The Best British Fantasy 2013

by Steve Haynes

  And then their mother had said, ‘Bill, please. Please don’t go outside.’ The children knew their Mom had put her hand on their Dad’s elbow as she said this. They didn’t see her do it because, by that time, they had been herded into the laundry room where they had stayed ever since, but they could tell by her voice that she had touched his arm.

  ‘Ssh. Jan. Just ssh now. Stay with the kids,’ their Dad had said to their mom, but once he was outside no one heard the car engine start. The Morris Marina was parked at the bottom of the drive, under the Wattle tree where Hector once found a funny-looking bone that must have come from a cow. And they had heard nothing more of Dad since he went out to the car.

  The sudden gravity introduced into their evening had increased with every passing minute as a stillness inside the house, a heaviness that made them all aware of the ticking of the clock in the hall; it was the very thickening of suspense around their bodies.

  Their Mother eventually opened the laundry door to report to the kids. She was trying to smile but her lips were too tight. On her cheeks were the red lines made by her fingers when she held her face in her hands. Sometimes she did that at night, sitting alone at the kitchen table. She did it a lot when Dad was out looking for Schnapps, day after day. And Mom had never liked the new house in Muriwai or the surrounding countryside. Didn’t like the whistles and shrieks of the birds, the yelps in the night that sounded like frightened children, the animal tracks in the soil beneath her washing line that spun around in the fierce winds, the fat five-foot eel they had seen by the creek with a lamb in its mouth, the large sticky red flowers that nodded at you as you walked past, the missing dog or the stolen chickens . . . Mom didn’t like any of it. Mom doubted she could ever become a Kiwi. She came here for their Dad; they knew that. And now she was missing too.

  Holding Lozzy’s Wonder Woman torch, because their Dad had taken the big rubber flashlight from the kitchen drawer where the matches were kept, they had heard their mother calling, ‘Bill. Bill. Bill!’ in a voice with a tremble in it, as well as something else trying to smother the tremble, as she went out the front door and then walked past the side of the house toward the garden and the car. Her voice had gone faint and then stopped.

  And the fact that both of their parents had vanished without a fuss – no shout, or cry, or scuffle had been heard from outside – first made the two boys hopeful with the possibility that their mom and dad would soon come back. But as the silence lengthened it made their hearts busy with a mute dread that whatever had taken them was so quick and silent, you never had a chance. Not a hope out there in the dark with it.

  Lozzy had sobbed herself into a weary silence after seeing the pig thing on the sundeck, and had then begun whimpering after her mother’s departure. For the moment, she had been placated by each of her older brother’s reassurances, their lies, and their brave faces. But her silence would not last for long. Lozzy stood up. She was wearing pyjamas. They were yellow and had pictures of Piglet and Winnie the Pooh printed on the cotton. Her hair was tousled and her feet were grubby with dust. Her slippers were still in the lounge; Mom had taken them off earlier to remove a splinter from her foot with the tweezers from the sewing box. Although the soles of the children’s feet were getting harder, from running around barefoot all day outside, the children still picked up prickles from the lawn and splinters from the sundeck. ‘Where’s Mummy, boys?’

  Immediately, Jack patted the floor next to him. ‘Ssh, Lozzy. Come and sit down.’

  Frowning, she pushed her stomach out. ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll get you a Tip Top from the freeze.’

  Lozzy sat down. The freezer hummed and its lemon glow emitted a vague sense of reassurance when Jack opened the lid. Hector approved of the ice-cream trick. After a deep breath, Hector looked at Jack and then returned his stare to the laundry door. He sat with his chin resting on his knee and both hands gripping the ankle of that leg, listening.

  Committed of face, Lozzy tucked into the cone, loaded with Neapolitan ice cream.

  Jack shuffled up beside Hector. ‘What dya reckon?’ He used the same tone of voice before he and his brother crossed a waterfall in the creek, or explored the dark reeking caves up in the hills that Mr. Pitchford had told them to ‘steer clear of, lads’, or shinned across a tree fallen over a deep gorge in the piny vastness of bush surrounding their house. The forest stretched all the way to the crazy beaches made from black volcanic sand, where the blowholes and riptides prevented them from swimming.

