33 Women: A gripping new thriller about the power of women, and the lengths they will go to when pushed...

by Isabel Ashdown

  ‘Lily made the quiche,’ Thistle tells her, leaning in to be heard over the chatter of the room. She points at one of two wheelchair-bound women at the far end of the table. ‘She’s seventy next week. She’ll tell you, given half a chance. Funny thing is, even though her memory’s going, she knows how old she is. There’s a few in here who are going that way.’

  Celine takes a slice of quiche and passes the platter along. ‘Do they have a carer?’

  ‘What, the oldies? Oops, shouldn’t say that. Seed prefers “elders”. But yeah, a couple of women here are dedicated carers. Rather them than me.’

  ‘How old’s Bramble?’ Celine asks. ‘She must be in her eighties?’

  ‘Must be.’ Thistle nods, eyeing up Celine’s as-yet untouched bread roll. ‘Aren’t you gonna eat that?’

  Celine pushes it towards her. ‘She’s one of the original six, isn’t she?’

  ‘A Founding Sister. And don’t she let you know it.’ Thistle gives a dramatic roll of her head, and she looks suddenly young, like a sulky teenager. ‘She’s got her beadies on everything, that one, feeding it back to Seed the minute your back’s turned.’

  ‘You don’t like her?’

  ‘Don’t trust her, more like. She’s nice enough to your face, but she’s a typical deputy. You know, like those women on the ends of the checkouts in Asda? Give ’em a bunch of keys and a clipboard and they turn into a bloody nightmare.’ She polishes off Celine’s roll. ‘My sister-in-law was one of them women. Snout in everything.’

  When lunch is cleared, pots of tea are brought through, and Seed chimes a spoon against her cup, to gather attention.

  ‘In honour of our special guests Una and Celine, we’re having a slightly extended lunch today, sisters, hence the tea-and-biscuit treat.’

  There are murmurs of approval all around.

  ‘As you know, the police have been hounding us since the loss of our dear sister Robyn.’ She appears to gather herself for a second or two before continuing. ‘Una is an ex-detective, retired now, and, following negotiations with the local inspector on Robyn’s case, we agreed to invite her here to answer some of their questions, in the hope that we might finally be rid of this interminable police and media scrutiny.’

  Una holds back, waiting to be invited to speak.

  ‘And Celine. She’s …?’ Seed says, and it’s suddenly clear that she thinks they’re together, a couple.

  ‘We live together,’ Una says, smiling, not correcting her, and avoiding Celine’s gaze. The interest in them suddenly ramps up, which was obviously Una’s intention, and Celine resists the urge to kick her under the table.

  ‘Good, good,’ Seed says, pressing her palms together. ‘In the spirit of openness, I would like to invite Celine and Una to ask us any questions they have, before we get back to work for the afternoon? Bramble and I thought it would be least disruptive to our working day, and a good way for us all to get to know each other. Agreed?’

  The murmurs grow more lively.

  ‘Una,’ Seed says, extending her elegant palm. ‘Would you like to start?’

  Una thanks her and the rest of the group, and launches in. ‘How many of your residents are victims of partner abuse?’

  ‘We don’t use the word victim,’ Seed says, ‘though of course a high proportion have been through some kind of trauma at the hands of men.’ She gestures to a thin, olive-skinned woman in her twenties.

  The young woman speaks. ‘I’m Oregon. I came here when I was seventeen, straight from my foster home where one of the teenage sons had started—’ here she falters ‘—being a problem.’ She talks quietly, in a cool, detached manner. ‘Not all of us are running away from partners.’

  ‘Still, you were driven here to get away from a man,’ Una says gently.

  A number of women around the table agree, until there’s another tiny gesture from Seed and a crop-haired woman to Una’s right starts to speak. ‘I wasn’t abused, but I needed a new start. I’d had enough of the world – out there – the greed, the waste, the constant noise of social media. It was like there was this endless buzz in my head, stopping me from thinking and feeling properly. I came here for the quiet. That was four years ago, and I can’t imagine leaving now. I wouldn’t care if I never saw another mobile phone in my life.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Celine says with feeling, and there’s a ripple of laughter, and a seductive sense of belonging.

