The Visitors

by Catherine Burns

  Marion and John went and sat in the mouse bumper cars and made noises like they were crashing into each other. Then Marion felt something scuttle over her foot. When she looked down she saw a real mouse, trapped in the footwell of the bumper car. Shrieking, she jumped out.

  John laughed and then spent ten minutes trying to kill the mouse by throwing stones at it while the poor little thing raced around in a panic. Marion thought that was funny; a real live mouse trapped inside a pretend one. John made her throw stones too, but she didn’t really want to hurt it, so she missed on purpose and was glad when it finally found a way out through a hole in the metal shell.

  When the sun disappeared behind a mountain of twisted metal, they went back to look for Dad. The cabin was locked, and the parking lot empty. Together they wandered around the dump.

  “What’re we going to do?” Marion asked her brother. She wanted to take hold of his hand but knew that would make him angry.

  “We’ll just wait here, stupid. Why, are you scared or something?”

  “No, just hungry. Do you think it’s time for dinner yet?”

  “You’re going to have to wait a bit, fatso.”

  John went off to find a place to go to the toilet, leaving Marion alone. Everything seemed spookier in the falling light. The octopus became a giant hand grabbing at the sky, loose bits of metal creaked in the wind, and the skeletons sitting in the ghost train glowed eerily.

  He seemed to be gone for an age. She called out. “John, what’re you doing?”

  Then her brother jumped out from behind a fake tombstone and shouted “Boo!” right in her face.

  Marion screamed and stumbled away from him. She lost her balance, falling backwards onto a pile of scrap, then felt something sharp stick into her hand. When she got up, the palm was wet with blood.

  “You stupid idiot, why did you have to do that?”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” she protested. “You jumped right out at me.”

  Then John did something weird; he grabbed her wrist and licked the cut. His tongue felt rough and warm and in a funny sort of way she liked it.

  “You have to do that to stop it going bad. If that happened, they’d have to take off your whole arm.”

  He gave her a handkerchief to wrap round the cut. Miraculously this treatment stopped the bleeding.

  “How did you know to do that?” asked Marion.

  “I read a book about survival skills,” said John dismissively. “Just don’t tell Dad.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you don’t have to open your fat mouth about every damn thing, do you?” he yelled.

  When they saw the white glare of the Bentley’s headlamps staring at them through the gates, Marion nearly burst with relief. They heard Sally laughing as she struggled with the padlock.

  On the way home Dad stopped at Murphy’s chip shop and bought them a fish supper each. Being allowed to eat on the backseat of the car made the two of them feel like kings—Dad normally had a fit if Marion even tried to nibble so much as a fruit gum on that sacred calfskin upholstery. While stuffing lumps of delicious fried potato into her mouth Marion saw something glint in the darkness. Sliding fingers greasy with chip fat down the back of the seat, she pulled out Sally’s silver hair bobble, a few strands of black hair still attached. She was about to remark on her find, then remembered John’s words about not opening her “fat mouth about every damn thing” and slipped the bobble around her wrist before carrying on eating.

  A few months later, Dad gave Sally a job at the warehouse. She swapped her jeans and work boots for miniskirts with long rainbow-colored socks and had her long hair cut in a Prince Valiant bob that cunningly hid the birthmark.

  • • •

  DAD’S OFFICE ABOVE the warehouse was filled with the dry, pleasant smells of new cloth and freshly sharpened pencils. Through the windows you could look down at workmen moving giant rolls of fabric below. While Dad talked to clients on the big black telephone, twisting his fingers through its long curly cord, Marion would sit in a corner, turning the floppy pages of sample books, flooding her mind with colors and patterns.

  Regatta Stripe made her think of aristocrats drinking champagne on boats with pure white sails; Bermuda Mirage—a man bleeding to death on a sandy beach; Turquoise Duchess—an aging yet beautiful woman putting on diamonds to meet her young lover.

