All in all, the furniture and ornaments seemed to have grown too large for the flat, like animals still kept in the cages that had housed them as newborns.
So much to look at!
But neither Gal nor Deirdre were looking at any of it. For of course the flat was dominated, as it always had been, by Deirdre’s dead relatives. And in the end, it was impossible to look at anything but them.
They seemed to drag your eyes towards them, as if each of them had something they needed, desperately, to tell you. You had to strain to look at anything else. The effect was such that you only had to be in the flat a few moments to feel exhausted.
Deirdre’s great-grandmother, who had died when Deirdre’s grandmother was born. Deirdre’s great-grandfather, who had built the building they were standing in, and who had travelled to Japan and all over the world. Deirdre’s great-uncle, her grandmother’s brother, who had died when he was twenty-seven. Deirdre’s uncle, her grandmother’s son, who had died as a two year old.
And Deirdre’s grandmother.
Her photograph had been there for as long as either of them could remember. But now she had joined them. Now she was one of the company of dead relatives.
And yet she was set apart. The latest to die, now she was queen of them all.
She was standing with her arms resting on the back of a chair. She was blonde and dressed all in black, her hair cut in a short bob with a fringe. Her little face was strangely piquant and alien, unforgettable in itself; but the reason the photograph was so arresting was her expression. It was impossible to interpret, or at least, impossible to come to a decision about. It was as if the camera had caught her in a kind of war between hostility and defencelessness, and as if this inner struggle drew you into it with her. It was impossible not to take sides, and yet it was impossible to choose definitively one side over the other. She was wearing a calf-length black dress, drop waisted, with long black tight-fitting sleeves and black stockings and shoes. She was clearly in mourning, and clearly in the dress of another era. She looked about six.
And she ruled the flat – she ruled Corbenic – with ease.
‘It’s all still here,’ Gal said again. ‘It’s the same, only more so.’
‘A lot of these things used to be in other flats,’ said Deirdre. ‘My grandmother took the best stuff when people left, and put it in here. It wasn’t this crowded when you first saw it.’
But it was, Gal knew, because it was really the photographs that crowded it. And they had been here all along.
‘Do you remember the day I first came?’
‘Of course I remember the day you first came!’
For a moment, they were looking softly at each other.
Then he saw the crack.
And the sound, the sound that was so familiar to both of them, and yet which they could not identify, grew suddenly fast and insistent.
It was an ugly, obscene-looking crack, dividing the high ceiling from wall to wall like a knife wound through flesh, as shocking as a bolt of lightning splitting the night sky. The ceiling on one side of it had begun to cave, so that you could see three or four inches of the layers above the plaster. It reminded one of a split in the earth during an earthquake, it reminded you that the part of a house you don’t see, the ugly part, exists just as surely as the painted exterior.
It made you feel as if the whole building might collapse at any minute.
Gal was shaken.
‘How long has that been there?’ he whispered.
‘I don’t exactly know,’ said Deirdre. ‘I noticed it when I got home after the funeral.’
Gal stared at it.
‘What does it mean?’ he asked, for it hadn’t occurred to either of them that it might mean nothing.
‘It’s the beginning of the end,’ said Deirdre.
‘How do you mean, the end?’
‘The building is going to collapse.’
Gal was startled.
‘What?’
‘The building –’
‘No, sorry, I heard what you said. But why are you here? Why aren’t you gone?’
Deirdre looked up at him strangely.
‘Don’t you know?’
‘No.’
‘Because I’m the guardian,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave, ever. I must perish with Corbenic.’ She looked again at the crack. ‘That’s how she planned it.’
Gal was looking at her with a kind of horror. ‘The guardian of what?’ he wanted to say. Only, he was afraid of the answer. And in his head he kept seeing the Grail Maiden, the ghostly woman of Arthurian legend who guarded the Holy Grail. ‘But she’s dead,’ he said again, instead. Every time he said it, he somehow felt less convinced.
‘I’m doomed, you see,’ said Deirdre as if he had not spoken. ‘Along with the building. She meant it that way. And now it all seems to make sense. All the strangeness of it, through the years. That’s why I’m so grateful to see you. If I’d been given a wish – a last wish – I would have asked to see you again. That can’t have been her doing. Your being here, I mean. Not everything is, after all. Although sometimes I have difficulty believing it. But do you see why you can’t stay? This is not your doom. You were banished years ago.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said Gal. ‘Don’t say you’re doomed. Don’t say I’m not. Whatever happens, I want it to be the same for us. I can’t bear it otherwise. I know I can’t. I’ve tried.’
Deirdre looked sadly at him. But he was still staring at the crack. ‘You know what we have to do, don’t you?’ He was calm, and he spoke softly.
‘No.’
‘We have to find it.’
Deirdre looked alarmed. She knew immediately what he was talking about: the shared, forgotten memory. But she shook her head. ‘No –’
‘We have to, Deirdre. Don’t you see? This is our last chance. If we don’t, she’ll have won, and it’ll be lost forever, and so will we.’
For a moment, despite herself, Deirdre dreamed a beautiful dream. Then it died.
‘It’s too late.’
‘It’s not. The building’s still here, isn’t it?’