  ‘My husband passed away,’ a woman in her sixties volunteers. ‘I adored him. He was the best of men, and if I hadn’t come here I think I would have died of loneliness. I remembered an old friend had come here in the ’80s, and I phoned her at my lowest point. She put me in touch with Seed.’

  ‘Not all men are villains,’ Una says, and to Celine’s surprise a great number of women around the room nod enthusiastically.

  ‘Just some of them,’ Seed agrees. ‘The ones who drive women into hiding.’

  ‘Is there a time limit?’ Celine asks, aiming the question at Bramble who has been silent throughout lunch. ‘For how long you can stay here?’

  ‘There’s no limit, so long as women abide by our Code of Conduct and embrace the lifestyle.’

  ‘Some of you have been here since the beginning, haven’t you?’ Celine presses, still focusing on the older woman.

  ‘Yes, we have,’ Bramble replies. Several other women nod and agree, but only a handful are old enough to qualify as Founding Sisters. ‘Some of us had no reason to leave.’

  ‘But women do leave, don’t they?’ Celine says, realising Bramble’s not about to reveal who the others are. ‘I mean, your residents’ journal is huge, and Seed, you said there are close to four hundred portraits around the house. Four hundred – if you go back over forty years, that’s around ten new residents a year?’

  Bramble places her forearms on the table, and slides her hands inside their opposite sleeves. ‘You must remember, Celine, women come for different reasons. Some are genuinely searching for a long-term place to call home, somewhere they can feel empowered and independent. And some are just passing through, looking for a place to rest and recover from the world for a while, before moving on to the next thing. We see value in both, and so, yes, many come and go, but a good number stay too.’

  Seed raises a finger, as though testing the air for wind. ‘A show of hands if you’ve been here for over two years?’

  More than half the women raise their arms.

  ‘How long was Robyn here?’ Una asks.

  ‘Three months,’ Bramble replies.

  ‘Is that all?’ Celine is shocked; from Seed’s emotional response to Robyn’s death, she’d assumed she had been a resident for much longer.

  ‘What was she like?’ Una asks.

  ‘Funny,’ says old Lily from her wheelchair. She’s wearing thick-lensed glasses, clutching a handkerchief which she uses frequently to mop her rheumy eyes. ‘Some of her ways used to make me laugh, oh, so they did. The way she’d say “jelly” for jam and “cookie” for biscuit and all sorts of other American slang. Reminded me of you, Regine, the way she talked.’

  An older woman opposite me gives a distracted nod. She wears her hair in a heavy grey plait and her dark face is deeply lined.

  ‘I used to correct her all the time in the kitchen,’ Lily continues. ‘But she’d just flick a tea towel at me and call me Lily La-di-dah. She used to make me feel young. Didn’t treat me like an old has-been, like most of this lot.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nonsense, Lily,’ a woman only a few years younger says, tapping her hand lightly.

  ‘No, it’s not. They all know I’m seventy next week. They all think I’m past it. Robyn didn’t think I was past it.’

  Seed laughs. ‘You’re a spring chicken compared to some, Lily.’

  ‘Tell us about Robyn’s ex-husband,’ Una says, bringing back order. ‘Did Robyn ever talk about him?’

  There’s a ripple as everyone answers at once, the general consensus being no.

  ‘She didn’t tal
k much about life outside of here,’ Seed says. ‘Although I probably knew more than most. She confided in me that they’d been meeting up, that they were planning to make another go of their relationship.’

  ‘Why you?’ Una asks, and it seems as though all eyes swivel towards Seed in that moment, collective breath held. ‘Why did she confide in you specifically?’

  Seed’s eyes are lowered, and she’s trying to gather her words. ‘We …’ she says, and for a second Celine believes she might actually cry. ‘We were close,’ she says softly.

  Una glances at Celine, but before she can ask her next question Bramble is on her feet and the room is a flurry of plate-clearing and chatter and, with no warning, lunch is over.

  In the afternoon, Celine and Thistle move on to chicken duties, mucking out the hen house and run, and scrubbing clean the feeding stations.

