by Lucy Wood
‘The boy hasn’t grown,’ Mr Rogers eventually said to Grandma.
‘He’s sitting down,’ Grandma said. ‘It’s hard for you to tell.’
‘Where’s his purse?’ Oscar had carried a purse around for a while and Mr Rogers hadn’t seemed to like it.
‘He’s moved on,’ Grandma said.
Oscar swung his legs and thought about the door. He imagined the tide creeping in like fingers and his chest was tight and fluttery.
Something wasn’t right with the argument that Mr Rogers and Grandma were having. They always argued about the same kinds of things, and they said the same things each time and then they said, ‘It was good to have got that off my chest.’ They argued about boring things like the weather changing, or old films, or about people they used to know. But today Grandma wasn’t sticking to her side of the argument; it was almost as if she was about to agree with Mr Rogers, and Mr Rogers was looking nervous and clearing his throat and thumping his chest.
‘They’re just fiddling the stats, fiddling the stats is all they’re doing,’ Mr Rogers said.
‘Perhaps they are, yes,’ Grandma said. She looked tired and distracted and couldn’t seem to remember what part of the argument to take. She should be saying something else now; she should be saying something about how paranoid Mr Rogers was. Oscar stared at her. Mr Rogers had angled his chair away from him on purpose, which he always did. Oscar wanted to go away and see the door by himself and leave them to it, but there was a horrible silence that went on and on and on and so, before he really knew what he was doing, he said, ‘I have to show you both something before the tide gets it. It’s very important.’
He took them to the door. It was just as beautiful as it had been earlier. He looked at Grandma anxiously to make sure she liked it. He didn’t want it to be a waste. She was examining it carefully. ‘If we opened it,’ Oscar said, ‘where would it go?’
Mr Rogers snorted. ‘To the stones underneath, I reckon,’ he said. He didn’t deserve the door and he was ruining it, just like Oscar knew he would. He was tapping at it with his stick and some of the paint was chipping off.
‘Under the sea?’ Grandma asked. Oscar shrugged.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But maybe it would go back into the room it came off, and you could walk in and be inside the room.’ He only looked at Grandma when he said that. Grandma nodded and said that was a better idea than hers because hers was obvious.
‘Let’s open it and see, shall we?’ Mr Rogers asked. He poked at the letterbox with the stick. Oscar’s heart dropped. He didn’t want to. It was his door. He shouldn’t have let anyone else see it. He would have to open it now and Mr Rogers would be right because it wouldn’t really go anywhere. He walked around the door, figuring out where he should stand to open it.
‘We can’t open it,’ Grandma said.
‘Why?’ Mr Rogers asked.
‘It wouldn’t be the done thing,’ Grandma said. ‘Would it, Oscar?’
Oscar stopped walking, shook his head and glared at Mr Rogers. ‘It wouldn’t be the done thing,’ he said.
The water was just starting to reach the door. Grandma watched Oscar as he walked ahead with his hands in his pockets. It had been a very generous gesture, him taking them to the door, she knew. She caught up with him. ‘It was one of the best doors I’ve seen,’ she whispered as they walked back.
‘I know,’ Oscar said.
The Whale
It was going to be a summer of storms and no doubt about it. Grandma could feel it in the air as soon as she woke up. There had been a spate of storms for the last few days and they were going to carry on. They were the sort of storms that came all at once, loudly and hurriedly and brashly, and then burnt themselves out quickly. She went to the mouth of the cave and looked out. The sea looked swollen and dark grey. It was ugly a lot of the time, the sea, if you really looked at it. Ugly and beautiful too, with its muscles and its shadows and its deep mutterings, as if it was constantly arguing with itself. Sometimes she hated it and sometimes she loved it, which was the same with anything, she supposed. Once, a storm had blown in hundreds, thousands, of pieces of foam. The white foam had raced in like a flock of birds and each piece glided down and landed on the beach or on the cliff grass like sandpipers landing. Sometimes she wondered whether all she was doing here was waiting for that to happen again. Storms were because of the buccas. They did beautiful as well as terrible things; she could see that. She had to keep an eye on them. That was all she could do.
