“I’ll remember next time.” He needed a distraction, but what could he conjure with this little sleep and at this early hour? “Do you want a shower? I can give you a hand if you like.”
His dad looked baffled. “Why would I want you to give me a hand in the shower?”
“Never mind. How about you go for a shower and I’ll make you a coffee for afterwards?”
Somewhere in the house, a door blew shut. His father’s head snapped up.
“What was that?”
“Just a door in the breeze.”
“Don’t be stupid. We can’t afford to be stupid.” His dad was already hurrying down the stairs, gesturing imperiously to Jacob to get out of the way. “Go to your room and shut your door. And don’t come out until I call you.”
“Dad, there’s no one… Let me come with you.”
“No. It’s not safe.”
“I can help. I’ll help you look. Please, Dad. I need to learn what to do.”
“Then stay behind me, and do exactly what I say.”
And they were off, a fruitless tour of the house that ended with his father, almost in tears with frustration and terror, slapping Jacob brutally around the face. The blow hurt, but Jacob almost welcomed the release of tension that it brought. Afterwards his father sobbed for a while, until Jacob managed to persuade him upstairs to the shower. When he came down again, subdued and frail-looking in his dressing gown, he accepted the toast Jacob offered him with a smile.
The day trundled along in its familiar groove. They spent the morning checking the doors and the windows, the afternoon sitting quietly in the living-room while his father dozed and grunted and occasionally startled himself awake. Jacob normally fought the temptation to let his dad sleep during the day and knew he’d regret it later, but the early start had eroded his good intentions. Perhaps he could give him one extra tablet this evening, just this once, or perhaps go back to the doctor and ask for something slow-release to keep him under for longer… He was falling into sleep himself, he knew he was, and he ought to fight it, but he couldn’t. It was easier to give in to the slow pull and drag of exhaustion and let the waters close over his head.
In the border country between sleeping and waking, he heard his sister singing to herself. As a baby, she’d always woken before him, and he would open his eyes to the sound of her singing or babbling to herself in her cot. As soon as she could climb out, she’d seek out his company above their parents’, pushing open the door a fraction so she could peer in and see if he was still asleep. As long as he kept his eyes closed, she’d occupy herself with whatever she’d brought with her, tucked under her arm like a talisman to shield her on the perilous journey from her room to his. When they’d moved here, his day always began with the distinctive creak of the floorboard outside his bedroom. If he’d known then how few of those mornings there would be –
Coming back to full wakefulness with a start, he saw for a startling heart-stopping moment a face looking in at the window. A couple of rapid blinks, and the face was only the brief conjunction of two wild rose blossoms and a shadow from a cloud passing overhead. His father slumbered on, oblivious and innocent. Jacob’s face throbbed. Was it swelling? Would his father notice? And what could he say to him that would satisfy the anxiety this would raise? Perhaps if he got a cold compress? Was that a thing that really worked, or just a parenting fiction to get Ella to calm down and stop crying? The memory drove him from his chair in a kind of frenzy. Why couldn’t he get her out of his head today?
In the kitchen, he ran cold water over a clean tea towel and held it to his face. His parents used to use kitchen roll, but of course they had none in the house. The pantry door was ajar, and when he went to close it he saw that another whiskey bottle had materialised, like a confession, among the baked beans and tinned tomatoes. This one was new, the bottle plastic, the label fresh; the brand was the one they stocked in the village shop. Had his father slipped his moorings, crept away from Mrs Armitage’s supervision, walked into the village and bought it? The man who ran the shop would probably have noticed nothing unusual. His father could seem quite normal and lucid as long as he kept off the subject of the people who were coming to his house to find them, and as long as the person he was talking to didn’t realise everything he said about himself and his family was hopelessly out of date.
Or had he himself bought it and forgotten about it? He hid it beside its identical twin in the Weetabix box.
(“Can I tell you a secret?” Ella, smiling and patting at his arm as he put down her breakfast in front of her, the house so silent they might as well have been alone in it. “I don’t actually like Weetabricks.” She took a huge, heaping spoonful and put it in her mouth, her gaze fixed on his. “But I tell Mummy I do, because she likes me to eat them, and I’m so good at pretending I can even make myself think I like them. So my secret really is, I actually do like Weetabricks.” A typical Ella-statement, absurd and contradictory and impossible to get to the bottom of.)
He came back out of the pantry, slamming the door to dislodge the thoughts in his head. One of the great puzzles of his father’s illness was the way Ella had slipped between the cracks of his memory. It was only Jacob whose days were haunted by the little girl who lived in terror of the lurking sea, but overcame that fear to seek out the things she craved. Daisies and dandelions, stuck in cups of water and left around the house for people to knock over. Pebbles for her socks. Time with her older brother. Ella was with him every day, even as he tried to deny her. Why else was he still living in this house with his father, if not so he could suffer the sweetness of her haunting?
The kitchen was dank and stuffy. The whole house was dank and stuffy, smelling of old food and old man and old memories. He clambered onto the worktop and wrestled with the half-rotten sash window over the sink. The wood had swollen and shrunk over so many winters that it rattled and shook in the breeze that was sometimes the only ventilation the room got, but the window itself stubbornly refused to open. He swore and climbed back down again, unlocked the back door and threw it wide instead. After a minute, he walked out into the garden. Perhaps the fresh air would help the swelling in his cheek. The world was so bright and lovely, surely he could make himself enjoy it.
