The Visitors

by Catherine Burns

  “What’s the matter? Why are you crying?” she called out.

  The child looked up; her mouth was open and ragged with pain. She scowled at Marion, mucus dripping from her lower lip.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, I just wanted to make sure you were all right. Have you hurt yourself? Where’s your mummy?”

  The child looked down at a small felt mouse she was holding as if it might have the answers to these questions.

  “Is your mummy inside the house?”

  “Ummy hurt gar—” said the girl through sobs.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “Mummy hurt gar!” she shouted.

  “Your mummy hurt you?”

  “Ooooooooooh—” Then she let out a long squeal of frustration. A fat globule of spit fell from her lip, forming a dark patch on her green dungarees. The girl wiped her face with the felt mouse and took a shaky breath.

  “Mummy hurt car—Daddy has to pay to make better.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Dey’re fighting.”

  “I see.”

  “An when car got hurt—I got a sore arm.”

  The little girl held up her left arm. Marion saw a dark bruise.

  “But don’t tell Daddy,” she whispered, and put her finger over her mouth.

  “All right, I promise I won’t.”

  Then Judith came out of the house, looking like a French prostitute from the 1920s, her hair in a lopsided black bob, red lipstick, leather miniskirt with fishnet tights. Marion waved at her over the fence.

  “Hello there, I’m your neighbor, Marion.”

  Judith ignored her, so Marion tried again. “I think your little girl is upset.”

  With barely a glance in Marion’s direction, Judith snatched up her daughter and went back into the house.

  A few weeks later she appeared on Marion’s doorstep with Lydia. The little girl was holding a pink lunch box in one hand and sucking on a raw, unpeeled carrot in the other. Unlike the last time they met, Judith was smiling and apologetic, her words came out in a giddy torrent:

  “Margaret, isn’t it? Hello, I’m Judith, I’m so sorry we haven’t had a chance to really meet until now, but we’ve been so busy, what with the move and everything. I was wondering if you could do me the most enormous favor. This is terribly cheeky of me, I know, but if you’re not busy, could you watch Liddy for just a short while?”

  Judith patted her daughter’s head as if she were an unfamiliar, yet friendly dog who had just wandered up to her.

  “You see, I’m in the middle of something of a crisis—do you know Patric Mulvane the sculptor? Of course you don’t, but he does fantastic things with bird skeletons—well, I’m supposed to meet with him, as a potential client, anyway I won’t bore you with the details, but her father promised to leave work early and take care of madam here—but he hasn’t turned up—I’d be so grateful.”

  “Marion.”

  “Sorry?”

  “My name is Marion, and yes, I’d be happy to watch her.”

  Lydia came into the house, without saying goodbye to her mother. She handed Marion the carrot, still warm and moist from being sucked, then went into the kitchen. After sitting down at the kitchen table, she opened her pink lunch box, took out a drawing pad, and some felt-tip pens, and began drawing pictures of neat little houses.

  Marion was filled with wonder as if a baby unicorn had trotted into the house. She sat down cautiously so as not to frighten her away, then watched as she drew pictures. It was difficult to believe something so perfect could exist; perhaps some magical toy maker had created her in his workshop, painted that tiny mouth with sugar-pink enamel and modeled those blue eyes from sapphire-colored glass. Next to the child, Marion felt like a storybook ogre with her big, messy body, clumsy movements, and rough, blotchy skin.

  After a while the girl got bored with her drawing; she pushed the pictures away and began kicking her legs beneath the chair.

  Marion spoke in a whisper. “Why don’t you come upstairs with me, I have something exciting to show you.”

  The girl looked cynically at Marion, and put a finger in her mouth dragging down her lower lip.

  “What is it?”

  “A secret, something you can’t tell anyone else about.”

  Lydia followed Marion up the stairs right until they came to the attic.

  When she first saw all the teddies, nearly a hundred piled on the bed, Lydia’s eyes swelled with amazement. She charged across the room, jumped onto the bed, and then began tossing the toys in the air and whooping with glee.