  Sally shared the office with Dad, and as far as Marion could tell, she did nothing all day but read fashion magazines and apply cherry-scented lip gloss that came from a small bottle with a roller at the end.

  When Marion grew bored of the sample books, Sally would lend her magazines. They had titles like Girl Trend, Jacey, and Modern Chic and were far more exciting than the fabric sample books. Even the adverts fascinated Marion. Her favorite was for deodorant. In the picture a girl in a white dress rode a horse along a country lane, with a wistful expression on her face. Marion longed to be that girl. The horse would be called Jester and she would ride him every day to visit her best friend, Anna, who was slowly and beautifully dying of consumption.

  Girls wrote to the problem pages wanting to know if their breasts were normally shaped or if they could get pregnant by sitting on their boyfriends’ laps; there were detailed diagrams of female parts that showed you how to put in a tampon properly and where pubic hair was meant to grow on the female body. To Marion the business of becoming a grown-up woman seemed terrifyingly messy and she wished her body could be as clean and changeless as a plastic doll’s.

  Sitting on a floppy book of damask swatches, she studied articles about how to make your eyes look bigger by putting a darker color in the socket and highlighter on the lid, then curling your lashes with tiny little tongs. She learned that vertical stripes made you look thinner, and girls with short necks and round faces ought to wear their hair long and straight to give the illusion of length. Marion believed if she followed all these rules to the letter, then she’d be just like Sally.

  The men in the warehouse were always whistling at Sally. She didn’t seem to mind, but Dad got furious when he caught them doing it. He would tell them they were a “bunch of uncouth buggers,” then threaten to fire the lot of them and see how they liked that. John said Sally was a flirt and knew how to twist men around her little finger. He pretended that he didn’t like her, but Marion knew he’d stolen one of her woolen mittens and kept it hidden in his sock drawer.

  After Sally had been working at the warehouse for a few years, she started dating a sales rep called Owen. Dad didn’t like his secretary going out with this charming Welshman, who visited the warehouse extolling the virtues of stain-resistant velour. He claimed it was “unprofessional.”

  One day, Marion saw Sally hurrying down the metal staircase that led to Dad’s office, black mascara streaks staining her cheeks. When Marion asked what was wrong, Sally told her that Mr. Zetland demanded that she finish with Owen or risk losing her job. Sally, of course, chose Owen over Zetland’s Fine Fabrics. A week later she was showing off her diamond engagement ring and telling everyone she had found a job as a receptionist at a solicitor’s firm.

  Each evening Dad came home from work with a dark look on his face and snapped if you spoke to him. Just before Sally’s notice was up, he announced that he had to go on a business trip to Scotland to visit the suppliers at Highland Tartan Mills. He needed someone to take minutes, so Sally would have to go with him. Dad and Sally were on their way for lunch with the tartan suppliers when the majestic Bentley swerved off a bridge and into a river. An Australian backpacker who was hiking in the area dove into the fast-flowing water but couldn’t open the car doors and nearly drowned himself trying to save them.

  Marion imagined the two of them trapped underwater, hair twisting about Sally’s face, Dad, his black mustache stretched into a scream, while the Australian banged on the windows of the Bentley, watching them perish. Yet it was impossible for her to accept that the accident had actually happened. She ought to feel devastated, but death, like
algebra and French verbs, was something her brain just refused to grasp, leaving her wondering if she might be too stupid to grieve.

  John took leave from his new teaching job at Broadleaf Academy to make arrangements for the funeral.

  “That Sally was no good,” he said to Marion. “She drove Dad to this.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Marion. “Sally wasn’t driving the car, Dad was.”

  John made one of his “for goodness’ sake” huffing noises and went off without saying anything else, leaving Marion with a head full of jigsaw pieces that refused to fit. Certainly Mother couldn’t help her make sense of it all. She refused to speak to anyone and spent her days sitting up in bed, fervently dealing tarot cards like a gambler on a losing streak. It was John who dealt with the detectives that came all the way from Scotland. They talked to him in the living room for more than three hours, while Marion tried to listen at the door.