  Hector had no answer for his brother about what to do now that he, the eldest, was in charge. But Hector was thinking hard. His eyes were a bit wild and watery too, so Jack knew he was about to do something. And that frightened him. Already, he imagined himself holding Lozzy when there were only the two of them left inside the laundry room.

  ‘I’m gonna run to the Pitchfords,’ Hector said.

  ‘But it’s dark.’

  ‘I know the way.’

  ‘But . . .’ They looked at each other and swallowed. Even though Jack hadn’t mentioned the pig thing, they had thought of it at the same time.

  Hector stood up, but looked smaller than usual to Jack.

  Peering between his knees, Jack kept his face lowered until the creases disappeared from the side of his mouth and around his eyes. He couldn’t let Lozzy see him cry.

  Before his brother left the laundry room and then the house too, Jack longed to hold him for while but couldn’t do it and Hector wouldn’t want it anyway; it would make his leaving even harder. Instead, Jack just stared at his own flat toes spread on the lino.

  ‘Where’s Hegder going?’ Lozzy asked, just as a bubble popped on her shiny lips.

  Jack swallowed. ‘To get the Pitchfords.’

  ‘They have a cat,’ she said.

  Jack nodded. ‘That’s right.’ But Jack knew where Hector would have to go first before he even got close to the Pitchfords’ place: he was going into the forest with the clacking branches and ocean sounds when the wind blew; along the paths of damp earth and slippery tree roots, exposed like bones, that they had run and mapped together; over the thin creek with the rowing boat smells; across the field of long grass, that was darker than English grass and always felt wet, where they had found two whole sheep skeletons and brought them home in a wheel barrow to reassemble on the front lawn. Hector was going to run a long way through the lightless night until he reached the Pitchford’s’ house with the high fence and the horseshoes fixed around the gate. ‘To keep things out,’ Mrs. Pitchford had once told them in a quiet voice when Hector asked why it was nailed to the dark planks.

  ‘No. Don’t. No,’ Jack hissy-whispered, unable to hold back when Hector turned the door handle.

  On the cusp of his brother’s departure, that Jack knew he could do nothing about, everything went thick and cold inside his chest. Welling up to the back of his throat, this feeling spilled into his mouth. It tasted of rain. And this time, he couldn’t swallow. Inside Jack’s head was the urgency of desperate prayers trying to find words. He squinted his eyes to try and push the thoughts down, to squash them down like he was forcing the lid back on a tin of paint. Did anything to stop the hysterics he could feel storming up through his entire body.

  ‘Got to,’ Hector said, his face all stiff but still wild-looking.

  Lozzy stood up and tried to follow Hector, but Jack snatched her hand and gripped it too hard. She winced, then stamped, was tearing up again.

  ‘Jack, don’t open the door after I’m gone. OK.’ They were Hector’s final words.

  The laundry door clicked shut behind him. They heard his feet patter across the floorboards of the hall. Then they heard him turn the catch on the front door. When that closed too, the wind chimes clinked together and made an inappropriate spacey sound. There was a brief creak from the bottom step of the porch stairs, and then the silence returned for a while, until Lozzy’s sobs made a
n unwelcome return inside the laundry room.

  After comforting her with a second ice-cream cone, Jack unplugged the freezer. Quickly but carefully, so as to make less noise, he removed the rustly bags of frozen peas, steaks, stewed apple and fish fingers. He put the food in the big laundry sink that smelled like the back of Gran’s house in England. Then he stacked the white baskets from inside the freezer against the side of the sink. Around the rim of the freezer cabinet he placed plastic clothes pegs at intervals, so there would be a gap between the grey rubber seal of the freezer lid and the base. Then they wouldn’t run out of air when he shut them both inside.

  ‘Come on, Lozzy’,’ he said, hearing some of his Mom in his voice. And he felt a bit better for doing something other than just waiting. He picked Lozzy up and lowered her into the freezer. Together, they spread Schnapps’s old blanket over the wet floor of the cabinet so they wouldn’t get cold bottoms and feet.

