It’s worse than I thought. They are not only children, they are girls. I hear their tittering voices...
Harry stops to get some food. The apple is gone and instead of sating him it awakens a hunger he did not know was there. He leaves everything in place and goes to the kitchen. The fridge is full of that kale healthy shit Tara likes. Harry fancies a fish pie or something that can add plaque to his arteries. At least eggs are eggs. He cracks three, whisks, lights up the gas, adds a slice of butter, pours the eggs in, forgets salt, tries to add retrospectively but hesitates and ends up adding too much. He turns down the gas to regroup, and hears something upstairs. He waits. It does not recur.
He climbs up the stairs, checks the entertainment room, the spare rooms, the lounge. He checks Adrienne’s room, then opens Cory’s room.
Nothing.
He exhales. Tara’s comments plus reading the creepy writing has him so jumpy he had expected to see children! And they are girls! He turns slowly, but then he hears something behind the door, in the blind spot. He goes in and closes the door. There is a small garden snake making its way to the dark space under the bed. Shit. The gardener had assured him there weren’t any more. Harry lifts the bed and moves it closer to the centre of the room. He almost drops it on his own feet.
He does not know the collective noun for slow worms, but there is a collection of them under Cory’s bed. Dozens, maybe up to a hundred of them coiled among each other, silent but nesting in wet shredded paper. When he exposes them they stop whatever they were doing and are uncannily silent, raising their heads towards him and not moving, as if waiting.
“Holy fucking shit.”
He backs out of the door and closes it. He takes off his T-shirt and bunches it under the door, then he pulls out his phone.
“Find exterminator,” he says to the assistance programme.
FOUR HOURS LATER the portly exterminator loads up the last of his equipment.
“All done for ya,” he says. He rips off a dubious invoice. “I’ve never seen so many in one place, I’ll tell ya that fer free.”
Apparently that is the only thing free, Harry thinks as he looks at the bill. Half the price is the emergency call-out fee.
“I looked everywhere else and the house is clear. I checked the grounds. Nothing.”
He drives away in his gaudy yellow pest control van. Harry watches him go and decides there and then not to tell Tara. The van rounds the corner and that girl with the bicycle comes round it, the Newcastle fan. What’s her name again? Shit. Lara? Louise.
“Harry, you look really cross,” says Louise.
“Yeah, well, that van you just passed? It’s gone with five hundred of my pounds.”
“Ouch. Why?”
He tells her.
“You could make that trilling sound that Arabs make when someone is dead,” she says.
“It won’t give me my money back.”
“No, but it might make you feel silly.”
“And this is the kind of feeling you advise me to cultivate?”
“Trust me, silly is good. Try it. Go on.”
She reminds him of Tara, the kind of thing she used to say when they had just met. Soon, Harry is ululating after the pest control truck. Her voice joins his and they break into laughter. People stare at them while walking past the house.
She is going to grow into a great beauty, this Louise. He can see the proto-elegance in the gestures she uses to return her hair after laughing. She also reminds him of Adrienne in some way.
“Do you live close by?” asks Harry.
She points in a north-westerly direction. “In the high seventies.”
Good girl. Vague, but polite.
“So you must know about the people who live here,” Harry says.
“What would you like to know?” she asks. She is momentarily distracted by a heron in flight.
“Oh, anything.”
“In number fifty there’s a time-share flat. Three Nigerian families. They live there in eight-hour shifts. The ones on the late shift are nice. Number eighteen belongs to a cat lady. She has twelve cats that I’ve counted.”
“Louise, twelve cats do not a cat lady make.”
Louise wags a finger. “Best not interrupt me, Harry.”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“Mr Collins at sixty has a mail-order bride from Kazakhstan.”
“How do you know what a mail-order –”
She raises an eyebrow.
“Fine. Go on. Wait, do you know about this house? Our house?”
“Why? Do you have problems?”
“No. Well... the kids are having problems adjusting.”
“Do you want me to talk to them?”
Harry is considering this when Tara calls. They talk about Adrienne, who is now vomiting, and he turns away and drifts from where he stood.
When the phone call ends Louise is no longer there, but it is time to get Cory. It is much later when he remembers that she did not answer his question about the house.
7.
IN THE HOSPITAL corridor, there is a vending machine, and Tara aims for it.
She selects a cherry-flavoured soda, pays for it, then gets an artificial tropical juice flavour. It does not upset her. She did not really want anything, but comes to the machine for a sense of normalcy. There are two blue plastic chairs about a yard away from the machine and Tara sits on one. The can of soda is open and emits a gentle hiss as the bubbles burst. She does not drink.
Adrienne is asleep, but she is receiving a drip because she cannot keep anything down. They gave her anti-emetics, but she can’t even swallow a glass of water without retching. At least she’s speaking in English. She has a slight fever, and the doctors now think it might be a viral infection, although dehydration can cause a fever by itself. The fall-back diagnosis is an eating disorder. She is seven years old. How can she have an eating disorder?
