The Devil in the Snow

by Sarah Armstrong

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’ She flipped through the images of Cerys, the words overlapping. Have you seen her, you seen her, seen her, her? ‘I don’t know. If the police have already spoken to her friends and she’s probably not even here, it won’t achieve much.’

  ‘They’re for her, the posters and the fliers. Isn’t that what you said?’

  ‘I know. If she sees them, she’ll know I haven’t given up on her. I don’t know where she is but I know that she’ll be wanting me to look for her. But, honestly, I think I just wanted something to do.’

  Her mobile trilled. A message from Marianna. She turned the phone on its face.

  Kallu pulled the chair out and sat next to her. ‘Something has changed in you. You don’t think she’s gone now, not properly?’

  ‘I think she’s making a statement, that she doesn’t love me or need me.’

  ‘So by sending out the leaflets you’re allowing your daughter to emotionally blackmail you? To prove how much you love her before she makes contact?’ Kallu put his hand out and held a flyer up. ‘That’s mad, Shona.’

  ‘That’s motherhood.’

  ‘Something has changed.’ Kallu looked into Cerys’ flat paper eyes.

  The phone rang and she looked at the display. The number was withheld. It was probably Marianna, but maybe not. Maybe.

  ‘Hello?’

  An almost silent static and the call was ended.

  ‘Wrong number,’ she said.

  ‘Do you think it was Cerys?’

  She shrugged and placed the phone face down on the table.

  ‘Something has shifted.’ Kallu was talking to Cerys. ‘What has moved?’

  Shona threw her head back at looked at the ceiling. She wasn’t in the mood for Kallu today. There were real things happening. She had to do something real. And where was Maynard? Maynard didn’t care, he wasn’t bothered. He was going to get his money from the house. He said Cerys could look after herself. He said Shona was overreacting. The police said she was somewhere safe, and there of her own volition and didn’t want Shona to be given the address. Everyone said she would just have to wait. She wanted them to trawl the river, to dig up gardens, to get the helicopters out and turn the town over. She had the clear feeling that everyone knew something except her. Especially Kallu.

  She was trying to be open with him, but the idea that she was a fool believing in a fraud hadn’t left her. Even, she thought back, that he’d had his episode the very day she began to truly doubt him, that was suspicious, like he was proving himself.

  At some point during the night she’d decided that she wasn’t going to tell him anything. If he was for real, whatever he was, he could convince her.

  ‘It’s you,’ Kallu said. ‘You’ve shifted.’

  ‘What?’ She swung her head down and her neck cricked.

  ‘Tell me about the last time you saw Sean.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s important.’

  ‘We argued.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘No. I can’t remember, it was a long time ago.’

  Shona went to the cupboard and took out two mugs, slamming them down with such force in front of the kettle that one bounced off and smashed on the floor. They stared at it. Kallu went to fetch the dustpan. Shona sat back down at the table.

  ‘Now you can remember,’ he said.

  Shona didn’t recall much of her brother during their childhood. The nine-year gap meant that they had little in common apart from their parents, and they rarely wanted to talk about them.

  When their father died, no-one went back to the house after the funeral. There were a couple of people who had worked with their father who turned up at the crematorium, but no-one had been invited. They tried to sympathise with the family, angled for an invitation onwards. Their mother, dressed in a yellow polyester dress which stuck to the back of her legs in the heat, flapped the order of service.

  ‘No, we’re not going on anywhere. I have shopping to do.’ She put the pamphlet down and smoothed out the creases behind her knees. ‘Lovely to meet you.’

  Shona heard her on the way out asking when she could pick up the ashes.

  Sean had taken Shona’s hand and reluctantly led the old workmates to the local pub. Shona tried to drink a glass of Coke but it made her feel uncomfortably bubbly. The men exchanged looks before making their excuses. Sean drank the two pints people put behind the bar for him and began to talk about leaving.

  Sean left home the year after the accident, found lodgings and began work as an electrician’s apprentice. He wrote home every week and Shona was in awe of this giant brother who scaled pylons and danced along the wires, or so she believed.

  By 1988, when Shona was sixteen, Sean was twenty-five and had a house and baby of his own. He came back to show Greta the baby, already fifteen months old.

  Shona stayed for as long as she thought was polite and then went up to her bedroom. Sean knocked on her door.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. Shona put her book down on the bed and watched him look around her room.

  ‘You never moved into my room.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s bigger.’

  ‘I know.’

  He looked at the bookshelves. ‘Law and religion. A strange combination.’

  ‘They’re not on religion really. Spirituality.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  Shona hesitated.

  ‘You’re going to have to be quicker than that in the court room.’

  ‘I don’t want to do that kind of law. I want to investigate bad convictions.’

  ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘Same old Shona. You always knew more than everyone else, didn’t you? I think, if someone’s convicted, there’s a bloody good reason. But you? No, you wouldn’t accept that, would you? If someone tells you something, they must be wrong.’

  Shona sneered at him. ‘If laws were truly right, they would never be changed.’

  ‘You always were a smartarse.’ He pulled a book from the shelf and flicked through it. ‘The precious, favourite child.’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  ‘Had a better time of it then me, though, didn’t you?’

