The House of Whispers

by Anna Kent

  I saw nothing.

  I did nothing.

  Fifty-Six

  Of course I find out her name later. The story doesn’t make the national news, but it’s in the local paper, and her friends write tributes on Facebook. Hundreds of tributes. She wore glasses and she had dark brown hair, the sort that’s fine and a little curly, and goes flyaway in certain weather conditions or when you use too much conditioner. She liked to wear it in a high ponytail. She had that type of pale, translucent skin that burned before it tanned. She liked horse-riding, netball, reading, pizza, Beyoncé, and Maroon 5. She was a whizz at maths. She was seeing a boy; it looks like it was serious. Earlier that summer, she’d been to Thailand with her parents. She’d got the results she needed – she’d got into UCL. Her life was about to begin.

  These things I find out as I pore over her Facebook page. I don’t go to her funeral, so I don’t see for myself how popular she was; how loved. I don’t see the church packed out, her shell-shocked parents choking back their tears; her friends scrunching balled-up tissues in their fists; the flowers that decorate her coffin, nor the teddy bears and bouquets that pile up at the crematorium. I dream about them, though – I dream about them over and over until it seems to me as if I was there.

  And what do you do when you’ve accidentally killed someone and failed to report it? How do you live with yourself? Around and around in my head went the thought that a girl was dead because of me. That she didn’t deserve to be dead.

  I sat silently in my room that summer, unable to get out of my head that shuddering moment of impact and the look in the girl’s eyes as she died. I had nightmares from which I’d wake screaming, sweating and paralyzed. Heart thudding, I’d lie there and reassure myself that it was just a dream, and, for a split second, everything was okay – and then reality would slam into me, making me cry out loud.

  But it wasn’t just a dream. My nightmare was true: I had killed someone. I’d lie there, haunted by the thought that that impact I’d felt on the car – that I’d thought was a branch – was one of the last moments of that girl’s life. What part of her body had hit the car first?

  The imagination can be cruel.

  I’d go through the evening – the whole day – from the girl’s perspective: the excitement of getting her exam results and confirming her place at university. Her parents proud of her; she overjoyed. Maybe she was picking up provisions for a celebratory barbecue, the French bread and the tomatoes to go with burgers and sausages. I imagined her cycling down that lane. Was she happy? What did she see? What did she feel?

  What were her last thoughts?

  Did she realize too late what had happened? Did she have that awful moment of wishing she could rewind time? Was she even aware of she’d been hit by a car, or did she just find herself lying on the tarmac looking into the eyes of a stranger while she struggled to gasp her last breath? Did she know, when she was looking at me, that I was the one who’d killed her? Was she in pain?

  Did she hate me?

  I’d lie awake at two o’clock and three o’clock and four o’clock and go over the events of that evening in my head. Had I been tired? Was I too hungry? Did I need glasses? Had I had a headache? Was I distracted? Why didn’t I see her? Because, despite everything, the facts spoke for themselves: a girl died that day, and she died because of me.

  Why me? I pleaded in those godforsaken early hours. Why my car? And then I’d squirm in my bed, feeling selfish for even thinking that because she died, her life cut short before it really even started, while I got to live. I’d go down that horrible, beautiful country road again and again in my head, playing a version of events where there was no impact; where I carried on and made it to the chippy without two lives changing so irrevocably on a country road by a small Kentish village. A version in which I had nothing bigger to worry about than niggling Dad that I wanted to do Fine Art instead of Management Science.

  I’d imagine a version where the impact was just an overhanging branch. I’d stop and get out, the other cars whooshing past, hooting even, and I’d be dismayed that the car’s paintwork was scratched – maybe the roof was even a little dented – and Dad’s wrath would be the worst thing I’d have to face. I’d be grounded for a week or two, or have to pay for the damage myself, and that would be fine.