A woman walks down the corridor and sits beside Tara who shifts a little as if making room, even though the seats don’t require this. From the corner of her eye, Tara thinks this woman is dressed too elegantly for hospital, but can’t be bothered to suss it out. She drinks the soda, which tastes like battery acid. She actually checks the can for an expiry date.
“That bad?” says the woman.
The woman is seated in an awkward position. She twists at the waist so that the front of her body faces Tara. She holds herself rigidly, like she is a cardboard cut out. She seems desperate to speak, although Tara would rather not.
“Let me guess,” says the woman. “Child?”
“Daughter,” says Tara. The woman talks funny, like the old house-style of the BBC circa 1950, though she looks to be in her mid-thirties.
The woman nods stiffly and says, “I had daughters.”
Tara doesn’t want to ask, but the “had’ hangs heavy. “What happened?”
“Oh, they died. Daughters always died on me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Tara isn’t sure, but the woman seems entirely devoid of sorrow. There is something about her eyes, too. She doesn’t exactly have a fixed stare, but the blinks seem deliberate, as if she has to remember to blink. Her makeup is perfect in a way that reminds Tara of Betty’s next-morning efforts. All of a sudden she no longer wants to be in the woman’s orbit. Tara rises, takes the foetid soda with her, says goodbye.
The woman turns at the waist as Tara passes her, making sure her torso is always facing Tara. She looks like a manikin or a wooden puppet. After Tara has been walking for a minute she turns, looks back, and the woman is still maintaining the abnormal posture, facing towards her. She waves a spooky manikin wave.
Tara does not wave back.
Daughters always died on me. Is that the kind of thing to say to a woman with a hospitalised daughter? Tara almost died once, when she was just a little bit older than Adrienne is now, fell off a horse. Is this something all little girls must go through?
She nods to nurses she knows from when she used
to work here. As she is about to enter Adrienne’s room she hears voices inside, but when she opens the door only her daughter is in the room.
“You’re awake,” says Tara.
Adrienne nods slowly. She is sitting up in the bed, IV line trailing from her left arm like a charger cable for a robot.
“Who were you talking to?” Tara casts about for the inevitable mobile phone.
“Nobody.”
“You seem better.”
“I feel better, mummy. Daddy did something.”
Maybe she’s a little delirious. “No, darling, the nice doctors gave you fluids.”
“No, daddy did something at home, mummy.” Adrienne scratches around the IV insertion point. “I’m hungry.”
Tara feels she will burst into tears. “I’ll get you something from the vending machine.”
8.
CORY’S BAG IS lighter as he waits for his father. He did not eat everything. In fact he only ate the banana and threw the rest of the lunch into the bin. He is not hungry, but he does not want to worry his parents because of Ade, so he gives them the impression he is eating.
He knows from experience that his father will be a bit late, so he sits under an ash tree and hums to himself as he watches other parents pick their children up.
“Cory.” The voice comes from his left, but he knows who it is.
Louise is holding onto one of the handlebars of a bicycle and smiling at him.
“You’re here,” says Cory. “You made it. What took you so long?”
“The new house,” says Louise. She lays the bike on the grass and sits with her legs tucked under her. “It’s not right.”
“I know. There’s a woman. She says she’s going to hurt us if I don’t –”
Louise makes a dismissive waving motion. “Pfah. Rodomontade.”
“Ro... do...?”
“Empty boasting. I won’t let anything happen to you, Cory. Do you believe me?”
“Yes, Louise.”
“Always?”
“Always, Louise.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too, Louise. So does Adrienne.”
LOUISE HAS ALWAYS been there.
As far back as Cory can remember Louise has been with them. When he was three he remembers her standing in the room all the time, slightly to the left of mummy, silent most of the time, but sometimes whispering to Adrienne. When Cory gets older, Louise speaks to him, interested in the games he plays with his toy cars, whispering answers to questions from time to time, tickling him. It takes a while for Cory to realise that neither his mother nor father can see her, but Adrienne accepts this and so does Cory. Both he and Adrienne insist on setting a table place for Louise, and mummy thinks it’s for an imaginary friend, but Louise eats the food. Mummy thinks either Adrienne or Cory eats it.
Cory never tries to understand who she is. He thinks at first she is a second sister, but though she looks like a child, she talks like a grown up. She knows things that grownups know.
“WHY AREN’T YOU looking at me, Cory?” asks Louise.
“You look different,” he says.
“I know I do, but you recognise me, right?”
Cory nods.
“I spoke to your daddy. I had to. He found the slowworms.”
Cory feels fear at this. “The woman will be angry.”
Louise seems uncertain and looks away. “Cory, your father will be here any minute. I have to go. But I won’t let anything happen to you, all right?”
Cory nods.
“Cory!” His daddy calls from the gate. When Cory looks back Louise is gone.
9.
HOMEWORK, THEN THE junkiest junk food available to humankind.
Adrienne keeps the strawberry milkshake down and promptly falls asleep in Harry’s lap. She maintains that her father is a hero. Harry himself dozes, perhaps the result of the hard shake he had, bourbon-impregnated. Cory is asleep beside them, clutching Adrienne’s left ankle.
