As the sky clears, we check in all the outbuildings and find nothing and then fetch a torch and a spade from the car. The sight of them makes me retch.
Neil waits for me to recover. ‘You can still change your mind. Do you want to go?’
I don’t know, but we start walking around the edge of the fields down to the stream anyway. When we get there, I sit on the bank and take my socks and boots off so I can wade out into it. I stand back and look for the overhang Mum described in her letter. The water slices cold around my ankles but the bed of the stream is soft, and the silt squeezes up between my toes. Neil slips as he tries to reach me, and I lean towards him to catch his arm, and, for a moment, we both waver between standing and falling until he takes another step and we are clinging on to each other and actually laughing.
‘Fool,’ I say and kick an icy sheet of water at him and he pulls me off my feet. He tips me over until I am hanging inches away from the surface of the water and looking up at him, his eyes crinkled up and his mouth open with laughter and the clouds scudding across the sky behind him.
I feel lightheaded. Then I remember why I’m here and that Neil’s only here to keep an eye on me. I push him away.
We nearly miss the overhang altogether because a patch of earth has fallen down into the stream recently so that the opening is smaller. We pull some of the hanging strands of grass away and push the fallen soil to one side, washing our hands in the stream until they’re as blue as our feet. Inside the mouth of the cave, the ground smells damp and gives way beneath me. My eyes adjust slowly to the darkness then I step forward to let Neil up and my foot comes down hard on something. I pick it up. It’s a wooden cross. The rust from the nail has bled into the wood, and the letters D O G are only barely visible.
‘It’s the right place, then,’ says Neil and picks up a bone too small to be human. He squats and feels around finding a few more and lays them by the cross I’ve set to one side. ‘Looks like the drier earth at the back may have been dug out at some point, but there’s nothing there now.’
He comes back to me and drops some more bones by the cross. I was a fool to think it might be this easy. Neil takes my shaking hands and lets me choose when we step back outside into the daylight.
We walk barefoot up through the empty fields until our feet are dry and then sit to pull on our socks and boots.
‘It was a long shot, Robyn — we know the farm’s been searched already,’ says Neil. ‘But, you can’t give up now, we’ll find her.’
It’s nearly the day of the visiting order. And my last chance. Neil can read my mind, he turns to me. ‘Please, don’t go and see him yet.’
I finish tying my laces and he grabs my hands and makes me stop. It’s hard to look at him. I pull my hands away and tie the knot.
‘There’s another place I want to see.’ It’s her special place. I’ll show him one of our secrets. It’s better than a promise I can’t keep.
We leave the car by the road and walk up through the trees, slipping a little on the pine needles and wet earth, the pungent smell bursting in my nose. Droplets of rain shake free from the branches as they brush over us. I’m starting to panic that it won’t be there, but I find a hollow where the roots of a huge tree have been ripped out of the earth so long ago that the ground around it is glossy and smooth. The trunk of the tree is still there lying down the hill with the twisted roots sticking up, shielding us from anyone looking up the slope.
It’s exactly how she described it in the letter. We drop back into the hollow and look up through the twisted roots that are like a Gaudi balcony and through the dark green of the branches dripping down overhead. The clouds moving across the sky throw us in and out of shade. Kit might even remember being here.
There’s only one thing left for me to try now, and I know I need to do it on my own, — for everyone’s sake. Neil turns the engine off when we get home, but I put an arm out to stop him getting out of the car.
‘It’s okay. I can do the rest on my own.’ He looks surprised. ‘Carol told me you’re just here because Kit asked you to babysit me. Well, you don’t have to anymore.’
I shut the car door firmly behind me and walk away from him. At the door, I blink hard until I can see to put the key in the lock. It’s cleaner this way. I have one last thing to do here — then we leave.
‘Have you got it?’
He pulls out his chair and settles into it opposite me. His hair is a surprise. It curls back grey over his head like a sheep’s coat and kicks out behind his ears. The scar has become just one more groove in the lines of his face. Seeing it makes me reach for my own, adjusting my waistband so that it sits a little away from it.
