by Megan Tayte
He pulled a small package from his back pocket and handed it over. It was addressed to my mother and the branding on the back read Malcolm McAlson Wedding Videography.
‘Must be from that bloke who was at the wedding fair,’ said Luke, reading upside down. ‘Remember, the little man with the dodgy toupee who lurked about videoing everything?’
‘I remember,’ I said. ‘Mum said they’d done a deal – he exhibited for free at the fair, and in return he shot footage of the event that she could use on the Hollythwaite website.’
‘So it’s a DVD,’ said Luke. ‘We should watch it. Movie night. Maybe he caught Cara’s stand. And the hunt for the escapee donkey. And you in that dress!’ He noticed my distinct lack of interest. ‘Sorry. Not the time. So, I’m here now. Where’s next to search?’
‘Nowhere,’ I said bleakly.
‘Nowhere?’
‘I’m done, Luke. I’m sorry – you came all this way. But Sienna was right: there’s nothing here.’
‘You searched all the buildings?’
‘Yeah. Well, the ones Mum uses.’
‘Right,’ he said as if that made sense.
But I realised suddenly – did it make sense? Why had I only searched the parts of the estate my mum used regularly? I wasn’t looking for evidence of her presence, but someone else’s. Someone who could have scaled the perimeter wall, just like Luke had today. Someone who could have roamed this estate. Explored it.
Stayed on it.
‘The treehouse!’ I grabbed his arm. ‘Luke – the treehouse!’
‘Really?’ He looked shocked. ‘You want to… right now?’
‘No. Not that. The treehouse. Someone had been there!’
Luke and I had sheltered there twice in recent months. Both times I’d noticed the old treehouse, abandoned since my childhood, had been patched up. And kitted out with camping gear.
‘There were blankets,’ said Luke, remembering. ‘And a storm lantern.’
‘I assumed it was the kids from the next-door estate. But what if…?’
‘Come on,’ said Luke, taking my hand.
He’d barely finished talking before I took us there, to the little fairytale castle in the woods.
Luke collapsed to his knees and took deep breaths as he reoriented himself, but I wasted no time scanning the surroundings. No blankets, no lantern, not even a cobweb.
The floorboards creaked as Luke got to his feet. He said nothing. There was nothing to say. Nothing to see.
Nothing.
Whoever had been in this treehouse, they’d abandoned it now.
And I couldn’t stand it. This abandoned treehouse. This abandoned estate. Empty. Silent. Still. Like her.
Luke saw the first tear fall and he hugged me to him.
‘I need to see her,’ I said.
‘Your mum?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then go see her.’
‘Not at the hospital. Not like that. I need to see her alive. The DVD – it’s the last thing I have of her. Can we watch it? Tonight?’
‘Sure.’ He kissed the top of my head. ‘Are you ready to leave now?’
I looked around the treehouse, where my sister and I had once played… where my boyfriend and I had once lain… where, perhaps, another had once looked out at my mother’s home and fantasised about his hand on her throat.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Cara was deeply excited by the prospect of a movie night in which we were, as she put it, the stars of the show – so much so that being sandwiched between her and Chester on Si’s sofa quickly became a feat of physical endurance as I was rocked and jolted and jerked. After twenty minutes of footage, I gave up and stood. Luke, settled comfortably on a recliner, patted his lap and raised a questioning eyebrow, and I smiled and sat down.
‘Am I squishing you?’ I whispered.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like it.’
‘Shush!’ hissed Cara, pointing at the screen. ‘Look! That’s me!’ Without taking her eyes off Si’s vast plasma screen, she yelled, ‘SI! OUTTA THE KITCHEN! WE’RE ON!’
Si hurried in, hands still gloved up in oven mitts – he was making us a pasta bake. He sat next to Cara and at once she clutched at him and wailed, ‘Look at that leery chap checking out my legs! My skirt is too short!’
‘I’ve been telling you that for months, sis,’ said Luke, just as Si said:
‘Whatever skirt you wore that man’d be looking, Cara, because you’re hot.’
