by Jess Kidd
By the time I’ve crossed the kitchen to the back door, he’s at the bottom of the steps standing on the garden path.
I know better than to follow a fox in life.
* * *
LARKIN LEADS me past car batteries and suppurating bin bags, beyond bed frames and rusting bicycles. I wonder if we might stop at the caravan but we don’t, although he hesitates there, one paw held up.
We weave through bushes and shrubs, stacks of roof tiles and broken window frames. I tread gingerly through piles of scrap metal and rotten planks of wood with proud nails. Even in my excitement I’m mindful of the risks of lockjaw and septicemia and ear spiders from the webs that break over me like sticky curses.
Larkin shuttles forwards and back, perhaps impatient at my slowness.
Out past the refuse there’s an untouched jungle of plants: legions of fat-stalked weeds furious with bristles and wonderful mushrooms in unreal shapes and colors. Some speckled scarlet like brilliant, cautionary tales, others the shape of baby ears, sprouting neatly all in a row.
Stems snap with pungent smells, leaving sap on my legs. Twigs break and twist. Burrs stud my cardigan and thorns pull at my skirt. Soon my hair is spotted with ladybirds and my ankles are ringed with ants. On my shoulder a caterpillar rides: a ferocious orange-quilled monster in his world.
Sometimes I lose sight of Larkin; when I do I trample to a standstill and wait for the bushes ahead of me to quiver.
With every step I seem to shrink and the plants grow taller and the light grows greener.
Then all at once we come to a clearing.
* * *
THERE IS a round brick structure set into the ground: a half-buried beehive, an old icehouse.
Leggy saplings dot the surrounding bank, dappling the afternoon sun that shines into the clearing.
I follow Larkin down a flight of steps. Nature has reclaimed this place: the brickwork is vivid with mosses and the path is thick with brambles. The iron gate is held open by a clump of nettles and just beyond leaves are piled high against a riveted wooden door. I kick them away and see the door is gnawed at the bottom. Larkin noses along it.
“Would there be rats in there, Larkin?”
As if in answer, Larkin snorts.
I try the key. It turns surprisingly easily.
* * *
THE DOORWAY is squat and the air inside clotted with the smell of damp and leaf litter. And it’s cold, so cold you feel that the sun has never trespassed here.
In the light from the doorway I can see that the floor falls abruptly away to form a great bowl, perhaps ten feet deep. There is a narrow walkway all around it. Ice would have been stored here, packed in straw, kept intact by the subterranean chill of the building. From this dank place frozen slabs were carved and spiked and heaved up to the house to keep food fresh, to make cool drinks and sorbets. There is nothing in the bowl now but leaves and twigs and the remains of fallen birds: matted bundles of feathers and tangled wings. I hesitate to go any farther, for the little building has the strange sad air of a plundered tomb, a disturbed burial site.
Larkin turns away from the door and runs back along the path, stopping halfway down, his attention focused on the bank above.
I cross the threshold, my hands on the door frame, picking my way forwards to the start of the walkway. I follow it, keeping close to the wall, although my clothes will be ruined, as the bricks run with moisture and are wet to the touch. The smell is overpowering: as if the belly of the earth has opened. The primordial smell of hidden places, deep dark places, where life ends and begins again, a cycle of rot and germination.
I run my hand along the wall but there is nothing to be found, no loose bricks or cubbyholes, no messages in bottles or hidden envelopes.
* * *
IT ALL happens so quickly. A figure fills the doorway, backlit. The icehouse darkens. The door is pulled shut and the key turns in the lock, a single resounding click. These sounds are spun, amplified, and become echoes.
* * *
IT’S NOT quite pitch-black, I tell myself. There is a strip of light under the door and a small barred window high above it.
I make a simple plan. I will keep moving through the dark towards the light, sliding my foot against the wall, keeping my shoulder to it. Edging along, slowly, calmly. Not minding the space below me, above me, and all the solid black air that fills it.
It flies into my face. I throw up my arms.
