by Elaine Chong
I’ve spent most of the day in my room here thinking about the past and contemplating the future. I can’t feel what Julia feels. I can’t feel angry indignation. She can only think about the legacy that isn’t hers and that’s why she’s been thumping up and down the stairs all day long in the uncertain hope that she’ll uncover another piece of evidence. But what has Maggie’s Miriam really got? It’s only the promise of Hillcrest. The actual bricks and mortar might never be hers to possess, because life is unpredictable and uncertain.
At around four-thirty, I heard a car pull up onto the drive and then the front door slammed shut. I know Richard and Julia intend to drive over to Hutton Home Help offices and confront Maggie, but what good it will do them, I’m really not sure.
I’ve continued to doze since then, but the sound of glass breaking suddenly wakes me. The noise appeared to come from somewhere downstairs. I think it must be a window. At first, I’m apprehensive but then I remember the great pile of metal poles and wooden planks erected beneath Julia’s balcony doors. Clearly something has broken loose.
I’m thinking about going down and investigating when it strikes me that the temperature in the room has dropped dramatically. My immediate thought is that the timer on the central heating system needs to be adjusted and I sit up, reminding myself that I have to lead with my operated leg first when I get out of bed.
I’m shuffling my bottom to the edge of the bed as per Frankie the physiotherapist’s instructions when a movement on the far side of the room catches my eye. Most of the room is in semi-darkness; only the bed has light. It spills from the table lamp onto the place where I was lying and it doesn’t reach into the corners of the room, but I already know what’s hiding in the shadows.
I haven’t thought about Aggie for several days, not since I woke up the morning after I was discharged from hospital and knew that she was in the room with me. I know that she’s in the room with me now. I also know that I’m alone in the house.
I realise, that somehow, I have to get myself to the front door without toppling headfirst down the stairs. In my haste to get away, I knock my walking stick to the ground, but I’m not going to waste time searching for it. On Saturday I screamed my fear out loud, but now it’s like a huge weight pressing on my chest: I can barely breathe.
Holding onto to anything that meets my outstretched hand, I feel my way to the door. My hands are shaking so hard that I struggle to hold onto the handle, but I manage to turn it and let myself out onto the landing.
Julia has left a light on downstairs. It shines like a beacon of hope in the darkness. I tell myself I just have to hold onto the bannisters with both hands and keep my wits about me. Don’t look down but most of all don’t look back, I tell myself.
I’ve almost reached the head of the stairs when I realise that someone is walking into the hallway from George’s study. It’s a light feminine tread so I know it isn’t Richard. Relief floods through me. “Julia?” I call out. “Julia, is that you?” The voice that calls back to me isn’t my daughter, but as soon as I set eyes on the person now standing in the stairwell, I know who she is. It’s like looking at a carbon copy of George: the eyes, the nose, the angles of her face, but most of all the cruel twist of her mouth as she smiles mockingly up at me. And now I understand what she’s done, how foolish I’ve been, and I feel the blood rush to my head. She’s even wearing the red dress.
“So, that’s where you are,” Miriam says.
“What do you want?” I call down to her.
“I want what’s rightfully mine. I’ve tried for months and months to persuade you to give it up to me, but you’re a tough old bird. You even survived that fall down the stairs, so now I’m just going to take it from you.”
I hold tightly onto the handrail in front of me, because I know that, once again, I’m in danger of falling. I have no idea what Miriam has planned but I’m not going to hand myself over like some sacrificial lamb. “This house is legally mine until the day I die and I’m not leaving it before that, so how exactly do you propose to take it from me?”
She replies in a voice that would freeze the brandy in a Champagne cocktail, “I think you’ve just answered your own question.”
It takes several seconds for my brain to process what she’s said. When I see her place her foot on the first step, my heart beats wildly, but suddenly I feel something pulling me back into the bedroom. I feel hands on my shoulders dragging me away from the stairs; I feel icy breath on my neck and for a moment I panic and struggle against it, but the more I struggle the more insistent it becomes.
I’m being forcibly manoeuvred back to where I’ve come from, and when my legs buckle under me, I’m lifted up by unseen arms and hauled across the length of the bedroom into the en suite shower room with the heels of my feet drumming on the floor. As soon as I’ve crossed the threshold and the door has slammed shut behind me, I’m left to fall heavily onto the cold tiles.
A small part of my brain is telling me that my new hip joint is a searing ball of agony as the newly healed tissue is torn away, but I don’t feel the pain because my whole attention is now focused on the space between the door and the window.
It’s dark inside the shower room, but a pillar of rippling white light has manifested. Slowly it begins to take colour and form. It’s Aggie. She’s wearing her red dress. It’s a shimmering swirl of scarlet. Her blue eyes shine out of her pale face like the brightest, shiniest sapphires. She looks into my eyes, and then she’s gone, and the room is dark once more, but in that brief moment I saw only love and devotion.
How could I have doubted her?
Somehow, I manage to get to my feet and draw the bolt across on the door, locking myself inside the room. It seems like only moments later that Miriam is banging her fist on the other side of it.
“That won’t save you,” she shouts at me. “You’re going to die, Lenora Oakley!”