She needed things for the cave. She needed batteries and milk and camping gas. Oscar was meant to be bringing them this morning; he’d better not have forgotten. Still, it was early yet. She was always up early. If you weren’t up before seven you might as well not get up at all. The first thing to do when she got up was heat some water in a saucepan for a wash. She had saved just enough gas for that. Then she washed behind her woven screen, one half at a time so she didn’t get too cold. Then layers: tights, trousers, socks, vest, several tops and a jumper. Then she put the water on for coffee and spooned in the coffee and the secret teaspoon of sugar she had now when no one else was around. And in her head she could see the window in her old kitchen slamming shut, and the washing stretching and billowing out and snapping back on the line. She sipped her coffee. And eventually, as it always did now, the movement of the washing turned into a song, or a tune she thought she’d forgotten, and she swept the sand away from the bed, humming it.
Everything seemed to need fixing suddenly. The mattress was splitting again and the wind-up light kept blinking. She would need a better sleeping bag for next winter. Maybe she could send Oscar into the shop to look at them for her. But his mother was bound to find out and she didn’t want her to know about the sleeping bag. Anyway, it was summer first. Summer first, so that didn’t matter.
Where was Oscar? He ought to be here by now with her things so that he wouldn’t be late for school. She sat on the bed and waited, then went out on to the beach. There was someone walking but it wasn’t Oscar. She really did need those batteries. And she was going to tell him about what the buccas had sounded like in the storm last night, how they’d sounded like migrating ghosts.
She started to walk up the beach, following the figure she had seen hurrying past. The figure joined a group of people up ahead and suddenly there was a huge whale lying on the beach like a shipwreck and the people were gathered around it as if it was a campfire.
Grandma went a bit closer but she stayed near the rocks that jutted out from the cliff. It was a fin whale, at least fifty feet long, which must have been washed ashore during the night. It was pale, almost sand-coloured, but there were also darker marks that criss-crossed one another close to the tail. The tail itself was so big, so powerful-looking, that it was hard to imagine there wasn’t any life left in it.
Oscar was there, standing next to his mother, wide-eyed and rigid, staring up at the whale with amazement and horror and wonder. The sides of the whale were taller than his head. He looked at it, then at the sea, then back at the whale as if he had never quite believed that such things existed in there, as if the whale had made the depths and the shifts and the floors of the sea suddenly clear to him.
Grandma kept close to the rocks. Oscar had forgotten her for now – he wouldn’t be coming over today. She didn’t blame him.
Oscar’s mother looked at her watch and then leaned down and said something to him. They took one last look at the whale and then started to walk quickly along the beach, ready to cut up one of the dunes to the road to get to school. They would have to pass the spot where Grandma was. She hid. She wasn’t exactly sure why. She just saw them coming towards her and she hid. She’d always had a knack for hiding. She crawled under an overarching bit of rock and tucked her knees up as far as they would go and then stayed very still. She couldn’t see whether they had gone past or not so she waited there, crouched down, feeling ridiculous, until she was sure they wouldn’t see her when she crawled out.
&
nbsp; A Piece of the Moon
It was probably too high to reach. It was right above them, snagged on to the cliff above the cave, next to the thrift’s bobbing hats and the stone that looked like a face. It was late in the afternoon when Oscar spotted it. It was a thick, white, bright shape that looked like it had fallen from somewhere very far away. It was all crumpled up but still glowing very slightly like a night light. It could be many things. But the thing was, it was so difficult to tell, and Oscar felt like he really needed to know what it was. Sometimes he didn’t really care what things were and sometimes he did. When he looked up at it from one angle it looked like one thing and then from another it looked completely different.
