Lacey's House

by Joanne Graham

  But as I made the plans that tried to keep my mind focused away from grief, I saw the swift flash of bird wings as it passed the glass and I thought, why stop there? What was there for me here in Birmingham? The relationship with my baby’s father had been over before I had even discovered the pregnancy; a short-lived romance that neither of us had wanted to take any further. I hadn’t had the chance to tell him about the baby and now there was nothing to tell. There were few ties left in the city and those that existed would stretch or be easy enough to sever.

  I had my work, but as a freelance artist I could do that practically anywhere. I could move away and start over. I grasped the idea as if it were a lifeline; a fresh start somewhere completely new. The more I thought about it, the more appealing the idea became until it seemed that there were no other options. I told myself that this was what I needed, that this was the best thing to do, that I wasn’t running away.

  I let my mind drift along with thoughts of what I could do the following day to set everything in motion, and I tried not to think about the force behind these decisions. I tried to ignore the cramps and aches, and willed myself to push aside my longing. I tried to forget that as she left, she took with her the fulfilment of a dream I had carried since childhood.

  Chapter 2 ~ Rachel

  I listened to the wet slap of feet on the glistening grey pavement, the gritty tyres scouring the roads, and I thought about the plywood sign. Whenever I looked back at the child I had been, the sign was the first thing I would see hanging in front of me, compelling me to turn away. It had been hastily made, roughly broken from a larger sheet so that the edges were sharp, splintered. Harsh enough to draw blood as it poked through my clothes. I can still feel the friction burn on the back of my neck from the twine; I still recognise the sharp sting of my humiliation.

  The children’s home I grew up in stood near the crest of a small hill on the outskirts of Downham Market in the wild Norfolk countryside. I had no memories of a time before it. I would screw my eyes shut tightly as I tried to force a memory – anything – but there were only empty spaces that would eventually be filled by other people’s tales of a life I didn’t recognise as belonging to me.

  I couldn’t even remember my arrival. I had been barely eighteen months old the first time I set foot in the old house. I often wonder what my first impressions of it were. Was I intimidated by the size of it? Did I take a step across the doorway on tiny, nervous feet that teetered and stumbled? Or did I enter in the arms of someone appointed to care for me? Did I turn my face away and bury it in a stranger’s shoulder?

  All I really know is that my earliest memories are of that house and the children that lived within it. Despite its size, it didn’t look bleak and dark and cold, though it should have. The house was built of warm brown stone, with windows in the eaves and a big porch. If you looked closely enough, the signs of age and lack of care were visible beneath that first impression. I saw it in the paint that I flaked off with my fingernails and in the crumbling wood beneath it. But despite its flaws the house looked majestic and beautiful. I wonder if that would have given me hope when I had first arrived with nothing but a name and a cloak of neglect.

  How long was it before I couldn’t see its beauty at all? Behind the front door a different story emerged. Cracked and worn lino on the floors and a smell of disinfectant. Inside it felt as though it was no-one’s home, just a collection of walls to hold the unwanted children whose identities were left firmly at the door.

  It was all I knew until I was eight years old. Like all the other kids I existed only as a problem to overcome; a frequent thorn in the sides of those paid to make sure I made it through another day without getting hurt. Sticking plasters were given out for gashed knees and grazed elbows but emotional wounds were left to fester untended and ignored.

  There were good care workers and bad. Some of them just wanted to get through the day, others tried to make it better for us, dishing out sweets and cuddles, holding our hands when we were upset. But they couldn’t take away what we were; the foundlings, the kids in care, lost boys and girls. We were charity cases, all of us. Our donated clothes were frayed and worn. I had someone else’s name tag in my school uniform as if I wasn’t a person in my own right. Everyone at school knew what we were, and walking the corridors became another source of torment. Sly pokes in the ribs and chinese burns from children who forgot all about me and the hatred in my eyes as their parents tucked them up snug and warm at night.