  “They can’t prove it wasn’t an accident. There’s no evidence,” he told Marion after the police had finally left.

  “But who says it wasn’t an accident?”

  “Her dad, of course. That bugger Frank is trying to put the squeeze on us, but he won’t get a penny if I’ve anything to do with it.”

  After things had calmed down, and John had returned to Broadleaf Academy, Mother overcame her dislike of touching people to hook Marion’s arm with her dry fingers and say: “You won’t leave me, will you, Mar, not ever?”

  “Don’t worry, Mother,” she replied, full of happiness at being needed. “I’ll stay with you.”

  Mother never spoke about Sally or how strange it was that the car had just gone off that bridge on a fine day in broad daylight. If anyone asked her about Dad, she told them that he was a wonderful and devoted husband who had been ripped away from her in the prime of life. Mother knew how to turn a blind eye to things.

  LAUREN HARGREAVES

  John had taken the job teaching chemistry at Broadleaf Academy, a mixed boarding school, straight after graduating from Oxford. If Mother had been disappointed by her son choosing to waste his talents on teaching when he could have been earning a fortune working for some drugs company or becoming a member of parliament like she wanted, she hid it well enough. For fifteen years he earned a reputation as a solid and well-respected member of staff, and it seemed likely that he would have remained at the school until retirement if it hadn’t been for Lauren Hargreaves.

  There were two things that Marion knew for certain about John’s dismissal from Broadleaf Academy: the girl’s name was Lauren Hargreaves and John had never laid a finger on her. Never laid a finger—even those words troubled Marion. Where did the girl claim fingers had been laid?

  At nearly forty with his reputation in ruins, he was forced to leave his flat on the school campus and move back home to live with his sister and ailing mother. Late one night he got terribly drunk and went into Marion’s room, where, sitting on the edge of her bed, he blurted out his story between glugs of whiskey:

  The girl was a barefaced liar—everyone knew that. She’d already been kicked out of three other schools and was always up to no good—getting caught sneaking into the boys’ dorms or drinking cider. His only crime had been in allowing her into his flat on campus. And why had he done that? To give her extra tuition, of course, because she was falling so far behind. To help the ungrateful little bitch. But would anyone believe him? Not a single one of those bastards stood up to support him, did they? Not even his chess buddy Tony Boyle, head of Physics. Not even Bob Phillips! And to think he had bloody well covered up for him, hadn’t he? When that cash went missing from the legacy fund!

  Marion should have been flattered that he confided in her; instead she found the unexpected display of intimacy frightening. Each bit of the story felt like something long and sharp being pushed into the soft pincushion of her brain.

  After a while his words became too slurred and tearful, and she wouldn’t have been able to understand him even if she’d wanted to. All she could make out was something about a fruit knife, a school porter, and the girl wandering the grounds with a torn blouse and bloody knee.

  Whatever had or hadn’t happened, it seemed that nothing could be proven against John. Even Lauren’s parents, who divided the year between the slopes of Colorado and the Côte d’Azur, didn’t seem particularly inclined to believe their daughter. All they cared about was avoiding a public scandal, and they agreed not to involve the police so long as John was removed from the school.

  It was a small blessing that at least they managed to hide the awful business from Mother. She never even asked why her son had moved home. In the years since Dad’s death, a diet that consisted almost entirely of warm milk and sleeping pills had sent her so far downhill that sometimes Marion wondered if she even knew who John was. Mother died just six months after John lost his job. Secretly Marion was grateful to Lauren Hargreaves. She did not know how she could have coped all alone in that big old house without her brother there to keep her company.

  NOISE FROM THE CELLAR

  It was a warm summer night and Marion had opened a window to let some air into the stuffy dining room. While she and John ate their dinner of tinned ravioli the sound of voices could be heard coming from outside; Judith must have people over. She heard a loud shriek of female laughter, and then an unfamiliar male voice said: “Go on, I dare you to show it to Jude, she’s never seen one before.”