‘Well?’ he asks, leaning across the table. I push my chair back and pull my hands on to my lap. He tilts his head back under an imaginary brim and the familiarity of the movement steals my breath away.
I sit it out, the mad pounding of my heart, by taking a good look around, the room is full of the stale breath of hope and disappointment.
When I’m ready, I look back into those pale eyes that I’ve never been able to see properly. They are narrowed and icy. My silence is making him angry. He pats the cigarette packet bulging red and white out of his pocket in a fingertip tattoo and shifts in his chair.
I pick up the bag and pull out the keys and the wallet.
‘That’s not what I wanted, and you know it,’ he slaps his hand down on the table and makes it judder. A guard at the edge of the room stands up straighter, watching us.
‘Tell me where she is first.’
‘Come on, Robyn,’ his smile is cunning, ‘you’re brighter than that. You help me, I help you.’ He winks at me as though we’re old buddies. I don’t answer so he shrugs.
‘Okay, let’s start again. How are you? How long are you planning to hang around?’
‘Until I find her,’ I answer. He frowns.
‘That could be a long time. Does your brother know you’re here?’ I glance towards the guard at the wall. ‘No, I’ll bet he doesn’t.’
I see Kit, stiff and distant, asking me not to provoke Ray, if not for my own sake, then for his.
‘He doesn’t even know what we look like now!’ Kit said. It’s not true, of course. If you look hard enough, you can see both our parents in our faces. Sometimes, when Kit’s angry, his eyes glitter and spark up memories for me that smell of smoke and leather and make me afraid for him. Those are the nights I dream of Ray creeping through our windows.
‘Look, are you going to tell me or not?’
He leans forward. ‘Well, that’s a nice way to talk to your old man after all these years. As if I’m nothing to you when I’m your blood and bone — and up here …’ His voice fires up and he taps his head. Behind him, the guard watches us. Ray turns and follows my gaze and then puts his palms up on the table.
Neil won’t be happy I came, but he doesn’t understand Ray’s inside my head and there’s no room for anyone else until this is over.
‘You helped me out once, do you remember? She was going to betray her own flesh and blood and you helped me.’
And there it is. I betrayed her. My own flesh and blood
He starts to laugh, a low rasping sound without humour. ‘Ah, you never told them that, did you? So we have another little secret, don’t we?’
It’s true. We’re all about secrets in this family.
Mum told me to step right back up to the bullies because if you don’t, they’ll never stop. Not that it’s always the bullies you need to watch out for. Still. If she were here, she’d be right beside me. I close my fingers over the engraving on the bracelet.
‘Come on, let’s see it. Then I’m gonna tell you how to pass it to me without this lot knowing.’ He jerks his head towards the guards and his smile stretches the scar flat so it is a falling streak of white from the unmoved skin around his eyes. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve done it before.’ He pats the packet of cigarettes in his pocket and winks.
I stretch my wrist out o
f my jacket and hold it so that the silver around it is just a flash in the electric light. My own scar tightens over the hard knots in my stomach.
He reaches across and I can smell the stale tobacco on his breath. I pull my hand back.
And now I know this moment is what I came for.
‘No,’ I almost laugh out loud, ‘you can’t have it.’
There are flecks of yellow in the blue of his irises that catch the light and I concentrate on looking at them and not into them. His fingers rap rap rap on the table.
‘I want it.’
I shake my head. He lunges at me and grabs my wrist. His fingers dig into my flesh as though he would cut through it to take the bracelet. The guard steps forward from the wall and then relaxes as Ray leans back in his chair again. He lifts his hands up in an apology that doesn’t show on his face. I rub my wrist with my other hand, the prints of his fingers livid on my skin. The bracelet is still there, and I move my chair further from the table.
‘Why do you want it anyway?’ It would be nice to know what he has planned. ‘You might have given it to her, but it’s mine now.’