  I would sit on my bed, up in the eaves watching the room around me grow darker as the natural light faded. The streetlamp beyond the window would come on and behind it the sky was vast and gloomy. A huge dome of clouds, bleak and heavy with rain hung above the flat wasteland of the Norfolk countryside. How I hated that oppressive sky; the weight of it made me feel as small and insignificant as an ant beneath someone’s shoe.

  I was small for my age, an easy target for the displaced angry children that lived in the home. I rarely spoke and spent a lot of time on my own. I made no attempt to fit in with them, to do things their way and so I stood out, I was different.

  I had a bedroom of my own because I wet the bed and screamed out in my sleep, waking the other children and the carers posted to watch over us. Sometimes I would get the slipper for disturbing the house, other times the scorn and laughter would pour over me from the mouths of others. I preferred the slipper.

  The room was no larger than one of the store cupboards but it had the window, through which I watched the world outside and for a few hours I was free. Those hours of silence painted dark shadows beneath my eyes, as I yawned my way through the following day. My solitude was more than recompense for the exhaustion that made my heels drag, bringing sharp words from the teachers as I failed, once again, to pay attention.

  I watched the changing seasons pass slowly. Autumn was my favourite time as the leaves turned the colour of fire and began to fall, turning the dull grey of the drive into a soft, patterned carpet. Immersed in the beauty of their colours I would weave dreams from nothing, creating a life I had never known.

  I sat in my room feeling like Rapunzel as I waited for my mother to come and rescue me. I designed a mother who was alien and strange but whom I was sure existed somewhere. I had no knowledge of her but I had seen other families on their way to school and envied their easy laughter and warm glances. She was woven from strands of hope and longing until the image took on a deeper resonance and became almost real in my mind. If someone had asked me what she looked like, I could have told them in detail, right down to the curve of her smile and the glint in her eyes as she looked at me with pride.

  I was sure that my mother had lost me somehow, through no fault of her own. I wondered if we had been on a trip to the park or the shops and I had been accidentally left behind. I knew that she would be desperate to find me and I waited and waited for her to turn up and take me back home, wherever home was. I simply couldn’t accept that I was stuck in that soulless house forever.

  How long was it before that hope faded? Before I finally realised that she wouldn’t come? How long before waiting and watching from my window became a chore, something I felt I should do but had no patience for? The sense of identity I had created around my mother faded over time and left a space behind. I no longer recognised the person I was in the mirror and I drifted through the house wondering if I was solid, whole.

  My room was a sanctuary for me, somewhere I could sit at my dressing table and look at my reflection. I stared at the darkness of my eyes, the shape of my nose, my lips, my smile. I committed every tiny detail to memory and wondered if I would one day recognise my features on the face of a stranger in the street. And as I sat there one day, the door burst open and my reflection disappeared into a crowd of grasping hands.

  I was pulled roughly from the room, my feet sliding out from underneath me as I fought for balance. They dragged me down the first flight of stairs into the corridor below where there was more space to gather rou
nd and join in the fun. ‘Call me stupid’ the sign read, black poster paint daubed on with a childish hand. And they did, over and over again. Chanting it until the words blurred together. They pushed me between them, hands moving faster and faster until I became disorientated. Their sly kicks aimed at my shins as the board slapped against my ribs.

  I didn’t fight back. By then I had already learned that fighting back only prolonged the torment. I hung my head so that a curtain of dark hair fell across my eyes, hiding my face from theirs so that they couldn’t see my shame, so that I couldn’t see their sneers and cruelty.

  I lost my balance, tripping over an outstretched foot and sprawling onto the sandpaper floor. I heard the jeering laughter, but it died as quickly as it started. When I looked up one of the wardens was there, her tight face slightly flushed and pinched with irritation and I knew that, for the moment, it was over.