‘But – she won’t let us. She’ll hurt you. You’re not even allowed to be here. We’ll only anger her. Anyway –’ She stopped, and started again. ‘What if we were wrong, to find it? What if finding it – whatever it was – was . . . wicked? What if this is my punishment – and the punishment is just?’
‘You don’t believe that,’ said Gal. ‘Please don’t believe that.’
‘Why do I feel so guilty when I think about it?’
‘You feel guilty about breathing.’
Deirdre shut her eyes. Gal studied her face. I remember that, he thought. That’s what she looked like when she was sleeping.
‘Sometimes,’ he said softly, ‘I feel like it’s the only thing I know for sure. That the thing we found was good, holy even. If it wasn’t, I’d have nothing to live for. I don’t know what it was, but it was ours, Deirdre, not hers. The sin would be not looking for it. If we look for it, we’ll find it, I know. Or it’ll find us. And she’ll be forced to let go.’
‘She’ll never let go,’ said Deirdre.
Just then there was a splintering sound and some plaster fell from the ceiling. At first they thought the crack had deepened.
But it wasn’t that. Not exactly. There was a word scored jaggedly into the ceiling, just where the crack tailed off. It was:
NO
And the sound, the sound they knew so well but could not name, swelled in a distant, thumping crescendo.
Deirdre was five years old when she first met Gal.
‘Galahad,’ she repeated slowly when his father introduced him. It was a big word, a storybook one. And she had never met a boy her own age before.
Mrs Dark was standing behind her with hands resting lightly on Deirdre’s shoulders. In those days, things between Deirdre and her grandmother were simple. Deirdre adored her. She had not yet learned to fear. That came later. Mrs Dark leant down a
nd placed her cheek against Deirdre’s, as if she were the same height. Sometimes Deirdre felt that, in her heart of hearts, her grandmother was just a little girl, the same age as Deirdre. Only, Mrs Dark knew everything; Deirdre nothing.
‘Do you know who Galahad was?’ asked her grandmother.
‘A knight in shining armour?’ suggested Deirdre.
‘He was the perfect knight. He found the Holy Grail. He was the only one of all King Arthur’s knights who was worthy, because he was the only one whose heart was pure. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God . . . But he was illegitimate. Lancelot’s love child. This little boy is my godson, Deirdre. They let me name him, so I chose Galahad. It was what you might call a private joke.’
Deirdre was used to not understanding what her grandmother said to her. Mrs Dark could never have been accused of talking down to children. She had a peculiar way of talking to Deirdre as if she were a contemporary. So actually there were two possibilities. Either Mrs Dark was really five, or Deirdre was really her grandmother’s age.
Still, Deirdre knew what her grandmother was trying to teach her. She was telling Deirdre that this boy, that all boys, were of no account. But Deirdre was not listening.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hello, Deedee,’ said Gal. It was as much as he could manage of her name – for hers was difficult too – but it stuck. ‘I’ve got a rabbit,’ he added.
‘All right if I bring the bunny in?’ asked Gal’s father.
Mrs Dark smiled brightly and made a welcoming gesture. She didn’t ordinarily like visitors, but she seemed so pleased about these ones that she could hardly stop smiling. She was shifting her weight restlessly from one foot to the other, a girlish habit of hers. Gal’s father had left the cage outside the door of the flat; he brought it in and put it down in the middle of the lounge-room carpet. Gal opened the cage door and out limped the rabbit.
Deirdre held her breath. The rabbit was the most wonderful thing she had ever seen. Deirdre was an indoors child. Animals were a kind of miracle to her. They went by themselves, without batteries or cords or any need to wind them. How she admired this boy Galahad for being a keeper of rabbits.
‘Do you know all about rabbits?’ said Deirdre.
‘Just this one,’ said Gal modestly.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Fierce Bad Rabbit,’ said Gal.
‘Can I pat him?’
Gal nodded.
The rabbit, who was soft, warm and tolerant, took no notice of Deirdre whatsoever. It seemed to exist in its own world; it brought a meadow with it.
So did Gal.
Even at five, he seemed to dwell so far back, so deep beneath the surface, that it was impossible to reach him by the usual means. It was almost as if he was not really present, or dwelling simultaneously in another dimension that took most of his attention. Or as if he really belonged in another story.
And yet, to be looked at or smiled at by Gal was to feel that no one had ever really seen you, or liked you, in all your life before that moment. He had a way, when he smiled, of welling up through his eyes, as if the cup of himself were running over, and as if that cup were full of goodness. It was as if he knew a secret, a very important one, and as if the secret gave him a reason to be happy, no matter what.
Mrs Dark knew a secret, too. Deirdre had always known that. But her secret made the whole world sad.
‘If he could stay here with you for a while,’ Gal’s father was saying as they played with the rabbit, ‘just while I find my feet, I would be so grateful. Aunty Lainey would love to have him but she’s really too frail. Anyway, he doesn’t remember her – she hasn’t been out to the farm in years. And he’ll see her round the building, I suppose. You must see her all the time.’
Mrs Dark just smiled.
‘There is nothing to be grateful for,’ she said. ‘He is my godchild. He can stay as long as he needs to.’