Oscar was staying over for the first time in the year because the nights were just warm enough now. He had brought over his rucksack and his own cereal because he didn’t like the stuff Grandma got in. He had an airbed and a sleeping bag and a torch. It was early evening. There was a party going on somewhere along the beach because they could see a bonfire and hear laughing and whoops. The tide was in and the sky was covered in dark blue clouds. The water was dark blue and barely moved.
Oscar paced around the bottom of the cliff, looking up. Grandma told him to relax but he couldn’t. What he needed to do was climb up there and see for himself, but it was too high. Almost too high – he might be able to do it or he might not. He decided he couldn’t, and went into the cave. Grandma followed him inside and got him peeling carrots for dinner. He couldn’t concentrate, though, because he could tell it was still up there and he didn’t know what it was. He thought he knew, because of the glow. He wondered if it would be hot or cold to touch. It was going to start getting properly dark in a few hours. Maybe the buccas would steal it in the night and then he would never know. He went back out and paced around the bottom of the rock.
‘What are you doing?’ Grandma asked.
‘Thinking,’ Oscar said. He would be a coward if he didn’t climb up there. No one would know he had been one except himself. But he would always know, which was his biggest problem.
Grandma looked up and saw the white, glowing thing. ‘What is that?’ It was so hard to tell – it looked shapeless, but then sometimes it looked like a crumpled triangle, and other times a pale, curving arm. She could see Oscar’s problem. It was too high really, but it was too low to abandon altogether. He was going to have to climb up there. ‘You’re going to have to climb up there,’ she said. ‘I’ll come up as well.’
‘You aren’t meant to climb,’ Oscar said.
‘Neither are you.’
Grandma went first. It was easy to start with because the rock went up in a series of wide, flat steps that they could wait on while Grandma coughed and caught her breath. Oscar coughed too, to make her feel better, until Grandma told him to stop faking it. Then they scrambled up a steeper bit and rested on another platform. Oscar kicked some gravel over the edge and it pattered on to the cave’s roof. After a while they hoisted themselves up to the next flat platform and sat down. There wasn’t anywhere to go next. There was a shelf of rock blocking the way above and nothing to grip on to either side. They could see out over the whole beach from their ledge. There was the party – a whole lot of tiny black shapes floating in front of a fire. You couldn’t hear them from up here. You couldn’t really hear anything.
‘We can’t go any further,’ Grandma said.
‘No,’ he replied. After a while he said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It doesn’t matter at all,’ Grandma said.
‘We might fall off, like that cow.’
Grandma said that they wouldn’t.
Oscar said, ‘Lisa at school said you must be the most unhappy person in the whole world.’
‘Lisa is a shit,’ Grandma said. Oscar nodded. She was a shit. ‘I am certainly not the unhappiest person in the world.’
‘I said that. I said to her that Grandma is certainly not that. I said: Grandma is keeping on, which is very different.’
‘Where did you get that from?’
Oscar shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ They looked out over the beach. It was important to have come this far.
Notes from the House Spirits
There is a sudden silence and then everything is the same. An empty house is never silent for long and a house is never empty because we are here. There is a sudden silence and then everything is the same. Nothing is ever exactly the same, but it goes back to how it was. The staircase creaks and relaxes, the air slows and stills in rooms.
The buddleia in the attic is growing. We dream, as we have always dreamt, of doors and windows under water, of walls under water. We try not to dwell on these dreams.
Dust drifts across the room and settles on skirting and curtain rails. We can see it, every single piece, as it piles up and no one brushes it away. Dust is static and lazy; it lands on the first thing it sees. It fills the house bit by bit and no one brushes it away. It is not our job to brush it away.
This one left suddenly in the night. She sat up quickly in bed, swung her legs on to the floor and walked down the stairs. She stretched out her arms but there was no one else there. She talked to someone that we couldn’t see. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘You didn’t take your boots off. Will I need a coat?’ She went out the front door and she left it open.
Things we glimpse out of the front door:
Other rooms.
Other houses.