‘I didn’t give it to her.’
I pull it out again and hold it away from my arm. ‘Love R, it says.’
He laughs. ‘Not R for Ray. R for Rose.’
My fist closes around it tight. I won’t give it to him now whatever he tells me. I drop my hand back on to my lap.
‘You were never going to tell me where she is, were you?’ I grip the seat of the chair hard to stop myself from jumping across the table at him.
‘She’s probably off ruining some other bloke’s life, what do I care?’
‘Liar!’ I can see it all in his face now. Shame, rage, defiance.
I wrap my arms around my body, covering the scar and the bracelet. Neil was right, it’s a trap of some sort.
‘Just give it to me and I’ll tell you all about her. Wouldn’t you like to know?’ He switches on the charm. Of course, I want to know all about her. That’s everything. He’s the only person left in the world who can tell me.
What harm can he do with one silver bracelet?
‘Ah, you would! I knew I could talk you round.’ His lips curl in triumph, and I see the snake back in the glitter of his eyes.
He sees me, he does. But not all of me. Because I had a mother who taught me to stand up for myself. Because I still have a father who shows me how to make the right choices.
If he really sees me, he’ll know I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure he doesn’t get his way — even if it means I can never get mine.
‘No.’ I tell him. You lose.
I put the bracelet back in the bag and click it shut.
I’ll tell Kit everything. Eva and Neil are right, no more secrets. We’ll find another way to pay our respects because, whatever this man wants, it’ll never be right for us.
‘What?’ Ray’s voice is soft with surprise.
‘No.’ I shake my head for emphasis and stand up. Ray hisses through his teeth.
‘I will get what I want, and, when I get out of here, I’ll teach you a bit about family and loyalty.’
‘Family?’ I call out as I walk away. ‘But you already taught me that. Family is blood and pain.’
Chapter Thirteen
1976
My eyes open, and I can see nothing. The sheet is half over me and I try to slide further beneath it as silently as possible, listening. It was just a dream, it’s just a dream. I say it over and over in my head until my heart starts to slow down. I look around the room and see that the monster in the corner is only my dressing gown on the chair, and the vampire hiding in the wardrobe is just my school uniform on a hanger.
The curtains have not been drawn tight and there is a sliver of moonlight that falls into the room and points at the bed from the open window. I try to shake out the stiffness from my legs without making a noise and stretch carefully over to reach my book, holding it open so that the light hits the page I’m reading.
Something makes a noise in the garden and I hold my breath trying to work out what it is. I think it might be a cat or a fox, so I slip off the bed, sheet wrapped round me in case I need to jump back in quickly. I put my eye to the gap in the curtains.
There is a figure walking slowly across the lawn. It walks in and out of the throw of shade from the trees where they stand tall enough to block the moonlight. It takes me a while before I can tell that it is Mum. I nearly call out because I didn’t know she was back, and I am pleased to see her. She is wearing a plain T-shirt and jeans and her hair is a cloudy mass around her shoulders. I notice that her feet are bare and can almost feel the scratch of the dry grass between my own toes as she stops to get something out of the shed.
She looks around, and I pull away from the window. When I look again she is at the bottom of the garden and I see her climb over the fence into the Jonsons’ garden. It seems like a strange thing to do, and I think about waking up Kit, to show him but I don’t want to miss anything. I stand very still behind the curtain like a real spy would.
When Mum climbs back into our garden, she is holding something under one arm. She walks in front of the shed and then sets it on the ground. Now I can see that it is the Jonsons’ cockerel. Matthew hates that bird. He is always asking when someone will do something about it. As Mum releases the arm around it, its wings stretch out in an effort to take off but only for a moment. Mum reaches for a broom I hadn’t noticed lying on the grass and places the cockerel’s head on the ground. It is facing the house and I can see its eyes flashing as it tries to twist away from her. She puts the broom across the bird’s neck and then places her feet on it on either side of its head. As she stands up, she pulls hard on its legs in a sharp jerking motion.