  Shona stiffened. ‘You weren’t the only one. Dad hit me too.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Once.’

  Once. He’d hit her once and then he died. It was then, aged six, she decided that her life would be dedicated to punishing the wrongdoer, to looking at them until they admitted their actions were wrong and changed. If they wouldn’t change of their own accord, then she would force them.

  Sean looked at her. ‘You still think you did something magical that night, don’t you?’

  Shona flushed. ‘No.’

  ‘Something spiritual?’ He laughed. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Just a strange coincidence, was it?’

  ‘You need all the evidence. You should know that.’ He pushed the book back onto the shelf. ‘You’ve had a gift for making people look at you, Shona, and that’s your only talent. There’s nothing special about you. You were a girl and your mother took pity on you.’

  ‘Mum never did anything.’

  ‘Didn’t she?’ Sean looked at her posters. ‘Someone was looking after you, Shona, but there was nothing mystical about it.’

  Shona thought of her mother, thin and so breakable, fighting the muscular delivery man, the man who humped around boxes and wielded sharp tools. But then, she’d seen the look in her mother’s eye the morning after he died as her lips pressed against each other.

  ‘I don’t think she could have done anything.’ Shona shook her head. ‘Not after all that time. She was more scared of him than anyone.’

  ‘Oh, yes, she could. You were worth protecting,’ said Sean. ‘You had everyone standing up for you, you always have had.’

  In his face there was a glimpse of the boy she remembered in the lumbering man. He looked as if he might cry and turned away. Something had been transgressed and she knew he could feel it too. He looked relieved that memo
ry had been pricked like a bubble and dispersed. There was nothing left between them.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sean.’

  He pulled the door closed behind him.

  Shona had never said anything to Greta about it. The idea of her struggling with her father was too ridiculous. Both she and Sean had created their own versions of what happened. In her version, she was the victor. In his, he was the victim.

  Since returning to Essex Shona had forced herself to visit her mother twice a year, on her birthday and Boxing Day. They never spoke about her father. His presence had never really been felt in the ornaments and books, but Shona suspected that the house had been cleared of anything that had been his. Still the space where his chair had been felt occupied.

  On her third visit as an adult, as she lounged in the armchair, her belly swollen, there was a phone call. On the verge of sleep, as she had seemed to be for the whole pregnancy, she could hear her mother’s voice becoming more strident and angry. Shona opened her eyes and considered rearranging her limbs, placing her feet on the floor, but couldn’t bear to raise her head from the soft purple cushion. She caught the flow of her mother’s anger and then let it float past her. There were so many colours in the room now, primary and secondary, it hurt her eyes to try to process it all at once. There were no sugary pastels, just the pure colour of flags.

  Her mother’s present was still unopened, Shona’s card next to Sean’s on the mantelpiece. There were two photos at either end: one of Shona, aged about ten, serious and pale in her school uniform; one of Sean in his cowboy costume, aged about six, with sad, shadowed eyes.

  Her mother slammed the phone down and came back into the room. She settled herself back on the sofa and picked up the knitting. A small luminous orange cardigan. Shona would never put it on the baby.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Patricia.’

  ‘Auntie Patricia? Does she want to visit?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a bloody nuisance.’ Greta turned the needles around for a new row. ‘She wants to stay for a few days, or a week, and fill it with talk about what a fabulous brother he was. I couldn’t be bothered with it then and I certainly can’t be bothered now. She said I said I’d call her eighteen months ago. Fancy waiting all that time for me to contact her.’ She frowned. ‘Is this a purl or a knit?’

  Shona closed her eyes again. After a while the ticking of the needles resumed, slowly with an unpractised skill.

  ‘Can you give it a couple of weeks and write to her? Say I’ve died or emigrated or something,’ Greta said.

  ‘How about, you’ve been sectioned?’

  The ticking stopped. ‘If you like. Anything to stop her calling.’

  Shona opened her eyes and her mother resumed the row. She had started dyeing her hair, back to the dark brown Shona remembered from childhood. The way it fell forward onto her face reminded Shona of being put to bed, gently tucked in and lying perfectly still while the shouting escalated in the front room underneath her bed.

  ‘I’ll change my phone number too.’

  Shona nodded and closed her eyes again. She would have a sandwich and a slice of birthday cake and then she could leave.

  Shona looked at Kallu. There was something else she needed to know. Jimmy had said Maynard wanted something. The more she thought about it the more she thought this could be her way out. Somewhere in her mind she must know what it was, but she was sure that she’d seen Jimmy with Kallu and until she knew why she wasn’t saying anything. Just maybe Maynard wasn’t the only one who wanted it.

  Kallu was watching her face carefully. ‘Is there anything you need to ask?’

  ‘I need to see my mother.’

  ‘Give me her address,’ Kallu said.

  Shona wrote it on the back of an envelope. ‘You’re not going to visit her, are you?’

  ‘No. I want to meditate on it. There’s something else there and it’s easier if I can place her in the world. But you, Shona, will find answers with her.’

  He stood up.

  ‘It was Halloween last night,’ Shona said.

  ‘I know.’

