The House of Whispers

by Anna Kent

  I didn’t take the brochure so she flicked through the pages in front of me and I saw a country-style kitchen-diner with a terracotta flagged floor and a cosy living room with a big open fireplace, but my mind wasn’t on her house-hunt and my eyes soon slid back to the car window. The motorway arced around North London, past rolling fields, industrial areas, and the ugly outskirts of satellite towns. And, with every town that we passed – South Mimms, Waltham Abbey, Epping, Brentwood – a ball of sickness grew inside me.

  ‘You’re sweating,’ Grace said, breaking off her monologue about her dream home as I adjusted the air vent to reach my face. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘No. Can we pull over?’ The words rushed out of me like a torrent, my teeth on edge as saliva flooded into my mouth with the rising bile. ‘Stop now!’

  ‘Sure,’ said the driver, checking his mirrors and pulling onto the hard shoulder. ‘Lucky this isn’t a smart motorway. You okay?’

  I ripped open the door and threw up immediately, my vomit splattering the tarmac.

  ‘Maybe it’s something you ate,’ Grace murmured, when I climbed back in. There was an interminable queue for the QE2 bridge.

  ‘It’s always bad.’ The driver gave me side-eye as he peered back to see if I looked likely to vomit again, but there was nothing inside me, and we were finally up and over, past Dartford, Swanley, Orpington and off down the A21 into the heart of Kent. I could feel Grace thrumming next to me, brimful of anticipation for the day ahead. I couldn’t understand her ghoulish fascination with the girl who had the accident, but who was I to stop her if she wanted to place a toy there?

  My head craned towards the opposite window, taking in quaint pubs, oast houses, big manor houses on impossibly green hills, cows, sheep and ponies standing, bored, in fields of homespun jumps. Against my will, I found myself scouring the landscape for familiar landmarks: that pub, the house on the corner, the scary grey house on the hill that I always thought looked haunted. Finally, the car entered the outskirts of a small country town, and I sat up straighter, peering at the familiar roads.

  ‘Could you just take a left here?’ I asked the driver, and he swung down the road I used to live in. It looked smaller, somehow, narrower than I remembered. The grass verge had gone, too, making the street look more built up than I pictured it in my head. My eyes fixed onto the house I was brought up in, its red and brown façade as familiar to me as the back of my hand. The front garden was paved over now, and there was a gate at the end of the driveway, an iron fence drawing a line around the perimeter of the garden. Keep Out, it said, and I was more than happy to. The house was something from another life; another me. Dad had moved out five years ago – gone up north to live near my aunt. There was nothing for me there; the whole thing tainted by what had happened.

  ‘Is that it?’ Grace asked, following my eyes. ‘Do you want to stop?’

  ‘Not here. You can turn around now,’ I said to the driver. ‘Sorry.’

  He rejoined the main road and, within a few minutes, we entered a small picturesque village. Grace looked at the signpost and then pulled the stuffed dog out of her bag and waggled it at me, asking the question with a tilt of her head and a shrug. I leaned forwards, my heart a lump of stone.

  ‘You can stop here, thanks,’ I said.

  The driver looked doubtfully at the postage stamp of muddy grass that counted as the village green. ‘Are you sure? Seems like the middle of nowhere.’

  I double-checked the name: yes, I was sure. I paid the driver, and Grace and I got out by a row of village shops. I filled my lungs with the cold, fresh air of the countryside, my breath visible as a puff, and took in the green with its weather-worn benches, the red post box, the row of quaint shops – a quintessential village that seemed untouched by time. I couldn’t imagine people here doing anything that wasn’t wholesome and pure. My breath was sour with the taste of vomit.

  To the right of the green was a small lane: if you hadn’t been looking for it, you’d have missed it. I looked down it seeing, at the end, the flash of traffic passing on a busier road. Grace looked between me and the lane, her eyes dark holes in her face, and my heart thumped.

  ‘It’s down here,’ I said. I could barely hear my voice over the sound of the blood rushing in my head. Grace nodded.

