by Evie Wyld
Father is white. I look at him. He has tears in his eyes.
‘It wasn’t her,’ I tell him. I get up and crouch next to him, help him to cover himself, place a hand on his back. ‘She was only wearing Mother’s dress to trick you. She made herself into the image of Agnes to bewitch you. You were bewitched.’ And I hadn’t known these words would come out of me, but as I say them, I see that they are true and there is such a thing as evil in the world.
‘All will be well now, Father,’ I say and he sniffs back tears, wipes his eyes and breathes out of his nose. He pats my arm.
‘Thank you, son. Thank you so much.’ And my disappointment is replaced with pride.
II
It was nice that the boys and Bernadette still thought of the place as home. It was though rather ridiculous that she still thought of them as the boys. Ruth watched out of the top bedroom as Michael and Bernadette arrived, Michael carrying the baby, Bernadette swinging her arms like a child. Her hair had turned a deeper red in adulthood, and Ruth could never be sure if it was coloured or if Bernadette’s life really was as carefree and as simple as she made it seem. No bra, she noted.
As she heard the doorbell chime, she saw Christopher arrive behind them. He stood hidden a moment, perhaps to let the baby be introduced to its great-aunt, or to finish off his cigarette in peace. It was only the matter of half a minute, and then he rounded the garden wall and flashed a smile in greeting. She could hear his practised loud friendly voice, heard him cooing to either the dog or the baby, the murmur of Michael’s softer voice and Bernadette laughing in the way that she did, the way that Betty had described as a laugh like a drunk sailor. There was a feeling in the bones of the house when all visited at once, everything fused back together, the marrow of the house became dewy again, a warmth, like it rolled over in its sleep and opened one eye and smiled.
The girl had started to appear in a more or less regular way. It could quite easily be the first showings of a habit with gin, that would be no great surprise. She would see a fleeting movement out of the corner of her eye, look up expecting the dog, and instead see, just for a moment, a girl with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She disappeared if looked at straight on, but just now she stood in the corner of the room, picking at the quicks of her fingernails. She would stay there as long as Ruth continued to look at her own hands, clasped on the dressing table. She had wondered at first what the girl meant – that death was near? She had been near and getting closer for some years now, and it had stopped being frightening. It was just a third person in the household to take into account, a silent fixture which had meant that when the opportunity had arisen to sell the house, she had not. For a long while she had awaited a message from the girl. But the girl did not speak.
Ruth pinched her cheeks and tucked her hair behind her ears, took the stairs carefully, and found them all in the drawing room, the baby wrapped in a blanket and very much asleep in Christopher’s arms.
All looked up.
‘Darling,’ she said to Bernadette, and Bernadette smiled and moved towards her. They exchanged kisses on the cheek, Bernadette’s pleasantly cool.
Michael stood and kissed her too. Christopher remained seated, unable to move in case the baby woke.
‘Are you quite well?’ Ruth asked Bernadette.
‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Grateful to be out of London.’
Ruth’s hands were laced in front of her, and she couldn’t for the life of her remember where they usually put themselves.
‘Well,’ she said from afar, peering at the child, ‘she certainly looks very well too. And have you a name yet?’
‘Viviane,’ said Bernadette, and Ruth tried to look like she thought it a pretty name.
‘It means lively,’ said Michael, perhaps noting a look of uncertainty on Ruth’s face.
‘Yes,’ said Bernadette, ‘she’s a wriggler.’
‘Well, I’m sure,’ said Ruth and smiled. She was, she realised, afraid of the baby.
Christopher’s hands looked enormous next to it and rough. He held her like she was a bowl filled to the brim of water and he mustn’t spill her. He was conspicuously quiet, and Ruth noticed with alarm that his eyes were wet.
‘So!’ she said loudly, hoping to take attention away from Christopher and also from herself. ‘I wonder where Betty has disappeared to – she’s been baking God knows what for several hours. Let me get you all a drink – what will it be?’ Unusually she clapped her hands together and then felt hot dread run through her – Don’t wake it. Don’t be the one responsible for waking it.
‘I tell you what,’ said Bernadette, ‘I am absolutely desperate for a cigarette. Christopher, do you have a spare? Michael’s gone and given up.’
On Christopher’s face, a giant and over-performed smile.
‘Why yes I do,’ he said and cleared his throat.
‘I’m going to get our bags in,’ said Michael, ‘and then I’d love a Scotch, Mum, if you’ve got it – I’ve brought a bottle with me just in case.’ He left the room and Christopher patted down his jacket pocket to locate his cigarettes. Bernadette took the sleeping baby from him, with an ease that looked precarious. Christopher found his tobacco.