  Once she’d got over the gaggingly bad smell of the dirty coop, Celine found the task strangely meditative, and even Thistle stopped talking for a while as they settled to work. Chickens, which Celine had always treated with some level of suspicion, turn out to be surprisingly likeable, one or two of them taking a particular interest in her and following her about as she works.

  ‘Some of the sisters will volunteer for anything over chicken duty,’ Thistle says as they clear up at the end of the day. ‘But you did all right.’

  To Celine’s surprise, Thistle wipes her chicken-shitty hand down the side of her apron and offers it in a firm shake.

  ‘You too,’ Celine replies, humour in her voice.

  Thistle snorts. ‘Good thing about chicken duty is that you get the first showers. The bathroom rota is based on how dirty your job is, so we’re first.’

  She shows Celine to the shower block at the side of the house, a campsite-grade outbuilding housing six showers and sinks, where she provides her with a towel and her own bar of handmade soap.

  ‘Shampoo’s in the shower,’ Thistle tells her, smirking when Celine asks if there’s any conditioner. ‘Supper’s six o’clock in the dining room.’

  Within the hour, Celine has showered, dressed, been shown the upstairs bedroom she’ll share with Thistle tonight, and is once again sitting in the busy dining room opposite Una. There’s something strangely comforting about the predetermined routines of this place, as though the removal of choice gives the women a sense of more freedom, rather than less. They can’t choose to take their meal at a different time of day; there’s just one sitting, one opportunity to eat. They can’t sit at a PC trawling the internet for cheap flights and new shoes; there’s work to be done. They can’t worry over frizzy hair or eye bags when nobody else does, and nobody else cares.

  They dine in relative silence, and when the kitchen team have cleared the table Seed announces it’s a reading night, and everyone is sent to bed at eight, to read and catch up on sleep before the dawn bell. After using the bathrooms and selecting a book from the extensive living room library, Una and Celine manage to snatch a brief update on their way up the stairs.

  ‘Find anything out?’ Una asks in a whisper.

  ‘Not much,’ Celine replies. ‘You?’

  ‘From Rita? If I could speak Polish, perhaps – listen, work on your woman, will you? She seems like a right know-it-all. She’ll be busting to share a bit of gossip. See if you can find out if Robyn and Seed were an item.’

  They say goodnight and part in the hallway, Celine heading into her bedroom with Thistle, Una into hers with Rita a few doors down.

  Thistle turns her back to Celine and strips, seemingly unembarrassed by her heavy white body. ‘There’s a nightshirt on your pillow. In case you didn’t pack one.’

  Celine did pack pyjamas, but she opts for the nightshirt, like Thistle, turning her back and stripping in layers, so as to expose the least amount of flesh. She climbs into bed with her book and lies back, feeling grateful for the bedside table which separates them.

  ‘Knackered?’ Thistle asks.

  ‘A bit,’ Celine replies. ‘Is this a typical day?’

  ‘Pretty much. Except Sundays. That’s just a half-day.’ She clears her throat and starts thumbing through the pages of her book, and Celine wonders how to break into conversation about Robyn.

  ‘The food’s good,’ she says.

  ‘I’ve had better,’ Thistle snorts.

  ‘Was Robyn a good cook?’

  In the momentary lull before Thistle answers, Celine is certain the women have been briefed not to say too much. Her roommate sighs heavily, shuts her book and slaps it on the side table.

  ‘Better than most,’ she says. ‘She was a proper chef, like. Worked in New York and London, fancy restaurants, so she shook things up a bit in the kitchen. Put a few noses out of joint, I can tell you.’

  ‘Because she was a better cook?’

  ‘Ah, they soon got over that. No, cos of her special treatment. When she arrived, instead of putting her in with Irma, where there was a spare bed, Seed kept her downstairs, in the room next to her.’

  ‘Sounds to me like Seed and Robyn wanted to be near each other,’ Celine says.

  Thistle turns on her side and leans out so she can make eye contact. ‘I’ve been here more than five years, and Seed’s never had a favourite like that before. No one, except the Founding Sisters, gets a room of their own. The others said it was unheard of, and some of ’em have been here for years.’

  Celine rewards Thistle with her best wide-eyed look of surprise and drops to a whisper. ‘I heard they’d been writing to each other for a while beforehand. That there was something going on.’