The shape beneath the apple tree was so still his eyes barely snagged on it at first. It wasn’t until the third time that he came back to study the newly-thickened outline of the trunk (apple tree must have had a growth spurt don’t be stupid it’s a tree they don’t grow that fast there must be something wrong with it no hang on that looks like who the bloody hell) that he understood what he was looking at.
Someone had come into their garden. Not to the front door, not crunching over the gravel and ringing the doorbell, not someone legitimate he could explain to his terrified and disbelieving father. Someone had crept past his defences, and now they were in his garden. His heart, angry and sore with a too-long effort of patience, swelled with rage. He strode down towards the apple tree, aware that some sort of bellow was coming out of him like steam from a kettle, accompanied by words that came out of his mouth without any intervention at all from his brain (“get the fuck out of here you little bastard this is private fucking land now get moving or I’ll fucking kill you right now and throw your body over the cliff –”)
“Jacob? Is that you?”
The light was behind the tree and he couldn’t make out the face, but the voice was straight out of his dreams.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sneak around – Jacob, it is you, isn’t it? I’ve got the right person?”
His mouth was dry with shock. He could hardly move for hope and fear. He wanted to hurt himself to make sure this was real.
“I – I don’t know if you remember me. I didn’t know where else to come.”
When she moved away from the tree, he could see her in silhouette. Small and slight, long hair streaming down her back, her shoulders sagging under the weight of a rucksack that looked too heavy for her. Jeans and traine
rs. He shaded his eyes with his hand and blinked, and the colours and details began to come into focus. Fair hair. Blue eyes. All the prettiness he’d known she’d grow into, finally come into being. Her face, grimy and anxious. Her lower lip, chapped and dry, caught beneath the white of her front teeth. She was waiting for him to say something, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Jacob, please.” She was trying not to cry now. “It’s Ella.”
And as if her name was a spell, his legs unlocked and he could move again, and he threw himself across the few feet of grass between them and held his little sister in his arms.
Today I realised that the man who hunts me often comes to me in disguises. I think perhaps he must put them on and off like suits. Skin-suits. Flesh-suits. Flesh-and-bone suits. I wonder where he keeps the ones he isn’t wearing? Does he hang them in a closet? And what on earth can he look like in the moments when he’s naked? If I could catch him in the moments when he changes his suit, perhaps I might begin to understand him.
He was wearing a particularly lovely one the first time we met. We undressed each other as soon as we decently could, or perhaps as soon as we indecently could, and I thought then that I was seeing the core of him, his true self beneath the clothes, but I should have known it was just another disguise. There is nothing more deceptive than the sight of a beautiful face and body. And I deceived him too. I want to forget that part but I can’t. I fooled him as well. I showed him my skin-envelope, no scars or inky lines on it yet to tell my story, and he thought he could read everything about me from the touch of his fingers on my flesh. But really I was full of secrets. And over time he began to discover them, just as I began to discover his.
He used to tell me I was his goddess and he wanted to worship me. We both thought he meant it. It took me longer than it should have to realise it was simply the spirits inside him, speaking with his mouth and tongue.
Only by then he was too much in love with me to let me go, so I had to run away. And now he’s found me again, and the only way I can escape from him is to tear off my skin and grow a new one and never, ever let him see it.
It would be easier if I didn’t secretly like the suits he wears. He looks good in all of them. It was the suits that first attracted me to him. All of this would be so much easier if a part of me wasn’t secretly in love with him.
Chapter Six
2007
The high fence gave Mrs Armitage the comforting illusion that her world was static and secure. The North Sea could continue its campaign to tear down the cliff, but she would know nothing of it. Pressed close against her fence, her fingers grubbing in the clay-heavy soil as she prepared the pit where her new viburnum would sink its roots, she could imagine everything was unchanged from the first time she came here. But wilful blindness was for children and fools, so she opened her eyes and stood up and opened the gate, forcing herself to confront reality.
The land had already begun to settle into its latest shape. Within weeks of a fall, plants would begin re-colonising the edge, making it seem as if this was how it had always been. It was only in her memory that the past would live on.
There was a very small person coming along the cliff towards her. She’d normally describe this person as a child – the person was child-sized, child-shaped, wearing purple wellies with unicorns on them and carrying a small tatty plastic object clutched tight in one small paw. But there was something so utterly un-childlike about the way she walked; very slowly and carefully, shoulders tense, head bowed. As Mrs Armitage watched, the small person stopped, glanced towards the sea, and shuddered. Then she squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and recommenced her slow careful tread across the scarcely worn grass.
I should go back to the garden, Mrs Armitage thought, and finish planting that viburnum.
