by Chris Ward
The house had always spooked him, even before his sister did. Four of them until his mother’s death, then four again at times when Uncle Red stayed, could not bring life to a house which contained at least twelve bedrooms, though Matt wasn’t sure exactly how many because he had always preferred his explorations to take place outside the house. Bethany had ruled in here, despite rarely leaving her rooms – except at night; Jesus, why always at night? – with her very presence alone.
So many rooms remained untouched.
He slipped in through the door of what had once been his bedroom, already pulling the brandy out of his coat.
He stared. Disbelieving.
It hadn’t changed in the years since he had been away. His bed, though made up and cleaned, still had the same bedclothes, the same green patchwork design he had made his favorite as a child. His books still lined the shelves, albeit with a sheen of dust, his posters, now fading, still faced him along the walls. Gary Numan, The Clash, The Damned, Blondie – boy, he had had a real thing for Debbie Harry – ABC, one of The Ramones with the blonde one from ABBA poking out from behind (after Debbie, Anita had ruled his fantasies, but that was as far as it went – Matt thought their music had sucked), Taxi Driver, Star Wars, one of Ursula Andress in Dr No.
He gulped from the bottle as memories swamped him. So many days sat in here alone, reading books, listening to the records still stacked in one corner, writing love letters to girls at school on the desk by the window. He even remembered a couple of times when he had sneaked a girl in and smiled coyly, though his vision rapidly soured as he remembered how Rebecca Crowley, the sixth–former who had promised him oblivion in exchange for two Stranglers records, had freaked out and ran when she’d looked up from her “business” to find Bethany standing in the doorway.
Matthew’s mood abruptly darkened. What was he doing back here? He had no place here now. His life existed on a whole different plane, in a whole different world to this. This was nothing but a bad dream.
He went to the window and peered out. His father’s truck sat in the driveway, now accompanied by a clutch of other vehicles. And by the top of the drive, parked tight under the trees, in a way that could either have been to allow others to pass or to conceal it, was a big black car. Matt frowned, remembering the car from yesterday, and the one he had seen driving down the lane to the Meredith sisters’ cottage. The same one? He couldn’t tell because the rain had begun to fall, getting heavier as the minutes passed. Matt groaned. Trust his father to pick a day like this for a fucking funeral.
A creaking sound came from above him, and his thoughts on the mysterious black car were pushed aside. He looked up reflexively, as though the ceiling might suddenly collapse, wondering who on earth might be up there.
Then it came again.
No, not a creaking sound. More of a whine, muffled by the floor, but something organic, rather than, say, the movement of a piece of furniture.
His mind, juiced up again, took a moment to place it.
A baby’s cry.
It came again. Matt rose and went to the door, peering each way along the deserted corridor, half expecting to find his little sister standing there watching him the way she once had, with those desperately blank eyes. He heard nothing, but moved towards the end staircase, a thin spiral leading up to the fourth floor and the attic beyond. He climbed, the turns in the stairwell far tighter than he remembered, and emerged on to a thin corridor, doors off to either side. A few grimy prints lined the walls, and a once-red carpet that faded in and out where the sun reached it through the windows coughed up little plumes of dust as he moved forward.
He had almost never come up here, especially not after his mother’s death. His parents had resided on this level; it held far too many dark memories for him. Shivering, he moved along the corridor, looking for the door which would roughly equate to the room above his own.
He took a sip from the brandy for courage, and tried to rationalize. Some kid from the congregation downstairs must have come up here, got lost, and was now crying for his mother. Matt might even turn out to be a hero, which would make a change.
He found the door ajar, pushed it wide, and stepped into what he first thought was an empty room, the furniture that lay inside covered over by dusty sheets.
A woman stood by the window, tall, slim, with hair that fell almost to her waist. Matt felt a sudden lurch in his stomach, as though reality had detached itself from him, the world drifting away in one direction as he followed another, like two identical film stills being moved in and out of line.
‘Hey!’
She turned around, and Matt’s stomach lurched again, her features like a blurred painting. He didn’t wear glasses but his eyes wouldn’t work. He squinted, trying to focus on her face to identify her, but failed.
‘Who are you? Do I know you?’
He thought she smiled, but couldn’t be sure. Oh, my head.
‘I do know you . . . Bethany?’
The word had just popped into his head. The woman seemed to look surprised. He thought she tried to say something, and for a second her features bloomed into clarity, giving him a moment to see her clearly. She was beautiful, like an angel. Like they said.
Then the woman’s features blurred again, breaking up like a reflection in choppy water. Matt felt the muscles in his legs tremble. He stumbled forwards a few steps, glancing around for something to hold on to, but the room swayed and revolved around him. He moaned and staggered backwards, almost losing his balance.
The woman raised an arm. The other was holding on to a small bundle that bulged and wriggled as though alive.
Matt bumped back against the wall behind the door. His feet slipped out from under him and he slumped to the floor. He heard the brandy bottle smash on the wooden boards beside him, and the sharp, petroleum scent of alcohol filled his senses.