I don’t realise straight away what she has done because the cockerel is still twitching, and it is so unexpected. I wonder if she learnt how to do that on the farm. Mum waits until the movement stops. Her face looks hard like an old statue, as if she does this all the time, and, when the bird is finally still, she takes a moment to look around before walking back into the house. I wonder if killing the chickens was one of her jobs when she lived on the farm.
Then, I wonder if I’m dreaming again and she is some kind of zombie mum monster. She comes back out again minutes later with newspaper which she uses to wrap the bird up and then she puts it into a plastic bag and ties it up tight. She has another quick look around and carries it around the alley at the side of the house where we keep the bins and returns with empty hands.
When she comes back, she stands in the garden for a little while her arms folded across her body and her face turned up to the sky. I think how pretty she looks, which seems weird after what she just did, with the moonlight reflecting on her cheeks which are shiny in the clear night. Then she puts the broom back in the shed and disappears again through the back door.
I want to go downstairs to see my Mum, but, now that she is out of sight, I start to think that it can’t really be her. If I walk up to her and she turns around and it’s not her and it is a zombie mum I know I won’t be able to run fast enough. Not on my own in the dark and the others all asleep.
I wonder if Kit and Matthew will even wake up if the cockerel doesn’t crow and disturb them. Matthew hates being woken up by it, but he’s the one who wakes me up when he opens the front door to pick up his paper. He always lets it bang shut, and then I can hear him walking through to the kitchen to make his coffee.
My Mum just snuck out in the middle of the night and killed a cockerel. I didn’t know she could do that. I’m not too sad about the cockerel, but it is a living thing and that makes her a murderer. I wonder if that’s how murderers start. Insects and rodents and then bigger and bigger. I want to ask Debbie what she thinks, but she wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret. Maybe everyone who lives on a farm can do that, and it’s a normal sort of thing if you have chickens. I climb back into bed, pulling the sheet tight around me, and wonder what else she can
do that she hasn’t told us about. I wonder if Matthew would still stay with us if he knew she’s a killer.
I’m shivering so hard that I almost don’t hear Mum coming upstairs. I sort of want her to come in, so I can tell her what I saw and then she will give me a cuddle and explain that she did it because the bird wasn’t well, and Mr Jonson didn’t want any of us to see in the daytime and get upset. But it doesn’t make any sense that he would do that, and, when she stops at my door and looks in, I don’t call out after all. I don’t want to make her angry with me for spying on her. Maybe it’s part of my nightmare, like when you wake up and think you’re safe, but the witches keep coming back and you keep thinking you woke up, but you’re still dreaming until in the end you can’t sleep at all.
When I’m sure that Mum has gone to bed, I slip into Kit’s room. He is fast asleep, but I don’t want to go back to my room alone, so I climb in beside him and tuck the sheet in all around me. He is warm and solid but so still it is as if he is pretending to be dead. I notice that his Action Man is still climbing up on to his windowsill and I think that if he’s not playing with it anymore, and he’s not still angry with me, maybe he will let me have it.
I don’t notice when Kit gets up, but, when I wake up, I am on my own. My hair has stuck over my face and the sheet feels soggy in the heat. My dreams are still a little bit in my head, and I keep my eyes shut while I try and sort them out. I hope the cockerel bit is a dream, but I feel anxious about seeing Mum this morning. I tell myself that if she’s not here, it was a dream, but if she’s back, then it wasn’t.
There are voices downstairs and it takes me a little while to realise that one of them is Sergeant Cadogan’s, and I must have slept in late because he wouldn’t call around early unless there’s an emergency. I can hear Matthew’s voice too, so he hasn’t gone to work yet which means that the cockerel can’t have woken him up. Maybe Mr Jonson called Sergeant C and he is going to arrest Mum. I brush my teeth quickly, pull on some clothes and go downstairs. Kit is sitting on the bottom step leaning against the wall.
A Little Bird Told Me Page 17