Food. Sleep. English language. Easy, right? Easy to take for granted, more like. Even now Tara feels like waking Adrienne up to see if she will speak in that gibberish, or if she’s going to have pink-tinged vomit. Or to see if Cory will hum that stupid Hanged Man song.
Tara is happy for the break from all the tension, but she does not feel relaxed at all. She contemplates the house, what Harry has done here. On most of the floors he took out the walls that were not weight-bearing, creating wide spaces, massive rooms, and a sense of freedom. Five storeys of freedom. So why does she not feel free? Five storeys of shiny new wiring, new plaster, new paint, new carpets. A proto-wine cellar in the basement. It all seems so nouveau riche to Tara, which she knows is unfair, but she can’t help feeling all the same.
And it’s wrong. Something is wrong, and the children are just the mine canaries for a wider toxicity.
She walks up and down the stairs. Brightly lit, modern. She checks Harry’s man cave where, for all she knows, he hides porn. It is calm with the odious electronics, the abandoned guitar, the kitsch cadmium red bookshelves with bound volumes he would never read. He has, she sees, collated all the books on which Cory has written. She now remembers the document he mentioned.
She opens the laptop and reads.
What now? What the hell were they up to?
Noise, noise, shifting about, noise. I had a surprise for them. I got the notion to stockpile beetles, ants, spiders and reptiles, all in a tarpaulin. It just dropped in my head. I suspended it from the ceiling of the room above me. Maybe I should get a dog. I should get two dogs.
Their noise followed a pattern, and I waited for it. It usually started with some scratches, a thump or two, giggles, sometimes little girl tears, then they seemed to get into a dance party. This marked the crescendo, and after this the noise usually reduced to the occasional knock and scratch, with random bursts of hilarity.
I knew at that point that they were not ordinary girls, but then, that was an oxymoron if I ever heard one. There are no ordinary girls.
I had even caught glimpses of them. I thought perhaps there were six or seven of them, but I couldn’t be sure. I caught a scraggly haired, skinny thing gnawing on a chair leg in the dining room. She looked up at me as she chewed, like a puppy cutting teeth. I could see where her teeth had scraped off the varnish. She would chew and lick, chew and lick. I threw the cup I was holding at her and she slinked off, first backing away, then climbing the wall, then ceiling. Her dirty nightgown billowed downwards when she was upside down. She rasped at me, and clambered through the top of the doorway like a gigantic spider.
The arachnoid movement was what made me think of spiders and other crawlies that little girls don’t like. I anticipated the pleasure of when I would spring the trap.
I accepted all this because there are strange things in the world and we don’t always Tara, do you really think the answers lie in this story? Tara. Tara, you cannot save your family. They will all die screaming in pain or moaning as they waste away or cut short as a noose –
Tara screams, and flings the laptop from her. “What the fuck? What the fucking –”
Her heart hammers inside her chest. She crawls over and picks the laptop back up. The screen trembles because her hands are shaking.
Language, woman. Your mouth is filthy. Before I kill you, I will wash it out with noxious chemicals –
“Tara?” Harry’s voice. She rises to meet him.
“Harry, why didn’t you tell me about this.”
“About what?”
She shoves the laptop at him.
“I did tell you. I told you I had collated –”
“Not that. You didn’t tell me he mentions me.”
“Sorry, what?” Harry looks at her with a worried expression.
“Here.” She looks at the document, standing beside him. There is no mention of her anywhere. The document just continues its odious journey. At times it describes spells, but otherwise it is all invective.
Tara feels like she is lo
sing her mind, but is sure she is not. She is not flaky at all. She knows the sun is mostly hydrogen, she does not trust hippie philosophy and she is the kind of person who would not drink the Kool Aid. Betty, bless her soul, would, but not Tara. She knows what she saw.
“Sit down,” she tells Harry.
She speaks.
10.
CORY OPENS HIS eyes and realises his parents are gone. Adrienne is asleep on the couch. He sees what woke him. Six girls in nightgowns surround him and his sister. He swallows, then reaches into his pocket. He removes the dead spider and the girls retreat to the walls. A lizard or slow worm would have been better. He puts the spider between him and Adrienne and hugs her. Soon he is asleep again.
11.
SHE HAS STOPPED talking. The laptop lies between them, fan humming. Harry wonders what she thinks, what she expects of him.
“We have to leave,” Tara says, as if she has read his mind.
“Wait, what?”
“We have to leave this house. It’s off somehow. It’s bad.”
“To leave the... Oh, Tara.” Harry laughs bitterly. “This is our home now. We can’t leave. All my money is tied into it, remember?”
“‘My’ money?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, did you spend time in prison for a crime you didn’t commit, then receive compensation?” It comes out sharper than he intends.
“Why are you suddenly angry at me?”
“Because you have no idea what you’re saying. This is it. Who’s going to buy this? I did it for you.”
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