I sit back down on the hard floor with my back pressed against the door. “Julia and Richard will be home soon,” I shout back at her. “You should go now, before they find you.”
“By the time they get back here it will be too late to save you, you stupid, old woman.”
Once again, I’m seized by dread and fear. “What have you done?”
She laughs wildly. “I’ve disconnected the fire alarm and built a bonfire under you. It seemed an appropriate way to end the life of a witch.”
The only words I can take on board are ‘built a bonfire under you’, but this is complete madness. “You’re burning down the house?” I cry.
“Not the whole house. Obviously. My father taught me all about fire safety: how to contain them, how to manage the spread, but most of all the importance of keeping doors closed. The paint on the ceiling of the room below you is already blistering by the way. Can you smell the smoke yet?”
I can, but I know Aggie brought me here for a reason, and now I understand why: it’s my only hope of survival.
Miriam pounds on the door. “Are you still breathing in there? It won’t take long to die, and if you’re lucky the smoke will kill you first. But just in case I’m going to open the window in the bedroom here. That should speed things up nicely.”
I hear voices outside – someone must have seen the flames through the window – then I hear Miriam running from the room. When I’m as certain as I can be that she’s gone, I crawl over to the handbasin and heave myself into a standing position, ignoring the pain in my hip and leg. I push in the sink plug and turn on both taps then I turn on the shower.
I’m frightened to switch on the light, so I feel my way to the cupboard where I keep the towels. I grab an armful of them and throw them into the shower and as soon as they’re drenched with water, I pile them up around the door. The basin is already overflowing onto the floor, so I carefully climb into the shower cubicle. My legs are trembling, and my courage is failing me, but I stand under the shower, let the water soak my clothes till I’m wet through to the skin. Only then do I allow myself to s
ink to my knees.
I don’t want to die like this, alone and frightened with the smell of my home burning around me, but if this is the end, at least I know that Aggie, my forever friend, will be waiting for me on the other side. It fills me with an uncertain relief.
Julia
Maggie wants to come with us when we leave.
“Come with us?” I shout at her. “You must be mad! For all we know, you put her up to this.”
Richard tells me to shut up. “Come on, Julia,” he urges. “Let’s get back to the car. It’s just a five-minute drive and we’ve been gone less than an hour.”
“She could be in the house already,” I tell him as we hurry out of the office.
“She doesn’t have a key anymore,” he says. “And I’ve locked the garage so she can’t get in that way.”
I know this is meant to reassure me, but I don’t feel reassured. I haven’t met Miriam, but she strikes me as someone who will go to any length to get what she wants.
We reach the car and scramble into our seats. Richard starts the engine, but he doesn’t pull away.
“Why aren’t we moving already?” I yell at him.
He slowly turns his head to look at me. The colour has drained from his face and his eyes are dark pools of fear. When he speaks, it’s barely a whisper. “Miriam doesn’t need a key. All she has to do is ring the front doorbell. Mum probably got up when she heard us leave. She’ll recognise her, I know she will, and then she’ll invite her into the house because she thinks it was Aggie, who pushed her down the stairs.”
“Why are you wasting time telling me this now?” I say.
He doesn’t reply. He puts his foot on the accelerator and the car shoots forward.
Five minutes is an awfully long time when you’re counting down the seconds, and when we finally arrive back at Hillcrest, there are people standing in the front garden and in the road in front of the house.
A man motions to us not to pull onto the drive. He points back at the house and that’s when we see it: Daddy’s study engulfed in flames.
Richard leaps out of the car before me. I hear him shout, “My mother! Has anyone seen my mother?”
“I haven’t seen anyone come out,” the man says.
I can hear sirens in the distance, but I know it takes just minutes for a whole house to go up in flames. I run over to Richard, who’s pacing up and down in front of the house.
“I have to get inside,” he says. “She could still be in one of the rooms upstairs.”
“You can’t go in there. Please don’t do it Richard,” I plead with him, and I try to pull him back to where the neighbours are standing in a frightened group on the pavement.
He pushes me away. “I’m not going to just leave her to die!” he screams. Before I can do anything to stop him, he’s running around the side of the house.
“Richard!”
“The scaffolding,” he shouts back at me. “I can climb up!”
When I try to run after him, the man who greeted us grabs hold of my arm. “You stay here,” he says. “They’ll need to know the layout of the house. You can explain.”
The sirens are louder now. I know it’s probably just seconds before the fire engine is going to arrive, but the fire has moved into the hallway and thick smoke is billowing up the stairs.
Richard
They say when you drown your life flashes before your eyes. But only when you drown? What happens when you’re trapped inside a burning building and smoke is filling your lungs? Is that like drowning?
I can’t help it. I can’t stop thinking: Is my mother lying on the floor somewhere inside this house and in her mind’s eye a procession of pictures whizzing past at lightning speed? What does she remember as the years race by? A happy childhood on the family farm? A chance meeting with a handsome stranger? Her own children as babies and then, in the blink of an eye, a grown man and a grown woman? Does Lena Bartok feature in this rapid cinematic review of her life? And what about Aggie, the girl in the red dress?
I can’t bear for it to end like this.