  ‘This smells. His fur is on it. Look.’ She held up a tuft of the brown fur the dog used to get stuck between his claws after riffing his neck. Their Mom and Dad had been unable to throw the dog’s blanket away, in case he ever came back to lie on it. So the blanket had stayed in the laundry where Schnapps had ended up sleeping at night. Their Dad’s idea of dogs sleeping outside became a bad idea after Schnapps began all that barking, whimpering, and finally scratching at the front door every night. ‘He’s soft,’ their Dad had said. But tonight, it all made sense.

  After handing the tub of ice cream and the box of cones to Lozzy, Jack climbed into the freezer and sat beside her. She reached for his hand with her sticky fingers. As he pulled the lid down over their huddled bodies, he secretly hoped that the cold and wet of the freezer would stop the pig thing from smelling them. He also wondered if those trotter things on the end of its front legs would be able to push the lid up when it stood up on those hairy back legs, like it had done out on the sundeck. But he also took another small comfort into the dark with him: the pig thing had never come inside their house. Not yet, anyway.

  Mrs. Pitchford entered the house through the empty aluminium frame of the ranch-sliding door; the glass had been smashed inwards and collected in the mess of curtains that had also been torn down. She favoured net curtains behind all the windows of her own home; she didn’t like the sense of exposure that the large windows gave to the new homes the government had started delivering on truckbeds for the migrants, who were settling all over the area. She also found it hard to even look at the red earth exposed beneath any more felled trees and cleared bush. The appearance of these long rectangular bungalows with tin cladding on their walls never failed to choke her with fury and grief no good for her heart. And who could now say what kind of eyes would be drawn in to these great glassy doors if you didn’t use nets? You couldn’t then go blaming them who was already here.

  All of the lights were still on. It felt warm inside the house too, even though the cold and damp of the night air must have been seeping into the living room for at least an hour after that big pane of glass was put through.

  She looked at the brown carpets and the orange fabric on the furniture, was amazed again with what the English did with their homes; all Formica and white plastic and patterned carpets and big garish swirls in wallpaper the colour of coffee. Shiny, new, fragile: she didn’t care for it. They had a television too and a new radio, coloured silver and black: both made in Japan. They mesmerised her, the things these soft-muscled, pale-skinned Poms brought from such faraway places and surrounded themselves with; but anyone could see they and their things didn’t fit with the old bush. It had ways that not even the Maoris liked, because there were things here before them too.

  Glass crunched under her boots as she made her way further inside the house. The kitchen and dining room were open-plan, only divided from the living room by the rear of the sofa.

  Unable to resist the lure of the kitchen area, she went inside and stared, then touched the extractor fan over the stove. It was like a big hopper on a petrol lawnmower, for collecting cut grass. She marvelled again at what young mothers considered necessary in the running of a household these days. And here was the food mixer Jan had once showed her. Orange and white plastic with Kenwood Chevette printed along one side. A silver coffee pot with a wooden handle; what Jan had called a ‘percolator’, beside the casserole dishes with their pretty orange flower patterns. Mrs. Pitchford ran her hard fingers across the smooth sides of all the Tupperware boxes that Jan had lined up on the counter; they were filled with cereal, rice, something called spaghetti, bran, sugar. You could see the contents as murky shadows through the sides. Everything in her own home was wood, pottery, steel, or iron. And she remembered seeing it all in use when she was a little girl and helped her mother prepare food. Hardwoods and metals lasted. Whereas plastic and carpet and ‘stereos’ hadn’t been much use to this family tonight, had they?

  The sound of the car engine idling outside returned a sense of purpose to her; her Harold had told her not to get distracted. She turned and waddled out of the kitchen, but her eyes were pulled to the sideboard beside the dining table; at all of the silver and ceramic trinkets kept behind its sliding glass doors. Little sherry glasses. Small mugs with ruddy faces on the front. China thimbles. Teaspoons with patterns on their handles. So special. She had her own things for special occasions; all a lot older than these things the family had brought with them from England.

  They also had a washing machine in the little laundry room beside the ‘dining area’, and a freezer too. Jan had been horrified to learn that Mrs. Pitchford still washed clothes in a tin bath, used a larder for food, and still preserved things in jars. The bloody cheek.