  ‘Lead the way,’ she said, so I stood at the top of the lane, picturing for a few moments a girl on a bike, her whole life before her. A girl taking a shortcut on the day she got her A-level results. A girl who didn’t stop at the end of the lane; a girl whose bike smashed into a passing car, leaving her broken and dying on the tarmac.

  My heart was thumping now, really jumping in my chest, and I had to pause before I could carry on, putting one foot carefully in front of the other, trying not to feel the speed of the girl’s bike freewheeling beneath her; not to see her ponytail flying in the wind as she lived the last minute of her life on this very lane.

  With every step I was able to see a little more of the main road that lay ahead: a snatch of tarmac, the flash of cars sweeping by, the verge on the other side soggy and brown. It was a busy road, even more so these days, a bypass that fringed the village, connecting bigger towns to each other like the strands of a spider’s web. Beyond it, the fields of Kent stretched out, the pale greens and browns of winter and, above them, a straight line of black clouds approaching: the storm about which we’d been warned.

  At the point where the lane met the road, I stopped abruptly, centimetres away from the passing traffic: the cars, vans and lorries that streaked by in a hurry, their tyres swishing close to the verge. The strip of green was splattered with mud, summer’s flowers nothing more than a memory. On the other side of the road, the hedge was taller, more unkempt, giving just a glimpse of the winter fields beyond. Dark specks of birds beat their wings high above, their raucous screams renting the sky. The trees above me rustled as the wind picked up and, in the distance, above the sound of traffic, there was a low rumble of thunder.

  ‘Is this where it happened?’ Grace whispered.

  I nodded and steadied myself, checking that I really was here, right now, not just having another nightmare. I bowed my head.

  ‘Apparently, she lost control on her bike,’ Grace said. Her face twisted. ‘Shot out into the main road. I don’t know if it’s true, but the estate agent said she’d found out that day that she’d got into UCL.’

  ‘Such a bright future,’ I whispered.

  For a moment, inside my head, the air ripped with the sound of screaming. I could picture the rotating flash of blue light; the girl lying on the ground, a trickle of blood oozing from her head; the white faces of people waiting bleakly for the emergency services; the hopelessness of knowing there was nothing to be done. Under the tyres of passing cars, the tarmac hissed. It bore no mark, no scar to show what had happened.

  ‘Why don’t you do it?’ Grace held out the stuffed dog, so I placed it on the grass at the roadside and, when I stood up, my face was wet with tears. Thunder boomed again, closer this time, and the wind picked up another notch.

  ‘Come on. Let’s go,’ I said, wiping at my eyes and stuffing the tissue back in my pocket. ‘She wouldn’t have known what hit her. It would have happened very fast.’

  ‘She might not have known,’ Grace said, and my lungs released the air they’d been subconsciously holding. For a moment, I thought we were done. But then Grace spoke again, her voice low. ‘But what if she did? What if she realized what had happened and died alone and in pain? Died with no one holding her hand; no one to tell her she was loved?’

  As Grace looked at the road, the rain finally started to fall: big, fat drops that pebble-dashed the grey of the tarmac. I looked up at the sky, darker now, and pulled my hood over my hair. Within seconds the road was dark and slick with rain.

  ‘She wouldn’t have known,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t know that. It’s what you tell yourself.’

  ‘Grace… please.’

  Grace tilted her head as she looked
at me. ‘I wonder about the driver. How they could ever move on knowing they’d done something like that. How could you live with yourself knowing you’d killed someone?’

  Her eyes met mine and I stared back at her, eyeball to eyeball. ‘That’s enough now. We’ve paid our respects. Let’s go.’

  The rain got harder, drumming down and flattening Grace’s hair, pasting it to her forehead, which only made her eyes look bigger; more like holes in the pale of her face. She kept my gaze as she gave a sick laugh.