  She wanted to say, what about the veil between the worlds thinning, isn’t it supposed to mean something? Make messages between the worlds easier? Instead she said, ‘Happy All Saints Day.’

  He smiled and went to the shed. She shivered as he let the cold air into the house. She lay down on the sofa and then made herself sit up. She was so tired, but resisted having a nap because she was bound to oversleep and be late for Jude. Since they came back from Mariana’s she had started a habit of wandering the rooms in the night, rushing to every noise outside the house or downstairs. That’s if Kallu wasn’t making a weird scene and covering every noise. What if it was Cerys knocking lightly so she didn’t wake Jude? What if she couldn’t get in? She could barely close her eyes despite knowing that the sounds she heard were fantasies, little fabricated hopes and disappointments. All the fireworks going off in the dark made her jump, and it hadn’t reached its peak yet. She needed to get tickets for the display for Jude, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to walk around in the dark.

  The letterbox snapped shut and there was a thud almost simultaneously. She forced herself from the sofa, expecting the image of someone, maybe Cerys, behind the patterned dips of glass. Something had changed, he said. It could be her. There was no-one there, just a small package on top of the local paper, no address or stamp.

  She picked both up with her fingertips and took them to the kitchen. With a knife she sliced the brown paper underneath the Sellotape on the package, thinking all the time about where fingerprints were most likely to be found. Loosened, she teased the paper away from the contents. Bubble wrap surrounded something hard and silver. She tried to slice underneath the Sellotape again but had to give up and use her fingers to rip a hole in the wrap. It was a photo frame with a picture of a still blonde Cerys, underneath an umbrella, laughing. She was looking up at something or someone; it had to be someone, the way she was looking so engaged. It was dark, the flash having whitened Cerys’ skin and the shine on the umbrella. Shona scrutinised the details: the clothes were all new, she hadn’t seen any of them before, and they were shorter and tighter than anything Cerys had worn at home. Neither did she recognise any buildings in the background. It looked like any town centre; a Costa café, a phone shop and WHSmith. Not abroad, then.

  Shona pulled out the back support and stood it on the table. She was less angry than before, but much less scared. She realised that mostly she was angry that Cerys was well and cared for, free to come back, and angry with Cerys for being happy without her. She dialled Cerys’ mobile again. Sometimes it went straight to voicemail and sometimes it rang first. It must mean something. She didn’t know what. This time it was voicemail.

  She couldn’t talk to Mariana about this. She wanted to phone Thea, she wanted her lightness of presence. Thea was like Kallu, she realised, but accessible and with no answers beyond common sense. But sometimes common sense was quite enough and being stoned would be better than getting drunk again. Or different, at least.

  She picked up the pile of leaflets, all with Cerys’ smiling face on. She was going to put one through every door between here and Jude’s school. One of her friends was bound to see it, if she put them through enough doors. She was probably still talking to them on Facebook or FaceTime or something like that. Shona had never got the hang of them, but Cerys’ friends would know how to tell her that her mum was still hoping. Still thinking about her.

  Greta

  I think Sean was four, just about to start school, when my mother took him upstairs to change his top. He’d bitten off the bottom of the square cone and dripped yellow ice cream right down to his waist. She never mentioned the bruises on his back. She never came back to the house either. She could finally see Larry for what he was, the devil she’d always anticipated.

  She blamed me, of course. After all the stories and warnings, I hadn’t been vigilant. I’d forgotten the rules and married him
. I’d allowed him into the family. As far as she was concerned, I’d married the devil that was chasing us. It was just us three against him.

  I watched my daughter alter and grow as my son, nine years older, shrank into himself and begin to disappear. His back curved and the skin at the sides of his fingernails was ragged. He developed a habit of looking over his shoulder at the slightest noise and he often complained to me of a stiff neck. The same monster which fed her was killing him but I saw my son sitting next to the baby, stroking her hand and passing back the toys she would throw to make herself laugh.

  I thought, maybe, it would be good for him in a way, make him stronger and more self-sufficient. It didn’t.

  He begged to be allowed to stay with his granny, but I wouldn’t allow him in her house in case my husband killed her while fetching him back. I thought of running but didn’t even know where to start. He had the money and all I could have gathered would have taken us to the end of the road before he caught up with us, his work van stinking with its faulty exhaust.

  I knew I should have done something to protect him but, if I’m honest, I wanted Sean to save me. My little boy. Smaller than average even when he wasn’t cowering, he was sweet and affectionate as a toddler. His father saw this and called him a pansy, a mummy’s boy because he didn’t follow him into the garden and demand to play football or cricket or learn boxing. And I thought, what if he’s right? What if I’m encouraging Sean in traits that will get him bullied and beaten up at school and at work? Instead I allowed him to be bullied and beaten up at home.

  My daughter had an entirely different father, smiling and indulgent. She smiled, she pouted, she shut her ears to everything she shouldn’t hear and she had absolute confidence in the world and its infinite fairness. Her father took her side against me or her brother, and she would never have disagreed with him, brought forward that frown. And so she was saved from his anger, and gave herself the credit. My son was sacrificed in the process but she didn’t seem to notice that. We see what we want, and the rest creeps around our peripheral vision.