‘Join me?’ Bernadette asked. He nodded and suddenly Bernadette was holding the baby very close to Ruth, and before she knew it, it had been handed over. ‘Do you mind, just for a second? I’m absolutely dying for a smoke, and apparently it’s not great for babies. She’s perfectly unsmelly at the moment.’ And just like that Ruth found herself holding the sleeping child. She had never held a baby before. For a few weeks after she had lost her own, she had woken at night feeling a weight in her arms like she had been holding something tightly to her in her sleep, but her own baby had never materialised. She had woken and time had passed and very little was said other than you can try again.
Her blood remembered the leaping-salmon feeling when the baby had repositioned itself inside of her.
None of that.
The baby did not wake up even in her dangerous arms. The rain that had been threatening since the early morning released, and somewhere through an open window came the smell of it like old stone. Ruth shushed the baby and gently jigged her up and down, not because she needed comfort but because that was what she had seen mothers do, and because Ruth felt afraid for the pink creature, at a loss of how to help it. She wished to be the sort of person who could comfortably sing to take away the silence and the heavy feeling the child gave her. There was lightning but for the moment no thunder, the rain fell harder, making the rose heads in the garden shudder. She could see it out on the Bass Rock, the rain coming down like a lace veil that made the edges blend into the clouds.
If she had lived she would have been just like you. She didn’t think it, but the words sounded in her head as if they had been injected there with a thick syringe.
Behind the piano, the girl appeared, picking as she always did at her fingers.
Look, Ruth thought loudly. Look, it’s a baby.
The girl stayed where she was, flickered a little as thunder rolled over the water, as though she was startled by it. There was a feeling that in the drawing room there was more than just the girl, like the hammering of rain on the windows had summoned a host of others. The baby twitched in her sleep, her lips moving like she fed in her dream.
I
Katherine has taken a sabbatical and will stay on with Maggie and me at the house until it sells. Christopher has decided to keep Mum company a while in London. No one questions anything. No one mentions Dom. We walk Mum and Christopher and the dog over the golf course and down to the beach, we pass the rocks, we pass the skeleton of the rowing boat, upside down, holes in the hull. Mum and Christopher stop. They look at the ribs of the boat, their hands join. The dog pees next to it.
We are at times a line linked at the elbow. When we come to the site of the old outdoor swimming pool, now a seabird centre, and the auld kirk, we kiss each other goodbye. The two of them carry on up
the ramp – it feels correct to leave us on the beach. Mum’s hair, standing up on end and to the side like a wind-altered blackthorn tree, Christopher holding on to her elbow. They are not young.
Katherine, Maggie and I walk back, no longer linking arms, but talking. When we get to the turn-off to the golf course, I say, ‘I’m going to carry on for a bit – do you mind?’
‘We’ll make something to eat,’ Maggie says and pulls Katherine up towards the house, which I am grateful for. I want just a few moments alone. I wind up the track through the rough to the remaining trees of the little wood. The wind blows the sound of the train whistle through the trees, likely it is the Edinburgh train. There is such stillness in that small wood where my grandmother died that it catches my breath, I feel I am looking up into space or into a deep high-ceilinged crevasse. ‘Hello!’ I call, just to hear if my voice echoes back. It does, three times.
On the bed, the girl’s largest suitcase. It is not big enough to move a whole life, but it will have to do. More than half the clothes are for the child, she will grow out of them quickly, but she can’t bring herself to leave them behind. She can’t believe they have come to this place.
When they met, the girl was still in uniform at school. And he insisted they wait. That is how she knew the difference.
Her nan and her mum kept telling her ‘Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up’, like they’d forgotten how it was. Like there was a choice. She’d seen it in the other girls in her class, even some the year below who hadn’t even any tits yet. It arrived in the night, this weight. One day you’re putting on a load of washing to help your mum, and the next you’re picking up your brother’s filthy pants off his floor, opening a window so the smell goes. First you’re preheating the oven so your mum can put the dinner on when she gets in after work, the next you’re doing the cooking every other night, your dad and brothers sat in front of the TV, shooting prostitutes or Afghanis, and they don’t answer you when you tell them tea’s ready, and you roll your eyes, but feel a little warmth of satisfaction alongside the annoyance. You have been accepted into womanhood by the boyhood.
I don’t know why I bother, you say.
The girl rings a taxi, asks it to come in fifteen, remembers the toothbrushes, and baby shampoo. In the bathroom, she puts on a little more cover-up – she doesn’t want people talking, she hates how embarrassing it all is. You have to put something with a hint of green in on first to properly cover up a deep bruise, but there’s not time. She checks out the bathroom window, the street is still empty, the sea slate grey and the rock looks white today against thunderclouds.
The night they did it, at his bedsit, the night she turned sixteen, she had teased him that she’d been born in the early hours of the morning, so technically he was still a rapist, and he had become angry. ‘Don’t even joke about that shit,’ he’d said steamily. ‘You have no idea what it’s like, the panic that one of these is lying about her age – you’re not lying, are you? Are you?’