  ‘Don’t you ever wish you’d turned yourself in?’ Her words were daggers. I twisted away but she grabbed my wrist and pulled me back to face her. ‘Don’t deny it, Abi. I know it was you who killed her. You were the driver who didn’t stop.’ I tussled with her but she wouldn’t let me go. ‘That’s why you tried you kill yourself in our first year. Isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I wrestled my arm free from Grace’s grip and sidestepped her on the narrow path. Thunder crashed overhead and the rain intensified, running down our faces like a shower.

  ‘You’re lying!’ Grace shouted. ‘You know exactly what I’m talking about! It took a while for me to put it together, but it makes complete sense. Your nightmares. The way you paint! Your first paintings. They were of this road, weren’t they?’ She looked me up and down as if she were repulsed. ‘It explains how you are. What you’re like. Why you bought her house!’ She stabbed me with the last sentence, each word a staccato jab of pain.

  ‘I’m going now, Grace. Back home.’ I pulled away.

  ‘If you were wondering, that’s why I didn’t let you die,’ Grace said, quieter now. Sneering. ‘I could have let you take those pills. Could have watched you froth at the mouth and die. But that would have been the easy way out for you. Wouldn’t it? That would have been the selfish, cowardly thing to do.’

  I stopped walking and stood motionless. I had to concentrate on breathing: in, out, in, out.

  ‘You thought I was saving you, didn’t you?’ Grace scoffed. ‘But why should you get off so lightly? Don’t you think you deserve to suffer? You deserve to suffer a lifetime!’ She laughed bitterly, and I hated her more in that moment than I ever had before.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault!’ The words burst out of me like dynamite. ‘She shot out of nowhere! I didn’t even see her! She hit the car and… I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to do!’ I sobbed. ‘I panicked! I was only eighteen myself! I was a child!’

  Grace’s breath was coming hard. I could see her chest rising and falling; her nostrils quivering as she tried to control her voice. ‘You could have done something,’ she said levelly. ‘You could have taken responsibility. You could have held her hand. You could have made her comfortable. You could have told her she was loved. You could have called an ambulance and waited with her.’

  ‘There was no need for an ambulance.’ The words fell like a guillotine.

  ‘You drove off. You left her dead on the road.’

  ‘I was scared!’

  ‘Poor you!’

  The rain, already hard, increased its intensity, a frenzy of water pummelling Grace, me and the ground, as if it were trying to wash the memory of that terrible evening from the fabric of the universe.

  Ten years of shame ignited inside me. ‘How dare you?’ I hissed. ‘How dare you stand here and throw accusations at me. You have no idea! No idea what it was like! There’s not a day goes by I don’t think about it! Not a moment I don’t think about her. I atone for what I did, every single day! Everything I do, I do it for her!’ I flung my arms out. ‘I’ve never driven a car since that day! I won’t have children because she can’t have them! I work at the hospice in honour of her! Is that not enough? Aren’t I doing enough because I don’t know what else I can do! It’s been ten years! Ten years!’ I sobbed.

  ‘Yet you’ve never been back!’ Grace shouted, her voice snagging in the wind. ‘You’ve never been to her grave! And don’t tell me you apologized to her parents because I know it’s not true. You never admitted what you did!’

  ‘Please,’ I begged. ‘I need to move on. She’s dead. I can’t change that! Let me live my life!’

  ‘You took her life! You don’t deserve a life!’ Grace stared at me, dripping from the rain, her face ugly with pain, and I realized I would never win. No matter what I did, I would never make this right. My life unfurled ahead of me, and I would never, ever be able to put this behind me.

  ‘I’m going!’ I shouted. I ran back up the path to the village green, my finger stabbing at my phone to find an Uber, listening for the sound of Grace’s footsteps chasing after me, anticipating the feel of her fists pounding on my back, her hands clawing at my arms. But when the Uber pulled up and I finally dared to look back, I saw the shape of her standing with her head bowed, back at the accident site.

  ‘Let’s go!’ I snapped as I slammed the door behind me. ‘Now!’

  Maybe the driver looked astonished. Maybe he said something, but I didn’t hear. The rain drummed on the roof of the car and I was far away: I was in Dad’s car, ten years ago, on the day I got my own A-level results.

