“I didn’t like to get rid of anything,” he said. “I know the clothes won’t be any good to you any more, but I didn’t like to…”
She wasn’t listening; she was down on her knees in front of the doll’s house, tugging open the door and peering inside as if the only space she could cope with in this moment was the tiny ordered domesticity of the imaginary people who lived there. The house had come with people made of wood and bendy pipe-cleaners, their spherical smiling heads beaming blandly up from beneath their woollen hair, but Ella had replaced them on the first day with the plastic ponies she adored, and now every room in the house was filled with doe-eyed horses with rainbow manes.
“I thought I’d dreamed this,” she said. “I used to dream sometimes I had this doll’s house, and I loved it so much. There was so much I thought I could remember, but I was never sure… Do you ever have that feeling?”
Looking at his little sister, he thought he might be having that feeling right now.
“Is it too creepy in here for you?” he asked. “You can have my room if you like, and I’ll sleep in here. The room I’m in now, I mean. I moved next to Dad so I can hear him.”
“No, it’s fine. It’s not creepy at all.”
“I know it’s really early but I don’t stay up late because Dad often gets up in the night. But you don’t have to –”
“It’s fine. I’m tired too.”
It sounded like a polite fiction but he could see she really meant it. From his perspective, Ella had simply materialised under the apple tree, but of course she’d had to travel to get here. Would he ever dare to ask her about that? Would he ever dare ask her about where their –
“Um, do you need anything? Toothbrush or toothpaste or anything?”
“I’ve got everything with me.”
“You’ll have to shut the door,” he blurted out clumsily. “Dad wanders sometimes but if I leave this door shut he seems to sort of –” he managed to stop himself from saying forget about what’s in here, but she must have known what he was going to say. How must it feel to her, to know her father had retained no memory of her?
“I’ll be fine.” She smiled. “I promise. I’m not seven any more, remember?”
He didn’t want to leave her here alone, in a room she’d been frightened of as a child, with all the emptiness of the house and the sea echoing in her ears. But he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I’ll see you in the morning, then.”
He woke shortly after midnight to an eerie silence, and the paradoxical conviction that he was needed. Dad, he thought blearily, and stumbled out of bed to peer in to his dad’s room. But his father was still mercifully asleep, starfished across the bed with his mouth slightly open, his heavy breath verging on a snore. The sight was too vulnerable and intimate to be endearing, but he lingered anyway. Did his father still dream? Or was sleep now a blessed relief from memory?
The need for sleep dragged at him like water, but still there was a lightness in his body, a sense-memory of something good that had happened and was still happening, even as he struggled to think what it might be. When he remembered, he knew at once what it was that had woken him. She’d never liked to sleep in her own room. She’d always been afraid of the sea.
Thank God his father was still asleep. Perhaps he, too, felt the joy of Ella’s return, even if his conscious mind couldn’t connect the young woman who had come back to them with the small daughter he never mentioned. He inched along the corridor, wincing with every crack and murmur of wood, looking over his shoulder to check that his father was not creeping up on him, determined and terrified.
The door to Ella’s room was open.
But the room itself was as empty and desolate as if he’d dreamed her.
His first thought was that this was exactly what had happened: he’d dreamed his sister’s return, and was only now waking to the truth. But no; there was Ella’s rucksack, the bedclothes were disturbed, and there was a faint warmth in the room. She was here, he hadn’t dreamed her. So where – ?
He opened the door to the room next to Ella’s that had once been his, trying not to see how desolate and dreadful it looked with the gaping space where his bed had been, and the un-treasured possessions of his childhood littered where he’d thrown them. Had she come in here, half-asleep and looking for comfort? If so, she must have been so frightened –
“Hey.” Ella’s voice, ghostly, came to him from low down and beside the door, and he almost swallowed his tongue. “I’m here. I know I shouldn’t be.”
She was crouched on the floor, with her back against the wall. When he sat down beside her, he could feel the tension radiating from her skin.
“I moved into the room next to Dad’s,” he said. “It’s easier to look after him. Can’t you sleep?”
“I’m fine, I can hear the sea, that’s all. I know it’s stupid. I forgot you’d moved rooms and I wondered if you were still awake, and when you weren’t here I thought I’d stay for a bit.”
He wished he had something to wrap her in. He’d forgotten how much she truly hated this house.
“Ella, did you ever try to find me?” Here in the dark he could finally ask the question that had haunted him all day. “I mean, I’m so glad you have now, I’m so glad you’re here, but – I looked and looked for you, I always hoped you’d write to me or come back, but you never did. I thought I’d never see you again, and then you came out of nowhere.”
“I wanted to. Mum wouldn’t give me the address.”
He wasn’t sure he was ready to talk about their mother at all yet, let alone to hear her mentioned with such casualness.
“But the internet? I’m on Facebook, I’ve got an open profile. You know my name, you know Dad’s name, you knew what the house looked like and roughly where we lived. There aren’t that many villages that are –” he stopped himself from saying the words falling into the sea – “along this bit of coast.”
“I know, when you say it like that it sounds so pathetic. But Mum – well, she didn’t want me looking for you, and I didn’t want to –”
It wasn’t her fault she loved a monster. She’d been left with no one else to love.