  Oh, it crossed my mind to go to the police; to turn myself in. But, in my twisted mind, that would be the easy way out; that would assuage my guilt, maybe, but it wouldn’t bring back the girl. Instead, I buried the accident in a compartment deep inside my head and vowed to get on with my life; to live my best life, both for me and for her. But guilt doesn’t like to be bottled up. It’s like a genie. It might lie dormant in its bottle but it moulders and festers inside you, and it grows and it turns into a nugget of shame that eats away at you; and the shame and the horror merge together and become something bigger, something black and toxic that eats you from the inside out, like an army of termites.

  You’re too scared to go out, you jump at sirens, you stop driving, you see every accident waiting to happen, you resolve never to have a child of your own because you don’t deserve to be a parent.

  You go off to university, and you’re relieved, at first, to get away from home, from the daily reminders of what happened, and you hope you might be able to move on with your life. Oh, how much you have to learn.

  In your first term, you learn that this is not something you can outrun. That no matter where you go nor what you do, there’s a huge ball of grief and shame burning inside you. You’re not worthy of being anyone’s friend, you’re not worthy of going to university, of having an education, a life, a boyfriend. You’re not worthy of having any happiness at all.

  You lock yourself in your room and obsess about the girl you killed. You spend every waking hour imagining what she’d have been doing if your carelessness hadn’t extinguished her life on a sunny summer evening. You stalk the social media accounts of her friends, and you picture what her life would have been like; you look at the places she would have lived, walked and played. You tear yourself to shreds imagining how her life would have been. And still it’s not enough. A couple of months after you kill a girl, you realize that you face a choice: either you forget her and move forward, or you die yourself.

  It wasn’t a cry for help.

  Fifty-Seven

  ‘Albert Road?’ asked the cab driver as we passed the station. It was the first thing either of us had said since I’d told him to drive, and his voice took me by surprise. I looked up to see the familiar shop fronts of the High Street; Mr Ho moving about inside the cosy, pink warmth of his restaurant. Dinners there with Rohan seemed another lifetime.

  ‘Actually, here’s fine!’ I said suddenly and the driver braked, unsure.

  He stabbed at his Satnav. ‘We’re not there yet. It’s just… right here, I think.’

  ‘No, it’s good here, thanks. If you can pull over.’

  I got out by the bus stop. As the cab pulled away, I crossed the road and hesitated at the gate to the graveyard. The storm lashing Kent hadn’t made it here yet, but the light was dampened – flat and expectant – and the air was deathly still. I followed the path round to the grave and stopped in front of it. What could I say to the girl I’d accidentally killed?

  I stared at the stone and the graves around me faded from my peripheral vision as my eyes bored through the stone to what lay beneath – through the earth and the coffin – through its wood and satin lining until she was lying below me once more, looking up at me, her limbs splayed, her lips parted, and that tell-tale trickle of blood creeping, ever larger, onto the tarmac beneath her head. From beneath the gravestone she looked up at me and my eyes locked onto the empty sockets of hers. I fell to my knees, my hands touching the cold of the stone as if I could transmit some warmth, some energy, into the depths of her final resting place. If I could bring her back to life, I would.

  ‘It was me. I’m so sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I didn’t see you. There was nothing
I could do.’

  Around me, the trees sighed and rustled, restless with the approaching storm. An oily black crow flapped and settled on a branch above me, and my hands clutched the edge of the gravestone more tightly. I waited but felt nothing: no reciprocal energy rising from the depths of the earth.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry every day of my life.’ Nothing. ‘Did you see I took your toy dog?’ I asked. ‘Did you feel me there today?’ I waited again for a sign – for something – but there was nothing but the rustling and chittering of the graveyard. ‘You know that I care, don’t you? Do you see what I do for you every day?’ My voice was a hoarse whisper as a decade of guilt clawed its way up from my belly, snagging at my throat.

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t comfort you when you…’ I squeezed my eyes shut and let the familiar sob rip through my insides. ‘But I do it for others now. You know that, don’t you?’ I was talking faster now; begging. ‘Every time someone passes, I see your face… I wish I’d held your hand… I could have told you you were loved.’ Another sob. ‘You were going to be a doctor. You were going to save lives…’ My voice trailed off. The tally of lives lost because of the one life I’d taken was a scoreboard rattling inside my head; the grand total multiplying exponentially every day. An ever-increasing number of people she would have saved in the last ten years, who were now also dead because of me.