* * *
I ROLL onto my side, swearing, and then onto my knees, to crawl around the bowl of the icehouse, my hands scrabbling at dead leaves, feathers, something. My voice is taken up, spun around in the dark, mocked, and repeated. Next time I move I’ll grit my teeth and stay silent.
When the echoes stop I hear his voice.
* * *
THERE ARE rungs. Sam guides my hands to them, climbing behind me. At the top he pushes me up and over. He gets me to my feet and half carries me out of the underworld into the light. I’m careful not to look back. Instead I look at my found treasure. In my hand a white ribbon bow on a broken hair slide.
* * *
SAM STEPS into the road to flag a cab. By the time we’re halfway home he has stopped telling me that we ought to be going to the hospital. He was coming to meet me, he says; he heard me swearing from the street. I’ve a set of lungs on me. I laugh and flinch; he takes my hand and squeezes it.
My hand is in Sam’s hand.
But all I can think about is Mr. Flood’s dinner half-made. The jam cake sat waiting for the custard and the salad waiting for the tinned ham, and the little white bow in my pocket. And beyond this, another thought: the silhouette of a figure the moment before the door of the icehouse closed, before the key turned.
Could something in their size, their build, give them away? I barely saw them.
Did I hear them? Of course not.
Would I really have heard the silent scuff of a loafer, or the hushed shuffle of a shape-shifter?
RENATA IS standing at her front door. Sam tells her he will take me up to my flat, for a change of clothes and to get patched up. Then we’ll be straight down. Renata nods and I can tell by the look on her face that she wants to follow but she can’t.
I take off my clothes in the bathroom while Sam waits in the hall. There are bad grazes on my back, legs, and arms. I put on pajamas and splash my face in the sink.
I call out and say I’m fine. I’ll be out in a minute. Then I sit down on the side of the bath and try hard to stop crying.
* * *
I HEAR him in the kitchen, finding mugs, washing them, boiling the kettle, sniffing the milk, and pouring black coffee. I step out to a bright greeting and a flat that’s different because he’s in it. Everything feels festive. The unwatered plants have perked up, the curtains look less drab, and the corners are cleaner than I expected.
He tells me to sit down on the sofa and rolls fabric up over my arms, then my legs. Taking a new cotton ball each time and wiping gently.
“Let me see your back.”
I turn a little on my side.
“Can I?”
He pulls up my top with hands so gentle I start to cry again.
“Done,” he says, and sits with his hand resting lightly on my leg.
I dry my face on my sleeve and we smile at each other. He puts the cotton balls in a plastic bag and goes into the bathroom to throw away the disinfectant.
I sip hot coffee and feel the pressure of everything in the room waiting for him to return.
“So you were following the fox?” He sits down next to me with a distracted smile.
I shrug. “It seemed like a plan.”
“And did you find anything in the icehouse?”
“No.”
I don’t know why I lie. Only that I can’t bring myself to show him yet the forlorn little ribbon clinging to the plastic comb, the comb with half its teeth gone. Was it dragged off her head? Was it stamped underfoot as Maggie tried to get away?
“Maybe it�
��s time to let go of this, Maud.” Sam’s face is grave.
“You know about what happened to Renata, don’t you?”
Sam nods. “She phoned me.”
“Did she tell you what was in the envelope? The one they ransacked her place for?”
Sam looks at me in despair and perhaps a little pity. I recognize this look; I have given it to my clients often enough.
“You have a sister, don’t you, Sam? You told Renata.”
He stares at me. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“If she disappeared, like Maggie Dunne, would you just let it go?”
“I don’t see—”
“Mary knew something, or suspected something, that’s why she kept the newspaper cuttings. That’s why she took such trouble to hide them. Everything started with Maggie’s disappearance.”
Sam takes a sip of his coffee.
“You wouldn’t let it go, would you, Sam?”
He puts his mug on the table and throws me a look, and for once I know what’s coming next.
CHAPTER 26
Sam sleeps with his hair across his face. I watch him until his eyes open. At first a lazy swimming gaze, a sweet beguiled smile. I wait for his expression to change. For that slow-dawning realization then that quick flood of horror.
