Mother would be dressed in her two-piece wool suit, scarf tied around her hair and clear-framed sunglasses. Dad always wore a suit and polished shoes. Even on sunny days Marion and John were forced to keep their coats on for fear the easterly wind might permanently weaken their young bones. Mrs. Morrison dressed, as always, in her stiff nylon overall, her thick legs, mottled like raw sausage meat, bare.
It was Marion and John’s responsibility to help Dad set up “camp.” First the tartan blanket, always a little crusty with stains of previous picnics, was used to lay claim to a plot of suitable beach. Folding chairs with tight springs and metal frames that could snap shut on a child’s small pink fingers if you weren’t careful were brought for the adults to sit on. A series of striped canvas sheets attached to wooden posts marked the perimeter of the camp; their supposed function was to provide shelter from the wind, but they were really there, Marion thought, to separate Mother from the “rough types” who frequented the beach.
Mother did not paddle in the sea or walk along the sand enjoying the sunshine on her face. The only pleasure that she derived from visiting the beach was in disapproving of her inferiors; yet in order to enjoy this activity, she was required to place herself in proximity to them. Anyone who played cricket, listened to popular music, allowed their dogs or children to run free might fall victim to her disdain. She often peered over the windbreak, cigarette in hand, to criticize overly large backsides and sagging stomachs in a voice loud enough for the person to hear, while Marion cringed with shame.
As Dad preferred to stand, Mrs. Morrison would be offered a folding chair, though the offer would need to be repeated several times and refused before she sat down and got out her knitting, a long brown tube-shaped thing that she had been working on for as long as Marion had known her. If this was a sleeve, then the garment consisted of nothing but sleeve.
When they were little, Marion and John would be forced to ride the donkeys. Even though this was supposed to be a treat, Marion dreaded it. The donkeys were nasty stinky things with terrifying teeth, not cute and cuddly like the storybook animals she adored. And she was frightened of the grubby little men in caps with small, tough hands who plonked you on the seat, then smacked the donkeys’ bums to set them off hurtling down the beach, with you fearing you would be thrown headfirst over a pair of moth-eaten gray ears and break your neck.
Once they got settled, the picnic hamper would be opened and its contents unpacked and passed around with ritualistic formality: gilt-edged plates and cups with indelible stains around the rim, a crusty pot of Gentleman’s Relish, a fruitcake with icing that fought your teeth to see which was strongest, strange little forks and spoons that resembled scientific equipment, and enough sandwiches to bury a man.
While they were eating, Mrs. Morrison would commence her favorite topic of conversation: Mr. Morrison. A man who appeared to have no profession other than undergoing surgery on one part of his body after another. She would relate with pride how his ailments continued to baffle modern science as if by refusing to either die or be cured he had outwitted those smart-aleck surgeons. Mrs. Morrison would lower her voice when describing the more X-rated elements of Mr. Morrison’s treatment, while Marion, perched on the edge of the tartan blanket weaving its fringe into plaits, strained to listen to the gory details:
“They split him open like a kipper.”
“He’s had it all taken away, down there, you know.”
Sometimes the words were so dangerous that Mrs. Morrison could only mouth them, and then point to body parts, while Mother responded by raising her eyebrows in what could have been either surprise or disbelief.
While the women chatted, Dad and John were allowed beyond the perimeter of the camp to survey the beach. As John got closer to puberty she would sometimes overhear Dad whispering little comments to him about the girls in their bikinis.
“That one needs sorting out.”
“What you wouldn’t do to that, lad, if you got the chance, eh?”
“That doesn’t leave much to the imagination, does it, son?”
“I’d show her what for.”
“She needs a good seeing to.”
John would say nothing, just stand there watching the girls, his cheeks reddening in the wind.
One year a group of teenage girls, the type Mother would think common because of their loud giggling and bright makeup, formed their own camp close to the fortress of windbreaks and tartan. When they then switched on a large portable radio, a look of disgust wrinkled Mother’s face.