  I keeled forward onto the grave and touched my forehead to the cold, wet stone, then I pressed my lips to it. The wind whipped the trees and rain splattered down: big drops that matched my tears and, within seconds, my hair was flat against my skin, cold rain sliding its way down my neck. I stood up stiffly, brushing dirt from my knees and wiping my hands down my jeans.

  ‘Please. You’ve got to forgive me,’ I said, ‘because I don’t know what else I can do.’

  I walked down Albert Road in a trance as the rain got steadily harder. Above me, the house looked down at the street, the unshuttered eye of the attic reflecting the wet smear of the branches back at me as I walked up the path. At the window, a movement caught my eye: a fleeting shape; the shift of a shadow that quickly withdrew back whence it had come. My hand pressed against the solid wood of the door as I leaned against it for support.

  ‘I’m back,’ I murmured as I turned the key. Inside the hallway I got the sense of something hiding, of someone pulling away just out of my sight, of clothes rustling, of breath being held. The layers of the house whispered across the centuries yet, before me, the hall stood empty aside from the grandfather clock, its tick echoing in the stillness of the hall. I felt again the heart of the house; that thrum of energy that came from another time; a different dimension.

  The wind caught, tugging at the roof and the rafters, rattling at the letterbox and catching in the branches of the oak tree. I touched the wallpaper, my fingers trailing along it as I went to the kitchen, where I opened a bottle of vodka, sloshed it carelessly into a glass, and drank deeply, wincing as it burned its way down my oesophagus. In my head, there was a jungle of sounds and images: Moira implying I had a drink problem. Me promising to cut back. Rohan’s concerned face. The horror of my paintings. The tatty pink dog a symbol of my shame on the tarmac down in Kent. The gravestone. Losing my position at the hospice. The weight of the guilt. The clawing shame of everything.

  ‘Oh, don’t look at me like that,’ I said out loud to the kitchen, as I put down the glass harder than I thought. ‘Don’t you think I deserve a drink?’

  The house answered only with a creak and a sigh. Outside the wind picked up and a dog howled.

  ‘Come on!’ I said. ‘I could have lived anywhere, but I chose you! I sought you out and bought you! I did it to keep her memory alive!’ I took another slug of vodka. ‘I’m taking care of you for her! I kept her room as it was… I know she’s not coming back, but…’ I drank deeply again as I looked out at the garden, the trees now starting to bend and sway in the wind.

  ‘She played in your garden. She ate right here! She did her homework here. Studied for her A-levels here. Cried over boys here…’ I raised my glass too fast and vodka sloshed out of it onto the table. I shoved my chair back and ran to the wall, touching it with my fingertips as if my stroke might bring it to life. ‘Her breath touched your walls, your ceiling!’ I sobbed. ‘You’re the same house underneath. I keep you for her!’

  I picked up the vodka bottle and went up to the bedroom. There, I dragged the chair across the room, positioned it below the wardrobe and climbed up, clutching at the wardrobe door as I swayed precariously for a moment. Heart thumping, my hand snaked around in the top section that no one could reach, scouting behind the pile of forgotten sweaters for something I hadn’t looked at the whole time I’d been married. For a moment I wondered if it had gone; if Rohan had somehow found it and thrown it out, thinking it belonged the house’s previous owners, but no: my fingertips pushed the tangle of a skipping rope out of the way and finally lit upon the solid spine of the folder. I slid it out and climbed back down.

  I took it up to the attic and gently wiped the dust off the cover. On the first page was a yellowing newspaper article. I unfolded it and drank in the black-and-white face that looked out at me.

  GIRL KILLED IN HIT-AND-RUN

  ‘You were pretty,’ I said. ‘But you knew that, didn’t you?’ My finger stroked the rough paper, as if I by doing so I could magic the girl back to life, but she stayed stubbornly pixelated, looking out at me with her chin lifted and a laugh frozen on her face, a tendril of hair blowing in a summer breeze. It was a face I knew as well as my own. A face that haunted every moment of my adult life. I turned the page and started to read the thoughts and memories that had been written on her Facebook page. I’d printed them all out. Every single one.