  “So many teddy bears, I love them all! How did you get so many?”

  “Some of them belonged to me when I was a little girl, and the others didn’t have a home, so they came to live here.”

  Marion lined the toys up in rows, and Lydia pretended she was the schoolteacher and they were the children. Then the bears were the audience in a theater while Lydia put on one of Mother’s old hats, a silk scarf, and what must have been several thousand pounds’ worth of jewels to sing “Three Blind Mice” for them. Marion clapped and cheered with delight. At eight o’clock that evening, when Judith came to collect her, Lydia sobbed and pleaded with her mother to be allowed to stay longer.

  “If you act like this, I won’t let you come and visit Margaret ever again,” Judith said. The look of distress in the little girl’s eyes gave Marion a glow of pleasure.

  From that day on Judith brought Lydia round to visit Marion at least once or twice a week; perhaps a babysitter canceled at the last minute, she had to go out on an important errand, or even, “Lydia just begged me to let her come over, Marion, you know how much she loves playing with you.”

  Marion bought special food, things that Judith herself would never have allowed the girl to eat: crisps, chocolate, gummy bears, and fizzy drinks. During the summer months they went to the beach for picnics. While most adults seemed to lose patience with children and their fanciful, repetitive games, Marion never got bored playing with Lydia. It fascinated her to watch the child as she went about arranging her toys and chatting to herself, a look of concentration on her chubby pink-and-white face. She had felt such love for the little girl, she almost wanted to gobble her up alive.

  She once overheard Judith and Lydia’s father talking while drinking wine one evening on their patio.

  “We really don’t know anything about these people, Jude—do you think Lydia should be spending so much time there?”

  “Oh, Duncan, don’t be so bloody paranoid, they are both as harmless as old carpet slippers. He does have the air of the disgraced scout leader about him, took early retirement from some public school, but I should imagine he’s only interested in boys; anyway, he spends all his time down the cellar playing with his train sets. Lydia never sees him. I admit she is a bit loopy, but quite sweet, never had a child of her own and desperate to love someone else’s.”

  If John was around during Lydia’s visits, he would pull faces that she found terrifying or grab hold of her and tickle her tummy until she went red from screaming. John, of course, was only trying to entertain her, he just didn’t understand that girls didn’t like rough play, so Marion tried her best to keep Lydia out of his way.

  Lydia was five, sitting at the dining room table eating lunch, when she asked:

  “Why do things grow up? Why doesn’t everything stay little?”

  “I don’t know,” said Marion. “I suppose because the little things need big things to look after them.”

  Lydia picked up a piece of cheese on toast from a plate decorated with fairies and goblins dancing in a woodland glade. The design was entitled Midsummer’s Eve and came from a collection of six that hung on Marion’s bedroom wall. The others were Christmas, Whitsuntide, Easter, All Hallows’ Eve, and Twelfth Night; the plates were collector’s items and meant only for decoration, but since Lydia liked them so much, Marion let her eat off them from time to time.

  “Marion, are you big
or a little girl?”

  “I’m a big person, of course.”

  Lydia chewed thoughtfully on her toast.

  “But you don’t have anyone to look after.”

  “Well, I suppose I have John. We look after each other.”

  “Is he your husband?”

  “No,” laughed Marion. “He’s my brother.”

  Lydia’s sweet face hardened into a strangely grown-up expression.

  “I don’t like him. He’s scary like an ugly smelly wolf.”

  Marion was shocked. Should she say something? Tell her off for being so rude about a grown man? But she could never bring herself to get cross with Lydia. Marion remembered that Dad had always called her “young lady” when she was in trouble, for some reason.

  “That’s not a very nice thing to say, young lady.”

  “Make him go away, then we’ll be able to play games without anyone messing things up.”

  “I can’t do that, he’s my brother, Lydia.”

  Then suddenly Lydia picked up the plate and threw it on the floor, where it shattered into pieces.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Marion. “Lydia, why did you do that? You know how precious that plate was to me!”