“Philip, go and tell them to turn down that racket,” she said to Dad.
Dad whispered something to John, and the two of them went off in the direction of the girls, while Mother leaned in to hear the details of Mr. Morrison’s most recent “ectomy.”
Marion watched Dad lean over to chat to one of the girls. She was the plainest of the group with short mousy hair and must have been fifteen or so, perhaps a little older than John. Then she was distracted by Mother scolding her for straining sand through her fingers. “Don’t touch that stuff, Marion, it’s full of dogs’ business and God knows what.”
When Dad returned, he was alone. An hour or so later John appeared, looking flushed and smirking in his nylon windcheater. Mother asked him what the devil he’d been up to. John replied he’d been looking for oysters, then shared a wink with Dad.
“Oysters? On Northport Beach? I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Mother replied.
Mrs. Morrison shook her head, then wound up the never-ending sleeve and shoved it into her bag.
Later that afternoon Marion glimpsed Dad under the South Pier giving the mousy-haired girl a couple of ten-pound notes. He then licked his thumb and wiped it across a fresh graze on the girl’s forehead. For some reason this sight made Marion shiver and cross her arms over her yet-unformed twelve-year-old bosom.
At the end of the picnic there would always be food left over.
“Why don’t you take all this for your Sharon and the kids?” Mother would say to Mrs. Morrison in a soft, patronizing tone.
This was Mother having a dig. Mrs. Morrison’s daughter was a single mum with two kids both to unknown dads. Mother was letting her know that despite being allowed to sit on a folding chair and drink tea from a gold-edged cup with a picture of a quail on it, she was beneath them. Mrs. Morrison would pucker her mouth defensively and shake her head as though she would rather let the kids starve than eat leftovers.
THE TREE
Simon, you’re just a young man. Why do you waste all your free time with me? You should be going out to pubs and discos with people your own age.”
“But I love spending time here, Aunt Marion,” said Simon, resting his head on her lap as they sat next to each other on the big white leather sofa. “I feel so happy just being with you.”
Running her hands through his thick blond hair, she felt a warm glow of happiness.
“I’m the luckiest woman in the world to have you as a nephew, Simon.”
“And I’m so lucky to have you as an aunt. Since my parents were killed in the car crash, you were the only one I could turn to.”
• • •
MARION WAS PRESSING John’s shirts in the face-wardrobe room while daydreaming about Simon, the young man from the estate agency. In the fantasy she lived in her aunt’s old flat on Ocean Vista Court and Simon had called round to visit. They ordered Chinese takeaway and ate it while watching television together.
“An accident waiting to happen—” Suddenly her dream was shattered by a sharp female voice coming from the garden at the rear of the house. Marion, still dressed in her nightgown and holding the hot iron, went over to the window. Judith, in a green waxed jacket, was standing by the sycamore tree talking to someone. A burst of steam from the iron scorched Marion’s cheek. Judith must have jumped over the wall from her own garden. If John saw her, he would have a fit. She would have to be got rid of immediately.
“It would only take a good gust of wind to brin
g that branch down. It could fall on anyone,” she heard Judith say. After quickly pulling on a pair of trousers and tucking her nightgown into the waistband like a blouse, Marion rushed downstairs.
Opening the back kitchen door, Marion came face-to-face with Greg, Judith’s lover. He was a full head taller than Judith and wore a lumberjack shirt and bobble hat. His beard was a muddy-brown color, and he had a silver ring through his nose and some other bits of metal in his eyebrows. In his eyes was the look of a boy who had been caught stealing.
“Marion,” said Judith, who was standing behind him wearing skinny jeans and Wellingtons with little skulls on them. “I didn’t know you were home. I was just showing Greg the tree.”
“Judith, you can’t be here right now. This isn’t a good time. I’m busy,” said Marion, trying to sound stern.