  Thistle’s mouth draws up into a self-satisfied little pout, and she nods before flopping back against her pillow with a soft thud. ‘You ask me, there was definitely something going on. Apart from anything, I’d never seen Seed so bloody happy in all my time here. She’s been a shadow of herself since her special one died.’

  ‘Her “special one”?’

  ‘That’s what everyone called Robyn – not to her face – but, you know, people notice things, don’t they?’ Thistle switches off the bedside light. ‘Night, then,’ she says.

  There’s a low whistle as the wind howls along the side of the house. Her ‘special one’. Celine feels a horrible sick feeling in her stomach, as she wonders, was Vanessa a ‘special one’ too?

  ‘Thistle,’ Celine whispers into the darkness. ‘You said you don’t trust Bramble.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Well, what about Seed? What do you make of her?’

  Thistle gives another long sigh. ‘I’d lay down my life for her,’ she replies, and with that she subsides into silence.

  The wind gets higher as the night progresses, and, although Celine dozes for an hour or so, by one in the morning she’s wide awake, lying in her single bed, listening to Thistle snoring just three feet away. She’s not accustomed to being in such close proximity to others, and she wonders how quickly these women get used to communal living. The strange thing is, she’s really beginning to understand the attraction of a place like this. There are no bills to pay, no text messages to reply to, no fashions to follow or clients to dress up for. There’s no family, or past; even the future seems an impossible thing to imagine in here. There’s the present, and it’s simple, and it’s tranquil and still.

  Celine closes her eyes, hoping for a return to sleep, but instead finds herself trying to imagine Vanessa lying in a bed like this, fifteen years earlier. What jobs had she been responsible for while she was here; what had she brought to the community? In her real life she had been a receptionist, but she was also fiercely practical, so she’d have turned her hand to anything. She’d have blagged her way in one way or another. And when she arrived, who had she shared with? What was she feeling? Was she relieved to be here? Or was she still afraid? Celine’s mind keeps returning to that big old leather journal on Seed’s desk, in the office just along the corridor. She tunes in to the sounds of the house, but all she can hear is the wind howling around the building, and the tap-ta
p-tapping of a tree branch against the window. She recalls the line in the journal recording Robyn Siegle’s stay here, and the blank space where her departure date should have been logged. Is there a departure date logged for Vanessa? And did she keep her own name, or was she eager to reinvent herself, to take a new identity?

  Eventually, too wired for sleep, Celine eases her legs from beneath the covers and slips her feet into the slippers she’d found at the end of her bed this evening. Barely breathing for fear of waking her roommate, she pulls a sweater on over the top of her nightshirt and slips from the room, hesitating to check the dimly lit hallway before easing the door shut. To one side are six bedrooms, to the other five more, and at the very end, beyond the landing to the stairs, is Seed’s office, its door firmly shut. Celine knows Seed sleeps alone downstairs, with Bramble along the hall, and the three more needy Elders and their carers in the large dorm adjoining the kitchen. They’re separated by an entire floor, and any sound Celine makes crossing the floorboards should surely be disguised by the howling wind. With a resolute intake of breath she makes haste, racing along the hallway, turning the handle and pushing the office door open, switching on the overhead light in one fluid motion – and it’s only when she finds the room empty that she realises she had been half-expecting Seed to be sitting there, regally poised behind her desk.

  Without delay, Celine makes for the journal, pulling it to the centre of the desk, taking care not to move anything else. Beyond the window she hears a crash, and she glances up to see an empty apple crate tumbling across the lawn in the half-light. Adrenaline pumping, she opens the journal to the front page and runs her finger down the first few names, pausing with a gasp when she finds that, indeed, Susan Green, the mystery woman in the wooden boat, was one of the Founding Sisters.

  Flipping forward to 2004, she continues to scan the lines at speed, racing down every name from there up to the end of 2005, searching for her sister’s name and finding nothing. She must have missed it in her haste. Celine starts again, back to the start of the year Vanessa left her boyfriend, discounting name after name until again she lands at the end of 2005, several months after Vanessa’s death. There has to be some kind of a mistake, she tells herself, as her heart races wildly; she has to be in here.