Men, she’d thought with affection. What are they like? His concern was endearing, she decided, and they did it again so she knew she was forgiven.
He came a few weeks later and met the family. He popped in before they went to the pictures. She wore a full-length dress, heavy eyebrows and make-up to hollow in cheekbones that would be there once her puppy fat had bled out. He was in clean work overalls, which she was pleased about – it showed her father and brothers he was a grafter, and that he could take care of her. He held his van keys in his hand, anxious to get going, but the girl’s father offered him a beer and they sat awkwardly in the front room, a quiz on the telly. He was quiet but polite to her father, ignored her brothers until one of them turned on the shooting game, and he sat forward on his seat, asked about it. Before long he was one of them, and her father told her, Bring the lad another beer, and she could feel her lipstick drying on her mouth.
‘If we go now we can still make the film – won’t get the adverts, though,’ she’d said, and he’d looked at her, disappointment on his face.
As they left her father squeezed her arm, a sign he liked her choice. He didn’t speak much on the drive to the cinema and was a little surly after the film. She shouldn’t have forced him to leave when he was having a good time. When she got back late, one of her brothers was still up, she saw the back of his head.
‘That bloke’s all right,’ he said. ‘You bringing him round again?’
And a funny thing happened when she got pregnant, that he was already part of her family, and although she was only seventeen, no one minded, and if she did she tucked it behind herself with the other things she couldn’t be sure of. It is important to be sure. Always.
He was there every Sunday as she and her mum and her nan served up the roast, he even made a small speech at her nan’s funeral, which everyone clapped him on the back for. When her waters broke in the middle of a row about the amount of money she spent on brand cleaning products, he rang her mum and spoke on her behalf, told her no one was wanted at the hospital, they’d call when the baby came.
A girl, another.
There was an infection and they stayed in the hospital a few days, he had to finish a job he was under contract for. When she complained about being left alone, he broke her finger. He was so sorry. He was just under so much pressure and the girl knew how to push his buttons. The nurse who splinted her finger asked how it happened. Caught it in the door, she said.
The suitcase is not yet closed, but it is full. She will take only her daughter’s one favourite soft toy. That will have to be enough. She is due to pick her up in the next hour from her mum’s then she will go on to stay with her friend, it is all planned. She catches her fingernail on a loose thread and it feels raw, like how she feels on the inside. Her fingernails are painted red, she did it last night to try to calm herself down, but her hands had shook and it had taken a long while to clean up the mess she’d made of them. She imagines herself and her daughter five years from now, sees them on a tropical island for some reason. Anything is possible.
She takes the cuddly toy, a long-eared rabbit, from her daughter’s room and lays it on top of the pile of clothes in the suitcase. She closes the top over and sits on it to squash everything down, begins to tug at the zipper. It starts to give. The taxi will arrive in just a few minutes. She stops and stands very still. Downstairs the soft closing of the door.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to:
Mum, Dad, Scout, Juno, Hebe, Speedy, Tom, Emma, Flynn, Jack, Matilda.
The Wylds, for being unfazed by my prying. I hope in among the carnage you recognise my affection for you all.
Everyone at Jonathan Cape, who, like always, provided exactly what I needed, especially Ana Fletcher, Michal Shavit and Joe Pickering. Diana Miller at Knopf and Nikki Christer at PRH Australia.
All at Watson Little, but most of all Laetitia Rutherford.
Sherele Moody, who I’ve never met but whose Australian Femicide and Child Death Map feels like the baseline of what I think about.
Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, Kiri Pritchard-McLean and Rachel Fairburn for their fantastic podcasts and for making women feel less shifty about themselves.
Friends who helped in all sorts of ways, Karen and Minnie, Gwen and Ross, Joe, Sian, Claire, Lizzie, Katia, Roz, Ruth, Alex, Ary, Max.
David and Johanna, Dylan and Blake for playing with Jamie and Buddy on the weekends while I finished the book.
Jamie, I wouldn’t write anything without your support, you can have half of whatever.
And Buddy, I wrote much of this book with one hand while you held on to my fingers in your sleep, thanks for the company.
ALSO BY EVIE WYLD
After the Fire, A Still Small Voice
All the Birds, Singing
Everything Is Teeth (with Joe Sumner)
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First published by Vintage in 2020
Copyright © Evie Wyld 2020
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, published, performed in public or communicated to the public in any form or by any means without prior written permission from Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd or its authorised licensees.
Quotation here from ‘You Can Call Me Al’ with lyrics by Paul Simon
Quotation here from ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ with lyrics by Calvin Lewis and Andrew Wright
Cover photography: birds © Teresa Dieguez Risco/Arcangel Images Limited; wave © Svetlana Sewell/Arcangel Images Limited; rock © David Baker/Trevillion Images
Cover design by Louisa Maggio © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd