It’s true, I said, though even just saying it made me feel quite cold and dull inside. Frank can’t ever be alive again, because you only get one chance at living and when it’s over, that’s it, you’re dead.
Now Lottie’s chin began to wobble.
Frank not dead, she said, and she folded her arms and shook her head and drummed the heels of her boots on the ground.
I put my trowel down and looked at her.
Oh, Lottie, I said. You know very well that he is. Don’t you remember how they put him in a box and how we all cried and cried?
Lottie stared at me as if this was a new and terrible piece of information.
But what about the little dog?
What, you mean Frank’s dog?
Lottie shook her head.
No, Tuffy. The Tuffy dog. Did we put him in the box with Frank?
I stared at Lottie.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, I said. I don’t know anything about any dog called Tuffy.
Lottie’s face turned dark.
Tuffy! The dog that is soft as a lamb and you put it on your face like this.
She made a rubbing motion with her fingers on her cheek. Jazzy was looking at her and shaking her head.
Shut up, Lottie. What are you on about? There was only our old dog and she wasn’t like a lamb and you know very well that Pa put her in a hole in the woods.
Lottie seemed to think about this. She put her thumb back in her mouth and sucked on it for a while. At last she pulled it out and wiped it on her pinafore.
I think Tuffy was the little girls’ dog anyway. But I thinked if Frank was dead, then maybe he could have it too.
I felt my heart drop.
What little girls?
She blinked.
Them little girls. The ones that died.
I bit my lip.
Lottie, I said, there aren’t any little girls. Whatever are you talking about?
Yes there is. The little girls of miracles that had the Tuffy dog.
Little girls of miracles! What a stupid thing to say, said Jazzy, and she began to laugh loudly.
I looked at her.
She probably dreamed it, I said.
Not a dream! Lottie said. Anyway, I used to be dead too, and I came back.
Jazzy had had enough. She threw down her trowel.
No, Lottie! You didn’t used to be dead. And you didn’t used to be a dog. You didn’t used to be anything. And there aren’t any little girls either. Why do you always make up so many boomers?
Not boomers, Lottie said.
Yes, they are, they’re boomers. Do you know that God punishes children who make up stories about dead people? It’s wicked to lie. You’re a wicked child and I wish you had died instead of Frank!
I looked at Jazzy and I thought that recently she’d become almost as mean as Phoebe Harkiss. But Lottie was staring at her.
When I was dead, she whispered in her darkest voice, I just laid there on the floor with the blood coming out of me.
Lottie, I said, that’s horrible. I wish you wouldn’t say such things. Where do you go getting such horrid ideas from?
From the man who killed me.
What?
Lottie smiled. Her eyes were raw and furious.
He couldn’t help it. He was a bad man, so he just had to do it and God let him because God is bad.
Lottie! I said. Just stop it right now.
The man hit me and hit me till I was dead. Just like the little girls.
I took hold of Lottie’s shoulders and looked in her eyes.
Just stop this nonsense right now or you’re going straight home to Ma. For once and for all, no one killed you and you weren’t ever dead.
Though you will be one day, Jazzy said. And sooner than you think, if you don’t shut up with all this rubbish about miracles.
Lottie was silent for a long moment.
Not miracles, she said. Mary Coles.
I THOUGHT THAT WAS THE END OF IT, BUT I WAS WRONG.
Later, much later, after night had come down and the sky had turned from blue to black, I was sitting in the kitchen biting my thumb and thinking about poor Frank and all the awful and aggravating things he used to say and do that now that he’d gone just seemed quite ordinary and sweet.
And I was thinking too about whether I should go and look for James, who had gone with my father to the steeplechase at Bungay but must surely be back by now. And I was thinking about something else as well—a wavy, upset, and hard-to-understand kind of thought that had not yet taken shape in my head but was already making my throat feel tight and sad—when she came and stood behind me.
At first I didn’t feel her there. In fact, she kept herself so quiet and still, that when at last she reached up and tugged my sleeve, I jumped so hard that my thoughts exploded all around me, shattering into pieces.
Lottie! I cried. Whatever are you doing? Why aren’t you in bed?
She was gazing up at me with hot eyes. Her cheeks were bright and her breath smelled sickly and of fever. She licked her lips.
I don’t like it, she said.
What? What don’t you like?
The lady.
What?
She keeps coming—Lottie looked around the room and then back at me. She held up her hands. I said to her to go away, I said: You must go away right now or I’ll bite you! But every time I say it she just stays and stays—
But, Lottie—
I watched as she plucked at her nightgown and stomped her bare feet and gazed all around the room again. I saw that she was on the verge of tears.
Make her go away, Eliza. Please make her—
Make who go away?
The lady!
What lady? I can’t see any lady. Ouch! I said as she grabbed hold of my arms so tight with her fingers that it started to hurt. Get off, Lottie. I mean it; you’re pinching me.
I prized myself away and got up.
Is it the same lady you were talking about before? I asked her as I reached for a spill to light the lamp.
Lottie was still for a moment.
It’s Mary Coles.
Mary Coles? Who’s Mary Coles? We don’t know anyone called Mary Coles. What are you talking about, Lottie? I said as I went to the window to look for any sign of James.
She blinked.
It’s a name, isn’t it?
Yes, but whose name?
It’s her name and I told you, I don’t like it.
Now Lottie began properly to cry.
Oh, Lottie, I said. Look at you, you’re just about ragged with tiredness. Why aren’t you in bed and asleep?
I don’t like her, she sobbed. I don’t like her—I want her to go.
Her sobs were so loud that I had no choice but to go over and sit back down on the chair and pull her on my knee.
I don’t know what you mean, I told her more gently now. What lady? There isn’t any lady here.
She turned and nestled herself into me, hugging her small arms round my waist and pushing her face into my sleeve.
She’s in here and I don’t like it.
In here? You mean in this room?
Yes.
And are the little girls in here too?
Lottie let out a wail.
Not them! The little girls are dead!
I thought about this.
Look, Lottie, I said as I got her comfortable on my lap and kissed her soft hair that smelled of bed and old milk. I want you to look around the room. Let’s do it now. Let’s look around the room together.
And I took her chin in my hand and as calmly as I could turned her head so I could show her every inch of that empty room with its shadows and dark spaces and familiar objects that were only just visible in the light of the lamp.
You see, I said. There’s no one. No lady, no little girls, no monkeys or bears or tigers either. There’s no one here at all but you and me.
Yes, there is! Lottie cried—and she pointed with her finger before twisting her head back
against my breast as if she could hardly bear to look.
No, there isn’t.
There is! Look. Over there!
Where?
There!
Again, she jabbed her finger into the air. And so I looked. I did it. I put my eyes in the very place where she was telling me to put them.
I looked at the flagstone floor that I’d swept not more than an hour ago. The sheet of newspaper that Pa had pinned to the wall, that had prices for horse rakes on it. The chair he always sat in to take his boots off. The mirror. The clock. The oil lamp. The platters and the mixing bowls on the dresser. A brown jug. Some strips of sack cloth for tying birds’ feet together. Ma’s worn-out apron with the blue flower pattern and the blackberry stains on it. And beneath all of that, the stack of firewood, barely visible now in the dark of the fireplace, which always had mice nesting in it, and the rug that Ma and me had made from an old red soldier’s coat she’d got from a rag-and-bone man.
I looked at all of these things—things I fully expected to see, and which were indeed as precisely and definitely there as they always were—and I was about to start scolding Lottie again for telling great big booming lies, when I saw it. Something—
Human, it was. Woman. The legs long and loose in dark breeches, the face shadowy, black hair coming undone and falling over its shoulders, moving fast across the kitchen floor, slicing softly through the air toward the place where we—
Drawing breath and springing to my feet, knocking the chair out from under me and pulling Lottie into my arms, I would have cried out, but at that exact moment James came in. His hands were dirty and hung heavy by his side and his face was gray and terrible.
You have to come, he said.
What?
I froze and stared at him, his body large and sudden in the open doorway, the black dark of the night solid behind him. I glanced straight back at where the shape had been. Nothing. I looked again at James.
What? I said again.
He swallowed.
Just come.
Slowly, I let go of Lottie and let her slide to the floor. I thought she would complain but she remained silent; she did not make a sound.
Why? I said. What is it? What’s the matter?
His face did not change.
I need help, he said. I need help, Eliza, and I need it right now.
MARY’S MOBILE SHUDDERS INTO LIFE. THE SOUND MAKES HER jump.
“I’m fucking begging you,” Ruby says, “to talk to Dad. He’s somehow got it into his head that I have to spend the whole summer with you guys like I’m some kind of underage retard or something and I thought I could get Mum on my side at least, but now he’s fucking well brainwashed her into it and she won’t listen to a single thing I say.”
Mary, sitting on the old bench and watching the dog sniff around the bricks she’s just laid over the roots of the clematis, thinks about this.
“Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the whole summer, does it?” Mary says at last.
She hears Ruby take a breath.
“Doesn’t it? That’s not what they’re saying. You ask Dad. I swear they want me on a train the very moment the term ends, so they can incarcerate me in the fucking countryside.”
Mary brushes a ladybird off her arm.
“I’m sure it won’t be for the whole holidays.”
“Won’t it? Try telling them that and see what they say. Seriously, Mary, will you talk to him? I mean it, I think I might be able to bear a long weekend or something but any more than that is going to be fucking torture.”
“Torture?” Mary says, still watching the ladybird’s dark blur of wings. She hears Ruby gasp.
“Yes, torture. Don’t you get it? That’s exactly what they want. It’s supposed to be awful. It’s some kind of a punishment for whatever it is that I’m supposed to have done. Mum wants me away from all my friends and all my social life that I’ve taken so long to build up and basically away from any possibility of the tiniest shred of fucking pleasure I have left in my life.”
Mary hesitates.
“And you don’t think it might be good to get out of London for a while?”
Ruby lets out a wail.
“Oh my God. Please don’t tell me you’re in on it too? You were my last hope. I thought you at least still had a mind of your own.”