“Doing what?” Judith snorted, amused by the idea that Marion could ever be busy. “I’m sorry, but this is important. You don’t seem to understand that tree is dangerous.”
She held out a leaf that was speckled with ugly red marks. Marion felt the tree had let her down somehow, pretending to be healthy, only to make her look a fool in front of Judith. Then, noticing a knotty, tumorlike lump beneath one of the branches, she felt a stab of guilt. Judith turned to Greg, demanding support.
“You can see what I’m talking about, can’t you?”
“Well, yes—I mean—” From his appearance, you would have expected Greg to speak in a booming, manly voice, but instead he sounded whiny and girlish. “He is quite an old chap—looks a bit unwell, I suppose. . . .” He trailed off, then went over to the tree and began picking off little bits of bark as though they were scabs from a wound.
I don’t care if the tree is sick, I won’t let her bully me, Marion said to herself. She can’t just walk in someone’s garden and start bossing them around like this.
“Even a fool could tell the thing is rotten through and through.” Judith kicked the trunk. “Did you mention getting it removed to John yet? It’s been months since you said you would.”
“No, John is very busy, I didn’t want to bother him. You know, I really think you both should go now. I promise I will ask him, though.”
Then Marion heard something. It was coming from the grate in the back wall that let air into the cellar. Very faint, echoing sobs. A chill came over her. This is it, she told herself. They are going to find out what is down there. This is how it will end.
Judith and Greg were both staring at her. Surely they could hear the sound too? They are going to call 999 on their mobile phones. Within minutes the police will arrive and break down the cellar door. Marion realized she almost wanted them to hear the noise; wouldn’t it be a relief to end all that dreadful secrecy?
“Why don’t you just go and get your brother now, Marion, then we can sort out this matter once and for all. Go and get John,” ordered Judith.
“I can’t,” she said weakly, and then moved so she was standing in front of the grate, as if this might block the noise.
“But why not? Isn’t he home? When do you think he will be back? We might as well come in and wait.” She began to walk towards the house and seemed ready to barge in through the kitchen door.
The sobbing got much louder, almost like screeching, the sound of someone terrified to the point of hysteria. Marion felt as though she were standing on the deck of a boat rocked by surging waves. The smell of bleach and drains filled her nose. She remembered feeling the same way that awful day in the wax museum with John. Suddenly everything before her eyes went silvery white, and the boat capsized.
When her vision cleared, she found herself lying on the sofa in the living room, Judith and Greg looking down at her. They made her stay there for several minutes with her feet higher than her head. Greg, who appeared to know about first aid, said she needed to do this to get the blood supply back to her brain cells.
“Please don’t tell John,” she kept repeating. “He will be so angry with me.”
Judith was holding on to Greg’s arm, as though afraid all the tangled wires, crumpled newspapers, and various broken odds and ends that cluttered the room might suddenly swarm and attack her. Judith couldn’t have been in the house since Lydia was a child, and things had gotten much worse since then. They must think we are animals to live like this, thought Marion. It seemed pointless to even try and explain or apologize. Though Marion felt embarrassed at Judith seeing the inside of the house, she decided she didn’t care a fig what Greg, with his pierced face and girl’s voice, thought about it.
“I’ll be quite all right,” she insisted. “You should go. Please.”
“Marion, you need to go and see a doctor—you might be having a brain hemorrhage or God knows what,” said Judith.
“I’m quite sure I’m not, Judith. Really, I will be fine—it’s just that I didn’t eat any breakfast.”
“That sounds like a reasonable explanation to me, Jude, I’m sure she will be fit as a fiddle after a cup of sweet tea and a piece of toast,” said Greg, looking desperate to escape.
• • •
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Marion lay on the sofa watching a film about two young gymnasts who were molested by their coach, then went on to win Olympic medals after testifying against him in court. She found it hard to get involved in the story; the girls wore rather too much makeup for her liking, and Marion couldn’t help feeling they had perhaps encouraged the coach. She also felt sorry for the coach’s wife, who was pregnant and kept getting harassed by the press all the time during the trial.