Luke shuddered under me and I laughed. I was glad of the light relief. We’d just sat through a section focusing on Mum that had made my tear ducts burn. Luke had reached over and squeezed my hand, and Cara had tried to distract me by discussing the quality of the footage – the background was blurry in places. But I’d sat silently, just taking in every view of my mother. She was so animated, so alive.
The film had moved on now, and Cara was interrogating Luke and Si on how her stand had looked on film: too low-key? too small? I wasn’t listening. Mum was back onscreen. She was standing in front of a huge canvas in a hallway and describing with great passion the artworks she’d commissioned for Hollythwaite and their unifying concept.
‘He’s so talented,’ she was saying.
I didn’t want to take my eyes off Mum, but the backdrop was distracting me. Seeing it now, through the medium of film, I found myself noticing the artwork in a way I hadn’t before, when I’d seen it in person. When had that been?
‘An exceptional artist…’
It was the night of the wedding fair, I remembered now.
‘Such emotion in the pieces…’
I’d stood in front of that painting – the vast, red, dizzying canvas – as I’d learned of the fire at Grannie Cavendish’s home. It was just along from that painting that the bearer of the dramatic news had materialised.
‘A real find… The thrill when I first saw his portfolio…’
Right on that upstairs landing he’d appeared.
‘So thorough in his research – wanted to know all about the estate, the family…’
And yet… no. That made no sense. The fundamental rule of Travelling: you can only Travel to a place you have been to previously.
‘Privilege to work with him…’
He had never been to Hollythwaite before that night.
‘There he is, the man of the hour! Come and discuss your works.’
He had never been to Hollythwaite.
‘Oh dear. I’ve frightened him off. Terribly private, you know…’
The camera panned in on the artist’s signature: Noah. The shape of the N, it was familiar.
He had been to Hollythwaite.
‘Oh God,’ I breathed.
No one heard me – they were too engrossed in a new scene unfolding onscreen. A jerky cut to an exterior shot. A banner that read I Dove You Animal Rentals. A peacock squaring up to an enormous rabbit. A miserable-looking owl in a cage. A woman patting a dog wearing a pageboy outfit. And then…
‘Look!’ shrieked Cara. ‘The donkey’s loose! Go, Luke – chase that ass down!’
As Si and Cara and Luke cheered and hooted, I slid off Luke’s lap and walked closer to the TV screen.
Noah, Noah, Noah, Noah, my heart thudded.
Closer, close enough to block the others’ views.
I ignored Cara’s, ‘Hey’; Luke’s, ‘Scarlett?’
Because there he was. There, in the corner behind my mother, watching over her. There, close enough to touch her. There, his outline even now blurring a little – not a fault on the DVD after all, but the image of a man who was not a man, a man who could come and go like a ghost.
My lips shaped the name ‘Noah’, but it was as wrong as the curve of the letters on the big, angry canvas.
And I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stand. I dropped to my knees. Distantly, I heard voices and I felt hands on me, but I wasn’t there in the room. I was locked in my mind, and it was dark there, so dark, and I was alone.
<
br /> But for him.
Fragments floating, flickering…
A painting, wrapped in brown paper – for me.
A story of origins, told in a disbelieving tone.
A taunt: ‘Are you a good girl, or a bad girl? A follower, or a maverick?’
A secret, and another, and another, confided so easily: Evangeline lies; I know where you can find Gabriel; there’s a fire.
A gaze, unblinking, uneven: hungry, haunted.
A question: ‘What would your mum tell you to do?’
Conflicts colliding:
Loyal; disloyal.
Honest; dishonest.
Obedient; subversive.
Creative; controlled.
Excuses splintering:
‘Antisocial? A typical artist.’
‘Bound to be odd, growing up so alone.’
‘Just a private kind of bloke.’
‘Hard work, sure, but harmless enough.’
Ideas connecting, converging:
He knew Hollythwaite.
He knew my mother: deliberately, secretively.