One huge space like a silent kitchen, with small lights on and one crescent of light, as if someone had left the fridge door open.
It is rude to leave suddenly, without any notice. She didn’t give us any notice. There weren’t any boxes. She didn’t take any of her things away. Didn’t she like it here? She left all her things behind. What does she expect us to do with it all? There is nothing that we can do with it, except count it, except look carefully through it, and we have done that already.
We back away, us, the house, towards keyholes and gaps. Now there is the house and there are the other things. We have retreated. They have become left-behind things. They have become awkward and extra, things that don’t belong. It is inevitable.
Now we notice what we didn’t notice before: that the paint is actually a strange blue, a cold blue, a blue that wasn’t the right decision. We don’t want that blue any more. We pick at it and bits fall on to the carpet. We notice how thin the carpet is getting. We notice how the clocks make the walls sound hollow. We don’t like the walls to sound hollow so we stop the hands on one or two clocks, but only on one or two, and maybe we loosen the battery in the back of another.
Sometimes a light shines through the window and it looks as if someone has turned on a light downstairs. Sometimes a voice calls through the house, we feel some weight on the stairs; or a coat, a dress left hanging in a cupboard seems rounder, body-shaped, like there is someone inside it. There is a flash on a door handle as if a hand were reaching out to open it, but there is no hand. We are the only ones left.
Things we miss about the one who left suddenly in the night:
Her laugh, which was as loud and sudden as the gas flame igniting in the boiler.
The kettle’s click and whoosh and teaspoons tapping like rain against the windows.
Her television with all its bright colours and its other houses.
The way she jumped when the doorbell rang.
The way we had to make sure the walls caught her when she stumbled.
That smokiness brews up and gets into the curtains. We don’t know where it comes from. There is a spider’s web behind a door handle and one under a light switch. We like spiders; they are quiet and make good use of the space.
Leaves come in under the door and we pick them up by their stalks and let them out through the letterbox.
Somebody comes and turns off the fridge and the freezer and the boiler. Perhaps we have seen her before. We are not good with faces. For a moment, we think that the woman who left in the night has come back. This new person watches as the fr
eezer shudders, then starts to drop pieces of ice. She stands there, watching. She doesn’t do anything except watch as the ice drops and melts on the floor.
Now that there is no noise from the fridge and the freezer and the boiler, we can hear other things. We can hear the pictures beginning to tilt off centre.
The telephone has been left plugged in and sometimes it rings. Sometimes we hear a familiar voice, always saying the same thing: ‘I’m not here at the moment. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’ It is strange, hearing that voice again, and we look around, half expecting to see someone. At least, we think the voice is familiar – we are not good with voices. It is easy for us to forget.
Sometimes we listen to the messages but we do not understand them.
‘Hello, I thought I’d ring for a quick catch-up. It’s been a long time. Sorry it’s been so long. How is everything?’
‘The book you ordered is now ready to be picked up.’
‘Is this the right number? Do you still live here?’
The shoes are packed into boxes and the boxes are stacked up like bricks. The mirrors are taken down and the walls are just walls again, which is a relief.
There is always somebody who sorts through the left-behind things and turns off the boiler. The woman’s footsteps are light and slow. She stares out of the window. She talks on the phone. She puts on one of the jumpers from the wardrobe and wears it all the time, even when she’s asleep. It is too small for her. Once, she drops a glass as she is packing, and she looks down at the pieces and then drops the rest, glass by glass, which is probably the clumsiest thing we have ever seen.
She takes the cushions off the sofa and moves it away from the wall. There is something in the empty space. There are small round balls, made out of butter, covered in dust and hair. The woman who left in the night used to cover them in sugar and make anyone who came over eat them. We didn’t know that most people dropped them behind the sofa. We didn’t know they were there. They are covered in dust and hair. The woman with light, slow footsteps puts her hand over her mouth and stares down at the butterballs. We didn’t know they were there. It is not our job to clear things away. They are the only thing we have ever missed.