“I’m so glad you came here.”
“Please don’t be angry with her. I know she left you behind but she was doing her best.”
“Of course I’m not angry with her,” Jacob lied. Was he convincing Ella? The little sister he remembered took her older brother’s opinions as gospel. He would have to get used to the idea that she might have her own opinions.
She was looking again at the shell of his childhood room, made ghostly by the night and the vanished furniture and the posters that peeled from the walls. It was, if possible, even more creepy than her own. “You didn’t take your stuff when you moved rooms.”
“I was in a bit of a rush.”
“And you never came back for it?”
“I didn’t, no.” He’d come back just once, for the photo of Ella and his mother that he’d used as a bookmark for a while. Their family had never been much for photos. He’d been lucky to find that one. “I didn’t seem to need it.” Before he could stop himself, his face split wide with a yawn.
“I’m keeping you up.” Ella was on her feet instantly.
“No, it’s fine, I don’t mind. It’s nice to wake up and chat to someone lucid.”
“Does he wander?”
“Sometimes. If you hear him, it’s best to stay put.”
“Okay. I’ll remember.”
He wanted to keep Ella here with him for longer, the two of them surrounded by the ghosts of their discarded childhoods, but the morning was already rushing towards them and he needed to be ready for the day. He wanted to kiss her goodnight, but she was still half a stranger to him. So he stood in his old room and watched her leave it, heard the hesitation of her feet outside her own doorway as she gathered herself for what lay on the other side, then went back to the room next to his father’s and let sleep take him.
>
Chapter Eight
2007
In her dream, Mrs Armitage was in her rowboat, pulling hard against an incoming tide. The sea was thick and opaque like soup and the air around her was warm; she had the feeling that if she chose, she could walk across the water. Her boat was low in the water, perhaps because of the stack of equipment at her feet – newly-filled air-tanks, the spare gas-can, her wetsuit – or perhaps because her husband was with her, watching with grave, attentive eyes as she bent forward and pulled back, bent forward and pulled back, dipping the oars again and again.
“I know this is a dream,” she told him. “You’re dead. I wish you weren’t, but you are. So whatever happens next is just my brain amusing itself while I sleep.”
Her husband smiled and reached out a hand towards her. For a moment she didn’t dare look for fear it would be grey and swollen, the flesh nibbled by the delicate mouths of fish as it soaked off the bones, but then she remembered that she was dreaming and she could control whatever happened next. So she told herself that his hand would be as she remembered, and when it came to rest on her knee, it was warm and strong and smooth and brown, long fingers and knotty knuckles, the way she remembered it. He was wearing the clothes that belonged in the photograph that sat by her bed, and she realised with a sinking feeling around her heart that she had lost the memory of how he’d looked outside of that photograph, his entire complex physical self reduced to a single frozen image.
“I can’t remember what you used to look like any more,” she told him. “And there’s something wrong with the sea. I can’t get the boat to move. This is my dream, so why can’t I get the boat to move?”
He didn’t speak; he never spoke to her in her dreams any more. Instead he looked very earnestly into her face, as if he could convey his message simply by staring. The sea had turned to cloudy glass. Her boat was trapped, her oars wedged in place. If it wasn’t for the warmth of the air, which she knew was the warmth generated by her own sleeping body, she would have said it was frozen.
“What do you want?” she demanded. “What do you want?”
Over his shoulder, she could see her own house, and also the house where the child Ella and her family now lived. The air was impossibly clear and sharp. She could see every detail of her dream-version of the house, which turned out to be far more baroque than the plain Edwardian lines she knew it to possess. The only point of similarity was the single rounded tower at the corner, where a yellow light shone out like a beacon.
“I’m not getting involved,” she told her husband. “It’s none of my business.”
His face was reproachful.
“I know what this means,” she said. “You’re my conscience, whenever you turn up in my dreams you’re the personification of my conscience. But I’m in control here. I choose not to take any notice of you. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it has to be. I like my life the way it is.”
Something fluttered by her feet, in among the heavy gas cylinders. She reached down for it and found she was holding a child’s picture. A woman with long yellow hair lay in bed, while a smaller figure with yellow hair sat on the floor. Ella’s mouth was a clownish downturned circle and fat blue droplets rolled down her cheeks.
“You’re not fooling me with this.” Despite its childish iconography and primary-colour palette, the drawing was of a far higher standard than Ella could ever have produced, with a depth of ominous expression and an emotional weight that only an adult imitating a child could create. “This is all in my head. I’m dreaming this. It’s my brain talking to itself. And I’m not having it, do you hear? I’m in control here.”
Her husband’s mouth was moving, but there was no sound coming out. She let go of the oars, stood up in the boat and sat carefully down on the edge, her back to the frozen sea.