  As I walked back to my flat from the hospital it was these thoughts of childhood that filled me, that prevented me from thinking too closely about the moment that surrounded me. As I looked at buildings reflected in grey puddles, I tried not to think about the poignancy of lying on a bed as a sonographer gazed into an empty womb.

  I knew that other people who lost children felt their absence as keenly as I did. I had seen it in the eyes of another woman in the waiting room, as we sat isolated amid the excited chatter of women who would soon see their unborn children for the first time. I saw loss in her eyes mingled with a tiny thread of hope that, for me at least, would soon be cut. She turned away and her gaze remained fixed on the worn floor tiles. I understood her confusion, her discomfort, knowing that she had seen what I saw. Her own grief mirrored in the eyes of a stranger; it was the insidious thing that bound us together. A fraction of time that would sit tightly in my memory. I would always remember that moment.

  Was the loss particularly bitter in my mouth because I had never known my own family? Was that why as I walked home I was regurgitating memories of a childhood I frequently tried not to think about? The devastation I had seen on the face of the other woman in the waiting room ran equally as deep as my own, yet I knew that I not only grieved for my child, but for that connection. For something sensed only briefly before it was gone.

  I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, a flash of colour vivid against the grey and turned to it, watching as a robin hopped among the bare branches of a huge tree. I stood beneath it and felt tiny, insignificant and remembered that not so long ago a tornado had hit Moseley and wrapped itself around trees just like these. I had watched as it bent and broke the vast trunks, snapping them like matchsticks. I remember the agonised sound they made as the wood splintered and tore apart. Small though I was, insignificant as I felt, I had survived the tempest that had felled these magnificent giants. Perhaps I could do the same again.

  Chapter 3 ~ Lacey

  The house stood at the end of the rough track. It was past all of the other village houses, beyond the tentative reach of the orange streetlights that ended where the lane began. Surrounded by trees and high hedges, the house was easy to overlook by any that passed. Few people ventured through the old wooden gate and up its path to the front door. Even the postman stopped on the other side of the hedge, leaving rare deliveries in the half hidden box nailed to the gatepost.

  Tonight was Halloween and after darkness had fallen, the children would come. Spurred on by taunts of cowardice, their hands would tremble as they opened the gate and crept up the path. It had been like this for years now, becoming as much a village tradition as the autumn festival at the church, the day after which the vicar would be seen walking up this very path to deliver offerings to the occupant.

  This was where the mad woman lived. They had grown up with tales of her whispered over tables in the school canteen, or from within sleeping bags on sleepovers. The tales grew with the children, passed from the older ones to the youngest. Each year the stories would be further embellished, entering the realms of the worst kind of horror. She was a witch who ate from the carcasses of dead animals. She plundered flesh from new graves in the graveyard to make spells with. She ate dead babies in mad rituals. The tales became more shocking, more unbelievable, but the children soaked them up and felt the fear coil through them when they were alone in bed at night.

  The latest tale was more exciting because they had evidence. They had seen the ambulance and the police pulling up the lane, they had been witnesses to the hunched shape with wild hair sitting in the back of the car with her face turned away. They had heard the murmurings from the adults when they thought there were no small ears to hear them. No longer was it just a whisper, a tale told in darkness. Now there was a body and the mad old woman had a new title: Murderer!

  Because of this, more children than ever were seeking to take the dare, to creep into the shrouded garden and launch eggs at the old house. The fear was greater than ever before and what had seemed a good idea in daylight was fast becoming the stuff of nightmares now darkness had fallen. For the first time there was a real chance that they could be hurt, even killed. Few would back out though, somehow the fear of public humiliation was worse. They had stated their intentions, received the admiring looks from those too sensible or too afraid to try and they knew that their reputations would be greater because of it.

  And so they went. Sneaking into the garden and launching their missiles, some of the braver ones began to chant ‘witch, witch’ and the others joined in, until their voices rolled into one and poured over the house like a flood. The smooth shells exploded against the whitewashed walls, the window sills and the path, painting everything yellow and sticky in the light from the full moon. Peals of laughter flew behind the children like balloons as they ran, jubilant, back towards the village centre, congratulating themselves and each other, amazed at their bravery.