Mary thinks about this. She thinks about her mind and she wonders, for the first time in what she imagines is probably quite a while, whether it really is her own. At the same time, she reaches out with a hand and tries to wave at the dog, who is now starting to scratch at the earth under the bricks.
“Hold on a moment,” she tells Ruby, “I just have to shout at the dog. The thing is,” Mary says as she wrestles the dog away from the roots and forces her to sit at her feet, “your dad is really quite worried about you. And so am I. I’m worried about you. And I know for a fact that your mum is worried—”
She hears Ruby gasp.
“Worried? What in fuck’s name is wrong with you all? It’s ridiculous. I’ve done absolutely nothing for ages except try to please you all, but at the end of the day, it just doesn’t work, does it? All I am is a bloody scapegoat. Lisa thinks that too. She thinks it’s really unfair. The trouble with you guys is you’re so fucked-up by what happened and you’re just looking for someone to take it out on.”
Mary is silent. Letting go of the dog and smoothing a hand over the leg of her jeans.
“That’s what Lisa thinks, is it? And what else does Lisa think?”
Ruby sniffs.
“All right and I’ll tell you another thing, but you won’t like it. I haven’t even told Mum this, but your house is scary. I don’t like sleeping there. It seriously creeps me out. I’m not being funny, and I swear I’m not making it up. And it’s not just me either. Lisa felt it too.”
Mary says nothing. She stays very calm. The air is warm and bright and sharp around her. It smells of apples, leaves, soil, baby’s fingers, the fuzzy brown hair of small girls. She doesn’t feel at all upset. She doesn’t feel bad or afraid or worried. In fact, she realizes she hasn’t felt so perfectly and conveniently comfortable in a very long time. A sinking euphoria, that’s what this is, blurring all her edges, a bit like the medication they gave her straight after it had happened.
“Mary?” Ruby says.
“What?”
“You still there?”
Mary swallows.
“I know,” she says.
“What?”
She hesitates. Feeling Ruby on the other end of the line, waiting.
“I know there’s something in the house,” she says at last.
SEVERAL HOURS LATER, SHE RUNS INTO EDDIE IN THE FARM shop. Both of them buying milk. He’s carrying Deborah’s big straw basket with the flowers on it. “Mary Coles!” he says. “Now isn’t that funny—I was just on my way to see you.”
Her spirits drop. She knows she won’t shake him off now. He waits while she pays. Outside in the sunshine, he stops and looks at her more closely. “Mary? What’s the matter? Are you all right?”
Mary tries to smile.
“I’m fine. Why? Don’t I look fine?”
He hesitates.
“You look very pale.”
“I’m always pale.”
“No, really. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so pale. You look like a ghost of yourself.”
“Well, I’m fine, really.”
He smiles.
“All right. If you say so.” Keeping his eyes on her face, he puts his hand into the basket and brings out something wrapped in newspaper. “Here.”
“What?”
“I wanted you to have it.”
“Oh, but, Eddie!” Mary unwraps it, pulling off the paper, the glass suddenly cool beneath her fingertips. “You can’t possibly give me this.”
He grins.
“It seemed to chime with you—that time I first showed it to you, remember? I could tell it meant something. You showed an interest. You even saw things in it
that I’d never noticed.”
The shadow. Mary tries not to look for it now. It might not be anything—might not ever have been there, she thinks.
“But that doesn’t mean I should have it,” she tells Eddie.
“Yes, it does. Really. Please don’t make me explain it. I just wanted to give it to you. I feel that you’re its rightful owner.”
Mary looks again at the picture—the country lane, familiar and barely changed except for the presence of those long-ago faces—all those small children lined up against the hedge, the stout little girl staring straight ahead, the other child hanging upside down, skinny dark legs in dark stockings, hair sweeping the dust. She sees with relief that it all looks quite different in the bright sunlight—bleached out and in some way benign. She turns back to Eddie.
“But what about Deborah? You had it on your bedroom wall.”
He makes a face.
“She won’t even notice it’s gone. She never liked it—she’s not keen on old stuff. And anyway, I told you, there are two more of the things at home waiting to be framed.” He lifts his eyes to meet hers, his face suddenly shy. “Your hair really suits you like that, by the way. I’ve never seen you with it up.”
“Oh.” Mary, hating herself for flushing, reaches up and touches the clip she’d forgotten all about. “I had a shower and forgot to take it out.”
“Well, it’s good. Makes you look a bit French.”
“French?” Mary laughs and his face falls.
“Anyway. You should wear it up more often.”
Mary doesn’t know what to say. She looks at Eddie, suddenly worried that she hasn’t thanked him properly.
“How are you anyway?” she says. “How’s your boy?”
“My boy?”
“Is he OK? When does the term end? Will you get to see him soon?”
Eddie looks at her for a long moment.
“It’s nice of you to ask,” he says. “No one ever asks me that. I’m trying to arrange a visit at the moment, in fact, but it’s difficult. Deborah gets quite upset if I even mention him.”
Mary looks at him.
“Does she? Why?”
“It’s complicated. It’s not her fault. Just maybe best if you don’t go mentioning him to her, OK?”
“OK,” Mary says.
Clutching the basket to him, Eddie looks at the ground.
The Stopped Heart Page 23