  Mrs. Pitchford went inside the laundry room; it smelled of wine, soap powder, and urine. All of the food from the freezer was melting and softening inside the sink. The lid of the freezer was raised and there was an old blanket inside the white metal cabinet that hummed softly. It was still cold inside when she leaned over. And it puzzled her why the food was stacked in the sink, and also how the food inside the plastic bags and paper boxes was even prepared. They had no mutton, no venison, no sweet potatoes that she could see. She looked under her foot and saw that she was standing on a yellow plastic clothes peg.

  Inside the unlit hallway that led down to the four bedrooms, she paused for a few moments to get her eyes used to the darkness. It was a relief to be out of the bright living area, but she would need more light to conduct a proper search. Ordinarily, she could have found a sewing pin on the floor by the thinnest moonlight, because around here there were plenty who could see better at night than others. But tonight there was no moon or starlight at all and the curtains in the bedrooms were drawn; it would be terrible if she missed something important. She found the light switch for the hallway.

  The family had no rugs; they had laid carpet all the way down the passage and even inside the bedrooms. How did Jan get the dust out of them, or air them in the Spring like she did with her rugs?

  Shaking her head in disapproval, she went into the first room. Jan and Bill’s room. Two suitcases were open on the large bed and full of clothes. The headboard was softened with padded white plastic. Mrs. Pitchford reached out and pressed it.

  The next room was for the little girl with all of that lovely thick raven hair. Dear little Charlotte. The light from the hall revealed the dim outlines of her dolls and toys, the books on all of the shelves, the bears in the wallpaper pattern. ‘Darlin’,’ she said, quietly, into the darkness. No answer. Some of the teddy bears and stuffed rabbits were on the floor; they had been pulled off the shelves. Mrs. Pitchford had a hunch a few would be missing too.

  She carried on, down the passageway to the two end bedrooms: Jack and Hector’s rooms. Hector was safe at their home. How he had managed to scuttle all the way to their farm in the dark had surprised her and her husband. But little Hector had come and banged on their door, then fallen inside, panting and as pale as a s
heet. She and Harold hadn’t wasted a moment and had swept him into their arms, before spiriting him across the yard to Harold’s workshop.

  ‘That kid was as slippery as an eel and quick as a fox’ Harold had said, his eyes smiling, as he came back into the kitchen from his workshop, and removed his sheep shearing gloves and leather apron before getting their coats off the pegs. ‘Come on, mother. Better get our skates on.’

  And Hector had been so concerned for his younger brother and his sister when he arrived at their farm, that she and Harold had sped to the bungalow in the old black Rover that someone else had also once brought over from England. Harold had taught himself to drive the car, not long after acquiring it from an elderly couple with those Pommy accents missing the H’s in every word.

  Harold would dress Hector when they returned with the other two children, if they were still around. That didn’t seem likely now to Mrs. Pitchford. The family’s bungalow was deserted then, like all of those bungalows on Rangatera Road, waiting for other Pom families, or Pacific Islanders, or even more of those bloody Dutch Dike-Duckies. Poles were supposed to be coming too. What next?

  The two end bedrooms were empty of life, but she smelled what all life leaves behind. Then she found it on the floor of one of the boy’s rooms overlooking the wattle tree. Kneeling down, she tried to scoop it into her salt-white handkerchief. It was ruddy in colour and smelled strong; the fresh stool of excitement, the stool of too much fresh blood gulped down by a very greedy girl. There was too much of it.

  She stripped a pillowcase off the bed. ‘You’ve been at it here, my little joker,’ Mrs. Pitchford said with a rueful smile. She must have hunted right through the house until she’d found the other two kiddiewinks hiding; under the beds maybe, or in that hardboard wardrobe with the sliding doors on the little plastic runners. ‘What a rumble you’ve had my girl.’ This kind of house couldn’t possibly make a family feel safe; it was like cardboard covered in thin tin. She’d at least had the sense to take Jack and little Charlotte outside the house first, like Harold had shown her how to do. Otherwise, they’d have to burn out another of these bungalows to incinerate the leavings, and that was always a flamin’ mess. ‘One more and it’ll smell funny,’ Harold had warned after the last one they lit up.