He’d sent flowers that symbolise friendship – and melancholy, madness.
He’d painted a canvas for the hospital full of dark, unvoicable feeling.
He’d come to the hospital.
He’d come to see my mother.
He’d looked anywhere but at her.
He’d been agitated, unbalanced – his eyes had been all wrong.
A voice, his voice, reaching to me across time:
‘“He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.”’
A beast or a god.
Power.
Control.
The will to commit terrible acts.
A name, a saintly name, the name of he who leads God’s armies against satanic forces:
Michael.
I don’t know how much time I lost before I came back to my senses. Too much time. But it was a light that catapulted me back to the now. A blue one.
‘Get off me!’ I screamed, lashing out blindly. ‘I’ll KILL you!’
I threw myself at him, the bastard. Arms held me back and I thrashed wildly against them.
He was shouting my name. But the voice didn’t match. Nor did the face, the eyes.
I collapsed back, gasping for air, reaching for something solid to anchor me – the cold stone of the hearth. I was on the floor, my friends huddled around me.
‘We called Jude,’ said Luke.
‘We thought you were ill,’ said Si.
‘What is it?’ said Jude. ‘What’s wrong?’
I struggled to stand. Luke was quick to help. I pushed him away. Stepped back, out of reach, onto the hearth.
‘Wait,’ I told them all.
I Travelled.
*
I Travelled to the hospital. I told Cindy the nurse to let no one – no one – in to see my mother without calling me first, and to stay at her side. I took a painting from behind Mum’s bed.
I Travelled to the cottage on the cliff. I took a painting from the hallway.
I Travelled to Luke’s cafe. I took a painting from above the counter.
I Travelled to Hollythwaite manor. I took a painting from the upstairs hallway.
I Travelled to the gatekeeper’s lodge. I took a drawing from my mother’s memory wall.
*
‘Scarlett!’ said Luke desperately when I rematerialised in Si’s living room. ‘Stop!’ He lunged forward and tried to grab hold of me but he couldn’t reach me over all the paintings.
I did as he asked. I stopped in front of the plasma screen, now showing a band-for-hire blasting out the Police classic ‘Every Breath You Take’.
I threw down the canvases in my arms. The others jumped back as I shoved them into a row stretching across the floor. I stood back, panting, scanning from left to right, right to left. The large painting from Hollythwaite was at an obscure angle. I kicked it into line.
‘What’s –’ began Luke, but Cara held up a silencing hand.
She stepped forward and walked slowly along the line, and then back. She studied each painting in turn as the lads looked on, bemused, and I looked on, expectant. I saw the moment she got it – the connection. Her eyes bulged. She pointed to a canvas.
‘That one, the big one, is from Hollythwaite – just like the one on the DVD earlier.’ She didn’t wait for a reply; her finger moved along the line. ‘That one, the square one, is from your cottage. That one, the blue one, is from the cafe.’ She looked up. ‘And the last one, the dark splurgy mess?’
‘From the hospital,’ I said.
Cara clapped her hands to her mouth. ‘Oh my God,’ she said through her fingers. Then, at once, ‘But why?’
‘Why what?’ demanded Luke.
‘Don’t you see?’ said Cara. ‘Look, look at them.’
Luke and Jude and Si examined the paintings, the abstract shapes, the brush stokes, the colours. I watched their eyes shift from one to the next to the next and back, comparing, finding the differences, finding the similarities.
Luke crouched down and traced the signatures on each. ‘Noah,’ he muttered, touching the name on the largest canvas. ‘And Michael,’ he said, looking at the remaining three.
Jude’s head snapped up. ‘Michael?’
‘Michael,’ I said.
Jude stared at me. And shook his head.
I turned away, blinking furiously against threatening tears, and looked for something to focus on. A twisted bronze sculpture in a far corner fit my mood. But the imminent tears were blinding me; the jagged metal was a wavering, blurry mess. I bit my lip hard. My vision cleared.