  It occurred to Marion that Judith had not mentioned cutting down the tree since she and Greg trespassed into the garden some months ago. She must have forgotten all about it. John was using a slice of white bread to mop up sauce from his plate when a loud banging came from the cellar door. The commotion sent a bullet of panic right through Marion’s chest. She looked at her brother.

  “What is happening, John?”

  John got to his feet and closed the window, shutting the drunken voices from the garden.

  “Get in the living room, right away, shut the door and stay there until I tell you to come out!” he ordered.

  “Yes, John,” she answered timidly, afraid of his rising anger as much as the noise from the cellar.

  Her heart hammering, she went into the next room and closed the door.

  “Don’t think about them, you silly old girl,” she said out loud. “Let John deal with it. Just don’t let them into your head, and it will all go away.”

  Then she heard a female voice scream something, it could have been “help us,” but she wasn’t sure, since the voice was so muffled. This was followed by the sound of furniture being knocked over.

  “Don’t listen to it!” she told herself, rapping her knuckles hard against her temples. Then she switched on the television and turned the volume up as high as it would go. The program was about gardening. A man with a beard was advising the viewers how to prune clematis plants. She turned the channel, a young woman in a silver dress was singing a song before a panel of judges. As she forced herself to concentrate on the program Marion’s breathing became steadier.

  “It’s all right,” she told herself. “John will deal with it everything is all right.

  • • •

  SHE WOKE IN the middle of the night with the vague sense of having had an important dream, but when she tried to remember it, the dream remained forever beyond her grasp. It seemed these days she couldn’t get through a night without waking three or four times, and usually it took forever to get back to sleep again. According to the glowing green hands of the clock, it was 3:15 a.m. The heat in her room was heavy and dark, pressing down on her body, filling her mouth and nose, making it difficult to breathe.

  “Help us.” She could have been wrong, but she was almost sure that was what the voice had said. “Help us.”

  On her way downstairs to get a glass of water, she passed her brother’s room. His door was closed, but she could see a band of light shining through the gap below. Muttering came from within. She stopped by the door to listen:

  “Never any peace�
��these women never give me any bloody peace. What am I to do with them? Tell me that? I try to do my best for them, but what thanks do I get? What thanks? All I want is a little bit of love and comfort—is that too much to ask for?” Then came the huge and terrible sound of him sobbing.

  At that moment the urge gripped her to go into his room and tell him she would no longer stand him having the visitors down there. That it was wrong and he must let them go immediately. The whole affair was making her sick with worry. She put her hand on the doorknob and was about to turn it, then stopped. Whenever she thought about defying him, an invisible brace tightened around her chest, making it difficult to breathe. What was she afraid of? John had never raised a hand to her, yet sometimes he looked at her like she was a drowsy fly he could crush between finger and thumb anytime he wanted to.

  THE BOX

  Mrs. Morrison the housekeeper had been cleaning John’s room when Marion heard her scream. The look on her face when she came out carrying the cardboard box, you would have thought she’d just witnessed a murder. The housekeeper went straight into the front room where Mother was having morning coffee and reading the Telegraph.

  Mrs. Morrison’s gruff voice was easier to understand from the other side of the heavy oak door. Marion picked out “filth”—“indecent”—“disgusting” from the muffled flow. Mother’s speech, warbling and reedy as the call of a waterbird, was harder to decipher. Before the door handle had finished turning, Marion had scampered away and found another vantage point beneath the dining room table.

  She caught the bitter odor of cigarette smoke and then saw Mother’s polished gray heels click rapidly down the parquet floor and stop by the telephone nook.

  “And she thinks she can lecture me about decency, Philip,” said Mother, letting a nervous flurry of ash fall onto the parquet floor. “What with her Sharon having those kids by different fathers and not one of them sticking around a minute after they were born.” She spoke loudly enough to make sure that Mrs. Morrison in the living room could hear too.