  Can’t believe you’re gone.

  To the best friend I could ever have wanted.

  You’re with the angels now.

  Fly high, babe.

  Uni won’t be the same.

  I flicked the pages: there were hundreds of messages, all of which added together to paint a picture of a girl who was loved, popular, clever, going places. There were pictures of her, too: blowing out candles, clutching a drink, with her arms round her friends, wearing bowling shoes, with her boyfriend, riding a horse, with her mouth wide open in a full-bellied laugh.

  Downstairs the letterbox clattered, and the doorbell rang simultaneously, jolting me from my reverie. The folder fell out of my hand as I froze.

  ‘Yoo-hoo, Abigail!’ came Meena’s voice through the letterbox. ‘It’s me!’

  Fifty-Eight

  The doorbell rang again and again.

  ‘Abigail! Open the door! I know you’re there!’

  I sloshed another shot of vodka into my mouth, then stumbled down the stairs with the bottle still in my hand, and pulled open the door a little too hard, which caused me to lurch backwards and grasp it for balance. The rain was heavy now, and Meena, huddled into a black coat, cowered as close to the wall as she could, sheltering under the eaves.

  I tried to speak but words wouldn’t come. My eyes were scratchy from crying.

  ‘Abigail!’ Meena exclaimed, and her eyebrows shot up as her mouth opened in shock. She gazed at me with such horror that I looked down to see what she was seeing: my top was stained, my jeans were wet and soiled from the graveyard, and my feet were dirty and bare. My hair, now I thought about it, must be matted against my wet scalp, and my hands were filthy, the nails ragged.

  Meena pushed into the house, dropped the bags, shook out her hair and unzipped her coat then turned to face me once more.

  ‘What happened? Your hair’s wet. And it’s freezing in here.’ She shuddered dramatically and peered into my face. ‘Is everything okay?’

  I put my free hand to my hair and felt its wetness, too. ‘I should get changed,’ I said, trying out the words carefully. ‘Grace’ll be home soon.’

  Meena scoffed. ‘Grace? Ronu’s on his way.’ She looked at me for a reaction. ‘Your husband?’ she said, rai
sing her eyebrows and pointing at me with a red-lacquered nail. ‘He’ll be back in a couple of hours. I’d have come over later, but Daddy and I are going to a bridge night. It’s been in the diary forever – everyone’s so busy – trying to get a night we can all make is almost impossible.’ She tossed her hair. ‘Anyway, we thought you’d probably want time alone together…’ her voice trailed off as she peered at me. ‘Abigail, is everything okay? You really don’t look well.’

  I closed my eyes and shook my head, feeling my brain ricochet back and forth in my skull. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Just have a shower and… some make-up.’

  Meena shivered again. ‘Is the boiler working?’

  She hustled to the utility cupboard under the stairs, then came back shaking her head. ‘The heating’s on. Why is it so cold?’ Then she gasped and slapped a hand to her forehead. ‘Arey! It’s the energy. Of course it’s the energy!’

  She extended her arms, palms, turned up and closed her eyes, her face a blank canvas. I watched as her eyelids and the muscles around her eyes flickered, then she opened her eyes again and sighed loudly. ‘This is bad, Abigail. Very bad.’ She paused for effect then carried on. ‘I know you think this is all nonsense – silly old Meena and all that – don’t think I don’t know how you laugh at me behind my back. But you must believe me. I feel something. And it’s stronger…’ She nodded. ‘Yes, we need to do something more. Smudging will be a start.’

  She sighed again, as if she had the entire world to organize, then she picked up the bags. ‘First let me get these in the fridge for Ronu before everything spoils. I’ve got all his favourites. The chicken, and even the lamb! It should last you a couple of days.’ She bustled into the kitchen and opened the fridge. From inside, I caught a glimpse of the black-and-yellow wine boxes lined up on the two middle shelves.