‘Let me get this straight,’ Si was saying. ‘Michael painted the one from the cottage. Michael painted this one from the cafe. Michael painted this one, which was in Elizabeth’s hospital room. But some bloke called Noah painted this other one.’
‘And yet it matches the style of the others,’ Luke finished. He grabbed my hand and turned me to him. ‘Michael?’ he said. ‘Michael is this Noah – your mother’s artist? Michael knew your mother?’
I nodded.
‘And you think he…’
I nodded again.
‘Stop,’ said Jude sharply. ‘Let’s get a grip here. So Michael painted for Elizabeth. And clearly he kept it a secret. But that doesn’t mean he… I mean, he’s a bit of an odd guy, isn’t he? Kind of a loopy genius. And funny about his work. Maybe he just didn’t want to talk about it.’
I kicked aside all the paintings except the one from the cottage. Which I’d never understood. Which had given my mother a nasty shock when she’d seen it, and driven her to demand who’d painted it. Which my sister had just the other day unthinkingly referred to as being ‘like all that poncey art Mum’s filled Hollythwaite with’.
I took the other picture, the drawing I’d held back, from under my arm and laid it down on the floor beside the remaining canvas. I stood back. The differences between the two pieces were stark: a simple, framed napkin dwarfed by a large canvas; a black-and-white scrawl set against an expert work of colour and texture; a simple, sunny scene versus a complex, stormy one. But the relationship between the two pieces, laid side by side, was indisputable.
‘The arch of the hill,’ said Cara. ‘And the four figures looking heavenward. It’s the same picture.’
‘The painting was a gift to me from Michael,’ I said. ‘The drawing belongs to my mother.’
‘The drawing came first?’ said Luke.
‘Yes.’
‘The canvas was inspired by it.’
‘Yes.’
‘So Michael had seen it.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’ Jude cut in, and I heard it in his voice now: fear.
I kept my eyes on my father’s drawing, his depiction of a happy-ever-after, as I replied: ‘In my mother’s home. In my mother’s bedroom. This picture was hanging on the wall right where he hurt her
.’
I looked up. Cara had started crying. Si was holding Cara to him and staring blankly at the paintings. Jude was frowning and muttering under his breath. Luke was watching me, his eyes wide with horror.
‘It’s Michael,’ I told him. ‘It’s Michael.’
‘It’s Michael,’ he said, and he pulled me to him.
A lone tear escaped, and then another, but I wouldn’t give in to the pain – not now, not here. I focused again on the far corner of the room. But there was no need. Even with the tears, the lines of the metal sculpture were crisp and clear.
Jude was talking, loudly and urgently, and I tried to block him out, to pin down the wisp of an idea that had come to mind but was maddeningly out of reach. Something about the sculpture?
‘… and while I realise it’s odd that he got to know your mother without saying anything, it doesn’t follow that it was him that day. Perhaps she was just a client? Perhaps she took the drawing from her room once and showed it to him… Scarlett?’
I dragged my gaze from the corner and met Jude’s eyes. I saw determination in them: to reject what just could not be, not in his neat little world of Ceruleans who were pure and godly and good.
I’d thought the paintings would be enough. Hard proof. Judging by Si’s silence and Cara’s quiet sobs and Luke’s arm holding me tight against him, it had been enough for them. But not Jude.
All at once, I was furious with him for his trusting nature, his Cerulean blindness. I wanted to slap him. I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to throw him into that nightmarish place where I’d just been trapped, the place between reality and dream, sanity and madness, the blissful lie and the terrible truth.
I didn’t. I reached down onto the sofa for the remote control. I cut a jazz band off halfway through Jamie Cullum’s ‘What a Difference a Day Made’. I rewound until I found a donkey trampling flowerbeds. I pressed play. I crossed to the screen and pointed to the top corner. To my mother. To a blur on the screen behind her sharpening into a figure. I pointed until the figure was wavering, blurring, and then my finger was highlighting nothing more than a woman standing alone beside a strutting peacock.
Jude sat down, hard, on the arm of the sofa.