Before the film had finished, Marion turned off the TV and lay on the sofa staring at the island of yellow damp that had been mysteriously spreading across the ceiling for the last few years. Her neck was hurting from the angle she had been watching television, and for some reason it was impossible to move the cushions into an arrangement that made her comfortable; eventually she found a position that supported her aching back, but then she needed to go to the toilet. When she returned, the pillows had all moved, and no matter how much she wriggled about, she couldn’t get settled again.
She began to think about the crying noise coming from the cellar. Why had the person been so upset? Were they in pain? Surely if one of them became ill, then John would call a doctor. Perhaps they were missing home, it must be difficult being so far away from one’s family, unable to even make a phone call. It seemed strange that neither Greg nor Judith had heard the crying. Was it possible she had imagined it? Could she be going mad like Great-aunt Phyllis, her grandmother’s sister, who had spent the last years of her life in a mental asylum?
Mother said Phyllis had been quite a normal sort of person to begin with. She had worked as a store detective for years at Boots and in her spare time she liked to go ballroom dancing and had even won prizes. Then she started going funny in her midforties. She would accuse people of trying to steal things in the street. She once accused a man of pinching his own Jack Russell and then tried to make a citizen’s arrest—grabbing him under the arm and attempting to drag him to the police station. When she and John were children, they had been taken to see her in the institution. Marion remembered her as a silver-haired skeleton strapped up in a highchair, screaming like a baby for her jam pudding.
Then it occurred to her how close they were, just a few feet below, separated by floorboards and carpet. Living and breathing, their heads just as crammed with thoughts and feelings as her own. The idea of them hearing her movements and thinking about her gave Marion this peculiar itchiness beneath the surface of her skin. It was impossible to imagine how their lives could be anything but awful, yet what could she do about it? And if she was powerless to help, wasn’t it better not to know what things were really like down there? Compassion for the visitors struggled with the desire for ignorance, producing in Marion a paralyzing anxiety that she could only relieve by striking her temples with her knuckles as if physically expelling the verminous thoughts from her head.
HOUSE OF WAX
The ev
erything-at-stake anxiety that filled the Zetland household during the time John was studying for his entrance exams to Oxford University was similar to that of a country on the verge of war. Marion was forced to become even more silent and invisible than usual; now she had not only Mother’s nerves to worry about, but also the possibility of disturbing the peace needed for her brother to absorb the huge quantities of knowledge demanded by The Exams.
The Exams: in her imagination, they were old and terrible gods that could make someone’s greatest dreams come true or doom them to a life of misery. John carried a book with him at all times, poring over heavy tomes about science or history in the bath or at meals. If the exam gods looked down and saw him wasting a single moment of revision time watching telly or reading a comic, they would punish him with failure, and since there was no hope of Marion achieving anything, his failure meant failure for the entire Zetland name.
In the evening after school he sat at his desk surrounded by textbooks. These dry manuals with their big sums and long words frightened Marion. She felt sure if she even tried to put all that information into her own weak brain, like dangerous chemicals stored in the wrong containers, they might cause it to explode.
Following Physics Part 1, his first exam, he came home with a red face and his shirt soaked through with sweat.
“How did it go?” Marion asked. She admired her brother with the asthmatic fervor other girls felt for movie stars and pop singers.
Instead of answering, he threw his leather book bag down on the floor and stomped upstairs.
“Marion, go and see if he’s all right,” Mother instructed her, and she followed her brother upstairs fearfully.
“Well, that’s sodding that, then,” he exclaimed, then threw himself on his bed so the springs twanged like a banjo. “I buggered it up. I’m done for. I’ll have to go to bloody Durham instead with all the other Oxbridge rejects.”
“But you revised absolutely everything that could possibly be on the exam. You did your best and you couldn’t have done more. I’m sure it will be all right,” said Marion, trying to soothe him.
The Visitors Page 7