And she looked at Gal as he played on the floor with Deirdre and the rabbit. She had the oddest expression on her face. The casual observer might have mistaken it for tenderness. But someone who knew her better might have thought she looked as if she simply couldn’t believe her luck.
Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.
‘Funny to think they’ll be starting school soon,’ said Gal’s father.
Mrs Dark frowned suddenly. Deirdre glanced up at her, and thought that she looked like a little girl who had placed her hands over her ears so that she couldn’t hear a rule she did not want to obey.
Gal’s father built a hutch for the rabbit down the back before he went away. Then he went, and Gal stayed.
For as long as she could remember, Deirdre had longed for another child to play with. Of course, if given the choice, she would have chosen a girl. She would have been shy of any stranger, but a boy presented extra unfamiliarities.
And Gal was not just any boy, or even a boy who had grown up, like Deirdre, in a block of flats. He was used to a very different life from the one Deirdre led with her grandmother at Corbenic. He had lived all his life on a small farm down the valley, where he was supervised, casually, by an extended family of aunts and uncles and older cousins, none of whom paid him much attention, although none were unkind. He was used to going barefoot and climbing trees and looking after animals. His mother had walked out when he was a baby, his father drifted in and out of his life, a pleasant man who seemed incapable of staying in one place for very long. All in all Gal had an air, even at five, of cheerful, lonely independence, as if he expected nothing from no one.
Gal had interesting scars – on his knee, on his elbow and under his right eye, and a hair-raising history of accidents he seemed lucky to have come through intact. He was not afraid of dogs. And he could make friends with anything.
Even a little creature as wild and shy as Deirdre.
In those days, the days when Deirdre and Galahad were five, Corbenic was still a going concern. It was not the thriving establishment it had been in Great-grandfather’s day, of course. Its glory days were over – half the flats could not be let. Still, there were tenants, and the tenants paid rent – notes folded up in envelopes and pushed under Mrs Dark’s door – and Mrs Dark paid a cleaner to vacuum the halls and a painter to paint the walls and a handyman to fix the holes in the roof – although her upkeep was always grudging and minimal, more a patching up than fixing. She seemed to have a grudge against the building, to resent it and any money that had to be spent on it. Deirdre understood that even at five. Children and animals were generally not allowed. But the proprietor’s granddaughter and godchild and his rabbit were an exception.
And so it was that Corbenic began to be Deirdre’s and Gal’s domain.
It happened tentatively at first. They liked each other, instinctively, from the moment they met, but it took a while to work out how to play together. At first the restrictions discouraged them. All play had to be as quiet as possible, so that the tenants would not be disturbed. And of course, although the space indoors was vast, no running or laughing was permitted. There was outside with the rabbit, but apart from the rabbit hutch the backyard was an unpromising place for play. It was bare and stony and uneven and it doubled as a car park. Once, long ago, there had been rosebushes planted along the sides of the buildings, but, strangely, Mrs Dark had had them pulled out and their roots poisoned. Deirdre and Gal were too young to play there unsupervised and somehow Deirdre’s grandmother, standing at the window, robbed them of ideas. Deirdre did not even have play clothes; she was always dressed in pleated skirts and cardigans and tights.
Deirdre was uncomfortable doing the things that seemed like good ideas to Gal – for example, seeing who could jump farthest from the third step of the fire escape or trying to catch insects. And Gal was perplexed by paper dolls.
Then one day they happened upon something they both liked doing, and Corbenic opened its heart to them.
It must have been at about the time that Mrs Dark bega
n her renovations, because Deirdre remembered being with Gal while her grandmother talked to a builder.
The builder, thought Deirdre, had rather an odd look on his face.
‘How do you mean, you don’t want it to end, Mrs Dark?’ he asked.
How do you mean, you don’t want it to end?
‘What’s down here?’ said Gal to Deirdre.
They were all standing in a kind of intersection in the building. There was a hall in front of them and one behind them. And there were halls leading to the right and left. The hall behind them led back the way they had come, to Deirdre’s grandmother’s flat and, beyond it, down the stairs, to the main entrance. The hall in front of them led eventually to a stairway that took you down to the back entrance and the yard with the rabbit hutch. The hall to the right of them ended quite quickly, with a door to a flat marked 11. But the hall to the left of them didn’t end; or at least, it ended in a darkness that obscured what lay beyond.
‘I don’t know,’ said Deirdre, but Gal had already ventured some steps away from her. He was always so fearless, so optimistic; he acted on his impulses. But Deirdre always hesitated. She glanced at her grandmother. Mrs Dark was talking to the builder. She seemed caught up in the discussion. But she always knew what Deirdre was doing, and Deirdre knew she would be stopped if it were not allowed. So rather than interrupting her, she followed Gal.
The hall ended in a blank wall and two more halls, one to their right and one to their left. The one to their right was dark, and seemed to end in some kind of storeroom; they could see the shadows of broom handles behind the frosted glass panes. The one to their left was dimly lit with soft electric lights along the wall on either side. At the end was a door. It looked like the door to a flat, but oddly, it wasn’t numbered and it was slightly ajar. A warm light came from the other side.
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