  The child stuck out her bottom lip defiantly.

  “It was a silly plate. You’re too old to have things with fairies on them.”

  The sight of the lovely broken ornament made Marion feel as if something sharp had lodged into her heart. And to think the other plates had lost a brother. The set would never seem the same again. In that moment she loathed Lydia, even though she knew it was wrong to hate a child. While she was picking up fragments from under the dining room table, Marion saw a glint of something shiny between the floorboards. Rubbing her finger across it, she remembered stuffing the sweetie paper there when she was young. After several minutes had passed Lydia slipped off her chair and peered under the table.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” snapped Marion.

  “I’m sorry I broke it.”

  Marion lowered her head and put her hands over her face. I won’t let her see that I am hurt. I won’t let a child know she has done this to me, she told herself.

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about the stupid plate.”

  “Then why do you look so sad?”

  “I-I’m not sad at all, Lydia.”

  “Don’t tell fibs!” scolded Lydia in a mocking voice that made Marion’s ears hurt. “You were crying. I can tell.” She fought the urge to grab Lydia by her pale arm and drag her back to her mother.

  “I was just thinking about things, aren’t I allowed to do that? About when I was a girl.”

  Lydia slid under the table and positioned herself cross-legged opposite Marion, then she reached out and pulled her hands away from her face.

  “Were you sad when you were little?”

  Marion sighed.

  “Sometimes I was sad, yes.”

  “Was it because of John? Because he was nasty to you?”

  “No, it wasn’t. Not because of John.”

  “Then why was it?”

  Marion felt the anger rising again. She knew she shouldn’t be cross with Lydia but she couldn’t help herself.

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Now, you be quiet, miss, or I shall give you a good slap, do you hear me?”

  Lydia’s small face went pale with shock, but she didn’t move; instead, the two of them stayed sitting beneath the table saying nothing until Judith rang on the doorbell to fetch her daughter.

  • • •

  DESPITE THE BREAKING of the plate, Lydia carried on coming to the house to see Marion. For her eleventh birthday, Marion bought her a Beachtime Boogie Babe, even though Judith had deemed the toy with its long blond hair and skimpy bikini “an offensive stereotype of femininity.”

  “But you will have to keep it here, of course, so she doesn’t see it,” said Marion, pouring her a glass of Coca-Cola, then emptying a giant bag of pickled onion flavor Monster Munch into a bowl.

  Lydia pushed a Monster Munch into her mouth and crunched. “Love you so much, Em, you’re the best. You’re never too busy to do stuff with me, Mum is always on the phone to clients or going to look at some ugly pictures, she hardly notices me.” Marion swelled with happiness. No one had ever thought her “the best” before.

  Once, a year or two later, Lydia arrived in tears after an argument with her mother.

  “Mum is such a bitch, she always blames Dad for making her unhappy, but she’s the one that always starts the arguments, he just gets stressed because she’s wasting all his money keeping that stupid art gallery open. She is trying to make him go to counseling meetings with her where they have to talk about why they fight all the time. She wants me to go too. I know why they argue, it’s because she’s such a pain in the ass. She won’t let me watch TV, she says if I am bored, I have to read a book or play my violin, I hate that stupid violin. Why doesn’t she play the damn thing if it’s so much fun?”

  Marion wondered if she ought to defend Judith, but she secretly enjoyed hearing Lydia say these things about her mother.

  When Duncan moved in with his twenty-five-year-old blond mistress who wore saris and had a pierced tongue, Lydia ran to Marion and clung to her, sobbing.

  “I don’t blame Dad for going, I hate her, I hate her, I wish I could leave, I wish I could come here and live with you! Can’t you ask her? Or maybe I could just run away and hide in your spare room, she wouldn’t even know I was here. You could bring me snacks and then at night I could come down and watch telly with you.”