  Fifty-Five

  It’s a sunny evening, just before six – I know that because the news starts on the radio just as I slam the front door. It’s one of those evenings when you know the last light won’t finish its slow fade from the sky till almost ten, and I’ve had the most amazing day – my A-level results were all that I’d hoped for and I got into my first-choice university. Everything is right with the world and I’m practically tripping with happiness as I yell ’bye to Dad and skip out of the house to the car. It’s a saloon, a medium-sized family car, more powerful than many, but I’m a sensible driver, not interested in pushing the boundaries, just in getting from A to B, and tonight I’m nipping into town to pick up a celebratory dinner from the chippy. The table’s laid and I’ll be back before Dad knows it.

  It’s been the most glorious summer and the fields along the bypass are incandescent with the yellow of rape flowers; the grass verges are popping with the optimism colours of wildflowers; their scents mingling in the air with the other smells of the country – cow manure, cut grass, the tantalizing whiff of meat being grilled outdoors. The birds are singing, their cheerful voices floating from the trees. I’m not speeding; I’m driving carefully, mindfully, aware of all the details, constantly monitoring the road around me. The windows are open, this is true. Katy Perry’s on the radio and my hair’s blowing around me. I’m singing along, my heart bursting with the joy of my A-level results when, from nowhere, there’s a bang and an impact that makes me clutch the steering wheel to stop the car swerving into the oncoming lane.

  The trees form a canopy over the roads and, in that split second, when everything’s still all right, I think it’s just a low branch.

  I think it’s just a branch.

  I wonder, even, if I have to stop, but then my instincts kick in, knowing somehow that it’s more than a tree, more than me having to worry about Dad being cross that I’ve scratched the paintwork. There was a metallic tang in the sound, and a thud; something that didn’t sound like a branch. This registers even as I slam on the brakes, pull to the side, and sit, shaking, for a moment before I open the door.

  I get out and look back down the road, and first I see just the bike – it’s bent and broken – and, after I’ve thought how hitting that will definitely have damaged the paintwork, I think: that’s odd. Why would a bike hit my car? And I take a few more steps and then I see a trainer – an Adidas trainer, and another one, with a foot in it, lilac shorts, brown legs and then there she is, lying splayed in the road; her, and the bits and pieces from her basket scattered across the tarmac. I remember a stick of French bread, and fat, juicy tomatoes, their skins split, spilling seeds, nestled on the verge as if they’d grown there.

  And at that moment I still think she’s going to get up and brush herself off. I’ve never witnessed anything like this, and I can’t comprehend that she isn’t okay. T
he enormity of the scene doesn’t catch up with me. I run over to her and drop down on my knees next to her. Her face is fine, unbruised, her skin a little tanned from the sun, a smattering of freckles across her cheeks, but one earring is missing, knocked out by the impact. I see it on the ground next to her, and I pick it up and hold it out, thinking: ‘You’ll want that back.’

  But the girl can’t speak; she just looks at me, her eyes pleading silently with me to do something, anything, to save her. There’s a gurgle in her throat and a creeping pool of blood seeping out from under her head but I can’t move because I realize then that she’s dying. I do nothing but stare at her, paralyzed with shock, my hand clutching her earring, and our eyes are locked at the very moment her life leaves her.

  Not only do I kill her, but I fail her, too. Grace is right: the girl dies on the road, without love or comfort, in front of a stranger. Those brightly coloured flowers on the verge are the last thing she sees. Those birds cheeping overhead – the birds that have haunted me ever since – are the last thing she hears, and I know nothing of who the girl is, of what her hopes and dreams are. I don’t know that she’s my age; that she’s just got her A-level results, too. I don’t even know her name. What I do know is that she’s dead and that there’s nothing I can do for her now. Numb with shock, I look around. I see that there’s not a single witness, and I edge back towards the car on legs of jelly. I climb into the car, and for another terrified, confused moment, I think. Then I start the engine and make an even bigger mistake: I drive away.