He looked up to find the woman standing over him, peering down, her own eyes squinting as though attempting to recognize him. She reached out a hand, and fingers soft as silk cupped his face.
Images swirled in his mind; reality and dream seemed to fuse like two coloured liquids being poured together. He peered up into her face, begging her features to focus, so he could look on her clearly again
(Bethany? Is that really you?)
just for one second, but her face remained as blurred as a bad photograph. The brandy swirled in his head but something else was acting on him too, some unseen force preventing him seeing her, as though she were a ghost and by seeing her he was defying two hundred years of physics experiments and thousands of laws and theories. Science wouldn’t let him see her, no matter what his own novels might say and he screamed and battered at its walls, crying out for mercy, for justice, and for one last look at her. He felt tears roll down his cheeks, and knew the face just inches from his own must be maternal, and compassionate, as though he were a child returned home.
And so he was.
‘Beth –’
The world spun. One instant the woman was there, the next she had gone, out of the door or wherever, he didn’t know, she simply had gone, and Matthew found unconsciousness reeling him in. He cried out her name once, and then everything faded.
19
She didn’t look back, didn’t want to see his face, the broken look about him that stank so much of Gabrielle that she almost wrinkled her nose.
Dear sweet Matthew, once such a beautiful child. Once so innocent, so pure, so full of love. She would have recognised him after fifty years out of any crowd, anywhere in the world, had his aura not turned so bad. So corrupted by anger. The essence of his soul had penetrated through her body and into her beating heart, and she could feel the intense hatred that had so gripped him.
But hatred towards what?
Things had happened, she knew. Things perhaps even now irreparable.
She fled through the house, through a thin door at the end of the third floor corridor and down a flight of stairs, now disused, but originally designed
to give servants access to the kitchens and basement. Hugging the small bundle to her, she tried to understand.
There were things she knew, things others knew. Like a scattered jigsaw, with all the pieces together it might just fit. But for her, the chances were the pieces would fit differently to how they would fit for Matt. Or Ian. Or once, Bethany. They all saw it in different ways, and with only a partial comprehension she couldn’t expect them to understand.
The baby, wrapped in her arms, began to cry softly, and she ran a finger over its doughy forehead as she reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped through into a basement. Immediately the tears ceased, the baby’s eyes closed and its breathing assumed the low contentedness of happy sleep.
She moved between pillars of stacked furniture, old tools and piles of sacking, until she found her way to a stairway that opened up on to the garden along the house’s left flank, out of sight of the dining and living rooms where people still milled about purposelessly. Outside, the air was sweet with the smell of fresh rain. She loved days like this, despite a little chill in the air. The closeness of the air, like a thousand fingers touching her.
Although the rain had briefly stopped, the woman pulled the open part of the shawl protectively over the child’s head. ‘Sweet, sweet baby,’ she whispered, as she watched the child’s sleeping face. So beautiful, so innocent. A single warm tear dripped on to the baby’s cheek. It didn’t react, and the woman reached down and traced a small circle with her finger, the tear quickly drying on the baby’s skin.
Liana Meredith felt guilty, and also worried that Elaina would know she had been to the house again. Her sister would have felt the pull of Liana’s magic; she had panicked when Matthew had discovered her and used a trick to hide her identity from him. It was cruel to let him think he had seen his sister, but when he had said Bethany’s name Liana had simply played on it, put a little indecision in his mind, turned him away from the truth as best as possible. She felt terrible about it now, hoped it wouldn’t cause him too much distress. She knew if her sister found out she would laugh and call Liana pathetic. Pathetic for caring.
‘Home soon, my sweet one,’ Liana said to the baby, and looked up across the empty garden, seeing the path around to the front, and her chance to slip away unnoticed.
20
Her father had taken the kids to the park with a kite and a football, and her mother was in the living room, watching the Eastenders omnibus. Rachel sat alone in the kitchen with a mug of coffee. Her hands shook as she gripped the mug, trying to hold back the tears that threatened to overwhelm her. To cry was to let him win, and there was no reason why she should do that. Matt had caused this. It was Matt’s fault she had left him, not her own.
The drunkenness, the arguments, the abuse and latent threat of more violence. His fault.
Wasn’t it?
And couldn’t he change?
Her mother said that people didn’t change. People were what they were. They could pretend, but deep down they stayed the same. Always.
Rachel shook her head. Matthew wasn’t a drunk and a wife beater. Her mother’s words: people can pretend, but deep down, they stay the same.
Her own mother’s words.
She had met Matt in the third year at University College London. He had little background; his mother was dead, his father he didn’t speak to anymore. At UCL they had shared a house, and she had grown to like and then later to love him; to love the kind, well-spoken and sensitive man Matt had always been. With the exception of his deepest past, they had shared intimate secrets, Matt telling her of his dreams to rise from nothing to become a name people would remember, to be something when he had always been a no one. He had worked slum job after slum job; his college money came from his own back pocket.
He had succeeded to an extent. His first book had sold in excess of fifty thousand copies in its first year on the market, making several bestseller lists. He had never quite topped them, but even now, at thirty-one, still young for a writer, he had time as his ally, and the literary world might yet fall at his feet.