  By midnight all was quiet. The garden was still and the adventurers were long since tucked up in bed, some still awake and terrified that they had brought a curse down upon their heads. Slowly the front door opened and a round face peeped out. The door opened wider and a small, vague shadow stepped through carrying a bucket and broom. For a time the only sound was the swishing of the brush as it erased the yellow patches within reach, accompanied by sniffing and an occasional sigh.

  The shadow stepped away from the house towards the centre of the garden where the moonlight painted detail onto the dark figure, giving her soft edges and a downturned mouth. The old lady stood statue still and looked north, as she often did, searching for the orange glow that had faded to embers so many years before. She raised her face to the clear sky and sniffed at the frigid air, tilting her head to one side, a puzzled look on her face. The chill filtered into her lungs and stalled the breath there. Her eyes took in the bright circle of the moon, the scant light of the stars and then glanced deeper into the darkness near the horizon.

  The old woman closed her eyes and let out her breath in a deep, keening sigh that clouded around her. She nodded in deference to the chill of the approaching winter before turning back to the house. Collecting her bucket she stepped back through the door, pausing for a moment to check the silence, to make sure she was definitely alone. Her gaze briefly fell on the shotgun that rested against the wall just behind the door. Picking it up she could still feel the warmth in the wood from where she had held it so tightly. Taking the gun to the larder, she tucked it away on a shelf beneath an old sack before she closed and locked the door. Slowly, she headed back upstairs to bed.

  Chapter 4 ~ Rachel

  And so I mourned for that little extension of myself. For the tiny creature whose blood was familiar, whose eyes might have looked like mine. I felt foolish, as if I grieved over shadows, something intangible. But even as I felt lost within that void, I pushed onwards, forwards. I drew a map around my feet and saw a road leading to somewhere else, somewhere better.

  I immersed myself in planning and preparing and didn’t once pick up the phone and feed words down the line that spoke of loss and
heartbreak. It was intimate, secret; it was mine and mine alone. My grief became hard and impenetrable. It sat in my abdomen like a stone, occupying the space where my baby used to be.

  I was so impatient to find somewhere new and yet I was unsure how to go about creating a new life for myself. I didn’t know how to paint a new scene over the top of an old, familiar one. How to choose where to go? I almost took the clichéd route of stabbing a pin into a map. I went so far as to get the sewing kit out. I held the metal in my hand, felt the sharp point of it before putting it away again. I was too afraid of the randomness and self-aware enough to know that I would filter the results anyway. Shying away from the totally unfamiliar.

  At this time of year, anywhere north of Birmingham seemed too cold although I did think about Cumbria for a few hours. The striking dominance of the mountains and the poetry of words like ghyll and tarn appealed to my artist’s nature. I was pulled away from it by the threat of the summer season, when the roads would become clogged with tourists and the scenery would become multicoloured with walkers and climbers.

  I had been there once before at the height of summer and had spent all my time trying to cross traffic logged roads, a sea of people threatening to sweep me away. Searching for a secluded place in which to set up my easel had been futile and eventually I gave up and stamped my way back to the hotel. Seclusion evaded me. It seemed that everyone else was searching for the same thing and had got there first. I had painted the scene from the hotel window, the constant ebb and flow of rainbow raincoats and cars splashing through puddles. The picture was a reminder to only ever visit Cumbria when the tourist season was over.

  For a brief moment Norfolk, too, seemed a possibility. I thought of it merely as a known entity, a place where the names were familiar if nothing else. I turned from that idea so quickly I felt dizzy. The county was never a real contender but I had lived there for so long that the name popped into my head and threw itself into the hat along with all the other possibilities. Norfolk, where the skies were too big and the memories were too harsh. It was a painful, lonely place.