It’s a look I know well, the look of an ambushed goat on a rope. I wore it myself once when I woke up next to an archivist I’d met on the bus. He had dry papery hands, enjoyed reading about canals, and winced whenever I spoke.
Yes, he would love a coffee, Sam says, the scaffold of his smile just about holding.
When I pull the door behind me the panic will set in and he’ll be up out of the bed, searching the room for his things, hopping into his cowboy boots. He’ll be swearing softly to himself and cursing the perils of kindness and proximity.
So long, Pardner.
I put the kettle on and get into the shower.
* * *
I DON’T have to check that the flat is empty; I know as soon as I get out, as soon as I wrap the towel round me.
St. Valentine is lolling around outside the bathroom door, swinging his dingy rope belt. “That went well with your man,” he says.
I throw him a caustic glance. “And you can keep your opinions to yourself.”
He grins. “He was very shook looking, coming out of your bedroom. But then he recovered himself and by God he put the good leg under him. I’ve never seen a man move so fast.”
“And you the saint of love saying this? And I’ll thank you not to be loitering in my hallway, uninvoked and uninvited.”
“Leaping and hopping out that door.” St. Valentine fixes me with one eye; the other wanders at will. “Like a rabbit he was. No, like a fox, running with the pack an inch away from his arse.”
“Breaking and entering no less.”
“He left a note.” St. Valentine nods towards the living room.
Propped up on the coffee table, my telephone pad. I wander over, feigning indifference. In a hasty scrawl:
Sorry M. Have to run.
“He’s slipped your hook.”
“I wasn’t trying to hook him,” I utter through gritted teeth.
“Well, you’ll have more chance of hooking a dose of the clap the way you’re carrying on.” St. Valentine wags a dim finger at me. “How long have you known him? Five minutes? He gives you the soft eye and you drop your knickers.”
I glare at him. “There must be some way I can report you?”
“Fair play to you though for getting a go on that. Jesus, who’d have thought it?” He gives me a jaunty wink and drifts off through the wall.
“YOU’RE LATE. Half the morning has gone.” Cathal glowers through his eyebrows at me.
He’s wearing a smoking jacket and a beret. I almost laugh. But I don’t. Not with the recent communications from Mary Flood on my mind.
“A bit of dry cake and not a drop of fucking custard,” he growls. “Tardy little fecker, are you coming?”
He heads off down the hallway and I follow him.
He stops outside the door to his workshop. I notice that he has reinforced his fortifications overnight. On each side of the doorway there is a wooden hat stand topped with stuffed animals, totem-pole-like. Surrounding this Mr. Flood has made a corral of plastic storage boxes filled with jumble. I recognize much that has been stolen back from the bins under the cover of darkness.
“Have you anything in your pockets?” he mutters.
“No.”
“Then keep it that way.”
He unlocks the door and flicks on overhead strip lights, illuminating a large cluttered workshop. A workbench runs the length of the room. Above it, a thousand dismembered creatures gather dust on shelves, like a taxidermy accident and emergency unit. Beneath the workbench lie boxes of cogs and levers and half-stripped mechanisms. Tools hang on the wall, between strange carved marionettes. There are princesses and witches, crocodiles and clowns. In the center of the room there is a glazed booth about the size of a Punch-and-Judy show. Red velvet curtains are drawn inside the window. Above it is a sign, painted in dull gold letters:
Madame Sabine
Tomorrow’s Fortune Today.
Cathal rummages in a jar on the shelf and hands me a coin. He nods at the slot at the front of the machine. “Put a penny in.”
The coin drops and there’s a whirring noise. The curtains open jerkily, getting stuck halfway across the window with a plaintive drone.
Cathal swears under his breath, takes a hammer from the bench, and wanders round the back of the booth. The curtains sway open to reveal a terrifying life-sized automaton. A small-waisted, plump-bosomed woman, dressed in a corseted gown of black bombazine. She has long necklaces of jet, huge lustrous eyes, and a disproportionately small mouth with tiny white teeth. Over her dusty coiffure she wears a coin-spangled veil. Between her be-ringed fingers sits a crystal ball. The painted backdrop is of a gypsy caravan. There is a little stove with a bright kettle on the hob and a line of patterned plates. To her right is a wire birdcage containing two fat taxidermy chaffinches. A stuffed black cat at her left elbow looks on.