Except that a darkness, a pain, existed in his heart, a wound he had never managed to heal throughout their university years and ten years of marriage. Something that had gradually risen out of his nightmares to haunt him, slowly encroaching on his rationality, until his very personality was in danger of being stripped away.
His past, she knew, it all existed in his past.
And now, after fourteen years, he had turned and gone back to something he had longed to leave behind. For years, he had fought against it like a wild hooked fish, but now his strength was done and the memories had reeled him in.
Weak, a collapsed shadow of the man she had grown to love, irrational, perhaps on the verge of a breakdown, and yet he had still gone back to face whatever nightmares had made him this way.
And she had let him go.
The one time he might have needed her the most.
Rachel pushed the coffee away and rose to her feet. Car keys jingled in her hand.
‘I’m leaving,’ she said, from the living room doorway. She raised a hand as her mother started to stand up, a look of shock on her face.
‘Rachel, where –’
‘After Matt. I have to go find him.’ Tears welled in her eyes. ‘I love him, Mum. I love him so much. I’ve got to go get him back.’
‘But he’s hurt you so bad.’ Her mother meant the arguments. Rachel could never mention that Matt had hit her.
‘I know, Mum. But that’s not him. You say people don’t change –’
‘They don’t! Look at your grandfather, still an old fool despite all those gameshows he watches day in, day out.’ She flapped an exasperated hand toward the TV.
‘That’s what I mean, mum. This isn’t Matthew. Matthew’s kind, and loving, and . . . and wonderful.’ She wiped a hand across her eyes. ‘That’s the Matthew I want back, Mum.’
Her mother stood up and came over to Rachel, pulling her into a hug. She smelt of olive soap and hair spray. Rachel had to grit her teeth to stop herself from bursting into tears all over again.
‘Then you go, honey. You do what you have to do to get him back.’ She kissed Rachel’s cheek. ‘Don’t you worry about the kids. Me and your dad will keep them quiet. You do what you have to do.’
‘Thanks, Mum.’
‘But be careful, for God’s sake. Especially in that heap of junk you call a car.’
‘I will.’
They went out the front. Rachel paused as she opened the car door. ‘I’ll see you soon, Mum. Say bye to the kids for me. I can’t wait for them, I just can’t. If I see them I might not be able to go. I –’
‘They’ll be fine. You know kids, they’re like elastic, always bouncing back. Be careful honey. We’ll be right here waiting for you.’
Rachel lifted a hand to wave goodbye, and then climbed into the car. As she ignited the engine and turned out on to the road, she didn’t look back. She had a long journey ahead of her. Longer than she could ever imagine.
###
Bethany’s Diary, March 7th, 1985
I heard gun shots in the woods last night. I think Uncle Red and Daddy were out shooting stuff. I don’t know why because there’s plenty of food downstairs.
Mummy’s not been back for ages, even though now the snow’s gone no one can follow her tracks.
Where are you Mummy? I miss you.
21
Matt opened his eyes. His head was pounding. Had he fainted? He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his temples, wishing he could clearly remember what had happened. Something about a woman; had she attacked him, or him her? Had he even seen her at all?
He looked down at the smashed brandy bottle, and couldn’t be sure. A lot of things didn’t seem to make much sense. Who had that woman been? Not Bethany, surely? Bethany was dead.
Wasn’t she?
He scrambled to his feet as someone called his name. Uncle Red’s gruff voice.
He slipped out through the doo
r, unsteady on his feet, unable to do anything about the brandy, but no matter, he would clean it up later. He doubted anyone ever came up here.
Except, of course, the woman.
Hadn’t this been one of his mother’s rooms?
Questions burned in his head as he made his way back down the stairs, into the living room, managing to avoid Uncle Red whose calls echoed from the end of the first floor corridor. His father stood waiting for him beside the drinks cabinet. A few other guests still lingered, some tearful, most inebriated. An older couple were making their way down into the kitchen and towards the front door.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Sorry, Dad,’ Matt said, only too aware of the slur of his words. ‘Got lost in memories, I suppose.’ Well, it was half true.
‘We need to get up to the chapel. Get this all over with.’
Matt nodded his assent, but his mind whirled. Twice, he had seen her. Twice, he had seen a woman with a baby. And then there was the woman he had seen watching him at the church. Were they all the same woman?
He thought it was the Meredith sisters, but now he wasn’t so sure. He didn’t know what his sister looked like now, after all. Could Bethany actually be alive and living with the Meredith sisters?
Was a game being played here? Who were the players? Who knew what was going on, and who didn’t?
And who was the child?
‘Red!’ His father shouted up the stairs. ‘He’s down here.’
Perhaps Bethany was alive. So who were they about to bury?
His mind reeled. His father, standing next to him, seemed to be oblivious to Matt, his neck arched to peer up the stairs as he waited for Red to reappear.
‘Dad?’ Matt didn’t give himself a chance to think about what he said, just let the words out as they came into his mouth. ‘Dad? Did Bethany have a kid?’
His father’s face snapped towards him. ‘What?’