At the rear of the house, I can still hear the low-throated roar of the fire at the front, but the flames haven’t reached the rooms overlooking the garden. Back here darkness fills the space, which heightens all my senses and I immediately become aware of the damp smell of wet leaves and light, peppery scent of autumn flowers.
I need a torch, but I don’t have a torch, and I don’t have time to get one.
I stand back from the scaffolding to get a better view – I know there are ladders fixed to the metal poles.
A movement behind the doors, which lead into Julia’s bedroom, catches my eye. They’re criss-crossed with chequered tape so I can see them fairly clearly. Without warning, they’re opened from inside and Miriam steps out onto the wooden planking. She’s wearing a red dress and her long hair is loose and falls about her face. Frantically I call her name, but she doesn’t hear me because she’s completely caught up with something happening in the room behind her.
Hope soars in my heart. My mother is safe. Miriam’s going to help her escape from the house.
But it isn’t my mother who demands Miriam’s wide-eyed attention.
From out of the darkened room, a hazy female figure in a red dress floats into view. It’s like looking at a very old photographic transparency. I recognise who it is straight away, for who else could it be.
Miriam backs away from what’s now a large opening in the bedroom wall and her abject terror is visible in the rapid, jerking movements of her outstretched arms.
I try to call out to her, but fear has robbed me of my voice. I run to the bottom of the ladder but in the very moment I place my foot on the first rung, Miriam screams. The sound slices through the air like a butcher’s knife. Seconds later, her body hits the flagstones on the patio.
The complete absence of sound and movement proclaims her death.
I have to make a split-second decision. Do I still have time to save my mother from the fire? Before I have a chance to move, uniformed figures are clustering around the bottom of the ladder beside me.
“Just stand back, Mr Oakley,” someone orders me. “We’ll take it from here.”
My eyes search the ground for Miriam but all I can really see of her is the red dress, blood-red in the pale light of the moon. Her broken body is soon surrounded by more uniforms and I’m asked if I know who she is.
I hesitate before answering. Do I want to claim her as my sister? Julia wouldn’t hesitate for a second to deny her, and perhaps this time she’s right, so I tell them, “Her name’s Miriam. Miriam Bartok.”
Six Months Later…
Lenora
A fine plume of smoke announces the success of Richard’s debut attempt to build a bonfire. We’ve been outside in the garden for more than an hour, but he isn’t inclined to listen to advice even though I’ve told him that burning green wood isn’t like putting kiln-dried kindling in the stove at his pretty, Victorian cottage. But I mustn’t complain, because Richard and Silvio worked like proverbial Trojans to get the bungalow ready for me and they’ve only just moved to a new house themselves. Silvio wanted me to stay with them for a while longer, but I think they need their privacy, and I’m used to living by myself.
Fortunately, my hip replacement has been a triumph of modern medical technology in spite of the setback it faced last autumn. It’s taking a little longer for my lungs to mend but as they say, time is a great healer, though Richard has forbidden me from sitting in the outside ‘smoking permitted’ area whenever we go to a restaurant.
That’s also why I’ve been ordered to stay at the top end of the garden while Silvio strims and weeds and he cuts back overgrown shrubs and tries his best to burn the woody branches. Every now and then my new neighbour pokes his head above the fence. He used to look after the garden for me but a conversation with my son in his smart suit changed his mind.
“Shall we take a break?” I call out to them.
Silvio shakes
his head but tells me he would love a cup of coffee.
Richard immediately stops piling wood onto the fire and throws his gloves onto the ground beside it. He trails up the garden after me. “Make a whole pot of coffee,” he advises.
“I’ll have to find it first,” I tell him.
The kitchen in Tyne Lodge is half the size of my old kitchen, and I’ve had to downsize everything since I moved in here. It was strange at first, but neither Richard nor Julia will countenance me ever moving back into Hillcrest, even though the fire only damaged part of the house. They think it’s full of unhappy memories – the memory of being put to the stake by poor Miriam is certainly not one I shall treasure – but it was also full of happy memories as well. [Not least being rescued from the en suite shower room by two handsome firefighters.]
After opening up several boxes, because I still haven’t unpacked everything, we manage to find the cafetière which Richard and Silvio bought me. It’s one of the many moving home presents they’ve given me since most of my own things were either destroyed in the fire or suffered smoke damage.
“Make the coffee nice and strong,” Richard tells me. “Silvio requires regular injections of caffeine otherwise he’ll be lounging on your new sofa for the rest of the afternoon.”
“I don’t mind,” I say. “I’m just glad you’re here.”
He reaches across the table, pulls my hand to his lips and places a kiss on my knuckles. “Not half as glad as we are.”
Tears spring to my eyes. It’s become a bit of a habit since the fire – me welling up with emotion. “You know you really didn’t have to move closer. I’m going to be fine.”
“We wanted to,” he says.
“But…”
He wags a cautionary finger at me. “No buts. This way we get to see you more often and you get to be a part of the extended Mazzi clan.”
“It is lovely,” I say, remembering how Silvio’s sister and brothers and his ferocious Mamma have taken me into their hearts. “I feel like a proper grannie.”