testament, inherited by Muriel. But Ruby took it upon herself to dispose of the ledgers straight away. She said she wanted nothing of the sort. She wanted rid of everything, said she couldn’t abide any of it. Morbid, it was, and quite beyond her why anybody in their right mind would hang on to the wizened remains of creatures long dead. Even so, she wouldn’t allow Muriel – now its rightful owner – anywhere near. Until Muriel was in a position to take the whole lot away, it would remain in the cellar, strictly under lock and key. Ruby, as Executrix of her husband’s Last Will and Testament, would dispose of whatever she wanted whenever she wanted, and as she saw fit.
But Grandpa Worthy was hardly cold in his grave when Ruby discovered the keys to the Cellar and the Beach Hut were going missing and Muriel, damn her, was taking liberties. With men. With that damned Frank Fanshaw. And with the stinking specimens.
It all blew up worse when poor Mrs Keating’s baby was stolen from his pram outside the boarding house. A plainclothes policeman was stationed at the house for a time in case Mrs Keating’s estranged husband should put in an appearance, but he never did, and the policeman eventually went away. After he left, Muriel was finally given her marching orders, told to get out and stay out, and to take the blasted stinking specimens with her, remove every one of them, every single one, and don’t come back. Ruby declared she could no longer abide the reverence of rot, the worshipping of mutilated specimens in jars of stinking formaldehyde – it wasn’t normal, it wasn’t right. Indicative it was, indicative of Muriel’s mentality, the warped mentality of a damn fool who couldn’t let go, not of anything, not even the dead.
Muriel meant to hang on to as much as she could. Those specimens had meant something to her much-loved father and, him gone, they were the world to her. Muriel refused to leave the boarding house till she’d got the specimens organised. She locked herself in the basement, she packed and pickled and labelled for days on end. Then suddenly Muriel and Mr Fanshaw were emptying out the basement. Stella had sat on the stairs, watching them cart off all Muriel’s carefully labelled jars and cases and boxes, dumping them into the back of an old munitions truck Mr Fanshaw had somehow got the loan of, leaving a trail of packing straw like in The Babes in the Wood. At the last moment, Mr Fanshaw had shoved Stella into the back of the truck along with the stinking specimens while he drove the whole lot clattering up the road to Embleton and dumped it at all angles outside the Beach Hut. Muriel would stay there and sod to bloody Ruby. Frank shrugged and left Muriel to carry it all in. He took Stella by the hand and helped her back into the truck. They drove back to Newcastle, more slowly, and in silence, Mr Fanshaw shaking his head and crunching the gears and occasionally scratching at his crotch.
So, contrary to Ruby Willoughby’s wishes, Muriel stayed on at the Beach Hut, where she tackled the taxidermy with a renewed enthusiasm and had a new kitchen built with shelves for all the specimens and chemicals. But still Muriel kept on coming back to the boarding house, turning up unannounced and taking Stella away with her, trying to keep her. By then, Stella had gone right off the Beach Hut. It was creepy. She didn’t like the smells of the chemicals and the dead animals hanging by their feet from the rafters with blood dripping out. She couldn’t sleep, knowing there were wizened specimens of innards and jars full of eyes on the other side of the wall from where her bed was. She was scared to go into the new kitchen where she knew eyes could watch her. And Frank Fanshaw was often there, his braces dangling, his grubby vest sweaty, his underarm hair escaping like crippled spiders. Stella would be glad when Grandma Willoughby came storming up in the A35 and, without saying a word, she’d grab hold of Stella’s wrist, manhandle her into the back seat of the car and fetch her straight back to Newcastle.
One day, out of the blue, a large brown envelope came through the post. Grandma Willoughby had stopped what she was doing, wiped her hands on the dishtowel and torn open the envelope.
‘Right,’ she said, ‘Right. I’m going to put a stop to this whole blessed malarkey.’
‘Have you got a bee in your bonnet?’ Stella asked.
‘You just wait and see,’ Grandma Willoughby said. ‘I’ve got a lot more than a blinking bee.’
Grandma Willoughby was always saying how she had right on her side. Now she was very pleased with herself and saying she had the full force of the
law behind her. The Judge had agreed with her and had made an Order of the High Court of Justice. The Order said Stella was a Ward of Court. Grandma Willoughby waved the official paper in front of Stella.
‘See,’ she said, triumphant, ‘it’s all there in black and white. I’ll fettle that Muriel if it’s the last thing I do.’ She’d folded the paper into four and put it back in its brown envelope. She put the envelope into her handbag.
‘From now on, our Stella, the Judge says you’ve to stay put here with me. No more gallivanting off with Muriel to that Beach Hut. Is that understood?’ Without waiting for a reply, Grandma Willoughby clicked the stiff black leather handbag shut.
Chapter Ten
That day, Grandma Willoughby cleared the breakfasts more quickly than usual. She bustled about, stuffing empty sacks and baskets and boxes into the back seat of the Austin. She ordered Stella to get in and be quick about it. She drove off at great speed with a determined look on her face and her hat at an angle – she’d been in such a rush of purpose she’d forgotten the hat-pin. Stella, squeezed in the back seat among the packaging, had watched her grandmother’s set face in the rear-view mirror. She knew better than to ask questions. Grandma Willoughby was clearly not in the mood for talking. They sped up the Great North Road in silence.
After an hour, they were bumping too fast along the muddy track that goes along behind the stone cottages at Low Newton, round the corner, past the back of The Fisherman’s Arms. With a scattering of stones, Grandmother Willoughby pulled up in the area where the fishing boats are kept in winter and where cars are not supposed to park. She yelled at Stella to get a move on and help her with the bags. She straightened her hat, locked the car, picked up as many packages as she could carry, and set off along the dune path with Stella stumbling behind carrying her own load, a sharp wind in their faces. There was nobody about. They wended their way through the dunes and through the little colony of wooden beach huts that stand here and there at angles, mostly closed up for the coming winter. Grandmother Willoughby puffed and panted up the last steep slope but didn’t slow down. Stella followed.