With a clank of the mechanism she lifts her slender wrists and passes her hands across the crystal ball. The two fat chaffinches shake their wings and the cat opens and shuts its eyelids.
“The birds sang once,” Cathal says. “And the cat purred, would you believe?”
With a terrible grinding, Madame Sabine’s head drops forwards and she regards me with a sudden awful scrutiny, her black irises glistening. Her hands make one last pass and drop lifeless back onto the counter. Her head yanks up with a clinking of her veil.
A card is dropped into a recess below and the curtains fitfully draw themselves closed.
I pick up the card.
Madame Sabine says:
If you meet a squinting woman be sure to give her the time of day
lest MISFORTUNE befall you.
I frown at it until Cathal takes the card and ushers me through double doors into a large interconnecting room. A garden swing seat, complete with sun canopy, occupies a central position surrounded by saucers of lapped and sour milk. At least four cats sway on worn cushions and tangled sheets.
“You don’t sleep on that, do you?” I say incredulously.
“I do. It’s lovely. Go on, try it.”
“I will not. I bet it’s crawling. When did you last change your sheets?”
“Now, that I can’t remember, Drennan.”
I follow him through the room and out into the conservatory. He has the painting covered.
“I was hoping to see it.”
“At the end you will.”
I sit on the chair and he tells me to move my arm, my head. He looks down at me.
“Your hair is wrong.”
“You told me to wear it up.”
“I did not,” he says. “May I?”
I nod, surprising myself.
He carefully, gently removes the pins. “That’s be
tter. It softens the line of your iron jaw.” He shakes out my hair then tucks a strand behind my ear. “Grand so.”
“Get on with it then, Rembrandt.”
He pats me on the shoulder and goes over to the easel. He uncovers the canvas. “You’ll be wanting a story, no doubt?”
“To pass the time.”
I watch him shambling backwards and forwards in front of the canvas. He has a wayward veer to him today; I wonder if he’s been at the turpentine.
I look at the painting of Mary in her yellow dress and Gabriel walking next to her, with his sketchy scowling face. “Tell me about Gabriel, as a boy.”
He squints at the canvas. “For fuck’s sake.”
After a while he speaks. “He was an all-round sneaky shit. Hiding, slinking, spying. Like a chameleon, changing his spots to stripes to blend in.”
I wonder if he inherited this trick from his father.
Cathal pulls a grim face. “And torturing. He enjoyed maiming things.”
“Aren’t all boys like that? What about yourself and the wasps?”
Cathal looks at me. “They are and they’re not. Gabriel was cruel. And hard. You could shake him until his teeth rattled and he’d admit to nothing. You could belt him all shades of blue and he’d stay silent.”
I frown.
“But Mary thought the sun shone out of his arse.”
“They were close?”
He glances at me. “No. He hated her as much as she loved him. He took every chance to be spiteful to his mother, playing tricks, hiding things or breaking them. Causing accidents about the house.”
“Gabriel caused accidents?”
“I caught him at it a few times and gave him a good clatter. Mary wouldn’t hear anything against him; she always took his word over mine.”
Overhead the sun goes in behind the clouds and the conservatory darkens. It is quiet but for the shuffling sound of Cathal’s slippers and the faint hiss of air sucked through his dentures.
A picture begins to grow in my mind, of Mary, rolling down the stairs.
A young Gabriel stands on the landing, watching her fall; it’s a long way down from top to bottom. She goes headlong. Her face a mask of panic, her legs, arms, the base of her spine hitting the steps, one sickening thump after another. Little round vowel sounds come out of her, along with funny squeaks, like the sounds of a bagpipe being tuned. On the turn of the stair her head hits the balustrade. She is quiet for the last stretch of steps.