  Marion was half tempted to agree to Lydia’s plan; in fact, she had often fantasized that Judith would be killed in a road accident or die of a fatal disease and she would be allowed to adopt Lydia. “How good and generous Marion is to look after that poor young girl,” people would say. There was obviously the problem of Lydia’s father, but in her fantasy he rejected Lydia too, and only Marion could save her from the orphanage. When Lydia was older, they would open a gift shop together called Pleasant Surprises on the seafront that sold pretty things like decorated pillboxes and scented soap.

  • • •

  AS THE YEARS passed Marion was shocked how quickly Lydia grew from a pretty child into an attractive young woman with a taste for shorts and miniskirts that showed off her long slender legs. There were occasions when John looked at the girl in a manner that made Marion uneasy.

  Really, she would think to herself a little angrily, if I were her mother, I would never let her go out dressed like that. How much prettier she would look in a nice long skirt perhaps with a bright floral pattern. But it isn’t my place to say anything to Judith. . . .

  • • •

  AFTER LYDIA STARTED college at sixteen, she visited less and less. One day Marion saw her on Northport Pier with two other girls. They were standing by one of the kiosks, laughing and joking around. They all wore tiny shorts and long loose T-shirts decorated with delicate sketches of flowers and fairies. A pretty girl with long dark hair put on a huge pair of novelty sunglasses and began walking like a duck while Lydia and a blond girl laughed. Marion caught Lydia’s eye and was about to wave, then Lydia turned away quickly and began looking at a display of postcards. That cold, gray feeling of being ignored reminded Marion of her days at Ladychapel, and she quickly walked away.

  She tried telling herself that Lydia was a teenager, and teenagers didn’t want to waste their time with adults. And yet it was around this period that Lydia became much closer to her mother. Judith seemed to relish complaining to Marion about Lydia’s neediness. “She’s getting so possessive,” Judith would moan. “She doesn’t even like me dating men. She wants me to act like some repressed, 1950s housewife. Then we could bake cakes and get our nails done together.”

  When Judith spoke about Lydia like this, Marion would ache with envy. How wonderful it would be to have a vibrant young daughter to share pleasant experiences with. She saw the two of them in a sunlit kitchen
putting trays of pretty cupcakes into an old-fashioned oven. They wouldn’t even care if they left them in too long and they came out black as coal. Laughing, they would throw them away and start another batch.

  LAUNDRY

  The little travel alarm by her bedside (why did she have a travel alarm, she never went anywhere?) said 10:15, but the heavy weight of dread that pressed down on Marion stopped her from getting up. It was Monday. Monday was a bad day because of the laundry.

  Eventually she gathered the strength to push off the weight and forced herself to get out of bed and go into the bathroom. After washing herself she sat for several minutes on the edge of the bath thinking about what she had to do. I don’t know why you get so worked up about this, she said to herself. All you need to do is gather the dirty laundry from the baskets in your and John’s bedrooms and then stuff it all in the big washing machine. And then when it is done, leave it to dry in the face-wardrobe room. That was the simple part. What filled her with dread was washing the third basket that contained the things belonging to the visitors.

  Of course she could have refused to do their laundry, but that would have meant bringing up the matter with John, and if they were never mentioned, it was easier to pretend that they weren’t really there. Sometimes she would even think to herself: How could there possibly be people living in the cellar of our house? John is only going down to meddle around with his tools, to try and fix all those old broken things he brings home. Then laundry day would come along, reminding her that they must indeed exist, and she would be once again overcome with a brittle, cold feeling of fretfulness.

  She always tried to deal with their things as quickly as possible, piling them into the washer, then dragging them out again, trying not to look too closely at anything. But every now and then something fell on the floor and she would have to pick it up. And once you looked at whatever it was—perhaps a pair of panties decorated with blue butterflies, a pink flower-patterned T-shirt that almost seemed small enough to belong to a child, or that yellow silk bra with wire poking out through the ragged lace trimming—then a picture got stuck in your head, and you couldn’t help wondering about the person it belonged to.