“I’m going into the water now,” she said. “You can stay here if you like, but I’m going down there where it’s quieter.” She wore her usual outfit of thigh-high waders, thermal leggings under jeans, a t-shirt and a jumper, and all her air lay in tanks in the bottom of the boat, but she knew this wouldn’t matter; she was dreaming after all, and in her dreams, she could do anything. “The water’s turned back to liquid now,” she said, and tipped herself backwards off the side of the boat, feeling the water welcoming her like an old friend, sinking down and down and down beneath the waves to the place where the fish darted among the weedy ruins of her favourite wreck-site and where no one, living or dead, would ever come to disturb her in her private meditations.
When the alarm sang out its little electronic song, she allowed herself the luxury of a single push of the snooze button, and lay in the morning darkness, savouring the warmth of her bed and the knowledge that the entire day before her was hers. She suspected very few people had the discipline required to live alone. For her, solitude was like the air she breathed or the water she swam through.
The alarm shrilled out once more, reminding her of the importance of self-discipline. She obeyed it immediately, rolling out of bed and commencing her morning routine with the same faint sense of pleasure that she brought to the start of each day. Standing by the open window over the kitchen sink, waiting for the kettle to boil, she looked at the sky and took a deep lungful of air and thought hopefully that perhaps she’d misremembered or even miscounted and there would, in fact, be enough cylinders left in her storage shed for her to spend this afternoon diving and not taking the boat around the coast to the marina to do a refill run.
She took her notebook out and checked, but she already knew what it would say. She had used all her supplies, and her refrigerator was almost empty, and her boat needed fuel.
“So that’s that,” she said briskly. Not moping was another important part of her self-discipline. The course of her day was set. She would have to speak to Derek at the marina and Sarah at the scuba club, but Derek was a shy hobbity creature whose dread of small talk would make their brief interaction a pleasure, and Sarah was always mysteriously and dramatically busy and could hardly finish a sentence before rushing off to the next task, and the supermarket by the marina had self-checkout tills, which Mrs Armitage considered to be the best idea anyone had had in years. A morning of busy effort, perhaps a brief stop in the little café for an elaborate sandwich and expensive lemonade, poured from a fiddly glass bottle. She dressed quickly and without thought, enjoying the freedom from choice that came from a wardrobe containing only the utterly functional. Her husband watched her from behind his sheet of glass.
“I’m not taking any notice of that dream,” she said. Talking to herself was not allowed, but talking to her husband was permitted – surely no more foolish than women who spent all day yattering away to their cat. “Dream interpretation is for people who haven’t heard of neuroscience.” The best thing about talking to a dead man was that he couldn’t talk back, couldn’t argue, couldn’t challenge, couldn’t do anything but blandly reflect the echo of your own words. “I’m not changing my plans because you turned up in my sleep.”
She locked her front door and dropped her keys into their place in her rucksack. A woman of her age was supposed to have graduated to something classic and expensive, a Mulberry perhaps, or maybe something by Dior or Chanel. Instead, she had her rucksack, that sat perfectly on her shoulders and had pockets for everything she needed from house-keys to tins of biscuits and wore its salt-stains and frayed straps with modest confidence. She enjoyed its utter and essential lack of beauty. She enjoyed knowing she would never own something tasteful and discreet in tooled brown alligator.
And when she turned left instead of right, taking the road through the village and towards the gravel track that ended at the house where Ella and her family lived, she did so knowing she was her own autonomous person, and had made her decision entirely of her own choice, free of any expectation from either the living or the dead.
The house wore its new occupants lightly. There were curtains at some of the windows, but the paint on the front door was the same sligh
tly peeling red it had been for several years now. There was no car in the driveway, although at least one car was surely an essential tool for any family living in this place. (Of course, she herself had no car, but that was because she had her boat instead.) So her assumption must have been right, and the husband was at work. Would his wife be asleep, locked in her room like Sleeping Beauty? Would Ella come to the door when she knocked? The knocker was a brass lion with a thick fat ring in his mouth, faintly greened with salt. In the silence that followed the heavy thump of its falling weight, she found she was holding her breath.
Silence. Silence. Silence. A scuffle of movement. Another moment of silence, and then the door swung wide. Standing in the space was a woman so like Ella that even if she hadn’t spied out her face, hadn’t secretly listened to her voice from the tall cliffs, she would have instantly known her.
“Hello.” The woman’s smile was sweet but wary, as if she was expecting enemies. Sensing the potential for disaster, Mrs Armitage rummaged hastily in her rucksack.
“I’m Mrs Armitage,” she said. “If you go out of your garden and turn along the cliff-path, my house is the first one you come to.” She held out the tin as if Maggie was a small animal she had to entice to eat from her hand. “I brought you some biscuits.”
“That’s so nice of you. Do I know you? I feel as if I know you.” The woman’s smile was unexpected and very lovely.
“I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Maybe we met in a former life or something. My name’s Maggie, by the way. Have you got time to come in?”
“Thank you.” She followed Maggie over the threshold. Ella’s unicorn wellies sat side by side, a little apart from the litter of shoes that piled like puppies. The house was a little warmer than the November chill outside, but not by much. Despite this, Maggie’s feet were bare, the soles rimmed with black. The sight ought to have been disgusting, but beautiful women were allowed to break the rules. In the kitchen, Ella sat at the table, bent over a printed worksheet. When she saw Mrs Armitage, her mouth made a perfect oh shape.
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