The soil was beginning to shrink and dry on her hands. She rubbed them against her jeans, knowing she would regret the muddy streaks later when they crumbled onto her carpet. She should wait and wash them properly under the tap. She should go back into her garden, right now, and shut the gate behind her and shoot the bolt home and finish planting the viburnum and go into the house and wash her hands and then decide what to have for lunch. It was ridiculous to stand here, watching the slow agonised approach of this small tousle-haired girl. If she didn’t move soon, the child would arrive, and since they already knew each other, they’d have to speak. How did she know her, though? She made a point of not getting to know anyone new.
After a moment’s intense thought, the answer came to her. Of course, it was Ella – that frightened little scrap who had thought she was a seal and had to be rescued from the beach where her older brother had stranded them both. The little scrap who she had told to come and visit her some time, if she wanted. Why had she said that? She didn’t like people in general, and children were among the least appealing ones on offer. In the moments when she berated herself for her stupidity, she saw that Ella was now far too close for her to make an escape without seeming rude, and she would have to go through with whatever encounter was coming her way.
She was not pleased about this. The treacherous little leap of her heart was nervous anticipation, not pleasure. She wiped her hands again, as if Ella might want to shake hands, and waited for Ella’s resolute steps to bring her within speaking distance.
“Hello,” she said at last, since Ella didn’t seem to be going to say anything.
“I’ve come to visit,” said Ella.
“Yes, you have.”
“You said I could visit?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”
“I don’t go to school, my mum teaches me at home.”
“So why isn’t she teaching you now?”
“She’s asleep. And so, this is my free time. I’m allowed to go out and play.”
“I don’t have anything for you to play with here.”
“That’s all right.” Ella held up the plastic thing she was clutching. Mrs Armitage could see now that it was an improbable blue-tinted doe-eyed rainbow-maned creature, about as far from an actual horse as it was possible to get while still somehow looking recognisably like one. “I brought Rainbow Dash.” She glanced towards the sea again, giving it the kind of glance one might give to a snake coiled behind glass or an alligator lounging in a concrete pool twenty feet below. “Should we maybe go into your garden?”
“But it’s so nice and sunny out here,” said Mrs Armitage, with a sudden impulse of cruelty. “I could bring you a drink and a biscuit and we could sit out here and enjoy the sunshine?”
She saw Ella’s eyes darken with fear, saw the little fingers clutch tighter around the neck of the plastic horse-thing, and realised she was going to have to let her in before Ella crushed her toy to death. Not that she was concerned with the fate of a piece of vacuum-formed tat, but Ella would be upset; and not that she cared if Ella was upset, but an upset child would be harder to send back along the cliff to her own house when Mrs Armitage’s small store of good-will was exhausted.
“Or we could go into the garden and you can help me finish planting something,” she suggested, and stood aside from the gate. Ella scurried inside as if the hounds of Hell were snapping at her heels.
Once behind the apparent security of the fence, Ella blossomed. Her death grip on the pony-creature (Rainbow Dash, Mrs Armitage thought scornfully, who thought of these names?) relaxed, and the tight, frightened concentration on her face dissolved into a smile. When she turned to Mrs Armitage, she seemed three inches taller.
“What shall we do first?” she asked. “Are we planting that plant over there?”
“That’s all we’re doing. And I’ve nearly finished. But you can help if you want.”
“What do I do to help?” Ella reached out a curious finger, then winced.
“Don’t touch it,” said Mrs Armitage, too late. “It’s spiny. Here, give me your hand.” She took Ella’s finger and squeezed it until Ella squeaked in protest and a fat bead of blood grew
and swelled, then lost its shape and spilled off the end of her finger.
“That hurt.” Ella put her finger in her mouth.
“The blood will wash away any germs. You don’t want an infection.”
“It’s a horrible plant. Why did you choose a horrible plant?”
“I like things that know how to defend themselves. Do you still want to help?”
Ella sucked her finger, trapped in the dangerously wobbly moment between tears and stoicism. Then she peered into the shallow pit Mrs Armitage had dug.
“Did you dig that?”
“Yes, of course I did. Who else would do it?”
Ella knelt down and measured the depth with her hand. Then she reached for the trowel and began to scrape away at the base of the hole.
“I think this needs to be a bit deeper,” she said, with the total confidence of the very young.
Mrs Armitage opened her mouth to tell her it was already the perfect depth, then closed it again. She had no idea how long the child was planning on staying, but it would be easier to get through it if she was busy with a project outside, while Mrs Armitage hid safely in the kitchen and boiled the kettle for a mug of tea.
What was she going to give Ella to drink, though? A child that age wouldn’t drink tea. She had milk, of course, but some children disliked milk. Other than that, there was water. Rummaging in her cupboards, she was surprised to find a vivid orange bottle of dilutable squash.
As she took it down to examine, she uncovered a vague memory of dropping it into her basket on her way around the village shop. The basket already held a packet of biscuits, shaped like rings and painted in the colours apparently favoured by the people who had designed Ella’s dreadful plastic pony. Another moment’s investigation revealed the biscuits cowering towards the back behind a can of baked beans.
Of course, she hadn’t been hoping Ella would visit. She didn’t like visitors. But when you found yourself accidentally inviting them anyway, it was best to be prepared. She studied the instructions on the bottle, then took down a glass. On the counter-top beside her, the kettle shuddered and steamed and clicked itself off.
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